Strings Attached

Have You Ever Wondered…

I’ve been dealing with a lot of personal stuff lately and have had neither time nor energy to go to the movies as frequently. After about a month without watching anything on either the big or the small screen, I started wondering:

Am I a movie critic if I don’t write about movies?

And the answer: I don’t know.

When I started this particular endeavor, I, undoubtedly, was more of a traditional film critic. I watched movies and gave my opinion. However, over last two and a half years my interests shifted. I started seeing myself as more of a culture writer, perceiving the movies that I consumed rather through a political and social lens and commenting on them from that perspective.

This is why I didn’t write about Oppenheimer, Dune 2, or other big blockbusters from year – I just didn’t have anything to say about them that a) hadn’t been said better by other critics, or b) had caught my attention enough to warrant a long-read. That is not to say that I didn’t like those movies, I just didn’t feel that my opinion would add to the conversation.

So, where does this leave Wax Cinematic?

Exactly where it is right now, I guess. You’ve probably already noticed the shift in content and frequency of publication, and I hope you liked my previous couple of essays.

I also might start posting shorter essays or editorials that are only tangentially related to movies, as my stray thoughts about media have to go somewhere. But no worries, I’ll get back to movies eventually, especially because I’m starting a post-grad in Film and Photography Studies in September and will, of course, inform you about everything I learn and new perspectives I gain on film and visual media in the process.

For now, instead of wallowing in my impostor syndrome, I started watching the second season of Disney’s Loki. I liked it, it’s engaging, the characters are well written, the acting is great throughout, and the resolution is very satisfying and just bonkers enough to be kind of genius. Great fun all around!

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Have you ever noticed how a lot of the agencies that handle supernatural stuff on TV or any other media feel … old? How a lot of them sport 1960-ies or 1970-ies interior designs, use old-timey technology and communication methods?

Why is that?

Chapter One: Masters of Time and Space (… and everything in-between)

The obvious answer: it feels like magic must somehow mess with technology older than the cathode-ray tube. In a way, it makes so much sense to show the opposition between the old and the new, old-world magic struggling against new technology, breaking it in the process. This feels right in a way that I can’t exactly pinpoint.

The other obvious answer is that a lot of government agencies in the real world are woefully underfunded or allocate their budget towards a bloated bureaucracy rather than towards any innovation. The fact that most administrative services in any given country haven’t been reformed since the 70-ies also might have something to do with this charming retro aesthetic.

Charming…

However, when I think about this particular trope, I don’t imagine some kind of magical DMV. I’m thinking about agencies like the TVA from Loki or the FBC from Control; agencies that have an enforcing power like the FBI or DEA. Those are definitely not underfunded, and in addition to bloated bureaucracies, these agencies have secrets to protect and agents to arm in pursuit of their respective responsibilities. Their jurisdiction also extends to pretty much anywhere they have to go to fulfill their heroic duties.

After all, their respective mission statements can be summed up in one single word – protection.

Protection of you, the citizen, the innocent soul, not in the know of the terrible things “they” will do to you, if not for the bulwark of the intrepid agents from … the agency, the bureau, the administration. Oh, the things they’ve seen, the atrocities they’ve witnessed – if you only knew.

Fidelity. Bravery. Integrity.

The myths surrounding the establishment and subsequent exploits of the FBI alone, as well as their blatant lies and copaganda, are fascinating to examine in their own right. Those fictions, with their satisfying stories of self-sacrificing loyal heroes and cool-headed agents fighting dangerous and mysterious enemies from without and sometimes even in their own ranks, have a special place in science-fiction, urban fantasy and especially in speculative fiction – in short: they’re just made for narrative media.

There are plenty of stories to choose from when analyzing the concept of an all-powerful agency exercising control over any and all supernatural time and space phenomena.

We have the plain old FBI with their numerous divisions for investigating supernatural or extraterrestrial activities, like in the X-Files and Fringe, or other sub-divisions of the US government or military, like in Star Gate or Warehouse 13. There are several fictional government-adjacent agencies who have some relationship with the government, but mostly govern themselves, like the Redwood Bureau, the SCP Foundation or the Men in Black.

Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith as Agents K and J

The list goes on: whether it’s the Office of Incident Assessment and Response (this one’s British), the Time Variance Authority (TVA) or the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), they all have roughly one mission statement. It’s even in the name of the aforementioned SCP Foundation: Secure. Contain. Protect.

Despite all of their perceived differences, despite some of them being sanctioned by the government and some by a plethora of other mysterious overlords, human and otherwise, despite their seemingly different chosen field of study – all of them seem in a constant state of war. War against aliens, Objects of Power, unknown terrestrial entities or even time itself. An eternal struggle against a never-ending flood of world-shattering, potentially world-ending, events; and apparently, only varying degrees of violence, inhumane callousness, internal and external red tape and secrecy galore can save us – the civilian population – from all of these horrors.

Chapter Two: Out of Time

When I sat down to write these here ramblings, I realized that I’ve consumed a lot of “agency fiction” over the years and how much I love it. Men in Black was my favorite movie for a long while, and Control is definitely in my top-ten video games of all time. A lot of my enthusiasm for this genre stems from a warm and fuzzy feeling that I can only describe as “inception nostalgia”. A nostalgic feeling for a time or thing you haven’t experienced, but is there nonetheless. Like someone or something has implanted you with false memories. An uncanny, mysterious feeling of excitement for men and women in smart suits, sunglasses and wibbly-wobbly jargon. A lot of it has also to do with how this media is presented – either visually or in audio format.

Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny as Agents Mulder and Scully

In non-visual media the old-timey feel of the respective agency is expressed through dialogue, the way internal documents are written or the description of outdated technology, which is miraculously still functional and in use. In movies, TV shows and video games, this is mostly expressed through production or level design.

In Control, a video game heavily based on a lot of agency lore, from Twin Peaks and X-Files to the SCP Foundation, our protagonist Jesse Faden enters the Oldest House, an innocuous New York brutalist skyscraper, only to find within it the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC).

With that Jesse enters not only the wacky world of Altered World Events (AWEs), Objects of Power (OoPs) and mind-controlling mold, but also a boring office building with bulky cathode-ray computer monitors and a confusing filing and memo system delivered via 60-ies pneumatic tubes. Within its white winding corridors, we find rows upon rows of desks arranged in a tayloresque open floor design from hell, sprinkled throughout with some cubicles and, of course, offices reserved only for the department heads. There’s no natural light, no clocks and seemingly no escape.

These retro aesthetics are not just for show but woven into the narrative of the game itself. We find a memo stating that the Oldest House, being a “Place of Power”, can and will not tolerate any modern technology and makes any device which emits anything other than radio waves either disappear or explode.

All memos are taken from the Control Wiki

Although the aesthetics encountered in such places vary in their “oldness”, it remains clear that, in order for agency fiction to work, the agency in question has to feel somewhat out of time to the characters. I found that a lot of it alludes to the very distinct styles of the 1960-ies and 70-ies, about which I’ll talk a little later, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be those decades.

For example, the very old computers of the Office of Incident Assessment and Response (the British one) from the podcast The Magnus Protocol run on a “modified version of Windows NT 4.0”, which is, for some reason, the only system the Office’s bespoke program, which scours the internet for … relevant stuff, runs on. I guess, some supernatural entities are just life-long nineties kids.

Warehouse 13 sports a weird mix of old-timey and modern technology that has more of a Victorian-inspired steampunk vibe. The agents use stun guns developed by Tesla and communication devices developed by the father of the television Philo Farnsworth. All the while Artie, the oldest agent of the Warehouse and in-house grump, is an accomplished hacker who both maintains an air-tight security system and hates computers at the same time. However, Artie’s story and a lot of the series backstories harken back to the cold-war era, so that the agency is very much grounded in those decades.

The Farsnworth communication device

Due to its singular authority over time itself, the headquarters of the TVA are located somewhere outside of time and space. Its interior design could be timeless, not beholden to any architectural trends known to humanity.

However, patterned walls and carpets in warm yellows and oranges adorn the offices and holding cells, while socialist mosaic murals show heroic scenes from the TVA’s creation. In its atrium, it houses cyclopean statues of the Time-Keepers, reminiscent of Soviet era statues of Lenin. Ageless agents (seriously, they don’t age) sit on modernist chairs, wearing slim-fitting suits with skinny ties and typing away on stylized cold-war switchboards, saving the world from anyone who falls out of (time)line.

All images from Loki taken from this article

Replete with the obligatory pneumatic tube communication system, the TVA’s interior is heavily inspired by 1960-ies and 70-ies architecture and design, with some socialist authoritarian brutalism thrown in for good measure.

Groovy!

Chapter 3: The Times They Are A-Changin’

During the late 40-ies and throughout the next four decades the Cold War ravaged our collective imagination. The Soviets were out to get us, every day could be our last, and either we succumbed to our fears or “learned to love the bomb”.

Riding the Bomb from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1964

In short, people were scared shitless for decades. Manipulating a frayed mind is not very hard, and so powerful grifters like senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover terrified the American people with false and sometimes ridiculous fearmongering claims, accusing civil rights and labor union activists, Hollywood creatives and left-wing thought-leaders of being Soviet spies or just run-of-the-mill communists out to threaten the American way of life.

Read the whole pamphlet here

By the end of the 50-ies, however, McCarthy’s credibility and social status were vastly diminished, which left Hoover to continue the fight against the rising tide of change.

J. Edgar Hoover (center) tests a gun. (Jeffrey Markowitz / Sygma via Getty Images)

And, oh my, what a tide it was.

By the 1960-ies, in the time where the US was still segregated, Black civil rights movements began to expand on their work from the 1950-ies. Several non-violent groups started organized sit-ins in segregated spaces, like the Greensboro sit-ins in February to July 1960, which in and of themselves kicked off an entire sit-in movement, organized by the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1963 more than 200.000 people gathered for the “March for Washington”, where civil rights icon Martin Luther King held his “I have a Dream” speech to world-shattering effect. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed, which was followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Martin Luther King at the March on Washington. Library of Congress. Getty Images.

While not at all perfect and far too slow, the civil rights movement was making enormous strides in comparison to prior decades. Women’s rights movements were also not far behind. Due to more (white) women entering the workforce, the privilege rift (the wage gap, unpaid care work, etc.) between men and women became painfully obvious. In 1963 Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a vastly influential feminist text, encouraging women to go beyond established gender roles and find new outlets for their ambitions.

Bettmann Archive / Getty Images

Despite their almost non-existent intersectionality, as they were comprised of mostly white middle-class women, the women’s rights movements of the 60-ies and 70-ies still achieved a great deal of change leading to the constitutional amendment in 1972, which states that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”. In 1973, the recently overturned Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling confirmed a woman’s right to obtain an abortion.

This is not to say that there weren’t any Black women’s liberation movements. (Women's Liberation group marches in protest in support of Black Panther Party, New Haven, November, 1969. David Fenton / Getty Images)

Amidst the screaming youths, the rock-n-roll, the hippies professing love to all mankind, and young people looking forward, imagining a brighter future for all, not just for the chosen few, the aforementioned “chosen few” were trembling in the bespoke suits, while tightly gripping their monocles. You see, the fight for civil rights can’t always be peaceful, there always has to be a fair share of violence involved when fighting against a powerful hegemonic establishment. The suffragettes burned churches, the Black Panther Party was an overtly militant group that defended the American Black population by any means necessary, and the Stonewall riots were, well, riots.

These instances of violence, born out of the desire for freedom and change, terrified the mostly white, male and straight establishment. So terrified were they that the police response to anything civil rights related was always, and still is, unapologetically brutal and cruel.

As with the fears stirred by the Cold War (which was not over by this time), Hoover used these new fears of radical civil rights activists for a decades-long crusade, under the charming motto “Discredit, disrupt, destroy”. By means of COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), which was highly illegal, Hoover and his G-men relentlessly pursued Black civil rights activists, feminist organizations, anti-war activists, environmentalists, Native American movements and any organizations the FBI deemed subversive (granted, they also surveilled the KKK). Smear campaigns, infiltration, unceasing surveillance and even assassinations were just a few tools in their arsenal of evil.

Read the whole document here

For decades, Hoover waged war on change itself, using his FBI, an agency he built around his conservative ideologies and hang-ups. In his almost 50 years as director of the Bureau he meticulously crafted the image of the FBI in the public eye. His agents were smart, professional and rational, cool-headed in every situation. They wore suit and tie and deployed only the most cutting-edge forensic technologies. They were the best America had to offer, and their moral compass was legendary. The agency was wrapped in mystery, secrets were (and are) its bread and butter, and, quite frankly, it was just cool as shit.

In other words, the FBI itself is an incredibly potent meme.  

Ultimately, the Bureau’s eternal opposition to change, its struggle for the status quo, combined with its larger-than-life public image, wormed its way into the collective subconscious, rearing its multifaceted head in works of fiction, where several shady agencies continue to fight in an eternal battle against unknowable, terrible and subversive forces from without.

Chapter 4: A Timely Death

From the heavily redacted files we find strewn about in empty offices of the FBC, we learn that it’s constantly struggling to protect the outside world from “Objects of Power” (OoPs) – seemingly everyday objects imbued with some kind of destructive supernatural power, which randomly bind themselves to the people who find them, lending them “parautalitarian” abilities, basically superpowers like flight or super speed.

OoPs on the loose, with or without someone to bond with, are extremely dangerous, and their discovery always leads to death and destruction before the said object can be found and contained by Bureau personnel. Those objects and their less potent cousins Altered Items are then squirreled away in the endless bowels of the Oldest House, where they’re studied, catalogued and contained. 

In an internal educational video, head of research Dr. Darling posits his theory as to why OoPs exist. He thinks that they are mere representations of everyday items, created by the sheer force of human collective imagination. Meaning, the creation of an OoP or a Place of Power is the result of society “knowing” and imagining. Think a slide projector that transports its users into other dimensions, a safe that shields you from harm, or a turn of the century carousel horse which lets you dash around. The existence and perceived meaning of these items are made literal by us thinking of them in a certain way.

Dr. Darling played by Matthew Porretta

By containing these objects and hiding their existence from the public, by way of shady cover-ups, the Bureau is ostensibly trying to protect us from our own imagination. How nice of them.

The FBC is not unique in its mission of controlling and containing urban legends, though.

Almost all supernatural iterations of the FBI or the military do ostensibly the same, with Agents Mulder and Scully going against shapeshifting aliens and vampires in X-Files or Agent Dunham dealing with a plethora of mad scientists as well as time and dimensional travel in Fringe.

Similarly to the FBC and the SCP foundation, Agents Bering and Lattimer from Warehouse 13 hunt down culturally significant artifacts and sometimes people. Under the motto “Snag it. Bag it. Tag it.” they pursue objects such as the comb of Lucretia Borgia, which turns middle-aged women into murderous “cougars”, or a chair belonging to James Braid, the father of hypnotherapy. At the end of season one H.G. Wells makes an appearance as a jolly evil time traveler, whom the agents try to snag, bag and tag throughout season two. In episode 2 entitled “Resonance”, they even confiscate a piece of music which contains the concept of “being loved”. Groundbreaking sci-fi authors and the concept of love itself? Now, this is some quality “collective imagination hunting”.

The TVA puts its own spin on “Secure, Contain, Protect” with its all-time charming slogan “For All Time. Always” (not ominous at all) and has dedicated itself to hunting down and exterminating “time variants”. These are normal people who, unknowingly, deviate from the “sacred timeline” and by destabilizing it risk the utter destruction of the universe. The aforementioned timeline is so fragile that all variants have to be eradicated immediately and without question, using brute force and other unsavory methods.

The narrow scope of the Sacred Timeline

Time, it seems, being one of the largest pieces of collective imagination, also has to be heavily controlled by a shady agency.

Chapter 5: “It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times…

… it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…”

But wait … Aren’t the protagonists of these stories somewhat rebellious?

Agents Mulder and Scully were not only shunned by the FBI, but they also uncovered a huge conspiracy within its higher echelons. The Redwood Bureau is just outright evil and, together with the agents in Matrix, one of the few instances of an agency modeled after the FBI always being shown as in a negative light. At the beginning of every episode Agent Conroy, a rogue agent, explains that he “escaped [the bureau] to leak their reports to the unsuspecting public” and that should he get caught, he’ll surely never see the light of day again.

Most of the time, we’re not supposed to root for the agency anyway, but for the protagonists, who expose their bosses and bosses’ bosses for being corrupt – kind of echoing what happened to Hoover and his legacy, long after his death. 

In Control Jesse discovers that the former director Zachariah Trench was responsible for the crisis that has befallen the FBC when Jesse first arrives. In Loki, the eponymous God of Mischief has to grapple with the truth that the Authority’s mission statement might be a huge lie, covered up by upper management.

Director Trench played by James McCaffrey

In addition to the overall conflict of the agency with its chosen evil, our heroes have to deal with an internal conflict stemming from corruption, a generous yardage of red tape, excessive compartmentalization and so, so many secrets. Our protagonists, on the other hand, are different: dreamers, who go against the grain with their idealism and propensity for defying authority. Despite their antics, however, they manage to hold on to their positions due to some extraordinary skillset or knowledge that no-one else possesses.

Whether they’re pariahs who work for the agency at the beginning of the story, are freshly transferred or just happen to wander in, they are an external force. A force which is capable of exposing the internal struggle within the agency. Most times, at the end of their story they supplant the existing power structures by becoming directors themselves or by generously giving power to the people or someone they trust within their inner circle. By getting rid of their old bosses and their crusty methods, the young and shiny protagonists swear to do everything differently – flat hierarchies, no red tape, no secrets.

On the surface, that makes for a great message. A fresh-faced optimist takes on the establishment and wins, their rebellion against the status quo complete.

If you think that this sounds too good to be true, well yeah, the status quo has many faces.  

Control demonstrates this quite well.

The story begins when Jesse wanders into the Oldest House in search of her long-lost brother Dylan, who was abducted by the FBC after an incident with a powerful OoP, in which the Faden siblings were heavily involved when they were children. Jesse managed to get away at the time, but at some point, resumed her search for her brother. As soon as she enters the offices it becomes clear that the building is on lockdown due to some kind of invasion, and now Jesse has to contend with an alien invading force, which makes it that much harder to find her brother.

Jesse reaches the director’s office, guided by the janitor Ahti, who’s convinced that she’s his new assistant, where she witnesses the suicide of acting director Zachariah Trench. After looking at the corpse for, like, five seconds, Jesse picks up his service weapon and is transported to a white space, which we later learn is the astral plane. There, beings that call themselves the Board congratulate her for binding the service weapon and becoming the new Director. Yay!

Jesse Faden played by Courtney Hope

In the blink of an eye, Jesse becomes the most powerful bureaucrat in the Bureau. The Oldest House doesn’t hesitate either, adorning every wall in the extensive office space with Jesse’s portrait, J. Edgar Hoover style. Throughout the game, Jesse becomes all the more powerful, binding several other OoPs. By the end of the game, she literally can fly and hurl vending machines at her enemies. What makes her different is that additionally to her obvious parautalitarian abilities, Jesse is also humble and nice, refuses to let people call her “Director” and quickly gets friendly with key personnel. She’s the cool boss.

Judging by how the game progresses, the quests we’re given and the people we have to talk to and befriend, it’s immediately obvious that Jesse is no grunt. While she destroys the office interior during her fights or flies high above the cubicles, it’s made abundantly clear that Jesse would never work in one of those. She has stuff to do, a Bureau to save, extraplanar entities to punch and red tape to tear.

Near the end of the game, in a nightmarish parallel reality, Jesse wakes up behind a desk in one of the open floor offices of the FBC. She was just hired, and everyone is mean to her, while she performs menial tasks which respawn endlessly. The level is in black-and-white, and every round of the menial task becomes more surreal, with reality glitching around Jesse, until she finds a way out by finding out the truth about director Trench. In the short time as an office grunt performing mundane tasks I, the player had a fascinating reaction to this perceived humiliation: How dare they? I’m the Director! I’m exceptional!

Speaking of office personnel. While Jesse is binding OoPs and punching walls, the normal people, who make the FBC run by performing those unimportant tasks mentioned above for a living, are floating in mid-air, possessed by the invading power and reciting a Dadaist poem. As they hang between life and death, neither here nor there, they can’t be saved and pretty quickly become background noise to our adventure. There’s no quest objective to try to save them, and the issue is never resolved throughout the game, leaving us with a vague hope that they might be saved after the game ends.

The Poem in Question recited by Sean Durrie as Dylan Faden (This is heard pretty much everywhere in the game, recited by the many voices of the FBC employees.)

There are some chosen ones, mostly the military wing of the FBC and some researchers, who were saved by equipping a McGuffin which shields them from the evil airwaves. But, let me reiterate, 90% of the people working at the FBC are mindless zombies, and saving them is NOT a priority.

At the end of the game Jesse fully embraces her role as Director of the FBC and swears to do it better – no red tape, no compartmentalization, no secrets. However, the mission statement of the FBC, its methods and treatment of the public as well as its own personnel, are never in question. From the get-go, Jesse doesn’t really care about the office grunts, she doesn’t consider the possibility of disbanding the Bureau or releasing their secrets to the public. When she gets the chance to at least reinstate the Investigations Unit, the equivalent of internal affairs in the FBC, the unit which tried to investigate Trench’s descent into madness, but was thwarted at every corner – she … doesn’t.

Yeah, he’s bonkers alright

The existence of shady government agencies and their obvious good for humanity is never questioned in their respective stories. The TVA persists after Loki ends, but under new management, and the FBI (real and fictional) still stands strong, regardless of the metric tons of uncovered corruption within the agency.

Turns out the fresh-faced idealists were never rebels, but the same establishment in newly minted, limited-edition sneakers.

Kendall Roy played by Jeremy Strong, Succession

Chapter Chapter:: It’s Our Time

If Matrix has taught me anything, it’s that shadowy law enforcement agencies are evil and those sleek, professional, cool-headed agents are villains.

However, what Men in Black inadvertently taught me is that those sleek agents are designed to appeal to us. I even have a soft spot for Agent Smith, the obvious villain of the entire Matrix trilogy. While the aliens in Men in Black and the rebels in the Matrix represent chaos, the agents are pure order. They are stable, they don’t waver in their beliefs, never change their minds – strong, reliable, professional.

Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith, Robert Taylor and Paul Goddard as Agents Jones and Brown

Being a political activist on the other hand, fighting for human rights or even just supporting a cause that goes against the establishment, is hard. There’s often in-fighting as to how to take action “correctly”, you have to be ready for new information and new ways of thinking all the time – you sometimes have to course-correct and admit that you were wrong. There’s a torturous instability in that, even if you’re sure that you’re on the right side of history.

“Agency fiction” is comfort food. The protagonists are always right, even if they’re terribly wrong. In Warehouse 13, for example, agents Bering and Lattimer invoke their status as Secret Service agents numerous times to circumvent basic human rights, including invoking the Patriot Act. But they’re cool and nice, have great chemistry and are very good-looking – and most of all, they’re doing it for the greater good.

Doing it for the greater good - in style! (Eddie McClintock and Joanne Kelly as Agents Lattimer and Bering)

Protagonists like Scully and Mulder, Jesse Faden or Agent J show us that you don’t have to fight and that you totally can change an oppressive system from the inside without dismantling it. And why would you dismantle it? It’s for the greater good!

At the core of all these narratives is the simple assumption that, we, the public, can’t handle the truth – can’t handle monstrosities lurking in our midst, can’t handle the discomfort of minorities existing and our responsibility for their plight. With terrifying ease and pleasure, we gave away our power to shadowy G-men for nothing but a whiff of perceived safety and for the privilege to look away. Now, we have to contend with a world where we’ve shunned our civic duty for too long, a world created by Hoover and his fight against civil rights and change itself.

The fight continues to this day, as the FBI still uses the same COINTELPRO tactics against Black Lives Matter and Anti-Zionist movements have seen government harassment for peaceful sit-ins.

There’s nothing wrong in finding comfort in these orderly narratives. I love and recommend all of the pieces of media I examined here. But, after we’ve had our fill of comfort and quiet, let’s get up from our collective couches and get our power back, shall we?

It's time to look our real enemies straight in the eye and illuminate their empire of lies. There are no monsters lurking on the edge of our perception, there are no evil gangs of civil rights activists, there are no woke mobs roaming the streets ­– there are, on the other hand, police violence, anti-democratic billionaires vying to take away our most basic civil freedoms, and patriarchal hyper-capitalism which only works due to worker exploitation and literal slave labor.

There’s another tide coming – don’t look away.

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Sources:

Primary Sources:

Control. Directed by Mikael Kasurinen, Remedy Entertainment, 2019. (Video Game)

Loki. Created by Michael Waldron, Marvel Studios, 2021. (TV Show)

Warehouse 13. Created by Jane Espenson and D. Brent Mote, Universal Cable Productions. Syfy 2009-2014. (TV Show)

Redwood Bureau. Presented by Josh Tomar, Eeriecast Productions, 2021. (Podcast)

Men in Black. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, Columbia Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Parkes/MacDonald Productions, 1997.

The Matrix. Directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures, Groucho II Film Partnership, Silver Pictures, 1999.

The Magnus Protocol. Rusty Quill Ltd., 2024. (Podcast)

Secondary Sources:

Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Doubleday, 2017.

Uetricht, Micah, and Beverly Gage. "J. Edgar Hoover Shaped US History for the Worse." Jacobin, 30 Dec. 2023, jacobin.com/2023/12/j-edgar-hoover-fbi-palmer-raids-red-scare-civil-rights. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.

Hoban, Virgie. "‘Discredit, Disrupt, and Destroy’: FBI Records Acquired by the Library Reveal Violent Surveillance of Black Leaders, Civil Rights Organizations." Berkely Library, 18 Jan. 2021, www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/fbi. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.

"Outline of U.S. History/Decades of Change: 1960-1980." WikiBooks, Last Edited: 28 Oct. 2022, en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Outline_of_U.S._History/Decades_of_Change:_1960-1980. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.

Foster, Hannah. "COINTELPRO [COUNTERINTELLIGENCE PROGRAM] (1956-1976)." Blackpast, 14 Mar. 2014, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/cointelpro-1956-1976/. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.

McLeod, Katie, and Tamsin Rose. "Rights Groups Condemn ‘Police Repression’ at ‘Peaceful’ Pro-Palestine Rally in Sydney." The Guardian, 22 Nov. 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/22/nsw-premier-defends-police-conduct-after-dozens-arrested-at-pro-palestine-rally-in-sydney. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.

German, Mike. "The FBI Has a History of Targeting Black Activists. That's Still True Today." The Guardian, 26 Jun. 2020, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/26/fbi-black-activism-protests-history. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.

Pilkington, Ed. "Fears of Renewed FBI Abuse of Power After Informant Infiltrated BLM Protests." The Guardian, 14 Feb. 2023, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/14/fbi-abuse-of-power-alleged-informant-denver-blm-protests. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.

Noe, Rain. "The Sets of Loki: Mad-Century Modernism." Core77, 16 Nov. 2023, www.core77.com/posts/126276/The-Sets-of-Loki-Mad-Century-Modernism. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.

"COINTELPRO." FBI Records: The Vault, vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.

Our Story

An essay about the immigrant story and who gets to tell it.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Hamburg to watch the newly minted German translation of the hit musical Hamilton by world’s favorite theater kid Lin-Manuel Miranda. I didn’t expect much. Specifically, I expected to witness a disaster, and even better, to look around and silently judge the other members of the audience for watching a translation, rather than the original. This was a thing that me and my college mates did constantly, back in the day, when we studied translation. We hated anything translated and, being stupid college kids, preferred the original. 

Fron left to right: Oliver Edward (John Laurens/Philip Hamilton), Benet Monteiro (Hamilton), Daniel Dodd-Ellis (Lafayette/Jefferson), Redchild (Hercules Mulligan/Madison)

The Hamburg production of Hamilton resides in the Operettenhaus Hamburg and was translated by Kevin Schroeder (German translations of Sister Act, Sound of Music and Shrek) and German rapper Sera Finale.

As expected, the entitled asshole that inhabited my headspace that day was wrong. The show was very good. The translation was on point and the actors talented and energetic. Miranda’s talent for compelling storytelling shone through regardless of the language. Great fun all around. Something bugged me, though. Bugged me on my way back to the hotel, in bed, on the plane back home. I couldn't put my finger on it, and soon life took over and I forgot. 

Holiday season rolled around soon after, and, like many of us, I found myself at an office holiday party. The company that hosted that party was founded overseas, and so almost all of the attendants, including me, were speaking a foreign language. Acclimatizing to a party with hundreds of people is no joke, but after I had my fill of food and drink, I finally started paying attention to my surroundings. As I was chatting with someone about my recent trip to Hamburg and the translation of Hamilton, I specifically started focussing on our use of language. I guess, you can get the girl out of the translation business, but can’t get the translation business out of the girl.

We spoke our native tongue with each other, but code-switched to English if someone who didn’t speak the language was around – standard procedure really. I also noticed a specific air of superiority when we did that, the speed and precision of the code switch definitely having an influence on what the people around thought of you. There was that familiar reverence for higher education that our parents, who were born in a country that doesn’t exist anymore, instilled in us, and fluent English was one of its markers. 

It seemed that listening to Hamilton in German slightly but irreversibly shifted my perception, not just of the musical, but of the world and the people around me. I retreated into a corner, listening. People speaking at least two languages with ease – out of fun, necessity, conviction? The band started playing Smooth Operator, I stared at the dance floor. I need to relax.

Not long before the party, I was listening to the official cast recording of Hamilton, procrastinating work, as usual. I was happily singing along, as, for the first time since listening to the musical, I got the urge to research Alexander Hamilton himself. I knew the basics of American history, but not enough to know specifics about every single founding father.

I was aware of the controversies surrounding the musical, and although I loved it very much (and, on some level, I still do), I too found it quite uncomfortable to see black men and women portraying well-known slave owners. A discomfort, I was assured, was folly, because Hamilton is just a fanfic and I shouldn’t take it that seriously, according to this article in Vox.

Despite my discomfort and general level of media literacy, the musical did manage to convince me of one thing. I was sure that Hamilton was a light-skinned black man. A mixed-race Creole man born out of wedlock or, as Miranda astutely put it, “... a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman…”, who then pulled himself out of the squalor by being brilliant. As a result, he got the chance to come to America and enroll into King’s College (now Columbia). 

“Another immigrant comin’ up from the bottom” he grew up to be a “hero and a scholar” and got “a lot farther by working a lot harder, by being a lot smarter, by being a self-starter”. You get the gist.

Lin-Manuel Miranda as Hamilton

His story is fundamentally that of a righteous underdog who fights for his principles, despite being half-accepted (or less) into the ranks of the other founding fathers only by virtue of his writing talent and policy making skills. Eventually, he dies by the hand of Aaron Burr, an opportunist bastard who hates Hamilton for being awesome. This is what the musical told me and this is what I believed.

Imagine my disappointment when I found out that Hamilton was very white and, despite growing up in poverty, had a lot of privilege regardless. It was also clear that  the musical, except for the obvious artistic license that every work of fiction is entitled to, didn’t exactly lie about his provenance. However, it used a distinct kind of narrative to make the audience sympathize with Hamilton – the archetypal immigrant story.

But why does it matter? Why bother, if Miranda, an American of Puerto-Rican descent, wrote a piece of fanfic and inserted himself into it? Is it actually important, whether we believe that a long dead white man was black? 

Yes. It matters. See, Miranda left some stuff out.

Back at the holiday party, I am surrounded by hundreds of immigrants, whose stories could neatly fit into the story Hamilton wants to convey. People that came to a foreign country by virtue of their intellectual faculties and ended up enriching the society they now live in. 

If you actually talk to them, however, an entirely different story starts to emerge: 

Why do you switch to English? 

Well, because I didn’t have time or felt the need to learn German. 

Why are you huddled together at this party? 

Well, because I still feel like an outsider and find it much more reassuring to stick to my people, my colleagues doubling as friends and potential love interests. 

Do you have German friends? 

Not really. 

The answers are then usually followed by horror stories about their visits to the Kreisverwaltungsreferat (Department of Public Order) - a famously uncooperative institution, especially if you’re a foreigner.

In Hamilton the minutiae of immigration are glossed over - the registration, the scowls of the public workers, the first attempts at speaking the language and understanding the culture. Actual immigration, however, is messy, confusing and sometimes painful. You live in a country that inherently doesn’t want you. Some of us are white and pass, some of us wrestled the language and came out on top, some of us didn’t. There is always uncertainty in an immigrant existence, there is always a part of yourself that is untethered to the place you live in.

The band continues to play the greatest non-denominational winter party hits, all proudly produced by the American cultural hegemony, which ensures that Don’t Stop Believin’ has lived rent-free in my head for what feels like millennia. Enough, Irma! It’s the holiday season. I want to dance and drink and laugh and sweat out all the horrible stuff that happened this year. I want to forget the war, the pandemic, the revolutions drenched in blood. I close my eyes and start moving to the rhythm.

The name he gave himself at the behest of his stern savior Professor Lovell, who saved him from certain death, is sufficient, but will replace his birth name forever. After all, he needs a proper name an Englishman can pronounce. Lovell will take him in, become his guardian and give him everything he needs – food, shelter, education, money. Yes, there will be some beatings, some scolding, but how else to expel the laziness inherent in his Chinese heritage? How else will he become proper? Thanks to an anonymous benefactor, he learned English by devouring books sent to him every couple months and from talking to an Englishwoman, who was living with his family for as long as he could remember. Later he will learn that Lovell is this benefactor and also his father.

Now he’s on his way to London, the greatest city in the world. He is brilliant, using his perfect British accent as a shield against prying eyes, using English as a means to survive, to dazzle. Due to his excellent language skills he is almost accepted, almost welcome – but he can’t hide his face for long, can he?

Robin Swift, bastard, orphan, son of someone, looks out on the harbor, his life ahead of him. There are, indeed, a million things he hasn’t done. Just you wait.

Robin is the main character in Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence by Rebecca F. Kuang, a Chinese-American fantasy writer and history scholar with degrees in Chinese Studies and Contemporary Chinese Studies. 

Robin’s story is remarkably similar to Hamilton’s as told by Miranda, with one key difference:. Kuang’s story is informed by history and, I assume, personal experience, whereas Miranda’s seems to be informed by narrative. 

In fact, it feels like Miranda’s entire immigrant oeuvre (In the Heights, Hamilton and Encanto) is informed by the stories he was told by his elders, relying on stereotypes and easily digestible factoids one might convey to a child, because the truth might be too painful. This results in a weird mixture of immigrant experience with a backbone of good old American Dream bootstrap mentality. 

There is no racial profiling, no systemic oppression in his art – the problems arise from an individual not working hard enough, from lacking the iron will to survive. Hard work, in turn, is rewarded with financial success and social standing – in other words, Miranda’s art reflects the notion that you can work yourself out of being distrusted just by virtue of being a foreigner.

Miranda’s Alexander, like Robin, also read all the books he could find, but there is no mention of him learning anything. He already spoke English, having been born in an English colony, and he knew the culture for this exact same reason. Hamilton hustled and wrote his way out of his poverty, so much so that an entire town donated money to send him to America to get a proper education. An education he then used to inform his policies. When he steps off the ship in New York harbor, he is promptly accepted into the society that is shown on stage. He finds life-long friends and starts advocating for freedom, which everyone agrees with – “Let's get this guy in front of a crowd” they say. He quickly gets an audience and achieves what he wants – a revolution, the establishment of a sovereign nation and, most importantly, a legacy.

The musical, extradiegetically, refers to him as a “bastard, immigrant, orphan”, but within the narrative, he is feared and respected – his prowess with a pen legendary. His otherness seems no obstruction, but more of a motivation to him. Having lost his family, which, according to him, is “unimportant”, he sets out to build a legacy, something that will outlast him forever. 

According to the musical, he succeeds. His policies, his face on the ten dollar bill, the establishment of the coast guard – all speak to that.

Kuang’s story rings more true in this regard. From the academic exploitation of foreign minds to the inherent perception of otherness, perpetuated by an oppressive system; her characters don’t shy away from conveying their stories as they actually happen.

When Robin sets foot on English soil he is reluctantly naturalized as a British citizen, after a doctor makes sure that he is in a fit state and not riddled with lice and other foreign diseases. More importantly, he is made to understand what is expected of him. He will be tutored in Latin, Greek and Mandarin (not Cantonese, his actual native language), and then he will be enrolled at the Royal Institute of Translation or Babel. It is of the utmost importance, he is told, that he knows the languages he is taught intimately. Him being a native speaker is of great import, as Asiatic languages are in high demand. Any mistake, no matter how small or youthful, is met with beatings, threats of deportation and humiliation from his guardian. 

It is the 1830s and translation is magic – silverworking they call it. Engrave a silver bar with a potent translation pair, and it becomes reality – the magic trapped in the untranslatable space between the set meanings of the words inscribed. Silver is everywhere in London. It powers the Empire’s mighty fleet, helping it conquer ever more colonies. It keeps the city sewers clean, makes its clocks more precise, its carriages run smoothly and the flowers bloom all year round. Translators are the only ones able to install and maintain the silver bars, as every matching pair must be spoken aloud by someone who truly understands both languages and the etymology of the words spoken. They exclusively establish new pairs, work the silver and get paid handsomely for services provided. Babel is the epicenter of the Empire’s power and language, and, in turn, native speakers are its main resource. 

It is not long, however, that Robin begins to fathom the exploitative nature of Babel. As the power of the Romance languages is fading, the silver business needs fresh blood in the form of Asian and Semitic languages. It’s “simple economics” really: Exceptionally gifted children from the colonies (mostly slaves or children of house servants) are being transported to Babel by white benefactors and guardians, “properly” educated, and their native tongue used to power the Empire, while all of the leading “experts” in the respective languages are white scholars like Prof. Lovell.

Parallel to Robin’s story, Hamilton, meets three friends and forms an unshakable bond with them. However, no thought is given to their dynamics. John Laurens, Lafayette and Hercules Mulligan are all white men played by black actors, Lafayette even being of noble descent. If Hamilton was an actual immigrant, would they have accepted him as easily as on stage? As it stands, Hamilton dazzles them with his youthful exuberance and gets their respect and eternal friendship. 

From left to right: Daveed Diggs (Lafayette/Jefferson), Okieriete Onaodowan (Hercules Mulligan/James Madison), Anthony Ramos (John Laurens/Philip Hamilton), Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton)

In his “I am”-song “My Shot”, he lays out who he is and what he wants: 

I'ma get a scholarship to King's College

I probably shouldn't brag, but dang, I amaze and astonish

The problem is I got a lot of brains but no polish

I gotta holler just to be heard

With every word, I drop knowledge

I'm a diamond in the rough, a shiny piece of coal

Tryna reach my goal my power of speech, unimpeachable

Only nineteen but my mind is older

These New York City streets get colder, I shoulder

Every burden, every disadvantage

I have learned to manage, I don't have a gun to brandish

I walk these streets famished

There is talk of some disadvantage and burden, which adds to his credibility, but that’s just it. It is glossed over so quickly that you wouldn’t even notice if you’re not reading along. Every nuance to his experience is drowned in his posturing and of course in the chorus, which is repeated several times:

And I am not throwin' away my shot

I am not throwin' away my shot

Hey yo, I'm just like my country

I'm young, scrappy and hungry

And I'm not throwin' away my shot   

After being enrolled in Oxford, Robin, too, gets a glimpse of a “respectable” life. He meets his cohort Ramy, Victoire and Letty, with whom he will spend his entire time in university. They cling to each other for support and comfort. Their bond feels as unshakeable as Babel itself. In their early days at Oxford they still try to ignore their respective treatment, to laugh it off, after all – translators hold all the power in the world, wouldn’t it be logical to assume that they also garner all the respect? They just have to hold out a little bit longer and focus on their studies. It is also made very clear that without Babel, they would be out on the street, deported, dead or forcefully married. Their social standing is directly tied to their loyalty.

A big chunk of the book is dedicated to conveying how Robin and his friends are treated. Ramy, stemming from India, is seldom let into any establishment without a fuss and is often ushered to the servant’s entrance, despite his scholar’s robes that should indicate his standing in Oxford society. Victoire and Letty are two of the very few women on campus and are neither allowed to wear skirts, as to not distract the male students, nor can they live on campus, enter museums and libraries alone. Their landlady thinks that they are servants. Victoire, a woman of color, is not even allowed to use the inside bathroom and on one occasion, drunk students want to “inspect” her breasts, to see if they’re different somehow. 

It is these experiences that shape Robin’s and the others’ decisions and the story’s inevitable conclusion.     

His name is Griffin Lovell, he is from Macau and he is definitely Robin’s older brother. Robin always suspected Lovell to be his biological father, but has successfully banished the thought for a very long time. Griffin left Oxford in his third year, faking his death, before he could finish his studies - the burden of knowing what he will be made to do in the service of the Empire unbearable. Instead he joined the Hermes Society, a revolutionary group that steals silver from Babel and redistributes it to those who need it. 

It is a dangerous undertaking, and the society members are regularly being killed or caught and tortured. Babel is not just a bulwark of learning, it is also greatly protected and the biggest source of silver in the world. Griffin asks Robin to join, but he is scared. He can’t fathom a life outside of the comforts Babel provides, but he also knows that what he enjoys are the spoils of war, suppressed revolutions, outright racism and so much blood. Robin and, as he later learns, Ramy and Victoire join the revolution and seal their fate forever. 

Hamilton doesn’t waver when it comes to revolution, and this is where his and Robin’s story also greatly differ. Hamilton, Immigrant Extraordinaire, wants “to fight, not write”. He doesn’t give up anything, he has the choice between being Washington’s right hand man and being on the battlefield. Revolution and war are his choice, for Robin they are a necessity.

Chris Jackson as George Washington

The plan is to fan this spark into a flame

But damn, it's getting dark, so let me spell out my name

I am the A-L-E-X-A-N-D-E-R 

we are meant to be

A colony that runs independently

Meanwhile, Britain keeps shittin' on us endlessly

Essentially, they tax us relentlessly

Then King George turns around, runs a spendin' spree

He ain't ever gonna set his descendants free

So there will be a revolution in this century

Enter me 

(he says in parentheses)

Due to the Hermes Society’s highly splintered nature, there are no communications between the members. Griffin, as the handler, gives Robin his tasks in code, and that’s it. Revolution seems a very lonely business. His tasks are minute: go to the tower at an appointed hour and open the door, that’s it. Rinse and repeat. This life quickly becomes routine, and the little he does appeases his conscience enough that he allows himself to dream of a scholarly well-fed life again.

At one of his revolutionary excursions, however, everything goes wrong and Robin gets injured. He told Griffin that there was a new protection spell on the door, but was ignored. He hates Griffin for abandoning him, hates him for being more interested in the cause than him, too. He hates Lovell for humiliating him, for being an imperialist, for not admitting that he’s their father, for everything really. He hates Oxford and he loves it, he hates society, but wants so desperately to have a place in it. In a fury he leaves the Hermes Society and is left out in the cold.

While Robin gets out while he can, Hamilton leads his troops to victory. He is so sure of himself, and the narrative supports him fully. “Immigrants, we get the job done!”, he sings with Lafayette before the battle of Yorktown. While society rejects Robin outright, Hamilton is not only easily accepted, but identifies with it. Enough to have an insatiable desire to fight for it – to die for it. Weird that the new society he helps create remains so incredibly xenophobic throughout its history. Hamilton's place in society is fixed the moment he starts advocating for revolution, and it needs something extremely scandalous to take part of his power away from him. Hamilton, again, makes the choice to destabilize himself by writing the Reynolds Pamphlet, he self-sabotages. 

Robin is constantly threatened with deportation, no matter the extent or scale of his mistake. From this unstable position, his decision to join the revolution purely on the basis of his conscience and convictions is much more meaningful.

Determined to finish his studies, Robin jumps head first into Oxford life, but one night, he is sucked back into the revolution, as he sees Ramy and Victoire trying to steal silver from Babel and failing. Robin saves them by getting himself caught by Lovell and, convincing himself that he’s doing it for his friends, ends up giving up one of Hermes’ safe houses Griffin told him about. Lovell assures him that now everything will be different, that he is the good one for sure, and that Griffin is a monster and a murderer. Lovell then gives Robin a silver bar that Griffin used to kill one of his colleagues. Shocked, Robin seems to agree, and we see how much he still wants to be in Lovell’s good graces, how much the dream of a respected, quiet academic life still affects him. How much he wants to exploit the fact that he can pass for white, if he just keeps his head low enough. 

Hamilton already passes for white, because, at his core, no matter whether he wears Lin-Manuel Miranda’s face or not – he is white. His story is, too.      

Robin and his cohort are at the beginning of their last year of school when they’re told that they’re going to Canton to take part in negotiations between a trading company and the commissioner of Canton, who refused to let their ships full of opium into the country and instead confiscated the goods. Their journey comes to a head, when Robin, distraught at being in his home town again, is set to translate between the two parties. After the negotiation that went expectedly nowhere, the commissioner asks to talk to him in private. Asked about his honest opinion on the matter, he tells the commissioner without hesitation that the Englishmen don’t really want an honest negotiation. They just want their way, which they are willing to get by any means necessary. To which the commissioner responds by setting the confiscated opium worth millions of pounds-sterling on fire in the middle of the river.

“The interpreter must not allow his or her personal opinions to affect the interpretation. The interpreter must not express his or her personal opinions at any time during the interpretation.” This and similar codes of conduct for interpreters and translators are set in place by many associations to ensure an ethical set of rules by which interpreters must abide. And if Robin had chosen this profession, and had not been treated like a resource his entire life, he probably would have followed them. However, this was not the case and now he’s dispensable. He betrayed the Crown. 

Lovell whisks them away on the next ship bound for London and lays into Robin, again humiliating and accusing him of being ungrateful, while Robin, so tired of this particular tirade, responds that he never asked to be saved and certainly never asked to be used as a tool to destroy his own countrymen. As Lovell, unresponsive to his remarks, responds with more humiliation and scorn, Robin grows more and more agitated, until he grabs Griffin’s silver bar, which he still has in his pocket, and kills Lovell. 

This is the first blood that is spilled in this book, and it’s treated with the gravitas and horror it deserves. It will not be the last. Robin’s friends help him without hesitation. They haul the body overboard and then pretend that Lovell contracted some Chinese disease and can’t leave his cabin for the rest of the journey. This experience wrecks them, they don’t eat or sleep, imagining all the scenarios of what will happen when they arrive back in London. 

When they finally do, loss is inevitable. Ramy, Griffin, the Hermes Society, even hope – all lost. Robin and Victoire, who have been betrayed by Letty, who fell back on the white privilege, as soon as there was talk of change, attempt a final coup. They occupy Babel with a handful of others willing to help and therefore block the Empire’s access to silver and the maintenance of the already installed silver bars. In the end, Victoire is the only one who survives. 

There is a lot of blood spilled in Hamilton, but the suffering is again sanitized and glossed over, the mentions of the horrors of war buried in a praising hymn for Washington and, of course, Hamilton.

They're battering down the battery, check the damages (rah!)

We gotta stop 'em and rob 'em of their advantages (rah!)

Let's take a stand with the stamina God has granted us

Hamilton won't abandon ship, yo, let's steal their cannons

Shh-boom, goes the cannon, watch the blood and the shit spray, and

And boom, goes the cannon, we're abandonin' Kips Bay

And boom, there's another ship

And boom, we just lost the southern tip

And boom, we gotta run to Harlem quick, we can't afford another slip

Catchy, no? Strong convictions and even stronger nationalism. 

The loss in Hamilton is only palpable when someone close to him dies. When his son dies. When he dies in the end. His story, his revolution, revolved around his ideas and choices. His legacy will not be forgotten and neither will be the legacy of this musical.

Every other founding fathers' story gets told

Every other founding father gets to grow old

And when you're gone, who remembers your name?

Who keeps your flame? 

In the end, Robin and Hamilton suffer the same fate. Robin dies with a handful of other revolutionaries, alone, unable to go on after he lost everything and everyone. With his last breath, he manages to corrupt the Empire’s silver reserves, thus buying time. Because one revolt is not enough, because you can’t easily win something like that, you can just slow it down long enough for others to follow in your footsteps. As with many uncomfortable immigrants, Robin’s legacy will either not be talked about, or his narrative will be corrupted or appropriated for a cause he never fought for. 

Hamilton is insanely popular. Hamilton is well written. Hamilton is catchy. Hamilton is comfortable. Hamilton makes predominantly white people feel good about themselves, as they revel in their wokeness without actually looking at the oppressive systems they benefit from. Hamilton makes a convincing argument that success is an individual matter, that there is nothing holding you back but yourself, and although we know that that’s not the case in the slightest, it is far more comfortable to believe than the truth.

Miranda’s sanitized version of immigration and revolution is part of the problem. It is disrespectful to those who died fighting systematic oppression and corruption, fighting for fundamental human rights and better working conditions – those who are still fighting.

In the end, it doesn’t matter, “Who lives. Who dies. Who tells your story”. 

It matters why it is told and to whom. 

It is a Dark and Stormy Life

In defence of my undying love for (fictional) Murder

After publishing my essay last Tuesday, I was exhausted. Nothing went as planned, the editor broke down and the whole process became a lengthy battle against my internet browser. I finished far later than expected and couldn’t make it to See How They Run (link to review) for which I had tickets that evening. All in all I was tired, frustrated and coming down from a serious panic attack that happened during this whole ordeal.

My head was blank and for a while I stared at my laptop screen, sniffing and sad. At some point, I mustered the strength to close it, before I could fall into another internet-related rabbit hole. I peeled myself off the chair and fell onto the sofa. What now? I needed something comfortable, a cozy blanket for my mind, eyes and ears - I needed a good murder. 

As I’d already planned to see a murder mystery, I decided to spend my evening with the coziest mysteries I could find, which I dutifully documented in my insta stories. But, as I lounged there enjoying Yvette’s bouncy boobs and Tim Currie’s mugging in Clue, the somber and somewhat disturbing ending of Crooked House and the absolutely wild ride that was Blithe Spirit, I wondered: Why do I love murder mysteries so much? 

Out of all movie and literature genres, they provide me with the most joy, the most comfort. The more people die, the calmer I become. Most would think that I’m referring to cozies like Miss Marple, Murder, She Wrote and Agatha Raisin - in which the murder is somewhat in the background and the focus is more on the quirky set of characters and the, mostly female, protagonist. But no, all murder comforts me, provided it’s fictional. 

There are some exceptions: I don’t particularly enjoy sleazy erotic thrillers, mostly because they all inexplicably revolve around Michael Douglas’ dick, and I don’t enjoy horror movies, where there is always a body count and technically a mystery, but it’s just too graphic for comfort. It seems there are three key components to me enjoying whodunits: an aesthetic that pops, a strong sense of justice and a mystery that I can follow along. 

There are a lot of interesting aesthetics that can adorn a whodunit. The Georgian and Victorian eras are very popular thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle, mostly featuring male detectives modeled on Sherlock Holmes and E. A. Poe’s Auguste Dupont (The Murders in the Rue Morgue), who strut around on dirty streets, employing grisly medical instruments to perform autopsies and talking to dirty witnesses, some of whom are dirty prostitutes. The medieval times are also quite popular; sporting a cast of sleuthing members of the clergy (Cadfael Chronicles, The Name of the Rose), curious coroners (The Sanctuary Seeker) or seemingly bored aristocrats, who might secretly be spies (The Owen Archer Series). But I want to focus on an aesthetic that makes me the happiest: the interwar years.

A lot of whodunits lean heavily into the aesthetics of the 20-ies and 30-ies, the Agatha Christie era, so to speak. Even movies that are not based on her stories (Amsterdam, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries) often employ the same looks and feel. The picture is golden and sepia-toned, the costumes are vibrant and the characters rich and exuberant. The visuals of the interwar years evoke feelings of freedom and lushness. We see a generation of survivors tasting, touching, experiencing life at its fullest. With them we take a joint sigh of relief - We did it! We survived the Great War!   

With this backdrop - the memories of war still looming large in the distance - any murder feels exciting and lighthearted. In one and a half hours you experience the excitement of a war ending, a breath of a new era, beautiful costumes and great characters. The motives are clean cut - love, passion, money, maybe even boredom - and everything is set in high society, where the actual repercussions of WWI (abandoned broken veterans, a second war right around the corner) are invisible. Add a brilliant and adorable lady sleuth or a quirky detective (or both) and you’re enraptured, following the story to its simple and elegant solution. 

Best of all: the mystery is yours to solve. By following the detective(s), you too, can collect clues, watch suspicious characters break under the watchful eye of our protagonist and solve the murder alongside them. Exciting, wholesome even. When you’ve seen the horrors of war, a lady killed for the inheritance money doesn’t seem as terrible anymore. 

When the culprit is found out, they have to be punished accordingly. If the time period allows, an arrest may suffice, but it’s also fine if the murderer and their accomplices die in the end. Whether the justice is man-made or divine doesn’t matter, as long as it is served.  

But, what makes it cozy?

For me it hits the golden spot between engagement and relaxation. As is widely known: We live in a society. Our brains are constantly working on something, at work we are, well, working, in leisure we’re focussed on not working or on socializing, which gets harder and harder each day, and following along is a day-long barrage of bad news, social media, impostor syndrome and the torturous question of what to have for dinner. We are constantly engaged, either by algorithms or our homemade drama. Doing too much is overwhelming, but doing nothing feels wrong or is just plain boring, due to our inability to relax. 

The same goes for movie genres. Romcoms are famously tropey but they’re all too familiar, as you sit there and wait for the next plot point to drop. Action movies also have a rigid set of rules, but their sound design and toxic masculinity are overwhelming to a point where relaxation is a distant memory at best. This is where murder mysteries come in. You are engaged, might even follow along with the mystery, but due to its eye-pleasing aesthetics and lavish soundtrack, you can focus on something else entirely and still derive pleasure from it. The characters engage your sense of curiosity, the situations tickle your funny bone and the clean cut ending is so round and satisfying that you might need another cup of tea after the movie has ended. 

You sit there, amused, but not overwhelmed, attentive, but relaxed - you find your middle. 

You are calm.

You are cozy.

Murder is zen.

Supergirls Don’t Cry

An Essay about girlhood, womanhood and everything in-between

“I need my golden crown of sorrow 

My bloody sword to swing 

I need my empty halls to to echo with grand self-mythology”

Since Dance Fever by Florence and the Machine came out, I’ve been listening to it non-stop. Especially the song King taps into a part of me that I haven’t visited in a long time, a part that I tried to hide even from myself to a point that I forgot what it actually does. My womanhood. 

Just like the movement itself, I, as a life-long feminist, have been struggling with womanhood as a concept. Is it something to shun or to embrace? Is it something to ignore or to celebrate? Is it a vital part of me or is it dictated by the patriarchy and has to be fought at all cost? How do I wield it? When does it even begin?

I wonder about the mystification of womanhood. I wonder about witches, cavorting with the devil and dancing naked on a hill under a full moon. I imagine the Crone, the Mother and the Maiden, tugging at the strings of fate of mankind. I wonder about wellness, diets and Kundalini yoga. About the green goddess salad and my iron goddess tea, which is supposed to calm my primordial urges to kill all men during PMS. We are terrifying and mysterious, a force to be reckoned with. 

“A woman is a changeling, always shifting shape

Just when you think you have it figured out

Something new begins to take”

Being mistaken for a mythical creature, however, has led and still leads to a lot of death, and although they don’t burn us at the stake anymore, we’re still not exactly human. In this age of rationalism and identity politics, of third wave feminism and overall wokeness, we are still inbetweeners in western society. We are objects and subjects. We are a minority for some and enjoy white privilege for others. We are forced to represent all of womankind, but have to bear individual responsibility when it comes to our health, needs and desires. Our bodies are dehumanized, our voices ignored, our entire being and right to exist used for political gain. 

But instead of banding together, we quarrel. Supposed feminist cis women attacking trans women, feminists attacking women in the public eye for imagined transgressions against all of womankind - I guess I’m not the only one who forgot and is in search of answers.

“What strange claws are these scratching at my skin

I never knew my killer would be coming from within”  

Tired and in a dark November mood I, of course, turn to Hollywood. Simple, it says, womanhood begins with blood, then, to spice everything up, we’ll add a difficult, harrowing transition period - et voila, a girl becomes a woman. Cool. 

In terms of genre I choose horror, as it has a lot more leeway in tackling taboo themes and because my mood only darkens, as my exploration continues. You can also add some superpowers, high stakes and monsters, which makes it much more fun. 

And so, we meet Eleven, now Jane (Millie Bobby Brown) in Stranger Things 4 in 1986, roughly a year after the events of season 3. El lost her superpowers, some variation of telekinesis and telepathy, in an intense fight against the Mind Flayer, who turned out to be her most formidable foe, yet. After the fight and the death of her adoptive father Jim Hopper (David Harbour), she was relocated to California by Dr. Sam Owens (Paul Reiser), formerly in charge of Hawkins Lab where she grew up and was exploited for her powers by Dr. Brenner or Papa, as he had all his subjects call him. 

In 1976, we meet Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) in Carrie. A shy young girl born in the recesses of the mind of the master of horror Stephen King and brought to life by master of exploitation Brian De Palma. Carrie also wields telekinetic powers, which crop up regularly when she is stressed or frightened. She lives with her mother, or Mama to Carrie, Margaret White (Piper Laurie), who is an abusive religious zealot and regularly beats and berates Carrie for her biggest sin - existing in a female body.

Both Carrie and El are bullied incessantly, mostly due to being quiet, shy, not understanding social cues and dressing “weird”. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, as both their journeys begin with blood.

We first see Carrie in an overhead shot of school girls playing volleyball. Carrie gets passed the ball, but drops it, resulting in her team losing the game. The first line of dialogue we hear clearly directed at Carrie is “Eat shit!”, spoken by her main bully Chris (Nancy Allen). In the locker room scene that follows, we see a dreamlike almost fairytale version of girlhood and womanhood, as girls brush their hair, talk, laugh and are unadulteratedly naked with each other, all clad in soft porn lighting and music. It is clear that we’re invited to watch and linger. 

The shot pans to Carrie alone in the shower, the camera almost caressing her body, as she washes herself. It very slowly moves between her legs and we see an inordinate amount of blood. After noticing, Carrie freaks out, running to her classmates, crying and frightened. And only at the 4:50 minute mark does she utter her first words: “Help me!”

El’s story begins in 1979, as her Papa, Dr. Brenner prepares to go to work. At work he conducts some kind of experiment with a subject, he calls Ten, when Ten begins to have visions of a blood bath and terrifying cries of agony permeate the sterile halls of Hawkins Lab. Brenner stumbles over more and more blood-covered corpses, until he reaches a room strewn with horribly maimed bodies of children. In the middle he sees 8-year-old El, panting, bleeding from eyes and nose and her hospital gown covered in blood. As a bloody nose is a common side effect of using her powers, Brenner manages a “What have you done?”, before the screen fades to black.

Oops, all periods.

For El there will be no aftermath for this scene for a long time, but Carrie continues to suffer, as back in 1976 the other girls don’t take kindly to her plea for help. They back her into a corner, pelting her with sanitary products, while chanting “Plug it up!”. The gym teacher Ms. Collins (Betty Buckley) quickly figures out what's happening, shuts the bullies down and slaps the terrified, whimpering Carrie back to her senses, but not before the Psycho Prelude plays and a lightbulb bursts right above their heads. 

El doesn’t have any memory of the bloody incident in her past, but her current life is not exactly sunshine and rainbows, either. Although she describes her life as perfect in her letters to Mike (Finn Wolfhard), her boyfriend back in Hawkins, her alleged friends are actually her worst bullies, her amazing grades are actually bad and her new adoptive family, the Byers, are so preoccupied with themselves that they don’t really see her or her distress. 

In school, after a class where the kids had to make a presentation about their hero, she is bullied by Angela (Elodie Grace Orkin) and her preppy clique of friends. Instead of choosing some historical figure as her hero, El chooses Hopper and shows a diorama she made, of the cabin they lived in, since he adopted her in season 2. As Carrie gets bullied for getting her period, El gets ridiculed for her expression of grief - two distinctly human processes and emotions. Really our first clue, as to how their humanity will be treated in their respective stories.  

It all culminates, when after getting another bad grade, El trudges through the school yard with her diorama in hand. She gets intercepted and tripped up by Angela, whose weirdly exaggerated friend tramples on El’s diorama. Enraged and crying, El runs after the group, yells and raises her hand to use her powers, but, unlike Carrie, she doesn’t have them anymore.

As I watch these properties back to back, I do notice some intended similarities, but also something else. 

Stranger Things has always been inspired by 80-ties nostalgia. The first and second seasons were an homage to Steven Spielberg movies like E.T and The Goonies, while the third was inspired by action movies like Red Heat. 

Season 4 takes a lot of inspiration from horror movies of this era. Vecna, the main villain of the season, is clearly modeled on Freddy Krueger originally played by Robert Englund, who also makes an appearance, as Victor Creel, later identified as Vecna’s father. Villains that we thought dead make a comeback in this season, just like the indestructible Michael Myers, whose famous William Shatner mask also gets used by the main characters in chapter 8 aptly titled Papa. So, it’s not a stretch that some of Carrie made it into El’s portrayal. 

But Carrie is a product of second-wave feminism, more precisely the beginning backlash to it, and El is a product of third-wave feminism, which means that there should be great differences between the portrayals of both characters. The parallels, however, go beyond homage, it feels more like the template for female adolescence hasn’t been updated since the dawn of time. And so, in both instances, up to this point we haven’t seen the girls show any emotion beyond crying, sadness, fright or despondency. It is clear that their journeys are just beginning and it won’t be fun, until they reach … some conclusion.

We listen in as Ms. Collins tells the principal that Carrie didn’t know about the existence of periods and they discuss how they can’t interfere with her mother’s religious beliefs. After the principal misnames her multiple times as Cassie, the Psycho Prelude plays again and his ashtray flips violently, which no-one remarks upon. Carrie is then allowed to go home, and as she arrives, we get a glimpse of her horrid home life. 

Her mother Margaret, a religious fanatic who goes door to door “spreading the gospel of God’s salvation through Christ’s blood”, gets a call from school informing her what’s happened. Carrie asks her why she didn’t tell her about periods, to which Margaret responds with a more and more frantic chant about Eve and “the curse of blood” that befalls sinful women, who have committed the “first sin of intercourse”. She simply hoped that Carrie would never get the period, but is now convinced that Carrie has sinned. To free her from sin, Margaret puts Carrie in a closet with a St. Sebastian statue to pray the sin away. After hours, Carrie emerges, thanks her mother and goes to bed.

El, meanwhile, is looking forward to a nice day for once. After almost a year apart, Mike is visiting for spring break and she is determined to make his visit as perfect as possible. It all goes awry of course, as Angela and her gang are visiting the same roller skating rink as El and Mike. The scene that follows is the most overt reference to Carrie, including their bullies’ motives for making their life a living hell. 

Presenting: The most 80-ies bullies you’ll ever hate!

Angela, set on ruining El’s life for “snitching” on her in the earlier incident, sidles up to her and Mike and leads El to the middle of the rink. As Mike notices that something is wrong, it’s already too late. Angela and her friends, one of them equipped with a huge eighties camera, start circling El, while the DJ plays Wipe Out by The Surfaris. The circle grows ever tighter, as they laugh at El’s growing discomfort, shouting “freak!” and mimicking her move from earlier. Mike tries to help by begging the DJ to stop the music, which he does and shouts “Wipe out!”, which turns out to be the cue for Angela, as she spills her milkshake all over the crying El. 

In both, show and movie, we are shown that three things are to be experienced at the beginning of the transition between girlhood and womanhood. Pain, isolation and rejection. Fun is not to be had.

El, however, is not finished with the bullies and, unlike Carrie, gets her revenge early-on. After crying in the closet for some time, she musters up the courage to stand up to Angela and demand an apology. Angela scoffs and turns to leave, as El, in one swift motion, takes a skate and bashes Angela over the head who starts bleeding profusely. The rink falls silent, as we hear Angela’s cries and Mike saying, “What have you done?”.

It is remarkable how the actions of the bullies are not given any gravitas in this scene, their meanness is purely shown, but no-one remarks upon it in any manner. While El gets silence and instant doubts of character, the terror and humiliation that preceded her attack on Angela are swiftly forgotten. As though her actions resulted from nothing. In Carrie’s case the bullying and abuse are somewhat acknowledged, but, in the end, it turns out to be somewhat righteous. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Carrie is nowhere near to exacting or wanting any revenge and turns out to be more curious than anything else. After coming to terms with her period and newly emergent powers, she goes to the library and reads up on telekinesis, quickly accepting it as part of herself and later on defending it, and therefore her right to exist, to her mother. 

During her research, she gets asked to the prom by Tommy Ross (William Katt), a popular jock and boyfriend to Sue Snell (Amy Irving). Carrie, not being dumb, refuses on the spot. 

At this point I have a stray thought. For all my talk about womanhood, women had little to do with the creation of both El or Carrie. El was created by Matt and Ross Duffer and Carrie is the lovechild of Stephen King and Brian De Palma. Both these harrowing stories of adolescence, blood, responsibilities and superpowers were conceived and realized by men. Sort of makes one wonder, whose journey into adulthood we’re actually following. 

El, meanwhile, has to deal with the repercussions of her actions. The next day, after the incident, she gets arrested and, after questioning, where she doesn’t seem to show any remorse, gets sent to juvie. Again, nothing that preceded her attacking Angela gets mentioned. 

Her trip to juvie is short-lived, though, as her transport gets intercepted by Dr. Owens, who makes her an offer she can’t refuse. After stating that her friends in Hawkins, nay the entire world, is in terrible danger, Owens gives El a choice: Come with me and get your powers back or refuse and everyone dies. He frames it as entirely her choice, but realistically speaking there is none. And here, we get a hint at what the Duffers are planning for El. 

Hopper, who survived his accident at the end of season 3, says this: “It must be hardwired into us somehow. To reject our fathers. So we can grow and move on, become something of our own.” (Episode 7). It is a story about independence, agency, but also, about responsibility for yourself and others.   

While Carrie’s responsibility to herself and society is not being a sinful woman, and the dire consequences of failing this responsibility are shown in the finale of the movie, El’s responsibility goes beyond sin. She is supposed to save the world - she is a saint and we all know how saints are made.

After she agrees to go with Owens, we see them drive into the desert and enter an abandoned missile silo that has been converted for the purposes of Project Nina. As El is about to enquire about the nature of the project, a man enters from the shadows - Dr. Brenner. Alive and well, after El blew him to smithereens in the season 1 finale. El panics and runs away, at which point she is quickly sedated. It is especially of note that the violence done to her is exclusively at the hands of men, Dr. Brenner, Dr. Owens, Vecna and even the faceless government goons and orderlies are all male. There is no narrative reason for that, except a facile feminist message that is contradicted by what is actually going on with the character.

Papa’s plan is simple. Shave El’s head, put her into Nina, a hermetically sealed tank with monitors on the inside, sedate El so that she can enter her mental projection/telepathic state and make her relive the worst memory of her life by showing her camera footage leading up to the incident in 1979, until she is shocked into unlocking her powers. Over the course of several episodes, we see El suffer. Nothing else, just crying, pleading, trying to run away, being sedated again, suffering some more, failing to regain her memories and powers, being dejected to a point of cooperating with her abuser and seeming to forgive him and crying some more (snot and all). At this point the song that became analogous with season 4 Running Up That Hill (Deal With God) by Kate Bush sounds especially ironic. Eventually, after an especially harrowing experience, El unlocks her memories. 

Carrie is quite distraught after being asked to the prom, she knows that it has to be a trap. Another ruse to humiliate and make fun of her. But Ms. Collins’ encouragement, mostly about her appearance and her own budding confidence, make her doubt what she already knows. She is flattered by the invitation and the compliments. 

We soon find out that Sue put Tommy up to it, because she felt bad about what has been done to Carrie, essentially loaning her boyfriend out to provide a boyfriend experience. Sue tells Tommy that it is imperative that he take Carrie to the prom and Tommy pretty much pressures her into eventually saying yes. Despite all that, the following scenes of her standing up to her mother, asserting her powers and womanhood, sewing her dress and trying out make-up for the first time, are very endearing. 

Of course, we know how it ends. After they arrive at the prom, the movie assumes the same fairy-tale-like lighting and blurring, as in the locker room scene, as they dance and have fun. Eventually, Carrie and Tommy are crowned prom king and queen and Carrie goes on stage to receive the crown and a bouquet of flowers, all the while we see her smile for the first time.

Inspiring anti-bullying quote time: “We explain when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you do not stoop to their level. Our motto is when they go low, you go high.” ― Michelle Obama

At this point Chris, who relentlessly bullied Carrie in the past and is now mad at her for being punished for said bullying, has been planning her revenge throughout the whole movie. The plan consists of getting a bucket of pig’s blood, hanging it over the stage and manipulating the election process so that Carrie is crowned prom queen. Finally, when Carrie is happiest, it comes to fruition, as Chris pulls on a string and the blood pours down onto Carrie in all its sticky slimy glory, soaking her and hitting Tommy unconscious with the bucket. 

… she went low

Chris, her boyfriend and best friend erupt in hysteric laughter. Seriously, fictional bullies are indeed the scum of the earth. The rest of the auditorium, however, is in shock and silent, but Carrie, with her mother’s warning filling her head “They are gonna laugh at you!”, hears and sees only laughter. With an abrupt turn of her head she shuts all the doors trapping everyone, but Sue and the real culprits inside and turns on the water hoses. She then proceeds to tear down the decorations, crushing Ms. Collins in the process. Soon the water gets into the wiring and the whole ball room goes up in flames. With a wild expression on her face and soaked in blood, Carrie wanders outside and shuts the door behind her, as the screams of her peers dying in the fire pierce the night. 

… yep, she’s practically a demon

Carrie slowly makes her way back home, as Chris appears behind her and tries to mow her down with her car, which Carrie notices and flips the car around, causing it to explode. At home, she washes up and tries to hug her mother, begging her to hug her back, but Margaret decides that she can’t “suffer a witch to live” and stabs Carrie in the back. She flees and hurls every metallic object in the kitchen at her mother, causing her to get stuck to the wall in the same pose as the St. Sebastian statue in the closet, bearing the same expression. The house then collapses on itself like Dracula’s castle and buries the Whites in a heap of rubble. 

In the end, the abusive mother was right about Carrie being sinful. By accepting her powers, her womanhood and sexuality, she flew too close to the sun and had to be punished accordingly. Instead of forgiving her abusers, she took revenge and died. Her mother’s final pose as St. Sebastian, who warned Diocletian of his sins and was killed for it, makes her a martyr and a saint who tried to warn Carrie, but was rebuked by a rebellious, super-powered teenager. There is no inherent empathy for Carrie, no mention of the abuse she has suffered. In the end, she is Sue Snell’s nightmare, who is, according to her mother, “A good girl.”

Speaking of good girls, in her unlocked memory, we see that El wasn’t a monster all along. The massacre at the beginning of the season wasn’t her losing patience with her bullies, who tried to kill her, no, it was Henry Creel, alias Vecna, alias One, Brenner’s first victim/experiment. One manipulated the bullies into bullying El, so that he could manipulate her further into trusting him and eventually freeing him of the restraints on his powers installed by Brenner. He kills and maims everyone, because he hates humanity and wants to reshape it in his image. There, in the desert, he tempts El to join him: “Imagine, what we can do together. We could reshape the world, remake it, however we see fit. Join me.” (Episode 7), but El refuses and strikes back.

In their fight El, bleeding from eyes and nose from Vecna’s attacks, understands that her powers are not fueled by anger or grief, but by love and empathy. Thinking about her birth and her mother naming her “Jane”, El is able to deal a powerful blow, sending Henry into the Upside Down and therefore opening the first gate and turning him into Vecna. 

This all happens in a memory, which is closely monitored by Owens and Brenner, forcing El to relive this past moment to unlock her powers. We, the audience, are forced to relive her trauma with her, but are also gleeful observers, which makes her entire storyline in season 4 incredibly exploitative. We are almost at the end of the season and we still have only seen her cry and bleed and cry some more. 

After reliving this memory El flatlines, but comes back via rebirth, as we see her literally exiting her mother’s birth canal from her perspective. With her powers intact, she gears up to go to Hawkins and face Vecna once again.

Parents play a huge role in any adolescent’s life, but in such stories they have a symbolic value beyond their character. Both Carrie and El have a “good” and a “bad” parental figure. 

In Carrie’s case Ms. Collins is the good mother who sees Carrie’s potential to be a viable member of society, in her case being pretty and getting a date to the prom, while Margaret, the bad mother, chastises her for exactly this potential. It is a push and pull between freedom and control, but as this is a horror movie set in the period of the beginning backlash to the feminism of the 60-ies and early 70-ies, Margaret turns out to be right and is vindicated with a martyr’s death, while Ms. Collins pays for her mistake of trusting Carrie and punishing her bullies with her life. Carrie needs both “mothers” to progress on her path to inevitable destruction, as their unyielding abuse on the one hand and staunch support on the other cancel each other out in the end. 

El, meanwhile, has two “fathers”. Dr. Brenner the abusive self-serving Papa, who steals her from her mother and whose experiments scar and traumatize her, but also help to develop her powers that eventually save the world several times. And Jim Hopper, the eighties Dad, who lets her eat Eggos all day long, but also tries to discipline her in the toxic male tradition of keeping her away from Mike, leading to their break-up in season 3. His biggest contribution and what puts him at odds with Brenner, is loving her unconditionally and eventually sacrificing himself to save her. Both fathers shape El’s perception of herself and lead to the conclusion of season 4.

Hopper is alive, but has no meaningful influence on El’s becoming, it is rather his absence and how she deals with his loss that define her. The focus, however, is on overcoming her relationship with Brenner. She has to come to terms with his abuse and her trauma, before she can move on and eventually reunite with her good Dad.

Against Brenner’s wishes to keep El close and to train her some more, because she is not ready in his opinion, Owens, being somewhat of an outsider to El’s and Brenner’s toxic dynamic, gives El the choice to leave for Hawkins right now, which she accepts. But before this can happen, Brenner’s goons surround Owens and get him out of the way, while Brenner tries to coerce El back into Nina. This goes predictably wrong and while El is on the verge of escaping, again, Brenner incapacitates her, again. 

The situation is resolved rather quickly, when an arm of the military that wants to kill El attacks the desert Jesus compound and everyone is forced to evacuate. El awakens right before the attack, woozy from the drugs and with a shock collar on her neck. Brenner sits next to her bunk and swears that he will never use the collar and that it is just for her safety. Then the attack begins and, as El can’t run due to the drugs, Brenner scoops her up and flees outside, where they are targeted by a sniper in a helicopter. The general gives the go, and the sniper starts shooting, but Brenner valiantly turns his back and gets shot several times to save El and to give her just enough time to crash the heli in a spectacular fashion.

Insert Lonely Island quote here

In his last moments he releases the collar and assures her, as he did many times throughout the season, that he did it all for her. He wants her to acknowledge that, but El just cries and says goodbye. Now, literally and figuratively free, she goes to fight Vecna.

The fight against Vecna is not really important here, but there is one thing worth mentioning. 

Near the middle of the epic two and a half hour finale, Vecna defeats El and pins her against a wall so that she has to watch her friend Max (Sadie Sink) die. As she hangs there, crucified and bloody, she tells him that Brenner is dead and tries to appeal to him by emphasizing his abuse and that Brenner is the real monster. To which Vecna says the following: "Papa did hurt me, but he was no monster, he was just a man. An ordinary mediocre man. That is why he sought greatness in others … in you, in me. But in the end, he could not control us, he could not shape us … he could not change us! Do you not see, Eleven? He did not make me into this. You did." (Episode 9) 

With her first act of violence as a scared 8-year-old, Vecna and the Duffers argue, El set a precedent for violence and did not attend to her saintly duties. She succumbed to the rush of power, just like Carrie did. Therefore, her abuse, trauma, crying (snot and all), were necessary for her to repent for this … one … “sin”. 

El’s actual fathers, her creators, set the weight of the world on her shoulders. Not only is she a savior, but she is the embodiment of female kindness. Due to the Duffers’ understanding of a “strong female character”, El is both Jesus and Mary, Mother of God. She is supposed to save the world, but also be motherly and compassionate, always (for)giving, never feeling. At the end of season 4, El is stripped of her right to be a complex human being, she has transformed into Woman. A symbol, to worship or to tear down, as others please. 

And as her transformation is complete, she weeps at the feet of Max, her only female friend, then reaches somewhere inside Max’s mangled body and resurrects her, giving life to her disciple.

So, what do we learn from these vastly different, but also similar, becomings? What is womanhood? 

According to Hollywood, womanhood and girlhood are plot points to use in a symbolic fashion. These stories are never about women or girls, they are unfortunately about the oldest trope there is - the mother and the whore. 

Becoming a woman has to be a harrowing morality tale. Either the girl learns to take responsibility for everyone around her, and preferably the world, or she succumbs to lust, vanity and revenge. There is seemingly no other option, and there is certainly no empathy for either. 

I don’t want to assume how it is to be a man or how the transition between boyhood and manhood affects one’s mind, but it is interesting to me that these stories are mostly written and directed by men. When they write about an unfeeling, unsympathetic world that doesn’t show empathy, are they actually describing their own world? Do they write about their own fathers and mothers? Are they in need of a savior so much that they are willing to strip women of their personhood, to finally be saved? 

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it seems to me that these lost boys are in agony and no one is rushing to save them from the world they shaped themselves. I know that we’re all tired and searching and only if we can see eye to eye, we can, finally, reshape the world - together.

“I am no mother,

I am no bride

I’m King!

The Aesthetics of Solitude

An Essay about the ubiquity of lifestyle vloggers and the 2021 Korean film Aloners

I have this recurring dream. I lie in bed, in this liminal space between the waking and the real world. I’m aware of my surroundings and I know that I’m alone. Suddenly, I feel someone lying down behind me, I feel the weight of their body, I smell perfume or aftershave, I feel the mattress distort towards them. I wake up. I’m alone and terrified.

She wakes up, stretches and smiles drowsily at the camera. She's in the bathroom looking at the mirror. She's in the kitchen making breakfast, her delicate hands arranging frozen fruit in a colorful smoothie bowl. A contre-jour shot of swaying trees. An aesthetic cup of coffee. 

Lately, I’ve been consumed by this type of YouTube video. A lifestyle vlog, where mostly female content creators from the APAC region, some Asian Americans and a lot of expats living in South Korea, have found a unifying aesthetic of crisp lighting, indie lounge music and an ASMR natural soundscape to show us what they do in a week. These women take you with them while doing chores, cooking, cafe hopping, shopping and working. Focussing on the mundane, they share personal stories, "thanks, guys, for being here - thanks for coming with me - thanks for letting me vent". If the creators have a partner, they are rarely shown, if they meet with friends, we're right there, sharing a bowl of noodles and laughing at some joke. life, food, crying, laughing - we're part of it all. From a downwards angle we experience a week with our friend, the vlogger.

The reasons for making and watching these videos are as numerous as the channels’ combined subscriber count, but in the slew of ASMR silent vloggers, budgeting tips and travel advice on what to do in Seoul, there is one particular theme that stands out to me: a woman alone. She cooks and eats on camera, cleans, buys plants and sometimes goes out with friends. She shows us her outfit of the day. Her style is casual, demure even, her color palette consists of nudes and pastels. She is straight sized and conventionally attractive, if we get to see her face at all. The premise of her oeuvre is being alone. Cooking alone, eating alone, working and watching TV (or rather Netflix on her laptop) alone. Some parts are dedicated to practical things like budgeting for one person, freezing leftovers and minimizing food waste, and some are an aesthetic, well edited, slice of cozy life.

My brain recalibrates as soon as the screen turns to black. I need something substantial, the vloggers start to feel all the same, like ghosts, free-form floating in my head. Who are those women? 

I hear doors opening and closing, murmuring from the other rooms of the apartment - but I don’t dare to look. I know that I’m alone.   

The more vlogs I watch, the more an uncomfortable thought starts entering my mind - how real is this really? The cutesy pastel pajamas, the shots of waking up, the image of noodles being shoved into a delicate mouth. How much of this is framing, lighting and editing? Is there a sexual aspect to this content?

These thoughts force me back to reality. A reality where YouTube is work and being a creative woman online can make you experience the deepest recesses of the human psyche - a reality where these laid-back, hygge creators blur out their addresses or anything identifying about them and their surroundings. This is an understandably necessary security measure, but the blurred out addresses and windows, faces and street names confine them even more to the small screen. They seem to exist only there, life sized dolls living, laughing and breathing for my amusement. Objects existing solely to alleviate my solitude. 

I can’t subsist on YouTube videos alone, my mind needs nourishment. How about a movie? 

Loneliness has been a constant presence in my life for the longest time now, and the 2021 South Korean film Aloners written and directed by Hong Sung-eun captures this perfectly. Of course I watch it alone.

We meet Jina (Gong Seung-Yeon) at work, as she listens to a customer telling her to remove the name of a fine establishment named “Titty Karaoke” from his bank statement, while his toddler tries to get his attention. She lives in Seoul and performs a mind numbing job at a call center of a large bank, including reading entire bank statements aloud, time stamps and all. At a review, we learn that Jina is a model employee and only took a couple days off when her mother died. She eats lunch at the same restaurant alone, while watching youtube videos, and goes home to a nondescript apartment building to fall asleep watching TV. As she navigates her glacial existence, she sees any people who attempt to talk to her as terribly intrusive and says that she enjoys being alone, when asked whether she eats lunch alone every day. Jina is a normal Millennial and I can instantly relate. 

Like me, and probably like most of us, Jina alleviates her loneliness with a constant stream of content. She stares at her phone when she rides the bus, eats lunch or even when she walks down the street. When we get a glimpse at her phone, we clearly see that she is watching lifestyle vlogs. Scenes of women eating and laughing when she is at lunch, or of them driving when she is on the bus. She watches TV while eating dinner at her apartment and wakes up to the TV still on. She is surrounded by ghosts and by-proxy intimacy. Exhaustion and exasperation are her go-to emotions throughout most of the movie.

This is her, a lonely exhausted woman in a late stage capitalist society. Her coping mechanisms seem more punishment than relief, and as the movie progresses, we see her judging other people’s coping mechanisms quite harshly. She hates it that her trainee uses a propolis spray sent to her by her father, to not only relieve her sore throat, but also to remind her of home. She gets angry at her father for finding solace in a church group after his wife died. And, of course, the clients, who call the hotline less to inquire about their credit card, but to alleviate their stress by yelling at the call center employees, or their loneliness by having someone read their entire bank statement - aloud, time stamps and all. 

While in the foreground we always see Jina alone, in the background there is always some kind of togetherness. A couple watching something together on a phone sharing earbuds, colleagues saying hello to each other and going to lunch, people sitting together at restaurants. Jina is apart from them, always, staring at her phone. 

Jina has a very strained relationship with her father, who is prone to lying to get her attention and who, she feels, doesn’t grieve her mother correctly. He left the family almost two decades prior, but her mother got back together with him in the last years of her life.

It is heavily implied that she did that out of loneliness because of Jina moving out. But although conflicted and full of rage and grief, Jina maintains a ghostly presence in her parents’ life. She's installed a hidden camera in their living room and watches them regularly on the bus from and to work. First she installed it to look after her mother, but now she rage watches her father, as he grieves and tries to find solace in a church group that he regularly visits.

“Did you know that cigarette smoke tastes different, when lit with a match?” and “What? No parting words?“, says her chain-smoking neighbor. These are his only lines, said approximately one week apart, to both of which Jina doesn’t reply and proceeds with her daily routine.

At work she meets her new trainee Sujin (Jeong Da-eun), whom she didn’t want to train in the first place. She struggles through her day, as the on-boarding process demands more and more attention. Sujin makes mistakes, is generally bubbly and interrupts Jina’s lonely lunch break to overshare details from her life. After a particularly nasty call from a client, Sujin refuses to apologize and Jina exasperatedly tells her to never follow her to lunch again. 

When she returns home that day, she sees her neighbor’s apartment being vacated. It turns out that he has been dead for a week, squashed by his abundant porn magazine collection, including one titled “My Lonely Nights”. His remark about cigarette smoke, then, was probably his last words, and his plea for parting words was already uttered by a ghost into an unfeeling uninterested world - to an exhausted and uninterested neighbor.  

After reading about how common it is for lonely people to die and not be found for days, Jina starts to spiral and her life goes awry. While finally falling asleep, she hears her neighbor’s ashtray being closed and the door to the next apartment slamming shut. Ghosts start to fill her waking world, as she wakes up to her TV being broken, showing ghostly shapes of people moving around, the cables disrupted by a new neighbor moving into the now vacated apartment. 

Although Sujin gets better at the job and even masters a particularly tricky call, she seems discontent and asks Jina whether she also hears the beeping sound every time a call connects, as she has been dreaming about this sound lately. Jina, of course, doesn’t respond, but eventually starts hearing the sound.

The last straw is a text from her father, who tells her that he’s at the hospital. A quick glance at her phone confirms that he is at home practicing dance moves. She calls him, but he lies anyway and invites her to a small wake for her mother that he is holding at home with his church group, which apparently has been very healing for him. She refuses, telling him that there is no point, as they’re doing it to make themselves feel better, something she judges harshly. Her father rebukes her for not being sad enough that her mother died and that he saw her at the funeral not shedding a single tear. She ends the call. 

Jina regularly watches everything that goes on in her parents’ apartment. In fact, she can’t stop watching, but hates every minute of it.  She watches as her mother collapses, how her father discovers her and calls the ambulance. She watches him grieve, pacing the apartment with her mother’s picture in his hands. She watches, until there is nothing left to watch. 

Until he starts to change and is no longer tortured, but decides to honor his wife and her ghost instead. Jina watches, angrily, as the wake for her mother proceeds without her, as her father reminisces, prays and even lovingly makes jokes about his wife, laughing wholeheartedly - laughing as though he doesn’t care. At some point he looks directly into the camera, suggesting that he knows who is watching.  

The day after the wake, with her father’s laughing content face haunting Jina, Sujin doesn’t come to work, leaving only her propolis spray behind. Jina is somewhat relieved and angry at the same time, getting rid of everything that reminds her of Sujin, exorcizing her from her workplace. 

With her father’s laughing face, her neighbor’s death and now Sujin’s disappearance haunting her, Jina takes the first call. Like at the start of the movie, a caller asks her to read out an entire bank statement, the woman sounds sad and forlorn. After reading some of the expenditures, however, Jina starts hearing the connecting sound, which startles her at first, but then seems to get louder with every line she reads. Frazzled and almost panicked, Jina starts misreading the numbers and, while the woman on the other end yells at her to stop and threatens to get her fired, her father’s satisfied laughing face flashes before her eyes. She disconnects the call and leaves, only to find herself at her father’s doorstep. 

She knows that he’s not home and calls him, but he can’t hear her over the loud music, which he tells her repeatedly, but she keeps pressing on. She rebukes him for having fun and being out and about, for still using her mother’s phone, for never apologizing. “Apologize!” to me, to mom, to us. “Apologize!”, she yells. But the phone disconnects and no further calls go through. She collapses against a pole, whispers “mom” and starts crying. Her pent up grief, anger and numbness finally come out in a steady stream of tears, alone on a street corner, beside some discarded furniture. 

The ghosts that have been haunting her - her mother, her father, Sujin, even her neighbor - leave her at that moment. The veil lifts and as she stumbles home at night, she is no longer alone.

A wake for her late neighbor is being held in his former apartment and Jina watches, unable to go in, how people who don’t know what he looked like or his name, wish him a good rest and peace, and for the first time this is framed as relief. Not self-indulgence, but a simple act of kindness for a lonely soul. So Jina does the same. She calls Sujin and confesses, awkwardly, that she is dealing with a lot and that she hates being alone, even though it's much easier. But more importantly that she learned that one has to bid farewell properly, and she does. 

Good bye, Sujin, it was nice to meet you, sorry for being mean.         

The next day she turns off the now working TV, takes a leave of absence from work and invites her boss to meet her for dinner once she’s figured out what to do next. On the bus home her father calls her and reiterates that he couldn’t hear what she was saying, but as he is prone to lying it’s clear that he doesn’t want to engage. In her newfound serene confidence Jina tells him about the camera, which he pretends to know nothing about, and that she will be looking in from time to time. She hangs up, lowers her phone and stares out of the window with a renewed interest in her surroundings.

A happy end of sorts, loneliness not eliminated, but repurposed - no longer torture, but relief.

As I always take the best life lessons from movies, I too want to repurpose this pressing feeling in my chest - my loneliness. I can meet the unfathomable need to share my thoughts and feelings by writing, and I can tentatively try to share whatever comes out of it with others, although even thinking about it feels unreal. No longer am I just watching lifestyle vlogs, I write about them, analyzing the genre conventions and my feelings towards them. And although I do care whether someone reads this or not, in a way the healing part is the writing itself.

Who are those women? 

They are women like me, finding solace in their solitude. Channeling their loneliness and sadness into creating. They write scripts, they edit, they choose music. And although they care whether someone sees their videos or not, the healing part ist creating itself.