Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Decades ago, I came across volumes 2 and 3 of the Sorcery Hall Trilogy in a bookstore. They were by Suzy McKee Charnas, author of the amazing Holdfast Chronicles, so I bought them instantly. And then they sat on my shelf unread for ages as I never got around to buying volume 1.

Earlier this year, Charnas died, and I decided it was time to fill the holes in my collection of her books. I finally got volume 1, and I also got something called "The Kingdom of Kevin Malone." And today, after many delays, I have finally finished reading the last of them. ( the good stuff )

And then picked up "The Kingdom of Kevin Malone," published in the early 90's, and... I'm not at all sure what to think. It's a portal fantasy - young Amy is roller skating in Central Park when a boy pins a brooch to her sleeve. She recognizes it as one stolen from her by a neighbourhood bully years ago, and recognizes the boy as the bully himself. She chases him down the path and through one of the pedestrian underpasses that dot the park. On the other side of the tunnel, though, is a fantasy world, with a quest and a prophecy in which she plays an important role. ( a book I have complicated feelings about )

It's a profoundly dissatisfying novel, and I'm not completely sure if Charnas intended it that way, or if the power of the tropes she was using prevented her from writing a better, more subversive ending.

As best I can tell, there have been extremely few movies that show the actual apocalypse of nuclear war. The War Game, The Day After, and Threads appear to be it. I'm going to invent a genre here and call them movies of calamity, which combines bits of tragedy and terror on a huge scale. They aren't disaster movies because they don't provide the satisfaction of seeing the Worthy Protagonists survive and prevail while everyone unworthy perishes - instead everyone suffers, worthy and unworthy alike. They aren't horror movies because the terror component does not have the pleasing feeling of being a little bit frightened while knowing that you are actually perfectly safe. Instead they seek to make you feel quite unsafe.

And the lack of pleasure, the lack of feeling safe and smugly superior to the hapless victims on the screen, is probably why nobody has made more of them. The closest I could find were some thermonuclear tragedies: Testament and When the Wind Blows.

Testament (1983) ( Read more... )

"When the Wind Blows" (1986) ( Read more... )

Moving away from calamities and tragedies, another major genre in the realm of thermonuclear war movies are the war films - productions where the focus is on the decision by leaders and generals to push the button, and then on the officers and enlisted men who carry out their orders to drop the bomb. Hollywood of course has a natural tendency to sycophantically focus on establishment leaders and adopt their point of view, so most of these films are worthless exercises in fellating the Pentagon and the establishment (Hollywood has always had a hard on for the military). The biggest exception is of course Doctor Strangelove (1964), which I won't address directly, but there are two other movies in the same theme that I watched or tried to watch.

Fail Safe (1964) ( Read more... )

By Dawn's Early Light (1990) ( Read more... )

The single biggest genre of nuclear apocalypse movies is of course the post-apocalypse story. Atomic war is just a background plot point to explain why the world has become a lawless wasteland where might makes right and the survivors are in a constant Hobbesean struggle to not become the prey of bullies who have more guns than they do. Hollywood has always loved Westerns and these movies become excuses to produce yet another Western without going to the dried out well of the 1880's yet again. I checked out one and a half examples that made it onto lists of noteworthy nuclear apocalypse movies.

Panic in Year Zero! (1962) ( Read more... )

Panic in Year Zero only makes sense if you accept the premise of the filmmakers that the potential for disorder, chaos, rape and murder are always there just under the surface, and that the slightest disruption to daily life will cause most people to suddenly for no reason start acting like violent sociopaths.

Despite all the evidence that in real life disasters people act rather better towards each other than they do in ordinary times, and that the natural tendency of people and communities experiencing calamity is to come together and help one other, the meme that disaster causes people to start acting like sociopaths is one that will not die in Hollywood. Hollywood is nothing if not a tool of the establishment, and thus it projects the fears and paranoia of the wealthy (who spend a lot of time worrying that one day the poor will treat them as they have been treating the poor) upon the world.

Miracle Mile (1988)

Imagine that the script for a romantic comedy about an awkward nerdy boy who meets and falls in love with a nerdy girl had a collision on the subway with a script about a boy learning, accidentally, that an all out nuclear attack will be be launched against Russia, with the inevitable consequence of a counter attack, and the world as he knows it will therefore end in 90 minutes. As word of the impending attack spreads from one person to a half dozen to the entire city, chaos, panic, and disorder break out, hugely complicating the boy's attempts to reunite with his girl and wrangle transportation for them both out of town before the bombs drop. In the end, the young couple die within yards of the place they first met the day before when the bomb blast crashes their helicopter.

Yep, this is another "disaster strips away the thin veneer of civilization" movie, with the decent into chaos happening this time before the bombs drop instead or after. I watched the first twenty minutes and the last ten and did not feel I missed anything of real interest in doing so.

And finally, we have another really crappy movie that somehow got onto lists of important nuclear holocaust movies for God knows what reason:

Special Bulletin (1983)

A group of terrorists seize a boat in the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina. They have a nuclear bomb, which they threaten to detonate if their demands are not met. In the end, they are captured or killed, but the specialists brought in to disarm the bomb fail and it detonates, destroying the city. That simple synopsis leaves out two of the things that made the film aggressively unwatchable for me.

First, the pretence that the entire made for TV movie is found footage captured from the broadcasts of one of the TV networks as it airs special news updates about the crisis. Since the narrative would have been woefully incomplete without showing the story of the terrorists, the network strings a cable into the boat and there is the pretence that the terrorists allowed TV journalists to join them on the boat to interview them and be a fly on the wall while they made their demands. Which is utterly ludicrous on its face - all activists everywhere know that you don't allow the press unrestricted access to your if you want to control your narrative and get your message out the the world undistorted.

The second thing that makes this film not just a crappy forgettable made for TV movie but a feculent and disgusting piece of right wing propaganda is the identity of the terrorists -- they are nuclear disarmament activists who are demanding that the US government give them the arming triggers to the entire US nuclear arsenal stored at the naval base in Charleston. So in the bullshit world depicted in this film, the terrorists, who at the start of the movie are battling local law enforcement with automatic weapons, are pacifists and peaceniks. Which I guess is part and parcel of TV's long history (as the tool and lapdog of the centre-right establishment) of demonizing left wing activists. But still, the ludicrous nature of this particular slander is just too ridiculous for words and make the movie too fucking stupid to watch.

As oursin likes to remind her readers, "secret history" is an overused marketing term for "actually quite well established history that people buying the book were maybe not acquainted with," but in this case it's definitely appropriate, as the history of Wonder Woman is inextricably tied to the polyamorous union of four adults who created her, and who did everything they could to keep their relationship an utter secret not just from the world but from their own children.

Various histories of Wonder Woman written by comics fans in this century have included details about William Marston's unconventional family and his fetishism for bondage, but all of them are frustratingly superficial and give little or no credit to his partners as co-creators, or to the political and social movements that influenced their creation of Wonder Woman.

Jill Lepore's book reveals that Wonder Woman, like all the writings attributed to William Marston, was a collaborative effort between Marston and his three partners, all feminists and suffragists like himself. Clues from college yearbooks and the like suggest that Elizabeth Holloway, Olive Byrne, and Marjorie Huntley were all bisexual and that the Marston family was not just polygamous but fully polyamorous. ( It is a truth universally acknowledged that bisexual women in want of children should find themselves an agreeable donor )
Overall, an excellent history not only of Wonder Woman, but also a look at one slice of the history of feminism in the years between the passage of suffrage and women's liberation, showing how there was never actually an end to activism and the push for greater equality. Recommended.