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| 06.17.04 (8:53 pm) [edit] |
Take my Love
I didn't want to watch FIREFLY. The idea of using American Reconstruction as the backdrop for a scifi series was, I thought, a dicey proposition at best.
The Civil War is ongoing in many quarters and, I thought, whatever side Joss and Company eventually fell on, they would be opening old wounds and creating new ones unnecessarily.
I liked liking Joss's stuff, see. And I didn't want anything, even Joss himself, to tarnish that. The rumors about FIREFLY made me very nervous.
I didn't want to watch and, as the opening air date approached, I made great pronouncements about how I would not.
What a load of go se.
Of course I was right there opening night, anticipatory drool already dripping on my denims. I'm Joss Whedon's bitch when it comes to TV and I might as well accept that and come to grips.
And I wasn't disappointed. New folks to like. Snappy banter with lots of quirk and left turns. And, amazingly, some actual hints of science in the fiction.
Space is a soundless vacuum. People die out there. Often at the hands of other people.
And the much feared proConfederate spin on Reconstruction never actually materialized. What we got instead was the Alliance– a sort of nation-as-corporation thing- having pretty much wiped out the dreams of the Independants- a bunch of freedom loving edge dwellers who didn't cotton to too much hands on from Big Brother.
The Alliance is all encompassing, oppressive, implacable. It is that same dark future of BLADE RUNNER or even the ALIEN series. Scary. Ugly and possibly where we're really headed provided we don't blow or sick ourselves into oblivion before we get off this rock. The Alliance, like many corporations today, embraces all forms of slavery as a function of serving The Bottom Line.
By contrast the last of the Independants, Mal Reynolds and his Partner-in-Arms Zoe, are all that's really left of that fire that makes people head for the unknown horizon. Reynolds and his crew of criminals- unabashed and unapologetic- often screw themselves out of cash or dive headlong into danger simply to preserve or defend the freedom of others.
And they pay for it in blood and obscurity.
The Alliance isn't the Union. The Independants ain't the Confederacy however much they twang and twist the language. In the Whedon Reconstruction it seems the slaveholders won the day.
Interesting take. Wickedly subtle and even, amazingly, subversive. On television. On FOX television.
So, of course, it had to go.
But I did show up, like I said. I stayed until the final final credits rolled.
And, should this tweaked Reconstruction rise again, you can bet I'll be there for that too.
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| Another Cold Mountain |
| 12.27.03 (2:53 pm) [edit] |
It's funny. Pretty much since the end of the Civil War the entertainment industry- in the form of books and stage plays first and then with movies and television- has done its best to cast the soldiers of the Confederate Army and the government they served in the role of Noble Lost Cause.
The most recent entry into this apparently never ending catalogue of revisions is COLD MOUNTAIN the film adaptation of the novel by the same name.
In the story a poor small town southern boy gets caught up in the Civil War and, while he's dealing with the attendant horrors that come with fighting a 19th Century land war, his long suffering wife must make a go of keeping the family homestead afloat.
Northern officers (dressed in full Union Blue) arrive at some point, establish their own marshall law in the little town and generally make assess of themselves until the hero returns to put things right.
Cast in the prominent roles are the ephemeral Jude Law and the crystalline Nicole Kidman with Rene Zelwegger and Natalie Portman adding support. The film is luscious in its visual style with huge buccolic vistas and sense shattering battle sequences all woven together by the skillfull hand of Mr. Anthony Minghella.
Now there are a lot of Southerners in the United States. A few are freinds of mine and one is a member of my family by marriage. I understand the need in them to cast their ignoble history in the best light possible.
I sometimes feel that way about Tupac Shakur.
There's a lot of talk about the skill of the outgunned and outmanned Army of the Confederacy making a go of a war agains the clearly superior might of the North. Eyes get misty at the thought of the burning of Atlanta, the honorable nature of General Lee and the [i]"muddy"[/i] reasons over which the war began in the first place.
I understand all that. The further away from some events people get, the greater the tendancy to gloss over the ugly bits.
But I wonder that Hollywood, a place driven more than most by the proverbial bottom line, considers the current population of Confederate Sympathizers to be of such a size that yet another film like this should be deemed a good bet.
Do we not teach what the Confederacy was in schools anymore? Do we not deplore the sort of scum who create an entire society based upon the degredation of human beings and are willing to kill and die to retain their "right" to do so?
Or, put another way: How would it be if we lifted the plot of Cold Mountain and, instead of placing it within the greatest American conflict of the 19th Century, placed in WW2 instead.
Now Mr. Law is portraying a young and honorable Nazi youth who after surviving the horrors of the Allies' assaults on his fellow goosesteppers, makes his way home to his hometown now under the military control of an evil American general.
Ms. Kidman now plays Brunhilde, the long suffering housefrau with the heart of steel, willing to suffer any indignation to keep the family brewery afloat until Heinrich- Mr. Law- returns home again to set things right.
With that simple change- of venue only- could Cold Mountain have been the best selling novel it was? Could it even have been published? And, should it have managed to find a publisher with such a thematic strike against it, could it then have been made into a film by an entertainment industry who have a decidely unsympathetic veiw when it comes to Nazi's however personally honorable a given individual soldier may have been?
I think not.
Yet the Grey uniforms and the Stars and Bars of the Confedercy are, at the very least, a 19th Century analog for the latter day worshippers of blitzkreig.
I mentioned some of this to some friends of mine who were contemplating going to see this film and was met with the blank stares of people who had literally no idea what I was talking about.
And these are people whom I love and who I believe love me. People who are, under all normal circumstances and by most objective measurements, the most egalitarian open minded folks it's been my pleasure to come across.
Yet off they went, leaving me with the disturbing thought that, if [i]these[/i] people don't see the hypocrisy and the ugliness of films and literature like this, what chance do the rest of you have?
Or the rest of us.
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