Age of the Executive Auteur

The Auteur as a figure in entertainment is dead. Grown strong on digital production, a more artistically bankrupt creature emerges in their place. It is the Executive Auteur, and it's coming soon to a theater near you, whether you like it or not.

Some Nightmares Before Christmas Or Thereabouts Part 3

Happy Friday 13th! In the middle of January, we have to face the facts. Halloween indeed... ends. Send the season out at last with my top horror movies of all time.

Some Nightmares Before Christmas Or Thereabouts Pt 2

The seasonal countdown of horror movies continues, with werewolves as romantic metaphor, the horror of adolescence, and a bunch of films whose place on this list is real unstable.

Some Nightmares Before Christmas Or Thereabouts Part 1

Over the last few years, I've watched close to 100 horror movies.

Now, to escape the nightmare of the holidays, I'm ranking them. All of them.

A Gothic Tomb for Meaning: The Batman

The Batman tries to find stark moral black and whites in a world of muddy greys. Why is the film's script so frightened of the ambiguity its cinematography creates?

In Search Of More Applause: 'Inside' And The World Neoliberalism Promised

Bo Burnham's movie "Inside" stretches the term "comedy special" till it shatters. Why does its clutter of fragments cut so deep? Maybe because of how it reflects the world neoliberalism promised us...

content include: spoilers for Inside, neoliberalism, suicide, jokes about suicide, jokes about jokes about suicide, self-referentiality, audience hostility, alienation.

Galaxy Brained: Annihilation and Queer Cosmic Horror

Annihilation: The Ending Explained!!!

content warning: body horror, spoilers for Annihilation, cosmic horror, mad ravings, closetedness and detransitioning, homophobia, slurs

Just Put "Whatever" Down For Gender: Gonzo, the Muppets, and Queerness

Gonzo The Great: famous muppet, cultural icon, and... queer non-binary performance artist? Join us as we attempt the death defying feat of discussing the queerness of the muppets, and Gonzo as modern artistic genius

Co-Written with Juniper Angel Barber
(Note: This piece looks slightly less awesome on Mobile)

Art from The Muppet Show Comic Book by Roger Langridge.

Let's Pop Together Part 2

Is what Pop Team Epic does to everything it touches that different from what Ready Player One does to The Iron Giant? After you flatten pop down, break it apart, and repeat it to the point of meaninglessness, can you find a way back to sincerity?

Let's Pop Together: Part 1

What is it that makes today's Pop Team Epic's so different, so appealing? And can it explain why people hate the marketing for Ready Player One so damn much?

The Trash World of Ideology: Thor Ragnarok Wants You To Destroy America

It's a StIT Thorsgiving Special! Feeling harried by your racist relatives? Hide in the bathroom, pull up this essay, and talk turkey with me about how Thor: Ragnarok really does seem to think Marvel, Disney, and America all need to be destroyed!

Image extremely helpfully provided by EssayofThoughts

A Galaxy Very, Very Near: Are Time And Space in Rogue One Core to its Resistance Narrative?

Rogue One is a film about resistance and domination, time and space, environment and technology. Can linking these concepts together tell us more about the film's science fiction storytelling... and reveal something about our own forms of contemporary resistance?

If The Train Stops We All Die: 2016 In Review

2016 sucked. Let's talk about Snowpiercer, clipping., and seceding from a broken reality.

All art in this article is by Kathe Kollwitz, queer revolutionary socialist engraver.

Jared Dark'ness Dementia Raven Leto: Is Suicide Squad Mall Goth?

As trailers for Suicide Squad rolled out, they brought with them jokes about the film resurrecting mall goth and scene kid culture. But we don't joke here on Storming the Ivory Tower, we just do hard hitting serious journalism. If we want to figure out whether Suicide Squad belongs in your local Hot Topic alongside trip pants and Invader Zim hoodies, we have to ask: just what is Mall Goth, and what makes it different from Goth proper?

Something That Could Never Ever Possibly Destroy Us: Ghostbusters And Its Ghosts

Writing about the new Ghostbusters film is tricky because the kind of stuff I like doing--digging into thematics and interesting structural decisions and so on--is hard to get to when a film is so totally surrounded by a river of malevolent cultural ectoplasm. And you can't really do pure structural critique anymore anyway--that hasn't really been in vogue since the early 20th century, so acting like you can just strip something of its context is disingenuous at best.

Luckily Ghostbusters does a good enough job of anticipating and reacting to its social context that you can get at the structural stuff and the cultural stuff all at once.

It's impossible to ignore the fact that this film has faced a major backlash merely for existence. The simple audacity of it daring-to-be is outrageous to people who might best be describe as "shitheads." Now I've written plenty before about geeks being conservative culturally and politically, hostile to outsiders, and rabid in their determination to ban any new thought whatsoever in the field of ostensibly "speculative" fiction. There's no point in me really retreading it here because while things are certainly bad^one this is essentially just the world we live in. It's Tuesday, the nerds are raging again.

In an astonishing series of events Leslie Jones was harassed off of Twitter, in the most egregious case of nerds raging. Thankfully, this led finally to the banning from Twitter of Milo Yiannopoulos, a man who is doing his best to bring back the early 20th century "gay-for-fascists" aesthetic, and an utterly repulsive racist piece of shit in the same class as Vox Day and Mencius Moldbug.

But I still feel compelled to cover the film simply because of the way it stands in relation to its predecessor and how we can understand that from a metatextual perspective. It hasn't escaped the notice of viewers that this is a film very conscious of the fact that it's coming on the heels of a "classic" film, rebooting or remaking or retreading or rehashing the film with a gender swapped cast. That is after all what all the nerd rage is about. And the film's creators are quite aware of the context that surrounds them. Sometimes this self-awareness is abrasive... but other times it is quite compelling, compelling enough to spend some time picking apart.

Now, it's probably worth noting that I'm not necessarily making this argument in order to win over long term Ghostbusters fans, because I don't really... care so much about The Ghostbusters Legacy or whatever, and I'm not that interested in consecrating the wider franchise. Someone else can do that. And while I'm always a little skeptical of the "unpleasable fanbase" thing (often a tool of huge corporations like, yes, Sony, who can deride all criticism as simply a vocal minority of over-committed fans), when an actress is getting hatemobbed off social media I feel like we have to accept that we've gone way outside the realm of the reasonable and we're not gonna pull people back.

Instead I want to talk to people who already enjoyed the film enough that they'll be interested in some deeper analysis of what the film is trying to do... and ultimately I want to try giving an imperfect film what a shocking number of people refuse to give it:

A fair chance to receive meaningful analysis.

"We're Still Friends Right?" Fanfictional Trauma and Captain America: Civil War

"Forty million readers follow the Gumps. ... If I could prove it I would say there are exactly 16,847,915 3/4 people writing to Sidney Smith, care of the Chicago Tribune, with suggestions as to what he should do with the Gumps next. And inasmuch as most of us take the Gumps seriously and expect to have our suggestions followed, the problem of these suggestions is a real one, after all."

--William Fleming French, describing an example of the problem of fannish engagement for newspaper comic The Gumps, quoted in Jared Gardner's Projections

There are really only two places you can have the villain of one major franchise sing a song from another major franchise. One of those places is in fanfiction.

But hold that thought while we talk about this image from Age of Ultron and what it can tell us about Captain America: Civil War.

I Have Nothing To Say About The Cabin In The Woods

So I finally watched The Cabin In The Woods.

And I have nothing to say about it.

So this is not going to be an article so much as a non-article, a void where an article might have been, the hollow space beyond the stars… where there isn’t an article.

Who Killed the World? or, Immortan Joe Crossing the Alps

I finally watched Mad Max Fury Road a few weeks ago and found it to be everything that people have been saying it was. It’s a true heir to the Mad Max legacy, with some truly gonzo stunts, amazing cinematography, and a really powerful feminist message, whatever some rather shallow leftist misreadings might say. I can’t say I went into the film without a sense of what was to come: plenty of folks, my partner Lee included, have discussed the power of the film and the importance of what it’s doing both thematically and narratively.

I was surprised though that I hadn’t seen a lot of commentary on one particular aspect of the film: its relationship to the 19th century concept of the sublime in landscape painting.

...Ok, I wasn’t THAT surprised.

It’s obviously a bit of a niche interest; I just happen to fall in the center of the venn diagram of People Who Study 19th Century Art, People Who Have Stolen Your Chair, and People Who Like Watching Cars Ram Into Each Other At High Speeds In A Postapocalyptic Hellscape. Still, there’s something really remarkable here about the way the film’s landscapes correlate to landscape art conveying ideas of the sublime, and I want to take some time analyzing just what that might mean. So let’s talk about Mad Max and landscape paintings!

Oh, you’re not interested in this topic? Hm, well, I mean, I know my articles on actual artwork tend to get less views, but hey, if you feel like finishing your drink and leaving without hearing what I have to say, well, no one’s stopping you, ha ha!

No one except for Lord Humongous, the Ayatolla of Rock-and-Rolla. Isn’t that right, LH?

LH: YOU DISOBEY ME… LITTLE PUPPY.

Quite, quite. Oh, you’ve decided to stay after all? What a surprise! I’m so pleased.

Since you’re sticking around I might as well start with the obvious question:

Just what is the Sublime?

Fitzskimmons Lament Part 2: Satisfaction

Last week I posted my article, part one of this series, to the Marvel subreddit, mostly because I am a little shit and like to tweak the noses of overly fawning fans.

Before the article was predictably downvoted to oblivion I did get one comment useful not so much for its contents, which were predictably terrible, but for the interesting irony that it presented. This redditor simply dismissed my article as "the babblings of a patreon-begger." Interesting. The claim there seems to be that my article can be safely ignored because I'm merely out to grab cash off of Marvel's success.

True!

I'll own up to it proudly! In fact, I'll encourage you all to donate to my Patreon today! I'm absolutely shameless. In fact, it's a little off theme, but is it time to bring back the supervillain suit? I think it is!

I know what I am.

But you know, I'm no more shameless than Marvel and Disney are, and a whole hell of a lot more honest. If I'm a hood at least I'm an honest one, with no illusions about why massively successful franchises frequently turn out to be the subjects for my articles. They're the subjects because when I write about my real loves, like fanfiction of a children's trading card game for example, nobody reads my articles.

These are concessions I MUST make, to a certain extent, if I want to make this blogging thing work for me. Marvel is in no such position. Anything they do seems to turn into a megahit, even if it's, say, Thor 2. Marvel fans will even get a little bit smug about this, proclaiming that DC can't make a movie with a female lead while Marvel can make a movie about a raccoon and a tree in space.

Ay, Marvel fans? You know who else can't make a movie with a female lead?

Marvel Studios.

So let's take this week to talk about the various ways in which Marvel, a studio that seemingly can do anything, continues to do, in a myriad of ways, absolutely nothing to support its queer fans.

Tony Stark in the Integrated Circuit: The Iron Man films and Cyborg Feminism

In Iron Man 2, Tony Stark describes his suit, the Iron Man suit, as a prosthesis. Now, granted, he's describing it that way in order to flummox a congressional committee who assert that his suit is, in fact, a weapon. The scene as a whole is full of uncomfortable, almost Randian grand standing^one. It's a problematic scene, to be sure.

The wild thing about Tony's claim, though, is that the films are almost calculated to back him up and support his claim. Iron Man--or, later, the Iron Men--is/are an extension of Tony's being. They are a prosthetic not in the sense that they restore him to some idealized "normal" human functionality but in the sense that they are a tool that acts as an extension of the human body in order to facilitate a human's aims.

It should be obvious that Tony Stark is a cyborg, though not a conventional one. His most obvious cybernetic feature is the power core embedded in his chest, but his suit, in the way it extends both his body and will, is also a part of his cybernetic being. The films consistently portray the Suit as a second self for Tony, an eventually unlimited tangle of extra limbs that transform his body into a fluidly-bounded and ambiguous mass.

Why am I bringing all this obvious stuff up?

Well, because these concepts aren't just of interest to transhumanists and science fiction fans, they're also of interest to a particular strand of contemporary critical theory--Cyborg Feminism. And the films don't just have a veneer of cyberization, they also can serve as an access point to these ideas and the deconstructive power they level at the existing power structures of the world.

Let's talk about Tony Stark the Cyborg.

I'm on a Giacometti kick after last article.