GIRLBOSS TROUBLE

 This CRITICAL DRINKER video was posted to YouTube in the last week. An "Open Bar" discussion followed but didn't add anything much.

I've followed Critical Drinker for some years now, and though I don't agree with him on various subjects, this was one of his better rants, even with the predictable, eyeball-grabbing title of "XXX IS DEAD." In many of his videos CD repeatedly complains about the offense to verisimilitude every time a female outfights a male in a way CD doesn't like. Yet until this "Female Action Movie was Killed by the Girlboss" thing, I didn't think he was very good on the history of femme-fight movies. 

Here, however, he contrasted a lot of the female action franchises of the 2000s and 2010s prior to the rise of the girlboss, such as Resident Evil, Underworld, Lara Croft, Hunger Games and (potentially) Kill Bill. He said were accepted by mass audiences in part because none of them were trying to usurp the place of the male action movies, which is something we began seeing with increased frequency in the late 2010s. To those franchises one might also add some above-average one-shot films like Jolie's Salt and Theron's Atomic Blonde, the latter showing up during the flood of the girlboss flicks. The Open Bar mentions how some of the nineties movies promoted actresses who clearly didn't have any command of fake-fighting, like Halle Berry and Pam Anderson. 

I hesitate to say that any particular moviemaking craze (talking here about the crazes of the movie-makers, not the viewers) kills things dead for all time. But he made a credible case for audiences avoiding reasonably competent flicks like BALLERINA and FURIOSA because audiences got burned so many times with crapfests like BIRDS OF PREY and THE MARVELS. Of course the Disney STAR WARS films were profitable even though they did what Drinker most hated-- slotting in girlbosses in place of established heroes-- but that was before we were drowned in all the MCU dreck, as well as some DC dreck as well. The new FANTASTIC FOUR movie sounds like its makers are still infected with the girlboss disease, so we'll see if it flops and validates CD's fatigue claims. 

Now I don't think this century is the first time filmmakers have overpowered female fighters. 1974's POLICEWOMEN, despite a scene in which Sondra Currie only beats Big Big Smith thanks to judo techniques, concludes with a scene where Currie vanquishes another male hulk with several straight punches and one kick. CD gives the Asian female action films a pass, but how often did chopsockies and "girls with guns" movies show women duking it out with men the same way, and not really getting thrown by a loop by superior strength blows? Only a couple hundred times, I'd say.        

Lastly, I am aware of one still successful girlboss franchise: HBO's HARLEY QUINN show, which enjoyed five seasons so far and is allegedly getting a sixth. I watched the first three seasons and thought they were all crap except for the general quality of the animation. HQ is entirely a girlboss, and the third season even has her replace Batman in the "Bat-family" of heroes. Granted, Harley earned a degree of spinoff success before HBO, and the character still seems wildly popular with cosplayers. And the HQ cartoon has an advantage over the BIRDS OF PREY movie, since the cartoon is sort of a Liberal version of SOUTH PARK, with loads of foul language and ultraviolence. So if HQ is the only current girlboss franchise that bucks the failures of MCU movies and of streaming shows based on the STAR WARS and STAR TREK properties, it could partly due to other factors that the pure girlboss project lacks.

TIMELY MEDITATIONS

 So far my most extensive ruminations about how icon-crossover is affected by temporal considerations appeared in last June's TIME OUT OF ALIGNMENT. And now, as if so often the case, I find myself repenting at leisure some of the proposals I put forth-- though in my case I've never explicitly been "married" to any of them.

So in ALIGNMENT, I said:

 A major aspect of my crossover-theory is that of alignment; the principle that every literary cosmos, particularly with regard to serial concepts, is dominated by one or more superordinate icons whose are the "center" of the narrative, while all subordinate icons orbit around the central icon or icons. In CROSSING GODS I gave several examples of innominate figures from mythology being "crossed over" with one another, and sometimes with newly created serial characters, the example of the latter being Atticus of "the Iron Druid Chronicles." In COSMIC ALIGNMENT PART 3 I spoke of a different form of innominate character, that of a fictionalized version of a historical personage. I asserted that no crossover took place when a narrative associated legendary characters already associated in history-- Jesse James and Cole Younger-- but that it was one if the author depicted an association between characters not known to have encountered one another, like Jesse James and Belle Starr.

Characters involved in time-travel, though, break down normative categories of alignment, and for that reason even figures I've rated as properly "legendary" don't rate as crossovers when they interact with characters who (more or less like authors) are no longer bound by restrictions of the time-space continuum. Thus, a goodie-good Billy the Kid meeting a version of Dracula? Crossover. A vampire-version of Billy the Kid, who has no real connection with the historical figure, meeting Bloodrayne? Crossover. But Billy the Kid, as portrayed by Robert Walker Jr. in the scene above, meeting one of the Time Tunnel guys? Not a crossover. And the same principle applies to works in which the time-travelers bring together assorted characters from different eras, as Billy the Kid, Napoleon and Socrates are brought together by those excellent time-dudes Bill and Ted.

So, in re-assessing this theory, I ask myself: why was it important to me that all subordinate icons in a serial narrative should be aligned in terms of time? Arguably, there are many serial narratives wherein the superordinate icons are not aligned with the subordinates in terms of space. All of the adventures in the 1960s STAR TREK take place within a certain time-frame, roughly aligned with the life-spans of the main characters. But the TREK superordinates never visit the same precise location once, aside from appearing on Earth, but in different time-frames. A couple of times, Enterprise heroes meet figures that appear to be such innominate legends of history as Genghis Khan and the Clanton Gang, but these are merely lookalike constructs.

I suppose my basic feeling was that protagonists who traduce the boundaries of time aren't "playing fair." Such TREK antagonists as the Metrons and the Excalibans are so separated by the gulfs of space that they're unlikely to meet-- but as long as they're in the same time-frame, they COULD. But there would normally be no way that a 20th-century "Time Tunnel guy" could meet the legends of other eras, like Ulysses, Merlin, or Billy the Kid, without crossing the gulfs of time. Conquering space with the use of a star-drive may be sheer fantasy in reality. Yet it seems a believable extrapolation from the way Planet Earth has grown "smaller" thanks to technological advances that allow, say, James Bond to jet over to Italy or Japan. 

Nevertheless, I have to admit that in my ALIGNMENT statement I accidentally alloted crossover-status to a different form of "time-travel." I said that Bloodrayne's meeting with Billy the Kid counted as a crossover. But the heroine is only able to meet her universe's version of the  Kid in the late 1800s because she's an immortal dhampire. Bloodrayne becomes a mature female in the early 1800s, but she looks the same age in the late 1800s, and the same is true in her final cinematic adventure, where she's still unaltered age-wise, in WWII, kicking Nazi ass. So, if I'm going to allow for Bloodrayne meeting The Kid thanks to a fantasy-factor, I suppose I ought to make the same allowance with regard to time tunnels, TARDIS-machines, and the like. 

However, not all fantasy-factors are equal. I would maintain that non-legendary historical figures still carry no innominate crossover-mojo when they appear in modern times, whether it's Ben Franklin whammied up by Samantha Stevens or Bill and Ted using their time-traveling phonebooth to summon Napoleon and Socrates. But Billy the Kid remains a legendary historical figure, so I guess his meeting with the excellent dudes-- who, to be sure, are both superordinate icons-- does count as a crossover. And the same would be the case for their interactions with innominate figures of myth and legend, like Satan and the Easter Bunny-- particularly when Bill and Ted meet both in the same narrative, giving rise to a "Super-Legend Crossover."

I also raised issues with the Quality Comics character Kid Eternity, whose super-power allowed him to call upon various figures of myth and fiction to fight on his behalf. I even cited a page from one adventure in which the hero calls up Sherlock Holmes. A side-character rightly remarks that Holmes was created in fictional stories, and Holmes answers that "Doyle's stories made me seem real to so many readers that I became a real person." Because of this sort of jiggery-pokery, I'd speculate that the hero's power didn't summon actual humans or deities from the past, but merely images of them, who were able to flawlessly emulate the skills or powers of their models. 

If these figures were all just spectres of the original models, then Kid Eternity isn't actually summoning anyone from any time-frame, not even contemporary heroes like Blackhawk and Plastic Man, and thus that they aren't any more diegetically "real" than the illusions of Genghis Khan and the Clanton Gang in STAR TREK. So it might be the case that none of the characters the hero summons are crossover-figures-- and the same would be true of legendary evildoers called forth by the Kid's polar opposite, Master Man from KID ETERNITY #15 (1946).

However, if the time-travel summoning is veracious, then innominate  manifestations can be crossovers. This would include such interesting if quirky examples as AVENGERS #10, in which newly-minted super-villain Immortus invokes innominate figures of fiction and history such as Attila the Hun, Paul Bunyan, Merlin, Goliath, and a version of Hercules presumably unrelated to the Marvel-Earth incarnation that would debut a year or so later.

And just to give an example of a "team" of innominate legends drawn purely from recorded history, here's a 1947 BLUE BEETLE story from ALL TOP COMICS #8. The titular hero encounters, thanks to a time-travel device, a "super-menace team-up" whose members are culled from different eras: the pirate Blackbeard, the serial killer Jack the Ripper, and the wife-murderer Doctor Crippen. In fact, the writer of this tale made an overt attempt to "mythify" the historical Crippen-- who only killed one woman according to the law-- into some sort of odd "Bluebeard" type who killed multiple wives.

NULL VS. NASCENT STATURE/CHARISMA

(NOTE: I posted this yesterday but belatedly realized I needed to correct a few things, so the continuity may be a bit rocky.) 

In ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2 I sought to establish some ground rules for my conception of stature as it operates either through what I termed either Qualitative or Quantitative Escalation. The theory's best summation would be that at times a given literary character can ascend to a certain height of popularity purely through quality irrespective of the number of times the character appears, but that it's more common for characters attain popularity through repeated appearances.

I began by giving two examples: one of a famous literary character who only appeared once, and another who appeared several times. 

This is the most important aspect of escalation with relevance to cultural significance. It does not matter that Ivanhoe had just one literary outing while Fu Manchu had twelve novels and four short stories; what matters most is that they became cultural touchstones. Once this happens, these iconic characters, no matter how much they may be changed in later adaptations, have had their stature escalated to the highest level possible for a purely literary character; the level of Qualitative Escalation.

For the present I believe that the contrasting example of Quantitative Escalation is clear enough for my purposes at present. Yet as I've studied my previous statements on crossovers, I've decided that there are occasional exceptions to the Qualitative Rule that evoke the matter of "quality" without involving what I called above "cultural significance"-- and this "quality" stems from the author's success in giving his characters a relatively high level of stature over time, in comparison to those authors who are not so successful. In this essay most of what I'll be writing about both stature and charisma will concentrate on how they operate within the context of crossovers. Wherever I speak of stature and charisma in this context, I will use the terms "c-stature" and "c-charisma," since I've already stated that Primes and Subs both possess certain amounts of stature and/or charisma even when they are not in a crossover context.

In the above-cited essay, I also wrote:

...I noted that I deemed the now obscure Golden Age heroine Miss Victory to have accrued a moderately high level of stature-- one related purely to how often she appeared-- so that when she was revived in the 1980s series FEMFORCE, her original stature "crossed over" with the new heroes created for the series, even if this "crossover" existed only in the initiating episode of the FEMFORCE series, since the character, re-dubbed "Ms. Victory," became thereafter absorbed into the Femforce mythos.

 

But the question comes to me: can I truly regard FEMFORCE #1 as a "crossover" if the renamed "Ms. Victory" is the only one with stature accruing from Quantitative Escalation? The other three heroines seen on the above cover-- The Blue Bulleteer, Tara the Jungle Girl, and the She-Cat-- are all familiar riffs of earlier superheroine types, but to my knowledge none had previously appeared in commercially published comic books or in any other professional medium. So at the time of this issue's publication, doesn't that mean that these three heroines actually had no more stature than any other character who appeared just one time-- say, no more than a hero who just got one story and never appeared again? And if they did not possess stature within the first issue, then one might reason that none of the "regular" issues of the magazine would possess "c-stature." (I say "regular" because some issues were devoted to reviving other public domain Golden Ages like Miss /Ms. Victory.)

My answer is that such a combination of a "established character" with "newbie characters" can possess "c-stature." However, the presence or absence of "c-stature" can only be determined once the feature or franchise has accrued some history as a recurring venue in which the established character and the newbie characters continue to interact and in which the newbies are free to "spin off," if only temporarily, from the parent concept. In such a feature, the author's intent to launch a "new universe" has been realized, and so I conclude that all three "newbies" in the FEMFORCE comic book start out with what I call "nascent c-stature."

The opposite type of "c-stature," one in which the stature-potential is not realized, is what I call "null c-stature." This type would appear whenever there's an unsuccessful attempt to launch a new starring character (or characters) with help from an established one. The best example can be found in the television concept of the "back-door pilot," in which a producer would seek to foment a new series by having the proposed series' principal(s) interact with the characters of an established series. In 1968 Gene Roddenberry attempted to launch a concept for a new SF-series by having its characters, Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln, encounter the characters of STAR TREK in the episode "Assignment Earth." If a series had eventuated from this encounter, I would have deemed the characters of Seven and Lincoln to share Prime stature with the TREK characters, and so both newbies would have "nascent c-stature" until their series actually manifested. In earlier essays I suggested that Norman Lear's character Maude had stature even prior to getting an actual series, having only appeared on two episodes of ALL IN THE FAMILY, but I did not have a distinct term for this particular type of stature, which is, again, "nascent c-stature." In those two episodes of FAMILY, Maude shares Prime c-stature with Archie Bunker and the other regulars, but only in a nascent sense. But no series for Seven and Lincoln eventuated from "Assignment Earth," and so the characters only possess "null c-stature," but only from the standpoint of a crossover analysis. For those who watch the episode without knowing that it was a back-door pilot, Seven and Lincoln are perceived to be just like any other Sub supporting characters on the show, possessed of charisma but no starring stature of any kind.

The same principle applies to null and nascent c-charisma. A character who appears just once and never again-- such as this 1947 Bat-villain The Glass Man-- has a base level of ordinary charisma, but he has no claim to any sort of c-charisma.

Now a character who appears only once may debut under circumstances that make it more POSSIBLE that he could be revived. Also in ESCALATION PT 2, I focused upon the 1996 multi-villain crossover BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN, writing:

The same [principle of charismatic crossovers] applies to a multi-villain crossover like THE LONG HALLOWEEN-- but only to those villains-- Joker, Mad Hatter, Scarecrow et al-- who have "made their bones." This same story introduces a new villain, Holiday, but since he never appeared prior to that story, he has negligible charisma and so is not part of the charisma-crossover per se. 

Given that close to twenty years have passed, and that Holiday, like the Glass Man, was slain in his debut, it seems at this point that Holiday also possesses ordinary charisma in that he achieved neither Quantitative nor Qualitative Escalation. Still, if someone did revive Holiday, I *might* judge that he retroactively possessed "nascent c-charisma" within the LONG HALLOWEEN narrative in a manner analogous to the newbie heroines of FEMFORCE possessing "nascent c-stature." But I'm not holding my breath for that to take place.

Of course a number of low-charisma characters were reinvented over time to have either high charisma or even high stature, both of which improved their chances to accrue either "c-charisma" or "c-stature." During the Golden Age of Comics, the Batman villain Deadshot only appeared once while the Riddler appeared only twice. But the Riddler's first appearance in the Silver Age led to his adaptation to the 1966 TV show, and he was almost instantaneously promoted to being a first-rank villain. One might say that this promotion also stemmed from quality rather than quantity, since Frank Gorshin's performance gave the character greater appeal to audiences than he had ever garnered from comic-book readers as the result of his three appearances in comics.  Eventually he would become notable in respect to both Quantitative and Qualitative Escalation, and even branches out to "cross over" with other DC heroes like the Elongated Man-- probably his first "c-charisma" crossover.

As for Deadshot, he certainly became Quantitatively more significant. The 1970s Englehart-Rogers redesign of his costume and modus operandi made him more popular with fans, and further articulations, particularly by John Ostrander in SUICIDE SQUAD, gave Deadshot a more well-defined character. I would not say that Deadshot became as Qualitatively exceptional a figure as did the Riddler. However, unlike the Riddler, Deadshot accrued high Prime stature through his membership in the eighties SUICIDE SQUAD (and, I  assume, later incarnations of the franchise as well). By definition,  of course, SUICIDE SQUAD was a crossover of many characters, almost all of whom had started as Subs, and this change resulted in all of them obtaining both regular stature and c-stature. 

The relevance of the "null and nascent" categories with respect to "charisma crossovers" also means that only from a historical perspective can I consider a story a crossover if it contains the association of a "first time villain" with a "repeat offender." In SPIDER-MAN #14, the "repeat offenders" are The Enforcers, though they had made but one previous appearance. The Green Goblin was the "first timer," and though his creators patently intended for him to be a repeat villain, his first appearance can only be seen as having "nascent c-charisma" from the perspective of knowing that the Goblin made further appearances. But from the current historical perspective, most comics-fans know that the character became far more iconic as a Spider-villain than the Enforcers ever could have been, and so SPIDER-MAN #14 also can be deemed a charisma-crossover. 

As I begin to wrap up yet another convoluted concoction of categories, I may as well circle back to a series that runs counter to that of the opening example. In A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT 5, I outlined three types of ensembles, concluding with what I called "the semi-inclusive ensemble." The earliest example of this known to me was the Golden Age series "The Girl Commandos," in which the feature's creators picked up an established solo character, Pat Parker, and "included" her in a team made up of "newbies." Now, the pattern here superficially resembles that of "Femforce," where only one established character with a bunch of newbies. However, "Girl Commandos" was not a crossover in my judgment as "Femforce" was, because the female allies of Pat Parker were not designed to operate independently of the "Girl Commandos" feature. The heroines of "Femforce," however, were over time frequently spun off into individual features, however short-lived, so that they began to resemble a purely inclusive ensemble, but one where team stature came first and individual stature came later. 

Semi-inclusive groups became far more prevalent in the 1970s. The  1960s X-Men team was entirely exclusive in its members were meant to remain in their own feature aside from very rare individual guest-shots in other features. However, the 1970s X-Men combined a group of newbies with one legacy character from the first series (Cyclops) and a smattering of mutant characters who had only appeared in supporting roles. The newbies for the most part became the most popular characters, along with one-shot Hulk-antagonist Wolverine, and the characters' association with the X-Men largely effaced any piddling associations that Wolverine or anyone else-- except Cyclops and, slightly later, Marvel Girl-- had accrued, so I would not tend to judge the X-Men to be an ongoing "static crossover" series as I would FEMFORCE and SUICIDE SQUAD.

NOTE: Some of the terminology in this essay has been discarded since its writing.

SHORTCHANGING THE SECOND MASTER

In this essay I noted that I was currently re-reading Wagner and Lundeen's analysis of the STAR TREK franchise, DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. I also noted that I felt a little reluctant to blog further about it, though I only referred to the "chimera" of rebutting points made in a book published over twenty years ago. It's a little different when a critic breaks down an earlier work that still has a following, like Ursula Le Guin's THE LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT, which I assailed in this essay and the two subsequent posts. Even if I had a larger following, would all that many fans, be it of STAR TREK specifically or of metaphenomenal criticism generally, even care about what Wagner and Lundeen said about "Star Trek in the American Mythos?"

However, one interesting aspect of the authors is their attempt to "serve two masters," as per the Matthew 6:24 quote. In HALF-TRUTHS AND CONUNDRUMS PART 2 I attempted to give the authors the benefit of the doubt because they claimed that they were pursuing the course of pluralism, even if they do not do so in the same ways I do. But now that I'm about halfway through the book, I think that the authors' claim to appreciate different paths was just them talking out of both sides of their mouths.

Wagner and Lundeen's claim to pluralism appears in the first chapter, following a generalized history of the many intellectual and academic interpretations of myth. In the concluding section, entitled "Plural Vision," Wagner and Lundeen write:

It is possible, when writing about myth, to be so driven toward a preconceived goal that one may select only the material that fits the chosen approach or stretch and whittle it until it does fit. Those who read myth in order to interrogate its hegemonic messages, are likely to write about such subjects as gender, race, ethnicity... [while] those inclined toward the veneration of myth are more likely to focus on heroism, self-transcendence, the achievement of inner wholeness and illumination...

Now that I've read more of the book, it's quite evident that there's a reason why Wagner and Lundeen first listed the critical, reductive analysis of "hegemonic messages," and gave short shrift to the view, expressed by such authorities as Jung and Frye, that myth has its own integral logic that cannot be reduced to materialistic explanations. Though I intend to keep reading, in the first six chapters I've found nothing to justify the book's title. DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. The title sounds like a response to one of mythographer Mircea Eliade's more "transcendental" books on mythology, such as THE MYTH OF THE ETERNAL RETURN or THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE. But Eliade is only cited three times in the index, just like Carl Jung-- which indicates that the authors were just bullshitting about their supposed respect for the non-reductive views of myth.

Since this is just a blogpost, I'll confine myself to one example of the authors' reductive proclivities. Chapter 5, subtitled "Gender in the STAR TREK Cosmos," concludes with a section with the bumptious title "Tinfoil Bikinis and Political Correctness." The authors assert that in the fourth season of STAR TREK VOYAGER, the producers introduced the svelte character "Seven of Nine" to add sex appeal to the series, with the clear implication that for the show's past three seasons not that many fans. hetero or otherwise, were enthralled with the existing female cast-members. Wagner and Lundeen paraphrase a quote by Berman from a 1997 article in which he made some comment about the show having become too "politically correct." The bias of the authors toward the feminist agenda is clearly shown by their response:

If "political correctness" means a sensitivity to feminism and other left-liberal political views, it is probably too simplistic to blame it for the decline of the "sexy" STAR TREK female.

Wagner and Lundeen then veer off any actual estimation of the "correctness" accusation by accusing the Original Series-- the souce of the "tinfoil bikinis"-- of focusing on "women as the sole object of the sexual gaze, with men doing all the gazing." This is not sustainable, not least because Mister Spock managed to attract a sizeable female fandom-- but he did so as men usually do in the real world, through his actions rather than through the use of makeup and attire. One need not be a Jungian essentialist to notice that hetero men and women have different orientations with respect to the opposite sex, and one cannot glibly downgrade any of the TREKs if they reflect that basic experiential truth. In fact, the "sexual gazes" directed at Seven of Nine's smoking body in her skin-tight attire apparently included a number of lesbians, since during the run of VOAYGER, a petition was circulated to declare Seven as having a lesbian relationship with the ship's female captain, as reported in this Wikipedia article.

I've often made fun of overly politicized critics, such as Noah Berlatsky, who blathered about my myth-critical approach without the slightest understanding of the issues involved. But at least he only served one master, unlike the hypocritical authors of this not-so-deep analysis.

ADDENDUM 12-15-21: I considered devoting a separate post to  the remainder of this book now that I've finished it, but I found it such a mixed bag that I don't think it's worth it. There are some okay insights here and there, but in large point this is a "proto-woke" work, continuously complaining about the STAR TREK franchise's lack of proper intersectionality. Even after admitting that the shows are all television programs that must use human actors for the majority of their players, the authors STILL fault the shows for being too anthropocentric, and so they are guilty of a fundamental dishonesty, throwing out valid reasons for production procedures and then dismissing those reasons out of hand. 

Though there have been Far Left studies with inventive points of view, Wagner and Lundeen are largely derivative and unoriginal in their analyses. The only puzzling aspect of their work is that I don't know why they stuck the phrase "sacred time" in their title. They correctly attribute the phrase to Mircea Eliade, and even quote the context correctly. But given that the authors are mildly hostile toward the claims of any religious hegemonies-- as was, BTW, Gene Roddenberry-- it's clear that they aren't the least bit concerned with the philosophical aspects of Eliade's idea. Maybe in some fashion they viewed Eliade's concept of a originary time before time itself started as some sort of "modernism," which they incorrectly associate with cultural traditionalism. But if so, they failed to make that association clear, and so their whole project shortchanges their readers as well as their "two masters."

HALF-TRUTHS AND CONUNDRUMS PT. 2

Around the same time I began turning my thoughts to the topic of half-truths, problems and conundrums, as seen in Part 1, I started re-reading the 1998 critical work DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME: STAR TREK IN THE AMERICAN MYTHOS, by Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen. I consider this a felicitous, given that "Classic Trek" was the source of some examples as to how both problems and conundrums function in narrative within the originating essay. In an earlier formulation I had also used Classic Trek and one of its many epigoni as illustrations of the more specific notions of "moira" and "themis" in this essay, which probably sustains some parallels with my current opposition of problems and conundrums.

I remember enjoying MYTHOS, though I'm reasonably sure I haven't revisited it in ten years. But the opening chapter by Wagner and Lundeen does state some views on the idea of "myth in popular fiction" with which I'll take issue.

The first passage presents no serious problems:

Because the bare physical universe offers so little comfort to the mind, people strive through the medium of myth to center themselves and to make cosmological sense of their experiences.

I would not personally favor the term "comfort," even though it bears comparison with Tolkien's concept of "consolation," and at present I have greater liking for Whitehead's concept of *concrescence,* which has more to do with a perceiving entity sussing out the values that other entities have for him and for his culture. But this is a viable and popular interpretation of myth's function, and the authors bend over backwards not to get caught on the proverbial "Procrustean bed" of any single interpretation. 

On the same page, though, the question of a given narrative's truth-value comes up. The authors admit that "fantasy fiction and science fiction" are the two "narrative realms" that most often invite comparison with archaic myth, but then, as if signaling their own Procrustean preferences, they state that "While fantasy may bear a superficial resemblance to traditional myth in its rustic and magical character, science fiction has a stronger functional parallel with older myths, because its futuristic setting can entail a more serious truth claim." A bit later the authors claim that "Like the primal past but unlike overtly fictional settings, the future can be thought of as potentially real and true."

I won't launch into a detailed defense of fantasy fiction's equal claim to "truth" in the sense I've discussed it here. It's clear to me that even though cutting fantasy fiction out of the picture is a pretty large process of logic-chopping, I understand that the authors' prime consideration was to provide support for the position that science fiction generally had a superior "truth claim" because this argument allows them to concentrate on the superior capacity of the STAR TREK franchise to reflect truth. They also admit that "all literature is thought experiment," with which I partly agree, though with the caveat that mythopoeic thought tickles a different part of the human psyche than does didactic thought-- and that Classic Trek in particular is an ideal modern narrative which can show each form working separately or in tandem. 

To admit that "all literature is thought experiment," even without a well formulated theory of mythopoesis, is tantamount to making the same purpose I've identified in both archaic myth and in literature: that of "exposing audiences to pure possibilities." I assume that like many other modern authors, Wagner and Lundeen attempt to promote the idea of those possibilities as having a "truth claim" because the majority of readers have been trained via public school to view literature as fiction whose real purpose is to communicate enlightening messages. This is one of those bromides that sounds so logical on the surface that it's practically impossible to eradicate without a book-long argument to that effect. Naturally, Wagner and Lundeen are mostly concerned with simply validating the linked narratives of one overarcing fiction-franchise, not seeking to stem the tide of functionalism, so they can't be criticized for not doing something they didn't purpose to do. I don't know if I will blog about other aspects of their study in future, but if I do, I imagine I will continue to pursue the chimera of, "Now here's what *I* would say about the matter..."

 

PROBLEMS VS. CONUNDRUMS

                     

 I’ve been meditating on the familiar opposition of “problem and dilemma” for possible application to my theories regarding the narrative interactions of lateral meaning and vertical meaning. The regular opposition goes as follows:

 

A problem is a difficulty that has to be resolved or dealt with while a dilemma is a choice that must be made between two or more equally undesirable alternatives.

 

For reasons I’ll discuss shortly, the idea of the “problem” aptly sums up the literary appeal of a text’s lateral meaning, because this is the part of the story in which the reader primarily invests himself, to see how the main character deals with the difficulties he faces, even if said character’s solution may be to avoid said difficulties.

 

However, “dilemma” in no way sums up the appeal of a text’s vertical meaning for readers. So, as my title suggests, I’m substituting the concept of the “conundrum,” variously defined as “an intricate and difficult problem” or “a difficult problem, one that is almost impossible to solve.”

 

My last major statement regarding the lateral and vertical forms of meaning appeared in 2016’s THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL. In the passage that follows, I didn’t utilize the term “vertical meaning,” since at the time I was preoccupied with seeing how that meaning could expressed by the joint terms “overthoughts and underthoughts,” but both of these together were always intended to make up my concept of vertical meaning.

 

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking"finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* It's possible for a work to be so simple that both its underthought and overthought amount to nothing more than cliched maxims, like "good must triumph over evil," but even the most incoherent work generally intends to engross the reader with some lateral meaning.

 

Nowadays I would reword this statement to elide the reference to overthoughts and underthoughts, because over time I have began to find these terms cumbersome. From my current position it’s easier to speak of all these narrative meanings in terms of their potentiality-alignments: “lateral meaning,” which is comprised of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, and “vertical meaning,” which is comprised of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities.

 

As for the essay’s observations on the concepts of “close sight” and “far sight,” these remained unchanged, and the notions of “the problem” and “the conundrum” can be used to symbolize the different ways each of the meaning-formations appeal to readers.

 

As stated above, the lateral meaning is that which presents the reader with the immediate, close-range difficulties in the lives of one or more characters, difficulties which must be solved in some fashion, just as difficulties in the reader’s real life must be solved in some way (even if the reader, like the fictional characters, may make the wrong choice).

 

Vertical meaning, however, is the part of the story that allows the reader to contemplate the character’s conflicts from the long-range view, with the understanding that those difficulties metaphorically embody some “conundrum” regarding the nature of human life. The conundrum exists alongside the problem, and since it’s more abstract in nature, the reader doesn’t necessarily expect to see the conundrum solved, even badly, because it embodies some intellectual or imaginative conflict inherent in human life.

 

Rather than starting with an example drawn from high culture, like HAMLET or LIGHT IN AUGUST, I will begin with applying the conundrum-concept to the two examples of mythopoeic and sub-mythopoeic meanings seen in my essay regarding two Silver Age ATOM stories. Both stories dealt with the Tiny Titan's battles against an insect-themed villain, the Bug-Eyed Bandit, produced by the same creative team and within months of one another. Though I was primarily oriented on the second of the two stories to show its qualifications as a mythcomic, I also included a rationale as to why the earlier story did not qualify as a mythcomic. I argued that the first “Bug-Eyed” story did not have a strong cosmological meaning, because the villain used generic robot-insects against the hero. However, in the second “Bug-Eyed” story, author Gardner Fox more strongly patterned the robot-insects on the capabilities of real insects. This narrative strategy produced a fictional “simulacrum of knowledge” and thus gave the story a stronger mythopoeic meaning. In both stories, the hero's problem is identical; to defeat the villain, primarily through the use of kinetic displays of force. (One story also has a very minor dramatic problem, to keep the villain from kidnapping an old flame, but the kinetic problem is paramount.) There is no didactic conundrum, but the amplification of the villain's insect-theme provides a mythopoeic conundrum; one best summed up as a fascination with biological adaptations in real animals.  

Now, neither of these comic-book stories makes any pretension toward the didactic form of virtual meaning, so a more complex example is needed to show how didactic and mythopoeic conundrums may exist separately or work in tandem.

 One of the most familiar master-threads found in “Classic” STAR TREK pertains to the crew of the Enterprise seeking to interact with more primitive peoples without violating the “Prime Directive” by interfering with the primitives’ cultures. The second-season episodes “Friday’s Child” and “A Private Little War” both deal with the same range of kinetic and dramatic problems that arise when the Federation’s political rivals, the Klingons, attempt to gain favor with primitive peoples without showing the Federation’s high-minded restraint. In “Child,” a Klingon agent abets an ambitious warlord to overthrow a ruler who is friendly toward the Federation. In “War,” Klingons give relatively advanced weapons to one tribe of planetary primitives to use against another tribe.

In both stories, the Enterprise-crew must seek to mitigate the Klingons’ influence, and so the “problems” that involves the lateral meaning are virtually identical, even if the solutions are not. “Child” is more of a straight thriller, with no deep reflections about the effects of both Klingon Empire and Federation upon the lives of the primitives. “War,” on the other hand presents the viewer with conundrums that invoke both the didactic and the mythopoeic potentialties. The didactic conundrum is the more obvious, since most viewers would have noted the direct parallels to the then-current Vietnam War, in which Americans had to continually arm their allies in order to offset the forces empowered by the rival superpower of Red China. Allegedly the original script was far more caustic regarding the activities of the “Americans,” i.e., the representatives of the Federation, and series showrunner Gene Roddenberry reworked the didactic conundrum so that it implied that the heroes had to do what they did to prevent the spread of Klingon influence. Not having seen the original script, I can’t say whether or not its author utilized the same mythopoeic tropes that appeared in the finished, Roddenberry-edited script. However, because of the way Roddenberry changed the didactic meaning, the mythopoeic meaning changes somewhat as well. When at the climax Kirk muses that they must introduce “serpents” into this planetary “Eden,” the meaning carries a sense of a less didactic, more mythopoeic conundrum. The implication is that, even as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden provided humankind with a chance for self-determination, Kirk’s ambivalent gift, putting more advanced weapons in the hands of the planetary primitives, may also be a rough but necessary means of setting the natives on their own course of self-determination.

 

As with the two ATOM stories, the problems in the two TREK stories are the same as far as involving the viewer in the travails of the main characters. However, “Private Little War” suggests an enduring conundrum that supervenes the particular problems of the particular situation. “Friday’s Child” implies a possible conundrum but does not seek in articulating it in terms of either the didactic or mythopoeic potentialities.

It's worth mentioning a couple of TREK examples which register only in terms of either a didactic or a mythopoeic conundrum. The third-season episode "The Savage Curtain" places Kirk and Spock in the position of "acting out" the struggle between good and evil for the education of some very literal-minded aliens, the Excalbians. The didactic conundrum implies that the struggle between good and evil-- essentially defined as altruism and selfishness-- is a difficulty that never ceases to confront mankind, no matter what happens to any particular heroic protagonists. But despite the evocation of legendary figures from Earth and from Vulcan-- whether historical like Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan, or made-up types like Sarek and Colonel Green-- none of these characters make strong use of any symbol-tropes. Even the appearance of a vaguely witchy villainess named "Zora" is given no stature as an incarnation of female evil, in marked to comparison to the "Lady Macbeth"-styled villainy of Nona from "Private Little War."

In my reviews of the first four STAR TREK theatrical films, though, I was rather surprised that the one with the weakest dramatic problem was also the one with the strongest mythopoeic conundrum: STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE. The closest thing the film comes to a didactic conundrum is its attempt to show Mister Spock's vaunted logic as inferior to human emotion, but this is underdeveloped in contrast to the predominant mythopoeic conundrum: that of depicting a newly-born machine intelligence recapitulating its creators' need for emotional connection, and enacting a hieros gamos with a human being in order to gain said connection.

I indicated above that I was cycling out the terminology of "overthought and underthought," originally derived from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins by way of Northrop Frye. I think the terms had a certain usefulness to me, indicating that the "overthought" springs from conscious, often utilitarian forms of thought while the "underthought" springs from subconscious, more playful cogitations. But I value symmetry above everything, and so in future I may start using the following terms:

KINETIC PROBLEM-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of kinetic applications, usually in the forms of "sex and violence." Aligned with Jung's "sensation function."

DRAMATIC PROBLEMS-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of dramatic interactions with other characters. Aligned with Jung's "feeling function."

DIDACTIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through didactic assessments. Aligned  with Jung's "thinking function."

MYTHOPOEIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through symbolic embodiments. Aligned with Jung's "intuition function."

TREK HARD

I've finished THE IMPOSSIBLE HAS HAPPENED, Lance Parkin's history of "the life and work of Gene Roddenberry."

In terms of propounding a thorough overview of the STAR TREK creator, Parkin's book does what it purports to do, regaling readers with all the details of Roddenberry's career (though I can't picture anyone but TREK enthusiasts bothering with said details).

There's one problematic aspect of Parkin's book, though. In an overview, it's impossible to emphasize any of a subject's accomplishments over any others. Parkin does give us "the life" of Roddenberry, but no aspect of the producer's work is any more important than any other. Thus Roddenberry's history with his primary accomplishment, "Classic Trek," cannot be allowed to loom larger than his role in his first show, THE LIEUTENANT, or his severely adumbrated influence on the set of STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION. Indeed, Parkin spends a lot of time talking about Roddenberry's failed projects.

So what made Classic Trek so persuasive to its audience? Parkin talks around this problem, but only provides circumstantial answers: how bad all the other SF shows of the time were, and so on. But the author is unable to see what it seems obvious to me: that Roddenberry was simply a more nuanced and vital creator/producer in the 1960s, and that he lost ground as he began repeating himself, as indeed many commercial creators do.

Certainly Parkin cannot deal with anything along the ideas I promoted in this essay...


ADDENDUM: I got interrupted in the midst of writing this essay, so here's the rest of it.


In the linked essay, I wrote:

Perhaps the best illustration of the difference might be the various iterations of the STAR TREK franchise. Though there are certainly some inferior episodes within the three seasons of "Classic Trek," Roddenberry in his capacity as head producer (for the first two seasons, at least) infused the show with a substructure of mythical ideas that balanced the show's apparent enshrinement of sweet reason.
In my commentary on the second-season episode "Amok Time," I mentioned that even though the writer was Theodore Sturgeon, I suspect that Sturgeon came up with the idea for the story as one he hoped that a producer with Roddenberry's tastes would purchase: one focused on the struggle of two males over a female. Even the caveat that one of the two doesn't actually want the female-- that Kirk is actually fighting Spock with the object of saving Spock from a more dangerous antagonist-- does not banish the archetype that I've termed "Savage Masculinity." This archetype of "men gone wild" persists in many episodes penned by many authors-- all of whom, it's been alleged, Roddenberry re-wrote for his own purposes-- and helps keep the TREK universe from being too antiseptic.

Parkin goes into great detail as to how sterile Roddenberry made the first two seasons of STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION, which is a POV with which I and many other TREK fans agree with, even though I may well be the only one concerned wit "mythical ideas." What I said of the later TREK follow-ups applies equally to NEXTGEN:

Rational overthought dominates almost everything, and for the most part there's no sense that any other mode of thought can even exist.

Lance Parkin, however, is so fixated on Roddenberry's lack of success in his later projects that toward the end of the book he states the case against the producer (without really ever stating "the case for"):

At the heart of the case against Roddenberry is the idea that he's a one-hit wonder, that he only ever came up with one show that worked, and that most of the best things about STAR TREK are demonstrably the work of people who aren't Gene Roddenberry.

Though I would affirm that Roddenberry was somewhat sparing of praise to those who worked with him on TREK, Parkin commits the same sin by attempting to minimize Roddenberry's contribution. Throughout the book he cites many anecdotes in which this writer or that actor gripes about not getting proper credit. Yet how many of these "behind the scenes" people can be said to have careers any more amazing than Roddenberry's? There's no question that Gene L. Coon was instrumental to infusing TREK with some needed elements, not least being that of humor. But by the same harsh standard Parkin imposes on Roddenberry, Coon was just one of hundreds of journeymen writers in the world of television. Coon served as a producer at times, but like his writing credits his credits as producer are pretty spread out. He wrote 13 TREK episodes.and produced 33. Only his tenure on IT TAKES A THIEF, producing 17 episodes, comes close to his TREK performance, and that took place right after his departure from TREK.

Parkin clearly feels the need to puncture Roddenberry's admittedly self-serving image of himself as the only driving force behind Classic Trek. Nevertheless, Roddenberry was, for roughly two seasons, the man who made the decisions about what scripts did or did not get produced. It seems demonstrable that at no time in his career was he as good at writing humorous scenes as Gene Coon. Nevertheless, if Roddenberry hadn't recognized the value of humor in TREK, then there probably wouldn't have been any humor in TREK. I can see, as well as anyone, ways in which Roddenberry may have vitiated certain scripts, as I discussed in my review of A PRIVATE LITTLE WAR. But at no time does Parkin demonstrate decisively that Roddenberry lacked control over the elements that went into making Classic Trek, outside of those that the network may have altered under the standards they applied to all of their shows.

I don't expect that Parkin should share my regard for the mythic elements of Classic Trek. But he should have at least considered the possibility that Roddenberry's creativity did not remain precisely the same throughout his career. I don't claim to be an expert on all the scripts Roddenberry wrote in the 1950s and 1960s-- a part of the producer's career that Parkin passes over quickly. But even without my doing a deep-dive into all 24 of the HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL scripts with which Roddenberry is credited, or the 29 he did for his one-season wonder THE LIEUTENANT, I still tend to believe there's more to Roddenberry than just a guy who took the credit from other people. We're not talking about BATMAN's Bob Kane, who by all accounts really didn't do much beyond selling a great idea to DC Comics while letting others do the work.

The relative sophistication of Roddenberry's pre-TREK work mostly seems to disappear from most of the projects he completed post-TREK, though I have a mild liking for PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW. I don't know what sea-change caused the change in Roddenberry's work following the end of Classic Trek. But I know that Lance Parkin is wrong to judge the best of the producer's work by the standards of his worst, much less by the idea that none of the good stuff came about from anything Gene Roddenberry did.

HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE

In KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 1, I argued against Nancy Springer's view that Ivanhoe was not the central character of the book named after him. I compared him to the serial hero The Spirit, saying in part:

From all my statements on centricity, it should plain that I have no problem with a main character having little color-- or mythicity-- of his own. For me Ivanhoe is as much the star of Scott's only story with the character as the Spirit is of his long-running serial adventures. Springer's metaphor of a "common thread" catches some of the sense of Ivanhoe's role in the narrative, but she apparently does not realize how often famous works may be organized around an essentially unremarkable character. The Spirit is not really any better-characterized than Ivanhoe-- Eisner tended to refer to his hero as something along the lines of a "big dumb Irishman"-- and as I mentioned above, most of the mythicity of the Spirit's serial adventures inhere in his supporting characters, just as figures like Rebecca, Richard and Robin Hood are more mythic than Ivanhoe himself.

To adjust this slightly to the new terminology introduced in the STATURE REQUIREMENTS essays,  both Ivanhoe and the Spirit enjoy the centric position because their respective authors have invested them with charisma, which is identical to the "organizing factor" I used in place of Springer's "common thread." In the case of non-serial hero Ivanhoe, his charisma is established early in the novel and remains the main organizing factor based on the "charismatic action" he takes then, even though other characters later shine more brightly. Ivanhoe doesn't even get to best the villain at the climax, though the hero's mere presence does ensure the villain's defeat.

Now, though one might say that Ivanhoe "plays host" to the supporting characters of his novel-- making him what I would call a "non-distributive" type-- the Spirit, as a serial hero, has a related but distinct dynamic. Though the Spirit is the undisputed star of many of his exploits, he plays very little role in some SPIRIT tales, sometimes appearing for no more than a single panel, having no actual impact on the story's events but still serving as an organizing factor. It should be a narrative given that no serial feature lasts long by focusing only upon the hero: usually he is required to become involved in the dilemmas of other people, whose stories take the forefront in a literal sense even if they still remain under the aegis of the star. In STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 5, I pointed out how the Joker provides most of the plot-action in THE KILLING JOKE, while Charlie Collins is the plot-center of the TV-episode "Joker's Favor." But I maintained that these were still Batman stories, that his charisma was only distributed to a partner such as one of the Robins.

The Spirit's only long-term partner was Ebony, but none of the Spirit's charisma was distributed to him, nor was it distributed to any of the many characters who provide the main plot-action of stories like "Wild Rice"  or "The Curse." The Spirit is thus non-distributive. There are many other ensembles that are arguably more varied than that of Batman and Robin: the three-man team of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in Classic STAR TREK, Gil Favor and Rowdy Yates in RAWHIDE, and some (though not all) of Jason's allies in THE ARGONAUTICA. However, though these ensembles are distributive in the sense that there isn't just one non-distributive character at the center of the mix, one might view the ensembles themselves to be non-distributive in comparison to a given narrative's support-characters. Thus all of the fabled TREK side-characters, despite their fame, do not receive any distributed charisma due to the original serial's concentration on its "holy trio."

Structurally, though, many exploits of THE SPIRIT are much more obvious about their status as "short stories brought under the SPIRIT umbrella" than are comparable TREK stories in which Spock, Kirk and McCoy have to involve themselves in, say, the personal affairs of the problematic lovers in "Metamorphosis." Both the Spirit and the TREK-team are non-distributive with respect to all of the (usually) one-shot characters they encounter, but the Spirit seems much more akin to the figure of "the storytelling host."

I won't try to trace the lineage of the storytelling host in modern times, but will note that one of the oldest examples of a continuing host would be Lord Dunsany's "Jorkens tales." In modern media everyone is familiar both with real-life celebrities playing the role of story-host, such as Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock, and with totally fictional characters created for this purpose, as with EC Comics' famed characters the Old Witch and the Crypt Keeper.

But here's the rub: though it could be argued that the presence of, say, the Crypt Keeper provides a familiar point of reference within a given narrative, he does not become an "organizing factor" because he's not actually a part of any of his stories (with the exception of one humorous "origin of the Crypt Keeper" tale). Thus none of the charismatic action from the author centers upon the Crypt-Keeper, Doctor Graves, Baron Weirwulf or any of these fictional types, except in those rare cases where they become focal presences in a given story. In contrast to the way Charlie Collins is a player in a BATMAN story, or Zephram Cochrane is a player in a "Kirk, Spock and McCoy" story, the stars of a TALES FROM THE CRYPT story like "Lower Berth" are the two monsters who join in unholy bliss-- not the familiar Crypt Keeper.

OVERTHINKING THEMIS, UNDERTHINKING MOIRA

Followers of Zeus claimed that it was with him that Themis produced the Moirai, three Fates.^[10] A fragment of Pindar,^[11] however, tells that the Moirai were already present at the nuptials of Zeus and Themis; that in fact the Moirai rose with Themis from the springs of Okeanos the encircling world-ocean and accompanied her up the bright sun-path to meet Zeus at Mount Olympus.-- Wikipedia entry on Themis.

I have to assume that the academics I've quoted on the subject of Moira's co-existence with Themis were influenced by something like the Pindar fragment cited above. In 2010's LURKERS ON THE THRESHOLDS, I wrote:

Just as [F.M.] Cornford had shown that Moira, a sanctity older than the gods, was identical with the origin of social order, so Miss [Jane Ellen] Harrison pointed to the ensuing process of social evolution, where Themis represents the behavior dictated by social conscience... Above all, Themis was "Justice in the realm of Zeus," which checked the primitive law of sacrifice and atonement, symbolized in a Mother Goddess who suffered a yearly death and rebirth through her son.-- Henderson, THRESHOLDS OF INITIATION, PP. 10-11.

I haven't read Harrison's THEMIS and so can't be sure if Henderson has correctly represented her views. Still, I also pointed out in LURKERS that Ernst Cassirer entertained similar views,  so to some extent the opposition of Moira and Themis has become independent of Harrison's specific views. For Cassirer, Moira represents human governance by a god-centered, "mythical" mode while Themis represents a man-centered "ethical" mode.

I've devoted considerable space to the difference between the Frye-derived concepts of "the overthought" and "the underthought," which I've aligned with the literary modes of "realism" and "escapism" respectively. Further, I would add that the "overthought," the more logical and discursive function of literature has displaced the function of the symbolically associative "underthought" in the world of criticism much as the ideal of Themis supposedly replaced that of Moira.

And yet, even though there's a place for works dominated by rational overthought or by "irrational" underthought, my concept of pluralistic tolerance doesn't keep me from finding superior those works in which overthought and underthought are balanced. In such works, the artist has access to what Jung called "the collective  unconscious" and the many archetypes found therein, rather than his simply using discrete symbols for the sake of allegorical illustration.

Perhaps the best illustration of the difference might be the various iterations of the STAR TREK franchise. Though there are certainly some inferior episodes within the three seasons of "Classic Trek," Roddenberry in his capacity as head producer (for the first two seasons, at least) infused the show with a substructure of mythical ideas that balanced the show's apparent enshrinement of sweet reason.

In my commentary on the second-season episode "Amok Time," I mentioned that even though the writer was Theodore Sturgeon, I suspect that Sturgeon came up with the idea for the story as one he hoped that a producer with Roddenberry's tastes would purchase: one focused on the struggle of two males over a female. Even the caveat that one of the two doesn't actually want the female-- that Kirk is actually fighting Spock with the object of saving Spock from a more dangerous antagonist-- does not banish the archetype that I've termed "Savage Masculinity." This archetype of "men gone wild" persists in many episodes penned by many authors-- all of whom, it's been alleged, Roddenberry re-wrote for his own purposes-- and helps keep the TREK universe from being too antiseptic.

Years ago I engaged in a mammoth re-watch of most of the TREK epigoni, all except for NEXT GENERATION. I searched in vain for any sustained use of an archetype with the mythic power I've associated with "Moira." But even though a lot of these episodes were entertaining, the writers of the epigoni had next to no understanding as to how to invoke the deep level of the underthought. Rational overthought dominates almost everything, and for the most part there's no sense that any other mode of thought can even exist.

Vulcans were not very popular with the executive producers of the epigoni up until the last series, ENTERPRISE. Even in that series, the series-makers were not able to grasp the dramatic contrast of Vulcan culture's conflict between impulse and rationality. But if there was any episode that best shows the producers' incompetence in the realm of Moira, it would be the 1997 VOYAGER episode, "Blood Fever."

Here the purely rational drama dwells upon regular character B'Eleanna Torres and her interaction with a minor crewperson, a Vulcan male named Vorik. Because the starship Voyager is far from the parent Federation and its planets, Vorik experienced a "pon farr" just as Spock did in "Amok Time." Like Spock, Vorik desires to get back to his homeworld to marry and spawn a designated fiancee. However, when circumstances seem to frustrate Spock in this goal, he at least contemplates having sex with a female crewperson to defuse his sexual torment. Captain Kirk makes it possible for Spock to carry out his ancient rituals of "marriage or challenge," but no one aboard Voyager can do this for Vorik. He works a Vulcan whammy on Torres, almost causing her to desire to mate with him. However, because such forced nuptials would be condemned as immortal by the show's audience, Torres is able to resist the Vulcan mind-magic. Finally Vorik initiates the "marriage or challenge" ritual, but this time, "the bone gets to fight." Torres roundly defeats Vorik in unarmed combat and defuses both his sexual desire and her own.

Now, the basic idea of a female character standing against a male aggressor CAN be archetypal. But here the writer of "Blood Fever," one Lisa Klink, merely uses both Vorik and Torres as flat representations of male desire and female resistance respectively. "Blood Fever" is by no means the worst example of a latter-day TREK-tale that has "too much Themis on its mind." Nowhere in the episode is there the sense that the "pon farr" is rooted in a centuries-old ritual designed to organize the interactions of males and females. Instead, it's just an inconvenient alien quirk that has to be defused so that Vorik can go back to being a useful member of the crew. (Not surprisingly, he never has a major plot devoted to him afterward.)

This suggests to me that the author's ability to make free associations with symbols has to be to some extent independent of moral considerations. Authors who are too concerned with framing moral messages cut themselves off from the depths of their own creativity. Thus the concept of Moira underlying Themis gives literary support to the philosophical opinion of Friedrich Nietzsche:

“Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.”

FINAGLING THE FOCAL PRESENCE PT. 3

The other two FINAGLING essays, here and here, have concerned the ways in which focal presences may include illusory phantasms that have been conjured up out of a character's mind, whether for the purpose of deceiving someone else, as with Washington Irving's story SLEEPY HOLLOW, or as a by-product of the character's strong identification with someone else, as with Mario Bava's film THE WHIP AND THE BODY. Some qualifications of this general rule are necessary, though.

In Part Two I mentioned that the character of Nevenka had become subsumed in her idea of her ex-lover Kurt, to the extent that she believed she had become Kurt and was killing as he would have killed people-- though he was already dead by Nevenka's hand before her serial-killing career begins. I also remarked that Nevenka was "no Norman Bates," by which I meant that Norman was a more well-rounded character, both in the novel and the 1960 film. But it also applies to the degree to which Norman's character is subsumed by the character of his mother, Norma Bates. The pattern may be the same, but Norma does not take over the narrative of PSYCHO the way Kurt takes over the narrative of WHIP & BODY. Not until 2013, with the premiere of the BATES MOTEL teleseries, did some raconteur develop the Norma character. Yet although Norma overrides Norman's character in the story proper, extrinsically Norman is still more important than Norma, even in BATES MOTEL.

Something similar to Norman Bates's transcendence of his role model appears in the 1964 film STRAIT-JACKET As I state in the review, this film was a case of scripter Bloch aping his own PSYCHO-success. This time, however, the situation is somewhere between that of SLEEPY HOLLOW and WHIP AND BODY. Years before the main story, Lucy Harbin has committed the axe-murder of her husband and her husband's lover, but though her legend gives her a repute along the lines of Lizzie Borden, Lucy doesn't get away with giving her victims "forty whacks," and she goes away to an asylum for twenty years. The main story opens as Lucy, rehabilitated at last, is released to rejoin normal society, and to re-connect with her daughter Carol. Carol, three years old at the time of the murders, witnessed the killings but now, twenty years later, seems entirely normal-- which ought to suggest to any viewers the most likely suspect when some new axe-murders commence.

Carol commits the new murders to frame her mother, whom she despises, and so in many regards she's doing the same Brom Bones (probably) did in SLEEPY HOLLOW: creating the illusion of a mad killer. At the same time, the film's conclusion suggests that she's more than a little nuts, which allies her more with Nevenka of WHIP AND BODY. Still, the focal presence of STRAIT-JACKET is not the illusion of Lucy Harbin Axe-Murderer. Rather, Carol is the imaginative center of the movie; the new psycho-bitch in town.

Age plays a role in this shift in the film's focal presence, for although Lucy briefly tries to camouflage her true age-- star Joan Crawford was roughly sixty-four at the time-- it's plain to the viewer that she no longer possesses the "mojo" to be an axe-murderer.

And yet, age can also lend a given character greater gravity. The Classic Trek episode "The Conscience of the King" is, like all such episodes, focused on the adventures of Captain Kirk and his ensemble. However, it occurred to me to ask: if the story had focused only upon the opposition-characters, who would have been the focal presence? Like Lucy Harbin, the actor Karidian is guilty of murders committed long ago. However, within the sphere of the existing narrative the persona of the killer, "Kodos the Executioner," has been overwritten by Karidian, the same way Lucy-the-murderer has been usurped by Lucy-the-penitent.. However, although Karidian's daughter Lenore has lost her mind due to finding out about her father's past, and has sought to kill off all witnesses to Kodos' crime, I would say that Lenore, unlike Carol Harbin, never has a shot at being the focal presence. She exists to provide Karidian with yet another torment in his life of regrets, and so a retelling of the story, sans the Trek-regulars, would have been focused upon the tragic figure of the aged criminal.

CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS

Upon closer examination of the dynamicity-ratings I explored in MEGA, MESO, MICRO PT. 2, I feel I should explore the differing phenomenalities of a given character's personal dynamicity and the dynamicity of the weapons he may control.

In the case of one example cited in the above essay, the heroic characters of VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA-- Admiral Nelson being the foremost figure-- exist in a naturalistic continnum.  Although the show's time-period was set a few years in the future, the setting was not distinctly distanced from the real time in which the show was filmed.  Nelson, like the rest of the Seaview crew, was just an ordinary man, perhaps better trained in self defense than an average citizen.  This military training, however, did not eventuate in the sort of spectacular fight-scenes characteristic of combative narratives, so that I rate Nelson as "mesodynamic."  The weapons controlled by Nelson-- simple handguns on the personal level, the nuclear submarine Seaview itself-- are all of a naturalistic phenomenality.  The employment of these weapons on the teleseries is similarly subcombative in nature; most of the time the various menaces covet the submarine's nuclear weapons, but rarely are they employed to produce spectacular effects.

The representative character of Captain Kirk from the 1960s STAR TREK is a more mixed example. In the essay I rated him as "megadynamic" both in terms of his fighting-skills and his weapons.  However, Kirk's personal fighting-skills by themselves are also as naturalistic in phenomenality as those of the Nelson character. In contrast, the weapons Kirk controls, the weapons typical of Federation technology, are thoroughly marvelous in nature, as is his overall environment.

His costarring character Mister Spock is a pure marvelous type.  Not only does Spock have access to the same marvelous technology appropriate to his environment, but he himself possesses attributes that go beyond the limits of the naturalistic: primarily greater-than-human physical strength and his famous "mind-melding" power.

This raises an interesting question, however.  If a given alien character is constructed so that his bodily resources are no greater than those of a standard human being, then logically he should be deemed "naturalistic" in terms of personal dynamicity, even if his environment is a marvelous one, simply because he inhabits a marvelous universe.

I'd enlarge on some of these concerns as I follow up on some of the implications of my essays on causality and efficacy here.

THE NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE, PART 1

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men's persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.

-- Thomas Hobbes, LEVIATHAN, Chapter 13.

 

Spock: There is no logic in Gav's murder.

Shras: Perhaps you should forget logic and devote yourself to motivations of passion or gain; those are reasons for murder.-- STAR TREK, "Journey to Babel," 1967.

Spock never comments on the advice given him by Shras. but he could presumably refute the Andorian's terms.  While the term "passion" can embrace a variety of emotions, including murderous ones, the motive of committing violence-- what Hobbes calls "quarrel"-- for the purpose of gain can be pursued with the coldest of cold logic conceivable.  And as the plot shakes out in the TREK episode, "gain" is indeed the motive behind Gav's murder and various other acts of sabotage.

But what of passion?  Is passion just one thing that one should see as ineluctably opposed to cold logic, as writer D.C. Fontana suggests?  Admittedly Fontana was not propounding this notion as philosophy, merely as a notion to round out an exciting melodrama, but the question comes up in other venues as well.  So the question becomes, is it feasible that the word "passion" subsumes a variety of mental activities, two of which could in theory subsume two of the "principal causes of quarrel" Hobbes cites, "safety" and "glory?"

As it happens, the question of the various meanings of the word "passion" has come up on this blog before, quite apart from any associations with a popular teleseries currently held in simple-minded contempt by the Bloody Comic Book Elitists. In THYMOS BE DE PLACE PART 1 I devoted considerable space to refuting Noah Berlatsky's conflation of aesthetics and desire.

I don't think "desire" (which Noah defines as inherently erotic) is at the heart of human experience. I think that desire is but one interdependent chamber of a three-chambered heart that Socrates chose to call "the tripartite soul," with the other two parts being nous (intellect) and thymos (passion).

But I hear some wonder whether or not "desire" and "passion" aren't the same thing...
 

There follows a citation of a passage from Plato's REPUBLIC, which I confess I've seen cited in both Francis Fukuyama and James Twitchell, albeit to different ends.  Having noted how Socrates demonstrates the existence of a "passion" that is not goal-oriented, I continued:

Thus Socrates demonstrates that what we translate as *passion* (though the most accurate translation seems to be "spiritedness," as the root word for thymos comes from "breath"), is not identical to desire since it can oppose desire. I can think of examples in which *passion* might side with desire against intellect, but that doesn't undermine Socrates' distinction, for in both cases thymos is still a separable concept. Further, this *spiritedness* has a lot to do not with just satisfying one's temporary appetite to have something, be it food or money or sex, but to have esteem for oneself regarding one's own personal self-control. Socrates' example applies to one's internal esteem but it obviously has a wealth of applications with respect to gaining the esteem of others in more social situations.

So in this argument I've defined "desire" as both covalent with Plato's "eros" and with all goal-oriented affects, while "passion" is covalent with Plato's "thymos" and with affects that are more abstract in their satisfaction, whether they take the form of a subject establishing one's "reputation" (Hobbes) or identifying with a host of fictional characters (my own contra-Berlatsky take on aesthetics). 

I won't explore aesthetics or character identification in this essay-series; the interested readers (?) will have to assume that both can be subsumed by what I now call "abstract goal-affects," which quite naturally contrast with "concrete goal-affects."

In his time Hobbes was certainly aware of Plato, so it's not impossible that his "three principal causes of quarrel" owes some debt to Plato's concept of the tripartite soul.  But whereas Hobbes makes no distinction between his three causes, the aforementioned Fukuyama asserts that Plato's faculty of *thymos*-- more than a little comparable to the cause Hobbes calls "reputation"-- is distinct from eros/desire in that *thymos* was properly a "desire for a desire," that is, to be seen as a person of esteem in a given community.  In my terms this makes *thymos* an "abstract goal-affect." 

Eros/desire is without question within the sphere of "concrete goal-affects," whether one wishes to "gain" one's goals with passionate emotion or cold logic/reason.  For Plato nous/reason would have been the highest faculty of the soul, set to control the others, but the closest parallel it has in Hobbes' formulation is what Hobbes calls "diffidence" or "safety," which to the extent that it's a desire is principally a desire for self-preservation, for rational homeostasis.

Extrapolating from Fukuyama's reading of both Plato and Hegel, I would say that the first two quarrel-causes in Hobbes fall under my heading of "concrete goal-affects."  In fiction as in reality, violence is most often-- though not always-- motivated by the prospect of "gain."  This in turn prompts violence perpetrated in the name of those victimized to protect their "safety."

However, outside this circle of "attack-and-defense," there is a much rarer species of quarrel-motivation, whose goals are as abstract as any goals can be.  I will deal more fully with these motivations, at least in terms of fictional narrative, in Part 2.