#fiction #films

Halfway through Civil War, the protagonists are confronted by an unidentified militia who asks them who they are. He has just casually shot one of their friends, so it is a rather pointed question. “Americans”, answer our reporters. “What kind of Americans”, is the retort, followed by a version of Russian Roulette where hailing from the wrong state means death.

This scene also featured in the movie’s trailer, for obvious reasons. Its visceral depiction of how the unifying signifier ‘American’ has fractured invites the audience to believe this disintegration is not only possible, but plausible. As a trailer this is effective, prompting the viewer to wonder how we got here, with the intent that they go and see the movie to find out. Which makes encoutering this scene again in the movie itself all the more disappointing, because by then, we are still looking for the answer.

#books #fiction #fantasy

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” s_aid Karl Marx. And while he had the proletariat in mind rather than the aristocracy, the words might have been the motto of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. Published between 1946 and 1959, Gormenghast gets classed as prototypical fantasy. Nowadays, it might have been labelled magical realism, suffused as the entire series is with the logic of dreams, where time, space and fate all bend in service of the story.

All three books follow Titus Groan, Seventy-Seventh Earl, first as child, then as youth and finally as a young man. Yet the main character of the novel is not Titus, but the eponymous castle of Gormenghast. Gormenghast is the ur-castle of our European collective imagination: so vast, complex and ruinous that even its lifelong inhabitants cannot fathom it. It is miles of crumbling ramparts and towers, battlements and courtyards, corridors and chambers, arrested in a permanent state of slow decay. Think the castle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, except if it was 20 times larger and designed by M.C. Escher. It would eat Hogwarts for breakfast.

As labyrinthine as the castle are the rituals of the House of Groan. They are the sediment of contingent decisions and events of generations of Groans, ossified into strictures that lock the castle’s inhabitants down in time in the same way the physical castle contains them in space. It is the rituals and the castle together that hold the essence of the House of Groan. Any living members of the line are incidental. As a metaphor for any old, impoverished, anachronistic aristocratic English family, stuck on a decrepit estate surrounded by mouldering artifacts of a glorious past, it could not do any better.

#tv #fiction #superheroes #SF

Warning – contains spoilers

What happens after the revolution? It is a question that is somewhat of a liability for the Left, with a tradition of unsatisfyingly vague answers tracing back all the way to Marx’ (in)famous quip that his job wasn’t to write cookbooks for the post-revolutionary society. It may therefore come as a bit of a surprise to see this question taken up as the central theme of a series in, of all places, the Marvel universe.

Loki season 2 picks up from the end of Loki season 1, where we saw ‘He Who Remains’ killed at the hand of Sylvie (implausibly the only female Loki variant we ever see), and a sacred timeline shattering into infinite fragments. ‘Our’ Loki finds himself in an unfamiliar timeline, now one of many, and quickly discovers that HRW wasn’t lying about the universe tearing itself to shreds now that the Sacred Timeline is no more. Unbeknownst to the Powers that Were at the TVA, they had a ‘Temporal Loom’ in the basement which had the job of keeping the known universe together. Unable to cope with the manifold new timelines, it is in danger of falling apart, taking the universes with it. It is up to Loki, assisted by like-minded TVA employees, to fix this piece of pseudoscientific technobabble and keep the universe together.

#books #fiction #speculative #dystopia

Warning: Contains some spoilers

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, is an observation attributed to Marxist critic Frederic Jameson and popularised by Mark Fisher. And indeed, our culture is rife with stories that tell of the end of the world, often as a result of capitalism, yet rarely do we see stories about capitalism’s transcendence. Post-apocalyptic stories walk a fine line between serving as a warning, and expressing our fears that the trolley can no longer be switched to a track where it will not kill all of us. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake sits within the latter category, being less a warning and more a bleakly cynical tale of human powerlessness.