Nov
23
In Defense of “The Big O” Finale (anime)
Filed Under media | 4 Comments
Spoilers galore ahead; this is a meditation on the last episode of the series
“The Big O” has come under fire by people that initially appreciated it. To quote Wikipedia:
For some reviewers, the second season “doesn’t quite match the first” addressing to “something” missing in these episodes. Andy Patrizio of IGN points out changes in Roger Smith’s character, who “lost some of his cool and his very funny side in the second season.” Like a repeat of season one, this season’s ending is considered its downfall. Chris Beveridge of Anime on DVD wonders if this was head writer “Konaka’s attempt to throw his hat into the ring for creating one of the most confusing and oblique endings of any series.” Patrizio states “the creators watched The Truman Show and The Matrix a few times too many.” The reviewer at Japan Hero does not think the payoff was worth it, writing “the audience had been waiting on pins and needles for so long, and practically every episode upped the tension and suspense at least a little bit, if not a whole lot, and then we come to the big IT-moment, and… well, there it is. For me, it was honestly a little of a disappointment.”
Any anime/sci-fi work has to be examined in terms of the counterfactuals it develops and the questions it raises. The counterfactuals - “what if” questions - arise from the strangeness in any given story.
1. In “The Big O,” Paradigm City lost its memory forty years ago and seems to be the only viable place left on Earth. Our hero within the city is Roger Smith, a “negotiator” who acts like a lawyer and a private investigator rolled into one. The character is clearly patterned after Bruce Wayne, complete with an “Alfred” type butler, a mansion, and an expensive toy few know he pilots: a giant robot (”Big O”) used to combat threats the military police of the city cannot handle. Roger handles cases for people in tough spots, and is drawn into the quest for the truth of what happened forty years ago only by outside forces, including various memories that come back at the wrong moments with full force and paralyze him.
The technology of the robot determines the entire series. Smaller, regular human-sized androids act - and as we learn through R. Dorothy Waynewright - feel just like people. The larger robots, not just Roger’s but the others that appear throughout the series, we come to realize are sentient, and also struggling with fragments of memory.
Moreover, it is said explicitly by the fascist (literally - he owns the Paradigm corporation that runs the city) ruler, Alex Rosewater, that the power of the robots allows one to determine what is just and enforce that notion. The series continually refers to giant robots having the power of God; the three major robots, Roger’s, Schwartzwald/Gabriel’s, and Rosewater’s, all pass judgment on their owners: “Ye Not Guilty,” “Ye Guilty,” and “Ye Not.” We can assume the robots have some fragmented notion of what is just, at least: in acting with a pilot, they represent something more, even if what they represent is failed or incomplete.
2. The technology of the robots determines everything. If you can create a destroyer of worlds that is sentient, what else can you create? A lot of fans object to the ending of the series, where we discover the world is one big set, and that the reason why people are having hell with memories is that the memories were prerecorded using sets and TV cameras for maybe all of them. It seems like postmodern absurdity: can’t we just get back to big robots fighting? After all, we have a series of Communist robots (3 from the “Union”), a fascist robot (Rosewater’s), one that symbolizes the tyranny of public opinion (Schwartzwald) and is modified later to represent a base desire for power (Gabriel’s). Big O itself is explicitly repaired by a team of Paradigm’s own citizens at the end, and defended by those same citizens when appearing to lose the final battle. Why did we have to get smarter than the political metaphor?
The answer is that Paradigm City is an entirely man-made world, with men having crafted other men. The crudity of just giving people memories - roles-in-life - like you would give trick-or-treaters candy is precisely the point. No amount of human foresight in the series can respect human freedom generally: one of the funniest things about R. Dorothy is her initial disdain for religion, and yet the series continues with religious imagery even up to its final moments. In an entirely man-made world, God matters that much more: the fact people suck at playing God demonstrates His necessity, the fact people can prevent others from destroying everything His Providence.
So the postmodern imagery isn’t postmodern, in my book: the Phoenix, the Big Robot that can do as it will with the template of the whole, is the ideal robot the other ones are shadows of. The generic cast of the series - the city is “Paradigm City,” the characters are intoduced to us in one sequence as “negotiator,” “android,” “butler,” “officer” - makes it clear this is the situation we’re in. We may not have giant robots, but we have nuclear bombs. If we want a civilization to disappear entirely, we can do this. We also have, through mass media, the ability to shape memory however we want.
Roger’s existential crises, which seems to occur at the most annoying times, are the key to unlocking him as a hero. He’s engaging in self-reflection despite the fact he only displays a fairly mindless andreia - being courageous, being a “real man” in Greek - most of the time. Reason is almost exclusively the province of R. Dorothy. But she falls in love with him first: in a world without a history, literally constructed by technology, there is no “nature” to contemplate except through the noble. And Roger, for all his faults, is very noble.
3. The entirely man-made world still has Providence within it because of a memory that all share. The character known as “Angel” is utterly useless, unable to commit any act of violence (save one) even though she’s an agent for the Union. The initial creator of Paradigm calls her a “memory” at the end, and says she’s not human. She ultimately gets to determine what the next city will be, even as Alex Rosewater tries to destroy it all for his own gain.
She’s completely head-over-heels in love with Roger, but it is pretty clear that Roger is in love with R. Dorothy by the point she’s really hitting on him. If she is a memory - and certainly Dastun feels a kinship with her, and the coldness of the Union towards her might consist in its never having truly existed - then she’s in a peculiar situation. Her arising - I submit she is the memory of “being loved,” nothing less - is precisely because Roger and R. Dorothy have feelings towards each other. Yet she has to be spurned because of that very fact. In the final shots of the series, she’s behind a smiling, probably human Dorothy in watching Roger drive away for the day’s work. And yet she truly held the power of God.
Playing God isn’t as much fun as it seems to be for many of us: if you do it right, you don’t get to be anything. If you do it right, what you get is to watch others do right.
Nov
4
Temptation.
Filed Under media, personal, politics | Leave a Comment
I want to post on the election, and I have no idea why. Yesterday I spent a good bit of time thinking about how all the entries written about the election are now a waste, consigned to the dustheap.
No one - not even me - cares what I thought about Joe Biden some weeks ago. But the poems I’ve written on I’m still mulling over.
So why am I tempted to write something about the news now?
From Waugh’s “Decline and Fall,” for your consideration: “…one of the first discoveries of his [Pennyfeather's] captivity was that interest in ‘news’ does not spring from genuine curiosity, but from the desire for completeness. During his long years of freedom he had scarcely allowed a day to pass without reading fairly full from at least two newspapers, always pressing on with a series of events which never came to an end. Once the series was broken, he had little desire to resume it[.]”
Before you take that passage as gospel, Josh has noted rightly that Pennyfeather, the person making the observation, is a very problematic narrator.
Apr
16
How Not To Discuss Blogs You Don’t Like
Filed Under blogging, media | Leave a Comment
Exhibit A: Via LGF - the Village Voice rips into conservative bloggers
Comment: I’m not opposed to poking fun at conservative bloggers, or even declaring “this blog is dangerous and should be opposed.” The Village Voice absolutely has the right to rip into Rightists however it wants.
But there’s a good way to make a case, and a bad way. The way they make the case for each blog is awful; if a conservative did this to liberal blogs, I’d be ashamed for conservatism.
Given that liberal readers might not be familiar at all with the blogs mentioned, one thing to do is provide links to posts one thinks indict the blogs. It doesn’t even have to be to their good posts, because the point is to ridicule. What is frightening about the Village Voice article is that it fails at ridiculing, even: by starting with a “stupid/evil” ratio and a “history” that paints any given blog - including ones run by law professors - as cruel and unusual populism, the only thing it does is reflect badly on the author.
What’s hilarious is that it is possible to have a field day with any given blog. If someone wanted to rip me for all the cruel/idiotic/ungrammatical things I’ve said, they’d have 500 posts and tons of comments here and on other sites to work with. If the Village Voice just introduced the blog they were ripping into in some way more than attacks via bullet-points, this article might be a lot more effective. Heck, don’t they realize that if they made a decent guide, I’d read it just to find out what blogs I might not know about?
You’re probably wondering why I’m ranting about this. I think the issue is vital - that we insult each other in partisanship is inevitable, but it should’t have to go along with a solidarity that assumes anything anyone else says is “stupid or evil” if they disagree. The Village Voice represents the dark side of Progressivism I’ve been complaining about recently: some more thoughtful liberals wonder why nationalistic, hawkish conservatives could ever feel the Left was fascistic in its drive for unity. The answer is pretty obvious when articles like this Village Voice one rear their head: the presumption of unity and replacement of engagement with name-calling makes one wonder how exactly this “out of many, one” project is supposed to work.
Feb
15
Thomas Jefferson On the Nature of News
Filed Under media, politics | 2 Comments
Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, Letter of June 14, 1807
I thought the above letter had some sections worth sharing, so here goes (words in italics are Jefferson’s):
1. I think there does not exist a good elementary work on the organization of society into civil government: I mean a work which presents in one full & comprehensive view the system of principles on which such an organization should be founded, according to the rights of nature. For want of a single work of that character, I should recommend Locke on Government, Sidney, Priestley’s Essay on the first Principles of Government, Chipman’s Principles of Government, & the Federalist. Adding, perhaps, Beccaria on crimes & punishments, because of the demonstrative manner in which he has treated that branch of the subject. If your views of political inquiry go further, to the subjects of money & commerce, Smith’s Wealth of Nations is the best book to be read…
Nature gives rights, and those rights dictate the principles of a proper government. Fine.
So why is there no comprehensive elementary work on the subject? Is it because the “organization of society into civil government” is a bloody, messy, awful affair where anarchism and despotism threaten the existence of society itself at times (think Cromwell’s England, or France during the Reign of Terror. There is a society, but there isn’t much of a government)?
If the “rights of nature,” of course, were so visible, one wonders why one needs to read 5 or more rather large, complicated books to understand them. Jefferson is fully aware of this irony. His advancing of liberalism through the rhetoric of “Natural Rights” is a response to the attempt to find meaning and justification in History. “History,” Jefferson tells us, “in general, only informs us what bad government is.” He goes on to say implicitly*, in this letter, that Hume (who wrote a history of Britain) falls prey to this pessimism, missing the good principles of British gov’t. The “free principles of the English constitution” are what one wants out of studying history, and therefore one wonders whether it is necessary to study any history at all to apprehend those principles.
2. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly [sic] deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle…. Defamation is becoming a necessary of life; insomuch, that a dish of tea in the morning or evening cannot be digested without this stimulant. Even those who do not believe these abominations, still read them with complaisance to their auditors, and instead of the abhorrence & indignation which should fill a virtuous mind, betray a secret pleasure in the possibility that some may believe them, tho they do not themselves.
News and History, of course, are very closely linked. Through “news” myths are made which define history. Although news, because it is concerned with the present, as opposed to history, which is tied to the past, has an added problem. It cannot even reflect specifically on what is bad; all it can do is create and magnify badness. Good news doesn’t sell. Lies and slander do.
Jefferson seems to be saying, on the whole, that some sort of philosophical reflection, a searching for principles and Truth, makes one wise and happy, but an emphasis on man in the past or man’s vileness in the present makes one jaundiced and cruel. The big question is why the mere reporting of events creates such a problem. Why does the want of knowledge of what people have done or what people are doing create wretchedness? Why does the search for a first principle, on the other hand, enlighten and empower?
*One could challenge this reading of the letter by saying that Jefferson appeals to Hume’s twisting of ‘facts’ to make his case against Hume. I have chosen to emphasize Jefferson’s castigating Hume for not respecting the “good principles” of the British gov’t, obviously.
Jan
28
Should Academics Blog?
Filed Under academia, blogging, media | 4 Comments
Lecture to be delivered in 2025 or whenever this blog gets popular, and not by me, but by whatever android holds my brain. I plan to be dead from drug abuse and an incredible amount of dirty sexual activity that is heterosexual in nature. Shut up now, the android’s about to speak.
I have been brought here to lecture not on Yeats or Xenophon or an issue in my field, Political Science, but rather on this phenomenon of New Media and whether or not it changes the nature of scholarship.
As we all know, this “New Media” thing started sometime between 2000-2010 and took off with these things called blogs, which were more or less a print medium. Podcasts and vlogs and user-generated television were there, and people were watching up until editing software became so incredibly easy to use that people were uploading full-length movies.
It is true only a small proportion of people choose to create anything; the rest would rather be passive. But something happens as tech advances, something strange, as we all learned - more and more technology that was alien at one point becomes a fixture. Everyone was using e-mail in 2012, when watches were capable of composing, sending and reading it. One didn’t even need to be online to have an account in 2015, as the nature of servers changed entirely. People started using the creation technology as a matter of course.
And we, of course, experience New Media fully as Virtual Reality. The question that has been raised is whether we should program alterego avatars in various virtual worlds to teach the subjects we specialize in. Several of you have created an alterego personality per subject. The issue you’re bringing up is whether this is necessary for the continuance of academic relevance, or whether the academy should be reactionary, as it was when blogs were first introduced. Only losers blogged then - people who sat around all day on IM, living with their parents, making no money, “writing a dissertation,” and ranting about online events and trends of no consequence to anyone who was in the real world.
It was clear blogging was going to go nowhere, and indeed, the ease of making one’s own TV shows and podcasts and all sorts of mixed media creations that emphasized audio/visual swept blogging away. Academics came to use blogs more then, when the less serious crowd left for the trendier technologies.
Of course, those academics were formed in my and my friends’ image and likeness, because we had been blogging the whole time in such a way as to teach people even when not working with them directly. We were doing something that others weren’t - not keeping a blog so much for the sake of news, or a running commentary on a topic, but for raising the best questions possible. Eventually people caught onto what we were doing, and things changed from the inside out thanks to those people who were appreciative and tolerant of my arrogance and willing to complement each others’ efforts. Students started taking the liberal arts far more seriously, and demanding their professors not give them the “gist” of a thinker, but pay close attention to the text. People started wondering if the questions they encountered in old books were relevant to how they perceived the world. Candidates for office were being asked what they thought about Lincoln or Jefferson in detail; informal discussions about policy started focusing on specifics and required a good working knowledge of arguments others made in the past, and an ability to assess costs and think through incentives for actors. My specific work focused on the theological-political problem as presented to us by an ancient thinker, and I had no clue how seriously religion was going to be taken by many in a fairly atheistic age just because I brought it up.
The world changed to some degree because we blogged. Then came the money, the band broke up, there was even more sex and drugs, I said I was bigger than John Lennon, and this android really sucks, I can’t get it to run itself into a wall full speed or throw Molotov Cocktails at people.
So anyway. You want to know about New Media, and whether you should participate in it. You want to teach to change the world, yada yada.
Here’s what I would have told academics back in 2008 if I were asked about blogging:
Don’t blog unless you have something to offer besides your opinion. Blog only if you want to teach and be directly useful to others.
You guys are going into these virtual environments with the “change the world” mentality. You want the world to look like you: I think that’s the ambition hiding under the fear of losing relevance. Now that’s not terrible - Aristotle says that when we posit a reason for something, we do so for ourselves and others like ourselves. The best reasons unite us as human beings.
But I can safely tell you that when I blogged, it was dealing with people I disagreed with over and over and over. And I wasn’t trying to convert them - many times, I wanted to make the best argument I could for their position, even if I disagreed.
You have to be directly useful to others, otherwise you’re bullying in the worst way. To some degree, all impersonal interaction where one says “I know better” is bullying. But academics around the time I started blogging were terrible bullies. They openly lied to advance partisan points: whatever good they had in mind was greater than the Truth.
The technology does not matter at all: things that look tacky can never compare to the original academic experience of Socrates bugging people in the agora because he couldn’t find some handsome boy to hang around. Nothing is tackier than that, except one thing: bugging people because you know the truth already.
You don’t, and neither do I. Your job as scholars is to raise the best questions possible, and allow people to think for themselves. You can introduce them to things they’ve never seen before, sure - I was happy to share poems and links to artists I found compelling. But if you go in with “the world’s going to change because of me,” you’ve got it all wrong. That was a very fortunate coincidence, made possible by a lot of people who cared and had plenty to share themselves. We learned from each other, and it is by their grace I did a little something.