The Diamond Island

This one’s for Liephus.

Preliminary Note:
I went to see this flick on a matinee and all I can say is dang!  $7.50, plus $3.50 “3D charge”?  That was 22 bucks for K and I.  Talk about fleecing the customer.  The theater was about 80% full, which isn’t bad for a Sunday afternoon and six weeks into the release.

As a result of the high prices, I saw very few people buying concessions—way to keep the theaters in business Hollywood!  K and I smuggled in a water bottle and crackers.  May both the theaters and Hollywood burn in the fires of Eblis Tech.

K knew this already, but I was very surprised to learn that you don’t necessarily get new 3D glasses when you see the movie.  We both got used pairs.  Luckily, K brought antiseptic wipes and we cleaned our allotted pair.  Sure hope the person before me didn’t have a cold or worse!

Okay, okay, recycling.  I get it.  But what if I wanted a souvenir?  What if I wanted to bring my pair back to another showing, in case the movie was so awesome I had to see it again?  I don’t care about the “3D charge” always being tacked on, but if I pay I want to keep the glasses.  Let me decide if I want to give them back for re-use.

They were obviously used too.  The lenses were scratched and blotchy around the edges.  But the worst indignity is that the glasses have anti-theft devices in the plastic, so you look like a moron if you try to remove them from the theater.  Dude, I’m renting somebody else’s glasses?

So at the end of the film I stomped mine into several pieces and kicked them across the floor.  Childish, I know.  But it ticked me off.  Way to make me feel positive about the 3D experience Hollywood!

Technical Analysis:
Okay, so the big selling point of the film is the visual effects.  What else has Hollywood got these days?  Certainly nothing remotely near a good yarn, that’s for sure.  I’d say my visual experience was a mixed bag.

When the 3D visuals work, they work beautifully.  The depth and disassociation of immersion are really something.  I believed I was seeing another world and I felt myself plunging in.

Unfortunately, one thing 3D does not do well is breaking the screen barrier.  When it happens, it throws you out of the movie and you have to start over.

For example, I’d be rushing through a forest with the main characters and then a fern frond or an insect would move too far out of frame and towards the audience in an awkward way, reminding me that this is just a movie with fancy tricks to distract you from looking too closely at the story.

Quite frankly if this is as good as it gets after 170 years of the technology (Stereoscopy was invented in 1840!) then these limits will never be surpassed.  Regardless of high definition or whatever super realistic photo-realism you throw at the audience. It’s an illusion of depth, not actual depth.

One must always remember that the main vehicle of immersion is the audience members themselves—we fill in the blanks psychologically and naturally.  But when the line is crossed the spell is broken.  I just didn’t feel this medium has been mastered enough to make a push for 3D being the savior of the movie industry.

It’s hard to judge the computer-generated effects, particularly the giant blue cat people.  Again, it’s a mixed bag.  The 3D effect masks a lot of problems that might be more glaring in a non-3D version.  I couldn’t help but be drawn in by the action of the characters and forget they were just advanced polygon conglomerations.  But during slower scenes the characters at times seemed off to me.

Mainly I found my eyes growing tired two-thirds of the way into the movie and I just stopped noticing the 3D effect because I didn’t care anymore.  About that time my eyes also started to water a lot, which made me chuckle.  I wonder if those next to me were wondering why I was crying when the “super evil no doubt about it he deserves to die” bad guy finally was killed!

My thought is that the 3D did best when the movie was in nature mode—the National Geographic style exposition scenes really stood out.  The computer graphics worked best when there was lots of action, but not so well when characters were hanging around talking.

The Meat And Potatoes:
It’s an average movie, made remarkable by the fact that:

• The dying movie industry has been churning out mostly poor material for a while, and
• It relies on the “event” gimmick of 3-D, reminiscent of carnival attraction psychology.

There’s precious little that’s new or groundbreaking in the movie.  The world of the humans is pretty much cribbed from the dark realism of the Alien/Aliens/Outland vein.  The world of the giant blue cat people is spectacular to behold, but we’re never allowed to immerse ourselves in it for long.  The movie has an agenda (save the planet) and nothing is going to get in its way.

I seriously expected Michael Jackson to step out of a trapdoor and stand in front of the huge bulldozer plowing down the magic trees.

Which is funny, because if this were a real science fiction film, it would focus on the “shock” of the premise—humans becoming aliens to infiltrate and weaken them in order to exploit their world.  What we get instead is fantasy, specifically the tried and true romance melodrama of the wounded hero who suffers indignity so he can inflict revenge on the source of his pain. It’s all about the sensationalism.

The criticisms of the film I’ve read focus on the characters and setting as if they were literally real.  Watching the film, I couldn’t help but think it’s a case of most people being unable to distinguish between psychic, non-real facts and non-psychic, real facts.

To say that this movie is Dances With Wolves meets The Battle For Endor, or another story of “white hunter saves noble savages” misses the point entirely.  It only scratches the surface.

I mean, there’s nothing plausible about this movie at all.  It all takes place in the unconscious on a symbolic level.  Any relation to the real world is only in the most superficial way.

You have human reason using the psychological constructs of cloned surrogates, mechanical exoskeletons and various forms of missile-firing VTOLs to invade the primordial unconscious.

The giant blue cat people aren’t people at all.  They’re superhuman beings that exist in the unconscious.  One has only to watch them walk through the neon glows of their environment populated by chimerical amalgamations of real animals and realize one is viewing numinous material.

In the unconscious all beings are by nature linked by the collective.  It is the cloned surrogates, the avatars that allow humans to become hybrids and cross over into the unconscious.

What’s most disappointing to me is that this movie doesn’t depict any raise in consciousness at all.  Ordinary people get to live back home on a “dead world” (the real world), while the big decisions get to be made by corporate and military officers, with scientists in the background as advisers as long as they say the right things.

But it’s all hopeless.  The unconscious always wins in the end and human reason is annihilated—sent back to earth as POWs while the giant blue cat people get to continue living in the paradise of unconsciousness.

The movie begins with the main character watching his twin brother incinerated—a scientist representing the highest form of reason and the main character’s own connection to humanity—and ends with him abandoning his real body for a regression into the unconsciousness of infantile existence.  It’s a bleak statement on the human condition that is safe, boring, and done to death by better movies with a fraction of this movie’s budget.

In a metaphorical sense the movie is not too far from the truth.  The designated carriers of our own worst qualities are pressing dangerously into unknown territories from which tremendous natural forces might be unleashed to tragic effect.

Environmental catastrophe is a real danger, as is our running out of hydrocarbons with which to fuel our unchecked advance into the farthest reaches of outer space—so we can avoid inner space.  But the movie never engages with these issues at all.

“Unobtainium” (the goal of the “bad guys”) is a good term—it doesn’t exist and it never existed.  The whole military industrial complex is headed for a brick wall and all of us will be paying the price in work not done on ourselves.

The magicians of aboriginal populations have been using avatars for millennia.  They at least have the good sense to come back and use what they have learned to help real people.  Nope, not this movie.  Our hero is on a one-way ticket to the faerie realms.

The people back home have no clue what just happened.  The soldiers, suits and scientists haven’t learned squat.  The fortunate few who have “gone native” and fight for the giant blue cat people all die.  The giant blue cat people are embittered by their experiences and now hostile.  The main character abandons his real life body for a supernatural one—just like when one becomes a vampire!

The modern savior as embodied by the hybrid is discarded.  Nobody wins.

But if you are looking for an action flick that sells a vision of the powerless rising up to defeat their oppressors—psst, hey kid, rent these plastic glasses and go in that tent.

Overcooked:
The fatal flaw of this movie is that it gets in it’s own way.

When the story is allowed to just happen it’s fun and engaging.  But too often the 3D, the computer graphics, the main character’s narration, the sudden attacks of  slow-motion (which always kick you out of the action)  and the rush to tell three complex acts in three hours—all serve to remind us we are watching a movie.

There were several scenes that cried out to be left alone to develop longer.  Too often I found myself letting go, only to cut to a scene that was painfully tedious or unnecessary.

Scenes like the main character’s first experience of his avatar (the joy and freedom of a supernatural body), the exploration and losing of his way in the forest as day turns to an alien blacklight night (departure of the hero into the unconscious), and the dizzying heights of the journey to the nests of the banshees (letting go of one’s earth-bound limitations and transforming them into spirit).  Great stuff.

Then the movie would trip over itself with an out-of-the-blue scene, like Colonel McEvil making a speech to the generic evil mercenaries using Iraq war references. JUST IN CASE I DIDN’T CATCH THE MOVIE’S DRIFT.

Because you know, American movie audiences are stupid and need to be told everything. They can’t make associations using their imagination, why the very idea is ludicrous!

The movie never turns off the Exit signs on this ride; there’s always one around the next corner. Lest you grow alarmed that the Pirates of The Caribbean ride might eat the guests.

Well, after Titanic where can you go but down?

That’s what my friend h-bomb said. I believe she is correct. It’s time to kick this series to the curb and look for the new life that will feed us.

K and I have been watching the original series and made a horrific discovery. The old series is out of print. What is being sold now is the old series with the special effects and opening music revised. Basically, all the special effects shots have been replaced by modern CGI scenes in an attempt, I suppose, to inject new life in the series. Talk about revisionist history!

Dude, the crappy special effects were part of the charm. This is just stupid. Things like the colorization of black and white film, or the re-release of the Star Wars trilogy aren’t audience-driven explorations.

All the coprorate (like my new spelling?) owners have done is made Star Trek more irrelevant. Face facts suits, this golden goose has been throttled to death, you ain’t getting squat anymore, no matter how you re-imagine this stuff.

Well, okay. A livejournal acquaintance (Tweedle Me Deedles!) once did a post about how simplistic and ridiculous the old Star Trek was and I didn’t want to believe him. He’s right though. This stuff just doesn’t hold up anymore, did it ever? It’s headed right for the dustbin of history as a fad. Hek, I’m wondering if Science Fiction itself isn’t headed the same way these days.

Even the reboot wasn’t anything new or different, just more of the same. When you start adjusting the show to try and maintain the interest, the process has entered a recycling sandpit. Each effort thereafter is going to be worse off than the one before. How many people do you know are talking about Star Trek and how “fresh” it is? For goodness sakes, there’s a reason why ideas die and are reborn in new forms. Get on with it already!

The youth aren’t getting drawn in either, they’ve already got their awesome cool dude stuff to hit up for tasty culture goodness AND they can hit it on the old school front as well. There’s no “drawing in a new generation” anymore. The kids are born with it all now.

The bad moments of behavior in Star Trek just seem to get worse as I get older. The solutions to the problems in consciousness just irk me at times, the course of thinking that are pursued. Of course, as a kid I didn’t notice these things quite so much (it was a different collective consciousness at that time). But now, ugh. The flaws just stand out like sore festering zits.

The evil bureaucracy of Star Trek is there right at the beginning. Something that shouldn’t exist at all if this is a “hopeful vision of the future”. The much-vaunted solving of poverty-disease-crime seems to me not a matter of the system now but a result of warp drive energy (dependent upon rare dilithium crystals, oh the resource wars never end). The citizens of the federation enjoy increased standards of living because of the abundance of energy, not because they have rights.

The settler colonialism expressed in “The Apple” episode, made me laugh out loud. Yes, let’s force our way of thinking on the natives because our way is better. It’s somewhere around this time that references start being made to a Prime Directive. Maybe the Prime Directive was coming into being as a means of justification, not unlike the Just War Theory bogeyman is used to excuse violence.

Watching the evil Kirk from “The Enemy Within” attack yeoman Rand in her quarters, followed by the awful post-assault counseling that McCoy gives (with Kirk present and demanding she explain herself!), made me cringe. This is the kind of care that exists in the future? Pathetic. Hard to watch.

The cheap jokes at Spock’s expense—mostly based upon the science officer’s physical characteristics. I mean, okay it’s close friends busting balls for comedy relief. But it still strikes me as unfunny and a bit too much of showing the reptile brain.

Not that the intention of the series creator doesn’t exert an influence. And it should be remembered that the network suits were interfering daily with attempts at making a moral statement. If you consider the times in which this TV show appeared, to even suggest that the crew have a female black officer or a Russian weapons officer was a ballsy move.

There are times when Star Trek does begin to reveal a vision that transcends it’s mediocre reality in-play. When the crew members pursue more compassionate lines of inquiry (trying to understand the Horta in “Devil In The Dark”, or use the translator in “Metamorphosis”) the narrative holds together more strongly. This is true exploration.

The show is not important because of what it depicts, but what it evokes—an imagination of a better future. The seeds of a future society taking root in the present, which for us is now in the past.

I will always love the original series, as broken and simple-minded as it appears now. However, the time has come to re-examine the show, break it into bits and cast it into the flames. We can do better, and we will do better if we try.

A five decade journey that was worthwhile, but now it’s time to dock and see what we’ve learned. There’s more to life than charting gaseous anomalies.

There’s more to the maiden-mother-crone triumvirate of female experience.  There’s actually a fourth stage of existence, just as there are four phases of the moon.  You know, that new moon thing, the dark of the moon, the hidden moon, the unknown where all is night and nothingness.

I went on about Fear of Icky Girl Power a while back, which was an attempt to make sense of the senseless.  You know, trying to understand the unknowable.  I’m talking about not the conscious, or the subconscious or the unconscious—all matters that can be conceptualized and grasped on some level.  But then there’s not just the infinite, but as a friend of mine once remarked, “the infinitely infinite”.

In practical terms we’re discussing the mer-she.  That woman which is completely veiled by the shimmering scales of the unknown and unknowable.  The other three forms of woman are veiled to various degrees but show some human side or character (crescent waxing, full, crescent waning).  Not so the dark of the moon.

This is some serious bad girl stuff we’re talkin’.  Associated with just about every bad thing you might imagine a woman capable of, because that’s all you can do—try to make associations.  There’s good reason to be afraid; not saying you should be unafraid.  But easy to project onto this unknown part of half the population, remain in ignorance, run and hide or try to overcompensate by subjugating and demeaning.

But all you’ll be doing is working out complexes on the other three parts of experience—half fears and mirages of the unconscious acted out by your own shadow, tortured by the rumblings of your fantasies at the back of your mind, or making stupid mistakes because you don’t have the waking tools to focus on day to day external reality.  The unknown?  Who knows?

It’s a futile absurdity, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t obligated to try.  The bad girl pushes us into trouble, and that’s just what she’s a gunna do.  So what if you can only guess, get hoofin’ it, sucker.

Difficult, because the numinous will materialize the unexpected for you.  Hostile rip apart of face and scarred for life, nothing at all but your friends laughing at you and your story of it—whatever it was, or Hek you might just wake up in the living room missing your coccyx.  What you thought you saw is also likely to disappear at your approach or never be found as be encountered.

You see a lot of movies based on encounters with this inexplicable experience.  The Fog (mist full of vengeful zombies), The Thing (extra-terrestrial shapechanger), Prince of Darkness (hostile liquid with psychic powers), Killdozer (machine animating space energy), Nightmare at 37,000 feet (psychic, freezing slime), Bug (swarms of fiery mutant roaches), The Giant Spider Invasion (swarms of inter-dimensional spiders), Return Of The Living Dead (hazardous animating chemical), and so on.

The plots all tend to center around identifying and neutralizing hostile forces previously unknown to our experience.  Maintenance of order through heroic action.  There is something to be said about extraordinary agency for the preservation of the community.  Stories that reinforce ideals of survival are useful.  They do protect the collective psyche from possession by outside forces.

However, it can also serve to repress and stifle creative energies that might be better served towards adaptation.  If you want to tap into survival talk to a bad girl.  But if you want to see what’s been saving our collective butts seek out the biggest baddest girl of all.

I’m talking about the bad girl as supernal super-predator.

• Absorptive (Devouring)
  Whatever you’ve got, she can take it and you as well
• Controlling (Possessive)
  She assumes command of anything she touches
• Infectious (Unrestrained)
  She goes everywhere and anywhere
• Exponential (Overbearing)
  Her influence grows in size with time
• Tenacious (Stubborn)
  She never takes no as an answer
• Disruptive (Difficult)
  She inspires fear and confusion wherever she appears
• Collective (Conniving)
  She is many, she is one

With qualities like that, she doesn’t need much else, does she?  She knocks over tyrannosaurus rexes for lunch money and invalidates the insurance policies of entire communities on good days.  On bad hair days she threatens all life on the planet!

The typical story throws in a hero (usually male) who discovers another quality of the ultra-bad girl:  Invented Weakness (Labeling).  The plot very often revolves around identifying and exploiting the way of thinking that will diss-empower (I play with words) this ultra-bad girl.

In some cases this just brings everything to a draw until the next sequel (In The Blob she gets frozen until next time).  In others there is a defeat but the knowledge that it could happen again is in the background.  Sometimes the attempt to stop the spread of the ultra-bad girl’s power only delays the inevitable and she returns even stronger (Return of the Living Dead has this kind of doomsday ending).

It could be that nature requires physical laws be followed and thus game-balance be maintained, but I can’t help but feel this is a human conceit.  It’s in our interest to believe in ourselves as being special if it maintains survival.

I prefer to dispel that characteristic as illusion and suggest a possible other characteristic:  Enjoys The Hunt (Capricious).  We are never out of truth, and does not the bad girl hold a mirror up to ourselves? Girls just wanna have fun.

I wouldn’t consider the realities of these movies fun for the participants, but are they not shared imaginary spaces of a certain form, in which we invite the ultra-bad girl to come and play?  To demonstrate to us her amazing power and give us insights into some of our deepest, most terrifying curiousities?

Who wants to be one of her victims?  Would anyone possibly want to watch as she destroys all our feeble attempts at understanding, turning us into corpses at her command so that we might slay our loved ones?

Or rather, is there not something in all of us who finds that exciting and invigorating?  She knows about life, and will teach us if we listen.  Because remember, she lives out there beyond the unknown reaches of what can be conceived.  Coming into our field of experience to scare the Hek out of us and inspire new ways of consciousness.  Bad girl just wants us to come out and play—wanna get crushed, crumbled and chomped?

So hey!  All you women out there:  Become the bad girl you already are.

Even if it’s just throwing mushrooms in the soup because everyone but you hates them and pretending it was an accident if they even notice.

The supernal super-predator ultra-bad girl knows secrets.  She’ll tell you one if you let yourself listen.

The End?

The more I explore and attempt a systematized analysis of the bad girl, the more I realize this is a vast subject matter that defies explanation. I’m on her turf now, and I’m simply going to have to abandon a wholly reasoned perspective (though I will still make attempts at some constellation points).

One could say my even treading here is invoking certain tropes that keep getting repeated. Yeah, I see a lot of bones in the shadowy alleyways and misty marsh corners of bad girl outer boundary sector two-point-two.  Yet, I’m waving my candle around because even nice guys need to be bad boys sometimes, and bad girls know most all of the cool stuff.

You opened the door and extended an invitation, right?  Let the bad girl come in so she can speak and act to assert her vitality.  You’ve got stuff to identify that she can point out.  Stuff that haunts you that you fight:  “I should be angry but…” or “I want to own a horse again but…” or “I need to weep but…”—but but BUT.

Time to recognize this stuff and draw it into your own life because the bad girl is carrying a rejected element in you, for you.  Get ready to chat, cause there’s stuff you can do to get your bad back.

Subversion is her friend
Take a summary of an art form’s schools of thought (for example, genre) and see how it can be infiltrated and corrupted.  We can look at Shojo (Japanese comics for girls) and Shonen (Japanese comics for boys) manga, for example.

Typically, Shojo is composed of daily life from the perspective of the female experience.  A major theme encountered in stories is that of love set against narratives of self-realization.

Usually the stories are set against a backdrop of romance, fantastical worlds, or a typical everyday life situation (living in company housing, for example)—all worthy and good interests for creative enjoyment. Particularly noteworthy is the prevalence of Sentai, or teams of superpowered girls working together.

Shonen tend to cater to what are considered young male experiences—goofball humor, themes of loyalty, and explicit naughtiness.  These take place along backdrops of technology, sports, and heroic adventure.  The role of females in these stories tend to be single, pretty girls.

A bad girl isn’t giving up any of her privileges, but she will transpose as she feels like it.  Put the guys in stories demanding emotional complexity and relational intrigue.  Let the gals into the stories of exploring the unknown and conquering obstacles.  Transposing of the sexes is a common plot device in manga, by the way.

Bad girls with a crew of handsome male robots and gigantic spaceships with cool space gadgetry.  Bad girls playing contact sports in all their brutal, high-stakes action and behind-the-bench struggles for what it takes to be a winner.  Bad girls hunting down werewolves in eighteenth century splendor and rescuing clueless but basically good-hearted guys who need to be protected so they can continue to be single and handsome.

That’s a good start.  But it doesn’t have to be merely mutual transposing; it can be a direct beam-in where the default assumption becomes both genders on the field and the working out of those complications.

Bad girls AND guy space adventurers.  Bad girls AND guy sports-playing—against each other as rivals at times.  Bad girls AND guy hunters in the night saving both standard Joes and good girls from monsters.  Mix it up, stir the stew, do what’s fun…and bad.

Admiration for her bad qualities
Recognize and honor the bad girl for the qualities you like.  Contemplate the things that draw you to want to be like her, and the things that remind you of her influence.  Remember, she’s everywhere—the bad girl has been keeping storytellers in business for a long time.

I think of Maleficent the evil sorceress in Sleeping Beauty.  A withering wit, a spooky castle that reflects her own ghastly outlook (yet functional!), a horde of evil beings at her command, and deadly magic.  Competent, dangerous, fashionable, dramatic, exciting, and complicated—weary at being the only bad girl in the kingdom yet still able to crack a joke.

It’s fun to think of how much havoc she causes on the simpletons in the story.  Who probably wrote it to make her look bad.  Remember that the movie begins with the opening of a book; History is written by the victors (or the hopeful who cling to the folly that she won’t turn up again like the proverbial bad penny).

There’s Pippi Longstocking, who goes where she wants to go, does what she wants to do, and refuses to compromise her freedom.  Super strong, endlessly inventive, unabashedly contrary, afraid of nothing, and always ready with a prank for anyone who takes their authority too seriously.

Oh, to be a close friend of hers like Annika and Tommy!  To disdain all the rules and have unalloyed fun—to accompany a girl so alive and unstoppable as to be a force of nature.

On a less fantastical note, I think of Foxfire and The Devil Wears Prada. In both of these movies the good girl brings herself into the field of the bad girl and forms a mentor relationship with her. In Foxfire, Maddy learns about friendship, loyalty, and courage from the wandering loner girl Legs. In The Devil Wears Prada Andrea endures hardship and challenge under Miranda’s unremitting demands, and emerges tougher and more resourceful than before.

It should be noted that in these two movies, Maddy and Andrea both voluntarily depart their bad girl mentor and strike it out on their own. I imagine they create and shape a power for themselves, strengthened by their experiences. And I also imagine the effect they’ve had on their mentors, for in teaching one learns the last few clues one needs to advance to the next level of awesome.

Telling her story because you can
My grand and wonderfully creative friend Hexe knows a thing or two about bad girls. This last holiday I gave her an Edward Gorey calendar based on various neglected murderesses.

All this past year she’s been taking the murderess of the month and making an artistic creation out of each entry, based on imagining what the murderess’ side of the story might have been.  You could say she’s been studying her subjects and drawing out of them the bad girl for everyone to see and contemplate.

That’s right, every month is bad girl month!

• January – Natasha Batti-Loupstein
• February – Angelica Transome
• March – Miss Elspeth Lipsleigh
• April – Mrs. Fledaway
• May – Lettice Finding
• June – Lady Violet Natheless
• July – Miss Q. P. Urkheimer
• August – Miss Emily Toastwater
• September – Madame Galoche
• October – Sarah Jane Olafson
• November – Miss Rosebeetle

This is a form of invocation—putting yourself at the disposal of the bad girl and giving her a voice.  Bad girls need to recognize each other and realize how much they have in common. Like it or not folks, there are things they can only get from each other.

Pick a form—writing, painting, music; whatever.  Choose a subject.  A particular bad girl or theme associated with bad girls you find interesting.  Dedicate it to your own bad girl and just see what happens.

You got all that?  Because now its time to meet the biggest baddest girl of all.

Reading some practical applications to the Bechdel Test at girlsreadcomics, it occurred to me there is a powerful, transformative scene when you have two bad girls together.  This is where using exercises to recognize patterns is useful.  But there’s another technique—meditations and visualizations which coax out feelings of immersion through mirrored identification.  You gotta have two bad girls.

I’m thinking of that scene from The Fisher King, where Anne and Lydia have a conversation about identity.  The two women share a few drinks together while Anne does Lydia’s nails.  The conversation culminates in this exchange:

Anne: You’re not so invisible. You want a personality? Try this on for size: you can be a real bitch sometimes.
Lydia: (cracks a smile and laughs a little) Really…?
Anne: (smiles) Yeah!
Lydia: (laughs) Wow!
Anne: I know, I know – it feels great!

It’s a moment of eureka for Lydia.  That’s the crux of it—finding the clue which opens up possibilities one is unaccustomed to expressing in one’s self.  Other people can hold up mirrors to us and share ideas we might not be able to obtain ourselves.  Two women sitting together sharing a pastime is a form of legitimate meditation.  It releases the mind so that you can enter a free-flowing state—out of which insights can spark and hopefully start a fire of inspiration burning.

I’m also thinking of the character of Storm from The Uncanny X-Men comic book.  There was a long storyline where she underwent an identity crisis and her powers started to slip from control.  She had been the gentle, life-giving weather goddess for a long time.  Her childhood roots as a thief on the streets of Cairo had become blocked off emotionally and left largely to stagnation.

This personal repression made sense because it was during these early years she developed her claustrophobia after being buried alive under rubble.  She survived by temporarily repressing a trauma.  But now it was coming back and she was getting wilder.  Her powers were truly like a storm untamed.

At one point, in order to save the X-Men she had to challenge the leader of their current foes to a knife-fight for dominance.  The panel where she stares hard, challenging the Morlock leader Callisto to a death-duel, despite suffering from exhaustion due to a super-power induced plague, still burns in my mind.  She returns to her roots, plays dirty, and kills the leader to the shocked looks of her team members.

Later, she runs into a woman mercenary named Yukio during an adventure in Japan (a friend of her teammate Wolverine).  Wild and untamed, Yukio regularly risks her life on unscheduled adventures for the thrill of being alive.  She invites Storm to come along for a night on the town.

For several days they push the envelope of physical danger.  Living only in the moment, delighting in physical prowess (and allowing her powers to roam free of having to “control” them for the team), Storm rediscovers joy.  She laughs out loud as she breaks through her wise, patient “nice girl” personality and finds she enjoys the taste of it.

Storm completes her transformation by openly embracing her bad side and changing her costume from an ultra-feminine, revealing outfit with a cape to a butch, punk-rock leather outfit complete with mohawk.  Stunning.  Her friend Kitty breaks down in tears and runs away, an image of Storm as “nice girl” shattered forever.  But as Storm says herself, “This is who I am.  I won’t hide it any longer.”  She would become the undisputed leader of the X-Men shortly afterward.

(Incidentally, Kitty would embrace her bad girl eventually as well, but that would be later.  Coincidentally, in Japan as well with Yukio making another appearance.)

The bad girl lives inside you gals right this moment, or maybe more properly she exists whether or not you recognize her life in you.  She isn’t going to be satisfied with being relegated to backstage; she’s going to pee in your soup as it passes from the kitchen to your refined restaurant table if you don’t watch out.

The question isn’t “Are you a bad girl?”  The question is “How are you a bad girl?”  She lives.

The next question is, “How are you honoring her?”  She has a right to be felt in your personal life and your work.

By asking these questions and answering them, you are granting her the right to existence.  You draw up a place where the two of you can meet each other halfway.

Because when two bad girls get together, stuff gets done.

These movies are very likely moving out of the theaters as I type this, if not already moved aside for the next installment of inefficiency Hollywood propaganda.

The question that comes to mind for me is:  Which of these two movies is an accurate rendering of the apocalypse?

This Is It begins with an acknowledgment of Michael Jackson’s death.  We the audience enter this experience knowing the ending—that the man we are about to see is dead-man-walking.  He has passed on.  And yet, through the magic of the movie screen we get to see him in the days leading up to his end, rehearsing a mega-galactic show.  When we see him, he is alive, yet we know he is dead.  This is the condition of being a god—both alive and dead, in two places at once.

I suggested in a previous post that there was something of the vampire in MJ, and seeing him during the movie I cannot help but think how supernatural he looks.  How supernatural his interactions with the other dancers, musicians, choreographers, and so on are.  One thing for sure is that MJ has total mastery over his music, his moves, and the presentation of both.  It is a supernatural experience, if you forget that he is mortal, as the movie has already stated.

What I enjoyed most about this movie is how we catch a glimpse of the show as it might have been, and how the creative process occurs as the participants work out the kinks.  It’s two shows in one.  Very much like life, because it is life and we know there is death because the endgame is in front of us.

It’s a glorious spectacle to behold, and yet the imperfection of the show as MJ tries to perfect it brings a human, individualized quality to it.  At the end, the film freezes to announce him as the King of Pop.  The show is ended, a life is ended, the movie is over.

Meanwhile, 2012 slakes our thirst for everyone to perish at the hands of impersonal forces.  You have the inviolable average white family struggling against the challenge of doomsday, with father doing most of the work and ensuring everyone stays together, everyone survives, and all interlopers are removed.

The doomsday special effects are everything one might hope, with entire buildings collapsing as thousands fall screaming into the black pit of destruction.  It’s been done before, in the first superman movie.  The death of Krypton is at least honest as it sets up a story situation.

In 2012 you get to watch billions die, the rich ensure their survival, and lip-service get paid to human values—allowing a few laborers to live long enough to become the next generation of slaves. How exciting!

Fear not, all will proceed as it has always done, with nothing changed in the fundamental social class of things or how decisions are made for the human race.  Even better, the predominantly white survivors get to settle in the new Africa and say they are where the human race began after the flood.  How convenient!

The movie truly ends about two-thirds of the way in, when the protagonists reach the islands of Hawaii, which have burst into flames.  It’s a genuinely sober moment in the story, when one realizes luck or skill or preparation will only get you do far–a message the rich would do well to contemplate.  They won’t—paying the Mammon dues will ensure their survival, right?  Nope.  End of line, program.  All fall down.

The movie ceases to be interesting after that and we focus on the passing on of life all doomsday movies are required to depict.  Don’t worry, it’ll all come out in the wash.  Give the audience enough special effects to slake their thirst for blood and a salve to their misery, but then bring them back from actually reflecting on their own clocks ticking.

The devil loves the old standby of “tell them there’s no hurry.”  Paid for itself all the way back to the beginning.

But with This Is It, the endgame is irrevocable.  Life does not continue on.  No ark of any kind, metaphorically or medically, is letting MJ perform a single show he rehearsed.  What we see is all we get.  When the end comes, that’s it.  Your number is up, no matter how frighteningly genius you are.

I watched This Is It and I felt whole, as if a truth had been spoken.  Yes, I’m seeing an edited program which excludes anything which might be construed as negative.  Yet I still found a sublime peace and sorrow at the same time.  All of us are headed into the last curtain call, no exceptions.

I watched 2012 and enjoyed the special effects.  Woody Harrelson stole the show as a crazy apocalypse nut.  But the story was all so phony.  Propaganda reassuring the owned that all will be well in a catastrophe.  It says more about the fears of the rich than it does about what the end of life on earth might be like.  The movie fosters a profoundly bleak, one-sided view of human beings.  At the end we’re right back where we started—get back to work, drones.

But MJ, standing alone against the actual, physical bulldozer coming out of the trapdoor on stage.  Trying to stop what in all reality is probably too late to change.  It’s complete farce.  Yet in that moment of the fool’s end I understood the fans, I saw the other side.  He’s gone, and I’m still alive—but even in the heartless heart of a vampire I see the good.

That’s what is known as sublime.

Godzilla isn’t the same for me anymore.  As a child I loved the destruction and the excitement.  But now, having been to Hiroshima, I also see the overwhelming, apocalyptic horror of the human experience crushed underfoot by the atomic unknown.

This is what is meant by the sublime.  The monstrous face we are seeing is humanity’s own hellish shadow, magnified many times over by enormous natural forces into a radioactive blast that annihilates the human completely.

I can’t know what it is like (I wasn’t there), or comprehend much of the significance—I’m just a tourist, a voyeur, a poser who caught a brief glimpse of an old claw-print.  But even having once seen evidence that Ancalagon is real, and we have the power to summon such enormous destruction against others, where can one hide?

I love the film deep and darkly, yet it is a heady draught I consume with caution and reserve.

This is the message the ghosts convey to me repeatedly for most of the night—that no one stands outside the shadow of humanity.  I lie in my bed, the other students fast asleep, and I hear the rumble of otherworldly clutches.  It might only be my conscience trying to open me up like a clam to the world, which I imagine to be the sounds of the dead.

I talk to them in my mind, twisting and turning hotly in bed unable to sleep.  I imagine myself helping them, being there with them (which is just fantasy guesswork), and suffering for them.  But these are all empty postures in the night.  I wear myself out wrestling with their noise and I finally sleep.

My dreams are of swimming in a vast underground ocean of red flame and muddy slime.  I am surrounded by people staring at me as they rot away into charred ooze.  Then I am struggling through the streets of a deserted, burning city that gives off a cloudy, shadowed heat.  I realize I’m asleep and I wake myself up, struggling to rouse my muscles and breathing out of the relaxation of slumber.  It’s daylight out.

The next stop for us is Itsukushima, which is known as Miyajima the Shrine Island.  One of the three holiest places in Japan.  No one is allowed to die here—you get shipped right off as soon as you start to croak.  People weren’t even allowed to live there until recently.  As a result, there is still a primordial virgin forest on the island.  Countless holy structures of all kinds shapes and sizes may be found throughout the island.  Plus lots of squeaking deer, and monkeys who are the messengers of the gods.

It feels good to escape the city for a while.  The sun is shining when we land, but the weather slowly changes as we meander through the streets.  A light rain begins, followed by a growing mist.  A few of us take the Miyajima Ropeway (a cable car system) to near the top of Mount Misen to snap some pictures, but by the time we get up there it’s useless.  The entire island and surrounding sea is shrouded in fog.

After a few minutes of taking things in, everyone decides to descend for some lunch, but I decline.  Taking my handy tourist map I figure I’m going to climb the summit and get some outdoor time to myself.  The map makes it look like a hop skip and a jump.  Scale, let me show you how not to use it.

I pass through a huge herd of monkeys and onto the fog-shrouded, forested mountain paths, which are well trod.  There’s no one about, and likely with good reason.  As I learned later, all tengu goblins in Japan gather in the forests of Mount Misen.  They scare away intruders by making loud noices like wooden blocks being banged together.

This is a scene only a crazy gaijin would find themselves in, ignorant of all the hazards of the spirit world.  Fools and little children protected by the purity of their motives, I suppose.

But I feel at peace, safe.  This a sacred place, whether or not I get the local meaning.  I know I’m an outsider, that I don’t belong, and yet I maintain a respectful thought at all times. I don’t hear anything but the wind and the rain.  Even the monkeys are quiet, and soon I don’t see them anymore (probably all hanging out close to the ropeway station for handouts).

I reach a small wayside shrine and make an offering of incense.  It takes considerable effort to light it in the light rain and wind, but I manage and place it in the proper place.  I struggle with my request of the gods, wanting very much to grant me some good fortune with my then-girlfriend at the time.  But all I can come up with is a request that my love for her be true, which seemed a cop-out, easy request to make in one’s prayers.

I ought to have prayed for the ghosts, or for an end to atomic weapons, yet all I can think of is my own needs at a time like this.  I spend a long time in the rain agonizing over whether I made the right request.  I tell myself that if the stick is still burning when I return this way, then I made the right decision.  I walk up the slope of the final approach to the top.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the shrine I visited is the Reikado (“Temple Which Protects Flame”).  There is a fire inside that is said to have been lit by a holy man and has been burning ever since.  This fire was used to light the Peace Flame in Hiroshima’s Peace Park, which will burn until all atomic weapons are destroyed and the world is free from their horror.

That holy man is Kobo Daishi, founder of one of the major branches of buddhism in Japan.  He’s one of the holiest holy men in Japanese culture, seriously big dude dinner stuff.  They say he’s still chilling out, hidden from our sight until the return of the biggest Buddha ever.  No messing around, seminal figure here.  Ka-boom.

I take the path where you have to bow down and walk under a stacked boulder to continue on the path.  It’s like a tunnel and a gateway at the same time.  The trees break away, the path twists one last time, and you find yourself with a 360 view of the surrounding area.  Boulders everywhere which the gods are said to rest upon and discuss/observe/contemplate the world.

Actually, I should mention that when I say “gods” I’m using it in the collectively neutral sense rather than say god/dess-s or divinities.  Shinto has a matriarchal pantheon, with all the major deities being female (for example, Amaterasu the sun goddess is no joke, takes care of her bizness, watch out).  The mother is everywhere in Japan, she’s what counts, but she’d insist harmony be maintained and everyone remain at the table, thus “gods”.

The actual summit holds an observation deck, which you climb a series of stairs to reach.  It’s a joke, actually.  You are standing on one of the most holy places you can in Japan, and there’s this ugly, cheeseball man-made structure to the side.  For some reason I didn’t mind though, it felt appropriate, like one last step into the heavens.  Taken on the stairway of ugliness, admitting our own human weakness.

This is the moment of enlightenment in the spiritual journey.  Hard climb, long travel, then revelation as the world opens up all around you.  At the top of the deck, I take in the four directions.  The spattering rain and crisp wind buffet my body, dousing my heat and strength.  Clouds and mist are rushing all around me.  The nearest shores and islands are hazy outlines.

I speak to the gods of Japan, ignorant of their names let alone their ranks and stations.  I tell them I don’t know what to say about what I’ve witnessed or how I feel.  I don’t know what to ask from them, or what to tell them.  I don’t even know if I should say anything at all.

It occurs to me I’m the only person up on this summit.  I am meant to be here, doused in the elements, shivering with the feeling of being alive.  A fragment of cultural relevance comes back to me from my studies, of how the Japanese consider themselves a “wet” people.  That is, they are a deeply feeling people who understand relatedness.  While outsiders, particularly westerners, are considered “dry”.  They have little awareness of the feelings of others.

I recognize how supremely purifying a moment this is.  Separated from the group and free to be myself, the gods are making me a “wet” outsider, if only for this moment.

Being blessed, I give thanks and take my leave, returning to the world of people with difficulty (harder to descend than ascend, and I’m low on energy).

The incense is still smoking as I shamble past the wayside shrine (if I can truly love, even after the mark of the ghosts, then the world grows). Marked, purified.  Departure, return.

At the bottom of the ropeway station, at a food stand, the group is waiting for me.  Waiting for the next ferry.  I have just enough time to scarf down a deep bowl of steamy hot udon noodle soup.

Slurp.

So me, the folks, and K are doing the loch walkaround.  We’re coming into the final lap through the square before the final uphill closure.  We pass a large piece of dirt that looks like a dried dog-doo, surrounded by tinier pieces.  I stop to take a closer look, because I sense something powerful about it.  In the space of a few seconds I believe I see a turtle shell covered by dried dirt.

I call the clan to hold up, and crouch down to get a closer look.  They think I’m picking up a dog-dropper and have gone nuts.  I pick up the little creature and get a closer look, the camouflage at last seen through—it’s a baby snapping turtle.  I recognize the long, slender, whip-like tail and curved claws.  The strong, snub beak that snaps shut like a steel trap.

The bulbous eyes blink as it shrinks into tight shell immobility.  Still alive!  How on earth it got all the way over here I don’t know, but we decide to carry it back down the path to the loch side.  I place the turtle on a flat rock half out of the water, surrounded by plants, safe to enter the water when ready.  I’ve seen huge snapping turtles in the shallows of the loch, and once in the road in the morning, so I know they exist.

This little one must have erupted from an egg in the dirt and gotten lost on that left turn in albuquerque.  Well, may the turtle find delicious morsels and grow to enormous size in the grand waters of the loch!  I’m going to bust out in song here, watch me work now:

Gamera is really neat,
He is full of turtle meat,
We all love you Gam-e-ra!

In the movie The Bermuda Depths, it’s the hatching of the baby giant monster sea turtle that creates the bond between the young Magnus and the ghostly Jennie.  There’s a familiar struggling in that story, I think, of lost souls for understanding of a love beyond mortal and immortal ability.  We create things through caring which descend into the deep and resonate with a mystery.

Some might search for the hard truth of that mystery, and get exactly that—with a locker courtesy of Davy Jones (another name for the Devil).  Others wander in and out of the mystery, finally walking away with a reluctance to face the vulnerable reflection that is revealed.  Meanwhile, clues attach themselves to minor actors we only get a few walk on scenes to notice and contemplate.  Lucky is the person who can rewind and reflect upon a slight turn of the light!

The star-crossed lovers never reach the unspoken dream.  Magnus returns Jennie’s talisman to the sea—which to me says he rightly sacrifices his old life.  Jennie keeps her promise and returns to the depths.  Given the misfortune she has spread by returning to see Magnus, this is a mercy for us on the surface.  Yet, carved in the shell of a mutual connection are their initials within a heart.

Is it a monster this mixed partnership creates, or is it perhaps we as the audience wish only to see the horror of the inconceivable?  There is an individual crumb in there that speaks again of the hybrid, if we as audience would only pull the sword from the stone of our own mind.

The movie Exorcist 2: The Heretic has been soundly trashed as one of the most awful movies of all time. I’ve seen awful movies and this one doesn’t even come close. I’m not a fan of the original, as it seems to me to be more about the disruption of the conventional as a result of people’s messed up expectations than about actual possession, which is a genuine problem today.

I am a fan of Exorcist 3, which truly is a sequel to the original. It deals more with issues of disbelief and unredeemed longing than possession, but it does so dramatically and with narrative wholeness. We are answered, by a self that is both guide and daemonic adversary.

Exorcist 2 is a development on the ideas of the first film, yet it stands on it’s own. It actually deals with issues of possession, using the locust swarm as a metaphor for the outbreaks of collective insanity in our world. Issues of obsession and willful denial make appearances in the plot, as expressed through the priest’s search for meaning and the doctor’s attempt to hide from the supernatural.

Linda Blair plays a more mature, post-exorcist girl named Regan who remembers everything of her horrific ordeal, and appears to be dealing with it quite well. Her ordeal isn’t over, but it’s obvious she has healed way ahead of anyone’s mundane views of her. In fact, she’s taking the next step in discovering that her experience has given her the ability to rescue those still in darkness.

I hesitate to support the narrative premise of “the way for women to gain power is to get jacked first.” That position too often leads to stories where heroines are violated as a means for them to move forward. But I don’t want to shy away from reality with rose-tinted glasses either.

Maybe the heroine’s journey that begins with a sparagmos (a crucifixion or tearing apart by the darkness) is the archetype we still need to come to terms with through a certain base popular culture.  I’m just keeping an eye on what I think is a little too much of one thing to be balanced.

Here, in this movie, it’s what Regan is dealing with; she’s working stuff out and not flinching. And this is some dangerous psychic material she’s working with, totally radioactive stuff that messes up the people around her. The main character is meant to be the priest, but his journey is our journey of getting on board with the real deal: A young woman’s coming to terms with how she has changed as a result of her possession.

The film is far from perfect—Richard Burton delivers solid actingas the priest at times, but for much of the film he’s off his game.  The film suffers from an undeveloped script, offering scant answers at times when a fuller revelation would have resonance. The timing on many actions is poor. There are moments when a hesitation or a cutting of scene time might have made things more clear.

However, there are ideas here that need worth thinking about. The main idea is that people who have been tainted by evil and have recovered can help other people who are possessed. There is the larger theme of how nature is working towards creating people (known as “good locusts”) who have the power to lead the rest of us out of confusion and back to harmony again. A constant theme is the interconnectedness of all things, the connection we all share unconsciously, and the forces of evil, which are both guides and adversaries.

There’s ambiguity, the hybrid effect of the individuated being, in all the characters. Regan wears white, is attracted to dove symbolism, and is sweetly friendly. Yet she has a knowing resolve, a crazy element to her that no one understands, and there’s the wicked side of her drawn out by contact with the demon. The demon itself is dangerously harmful and disruptive, yet also an instrument of destiny, with parts that can be understood and even assimilated into ourselves.

This dichotomy extends to the other characters as well, good and evil being relative, but still both aspects that can’t be ignored. The lines between science and mysticism are blurred.

At the end of the movie, surrounded by the collapse of the world, Regan discovers her true calling and completes herself, stilling the world back into harmony. The other characters still lack a complete picture, but they’re learning. Scarred, looking for the puzzle piece they have yet to find in themselves. But Regan stands out as an example of how we can find the good locust in all of us. The harvest of our lives and of others can still be saved and the hidden violence in our nature redeemed.

Like all good fairy tales (and the better Terry Gilliam films) we are brought back into the world to regard what we have witnessed. The flash of the synchronizer upon the doctor’s face as the movie fades to black leaves us with the knowledge that the struggle continues; even as nature creates a garden we have yet to notice. Given that at this point time and space are fluid, the doctor’s point of view becomes a remembering (with who as witness and/or participant?) of the last time she saw Regan and the priest.

Is the doctor showing us what she has witnessed? Are we the subject sitting on the other side of the synchronizer, descending into the earth of the unconscious so she might show us what she knows and feels first hand? The movie itself might be seen as our own “going deeper” via the synchronizer; to see how things are working out in other people’s lives, the present examining the past while the future watches the present. The connection crosses all time-space barriers because it is irrational.

The disease of possession might be something our bodies are adapting to, building up a psychic immunity, or rather more properly forcing the phenomenon to reckon with us as an evolving organism and establish ties with.

The hybrid, the cyborg, the tainted angel. Crossing boundaries and making us whole in all times and spaces.

Okay, so what did I like about the Harry Potter movies?  Some of the characters stand out as appealing to me.  There are times when I really enjoyed what was happening because it was portrayed well.

I like Snapes a great deal.  He strikes me as the most human of all the characters.  His bitterness is compelling all the more because its over a love lost to one’s tormentor.  Despite his obvious competence he wears a serious face to mask his insecurity.  He hides it well, but also seems to have a realistic fear of and appreciation for what Voldemort can do.

I continue to be impressed by Alan Rickman’s work as an actor.  His portrayal of Snapes never lets me think for a moment he is an actor playing a part.  His mere presence improves nearly every scene he appears in.  Easily, he’s consistently the best part of the movies.

I also like Hermione.  I’ve had my fill of overt, know-it-all female sidekicks, but somehow she works for me.  I totally buy that she’s a driven overachiever, attempting to live up to the pressures of being from a non-wizard family.  Despite her mask of self-control, she shows moments of vulnerability and insight.  Of Harry’s friends I feel she comes closest to being his equal in adventure.

The actress portrays her with a little less depth than I’d like, but still does a good job.  Better anyway, than a lot of the other actors around her phoning it in.  Harry always gets the attention and Ron is there for comic relief.  But I usually get the feeling that whatever Hermione is working on is based on her hard work.  Whether it’s saving the day with a little time travel or brewing a shapechange potion, when she gets to act with agency she does it nicely.  No fumbles there.

As far as scenes go, I think a few are done well enough to make me forget I’m watching a dysfunctional Hollywood movie.

I liked the scene where a torrent of letters come flying into the house to tell Harry his adventure has arrived.  I found that both hilarious and heart-warming.   It’s an affirmation that our destiny will drag us toward it willingly or not, and push anyone who stands in the way aside.

The scenes involving the cloak of invisibility tend to be pretty good.  Invisibility is an awesome power to have, and whenever Harry uses it I feel like he is being his own person.  There are so many people keeping secrets from Harry, not just enemies.  I like that he is able to turn the tables and get his own answers at times.

When Harry uses the Patronus charm to save his other timeline self and his godfather is pretty awesome.  He’s been practicing, facing his fears under the tutelage of probably the only competent Dark Arts tutor in the series.  Then when the time comes for him to be the great wizard (that is, embody the image everyone has of his father for once), he performs magnificently.

Come to think of it, the whole adventure where Harry and Hermione travel back in time to complete the timeline is pretty awesome.

The return of Voldemort just after Harry and Cedric win the tri-wizard cup is probably my favorite.  Cedric is killed almost immediately, showing us how stupid the cup challenge is as a measure of best wizard.  For once, Voldemort has the upper hand.  He achieves a major goal in getting a physical body again, punking out the so-called good guys and getting in some serious gloat while he’s at it.  He chitchats with his death-eater pals, showing us exactly how the other side interacts.

It was a mistake for him to let Harry go, given that Harry still had a really stupid Deus Ex Machina card to get him out of the jam.  But I can forgive Voldie for not having meta-story knowledge.  It’s still cool to watch Harry say, “fine, have it your way” and go out fighting.  Essentially tossing the expectations on his shoulders aside and accepting his death.

I was hoping he’d use the Patronus charm and catch everyone off-guard enough for him to escape (let that be a lesson to you Voldie!), which would make logical sense and rock the mike.  But the confusing and out of the blue save by the power of love ruins the scene, reducing it to just awesome.

Finally, even though it leads nowhere, I still liked Harry’s training of the students in the secret room.  Having fought and escaped the big dude baddie makes him somebody worth listening to.  And the dedication it takes to deceive the school authorities while teaching the students to fend for themselves is awesome.

The community rallies together in a sane and serious manner to prepare themselves for danger.  Plus the fact that the school reveals a hidden personality dedicated to just such a purpose is a nice touch.  It turns the school into something more than just an indoctrination center.

Basically I enjoyed scenes where I felt the characters had permission to matter.  That is, where they had agency enough to control their fates.  Too often I felt they were pulled around by circumstance and forced to react rather than act.  When they assumed control of their own lives, for good or ill, I was drawn in.