Categories
reviews

The Rise of…

I might be last to the race on this one, but I think I know how this all ends.

For the past month or so, I have been deep into the world of STAR WARS. I’ve read or listened to four and a half novels (just in the past month; a bunch more if you go back to the announcement of The Force Awakens). I’ve also perused a ton of Wookiepedia, which is a version of Wikipedia dedicated to every known detail of the now-seemingly parallel universe of STAR WARS. Finally, I’ve watched two of the prequels (with my seven-year-old daughter), one of the originals (with my twelve-year old student), part of Solo (fittingly, alone), a bunch of fan-created YouTube videos (for fun, I guess), and almost the entire first season of Rebels.

And yesterday, I purchased my first STAR WARS comic book.

I think I know where this ends.

The last episode of the 22-movie arc of The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which was released just this Spring, is titled ‌Endgame. The episode was attached to the announcement of two of its biggest stars that with this film, they would be retiring from the MCU.

Captain America and Ironman still live, however. If you miss them, all you need to do is pick up a comic.

The same goes for STAR WARS. After Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, regardless of what happens to Rey, Finn, Poe, Kylo, the First Order, the Knights of Ren, the Resistance, the Empire, the New Republic, Darth Vader, Darth Sidious, Luke Skywalker, Yoda, Ben Kenobi, and all the others, if you miss them, all you need to do is pick up a comic.

And that is how this ends: with The Rise of Comics.

**

Saturday night, my wife and I hosted a holiday party for some of our friends. During the party, one of them brought up his distaste for Episode XIII: The Last Jedi, the much beleaguered entry of the Skywalker saga written and directed by Rian Johnson. My friend (like many others) didn’t like the movie; I (like many others) did.

Sunday afternoon, he continued our conversation with a series of text messages based around the clarification of my opinion. His questions, my answers, and his rebuttals were well informed and well intentioned, and our ongoing conversation led me to seek various links in support of my argument, during which time I discovered the Kindle edition of the first issue of a Marvel comic titled, Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith. It was available for free to Amazon Prime members, so I downloaded the issue to read later.

Part of the conversation with my friend centered on whether we prefer storytellers to meet or subvert our expectations. He (like many) prefers the former; I (like many) prefer the latter. For example, he did not want to know how Luke Skywalker maintained his monastic existence while living for years on a lost island in the middle of nowhere; instead, he wanted to see Luke Skywalker fight an epic lightsaber duel. The movie did not live up to his expectation.

I had a similar expectation, but I enjoyed learning that, since the last time I saw him, Luke Skywalker had not been dwelling on the heroics of his past, but rather, hiding from the Force and from his loved ones in shame.

I also liked that instead of demonstrating his increased knowledge and power with the Force through an epic lightsaber duel, he faces his greatest failure through what might have been the greatest Force projection in the history of the universe. Any particularly dextrous Jedi can be dramatic with a lightsaber, but it takes a Jedi of Skywalker’s unique strengths to use the Force to communicate his love and his sadness to his sister while also facing off against the emotional pain that comes from dueling with a disgraced (and disgraceful) student…oh, and doing both of those things from the other side of the galaxy.

But I get it. Some people need their stories to fit an already-expected mold.

And that’s where the comics come in.

The first issue of Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith begins its chronicle of Vader’s story at the exact second it ends in Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith. Suffering from the incredible physical pain caused by the loss of his devastating duel with his master, Obi Wan Kenobi, and from the installation of the life-supporting suit that his new Master, Darth Sidious, fashioned for him, and from the emotional pain that came with learning of the death of his secret wife, Senator Padme Amidala, who had died of a broken heart following Anakin’s turn to the dark side, Vader clenches his fists and screams out the word, “NO!!!!!!” The movie ended, and the comic begins, there.

Before anything else, Darth Vader, Lord of the Sith, needs to come to grips with his pain and use it to find a new lightsaber. As his new master Sith Master tells him, “A Sith cannot be given a lightsaber; he must take it.”

Thus begins some of the most bad-ass encounters I’ve come across in the STARS WARS universe. Nothing — nothing — will stand between this legendary Sith Lord and his ultimate goal.

The story my friend wants to see, the one where the incredible Jedis and terrible Sith battle for the balance of the universe, can be found in Marvel comics.

That is the benefit of the behemouth that is Disney.

In the 2010s and 2020s, all the characters of our 20th century mythos are (mostly) free from the licensing issues that hampered their development in the 1990s and early 2000s. By purchasing political power (e.g., the late Senator Sonny Bono, who workshopped Congress into passing a Disney-friendly deal on the nation’s intellectual copyright law) and avoiding anti-trust investigations thanks to the rise of major competitors such as Netflix, HBO, and Amazon, Disney is now able to explore these mythos in a way that will satisfy virtually any audience member’s tastes.

Want to understand the political games Princess Leia played following the rise of the New Republic? There’s a whole book dedicated to it.

Want to see STAR WARS’ female heroes without having to deal with the various masculinities of Annakin, Han, Luke, Finn, or Poe? There’s a whole series of short TV episodes about that, centered around the conceit of a fireside story told by the old and wise female humanoid, Maz Kanata.

Want to hear how the Jedi lost Count Dooku to the Sith? There’s a whole radio show, available as both a script or an audio book, that you can check out.

Want lightsaber duels? Philosophical investigations? Noire crime stories? Spaghetti Westerns? Space battles? Deep lore? A Romeo & Juliet romance? You can have it. Whatever kind of story you want, Disney/Marvel/STAR WARS has something for it.

**

Is there a dark side to all of this? Of course. There’s a dark side to everything. And in this story, it’s the ever-increasing economic and political benefit to the men and women who profit from the goings on at Disney.

No one would complain if Disney’s storytelling and media production prowess didn’t rejigger the economics of creative storyelling, reducing the power of independent film makers at the same time as it increases the audience’s appetite for sensous delights. In society’s demand for bread and circus, Disney runs the big top.

At the same time, Disney employs talented individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds and has seemingly committed itself to promoting relatively liberal values through progressive representation and thematic intent.

Furthermore, the employees of Disney have donated $901,029 to Democratic politicians and only $47,298 to Republican ones, thereby (at least tacitly) promoting a (at least tacitly) liberal political agenda.

Does Disney have a dark side? Of course. First and foremost, as a capitalist entity, its very existence is predicated on the cruelty that is American capitalism, but given that environment (which if the older and more economically powerful members of the Democratic party continue to have their way, will continue for quite some time), isn’t Disney’s handling of our mythos kind of a good thing?

I’m teaching a class right now about the Historicity of Christianity. Working with one of my oldest (and longest tenured) students, I’m exploring how the books of the New Testament came to be considered canon. For example, in the earliest days of the cult, dozens (if not hundreds) of stories of Christ and Christian martyrs made the rounds, much of them contradictory and almost all of them pseudononymously. Why, then, did the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John come to be considered holy when others were considered heretical?

The answer is relatively well known, but my student had never considered the question; hence, the class.

There’s a comparison to be made here between Disney’s monopolization of the 20th Century American mythos and Rome’s monopolization of the early Chrisian mythos, but that’s not the comparison I’m aiming for.

Instead, I’m thinking about those early days in the Christian community, when various scrolls and books were read and traded by believers and nonbelievers, collected by monks and churches, and retold around countless fires.

It feels like we’re entering that phase of the STAR WARS universe.

The Resistance is in tatters, much like American democracy; heroes like Luke Skywalker and Martin Luther King, Jr. are gone. Stories of their deeds are now like wisps on the wind, making their way from lighted screen to lighted screen, manufacturing hope and promising that, like Jesus, it’ll come.

But in the meantime, here’s some folded-up book with colorful pictures that tells you even more of the story.

Don’t worry: it’s canon.

Categories
life

How I Teach My Five-Year-Old Daughter STEM

I was playing a series of games with my daughter this morning, when she said, “Dada, do you wanna play inventions?”

She’s said something like this to me before, and it usually turns into a drawing/coloring session where she intends to draw some invention-idea that she has, but where as often as not, she forgets why we sat down to draw and instead just makes some kind of weird pattern.

I wanted to sit on the couch and watch the Bills game anyway, and we usually draw and color in front of the TV (thought usually not with it on), so yeah, why not? We still had some time to kill before the game though, so instead of just saying yes, I asked her what she wanted to invent.

Then I stopped her before she could answer. We were sitting on the floor in her recently cleaned and rearranged play room, the sun was coming in the windows, and her mother was doing something quiet upstairs. The moment felt right for an actual conversation, so before she could spit out some weird invention, I told her that inventions usually solve some kind of problem, so before she thinks of her invention, she should think of what problem she wanted to solve.

That stopped her. Her eyes looked down at the rug and her forehead crinkled, her brain trying to locate the problem for whatever invention she was just about to tell me. We were playing Connect Four at the time, so I remained quiet and let her ruminate on it while we played back and forth, then she said, “I want to be inside the TV.”

Now, like a lot of kids, my daughter loves television. If given the chance, she would sit on the couch all day and watch television. She loves other things too, but she loves TV most of all. I mean, she is our daughter.

Over the next several minutes, I tried to figure out exactly what she meant and what exactly she wanted to achieve. If I was going to help her invent something, I had to make sure I understood its real purpose.

My daughter had recently been introduced to video games. Over Christmas, while at her cousins’ house, she played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for Nintendo Switch. Prior to that, her experience with video games was limited to relatively poorly developed children’s games on my iPad. She had no real idea that the world of video games included experiences like playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on a giant television screen. She knew console games existed (she’s watched me play various games on my XBox), but she’d never taken control of one.

I’m proud to say that she took to it rather well, and by the end of the day, she was competitive enough to go against some of the adults in the house. She hadn’t played since we returned from Chicago, but two of our friends visit with their Switch this weekend, and they had Mario Kart, so we let her play. While she didn’t win a single race, she could hold her own against the computer.

When she said she wanted to invent a machine that lets her go into the television, I wanted to figure out whether she meant she wanted to be part of a video game or be a part of a movie or TV show.

I said, “Come check this out,” and we got up and went into the living room. I brought out my laptop and showed her a commercial for the Oculus Rift, which if you don’t know, is the world’s first consumer-level virtual reality machine. We talked a little more after she watched it, and it came out that, no, she didn’t mean being in a virtual reality. She wanted to go into the TV.

I paused a moment. She couldn’t really think…

“Hey,” I said. “Go look behind the TV.” She did as I asked. After she’d looked the equipment up and down, I asked, “Do you think you could fit inside there?”

She thought for a moment, and shook her head. “No, I’d have to shrink.”

At this point, the football game was coming on, so I pulled her onto the couch with me and we cuddled under a blanket to watch the game. After a little while, I took out my iPhone, turned on the selfie camera, and held it up to her face. “Are you on TV now?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Not like that.”

“But that’s how people get on the TV. The football game isn’t inside the television. All we’re seeing on the TV is moving light.” Something moved in her face.

Months ago, my daughter and I had a long, multi-location conversation about how animation works. That conversation not only led us to creating a bunch of flip-style animations, but it also included a long diatribe about how everything on TV is just an animation, a series of moving pictures created by ever-changing colored lights, each color on and off in a pattern that tricks our brains into seeing something that isn’t there. (This same conversation contained a diatribe that  explained how the movies she watches on Netflix are really just a series of information packets sent to our house through wires over our streets and reconfigured by the television).

As we sat on the couch and I said “moving light,” I saw her mind go back to this conversation, and I continued, “Where this football game is taking place, there’s someone pointing a camera onto the football field, and that picture of the game is sent over the wires to show up here. Just like you’re not in the iPhone when you see yourself in the screen, they’re not in the television.”

She got quiet, and we went back to watching the game.

A little while later, she said, “I want to meet the people on the TV.”

Okay, I thought, we’re getting a little closer.

One of the TV shows that my daughter is obsessed with is Disney’s Descendants. You might not know about it if you don’t have a young daughter (I only assume it’s a daughter thing because the only people I’ve seen get excited about this show are daughters, and that includes daughters ranging in age from five to thirteen years old).

When I heard about the concept for the show, I thought it sounded pretty cool. Thanks to the combined efforts of the Beast and the Fairy Godmother, all of the wicked villains of the Disney universe have been confined to an island that is protected by a magical shield; essentially, they’ve been sent to a combination of Alcatraz and the island from Lord of the Flies. They’re free to do whatever they want, as long as they stay on their island (and the Fairy Godmother and the Beast have banished them there forever).

But that’s just the prologue. The real story takes place a generation later, when all of the heroes and villains you know now have children. When the son of the Beast and Belle receives the crown to the Kingdom due to some unexplained law of royal succession where a middle-aged King willingly gives up his crown to his still-coming-of-age Prince, the new King decides that the sins of the mothers and fathers shouldn’t be held against their children, and in a very moderate but still progressive manner, he allows four (and yet only four) children from the island join the rarified prep school that he and his friends attend.

I’m not going to get into the plot machinations of the story (there are two movies and several shorts, not to mention a warehouse full of merchandise and at least two full-length soundtracks), but the long and short of it is that my daughter loves it.

When she said she wanted to meet the people on the TV, I knew that the characters on Descendants were at least some of the people she wanted to meet.

At which point I told her that just like someone was holding a camera up to the football field, someone was holding a camera up while the people on Descendants did their thing. I told her that while she watched Descendants on television, the people she watched were probably on their own couches watching something else. “It’s just a video,” I said. “It’s not really happening when you watch it.”

I asked her who she wanted to meet the most, and she said, “Evie.” Evie is the daughter of the Evil Queen, the woman who wanted to poison Snow White for being too beautiful. Now in high school, Evie is a gifted fashion designer who benefits from the magic in her mother’s mirror (in this generation, the magic mirror fits comfortably in a pocket and Evie sometimes uses it to cheat on her tests).

“Okay,” I said, “But Evie isn’t Evie.” I opened up the IMDB app and showed her the page for Descendants. I clicked on the actress who plays Evie, and I said, “Look, her name is Sophia Carson. She’s been in other movies too. Look at all these pictures of her pretending to be other people when she isn’t pretending to be Evie.”

My daughter scrolled through the pictures a little bit. I know this sounds like I was destroying the wonderful illusion of Disney for my little girl, but she didn’t seem disappointed in the least. She seemed fascinated.

I showed her how to use the IMDB app, and then let her look through all the pictures of the various actors while I cuddled behind her and watched the football game.

At some point, she turned to me and asked, “So which Evie got my money?”

I didn’t expect that question.

The night before, when we had friends over and she was playing Mario Kart and being social and just having a wonderful time, we had to trick her into getting into her pajamas (doing it directly wouldn’t have been worth the hassle). We told her that we were going to have a contest, where she would go upstairs and put on her own pajamas, and we would stay downstairs and guess which pajamas she would put on. She loved the idea and went running up the stairs.

While she was up there, my wife made very rushed descriptions of the various pajamas my daughter had available to her, and then our guests and us each made a pick. To our surprise, when Nora snuck back downstairs and into the dining room, she yelled out that one of our guests had actually won (the little ninja had been downstairs long enough to hear us make our picks!).

She then ran into the next room, ransacked her own wallet, and came back with a dollar bill, which she gave to our guest. He tried to demure, but she insisted. He won, and in doing so, he earned himself a dollar. She screamed, “Wait! I need jammy pants under my nightgown!,” and she ran back upstairs for round two.

My wife again quickly described all the various pajama pants for our guests — but I didn’t need a description. I knew just which ones she would choose, and when she came downstairs, I was right. So, again, she ran into the other room, opened her wallet, and came back with another dollar (where she got two dollar bills, I have no idea).

At this point, the dollar bills became ridiculous, and we refused to accept them, but she wouldn’t hear of it. After some back and forth, we came up with a compromise. As the now rightful owners of the two dollar bills, my guest and I would donate them to one of the things she is saving up for: a trip to Disney World (months ago, her and I created a special savings account for this trip, and I told her we wouldn’t be able to go until it contained $2,000; she currently has $1.67).

She wouldn’t accept the dollar bills, but she loved the idea of us donating our money, and she quickly accepted the offer.

I took out my iPhone, opened up the special account so she could see it, and transferred $2 from my checking account into her Disney World savings account, then I put the two dollar bills in my wallet.

After confirming the transaction, she looked up at me and said, “Who do you think got it?”

“Got what?” I asked.

“The money. You sent it to Disney World. Who got it?”

(Man, I love this little girl).

“Who do you want to get it?”

She thought for a moment, and said, “Evie.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll send a text down to Disney World and make sure Evie got it.”

But now, 24 hours later, I’ve told her that the person she thinks is Evie is actually a woman named Sophia Carson. If she just sent $2 down to Disney World care of: Evie, and Evie isn’t really Evie, then which Evie got her money?

I had no answer to that question. And like a coward, I chose to pivot.

“So if Evie is just an actress,” I said, “and all the people on TV are just actors and actresses who people point a camera at while they pretend to be someone else, you don’t really need an invention to go into the TV. You just need to become an actress.”

She liked that idea. During the game’s next commercial break, I challenged her to mimic the people we watched on the screen. The commercial was that GEICO one where people  enjoy horrible things, such as having your seat chair repeatedly kicked from behind on an airline. Because of the content, her acting was actually pretty funny.

The game came back on, and we resumed cuddling on the couch.

After a few minutes, I said, “You don’t have to be an actress to be part of a story, you know. Every day of your life is a story. It can be as exciting as the things you watch on television, or it can be as boring as sitting on the couch. The choice is yours.”

If it were mine, she’d become a drum-playing astronaut.