Crone Wars: on the mythology of Fury Road

Warning: This Post is Full of Spoilers. I Kind of Assume You’ve Seen the Movie Here.

Our first glimpse of Immortan Joe, the Jehovah of Fury Road, is of his elderly, tumor-riddled flesh being encased in the clear armor that gives the illusion of health and strength. Immortan Joe’s cult deals in spectacle, in visual metaphors. It is founded on the male gaze. The masses below jockey to see him in his stone tower. The young, diseased boys that make up his army desire to be seen by Joe; and to be seen going to death in his name by one another. Nux is spurred into a frenzy of action by a glance from Immortan Joe. Similarly, as a War Boy goes to his death, he exhorts his fellows to “witness” the act. The War Boys blacken their eyes; painting a skull over their faces, surrounding the power of the eye with protective darkness. Later, Nux’s fate is sealed when Joe sees him fumble the assassination attempt on Furiosa. As he lies miserably in the back of the War Rig he laments that Joe saw him fail and also saw his own “bloodbag” (Max) driving the rig. Now, he will be denied entrance into Valhalla, an honor only Joe can bestow. It’s the power of the gaze to shape reality, to have effects as demonstrable and yet mysterious as the evil eye that forms a central tenet of the cult Joe builds around himself. After the escape, the vault in which the women are kept is tagged with defiant phrases: “Our babies will not be warlords” and “We are not things.” The words made visible; words that finally enter the eye and cannot be unseen.

Immortan Joe claims people as his property and brands them on the back of the neck with his mark. This is not a placement that reminds the branded as a mark on the hand or face might, it’s a mark to be seen from above, from a remove. A price tag unobtrusively sewn into the back of a garment. Even the “wives” have this mark, underscoring their position as objects not much different from the War Boys. His appearance echoes that of the Sky Gods: long white hair, the eyes piercing and red with wrath, the (plastic, armor) body hard and muscular. (Seriously, when was the last time you saw a skinny Zeus?) His face is obscured by a grinning mask-cum-respirator. He mythologizes himself as the great father. By his hand the people scrabbling in the dust below will be raised up, he preaches. His sons surround him and act out his will. On machines driven by slaves on immense treadmills he is seen to soar into the sky, to the heights of paradise far above the suffering below. He makes water fall from the sky as the Sky Gods do, and withholds it to punish as they also do. He, like the Old Testament patriarchs, keeps multiple “wives” whom he alternately defines as “treasures” and “property.” But Joe is sick and frail. His sons are mutants. His fatherhood creates twisted versions of life. He calls himself immortal when he is clearly doomed by time. His fierce grinning teeth are a facade, and beneath he is an old man, nearly sterile. In the vault where the women were held there is a sterile round pool of water connected to an umbilical stream; the illusion of life with no growth. He sequesters that which he has no right to claim as his: life. The water, the milk that he trades for gas and bullets are taken, hoarded and controlled. He has no power to create, only to take, and then by force.

Furiosa and the women are escaping to a place that has no name, that appears on no maps. It is known only as the Green Place or the Place of the Many Mothers. This place is a shadow place. It exists in Furiosa’s memories as a place of growth, freedom and equality. It is the place she lived in before Immortan Joe claimed her as one of his “things.” Max and Nux, both outcasts from the patriarchal society of the Citadel, find themselves swept along, but it is the women who push forward in search of this feminine space. What they are seeking is an antidote to Immortan Joe, to the warlords and the attitudes that “killed the world.” This place is made of stories and memory and exists in the imaginations of the women. This is the place where they can leave behind the question of who killed the world and find a way to make it live again.
Here an overview of the mythical overtones of the female characters would be helpful. Furiosa’s name contains the Furies within it. The Furies were chthonic deities that enacted vengeance. As chthonic figures, they are associated with the underworld or with residing beneath the earth itself. A theory that resonates with me about chthonic gods claims that these figures descend from a mythology in which the Goddess was the earth itself, and that the immanent, heavy, wet and fertile nature of the earth was a manifestation of the Goddess. The sky, storms, the unseen force of the wind by contrast became the Sky Gods, and eventually, the one and only God. The Goddess absorbed the shadow side of the Sky God. Her ways were not written, not plotted out with clear rules and boundaries. She was murky, formless, unknown, a mystery. She lived in stories and memories that filled in the margins of the Sky God’s mythos. Back to the Furies. Their function is to punish wrongdoers. In the Orestia, the Furies seek vengeance upon Orestes for killing his mother, even though the killing was ordered by Apollo. Initially, I assumed she’d earned her name as one of Joe’s warriors, but later we learn that her name was Furiosa before she was taken. This signals she would always bring a reckoning for Joe’s crimes. The Warlords killed the world. They killed their mother. Vengeance would have to be served.

The unofficial leader of the wives is the heavily pregnant Splendid Angharad. Angharad is a Welsh name that translates as “much loved one,” an ironic reminder that patriarchal values confuse domination with love. She is the mother-goddess, leader and protector of the others. She has convinced the others to go with Furiosa. During one scene, she positions herself so that Joe cannot shoot Furiosa without shooting her. The other women–Toast the Knowing, The Dag, Capable and Cheedo the Fragile–are maiden-figures, though far from naive. They are first shown in filmy garments of virginal white, rinsing themselves in the water from the tanker. The Dag cuts off her chastity belt, spits on it and kicks it with a booted foot. These maidens aren’t interested in playing the helpless innocent virgin. (A reminder that virgin goddesses were not un-sexual, only unattached to a male. Many a virgin goddess has children.) It’s Splendid’s insistence on only killing when utterly necessary that spares Max and Nux. She is the conscience of the group, and her death shakes Cheedo into nearly surrendering herself. It is Splendid who accuses Nux of equal culpability with the Warlords for the state of their world. “We are not things” are Splendid’s words, the women remind each other. Splendid is the one who brings Max water. The mother gives and preserves life. She dies protecting the others. Even the child they remove from her body–the one Immortan Joe falsely claims as his property–is perfect, sheltered from Joe’s corrupting influence as long as it remained part of the mother’s body.

The Vuvalini, Furiosa’s tribe, are the crones in the goddess triad. To reach the Vuvalini, the women have travelled overnight through a barren swamp that supports nothing but crows and inhuman-looking scavengers on stilts. This landscape is the land of the dead. The crows recall the crone’s function as keeper of death. The Celtic crone goddess Morrigan took on the shape of crows. Furiosa’s anguish at learning that the same swamp is what remains of the Green Place is heart-rending. The women have found themselves pushed to the ultimate margin of a dying land. Behind them, a poisoned swamp, before them plains of salt. These are the death-lands they have had to enter to find the crone. The crone goddess holds the keys to death and rebirth. Hecate in the underworld is a crone goddess; a being of dark powers and a forbidding figure of death, a goddess of witches. What she does and rules is hazy. She’s the goddess of the crossroads, where the straight lines of patriarchal society begin to blur. She rules over the spaces between life, death and rebirth. Nux’s incantatory “I live, I die, I live again” is a Sky God’s lie, devised to hide the reality of death. Only the crone knows that rebirth requires annihilation such that “I” is a useless construct. Life goes on, not ego. The Keeper of the Seeds explains to the Dag that she’s killed everyone she met out in the desert. “I thought you girls were above all that,” the Dag replies, searching, perhaps, for an alternative way to the force that gives the Warlords their power. The crone knows that death is a necessity. The Keeper of the Seeds (an epithet that calls to mind other powerful goddesses whose names were not to be invoked: the Kindly Ones or Furies) shows the Dag her bag of seeds, sharing with her the potential for rebirth. When the Dag mentions that she is pregnant, and speculates her child will be another ugly Warlord, it is the Keeper of the Seeds who reminds her that the child could be a girl, offering hope and hinting at the potential for the Vuvalini to persist. The scene in which the two groups of women meet and recognize their common kinship is one of the most beautiful scenes in the movie. The wonder with which the Vuvalini welcome these new daughters is a moment of unalloyed joy. There’s recognition as they pair off and study one another, each seeing their will to survive reflected in the other, exulting in a much-desired female companionship.

Because what the world of Fury Road ultimately needs is to clear away the Sky Gods to make room for Maiden, Mother and Crone. The Vuvalini have dwindled in number in their exile to the borderlands of the psyche, but they hold the keys to rebirth. Their Green Place was poisoned by the same patriarchal logic that killed the world. The Many Mothers have become a handful of woman warriors, prepared now by the infusion of energy from their younger counterparts to stop hiding and start pushing back. As the women observe, everything they need is in the Citadel, and they intend to take it back. Toast’s aside that the Citadel is a great place to live “as long as you aren’t afraid of heights” is the invitation to reclaim divine feminine power that the crones have been waiting for.

As Furiosa tears off Imortan Joe’s mask, revealing the vulnerable flesh under the machinery, her words “Remember me?” are for the crones and for every other facet of feminine power that has been poisoned, marginalized, co-opted or stamped out. Joe’s illusions can’t change the material nature of his body. Even naming himself an immortal can’t erase the effects of time and illness on the matter, the soft, wet meat of his body. Styling himself a Sky God provides no protection from the crone’s processes of decay, erosion and dissolution. Mother, matter, material; all subject to the Goddess in growth or death.  Even as The Keeper of the Seeds dies, the Dag—the witchiest of the maidens—saves her seeds and gives her the Vuvalini gesture of reverence for the dead. The Dag takes on the role of Keeper of the Seeds, and in the succession of knowledge from one woman to another, something of the original Keeper lives again. Returning to the Citadel, Furiosa is bloodied and weakened but triumphant as she eventually stands without Max’s help. She stands one-eyed and pierced in the side like Odin, returning a lost power to the world, though not claiming that power as her exclusive right. She has lost her mechanical arm and some of her vision, showing that the Sky God’s powers are not the only ways to be strong. The body of the Father Who Must Be Killed is revealed, for it is only through looking that the power structure Immortan Joe created can understand. The crowd sets upon his human remains and tears them to bits like Maenads. The Venus-of-Willendorf women who provide the milk open taps and the water flows. As the people chant “Lift them up” the women help the people onto the platform, opening the hierarchical sacred space of the tower to all. The crones bring more than seeds; they bring knowledge of other ways to live, a different attitude toward power, the possibility for different structures. They’ve killed the god of domination, objectification and slavery. They’ve balanced the scales for those who killed the world.

Questions to Ask Before Joining a Coven

Ladies, these days there are more and more options for harnessing dark forces to your will. While you could seek mastery of the invisible realms on your own, consider the potential benefits of joining a coven. For one thing, coven-based rituals have a greater chance of success since the group effort magnifies the power of everyone’s intentions. Coven work is literally empowering! Your fellow witches are a wonderful resource for learning hexes, bindings, and fun ways of styling your hair for those summer music festivals. Besides, nothing can beat the sense of sisterhood to be found when you and twelve of your besties connect around a bubbling cauldron, just basking in the song of the whippoorwill, the light of the moon and the cries of that persistent newspaper reporter. The right coven can do wonders for your flying ointment, your bread, and your social life, but first you’re going to have to do your research. There’s nothing more awkward than finding yourself the odd witch out in the middle of a crucial Walpurgisnacht when you assume everyone wants honeycakes but half of your coven is gluten-free! Getting to know as much as you can about your potential coven before you commit can save you a lot of time and heartache. Here are some questions that can help you in your search for the perfect coven.

1. What is the coven’s mission statement? Will there be the opportunity for great workings beyond the traditional milk-souring, storm-raising and enaction of mandatory female hiring quotas?
2. Is this a coven where I can materially improve my life through the application of dark powers, or one of those deals where we all just dance around at the Equinox?
3. Does the coven maintain an official grimoire? What are the standard procedures followed should the grimoire be discovered and used by a group of horny teens just out for some fun in an old cabin in the woods?
4. What kind of women do you allow in? Are they cool, or will I have to put up with a lot of conversations about “juicing”?
5. What sort of recruitment efforts does the coven engage in? Are they open to avenues beyond knitting circles, book clubs and ads in the back of MS Magazine?
6. Does the coven operate any of the usual business fronts, such as beekeeping, herbalists or eyebrow threading salons?
7. What are the duties of the High Priestess outside of consorting with the Great Goat and maintaining the coven’s Instagram feed?
8. How are targets and sacrifices identified? Is there a lottery to which coven members can add the names of potential victims or does the coven rely on nosy men stumbling in from the outside world?
9. What is your dress code? Are rituals performed skyclad, in robes or pantsuits? If robes are required, do you provide them? Is there an official outfitter the coven prefers? Are there regulations governing diadems, coronets or other headwear?
10. Where will Sabbats and Esbats take place? If on remote islands, groves or crossroads, will nearby accommodation be available at group rates? How will transportation be handled? If by spectral horses, does the coven have an insurance policy in case of accidents?
11. What is your approach to Necromancy? Is summoning dead musicians for the purpose of, say, dinner party entertainment frowned upon?
12. Who supplies ritual items to the coven? Are there multiple sources for potions, phials and tinctures? Which of the preceding are created in-house? Is there quality-control oversight of the raw materials to ensure the freshness of toads, bats and grave dirt? Does the coven use poppets? Are the wicker men built by coven members or outsourced to contractors?
13. Which sorts of animals are approved familiars? Are there exceptions made for really really cute cats that do this neat thing with their paws where they can hold a little piece of kibble between them but happen not to be black?
14. Can we just, like, talk about shoes for a bit?

Etsy Finds: Tetrad Edition

I return to you now at the turn of the tide, or something Gandalf would say. I’ve been consumed with my latest project, Baby Prime. Baby Prime is nearly a year old now, and it’s taken all this time to start getting some of my time and sanity back, but Baby is doing fabulously and I’m still shuffling about, gibbering and shedding hair as per the usual.

April begins a astrological/-nomical phenomena known as a Tetrad. This is a series of four lunar eclipses in a row. Astrologically, eclipses can set off crises in your life in the house in which the eclipse falls. These trials are often painful or stressful yet necessary for growth. So, we’re coming up on a set of four little personal apocalypses. For more about where you can expect your life to explode, see here. Perhaps you may be able to defray the Goddess’ wroth by robing yourself in her protective sigils.* Here are some examples:

This blood moon pendant by Out of Space Jewelry reflects the image of the darkened eclipse moon. Hang this around your neck in the hopes that in seeing her reflection, the Moon will briefly take pity upon you and confine her ill effects to an easily solved and inexpensive household issue, like running out of laundry soap.

This lunar jersey dress by Shadowplay NYC reminds the universe: “I’m a Moonchild. Do not fuck with me, dark powers.” It’s made of cotton jersey, and so sensible for the upcoming heat of late spring and summer. The dress can be worn several ways, either as a short dress or a long tunic. It’s sewn so that it hangs asymmetrically. I recently got one of these dresses in a different print from Shadowplay, and it fits more like a long tunic. I love their cosmic prints. Try wearing this to your Esbats for an extra moon-boost.

This stylish lunar calendar by Thorburn Collective will help you keep track of the moon’s phases.

The Lunar Amulet for Ceremonies of Intention by For Strange Women is a series of perfumes attuned to each new moon of the year. This version comes in a brass locket with faceted onyx representing the dark moon. There are some really stunning perfume lockets in their shop, like this one and this one.

For proper lunar protection, you’ll need silver. These hammered silver moon phase earrings by Aurora Shadow should fit the bill. Moon phases seem to be A Thing right now, from shirts to nails to cellphone covers, and I’m not opposed to this.

If all else fails, pull out your pyramid of power candle (by Artisan Witchcrafts) and do whatever banishing rituals you need to get your shit back together.

Those are my words of advice. Do with them what you will. And that shall be the whole of the law etcetera etcetera. My hope is that I will return with something more substantive soon. Thank you.

*Disclaimer: I’m not a witch, Wiccan, neopagan or any sort of left-hand-pathfinder. I just really love the trappings and language of the occult, as I’m sure many vaugely Gothy folk do.

Spellbound: BDSM in Gothic Fashion

A Brief History

If Malcolm McLaren hadn’t been running a bondage fashion shop, one can wonder if punks would have chosen some other apparel to shock middle-class sensibilities. The prevalence of bondage gear as punk—and later, Goth—signifiers has its roots partially in McLaren’s desire to promote his shop (then co-owned with Vivienne Westwood). But looking beyond the capitalist reasons why bondage fashion was associated with the punk movement, there are a number of symbolic meanings expressed by the choice of bondage as fashion. Westwood has been influential in shaping postmodern fashion, an aesthetic that embraces “clothing and imagery that appear dirty, ripped, scarred, shocking, spectacular, cruel, traumatized, sick, or alienating.” The youth of an economically ravaged, crumbling former empire walking the streets in collars, leashes and pants with strategically-placed straps and buckles designed for immobilization aimed for shock, spectacle and alienation. If Nationalism is Romantic (and I do think that it is) then punk used a harsh anti-Romanticism as a political and sartorial weapon. Bondage as fashion confronted several social myths. Gavin Baddeley, in the book Goth Chic, claims that “punk’s self-appointed thought police  . . . associated sexual dominance games with sexism and the hated middle classes.”  In laying bare the power dynamics of romantic-sexual relationships, bondage gear made visible the tension between power and romance underlying hetero relationships. Bondage fashion brought society’s dirty secrets out onto the streets. It revealed the former empire’s decadence, cruelty and hypocrisy. Wearing bondage gear was a sign that the wearer wasn’t buying in to the mainstream’s romantic narrative and their role therein.

Ironically, punk has historically been a subculture that prizes certain active virtues assumed to be masculine—freedom from authority, toughness, self-sufficiency—yet males (and females) embraced bondage fashions that in BDSM circles often denote submissiveness such as dog collars, wrist cuffs, and padlocked chains. These fashions paired with aggressive metal spikes, combat boots and hard, gravity-defying hairstyles. While punk music for the most part embraces an aggressive, anti-authoritarian and occasionally nihilistic perspective, there is a connection between submissive BDSM signals and the punk message. Portraying oneself as bound, restricted, beaten or oppressed reflected the real economic and social state of the youth in the U.K. (and to a lesser extent, the U.S.) during the 1970s. The Sex Pistols declared there was no future.  X-Ray Specs more overtly mocked youths’ social position with the lines “thrash me, crash me, beat me till I fall. I wanna be a victim for you all” in “Oh Bondage up Yours.” This sentiment gets to the heart of the punk use of bondage fashion: while it demonstrated the wearer’s sense of alienation, it also confronted the passersby with their own complicity in a system that kept them in slavery to its useful social and economic fictions.

Anti-Ordinary

Archaic Smile Sticker

As Goth mutated away from punk it kept the latter’s resistance to the mainstream.  In many ways, the practice of rejecting mainstream values shaped much of Goth’s preoccupations; from alternative spiritualities (Wicca, Neo-Paganism, Left-Hand Paths other forms of magick) to alternative sexualities. While punks also availed themselves of fetish fashions, Goth embraced these is sometimes unironic ways. As part of an expression of allegiance with everything shunned by the dominant culture, fetish and bondage fashion fit neatly into Goth’s system of valorizing the shadow side of the collective psyche. In a great post on what’s wrong with conflating the BDSM-fetish scenes and the Industrial music scene on the Industrial Anti-Oppression blog, Strigiform writes “from what I understand, industrial was not always associated with fetish, latex, women making out for men, etc. It was associated with pushing boundaries and counter cultures which I am sure at times included BDSM.”  As with Goth, alignment with marginalized or underground groups and practices was sought as a rejection of the mainstream. The (at one time) difficulty of finding these items of clothing  further imbued the wearer with subcultural credibility, as this formed a visible barrier to purchasing a Goth wardrobe from your local department store. However, Goth’s orientation toward more feminine values colored the use of sexualized clothing. For example, the corset—which by the late 20^th century had ceased to be underwear and become fetishwear—exaggerated the natural shape of the feminine body in resistance to the dominant culture’s ideal of a very thin, athletic, less fleshy female shape. The corset suits bodies that have some adipose tissue to compress and shift, and Goths of all sizes enjoy the benefits of this severe restriction. The corset, preferably with steel boning, tightened to reduce the waist by up to four inches, also forces the wearer upright. Its weight and rigidity encompass the wearer like armor. A common refrain found on buttons, t-shirts and stickers marketed to Goths proclaims “Tight? Of CORSET is” or some variant thereof, claiming the difficulty and occasional discomfort of corsetry as a signal of subcultural pride.

A Note on Corsets

A brief digression here on the comfort, or lack thereof, of corset-wearing. Modern corsets may give that Victorian hourglass shape, but they are made quite differently and are designed to be worn primarily as outerwear, not underwear. Aside from some extreme body modifiers, the 15-inch waists Victorian medical literature warned about are not prevalent. Keep in mind that those tiny-waisted women of yore were put into corsets in childhood and constantly wore compressive garments as they grew. Think of them as having bonsai waists if it helps. A modern corset can be quite comfortable for a long evening. The lacing can be adjusted so that the wearer can take full breaths. Some people can bend and dance with no problem. I have trouble bending at the waist when I wear one, but that’s easily accommodated. There have been times that I couldn’t wait to get out of my corset; one being when I made the mistake of wearing an underwire bra underneath—remember, everything gets pushed up—another when I went for a corset fitting right after eating a broccoli omelet. Nothing bad happened, it just made my stomach hurt after 10 minutes.

The Meaning of Masochism

BDSM fashion symbolically represented the Gothic embrace of romanticized pain, masochism and the taboo, forbidden or occult (L. occultus “hidden, concealed, secret,”).  This, I believe, also explains the prevalence of Catholic imagery and symbols such as crucifixes and the more bloody depictions of martyrdom; imagery of pain and suffering appeal to a perspective that seeks the sublime through darkness. Catholicism has a particularly vivid and rich tradition of encouraging the aestheticization of pain, with many examples of beautiful artwork depicting the death and suffering of saints. Bondage fashion is another way to wear reminders of pain. Gothic masochism tends to embrace pain as entwined with pleasure, at least psychologically. Piercings, tattoos and other body modifications are also visible signals of pain turned into beauty.  However, masochism cannot be taken as a literal pursuit.  Alongside the Gothic celebration of symbolic masochism, there are the appealing dramatized and ritualized aspects of fetish/BDSM images. The Gothic aesthetic is nothing if not dramatic, and BDSM imagery often involves ritualized violence and power as sexual psychodrama. Even though there is some overlap between Gothic and BDSM circles, it would be a mistake to assume that because a Goth is dressed in a black latex catsuit she’s indicating any interest in flogging random men who cross her path. The drama of power as expressed through fashion is the primary interest more often than not.

http://gothconfessions.tumblr.com/

Here is the greatest misunderstanding outside Goth circles. Bondage and fetish fashions, though not worn with punk’s confrontational intent, are symbolic of a perspective that embraces aestheticized masochism, not necessarily literal BDSM interests. In Paul Hodkinson’ Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture, many of his interviewees mentioned being irritated by people who assumed their Gothic fetish fashions were sexual advertisements. The post from Gothic Confessions above testifies that Gothic fashion is still being misinterpreted. Even the code of conduct at NYC Goth club Absolution addresses this:

“Will you find someone at ABSOLUTION to satisfy your fetish? You could, but that is not the main topic of the night so sitting around all night waiting for someone to spank or trample you might prove frustrating. If your main goal is to satisfy a fetish, you may have better luck at a party which lists fetishism as one of its main topics.”

Gothic dating sites seem full of men who have no interest in Gothic culture, but will leeringly write at length about how they’ve heard Gothic women are “freaky” and “will do anything.” The conduct code at Absolution goes on to explain

“A word about fetishists who are “carpet men”(guys who like to lie down on the floor and get trampled): You are welcome to come in and lie down on the floor in the hope of being trampled, but you cannot lie down in front of the bar at my club. I realize this is the area where people are most likely to congregate, but that makes no difference because we need that area accessible to customers. The truth is that if you employed the services of a dominatrix to satisfy your “trampling fetish”, you’d be spending upwards of $300 or more for a single hour of her time. You are gratifying your fetish for $10 or less at my club for many hours, so you get what you pay for,” further demonstrating that Goths are often assumed to be some sort of brigade of volunteer kinky sex workers.

In my next post, I want to address how class dynamics fit into this picture, as well as covering what I’ve come to see as increased conformity to mainstream gender roles.

Twisted Fairy Tales, Lovecraftian Dates and More

I suppose this is going to cost me my internet anonymity, if I ever actually had any, but I can’t not mention it. I’ve explained the types of stories I write on my author website KarenDBest.com, so if you’re interested in reading that, it’s available. You can also read a synopsis and the first story of the collection at Beating Windward Press.

It is a bit odd integrating my writing here with my real name and fiction work. Not that I think the two are unrelated in my mind, but I like maintaining different functional personas. I’m not necessarily comfortable having people who know me from other contexts reading my work, but I guess that’s one of those introvert things that I have to get over once bits of my psyche make it out into the public.

Peak Retro: Ready Player One

Ready Player One takes place in a future universe in which a digital reality has supplanted the boring old analogue version. This world, the OASIS, was partly created by a man called James Halliday. The creation of this wildly popular online environment has made Halliday immensely rich. Too bad he’s dead, and he’s decided to award his estate to whomever can solve the series of puzzles he’s embedded in the OASIS. As a result, the popular culture of the year 2044 is dominated by nerdly obsessions from the 1980s as people dedicate themselves to examining Halliday’s every minute interest for clues. Wade Watts is the hero, a poor kid and an orphan to boot. His devotion to being a true follower of Halliday and encyclopedic knowledge of 80s pop culture trivia pays off for this underdog. What happens is not of great interest to me, since if you can’t already tell, Watts beats the game and wins the spoils. What is more interesting to me are some of the unexamined implications in this book.

First is the notion that searching for Halliday’s fortune (a subculture known in the book by the inelegant portmanteau gunter, a fusion of egg and hunter) eclipses present popular culture in such a way as to render it nonexistent. Everywhere in the OASIS, people live in 80s movies, listen to 80s music, memorize old Dungeons and Dragons modules because Halliday was known to have once played them. There’s little in the book about the world outside of the OASIS. What we do see are trailer parks in which the units have been welded into stacks, vague mentions of an energy crisis that leave certain areas with sporadic electricity, dormitories-cum-prisons in which corporate debtors are forced to work off their debts. The outside world is of little consequence to Watts, in part, because the economy of the OASIS has eclipsed that of the meatspace. Having money in the OASIS seems to be more important. There are some things that reflect the meatspace world. Transportation from one place to another takes credits that can be earned in the OASIS or bought with currency. But for the most part, power in the real doesn’t necessarily translate into power in the OASIS. Meanwhile, in the OASIS, teens run around wearing clothes from well-known 80s films, arguing about Ladyhawke, playing low-res arcade games, hanging out in replicas of Halliday’s childhood home and otherwise behaving more of less like teen versions of the book’s 30-something target audience.

This is the purpose of the book, as far as I can tell. It’s about combining 80s geek signifiers to press that nostalgia button for the reader. It posits a world in which a major geek fantasy has come true; the fantasy that pop-culture trivia will suddenly become the only relevant currency in the world. Then those who can recite every word of Monty Python and the Holy Grail will be kings. The cultural references seem placed throughout the book to trigger a reaction of “I recognize that, therefore I like it” from the reader, which is becoming a serious malaise in the 21st century. This isn’t Eliot making a statement with bits of Arthurian legend, it’s Watts driving a virtual hybrid of the cars from Back to the Future and Ghostbusters. Why? Not sure entirely. I kept expecting the references to have some purpose in revealing either Watts’ character or Halliday’s but I gave up on that about a third of the way through.

There seems to be no new culture, rather a pastiche of dead-ends from the 20th century. We’re not far from this ourselves; endlessly recycling films, music and fashion from 20-30 years ago. Patton Oswalt named this phenomenon “Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever.” And in the book, Watts praises the ready availability of every cultural artifact in the OASIS. Oswalt wrote that “Etewaf doesn’t produce a new generation of artists—just an army of sated consumers. Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie?” This is the world of Ready Player One, and the bleakest element of the book. Forget the 20 people living in one trailer, the absolute death of innovation and art signals the entropic state of American culture. Watts is a kid who is good at 80s arcade games. That’s his talent. He doesn’t produce or conceive of anything. I was initially surprised that Halliday’s will didn’t award his fortune to someone who was capable of innovating, as it appeared that what made Halliday special was this ability to create, but as I read I came to see Halliday as a disturbed person and potential megalomaniac.

There is very little to Halliday’s meatspace life. He’s drawn with the merest outlines of technocratic hero, meant to be a cipher figure into which the reader can project his or her geek sympathies. We know he was a nerdy kid. He worked with Ogden Morrow to create the OASIS. He apparently developed a young adult crush on a woman (I cannot remember her name. If you know it, drop me a line & I’ll put it in.) who was more interested in Morrow. As a result of Morrow’s marriage to this woman, Halliday became a recluse and spent the rest of his life in the OASIS.

Here I’d like to say that I hate “unrequited love” as a method of character building. It can work, but in this case it seems to exist in order for the reader to empathize with Halliday. It also hints at this nice-guy worldview in which it’s made into such a tragedy that the lover’s affections are unrecognized, yet it completely voids the woman’s agency to choose who she’d rather be with. I also hate “one-true-love” ideology and think it’s an excuse for obsessives to rationalize their issues. Halliday completely gives up on the real world after this one disappointment. This seems like an outsized response and exactly the sort of drama a teen would indulge in. His retreat from life seems like the symptom of an emotionally immature person. Bah. I am a heartless lady, because I always think “She picked someone else. Get over it.”

Anyway, Halliday continues to live after his death in the form of his avatar, a Dungeons and Dragons wizard called Anorak. The quest structure of the story involves its own troubled love plot between Watts and an avatar named Art3mis, who are both competing to complete the game. What’s troubling about the nature of the game is that it centers on deep knowledge of Halliday’s teen obsessions. These cultural products are framed as sources of comfort in Halliday’s youth. So, in seeking to make the game reflective of his lonely youth, Halliday is not so much reaching out to another similarly introverted outcast, but is ensuring that the winner will be someone who has studied him intensively. In other words, instead of looking for someone who created his own rich inner world out of cultural scraps, Halliday is ensuring he recreates himself by geek osmosis. He doesn’t want the heir to his fortune to be any another geek, he wants to create another geek as close to his own personality as possible, and since this is a world in which all culture is made out of retro, the method he chooses to replicate himself is pop-cultural pastiche. Halliday has made the OASIS a place where thousands of people live out his memories. There are planets devoted to replicating his childhood home over and over. In contrast, there’s much less veneration of the still-living Morrow, perhaps because he hasn’t waved a multi-billion dollar carrot in people’s faces to make them memorize all his favorite movies.

Halliday’s influence has shaped pop culture into his own personal scrapbook, which leads me into the next problem. All the people in the book are devoted to Halliday’s memory because there is a large cash prize attached. So what happens when the prize is won? The story really doesn’t linger on this point, but it appears that solving the game would essentially deprive thousands of purpose and destroy the world for gunters. Without the prize, why would anyone continue to participate? By proving his devotion to all things Halliday, Watts has eclipsed him and in essence destroyed his memory. Perhaps the future of Ready Player One is about a kid reliving Watts reliving Halliday playing Atari. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a Rubik’s Cube stamping on a human face—forever.

At the end of the story, Anorak appears to give Watts the prize along with a few words of wisdom. Part of which include an admonition not to become a recluse and spend all his time in the OASIS. Cough. If Watts wasn’t already 80% of the way there, would he have won the prize? Seems pretty weak to impart a life lesson that’s essentially “Go play outside.” Watts ends up sitting in a garden with the real Art3mis, having won her love despite out-competing her in the game. The end undercuts everything that has come before and makes an attempt to reassert the importance of the real world. I read this as a sigh of authorial defeat. What remains when the hero has essentially attained virtual godhood? Taking a walk outside. It strikes a false note because the real world has been so completely marginalized by the OASIS that it’s difficult to believe it matters at all. We’re returned to the values of our world, even though they have no place in the world of the story.

I’d love to have juxtaposed my thoughts about this book with another book; Simon Reynolds’ Retromania, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.

I Was a Vampire Roleplayer

If you, like me, grew up in the 90s, then, you may have been lucky enough to experience the wonderland of strange lipstick colors, DIY hair dye jobs, techno music and vampire role playing games. If you were not so fortunate, come now and hear the un-shocking truth about vampire roleplaying. Let me tell you of a time before Twilight and MMORPGs when the games were on paper and vampires were sexy but never sparkly. The game of choice was Vampire: the Masquerade. V:tM could be played as either a tabletop dice game like Dungeons and Dragons or a Live Action Role Playing (LARP) game. Produced by a Georgia-based gaming company White Wolf, V:tM had several subtitle-happy companion games such as Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Mage: the Ascension, Wraith: the Oblivion, etcetera. All these games shared a universe known as the World of Darkness, which was described in several of the source manuals as a “Gothic-Punk” world. The universe created by White Wolf was compellingly peppered with mythological references, obscure vocabulary and interesting alternate histories. In short, it was like crack to the sort of nerdbrain that thrived on Joy Division, etymological dictionaries and Bulfinch’s mythology.

One of the things that made V:tM more interesting than a typical hack-and-slash role playing game was the focus on building characters. As a vampire player, your character had two archetypal personalities, your public persona and a private, concealed personality. Rather being defined by a character class (what you character does) and alignment (good or evil) you could decide to be a Benefactor/Predator or a Scientist/Martyr. Your character belonged to a Clan which dictated what sorts of vampire powers you’d have. Clan affiliation also dictated your weaknesses. For example, the Toreador Clan were your basic Anne-Rice-style fancy lad vampires, making lots of art and devoted to beauty. One of their powers was the ability to emotionally manipulate people around them—think stage presence—but their weakness was that they could fall into a paralyzing fascination in the presence of beautiful artworks or people. Your vampire powers operated on a system of finite willpower points. I think this system would be a wonderful one to implement in real life. As in “I’d love to have the salad instead of fries, but I’m all out of willpower points today, so . . .” Willpower points were regained by sleeping, feeding or other actions dictated by your personality type. In the live game, the powers operated inelegantly. For example, if your powers made you invisible, you’d cross your arms over your upper chest—hands touching shoulders—and everyone would have to pretend they didn’t see you creeping around. Even worse were the intangible powers, which would lead to dialogue like this:

“I just used my powers to make you do my bidding.”

“Oh, okay. What do you want me to do?”

“Go over there and ask that girl if she’s got a boyfriend.”

“Sigh.”

Since most of the people I played with were in high school, our characters’ concerns fell often into one of the following categories:

1. Being sexy and mysterious.
2. Shoving it to The Man.
3. Killing each other. Preferably with explosives.

These goals took some doing to act out in a suburban park or in one of our back yards. It was hard to be sexy and mysterious when your mom drops you off for the game. Even harder than that was convincing all the people loafing around on your back porch that they’ve just been in a hellish explosion. LARPing with your school chums also led to plenty of awkward moments when trying to decide if the person talking to you was the kid from math class or Destructo, the Undead Viking. Generally, you’d just ask if they were in character, but by the time people started feeling comfortable slipping out of character, the game would devolve into a night of hanging out in a parking lot.  

The live-action game usually ran like a chaotic play about a deranged city council. A major premise of the game was that vampires engaged in a conspiracy to control humanity and conceal their existence from same. An easy plot was to call a meeting about some outlier whose sloppy feeding habits were threatening to reveal the existence of vampires. It’s hardly surprising that the game attracted a lot of Drama Club members highly devoted to acting out their awesome vampire characters. At live action games, the players tended to dress the part—lots of black leather jackets and thrift-store black lace dresses—and to put on British-ish accents or Enunciate. Dramatically. And crisply. The system required a folded up sheet of characteristics and powers you had. This was kept on your person and consulted when an interaction required you to engage in verbal conflict with another player. In the case that your attributes or powers were matched to your opponents, you could decide the matter with a round of rock-paper-scissors overseen by the rule-enforcing Storyteller. (I guess that by then, people had figured out that Dungeonmaster had other connotations.) Imagine, if you will, the tense confrontation between a rebellious young punk and the be-suited stiff representing the repressive social order. The harsh words and open contempt. The powerful deciding throw of rock versus scissors.  

The post-Columbine hysteria about the sinister practice of Vampire LARPing led to a brief spike in the game’s popularity before an almost total loss of media interest in the game. For those of us who played, the fear was totally misplaced. We weren’t keying ourselves up to be psychopaths. We were just escaping into a world where we could be glamorous and powerful. Monday morning would shuffle us back into the system, but Saturday nights we could rule the world.

Etsy Finds: Non-Lame Skulls Edition

As difficult as it may be to believe, skulls were once considered reminders of death and emblems against vanity and not just cutesy motifs for an Avril Lavigne-branded sweater. The image of the skull in art traditionally reminds the viewer of inevitable and impending mortality. These Memento Mori tell us, the viewers, that death comes for all. Seems like an incompatible thought to emblazon on disposable consumer goods, though to me, the trend of cute, quaint skulls smacks of our collective attempts to defang mortality. The cute skull is intended to say less to the viewer than it reveals about the wearer. It tells others that you consider yourself edgy or wish to appear mildly threatening without diverging too far from the mainstream of consumer values. Yes, I am including Ed Hardy here, as the rhinestone skull may be the worst offender when it comes to trivializing and kitschifying death. I’m also willing to acknowledge that kitsch is part of the humorous flip-side to Goth’s funereal overtones—“Bela Lugosi’s Dead” was recorded as a joke, after all—and the cute is often a necessary chaser to the morbid. However, I tend not to lean toward this aesthetic of cute skulls, candy witches and swirls of pink in my blacks. By the same token, I’m not about to go all Mortiis and armour myself in the darkest darkety dark of serious darkness. I prefer to walk a line that takes me near the abyss without setting up camp at the bottom. I’ve been thinking of this look as Classical Morbid. It’s part Trad Goth, part Corporate Goth. All that being said, the skull is still a compelling image that is a staple of Gothic fashion.  I’ve found some examples on Etsy that retain something of the heft of the Memento Mori.

Yes, I know what I just said about rhinestone skulls, but this jacket from Urbanhardware transcends the usual rhinestone skull in its wonderfully shaded and detailed execution. The closer the skull to the complexity of the anatomical image, the more visually interesting it becomes. The jacket’s use of velvet and lace are also an elegant touch. I love this sort of “Death is a Dandy” fashion.

Subtlety is key with the understated Goth look I’ve been pursuing lately. I have a tiny silver skull necklace very similar to this one by Etco. A tiny pendant like this can give a surprising flash of your morbid sensibilities without announcing itself too overtly.  Mine is on a fine silver ball-chain. I like wearing it with a quartz pendulum or a tiny silver wax-seal medallion.

This basic white stoneware skull made by Leigh Leigh Pottery would look great on top of a stack of leather-bound books. It’s a higher quality material that won’t remind you of styrofoam Halloween decorations. A basic ceramic figure such as this one also strikes me as less kitschy than a skull candleholder.

There’s no doubt, etchings are classy; just ask dead hottie, Albrecht Durer. This print, available from Tiger House Art, framed in an ornate black baroque frame, would make a great elegant Goth touch to any room. I have this print in my writing/sewing room.

I hope this has demonstrated a few ways to reclaim the skull from irrelevance, etcetera.

Things I Have Been Doing Instead of Writing

Yes, I am still here. Like many a Scorpio (or so I gather) I go through these periods of hibernation, isolation and torpor. These fallow periods are necessary to my continued survival. I’ve often envied the vampires in the Anne Rice books (the good ones–you know what I mean) who could sleep out a few dull decades.

So, what have I done?
Slept. A lot.
Listened to hours of Coast to Coast.
Journaled.
Prioritized daydreams and nightmares.
Watched a lot of Futurama.

I intend to return either this week or next with a substantial post.

Farewell from the land of wind and ghosts.

Music For a Monday: Switchblade Symphony

Now that the world is (finally) safe for 90s nostalgia, I find myself dipping back into the bands I listened to then. Switchblade Symphony seems to embody a certain 90s alt-girl (or should I say grrl) aesthetic that lodged itself in the nexus of all that was cool. There were two girls (and some guys, but, whatever) with dreaded hair making spooky music whilst dressed in tattered thrift-store rejects. They looked vaguely like early Courtney Love only with lots more piercings and they had a comic book that was something like this:

I owned this comic, but now I cannot recall what it was about. An abusive dad or something? It was very of the time when girls wanted to tell the patriarchy to fuck off by wearing shredded wedding gowns. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there, the point is that SS took a goth twist to the riot-grrl look, but lyrically, they were less invested in politics than in potentially spooky things happening to children. One of their albums was titled after the children’s book Bread and Jam for Frances, a reference that really never made sense to me considering how menacing some of their songs could be. By menacing, I don’t mean aggressive and threatening, but frightening or unsettling like “Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark.” Here is an example, a song which uses nursery rhyme and the sounds of a toy-like piano to create dark atmospheric effects:

The ‘Goth’ label stuck to them in part because that’s how their label Cleopatra promoted them. I always thought they were one of those unclassifiable sorts of bands like Rasputina or Medieval Baebes. Their first album, “Serpentine Gallery” had plenty of Goth club crowd pleasers, like these:

Switchblade Symphony moved away from these synth-goth sounds later, experimenting with scratching, different vocal techniques and less club-friendly songs.

Switchblade Symphony split in late 1999, which seems perfectly appropriate somehow, since I have such heavy 90s associations for this band. Tina Root is now performing under the name Tre Lux. Her website has samples of several covers she’s done, including the fully awesome but sadly overlooked Information Society jam “Pure Energy.”