Reconstructed movies

I have lately been seized by a mania to track down interesting re-edits of films, either done by the original creators or by fans.

Ones I have seen

Raiders

Steven Soderbergh — the prolific director best known for Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Ocean’s 11/12/13 — has transformed Raiders Of The Lost Ark into a seductive film school exercise. He changed the color to crisp black-and-white and stripped out all of the sound, even the dialogue, using instead a loop of Trent Reznor’s score for The Social Network.

Why?

I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me.

Fun for me too.

Raiders Of The Lost Ark: The Adaptation

Soderbergh’s experiment is weird film-nerd joy but it isn’t anywhere near as fun or as gutsy as this variation on the theme.

Back when Raiders Of The Lost Ark was new, a circle of tween-aged kids had a crazy idea: how about taking a parent’s home video camera and making their own version of the movie? They resolved to reproduce every shot from the original film as well as they could, which is bonkers considering that home video releases of films were not yet a thing, giving them no way to examine every scene closely. They went to a movie theater and furiously took notes, recorded the audio on a tape recorder, pored over stills they found in places like magazines and trading cards.

They spent their whole summer vacation working on it, but they didn’t get as far as they imagined. Filmmaking is hard. So during the school year they kept at it on weekends when they could. Then they devoted the following summer to it again. Then the next summer. They were in too deep to stop. They had almost the whole movie done when high school graduation forced an end to the project.

Decades later the kids, now grown, dusted off their VHS tapes and did a few showings at theaters willing to spare a screen for a couple of hours for this oddity … despite being unable to charge money lest a plague of studio lawyers descend upon them.

I was lucky enough to go to one of those early screenings, with a raucously enthusiastic crowd. Watching the film is uncanny and delicious. Actors transform back and forth between kids and teenagers from scene to scene, or even within a scene. Because it’s a film you know, you cannot resist thinking ahead. “I know what comes next. How the heck will a bunch of kids reproduce that in a backyard?” Every time, their solution turns out to be more clever and impressive than one would dare hope.

Word eventually found its way to Steven Spielberg, who decided he had to meet these creators. He must have twisted some lawyers’ arms, because now you can just buy a home video copy.

The Blackened Mantle

Akira Kurosawa’s lost original cut of his story of Annakin Skywalker’s fall from grace played out against the backdrop of the rise of the Galactic Empire.

Well, obviously not. But that is what it is meant to feel like.

Star Wars has enough enthusiastic fans that there are countless fan-made re-shufflings of the films. They follow in the footsteps of The Phantom Edit, a pioneering fan effort from before just anyone with a laptop and a lot of patience could re-cut a film; it re-arranged scenes from the first prequel The Phantom Menace and cleverly transformed Jar-Jar Binks into a wise sage by snipping out his slapstick moments and replacing his dialogue with an invented alien language and wholly new lines delivered in subtitles.

Mantle takes that trick much further.

Star Wars is a pastiche informed by a host of sources. George Lucas had originally wanted do a Flash Gordon film but could not get the rights, so Star Wars stirred that together with Westerns, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars stories, flying ace movies about both World Wars, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and … the films of Akira Kurosawa set in Japan’s feudal era, most directly The Hidden Fortress.

So informed by Kurosawa’s influence, The Blackened Mantle refines Revenge Of The Sith by presenting it in the style of Kurosawa’s works. It’s in black-and-white, with bits of the other prequels woven in as sepia-toned flashbacks. All of the actors’ performances have been dubbed in Japanese so that subtitles can tweak the dialogue to reshape the storytelling. It preserves most of the story elements and action sequences, but trims out elements which weaken the plausibility of Annakin’s turn.

A friend recommending this got me going down this whole alternate-edit rabbithole in the first place, and the creator has an index of numerous edits under the witty title Bad Movies Made Less Bad.

Gus Van Sant’s Psycho

So. What if it’s not a gang of kids attempting a zero-budget shot-for-shot remake of a Hollywood film? What if, instead, a talented real-deal director had the resources to do it right?

Would it produce the same movie? Would it turn out as a different movie? This should just be a film school hypothetical, impossible to test, but Gus Van Sant cashed in on the moment of his greatest industry pull to actually do it.

What did the experiement reveal?

I find it impossible to describe. Yeah, it’s the same film as Hitchcock’s … sort of. But also sort of not. The only way to get it is to see the film. Van Sant says:

The results were that it wasn’t as frightening as Hitchcock’s film, and I attribute it to the director, me, my DNA, and the different totally immersive style of Hitchcock. Without that, it seemed it couldn’t be reproduced.

I cannot recommend it unless you are a film nerd. But if you are, there’s nothing else like it.

Touch Of Evil — 1998 Walter Murch restoration

I’m glad that I somehow never saw the original theatrical version of Orson Welles’ noir classic despite having meant to catch up with it. It had a reputation for being great despite confused storytelling which resulted from the studio trimming the film down from Welles’ original cut.

Almost 20 years after the film was released, a print close to Welles’ last version was found, but that had been an unfinished film, with postproduction work still to be done when the studio took it away from him. Then another 20 years later, after Welles had long since died, sound designer Walter Murch discovered an angry memo Welles wrote to the studio criticizing what they had done to his film. There were 58 single-spaced typewritten pages detailing everything he would have done differently. Murch restored the film, using the memo as the blueprint, revealing the real movie at last.

Metropolis — The Complete Metropolis

One might guess that Touch Of Evil is the only director’s cut delivered from beyond the grave, but Metropolis may be an even greater miracle.

Metropolis was made in 1927 and it still looks wildly ambitious to eyes accustomed to mega-blockbusters. The cost of the elaborate sets and effects nearly bankrupted the entire German film industry. But epic result was packed with imagery so powerful and influential that I refer to it as a film everyone has seen even if they have never seen it, because its moves (and even snippets of the film itself) show up in so many later films that when one sees it for the first time, it feels familiar.

Few people ever saw the full film. It was trimmed down from its original 2½ hour runtime for distribution in Germany, then trimmed down further for international distribution. Then decades passed, with prints circulating through film schools and rep houses, getting scratched and burned and broken and spliced back together, so each extant print was at least a little different. In the ’80s a producer struck newly restored prints … with a different (rock ’n’ roll!) soundtrack, goofy colorization, and trimmed down more than an hour shorter than its original runtime.

Then at the end of the century, a German film foundation asked to borrow every print in the world. They scanned them all and combined the data — one print could correct the loss from a scratch on another print, a lost frame on one print could be covered by it surviving on three others. They pored over archived notes from the original production. This produced the fullest version any living person had ever seen, a little over two hours long. The computer synthesis of information from multiple prints made almost all of it look as fresh as if it had been shot yesterday; the film was even more beautiful than we knew. Title cards describing what surviving records revealed about the missing scenes got them as close to rescuing the entire film as anyone believed possible.

Then one more print turned up in a museum archive, a negative struck from the original full version. It was in bad shape, but it had 25 minutes of footage which no one had seen since 1927. There were a few bits damaged beyond repair, but it meant that we got all but five minutes of the original cut back.

Have I mentioned that the film is amazing? The film is amazing.

Brazil — The Director’s Cut

Terry Gilliam had such a hard time getting the film released at all that The Battle Of Brazil is a book entirely about Gilliam fighting against the studio’s attempt to bury it, which then spawned a documentary film. Gilliam showed the movie at film schools and art houses on the sly in his campaign to bring attention to it.

Finally the studio relented, but in a final tragedy they held Gilliam to his contractual obligation to deliver a film within a certain runtime. To keep the studio from hacking the film entirely to bits, Gilliam cut out ten minutes of footage from the finished film he had been showing around.

That theatrical edit was still hailed as a great film and became a staple of rep houses, where I fell in love with it as a young film nerd. But a decade later Criterion, the prestiguous home video publisher of classic and arthouse films, made Gilliam’s original edit available.

Gilliam was right to be frustrated by the theatrical version. The full version includes a scene unnecessary to the plot but underlining the film’s theme, the terrifying secret police revealed as working joes griping about their day, oblivious to the horrors they commit. It’s good to have the real thing back.

Blade Runner — The Final Cut

Possibly the most famous director’s cut to find its way to a broad audience, and one of the few to eventually displace the original theatrical version almost entirely.

Warner Bros had wanted a sci-fi action blockbuster, but director Ridley Scott delivered a textured, alienating science fiction art film. To make the movie more accessible, the studio insisted on adding a introductory title card, a happy ending, and voiceover narration throughout. Harrison Ford recorded a deliberately stilted voiceover track in an attempt to help Scott talk the studio out of using it, but the trick didn’t work.

The resulting film was not the hit they hoped for, but despite the voiceover and other flaws, Blade Runner became a favorite of film buffs, including me. I saw it in its original release and was a little too young for it. I rediscovered it as a budding film nerd in college, re-watching it obsessively. I no longer rank it among my top-tier favorites but it remains the film I have watched more times than any other.

Because cinephile love made it a rep house perennial, prints of an early assembly cut from before the studio’s changes found its way to screens, misrepresented as a “director’s cut”. Scott felt frustrated by that version’s lack of polish, but the interest people showed in it led to the studio coöperating with Scott to create a proper Director’s Cut. The resulting film was subtly different and better. Then Ridley Scott’s ongoing success in his career made it possible for him to get one more bite at the apple, making a host of fine adjustments and even shooting a bit of new footage more than two decades after principal photography had originally wrapped.

Despite having seen the original theatrical cut dozens of times, the Final Cut is so right that it has almost completely displaced that version from my memory.

Dark City — Director’s Cut

I had long thought that this edition just removed the opening narration forced into the theatrical release which undercut its surreal-mysterious tone, but seeing it recently revealed that it adds 11 minutes of footage to expand several scenes a bit, and to significantly alter the closing psychic-battle setpiece.

Fixing the opening is definitely an improvement, as I aleady knew from skipping it when watching with friends who were new to the film. I’m not so sure the other changes are worthwhile. That psychic battle landed as a little goofy even when it was new; having more of the effects which have not aged well belabors the inherent problems with the ending. Though is sure does land as anticipating The Matrix, which arrived the following year.

Maybe I need to make my own fan edit which never shows us the city from the outside?

Star Trek: The Motion Picture — Director’s Edition

Nerdy, obscure, and amazing.

I grew up a Star Trek kid. I was the right age to be entranced by the goofy Filmation animated series when it was originally broadcast, grew into nerdlove for the original series in syndication, and was still young enough when the first feature film was released that I was uncritically delighted to see new Trek on the big screen at all.

But by the time ST: The Motion Picture was released for home video, my tastes had matured enough that revisiting it revealed that how the film was a clumsy slog. I had heard rumours about how The Motion Picture had suffered from Studio Meddling. Since the special effects shots were expensive some suit had insisted on including every bit of them, whether they served the story or not, filling the second act with a stultifying series of shots of the crew of the Enterprise looking at clouds through the viewscreen. To spare time for that nonsense, a bunch of character stuff and ideas landed on the cutting room floor.

It did not stand up in contrast with The Wrath Of Khan and the run of pretty good original cast Trek films which were still coming out. Then there was Next Generation. Then other Treks. I thought I would never look back at Star Trek: The Motionless Picture.

This wasn’t a beloved classic the studio could cash in on investing in like Blade Runner; even the famously enthusiastic Trek fandom admitted that it was a dud. There wasn’t a better cut just sitting on the shelf like there was with Brazil.

But the studio still had the footage that didn’t make it in to the theatrical release, director Robert Wise just couldn’t let go of the thought of the better film he had wanted to make, and a lot of film professionals have a soft spot for Trek. Wise doesn’t call what he and a host of enthusiasts did a restoration of his cut, he says they got to finish an unfinished film. They didn’t just trim out the clouds and weave the story beats back in, they worked on everything. They improved the sound design. They cleaned up the effects shots they wanted to keep. They made new effects shots to replace things they originally hadn’t had time, or money, or capacity to do back in the 1970s, careful to match the distinctive look of the original effects.

The resulting labor of love is not just a marvel of craft or just a good Trek film. It’s a great Trek film. It may not have quite the appeal to non-fans of The Wrath Of Khan or The Voyage Home (the one with the whales!) but anyone who likes Trek at all will enjoy it, and for anyone who ever loved the original series it is a true gift.

Alien³ — The Legacy Cut

The theatrical version of this film was so bad that it nearly killed the franchise. I saw it on its original release, which was an unnerving experience. The first few scenes were so gripping that I thought the universally negative reviews were lunacy. The next few scenes didn’t quite work. Then the next few scenes were weaker still, and it continued to decline through an incoherent second act, and then further still to an excruciatingly hokey ending. Strong turns by Sigorney Weaver and Charles Dance couldn’t save it. It’s a pile of crap.

It was well known to have come out of a horrendous production process. There had been a succession of scripts and directors — including a script by William Neuromancer Gibson which one can now find adapted to comics and as an audio drama — and was already wildly over-budget when young David Fincher took the reins to direct his first feature. The filmmaking and wrestling with the studio was such a mess that Fincher is said to have come close to refusing to have his name on it. He hasn’t just refused to attempt a new cut of the film, he is so bitter that he has refused to ever talk about the movie at all.

The studio tried to lure fans into paying for a home video release of this unloved mess by creating a box set of Alien films with a bunch of special features, including what they called the Alien³ Assembly Cut, a Frankenstein’s Monster made without Fincher’s involvement incorporating a bunch of unused footage and reference images for special effects that were never made. I gather that the result is a hash that makes one wonder what might have been. That non-film inspired a crew of nerds to create this fan edit, tinkering with the arrangement of scenes and fleshing out missing effects.

The result is better than anyone who has seen the theatrical version would believe possible. It’s not as good as the original Alien or James Cameron’s Aliens sequel, but that is praising it with faint damnation; I think it’s better than the sequels Ridley Scott has given us. If you have a taste for the series it’s worth a couple of hours.

The Abyss — Extended Edition
Aliens — Special Edition

While I’m nerding out, I have to point to these James Cameron re-edits of two of his films.

The theatrical release of The Abyss was good but sloppy, and the ending was completely broken. We are lucky to have the Extended Edition even though it remains more than a little shaggy.

I understand why some people prefer the theatrical version of Aliens — it’s so tight that you could bounce a quarter off of it — but I concur with Cameron’s judgement in creating the Special Edition, if only to have the sentry guns pile on even more suspense.

Ones I want to see

The Dark Side Of Oz

Probably the most-seen fan edit ever made, in part because anyone can re-make it DIY: it’s just The Wizard Of Oz with the sound off, playing Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side Of The Moon as a soundtrack. There was a craze for it back in the 1990s, when video rental through Blockbuster was at its peak; reputedly there’s a lucky alchemy in the way the tracks of the album align with events in the film.

Despite listening to the album a billion times when I was young somehow I never got around to trying this. One of these days.

Silent Hill — Restless Dreams

I have not played the vidya game, but an enthusiast for it introduced me to the film adaptation. It doesn’t quite work, but it is so atmospheric that I found it seductive anyway.

Fan edit enthusiasts rank this one of the best examples of the form; rumor has it that even the movie’s director likes it.

Raising Cain — Director’s Cut

There are a lot of director’s cuts broadly recognized as better than the original theatrical version. There are a lot of fan edits which many fans call better than the original theatrical version. There are even a few fan edits which directors have praised. But I think this film is unique in being such a good a fan edit the original film’s director annointed it “The Director’s Cut”.

Admirable humility by Brian De Palma.

Bateman Begins: An American Psycho

This is a weird one. Christian Bale played both Patrick Bateman, the titular main character in American Psycho, and also Batman in the three Christopher Nolan films, so an enterprising fan has stitched the two films together to suggest that they are the same guy.

It’s so crazy, it just might work. I have to find out.

Blood Simple — Director’s Cut

An oddity both in that it tightens the the movie to be a few minutes shorter and that many fans fault it as inferior to the theatrical version.

End Of Skywalker

Nosing around the internet, I find a lot of people calling this the best of the sequel trilogy re-edits, mining footage from all three films and using the subtitles trick to assemble a single feature telling a significantly different story. That’s not as seductive as the Kurosawa conceit, but I’m curious.

As with the Star Wars prequel trilogy, the sequel trilogy is frustrating. The Force Awakens demonstrates impressive craft but not quite the resonance someone who grew up with Star Wars hopes for, The Last Jedi is divisive (I adore the way it brings Luke Skywalker full circle), and The Rise Of Skywalker wraps it up with … a total trainwreck. That last is particularly bitter given the gorgeous production design, actors’ strong performances, and nifty action setpieces it wasted. Good ingredients for stone soup.

The Empire Strikes Back — Revisited

It’s easy to pitch me on the fan edits above attempting to improve on Star Wars at its worst, but why mess with The Empire Strikes Back, generally recognized as the best Star Wars feature film?

Well, I found fans insisting that this edit is actually better than the original film. I didn’t think I needed to see Empire again at all, but my curiousity is piqued.

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut

The Superman II we got was a remake of an unfinished film the world never saw. The original plan for the 1970s Superman movie was to leverage the cost of the ambitious production by doing two films worth of principal photography, in the hope that profits from the first film could fund post-production on the second film. It almost worked. After a long, difficult production, director Richard Donner delivered Superman: The Movie and it was a hit. But budget and production challenges meant that the shooting Donner had done for the sequel was not quite enough to bring the sequel home, and in a complicated behind-the-scenes soap opera, Donner was replaced by Richard Lester.

In order to resolve the legal ambiguity that created in assigning a director’s credit, Lester wound up re-shooting a lot of what Donner had already done. While Lester deserves credit for how rightly beloved Superman II was and remains — “kneel before Zod”! — some of its odder elements are Lester’s additions.

As with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a sentimental director and enthusiastic nerds decided to finish the film that might have been. I gather that the result doesn’t have anything like the astonishing polish that the Trek team got to deliver, but I also hear that it qualifies as an interesting real movie.

Once Upon A Time In America — Extended Director’s Cut

The title is a misnomer. Director Sergio Leone’s true original cut was about 700 minutes long (almost six hours!). This recently released edit was created without him, since he has been dead for 25 years, and it runs “just” just 250 minutes.

The cut Leone preferred is lost to time. There are no records of what it contained, precious few people ever saw it, and he is not alive to tell anyone about it. Legend describes it as a glorious, fascinating misfire. Since the elaborate production had Leone starting from a ten-hour rough cut, there is no figuring out what Leone wanted to do from first principles.

It was cut down for a showing at Cannes, then cut again for limited release, then at the point when it finally got a full a full US theatrical release it had been whittled down to a broken 139 minutes. But then in the years since Leone’s death there has been a trickle of different releases adding more and more things back in. It seems that the latest edit is the most complete version we will ever get.

I have not seen any version. Someday I want to tackle it, and binging the longest available version seems like the way to go.

Dark

Dark was filmed in 2013 and released in 2014 under the title Dying of the Light. The film was taken from me after the first director’s cut, re-edited, scored and mixed without my input.

I offered to revisit the film, cut and mix a new version at my own expense but was denied permission by the producers.

This cut was created using work print DVDs. I had no access to the original hi-res footage and unmixed sound. I used those limitations to my advantage when creating this new film.

I was working toward a more aggressive editing style when Dying of the Light was taken away from me. Dark represents the direction I was hoping to go.

Dark was not created for exhibition or personal gain.

It is for historical record.

— Paul Schrader

Found by a friend who says it “largely takes place within Nicolas Cage’s CIA agent’s brain as it is being eaten by a tumor, as he pursues vengeance against a terrorist. I haven’t yet seen the official release, but the re-cut is just wild.

More fan edits

I want to come back to write these up in greater detail, ideally after seeing them.

The Escape from the Shining Alien Thing from Beyond the Stars

Reputedly a weird, inventive mashup of several films, starting from John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Cosmogony

A weird mashup of several films, said to be more “contemplative” than a narrative.

Dune: The Alternative Edition Redux

A fan attempt to recover the novel’s spirit and Lynch’s intent. I have soft spot for some of the weird stuff in the very long “Alan Smithee” cut, so I can imagine how that might be possible. And it gets surprisingly positive commentary.

Wes Craven’s Dark Nightmare

A fan edit of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare which reputedly makes it more psychological than fantastical to good effect. I revisited New Nightmare recently and I found it short of the fresh surprise which impressed me when it was new, so I imagine that there is room to improve the film by re-framing it.

Phantom Of The Paradise — Uncensored Cut Restoration

An elaborate fan project to rescue the lost version of a cult classic.

Paradise

A fan edit weaving together the Ridley Scott Alien sequels into a single film, in an attempt to produce something that makes sense. an attempt to make them make sense.

Hellblazer

A fan edit of Constantine drawing on deleted scenes. It seems there is a lot of opportunity there, given what a mixed bag the theatrical cut was, and the choice of title suggests that the creator shares my love for the ’90s comics. But hard to get.

The Matrix Revolutions Decoded

All the sequels woven into a single feature, much loved for clarifying the source’s themes. One can get a little taste.

More official releases

I want to come back to write these up in greater detail, ideally after seeing them.

Doctor Sleep — Director’s Cut

The theatrical release does amazingly well at sweating down the doorstop of a novel and reconciling King’s novel The Shining with Kubrick’s film The Shining along the way. But there is a lot more to say, so I wonder how it does that.

Little Shop Of Horrors — Director’s Cut

Lots of little changes, plus a big change to the ending, reputedly making it even more Faustian.

Das Boot — Director’s Cut

The theatrical release was already a great film … and it turns out there is a much longer version available.

Highlander 2: The Renegade Version

The director’s attempt to recover as much of the movie they had actually wanted to make as he could. Sort of. But do I care?

That Thing You Do! — Extended Cut

Reputedly better all-around, including that it corrects queer erasure in the theatrical release.

I Am Legend — Alternate Version

The only major change is in the last few minutes … but that is reputedly a profound change.

Kingdom of Heaven — Director’s Cut

A fair bit longer than the original theatrical version, which evidently makes it land as completely different on a thematic level. During the Iraq war era I had no appetite for a film about the Crusades, but I’m curious.

Blackhat — Director’s Cut

A weak film that came out of a very messy production, and this cut is supposedly very different. But in this case is different actually better?

The Ballads of Malcolm Reynolds

Over on Bluesky, Sean Kelly says:

Malcolm Reynolds starting off as an abusive prick who all the women love anyway because deep down, he’s a good person is such a case of Joss Whedon telling on himself.

Kelly is smart about this sort of thing. I see why he says this. As someone who watched — twice — all of Whedon’s perverse masterwork Dollhouse, I recognize him frequently revealing his misogyny, narcissism, and abusiveness in his storytelling. I see plenty of those problems in Firefly.

But on this point I see something else going on, because we know quite a bit about what Whedon wanted to do with Firefly and with Malcolm Reynolds. A few years back, I posted a quote from Whedon on this very subject:

Mal is somebody that I knew, as I created him, I would not get along with. I don’t think we have the same politics. But that’s sort of the point.

The series offers Mal to us as a noble scoundrel loved by all of the women aboard the Serenity, but not because Whedon wanted to tell that story, quite. Whedon created that under protest, as an adaptation to Fox’s insistence that the central character of the ensemble could not be the utter bastard he wanted to examine. Whedon filed down Mal’s rough edges — still an abusive prick, but less so — and made the whole ensemble less fractious, more loving. That paradoxically meant that the story did less work to justify the sympathy for Mal it asked for, creating a dissonance which made Kelly itch.

We can glimpse the different Malcolm Reynolds Whedon wanted to give us in the pilot which the studio rejected. The first sequence introduces Mal as a callously violent soldier smugly fighting for the Space Confederacy. In the second sequence, we see that losing the war broke something in him, turning him into an utter shit. He is insulting and disrespectful toward a sincere priest and a self-possessed prostitute! Had Whedon been able to figure out a way to justify including a dog in the scene, Mal would have kicked it.

In that pilot, yes, Kaylee does love Mal. Whedon has said that in writing the show “when Kaylee says it, we believe it” because she is a pure soul, wise enough to fall in love with the real hero of the Serenity crew before his heroism became apparent. But her love for Mal is the only thing in the pilot telling us that this asshole is worth caring about. Even Mal himself tells us otherwise.

In that pilot, River does not love Mal. Well, she doesn’t get to say much. In the second first episode, River says in one of her fugues of holy madness, “Mal. Bad … in the Latin.” The show uses River’s inhuman insight to tell us things, much as Whedon says it uses Kaylee, so that is stark. River comes to love Mal as the whole crew do, but along the way River — who is a scary murder-monster — often fears Mal.

In that pilot, Zoe does not love Mal. She is utterly loyal to him, and she trusts him. The show hints that she feels indebted to him for something he did in the war. But that is not love. In the Serenity film, Whedon tells us very clearly that Zoe only loves only one person in the ’verse, and it ain’t Mal. In the pilot it seems that Zoe does not even like him, though maybe she hopes to someday get back a better Mal she knew before the war broke him.

In that pilot, Inara does not love Mal, despite genre savvy telling us that Inara & Mal have romantic tension. What keeps them apart? Mal being terrible. Inara finds Mal attractive but dislikes him, for good reasons. (In this do see a different accidental confession from Whedon, resentment that women like Inara often feel attracted to men like Mal, an ugly note which shows up many times in his work.)

The changes in charactization after the pilot are significant but not jarring because Whedon and his team are crafty, largely just fast-forwarding to a state Whedon had meant to work hard to earn over a few seasons of storytelling.

He did a similar trick in wrapping as much as he could of several TV seasons’ worth of storylines in the feature film Serenity, including an abbreviation of Malcolm Reynolds’ arc. The series gave us Mal living by a code of honor which emphasized total dedication to his crew. In the film, he realizes that caring for a small circle of people is not good enough. He has to care about everyone. His moral obligation to the ’verse outweighs his own life and even the lives of the people dear to him. Had Firefly ended after seven seasons that could take him there, I believe that in the last episode Mal would have taken off the coat, because no, the browncoats were not just the losing side, they were the wrong side.

Had Whedon gotten to make that Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds, I doubt that many people would love it the way they love the cozier Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds we got. There are a bunch of reasons why I think it would not have worked, but I wish I could reach into a parallel timeline to watch it because it would have been a hell of a thing.

Luke Skywalker

I don’t entirely love Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi — it works for me, though I recognize that it is messy — but I consider its capstone to Luke Skywalker’s story not just the best thing in John Williams’ opera cycle but even so good that it retroactively improves Luke’s story in the original IV-VI trilogy. Rescuing some thoughts from X/Twitter and elsewhere:

For one thing, it keeps the promise made by that last moment in VII: The Force Awakens —

— Luke is now ready to truly understand Kenobi, though it takes Luke until the end of VIII: TLJ for him to fully register Kenobi’s final lesson to him and stop wallowing in his own bullshit. It is the fitting end both for Luke and for the “saga”.

John Williams knows the score, if you will pardon the pun. The first time we hear the Force theme is seeing Luke restless in IV: A New Hope …

… and Williams teases us by leaving the theme uncompleted. As he will again and again, either letting is fade away or interrupting it with something else. Until, at long last, he does complete the theme — gently, not triumphantly — with Luke’s death at the end of VIII: The Last Jedi when we know that Luke has in his last moment come to peace with himself, because he finally learned the lesson Kenobi needed him to understand.

A word about violence

It is a pity that the choreography of the fight between Obi-Wan and Anakin at the end of III: Revenge Of The Sith is so bad because the core idea is brilliant: Obi-Wan keeps falling back and falling back and falling back, desperately hoping that Anakin will make a mistake.

Obi-Wan’s error in succumbing to settling things with Anakin through violence and trying to set his own terms for it should give poignance to his duel with Vader decades later in IV: A New Hope, showing he has learned and matured. In Obi-Wan’s last duel, he finally accepts that he cannot — and should not — defeat Vader through violence. He does not try to set the terms of the fight, or try to “win”.

Wisdom.

This takes us to Luke — who we met and came to love as a young hothead — finally learning what Obi-Wan was trying to teach him, stepping up yet refusing violence, completing the work.

Moviebob

So Uncivilized

Luke is not a generic hero, he is a repudiation of the generic hero.

Jesse McLaren

So Luke Skywalker force projected across the galaxy to distract a Sith blinded by anger that he didn’t even realize he wasn’t a fighting a physical person, allowing the next generation of heroes to escape and then he gloriously faded into the sunset and you didn’t like that?!

And it was revealed Rey isnt from a famous family she’s just an ordinary person who has the power to take on the forces of evil and you were mad she’s not a nepo baby?!YOU WERE MAD SHE’S NOT A NEPO BABY?!

Jonathan McIntosh

A handful of The Last Jedi haters in my mentions are offering up a fascinating misreading of the final showdown between Luke and Vader in V: Return of the Jedi. I think it’s worth taking a moment to discuss because it may help explain why these guys hate Luke’s character so much in Episode VIII.

The misreading: Luke Skywalker uses his great warrior skills to defeat Darth Vader. Once he’s proven himself in combat and stands victorious, Luke does the honorable thing by showing mercy and sparing his enemy. Thereby saving himself from corruption and redeeming his father.

What really happened: Luke tries to avoid fighting but gives into anger. As he bests Vader in combat, Luke realizes his great mistake, winning this fight means losing his soul to the Dark Side. The battle itself is corrupting him, understanding this Luke throws away his weapon.

Notice that the misreading (above) reframes Luke as a badass warrior and reframes his refusal to kill Vader as an act of mercy stemming from a position of power. This is significant because Luke beating Vader in combat is explicitly depicted as a moment of weakness not strength.

The desire of some fans to re-imagine Luke as a powerful warrior who spares the bad guy out of benevolence is consistent with the way male heroes are often represented. It’s the way Batman is framed when he doesn't kill The Joker. But Luke Skywalker isn’t the typical action hero.

Luke’s arc in the original trilogy ends with him not only refusing to kill the bad guy, but refusing to even fight a worse villain. This is why Luke’s force projection standoff with Kylo in The Last Jedi is so perfect. It's the ultimate expression of everything Luke has learned.

The fact that an iconic figure like Luke Skywalker was explicitly framed as weak for fighting a murderous villain like Darth Vader is a pretty subversive message, especially for a male hero in Hollywood. And it’s something that, 35 years later, some fans still refuse to accept.

Max Gladstone

Responding to a comment lost to the sands of time, affirming my own disdain for the Jedi.

I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t buy it. Admittedly, in part because I have no difficulty either rejecting prequels or considering them as schlocky historical dramas produced in the period between VI and VII. That said, you’re spot on with respect to Luke’s moral issues in VII and VIII being natural outgrowths of his character in IV-VI. On bias I think the evidence of the prequels is that the Jedi were terrible Jedi. Which kicked me in the feels the way I think some feel kicked by the Luke thing.

The whole plot of the Prequel Trilogy (I-III) rests on the Jedi being so bad at the most basic of human interactions that they don’t recognize fascism and Palpatine’s general skeeviness staring them in the face, and never think through the underpinnings of the civil war. If we sort of go with the prequel trilogy where it seems to lead us, here’s the story as I see it:

• I-III: The Jedi are an ossified order so devoted to strength and self-righteousness that they forget their role and allow a great crime to take place.
• IV-VI: Luke learns the Force but resists exactly the old Jedi bullshit that got the galaxy into this mess. (In this light, walking out on Yoda turns out to be one of the wisest things he does in the whole trilogy …)

This tacking into personal connection ends up saving the galaxy from the Emperor: Luke going to save Han and Leia leads to him reconnecting with Vader (traumatic as that is), and reaching out to Vader leads to the Dark Side eating itself. But, we get to the New Trilogy (VII-IX): Luke’s rudderless when he encounters the limits of his philosophy, and petrified precisely because his iconoclastic mysticism has left him so alone. And he’s aware enough to see himself recapitulate old Jedi mistakes. That leads to his breakdown, and I think that’s the root of his recovery at the end of VIII. At least that’s how I see it.

Brendan Hodges

This week taught me loads of people think the Jedi in the prequels were Good Guys who did everything right, instead of inhuman militarized priests whose hypocritical arrogance directly contributed to the fall of The Republic. The Jedi steal children from their parents, never let them talk to their parents again, generally act like inhuman robots and “training” is forcing kids to play party games seeing if they guess a speeder or a cup is on their iPad. What could go wrong!

When Anakin goes to Yoda for spiritual support, mortified Padme might die, Yoda responds: “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.” If Yoda had a more nurturing & accepting hand, Anakin never would’ve become Darth Vader. Instead, it’s a culture of Catholic Guilt. Brendan Hodges

It’s significant the only Jedi to stand up to the Council in all 3 prequels is Qui-Gon Jinn, the first Jedi to learn to become a Force Ghost. Lucas is demonstrating knowledge and wisdom go deeper than fundamentalist attitudes and over-reliance on arbitrary dogma.

The Jedi think they’re “keepers of the peace, not soldiers,” only using the force for “knowledge and defense.” Yet, from the opening of I: The Phantom Menace, Jedi are deployed as armed enforcers for The Republic, shaking down CEOs of trade companies. They live by none of their values. II: Attack of the Clones is especially damning. Yoda and Mace are anguished their “ability to use the force has diminished.” Ultimately, they cover up their failure from the Senate, the same toxic attitude of cover-ups with the police & the Church, an image of power above all else.

When Luke ultimately realizes the cycle of violence and fundamentalist hypocrisy must end, he’s right.

“Now that they are extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if you strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy, hubris.” Luke hides on Ahch-To out of guilt, but also in fierce ideological opposition to propagating a toxic religion. Until Rey, he doesn’t see a way of reconciling the virtues of the Jedi with a new outlook (syncretism). IX: The Rise of Skywalker should have deepened these ideas, but alas.

While the Star Wars Prequels (I-III) may fail as entertainment or drama, they persevere as rich, rewarding and sadly relevant texts by a very strange man, George Lucas. And Rian Johnson is the only post-Lucas storyteller to meaningfully reckon with them. They’re a magnificent work of art.

Redford headcanon

I have a headcanon that Robert Redford’s characters from Three Days of the Condor, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Spy Game are all the same guy — and also appears in Sneakers, if you understand that he is played not by Redford in that film but by Sidney Poitier.

In the early 1970s, Joe Turner was a nerd working in a minor CIA analysts’ office sifting through seemingly-innocuous publications and writing reports on his findings.

Turner before the Condor Incident

In Three Days of the Condor we see how higher-ups assassinated the analysts in Turner’s office for stumbling across evidence of an illegal operation. Turner narrowly escaped through a combination of luck and wit, and responded by leaking documentation to the New York Times. This helped spark the Rockefeller Commission On CIA Activities Withing The US, which subpoena’d Turner to testify in a closed-door session. That got him tapped to work on reforms at the Agency, where he took on the new name “Nathan Muir” to avoid reprisals from dirty agents.

Because Turner was smart, diligent, and had a surprising knack for fieldwork by the early 1980s “Muir” had secured a place as a mid-level CIA insider with a mix of friends and enemies. Among those friends: then-young Army Sargeant Nick Fury, who would join the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division at Turner’s encouragement.

S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Fury in 1995

During the Reagan era Turner saw enough dirty business and geopolitical chaos to become bitterly disillusioned. The Hydra network paperclipped into the CIA turned him, and he became an effective Hydra recruiter, bringing in S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Sitwell, Rumlow, and countless others.

S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Sitwell circa 2015, by then a highly-placed Hydra mole

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hydra wanted to re-deploy him. Spy Game depicts Turner making his exit from the CIA pay off by leveraging it to secure the loyalty of rogue agent Tom Bishop as yet another Hydra recruit.

Turner as “Muir” serving as Tom Bishop’s handler in the early 1980s

Turner then slipped into the increasingly-important hacker underground under the name “Donald Crease”, joining Martin Brice’s tiger team security crew, coyly refusing to tell them why he left the CIA.

(Note again that in Sneakers Redford plays not Turner as he does in other films but rather Turner’s asset Brice-aka-Bishop. In this one film, Turner is portrayed by Sydney Poitier. No doubt the studio made this confusing swap to blunt Brice’s ’60s & ’70s radicalism by eliding his involvement with Black nationalists. It is no coïncidence that Fury & Brice are both brilliant Black men Turner manipulated as assets; Hydra’s history of recruiting racist bigots long predates Turner.)

Turner saw most of Brice’s crew as useful idiots. No doubt his choice to use Tom Bishop’s name when creating Brice’s latest cover identity was a private joke. He did eventually recruit the amoral Carl Arbogast into Hydra.
Turner as “Crease” (left) noting Arbogast’s potential, circa 1995

When Brice’s crew stumbled across Dr. Gunter Janek’s SETAC ASTRONOMY decryption chip known as the “Box”, he coördinated with top-ranking Hydra military intelligence mole James Greer. Posing as “Bernard Abbott”, Greer engaged in a pantomime in front of a team of SpecOps soldiers suggesting that Brice tricked him out of the Box. This persuaded the US government to abandon the Box as lost, so that Turner could steal it and deliver it into Hydra’s hands.

Hydra mole Greer during the Red October Incident in 1984, pictured together with Jack Ryan (left)

This blew Turner’s relationships in the hacker underground, but he no longer needed them. The SETAC ASTRONOMY tech meant Hydra no longer needed as much hacker support because they could incorporate its decryption tech into Arnim Zola’s elaborate computer system.

A Zola System site found by Steve Rodgers & Natasha Romanov in 2014

Hydra directed Turner to build a power base to help accelerate Hydra control of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Fury, still unaware of Hydra, set up yet another new identity for his old friend, fabricating war stories about working with “Alexander Pierce” at the “State Department” in the classic intelligence operative’s cover.

“Pierce” landed a position at the World Security Council. Exercising Hydra’s resources and his personal networks at CIA, S.H.I.E.L.D., and elsewhere, Turner manufactured incidents which burnished both his own reputation and Fury’s. Turner came close to winning a Nobel Peace Prize as “Pierce”, which got him elevated to Secretary of the WSC in the early 2000s. He returned the favor to his asset Nick Fury by appointing him as Director of S.H.I.E.L.D..

Turner as “Pierce” in 2014, meeting Steve “Captain America” Rogers

In command of the WSC, Turner spent a decade supporting Hydra’s orchestration of escalating geopolitical chaos. Turner recruited the resulting fears to set up Project Insight, Hydra’s plan to use intel gathered using the Box technology to target potential dissidents for mass assassination by S.H.I.E.L.D.’s network of helicarriers. This plan for global domination was just baredly averted by the intervention of Steve “Captain America” Rodgers mere hours before it was enacted.

Again, this all starts with CIA Deputy Director of Operations for the Middle East Leonard Atwood killing off low-ranking analysts in an attempt to avoid embarrassment over an illegal operation. It took nothing less than a team of superheroes lead by Captain America to finally stop one angry nerd.

The moral of this story? Fear blowback from burning your nerds.

Andor

Andor : Star Wars
   ::
The Wire : cop shows
   ::
Deadwood : Westerns

It uses Star Wars as a setting to talk seriously about how authoritarian governments actually work, and how to actually fight them, without getting hung up on any historical or contextual specifics. And like those other series, it as well-crafted and entertaining as it is serious. And of course now timely.

Nemik’s Manifesto

Of course it’s my favorite thing. I am very fond of this little adaptation with some very graceful allusions to Star Wars at large.

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And …

Remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Remember this: Try.

A wise internet acquaintance says of it [spoilers]:

I’m sort of a cruel cynic because while that monologue is genuinely stirring, I can’t help but remember the incredibly cynical beat where the idealistic little “read theory!” guy writing his manifesto is literally crushed to death by money (the real power of a rebellion) after achieving very little. Like yes, the monologue is great, but Andor is also cold enough to recognize that what sparks the rebellion after decades of Imperial oppression, is a theft of cold hard cash deliberately conducted to provoke reprisal, not just stirring words alone.

Despite being someone sentimental about the stirring words, I agree. It’s part of what I love about Nemik’s story and Andor more broadly. The series insists that revolution against authoritarianism is no one thing. It warns of the danger of resting the movement on any one thing. Some moves just won’t pay off.

I assume that Star Wars lore will eventually succumb to making Nemik’s Manifesto the rallying cry of the Rebellion. But at least as of today, while we just have Season One, Andor is wise enough to hint that Cassian Andor — Nemik’s “ideal reader” — is the only person who read it and no, the Manifesto didn’t radicalize Cassian Andor.

At first.

By itself.

But even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

A hero

Rescuing a thread from the Bad Place which explains why I caught feelings from a glimpse of a tiny little street sign in the background at the 15-second mark in the first proper trailer for Fantastic Four: First Steps.

I will never, ever locate and re-read Marvel Two-In-One Annual ^#7 because I want my memory of it from when I was twelve to remain pristine, because when I think of a hero, I think of that comic and the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing.

In the comic, this big blue zillion-year-old alien guy The Champion comes to Earth. He loves to box and travels the Cosmos challenging people to boxing matches. So when he arrives at Earth, of course he teleports a bunch of Marvel superheroes to his boxing gym.

The heroes are like, dude, we are not getting into the ring with you for your entertainment. The Champion is like, I am not asking, I am telling. Defeat me in a boxing match or my spaceship will blow up the Earth. So it’s superheroes vs. The Champion for all the marbles.

Cut to a huge stadium. The boxing match will be simulcast on all the TV channels.

One by one, The Champion squares off against various brawny superheroes. They get quickly dispatched or disqualified. The Hulk cannot keep his composure and obey Queensbury rules. Thor refuses to put down Mjolnir. Wonder Man probably just got KO’d with one punch because he’s such a doof. I do not recall all of the details.

The important thing is that the last hero left is The Thing.

The Champion soliloquizes: Woe is me, I have traveled from one end of the Universe to the other seeking a worthy challenge, but I am just too good at boxing.

The Thing asks do ya plan to win the fight by boring me to death?

Fans of The Thing know what time it is. But alas, it is immediately apparent that it is not The Champion who will get clobbered. The Thing is outmatched!

Ding. The first round ends and The Thing staggers back to his corner. The Champion soliloquizes some more about how sad he is that his might is peerless. The Thing tells the Champion I’m just gettin’ warmed up.

Ding. Round two. The Thing keeps taking a pounding. The Champion brags that the fight is a foregone conclusion. The Thing says my Aunt Petunia throws a better punch than you.

Ding. The round ends. The Thing is bleeding. The Thing. Bleeding. Twelve-year-old Me was very not okay with this. I had seen him take hits from wrecking balls, kaiju, howitzers, lasers, and what have you … and just dust himself off. This is scary.

As The Thing catches his breath in the corner, the Fantastic Four are there. Reed is like, don’t do this to yourself, Ben. The Thing is all, sorry Egghead but ya know I am just too dumb ta know how ta quit.

Ding. Round three. The Champion continues to mock The Thing while beating the tar out of him. He moans once again I have been denied the glory of a real fight. The Thing tells him I’m from Yancy Street so I know more about a real fight than you ever will.

The Champion lands a punch on The Thing which lays him out on the canvas. People in the stadium and around the world gasp. The ref starts counting.

Just as the count is about to run out, The Thing stands back up and puts up his fists, of course. But he looks bad.

The Champion mocks him some more. Why get up? You are bleeding and your ribs are broken and you can barely stand, Loser. I’m not even winded. It’s over.

The Thing says: The deal here is that when the fight ends the world ends, right?

The Champion says: Yeah, that’s the forfeit since you are such a loser.

The Thing says: Then I’m gonna keep gettin’ up, no matter how many times ya knock me down.

Ding. The fight is back on. But the Champion lowers his fists.

The Thing is all are we gonna fight or what?

The Champion tells him: No. The fight is over. Sure, I could knock you out, eventually. But you will not be defeated, will you? Not really. Not ever. I travelled billions of light-years seeking a worthy opponent and never even knew what one was.

Superheroes are silly. That story is silly. And of course that story is in no way original. It’s older than the written word. But I first got it in the form of The Thing.

I got teary retelling it.

So it was good seeing a little sign announcing “Yancy St”. I know a hero from that neighborhood.

Starship Troopers

In my wasted youth, I read most of Robert A. Heinlein’s published writing. I cannot recommend doing that. But that inheritance from my younger self has me frustrated with the state of Discourse around his novel Starship Troopers. At the risk of talking about the orangutan, I have something to add which I am puzzled no one else seems to have said. I feel an itch over failings I see in both defenses & critiques of the novel.

Yes it is fashy

One cannot talk about fascist themes in the novel without addressing the other Starship Troopers, Verhoeven’s film, a delicious satire offered as if it were propaganda from a fascist society. Many Heinlein fans grumble, with some cause. The film cutting so directly against the novel whets my own appetite to see its strengths somehow presented in film. I am nerd enough to want to see a depiction of a capable Mobile Infantry in powered armor, and I am sentimental enough that I feel moved whenever I re-read how Flores dies on the way up.

But people who reject the film because the novel is Not Fascist At All misunderstand both the novel and fascism. The book is fashy as heck.

In the world of Troopers, civic vigor results from martial valor, because it restricts the franchise to people who have volunteered to fight in endless frontier wars.

According to Dubois, the teacher of the required History And Moral Philosophy class taught in high school (who speaks in Heinlein’s unmistakable Author Mouthpiece Voice), their political order emerged after ruthless brownshirts arrogated power to themselves to replace decadant liberal democratic governance, in an echo of the history of You Know What:

⋯ With national governments in collapse at the end of the XX^th century, something had to fill the vacuum, and in many cases it was returned veterans. They had lost a war, most of them had no jobs, many were sore as could be over the terms of the Treaty of New Delhi, especially the P.O.W. foul-up — and they knew how to fight. But it wasn't revolution; it was more like what happened in Russia in 1917 — the system collapsed; somebody else moved in.

The first known case, in Aberdeen, Scotland, was typical. Some veterans got together as vigilantes to stop rioting and looting, hanged a few people (including two veterans) and decided not to let anyone but veterans on their committee. Just arbitrary at first — they trusted each other a bit, they didn’t trust anyone else. What started as an emergency measure became constitutional practice in a generation or two.

Dubois explicitly rejects our political order of universal human rights when he talks about the prior order, the world of the 20^th century:

But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights’. The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature [⋯] And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture [⋯] a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’ … and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.

The novel’s protagonist embraces the fascist reading of the world as an arena of endless violent competition between peoples, devoid of any other moral considerations.

Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics — you name it — is nonsense. Correct morals arise from knowing what Man is — not what do gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be.

The universe will let us know — later — whether or not Man has any “right” to expand through it.

In basic training, Seargent Zim tells recruits that they have neither the obligation nor the right to refuse immoral orders:

It’s never a soldier’s business to decide when or where or how — or why — he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people — “older and wiser heads,” as they say — supply the control. Which is as it should be. That’s the best answer I can give you. If it doesn’t satisfy you, I’ll get you a chit to go talk to the regimental commander. If he can’t convince you — then go home and be a civilian!

These are fascist principles & dreams. Considering them plausible — not even good, just plausible — is fashy thinking.

David Forbes’ superb long essay The Old Iron Dream (summarized here) situates Heinlein in a context of the far right strain in golden age science fiction; Noah Berlatsky observes how entangled far right fantasies and SF have been with each other. My favorite single commentary on Troopers is a series of long video-essays contextualizing Troopers in Heinlein, Verhoeven, and the essayist’s family (!) which defends having a soft spot for the novel while registering unmistakably fashy elements in its foundations.

But all that said, I do not read the novel as simply fascist propaganda, and taking Heinlein as a fascist badly misunderstands him.

Politics in Heinlein’s fiction gets weird

Heinlein’s harshest critics look past how protean and strange both his fiction and his personal politics really were. SF writer Charlie Stross’ comment Dread Of Heinleinism contextualizes the ideas expressed in his fiction.

Heinlein, when he wasn’t cranking out 50K word short tie-in novels for the Boy Scouts of America, was actually trying to write about topics for which he (as a straight white male Californian who grew up from 1907-1930) had no developed vocabulary because such things simply weren’t talked about in Polite Society. Unlike most of his peers, he at least tried to look outside the box he grew up in. (A naturist and member of the Free Love movement in the 1920s, he hung out with Thelemites back when they were beyond the pale, and was considered too politically subversive to be called up for active duty in the US Navy during WW2.) But when he tried to look too far outside his zone of enculturation, Heinlein often got things horribly wrong. Writing before second-wave feminism (never mind third- or fourth-), he ended up producing Podkayne of Mars. Trying to examine the systemic racism of mid-20^th century US society without being plugged into the internal dialog of the civil rights movement resulted in the execrable Farnham’s Freehold. But at least he was trying to engage, unlike many of his contemporaries (the cohort of authors fostered by John W. Campbell, SF editor extraordinaire and all-around horrible bigot). And sometimes he nailed his targets: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as an attack on colonialism, for example (alas, it has mostly been claimed by the libertarian right), Starship Troopers with its slyly embedded messages that racial integration is the future and women are allowed to be starship captains (think how subversive this was in the mid-to-late 1950s when he was writing it).

In contrast, Heinlein’s boomer fans rarely seemed to notice that Heinlein was all about the inadmissible thought experiment, so their homages frequently came out as flat whitebread 1950s adventure yarns with blunt edges and not even the remotest whiff of edgy introspection, of consideration of the possibility that in the future things might be different (even if Heinlein’s version of diversity ultimately faltered and fell short).

We need to get that to get Heinlein’s portrayals of strange politics. One should never take him as simply advocating for the political order presented in any of his fictions.

Stross points to how many read Luna in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress as a libertarian utopian fantasy despite how it depicts an anarchist culture muddling through in the context of a very neglectful authoritarian rulership and very peculiar material conditions. In Double Star, the Emperor Of The Solar System offers a spirited defense of constitutional monarchy! I take these stories, and others, and Troopers as provocations, letting illiberal socieites make their best case for themselves on their own terms. Each is a different exercise in pushing against how the core principles of liberalism-as-in-liberal-democracy are sacred cows in American society — inadmissible thought experiments indeed.

Part of why I read Heinlein in my youth is how I share his taste for looking the Devil in the eye, though I have learned that one must tread carefully. Heinlein was not careful enough, but his failures are interesting and twisty.

What I read RAH trying to do

The social & political order in Troopers has unmistakably fascist characteristics, but also includes a few breaks from the pattern of fascism. Importantly, it has no dictator, no cult of personality.

The core of its unique political system is now famous because Verhoeven’s explicitly satirical film adapation points directly to it:

• Only people honorably discharged from military service may vote (so people in service cannot)
• The military must accept all volunteers
• People in service may generally retire at will, but then they do not get the franchise

I read this What-If emerging from a tension between his romanticization of the military (which animates many of his stories, including my favorite) versus the liberatarian-unto-anarchist aspect of Heinlein’s worldview (evident throughout his work, loudest in Moon, which he wrote a few years after publishing Troopers).

Heinlein assumes not just that war emerges inevitably from human nature but that this reflects nobility, in protecting one’s society with violence. He dreads democracy devolving to lazy, destructive “bread & circuses” populism. Fashy sentiments. But Troopers also reflects Heinlein’s libertarian-ish disgust at conscription, and his sober dread of authoritarian alternatives to democracy. The world of Troopers tries to square the circle of these conflicting sensibilities through what Heinlein imagines could act as a tidy, clever system of checks-and-balances:

1. Requiring service as a test & training for a sober and truly public-minded electorate addresses his anxieties about electoral democracy — to vote, one must demonstrate willingness to commit to the public good.
2. Requiring that service accept every volunteer is meant to be quasi-democratic in spirit — since any can serve, none are disenfranchised. (I find it telling how in later commentary on the novel, Heinlein mis-remembered it as including the enfranchisement of people unsuited to the military by allowing for other forms of service.)
3. People in service cannot vote, to keep them from bending the military away from serving society.
4. Since voters have all Been There, that deters them from abusing the people in service.

But if one thinks about this with any depth, it falls apart.

Consider, f’rinstance, how this system would still allow a racist society to prevent the enfranchisement of people of color, simply by assigning Black & brown people in service to far more dangerous and degrading duty and refusing to ever discharge them from service. People of color would never become veteran voters who could prevent such abuses. Such shenanigans are so obvious to anyone familiar with the sham faux democracy of Jim Crow that one might suspect Heinlein of trickery.

I don’t. I see a naïve sincerity.

Heinlein’s good heart and shortsightedness enabled this bad idea

If one has read much Heinlein, one cannot miss his disdain for bigotry. He wrote a lot of smart, capable women. He often would make that mid-20^th-century move of revealing that a hero was a person of color midway through a work.

But as Stross observes, he had the sincere commitmment combined with shallow analysis of injustices like racism & sexism characteristic of white men of the era. He could not see the misogyny threaded through his Strong Woman Characters, wrote tone-deaf tranwrecks when making unmistakable attempts to stand against bigotry, and expressed mortifying opposition to civil rights policy. An instructive taste of that last echoes the logics offered by DuBois and others in Troopers:

To a man of humane instincts there is a great temptation to be uncritically all-out on the Negroes’ side, to support him in anything he asks for. We are aware that the poor bastard starts out with two strikes against him; we feel a strong inclination to want to give him a break. Such have been my feelings — and are my feelings — and such, I gather the impression, are your feelings, too.

But, damn it, more harm is done by uncritical do-goodism than by almost anything else. I find myself opposed to most of the current civil rights drive on several different levels—while painfully aware that to be opposed is to invite identification with the faceless murderers who bombed that church and killed those little girls. It is tempting to be publicly pro everything the Negro wants just to be sure that one is not mistaken for a KuKluxer.

But I am still opposed to most of what they are demanding. On one level, it is no favor at all to the Negro to invite him to think that he can become the equal of the white man in money, in social prestige, in education, or in anything else where he is clearly not equal, simply by passing a law or laws. The result is bound to disappoint him and leave him still more bitter. (For the depth of that bitterness and the hopelessness of it, on both sides, try James Baldwin’s Another Country — Baldwin hates us as intently as any Black Muslim.)

⋯

(However, I do not recommend patience to the Negro of South Africa. He outnumbers his white neighbors about four to one, or more. His proper solution is to arise some dark night and cut the throats of his white oppressor—which they richly deserve. But I don’t intend to help him with the job; it is his job. Freedom is never bestowed; it is earned.

(Which—and not “incidentally”—is the reason the American Negro is not yet free: He hasn’t earned it yet. The simple route of throatcutting is not open to him. But he won’t get it by shoving the white man around in any fashion; he’ll just get us sore at him—and we outnumber him something dreadful. He must either do it the hard way, by commanding our respect— which he doesn’t have yet—or emigrate to Liberia.)

⋯

“Rights” have no existence other than in the society in which they are found. They exist in the societal structure, as law or custom or belief (frequently all three); they are constructs of a particular society, rules inside the group for the behavior of individuals toward each other; they are agreed-on procedures only and have no existence other than in the minds of men who practice them.

The full letter I drew from there offers familiar libertarian crap about the right to private property & free association meaning that golly, we cannot actually do anything about the massive injustices of pre-Civil-Rights-Act America. It suggests that he might not have registered a racist version of the Troopers political order as unjust.

And on the other hand, he’s ready to applaud a bloody end to South African apartheid when most white Americans gave it no thought at all. Civil rights legislation as a bridge too far while also embracing violent revolution connects to the weird moral framework around violence offered in Troopers.

Heinlein’s unimaginative blindspots well-marbled with fecund imaginativeness suggest to me that he would have objected to a racist version of the Troopers world, but the possibility just did not occur to him.

Someone as fundamentally pessimistic about human nature as Heinlein presented himself as being should have seen this and countless other potential abuses of the system in Troopers. Heinlein’s fundamental decency paradoxically helped hobble his imagination.

These kinds of mistakes are why we need to be no less wary the dangerous short-sighted-ness of white male privilege than we are wary of overt bigotry and cruelty.

I suspect that decency also protected him from sliding down the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline. Among the anarchist fantasies, prescient warnings about American Christian theocratic totalitarianism, and other inadmissable thought experiments, Troopers was the high water mark of his fascist sensibilities in a writing career which lasted almost thirty more years. He probably would have voted for GWB in 2004 as the “lesser evil” had he lived so long, but I am confident that he would have hated Trump. But as he said to describe his mouthpiece character Jubal Harshaw, “he had more than his share of that streak of anarchy which was the birthright of every American”.

I think Heinlein’s libertarian-ish impulse won out because he wasn’t mean enough to turn to fascism.

The skeptical, satirical Heinlein

Heinlein’s faux-cynicism also reflects another virtue which softens my disgust at Troopers. Despite the smug, didactic, that’s-just-how-it-is tone of his writing, he was too cheerfully skeptical of everything to entirely buy any of the suggestions implied in his fiction, even from his own mouthpiece characters.

Some of his work is outright satirical — he named Stranger In A Strange Land explicitly as a satire. Even in works not intended as satires, the satirical note bubbles up often. I think of an aside in Friday depicting an independent Republic Of California with an exaggerated version of the state’s realworld ballot initiative process. In that example, though Heinlein lampoons “too much democracy”, the fictional political order is harmlessly goofy rather than sinister; he couldn’t help blunting the teeth of his own critique.

Indeed, a few defenders of Heinlein’s novel claim that Verhoeven’s film makes overt a critique of fascism covertly embedded in the novel. I don’t buy that, but Heinlein’s sensibility creates openings to read it that way. Consider a counter-reading which finds that the novel presents a dystopia of slavery and mind control.

There is evidence, however, that enslavement is ubiquitous in Starship Troopers in the form of coercive mass hypnosis. Such a plot device occurs in no other RAH book, so it can’t be dismissed as an accidental trope. RAH included it on purpose. Here, see what you think:

I’ve had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can’t really be afraid.

Implication: troopers are hypnotized before every drop.

each of them is mentally competent to take the oath and that neither one is under the influence of alcohol, narcotics, other disabling drugs, nor of hypnosis.

Implication: hypnosis can coerce agreement.

I understand, with each of them under orders and hypnotic compulsion to suicide if necessary to avoid capture.

Implication: hypnosis can coerce people to act directly opposite to their will.

I wasn’t in good shape at the time you enrolled. I was seeing my hypnotherapist pretty regularly — you never suspected that, did you? — but we had gotten no farther than a clear recognition that I was enormously dissatisfied.

Implication: Rico’s father was convinced to serve through hypnosis.

That linked post describes that reading to reject it — and I don’t find the Mind Control Dystopia reading convincing myself — but the argument in full does demonstrate how counter-readings are very available.

That satirical impulse makes it hard to measure the sincerity of Troopers ….

How plausible did Heinlein consider the political order in Troopers?

Having argued that depicting the world of Troopers does not mean that Heinlein thought it was a good society, we still have to grapple with him considering it a plausible society, which depends on invoking a lot of fashy ideas.

Dubois mocking the decadent failure of 20^th century liberal democracy as a result, in part, of failing to beat children:

Law-abiding people hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons … to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably — or even killed.

[⋯]

Were [those criminal kids] spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage.

[⋯]

the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ‘child psychologists.’

Disgusting. For the recored, research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that authoritarian parenting is harmful and indeed produces worse-behaved adults. This exemplifies authoritarian myths offered uncritically throughout the book.

Earlier I quoted Dubois rejecting universal human rights. In the context of the novel, it connects directly to the point above:

“⋯ Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’

“The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature.“

[⋯]

Librety is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes.

[⋯]

“⋯ There never was, there cannot be, a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenille criminal there are always one or more adult dilinquents — people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.

“And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’… and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.”

Repellant.

And yet.

In that same passage, Dubois claims that moral philosophy has become an “exact science”:

⋯ the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives) but their theory was wrong — half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry.

[⋯]

We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race — we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations.

Later, in the version of History And Moral Philsoopshy class taught to military officer candidates, the instructor expects students to do this.

Very well, is one prisoner, unreleased by the enemy, enough reason to start or resume a war? [⋯] This is an exact science. You have made a mathematical statement; you must give proof. [⋯] Bring to class tomorrow a written proof, in symbolic logic ⋯

Oh, really?

This science-fictional conceit of an exact science of morals is asserted by propagandists for the state. In moments like that — as when Heinlein gives us an Emperor rationalizing constitutional monarchy, or an anarchist philosopher recruiting revolutionaries on the Moon, or countless other advocates for Inadmissible Thought Experiments — I sense Heinlein’s tounge reflexively drifting toward his cheek, perhaps without him even realizing it, asking us:

”Do you believe that the people of this world are right to be so smug about having this all worked out?”

I sure do not. And I suspect that Heinlein was not confident in them, either.

Bad and complicated

So. I want to embrace a nuanced reading of Heinlein’s relationship with the world of Troopers without brushing off problems with Heinlein’s thinking by calling him “complicated”.

Heinlein’s political provocations are always weird, often dumb, sometimes ugly, and in the particular case of Starship Troopers, odious.

And complicated.

Feral Historian and civic virtue

Added in September 2025, together with some refinements of the post above

The Feral Historian is a videoessayist who talks about the political implications of science fiction worldbuilding. He has a liberarian-ish sensibility which bubbles up in stuff like using the word “statist”, but he is neither stupid nor a crypto-fascist. I think of him as the not-evil-but-contrasting twin to left-ish Damien Walter (who suggests that in Verhoeven’s film at least, the destruction of Buenos Aires was a false flag) and I enjoy and recommend checking out both of their commentaries.

Feral has a wry videoessay The Federations: It’s The Same Picture which asks whether the worlds of Troopers and Star Trek are really all that different. I think they are different, or at least should be if we are doing Trek correctly, but it’s exactly the kind of playful, astringent challenge which I talk about admiring from Heinlein at his best.

I want to look closely at his videoessay Starship Troopers: Service Isn’t The Point, which raises some points worth digging into. It’s worth watching the whole thing, but here’s most of his punchline at the end:

1. It’s asking us to consider that maybe voting — exercising political force — isn’t a right but a responsibility that should be earned by demonstrating in some way that it won’t be squandered or used to the deriment of society as a whole.
2. This is illustrated perhaps most directly in the History And Moral Philosophy course that officer candidate Rico must attend late in the book. Unlike the public school version of it earlier, he must pass to the instructor’s satisfaction. [quoting the novel]: “If he gave you a downcheck, a board sat on you [⋯] deciding whether to give you extra instruction … or just kick you out and let you be a civilian.”
3. Simply giving a few years of your life to the public good isn’t the point; it’s about molding responsible citizens. The whole thing is a civics course wrapped in an enlistment …
4. … to make most people not bother, the uncommitted drop out, and the stubborn but genuinely unfit fail.
5. It’s a process of tempering the politically active class to be worthy of the power they wield based on an understanding that people exercising that power without the commensurate responsibility and restraint brings slow ruin to their society.
6. Instead of saying that citizens must be infused with virtue if the republic is to endure, Starship Troopers asks “what if only virtuous people can become citizens?” [⋯] Exercising the power of the state is a responsibility that must be earned, not a right that one simply acquires thanks to an accident of birth. It’s a story that says voting is not about having a voice but about directing state force. While today disenfranching people is seen as a grave injustice, the book shows us a world that views enfranchisement as a grave responsibility and filters its people to determine who will have that power and who will not.
7. The overall point is that a healthy republic requires its citizens to have civic virtue. The book uses military service as the mechanism for presenting people with a choice […] It doesn’t have to be military service per se, but the mechanism requires that the choice be one that has a significant short-term downside commensurate with the power they receive on the other end.

There’s a lot going on in there.

Where does Feral think the society of Troopers locates civic virtue?

As I hope is clear from my original post, I agree with his read that the novel is, among other things, a thought experiment in how one can guarantee that an electorate has the necessary civic virtue to govern well. But there’s an ambiguity in how Feral describes the world of the novel doing that.

Feral titled his piece “service isn’t the point” and points 2, 3, and 5 suggest that he reads the society in the book believing that citizenship requires not just a process for identifying people with civic virtue, but a process which creates virtue in citizens.

But in points 4, 6, and 7, Feral suggests that Heinlein thought the choice to serve was a filter which demostrated the civic virtue of willingness to commit to the common good which the book’s society considers necessary for responsible citizenship.

Either way, Feral says in 7 that “it doesn’t have to be military service per se” that performs this function. But he underlines how the society presented in the book does require specifically military service.

I got a friendly note from Feral about this post, saying that this ambiguity reflects him seeing both things in play:

Whether one chooses to look at [service cultivating civic virtue] primarily as a mechanism of ideological conformity or just social stability is certainly open to personal interpretation.

I suspect that Heinlein would say that same … but I think the text of the novel clearly answers what the society it depicts thinks about these questions.

How the society in Troopers thinks about civic virtue

Before getting into where that society grounds the virtue necessary for voters, I’ll note again how their society is also interested in civic virtue short of what people need to vote responsibly. It talks about the virtue required to participate responsibly in society at all, holding that without beating children, society cannot be healthy.

Fashy.

I think the book offers clear answers to the ambiguities in Feral’s read. Their society grounds the necessary virtue for a voter not in the process of service, but in passing the test of choosing to serve. And they believe that only military service provides an adequate test.

The need to choose service

Consider this from Dubois, naming the need to identify people with the necessary virtue to vote rather than cultivate them:

“The unlimited democracies [of the twentieth century] were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority [⋯] No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority.”

Dubois explicitly names this as “civic virtue” in another segment from that lecture which made its way almost directly into the film adaptation:

Suddenly, he pointed his stump at me. “You. What is the moral difference, if any, between the soldier and the civilian?”

“The difference,” I answered carefully, “lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.”

“The exact words of the book,” he said scornfully. “But do you understand it? Do you believe it?”

When Rico takes his second History And Moral Philosophy course as an officer candidate — the only classroom experience from officer training described in the novel — his instructor Major Reid underlines the importance of choice over cultivation:

“Young man, can you restore my eyesight?”

“Sir? Why, no, sir!”

“You would find it much easier than to instill moral virtue — social responsibility — into a person who doesn’t have it, doesn’t want it, and resents having the burden thrust on him. This is why we make it so hard to enroll, so easy to resign. Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination — devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues — which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out. ⋯”

The specific necessity of military service

Reid walks through the many “failures” of history demonstrating that only military service provides an effective test:

“⋯ Throughout history men have labored to place the sovereign franchise in hands that would guard it well and use it wisely, for the benefit of all. An early attempt was absolute monarchy, passionately defended as the ‘divine right of kings.’

“Sometimes attempts were made to select a wise monarch, rather man leave it up to God ⋯

“Historic examples range from absolute monarch to utter anarch; mankind has tried thousands of ways and many more have been proposed, some weird in the extreme such as the antlike communism urged by Plato under the misleading title The Republic. But the intent has always been moralistic: to provide stable and benevolent government.

“All systems seek to achieve this by limiting franchise to those who are believed to have the wisdom to use it justly. I repeat ‘all systems’; even the so-called ‘unlimited democracies’ excluded from franchise not less than one quarter of their populations by age, birth, poll tax, criminal record, or other.”

[⋯]

“The sovereign franchise has been bestowed by all sorts of rules — place of birth, family of birth, race, sex, property, education, age, religion, et cetera. All these systems worked and none of them well. All were regarded as tyrannical by many, all eventually collapsed or were overthrown.

“Now here are we with still another system … and our system works quite well. Many complain but none rebel; personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest ebb. Why? Not because our voters are smarter than other people; we’ve disposed of that argument. ⋯

[⋯]

“⋯ So what difference is there between our voters and wielders of franchise in the past? We have had enough guesses; I’ll state the obvious: Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.

“And that is the one practical difference.

“He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rulers in history.”

Fashy.

Implied virtues

I’m grateful to Feral Historian for pointing me back to the officer candidates’ version of the History And Moral Philosophy class, because it clarified a point that the society in Troopers finds choosing military service a necessary test for a voter, but not a sufficient test.

As Feral points out, instructors in that class can not just flunk a soldier out of the class; if the soldier does badly enough the trainers will “kick you out and let you be a civilian”, losing the franchise.

In basic training, we get an episode in which a recruit strikes the company commander, foolishly talks himself into a hasty court-martial, and — denied legal counsel — he narrowly escapes hanging to be sentenced to “ten lashes and a Bad Conduct Discharge”. This inherits from military justice, and there are obvious reasons to consider those systems necessary. But they carry an extra weight when a dishonorable discharge denies a person’s vote.

So apropos of my point above about it not occurring to Heinlein how this system could easily maintain racist aparteid or other inequities in access to the franchise — since voters who survived military service could run the military unjustly to maintain a majority which supports that injustice — we see again how volunteering for military service is not in fact sufficent to become a voter. One must survive service. While in service one must demonstrate both obedience and ideological alignment with the regime.

Fashy.