(no subject)

Fargo 2.9 ("The Castle")







There be spoilings.






Title reference: The police officer played by Patrick Wilson is summoned to Sioux Falls because the suspect who escaped from his custody was apprehended there, but as soon as he arrives he's told to go away. He nevertheless can't bring himself to, paralleling the troubles of Kafka's K. (This is the second Kafka work used for an episode title.)

Space aliens: Continue to fit my theory, I thhhhhink? Are taken in stride by Dunst and enable her escape, thus maybe associated with her media-saturated self-denied selfishness. For the third time (?) they put a Gerhardt brother into deer-in-headlights mode allowing someone to kill him, which would fit their representing the forces that replace entrenched, old-fashioned assholery. And which they don't see coming until it's too late, at which point their confusion (and ambivalence? The UFO sighters tend to be that) prevents effective action. The racist misogynist Dodd is brought down by a woman and Native American recklessly discovering their newfound power (remember those stabbings?). Do what thou wilt back shall be the whole of the law, I guess? The arrival and withdrawal of the UFO is a bit similar to Milligan and friend's cameo on the scene (speaking of which where was Martin Freeman? One of the cops or something?). Bear's killed by Wilson, though. Meaning what, that corporate capitalism helps the forces of justice to kill off old style cosa-nostric tribalism? Becoming their basically legal replacement?

The wife represents what, then? Just someone in a Camusianly absurd bind? The end of a traditional gender role? Her "police work" is better than her husband's, at the Waffle Hut, so maybe her being cut off from her proper place has something to do with the cancer? The tumor moment where nothing's recognizable anymore except as a member of a broad category could I guess fit that somehow? The sugar pill ... someone else gets the real one. Dunst? Does the sugar have something to do with the coddled and coddling, forced-smile, all's-well aspect of the housewife role? All while the spirit is killed? Can't remember enough of her interactions with her father and husband - various teasing about her cooking, I think? While mostly leaving her out of what they're going through? Maybe a sort of pointed conflation of the gingerly treatment of the very ill with the nearly identical protective/dismissive attitude toward adult women that men of that place and time mostly had? Plemons too, pretty much. It's presented beingnky, but maybe its effects are not - terminal illness for one, for the other deepening psychosis. But Dunst may at least get to live, and in a "realized" way, so maybe did get the right treatment - empowerment. Perhaps of a dubious kind? Or is the show pointing out a BRIGHT side to a phenomenon many of its viewers deplore. But surely not just doing that? What with the Reagan association and all.

"Cheney" was a cheap shot, but a great cheap shot.

So the massacre is pretty much alluding to the, what was it called, incident at Oglala? Positioning it as a sort of revenge for massacres committed by the whites? And suggesting it connects some aspects of '70s feminism, and ... maybe Blaxploitation movies, with that whirling ninja violence against the clean-up assassins and the domination of the young white woman? Resenters becoming too much like what they with justice resent?

Re. previous title refernces: was "Loplop" just about the haircutting scene? I don't rcall other bird or Ernst imagery, but hadn't registered the title while watching that one.

All the titles are (or allude to) existentialist or surrealist/absurdist works, which I guess have in common the notion that the truth about life is best expressed as uncomfortable fantasy, since that's how it seems to us when it shatters our illusions. Like an alien world that we on some level did know was out there - or, in this oddly politicized case, coming? Or is the final point that fascism has not left us, but merely become a fascism of all against all, what with all groups now increasingly empowered?

Gift of the Magi seems like the odd man out, but I suppose one can read the story bleakly - if love is self-sacrifice for someone who love you back, thus is sacrificing back, no one will get what they want. As compared to "it's the thought that counts, and the sincerest thought counts most" or however we usually take it.

(no subject)

The Walking Dead 4.1-4.8











Completed my Gimple/Dead rewatch.

No clue how much of this I've said before in entries left public:

4.1-4.3: Basically adapt "Plato's Pharmacy" - seriously, this is a fully conscious use of Derrida on a tv action show. Recap of its relevant set of metaphors: ancient city states became constituted on us/them principles symbolized by their walls (inside, outside), but since slavery, trade, genetic mixing etc. meant that the group inside the walls inevitably included outsiders this distinction was unstable. When a threat from out was perceived two things would tend to happen that became as momentous as that threat: the distinction between "them" and "us" would be insisted on more strongly, leading to purity tests or purges (e.g. McCarthyism); and, shortly after, "our" ability to defend ourselves from the threat (usually made worse by the distraction from and/or radicalization of the outgroupers caused by the purification panic) would become so compromised by our inability to clearly see what was threat and what not that we'd NOTICE a change was needed and have to import back in some of what we'd excluded. Inoculation, basically. But for Derrida the point is that words, which are created by distinctions (walls), cannot be stable, as we'll always be trying to protect their meanings from the influence of neighboring words and that purification will always leave out what we later realize is necessary to that original meaning. Words will never fit actual conceptual contours neatly, the way walls will never be stable against weather, aggression, neglect/decay etc. unless fixed, changed, exchanged. The "pharmakon" is the aspect of the excluded word or world that one fears to be toxic (hence the distinction in the first place) but that one eventually turns to as the needed medicine for the illness insularity's causing - the ancient Greek word for medication and poison is the same, basically, much like how the Drug War caused a split in our sense of that word. And given how iffy medicine would have been for the ancient Greeks one sees their point. But Derrida of course loves how the word is both things, because it seems to prove his point: meanings shift in crazy ways based on shifting needs, so distinctions are forever being undermined. Main counterargument to which is that not every term can be proven to change significantly in meaning over a middle-term segment of time, thus flux is tendency and not rule, in which case not everything is deconstructible (i.e. based on an unjustifiable distinction on some level). If the instability of the universe is itself unstable in ways creating patches of stability - which is the take of (e.g.) Lucretius, Shelley, Stevens - this is a viewpoint with no particular problem with representation and empiricism, and one where even the limits of both need to be representable/experienceable in order to BE limits for us. But though Derrida hasn't given us a new diagnosis or new drug his allegory lures us in by how freaking familiar it sounds - this isn't how things have to go wrong all over, but it sure is the main way they go wrong when they do. Some words are more logocentric (having their own perceived authority as sole basis of their maning, rather than some independently verifiable fact they innocently gesture at) than others, and some *situations* can lead us to desire/hallucinate such self-proving authority to exist in certain words rather than in others (e.g. confusion, pain, fear of death empowering the words of the stabilizing, soothing, immortalizing language of the Bible, Koran, whatever). To the extent Derrida's just saying WATCH OUT, ANY WORDS CAN BECOME LOGOCENTRIZED YO then fine, sure, but he fell down the rabbit hole of our inability to talk about just which ones might or might not be without using, like, words. Whereas calling attention to what might make us stop carefully comparing representations to realities (at least, you know, now and then) seems pretty useful, if less clearly an original notion (Hi Orwell; What up, Borges; Hey Blake). And other aspects of the setup are really suggestive - he ties this in to scapegoats and to banishment, favorite and Socratically relevant Greek pastimes. When the volcano acts up you toss the more volcanic (unpredictably menstrual) members of your group (your virgins) into the volcano - it clearly wants them back, or anyway they're attracting its damn attention. And the introjective move is as familiar-sounding as the projective one: uh oh, a bunch of men are coming toward us and they're assaulting, raping, and taking all our food - so let's set up a standing army! What could go wrong?

The argument's not extended to language per se, in The Walking Dead, except to our overreliance, when fearful, on dubious distinctions enabled or reinforced by certain socially sanctioned language. The sanction is the main problem: precedents set by others tend to be the worst trouble, on the show. And it's not just language, of course, but action precedents. Slogans advance the process but aren't of a separate order from actual walls, are like them artifices maintained only through the belief they're effective. Derrida is misread this way often enough, and why not? It makes more sense than what he's actually saying, at least if we take the problem as a tendency rather than a universal truth. We need to revisit our distinctions whenever they're being acted on in ways where people could get hurt, not because all distinctions may be wrong but because fear and conformity can reinforce one another in ways that stop language (and behavioral contagion) from being examined. Late Derrida himself seems more interested in this sort of misreading than in what he actually meant, in fact. Meek's Cutoff is the only previous dramatization of these ideas I'm aware of, but Walking Dead can go deeper into the specifics because there it features actual walls - of a prison, no less. I guess you could say it has to strain a point by showing the mossy zombie sticking out of the ground right by the elderberries, whereas the Obamaesque new guide in Cutoff is a more properly ambiguous pharmakon. But the association allows zombies to be redefined in a fruitful way, which I'll maybe explain later. And the faltering wall, standing army, scapegoat/sacrifice/exile paradigms lead to more inspired images and happenings.

4.4-4.5: 4.4 is about that irony of exile - Carol has become too much like the callous outer world, so Rick tosses her out into it, which makes him as callous as the outer world. 4.5 is great because it admits what Derrida never can, that yes, there's a point where distinctions/exclusions do need to be made so that we can act, and more importantly they CAN be made fairly, and language helps us make them. Representation isn't the problem, but instead how we fall back to a simpler sort of language when we go fight-or-flight too soon, and then double down on that simplistic crap we'd been saying when that fear comes back or is sustained. So, yes, a counterterrorism allegory, but kept vague enough that it fits war, racism, every other damn politics-entangled problem ever.

4.6, 4.7, 4.8 extends the wall thing to distinctions one makes about self-definition - the Governor tries to exclude the good part his own past, his family, because it led to his overprotectiveness, atrocities and downfall, preventing him from seeing he's still the kind of person who needs to love and protect a family hence will as soon as one's available. And once one is and he knows he can't leave it he tries to exclude the bad part his past, his dictator self, so strenuously that he's led into violence, which makes him figure that's his real self after all so why not be dictator again. Or thereabouts - I'm mischaracterizing it a bit for brevity. Then in 4.8 his view that once you've gone bad you have to stay bad (since he feels like he tried to be good and failed) gets put up against Hershel's that assessment of reality rather than the lean imparted by your baggage can dictate what path to choose, once you realize you've talked yourself into a view of yourself that's mostly just talk. But sunk cost fallacy wins the day, as it often does. Worse, Rick gets converted from Hershel's view, which he himself preaches at the Governor, because it doesn't work at that crucial moment - the choice of another has blocked his own, leading to his doubting choice itself in the very way the younger Governor had. You have to do what you can do to survive (and survive in order to keep those you love alive), so where others might choose in favor of themselves and against you, like the Governor had, you need to choose in favor of yourself and yours preemptively, like the Governor had. Assuming zero sum when the sum ain't zero, on the grounds that you'll lose everything if you're wrong that the sum isn't zero. So instead lose everything more certainly, if gradually, by wrongly assuming it always is zero, since the Governor's is the path to hell on earth - no trust, no sleep, constant replacing of your last record ethical low with a lower, since you keep shifting your personal Overton window of what's normal. Anyway, Rick's antihero arc starts here. Well, back with Carol. Given Gimple's later practice I wonder if the Carol decision somehow affects how the Governor encounter goes - was there hesitation in Rick's saying that one can always change, when he's just previously exiled Carol on the assumption she can't? Maybe I should rewatch the scene. I do recall him not sounding entirely sure of himself, perhaps echoed in the Governor's murder-cut not being clean. Neither is entirely with or entirely against the head of Hershel, as it were. Is it that Rick holds back from giving something? Some proof? Risking himself instead? Can't remember to what extent he does. Later episodes and especially 6.4 will confirm that hesitation in any way from the faith that other lives are as real and meaningful as your own (and that your own is real and meaningful, relatedly) will have bad consequences sooner or later.

(no subject)

Rewatch of 6.4 of Walking Dead:











(May again be repeating much of what I said before - simply can't remember.)

Morgan's framed visually as though in prison, and of his own making, at numerous points, and often with pointed "bars" - ones he sharpened, often.

He's framed that way at the end after not throwing away the key, since this act is a bit of a repeat of Eastman's imprisoning and starving of Crighton Dallas Wilton. The bars are pointed in that scene, I think? And the words of Rick's he hears are "Open the gates" when he's just locked one. Meaning the example of Rick and what has happened to him should make him back down from his act of exclusion.

Eastman's making of cheese: milk gone bad can still become cheese. And he keeps trying till it's right, like he does with Morgan.

He's in the prison of going back to the moment when his son dies, with a door that might open out but just comes back in. If it's him or you, it needs to be him no matter what, he's in effect saying to his son - so kill your mother, son. He can't do this either when the son he killed of the man he killed comes back to kill him. So the argument he's been having all this time with his dead son is won by the son.

But the door eventually does open - one is eventually real. Eastman lets him see this. And he truly is outside, at the end of his story. The sun shines through the trees, the world expands everywhere.

On the wall by the daughter's infinitely indivisible house is a picture of a turtle, showing it in its shell from the side and from above, and then just the shell from the side and from above.

The notion of having your home on your back is being played with; hence his large pack at the end, echoing the packs of the man he kills and the woman he saves.

The contrast with the J.S.S moment where Enid eats a turtle alive (but has blocked from memory the part in between her attacking and its death?) is pointed. Eastman's shirt says "Save the Terrapins," and he eats oatmeal burgers.

His story ends on the train tracks, like The Grove did. A clear path forward?

Wanting to kill isn't condemned. Eastman wants to kill Morgan when he breaks his daughter's house picture, and again when in the clearing when Morgan seems to have not changed. Morgan has this after the Wolf's response to his story.

We do hear a lock after the fight in the house, meaning Eastman has locked himself in for protection. Similarly, he has a locked box with a gun in it he uses to kill himself. So locks have their place, for him - in this case as a temporary measure against a clear, proven danger.

Eastman doesn't go as far as to say that Wilton is not evil. Just that his life is precious too. But from his story one gets the impression he truly isn't evil, but rather in one of the other categories: born with a sick brain, having acquired one, or having been damaged but able to heal. Born, achieved, thrust-upon, for those keeping count. Heredity, environment, free will. The paradox that we can only hate those who have truly chosen to hurt, and that if someone can truly choose we cannot hate them because what if they choose differently next time. Since why wouldn't they? Evil is a terrible choice. Do I depart from the show in lamenting the concept of free choice, as implicitly defined? Or is that exactly where a show about zombies is pointing.

Does his mistake cause his death? Has he hesitated at all, with Morgan? You know, he really has. Because he lets him know that truly evil minds do exist. Which may be incoherent, but gives Morgan the option of believing that might be him, that he might be that 825th (826th?). Gives him the option of seeing his own good behavior as just an act, like Eastman's interpretation of Wilton's in prison. Where once "out," once in the other place (which, if evil can exist, it must have a whole world of its own, have its own code and justice), he can feel that it all was a dream. Can want to die, rather than accepting who he had been and trying to make up for it. It is a direct connection, then. A later failure of Eastman's, though one he makes up for by saving Morgan's life at the cost of his own. Tiny-seeming mistakes can have great consequences on this show. Because even the smallest acts might still change the life of another. Since Morgan's positive response is to how thoroughly Eastman seems to accept him, the single reservation matters, just like with Glenn's toward Nicholas.

All the words in the clearing have reversible meanings. Here's not here: 1. This seems like world but is prison, 2. This seems like prison but is world. Clear: 1. Kill everything and hope that clearing out the world around you will clear out the suffering inside, 2. Step clear of the fear and hate in your head, so it flies on past, and your way will be clear, your view of the world will be clear. Pointless acts: 1. Saving people is pointless since they will die, though killing them is also pointless since they will die anyway, 2. Acts that do not seek to kill, that accept and protect. What was the fourth one?

In his hometown he also wrote, "You are not here." 1. You are not in the world as it seems but instead imprisoned or already dead, or the son you speak to is no longer really here because he made his mistake and died - both a torment and solace, 2. That moment-prison of his death that you keep returning to is just in your head.

The violence seems to come from not knowing which to choose, living or dying. This is more or less brought up again in Always Accountable by Sasha: violence and other back to the wall situations seem to preclude choice, so can hide from others one's guilt (survivor or otherwise), but not from oneself. If we're all doomed or damned why kill everyone? Or anyone?

Redirection of aggression, fear, grief. A new direction, a new chance. Everything coming 'round again. This can be taken in an annoyingly implausible Eastern way, where it evades death itself, or just as a where there's life there's hope type thing. As Martin had said, there is always a choice. And as we learned with Tyrese, when there isn't a choice there isn't life anymore, so then you can let it all go.

The fire is supposed to make us think of Carol, I think, in that episode where all her abandoned past selves are symbolized by the various fires she's witnessed and sometimes set. Accepting who you were is the opposite; what lies behind the urge toward mayhem is always a death wish, on this show, hence the repetitions when cornered of "kill me" by Morgan, the Wolf, the priest, I think Martin ... probably others. Is the "clearing" impulse pure projection, can we say? Or a bit more complex than that?

Don't make me see what has happened. Don't make me see what I've done. Because what has happened has made the world unacceptable, identifying it with the worst that can be remembered about it. Because what I have done makes me unacceptable to myself, since I can remember that I did that. But no, instead of denying the worst this embraces the worst as the only true thing; "Don't ever apologize," Morgan says to Eastman, and later knows he has failed with the Wolf when the Wolf repeats that back. To apologize (or was the phrase "say you're sorry," which would be much better, since it includes the unwitting implication that you really are sorry but simply won't let yourself admit it) ... To apologize means to accept the reality that you have done something wrong and perhaps to express that you would like to make amends if possible. To not apologize might seem to be to not admit that you did something wrong, but instead (or as much) cuts your self-definition off from the things you have done that were right. Morgan admits freely that he has murdererd, but not that he has saved. Being damned is one end of the process of guilt - but it is a false one. Guilt doesn't end with being self-damned.

Wilton goes back to planting flowers after murdering Eastman's family. Flowers earlier for waiting rooms to remind those temporarily imprisoned by fear and sadness that life still goes on, renews itself, that the world isn't only one color. He has defined himself as the same evil that Eastman has, but can't live his remaining life according to that definition. And is angry at Eastman for, what, being right? If he were truly evil he would have nothing to prove to anyone. Rather than meeting "I think you're evil" with "Yeah? Well then I'll show you evil."

The couple Morgan saves ... He does basically mug them, but it's stranger than that. A feral, threatening hiss at people who are very clearly no threat. It's the kabuki version of being a clearer. He wants them to see him that way. But instead they give him food. Like Eastman? And that bullet, like Michonne gave when she had nothing else to give. As a mugging, it's not so great to have received someone's everything. Maybe the "thank you" was the point? She summed his series of actions as the best that it was: saving them. Not the worst. Definitely echoing how Eastman thanked Morgan for saving Tabitha, despite the fact that he had also endangered her - but did Eastman know that? Or is the point just that in each case Morgan had the choice of correcting the mistake but realized that he preferred the version of himself their mistake or fearful humoring of him had created? Because that's what re-cures him. But maybe the adding of the bullet is what proves that the gesture is "everything," short of their lives, is one of gratitude. She didn't have to do that, perhaps? Or is it that she does it because he still seems unappeased? But maybe to believe in good one has to choose to see it - to prefer to. Maybe it's as much about him preferring to see her as wanting to do good in return rather than doing whatever it takes to not be killed. Does he realize this too? That small nod.

The not quite deserved thank you - echoing Nicholas in the previous episode? That scene's certainly the one thing on our minds coming into 6.4.

The [Walking] Dead - Joycean? Some common ground.

(no subject)

6.4 rewatched continued, plus some 6.5 talk:








But Eastman also fails to let Morgan know what he himself did, which means he hasn't completely accepted who he was. If he'd let Morgan know, Morgan would have realized that Eastman was a damaged person who healed himself, a killer who stopped being a killer. If Morgan had known this then he might no have been thrown back into the wrong sort of "here" in the clearing.

The wall motif functions here too: uncovered windows, unlocked doors. The fence is just a noise trap, really. It doesn't keep them out.

Why lock the gun box? To not kill himself? Or because he didn't trust Morgan, thus his pacifism wasn't complete? Self-distrust because not accepting who he had been meant he didn't trust/know who he was? One must be as patient and forgiving with oneself as with others?

So walls again. Between here and here. Which eventually mean you see no heaven, just hell clear before you.

But isn't Eastman also choosing to let Morgan see the better version of himself? What's the difference?

Trees moss flowers

Says he won't kill and then kills zombies. Related? And still eats chocolate and milk, so not vegan - related? Related to his slight-seeming but highly significant ethical lapses.

Wolf goes from "maybe" to "I'll kill all of you" - in part because of Morgan's reactions? Or to test Morgan, to see if he'd truly trust him like Eastman had? Morgan DOES admit what he did - he tells his whole story, unlike Eastman had. His problem isn't nonacceptance of his own past, precisely, but not being fully convinced evil doesn't exist: the one Eastman had initially had, and technically died having.

In Always Accountable, in the clearing scene is the shot of D and the pilot supposed to be reminiscent of him and Beth in Still? The dead couple in the house are similar. The fire starters realize they killed them, and the woman (?) bites their innocent (Beth-like?) friend. Karma.

D asks for something in return for the insulin, thus buys into the local sin, however slightly (and kind of implausibly). Karmically, he loses his crossbow and motorcycle, his most prized belongings. Fitting pattern of 6.4? He does ask them to join him but only after seeing their regret. Conditional trust is not trust? Is his moment of mind change related to Aaron's seeing him lead his people to the barn? He sees helping them as stupid but does it anyway, so he's a little ahead of himself, like Rick saving Spencer though not as bad.

Returning to the pilot lets him find the fuel truck ... So has he faced Beth's death or something? They're a bit reminiscent of her killer, the forest people: overreacting from fear, compromising themselves for safety and regretting it ... And being at last corrupted by their compromise, like her. But does he even know all that stuff about her?

Both D and Abraham face zombie versions of ... Themselves? A soldier, a motorcyclist. The forest fire is as heavy handed and indiscriminate as the hostage taking of D.

The helmet protected the brain, like the plastic melted into them protects the fried couple - out of sight out of mind?

Facing himself? Beth? gives D the fuel to go on? That the others were denied because of the very people they (I guess?) killed? But what is there to face? I'm missing something. Something about the auto insurance? Vehicle one gets replaced by vehicle two because of ... Accountability? Deserving it? Or was deserting Sadha and Abraham his sin, returning his insurance, Karmically?