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Mar. 18th, 2017 01:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionWalking Dead 7.13
A Gimple episode, and explicitly harkening back to both Clear and Here Is Not Here, so crucial.
1. The two final shots are good "prison" ones: in the next-to-last, the camera pans up the fence in between it and the people enclosed (King, Carol and the boy), and close enough that they move little while the fence moves much, giving the impression of a barred gate descending into the ground - they have been freed. In the last, Morgan whittles his stick into a spear, hunched, - at the height of his heart/neck crossed, in the distance, by a tiny fence.
2. How have they become free free, and how has Morgan become confined?
2A. The King has wanted to lose no one after what had happened to Benjamin's father and his compeers, which is why he refused Rick's request to fight the Saviors with him. His deal with Negan's "good cop," putting the Kingdom under a much lighter and concealable yoke than the other groups', has covered up the basic fact that the town has been enslaved by people who will murder and torture whoever defies them. The acts of Richard and Morgan make it clear to him that the arrangement is too dangerous and demoralizing to be sustained. His mistake has been a much milder version of that of the Congresswoman, who sought to shield her people from the harsh realities of the outer world. He's gotten his to pretend they've been a bit safer and freer than they are, but that's still enough of a mistake to have contributed to two deaths and prevented his doing the right thing by accepting Rick's offer. At the end he's willing to risk what he has (lives) if it will permit him to keep what he's fostered in his Kingdom intact. The plant at the end basically is the young boy.
2B. Carol's appearances in the episode are quite symmetrical - after the first shot the story follows her for a few minites, then switches to Morgan, then she witnesses the stainching attempt in the exact middle, then disappears again till the last few minutes - up to the last shot, which, like the first, contains Morgan. Point of all of which being they have switched places, and done so because she has witnessed what had happened to him and realized it was exactly what happened to her. Carol has been softened by the King's version of behaviorism - asking for people to do what both of you want after letting them know you trust them to make your own decision because you're on the same footing (which his pretense to royalty tends to actually help - donning the trappings of superiority and then winking about it seems to be a convincing leveling gesture, one reason all his subjects seem both loyal in a personal way but also a little amused about him). This form of appeal let him talk her into leaving town but not going far - a compromise.
"Here is not here," the harsher interpretation of which was that the world is no place for people (thus being around people is no place for someone who understands that yet is glad that they don't) is answered by Carol's use of the King's paradox "What if you could go and not go?" Instead of getting clear of the world, being alone lets you be just clear enough to work through things, which usually involves becoming lonely enough that what really matters is clarified: being with people, letting them be with us, letting ourselves be hurt by their being hurt.
Carol doesn't understand what it did for her till she sees Morgan needing it, which proves to her both that she didn't need it anymore and that it was for this - becoming able to reach out - that she did need it. Her tolerating the shot boy being brought to her house primed this moment, since according to her new code she shouldn't have assented, but (though technically not saying yes) found she couldn't not. That code, being free of others and freeing them of you, is ridiculous because 1) you don't know how to really mean it and 2) people in need will eventually arrive at your door no matter where your door is.
As we saw in the first Kingdom episode, the hermit-with-visitors cure is illogical but acceptable because the malady, wishing to die or kill so that your intense love for others won't make you dead or a killer, is illogical.
Fear that you and especially your loved ones might be killed combined with the belief that you can stop it makes you dangerous, is pretty much lesson 1 of the show; fear that they will be killed and you cannot stop it makes you suicidally crazy, is lesson 2. Morgan's "clearing" fog threatens to overtake him again after Benjamin dies, and killing Richard is clearly as much about killing himself as it is a way to stop version 3.0 (or so) of his plot to start a war. By killing him Morgan pretty much becomes him, is the irony to that - he may wish to spare the Kingdom but he does now plan to kill all the Saviors ... and since his action turns the King he's basically fulfilled Richard's plan unwittingly, of course. He even comes near to killing himself over Richard's intended grave.
Reburying Katy's backpack seemed related to Morgan's not letting the King finish telling him what Benjamin would have wanted - what Morgan and Richard do in the name of their dead loved ones ignores their likely wishes. That moment with the King was very moving, since he neither condemned nor approved of Morgan's action. He was just mad that Richard had done that and concerned that Morgan not stay out there alone. As earlier with his waving aside Carol's stealing weapons etc., I think we're to look for specific parallels between him and Negan (who burns people who steal from him, kills Spencer for daring to undermine Rick's authority by approaching him), and, in this particular scene, between this "sparing" of Morgan and the threatening, domineering, punishing manner in which "good cop" spares the long-haired guy. The season's overarching theme is pretty much the comparison of trust vs. fear as motivational styles, in fact. The proof Rick's finally (after 6 years, for the attentive) ditched his antihero status is in his treatment of Father Gabriel and of the junkyard group back in 7.9: he trusts the first hasn't betrayed him, and at no point even vaguely threatens the junkyard people, which not only prevents tensions from rising but clearly throws them clear of their usual response pattern. He does ask them what they do with prisoners after everyone's freed, but doesn't push it, dropping the "are you good people or are you bad people" interrogation that Gimple stressed straight out of the gate in 4.1 (the bit with the foreign woman). Treat people like they're nice and you'll have a lot more nice people in your life - an assumption that we see working again when he negotiates about the guns in the episode before this.
"Injure your enemy and you injure yourself" is this episode's key ironically reversible phrase. You can take it in a hostile way - manage to kill your enemy outright or you'll anger him while losing the element of surprise - or a nicer way: don't attack someone or you'll have attacked yourself, since he'll harm you back. Or a REALLY nice way: don't attack people (unless absolutely necessary) because attacking people makes you sick because some part of you will soon turn against yourself, since for your life to be precious all lives must be. (Carol doesn't kill the zombie on the street, since she's stsrting to Get It - Richard does; at the gate she does kill several, but this prevents the knights from risking their lives when they come out.) And where the Saviors are concerned, shooting Benjamin is a terrible idea because it clarifies to the King that they ARE his opponents. Though the good cop Savior seems to feel genuinely lessened by what's happened - perhaps his own illusions about what he's been doing on this "low stress" route are desteoyed a long with the King's. Clearly he'd given the order to just non-fatally injure one person, which is about as far as you can stretch Neganism in the direction of civilized behavior, but (exactly like Richard) finds that it's hard to control where a blow will fall or how hard. "Kill your opponent and you kill yourself" is another variation of the phrase's logic that Gimple wishes us to contemplate, though it's never voiced. Fits Morgan and Richard, but it's also going to be Negan's downfall. Threatening may be sustainable in the short term, but killing is not, and killing everywhere he goes has made lots of people hate him more than they love their own lives, including apparent loyalists (the Dwight/Eugene episode is about how both have figured out Negan and are playing him using the same techniques - he wishes to break people using total fear moments and then keep them with randomly scheduled alternations of carrot and stick, so all they have to do is act extremely cowed and greedily grab at everything offered and he'll assume they're his).
A Gimple episode, and explicitly harkening back to both Clear and Here Is Not Here, so crucial.
1. The two final shots are good "prison" ones: in the next-to-last, the camera pans up the fence in between it and the people enclosed (King, Carol and the boy), and close enough that they move little while the fence moves much, giving the impression of a barred gate descending into the ground - they have been freed. In the last, Morgan whittles his stick into a spear, hunched, - at the height of his heart/neck crossed, in the distance, by a tiny fence.
2. How have they become free free, and how has Morgan become confined?
2A. The King has wanted to lose no one after what had happened to Benjamin's father and his compeers, which is why he refused Rick's request to fight the Saviors with him. His deal with Negan's "good cop," putting the Kingdom under a much lighter and concealable yoke than the other groups', has covered up the basic fact that the town has been enslaved by people who will murder and torture whoever defies them. The acts of Richard and Morgan make it clear to him that the arrangement is too dangerous and demoralizing to be sustained. His mistake has been a much milder version of that of the Congresswoman, who sought to shield her people from the harsh realities of the outer world. He's gotten his to pretend they've been a bit safer and freer than they are, but that's still enough of a mistake to have contributed to two deaths and prevented his doing the right thing by accepting Rick's offer. At the end he's willing to risk what he has (lives) if it will permit him to keep what he's fostered in his Kingdom intact. The plant at the end basically is the young boy.
2B. Carol's appearances in the episode are quite symmetrical - after the first shot the story follows her for a few minites, then switches to Morgan, then she witnesses the stainching attempt in the exact middle, then disappears again till the last few minutes - up to the last shot, which, like the first, contains Morgan. Point of all of which being they have switched places, and done so because she has witnessed what had happened to him and realized it was exactly what happened to her. Carol has been softened by the King's version of behaviorism - asking for people to do what both of you want after letting them know you trust them to make your own decision because you're on the same footing (which his pretense to royalty tends to actually help - donning the trappings of superiority and then winking about it seems to be a convincing leveling gesture, one reason all his subjects seem both loyal in a personal way but also a little amused about him). This form of appeal let him talk her into leaving town but not going far - a compromise.
"Here is not here," the harsher interpretation of which was that the world is no place for people (thus being around people is no place for someone who understands that yet is glad that they don't) is answered by Carol's use of the King's paradox "What if you could go and not go?" Instead of getting clear of the world, being alone lets you be just clear enough to work through things, which usually involves becoming lonely enough that what really matters is clarified: being with people, letting them be with us, letting ourselves be hurt by their being hurt.
Carol doesn't understand what it did for her till she sees Morgan needing it, which proves to her both that she didn't need it anymore and that it was for this - becoming able to reach out - that she did need it. Her tolerating the shot boy being brought to her house primed this moment, since according to her new code she shouldn't have assented, but (though technically not saying yes) found she couldn't not. That code, being free of others and freeing them of you, is ridiculous because 1) you don't know how to really mean it and 2) people in need will eventually arrive at your door no matter where your door is.
As we saw in the first Kingdom episode, the hermit-with-visitors cure is illogical but acceptable because the malady, wishing to die or kill so that your intense love for others won't make you dead or a killer, is illogical.
Fear that you and especially your loved ones might be killed combined with the belief that you can stop it makes you dangerous, is pretty much lesson 1 of the show; fear that they will be killed and you cannot stop it makes you suicidally crazy, is lesson 2. Morgan's "clearing" fog threatens to overtake him again after Benjamin dies, and killing Richard is clearly as much about killing himself as it is a way to stop version 3.0 (or so) of his plot to start a war. By killing him Morgan pretty much becomes him, is the irony to that - he may wish to spare the Kingdom but he does now plan to kill all the Saviors ... and since his action turns the King he's basically fulfilled Richard's plan unwittingly, of course. He even comes near to killing himself over Richard's intended grave.
Reburying Katy's backpack seemed related to Morgan's not letting the King finish telling him what Benjamin would have wanted - what Morgan and Richard do in the name of their dead loved ones ignores their likely wishes. That moment with the King was very moving, since he neither condemned nor approved of Morgan's action. He was just mad that Richard had done that and concerned that Morgan not stay out there alone. As earlier with his waving aside Carol's stealing weapons etc., I think we're to look for specific parallels between him and Negan (who burns people who steal from him, kills Spencer for daring to undermine Rick's authority by approaching him), and, in this particular scene, between this "sparing" of Morgan and the threatening, domineering, punishing manner in which "good cop" spares the long-haired guy. The season's overarching theme is pretty much the comparison of trust vs. fear as motivational styles, in fact. The proof Rick's finally (after 6 years, for the attentive) ditched his antihero status is in his treatment of Father Gabriel and of the junkyard group back in 7.9: he trusts the first hasn't betrayed him, and at no point even vaguely threatens the junkyard people, which not only prevents tensions from rising but clearly throws them clear of their usual response pattern. He does ask them what they do with prisoners after everyone's freed, but doesn't push it, dropping the "are you good people or are you bad people" interrogation that Gimple stressed straight out of the gate in 4.1 (the bit with the foreign woman). Treat people like they're nice and you'll have a lot more nice people in your life - an assumption that we see working again when he negotiates about the guns in the episode before this.
"Injure your enemy and you injure yourself" is this episode's key ironically reversible phrase. You can take it in a hostile way - manage to kill your enemy outright or you'll anger him while losing the element of surprise - or a nicer way: don't attack someone or you'll have attacked yourself, since he'll harm you back. Or a REALLY nice way: don't attack people (unless absolutely necessary) because attacking people makes you sick because some part of you will soon turn against yourself, since for your life to be precious all lives must be. (Carol doesn't kill the zombie on the street, since she's stsrting to Get It - Richard does; at the gate she does kill several, but this prevents the knights from risking their lives when they come out.) And where the Saviors are concerned, shooting Benjamin is a terrible idea because it clarifies to the King that they ARE his opponents. Though the good cop Savior seems to feel genuinely lessened by what's happened - perhaps his own illusions about what he's been doing on this "low stress" route are desteoyed a long with the King's. Clearly he'd given the order to just non-fatally injure one person, which is about as far as you can stretch Neganism in the direction of civilized behavior, but (exactly like Richard) finds that it's hard to control where a blow will fall or how hard. "Kill your opponent and you kill yourself" is another variation of the phrase's logic that Gimple wishes us to contemplate, though it's never voiced. Fits Morgan and Richard, but it's also going to be Negan's downfall. Threatening may be sustainable in the short term, but killing is not, and killing everywhere he goes has made lots of people hate him more than they love their own lives, including apparent loyalists (the Dwight/Eugene episode is about how both have figured out Negan and are playing him using the same techniques - he wishes to break people using total fear moments and then keep them with randomly scheduled alternations of carrot and stick, so all they have to do is act extremely cowed and greedily grab at everything offered and he'll assume they're his).
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Date: 2017-03-20 06:16 pm (UTC)It's doing interesting things with systems of organization too. The Saviors, at least in their warehouse/factory hometown, are very organized. A bureaucratic communism lead by an oligarchy itself lead by charismatic leadership. The vassal-states make it an unstable feudalism, unstable because of the trust vs. fear thing. Feudalism persisted because of oaths and other cultural enforcers of loyalty, but there must have been some point at the beginning when someone had to just take it. After a generation or two one could imagine Negan's utopia becoming an actual, viable, stable State. Trouble is there are currently two generations of people who hate him. Other trouble is he's built his organization around aforesaid charismatic leadership, which is notoriously vulnerable to succession failure. Without him the empire's gonna collapse faster than Alexander's. But Negan doesn't seem to be thinking about succession yet. Whereas Ezekiel is.
The Kingdom is more of a socialist utopia, and Ezekiel's brand of charismatic leadership is interesting in that he is already distancing himself from power. Even though he makes the decisions, the ridiculousness of his person makes him almost a figurehead. Like he's already preparing his people for his death, when he will become a myth. Richard he has given real power, as a general, whereas in other societies (Looking at you=, Rick), military power coups state power. And his affection for whatshisdeadname shows that he was grooming a successor, or at least a next generation of statesman.
Then we have the feminist utopia on the coast and the junk people, who are powerful because they are exclusionary, but are vulnerable to the desire for more --- more guns, more ethics, whatever. The question is whether these tribes can survive inclusion.
Hilltop -- douchebag leader acts like middle management, making a society that intentionally has no power: they're not fighters, they're not leaders, they just produce. A liminal state.
Meanwhile, Rick's group is still paramilitary. And Rick's transition from terrible leader (right, antihero) to effective general is interesting. For the first time in a long time he's out of power, and maybe being out of power makes him better able to imagine what good power would look like, rather than the contingent, pragmatic power that he's been enacting the last few seasons, lurching from crisis to crisis. The separation of power that has been growing between Rick and Maggie (military/state) was threatened by Glen's death and Maggie's brief need for immediate revenge. Curious that it is Sasha who is there to help guide her back, since Sasha is also in danger of abandoning justice for revenge. But maybe, just like the Morgan/Carol arc, helping someone else through your own problem is the best way to come to grips with it. Maggie will probably have to talk Sasha out of vengeance-suicide, or fail to do so, by the end of the season.
What still irks me is how Rick's group's claim to power is their rugged individualism, their very American reliance on personal responsibility and action, in contrast to the communism of the Saviors, the socialism of the Kingdom, and the unimaginable otherness of the junkers and the lesbians ((I mean lesbian-like, not sexually lesbian)). Liberal democracies like that of the congreswoman are doomed to failure, so is the show saying that the best governing is that of conservative democracies? Strong defense, kinship values, gun rights, etc?
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Date: 2017-03-21 03:11 am (UTC)Did that too with 7.1 b/c wtf. I mean, I get what they thought they were doing but they still should have realized why one ought not do that.
Saviors aren't precisely communist since conquest-based, and the points system is pretty much a service-centered version of capitalism (since all the goods are imports). They're a bit like decadent Rome, a bit like Darius-era Persia. But mostly they're an evil version of Skinner's Walden 2, with random interval scheduled carrot and stick used on the central group and initially just stick on the peripheral. Those with special skills get invited to the center. It's pretty much a homicidal pyramid scheme. Negan's charisma is about being the most psycho-seeming person, so it's also pretty close to how drug dealer hierarchies work (c.f. The Wire, when that second drug dealer takes over).
Alexandria falls because of a mixture of paternalist dictatorship keeping the people from knowing much - which they were fine with, but only because a leader stepped forward to play parent - and because the weakness that dynamic invited led to inviting in a foreign standing army (so Rome again - late this time) that finds dangerous excuses to keep existing. The show cares little about politics except as amplifications of micro-level moral decisions, though. Alexandria is Flight, Rick and co. are Fight (at the time), so neither is thinking straight. Democracies are good ways to ensure that straight-thinking mostly stays present - and comes back shortly when it doesn't. Neither group is a democracy, since each gave up its power to one individual out of fear long since. Rick and the congresswoman do have to think about public opinion, but even Negan does that. Their democratic gestures are basically PR. Ways to make it seem like their decisions aren't just theirs. Press conferences.
It's not even clear if Ezekiel's orders are even binding. The one person whose wish he even contradicts is Rick's, and Rick's an outsider. In 7.13 his lieutenant wants to eat the cobbler so does, Richard eants to stop the caravan do does, Morgan wants to strangle Richard so does. The gardener woman makes the garden call - the king just ratifies. Carol declares war - the king just makes her take the rest of the day off. It's totally unclear what the nature or amount of his power is since it's all based on trust. Even democracies are about compulsion. It's Mom power rather than Dad power, where she'll let you do what you want but you'll feel bad about it if she gets sad.
I can't remember what the deal was with Sasha and Maggie but the suicide mission thing is sounding pretty final.
Oceanside's visitor-killing and lack of males pose the same problem in two different ways, yeah. Isolationism = eventual attrition. Farmtown tries to buy its way out of fighting, Junkville tries to not care. All variations of Flight. I still assume they're doing a WW2 thing - Alexandria's Vichy then later the Resistance HQ, these other groups are Switzerlands or Swedens or whatever.