If you have a child between the ages of, say, two and ten, you probably know this movie and especially its lead hit, Golden.

The most surprising thing to me about this movie is that it was a fully American product.

Given the name of the movie, I assumed that this movie was, well, Korean. As in, made by Koreans for a Korean audience, but that it broke containment—similar to Squid Games, but for children—and became a massive worldwide hit.

Because we don’t have Netflix and I didn’t want to get Netflix, we just didn’t watch this until it got to a point where it seemed like we owed it to my son to finally be able to see what all his friends were talking about, what everyone was listening. And so I dug around on certain parts of the internet and procured a copy.

We’ll get more into the movie down below, but I was struck, initially, by how American the humor was.

When I lived in Korea, I asked my coworkers what kind of movies they liked. At the time, I loved Korean movies, but the ones that I had seen were the kind of arthouse movies that get exported to the west. Kim Ji-Wwoon, Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, and so on.

Korea has a thriving film industry in part because they have a protectionist market there for film. It has government subsidies and there are laws requiring theatres to show a certain percent of local movies per week. This keeps their film industry from being dominated by Hollywood and it has led to some fascinating movies by wild directors.

Anyway, one of them recommended a movie called My Sassy Girl, which was a gigantic comedy hit there (biggest comedy ever, at the time). I watched it and liked it. My coworker was surprised. She didn’t think the humor would translate to someone who wasn’t Korean.

Now, I don’t know if you’d like this romantic comedy but I thought it was good. I’d watch it again!

This memory tickled my brain while I watched this movie that felt like it had such a contemporary American kind of humor. The kind you would have seen in the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie or even some of what Marvel has put out over the last fifteen years. I sat there thinking, Korean humor has really become shaped by American conventions, which felt too bad because I had such strong memories of the creativity of Korean movies.

Anyway, it wasn’t until the movie ended and I decided to see who did the voices and so on that I realized the movie was made in the US by Canadians and Americans and animated in Canada, with some of the voice work done by Koreans.

Which brings me to the music, which I had assumed was produced by Koreans in Korea for Koreans and not by a mix of Americans and Koreans.

But what is it about this song specifically that became such a juggernaut, such a gigantic hit? Why this song and not Soda Pop?

Well, I could try to analyze this in a number of ways but the answer actually feels very simple.

People love to belt out a song.

We all love a sing along and this song is much easier to yell out than any of the other songs on the soundtrack, despite a song like Soda Pop being a much more fun song. It’s lighter, breezier, fun, danceable.

Golden, on the other hand, is much heavier and darker in every way. But it also reminds me of songs like Fantasy by Mariah Carey, in a very narrow way.

Now, Fantasy is a much more upbeat song like Soda Pop but it’s also just one of the most fun songs to sing along with and you’ll learn the lyrics on accident after hearing it just once. And, yeah, none of us are Mariah Carey so none of us can hit the notes, but that doesn’t change how much I want to stand up and shout Sweet sweet fantasy, baby! When I close my eyes, you come and take me!

And if you listen to that there, I dare you not to sing along.

The song is easy to learn, infectious, and does something that is not unusual but is just something that burrows deep inside us. There are countless examples of belting songs, but Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and Christina Aguilera, among many many others, made careers out of this kind of singing.

It’s something that is a bit out of fashion, I think. Taylor Swift doesn’t write belters. Ariana Grande could but she seems to mostly write club songs. Olivia Rodrigo is more like Avril Lavigne than she is like Aguilera, and so we don’t, as far as I know, really have a female artist making belters right now.

And then, out of nowhere comes Golden.

While Soda Pop is a more fun song, it’s also harder to learn the words, harder to find the melody, and harder to get a crowd all singing together.

Golden, on the other hand, is just made to be top of the lungs shouted in a room full of people all singing as one, out of tune but not giving a good god damn.

And at the core of a belter is experiencing someone pushing their voice to the limit. Bonedeep, it’s the same appeal in watching the Olympics or the Super Bowl. You’re watching a human do something extreme, something so far beyond you, yet they achieved it. They did it. Maybe because of the right combination of genetics or because of decades of discipline and training. No matter the reason, they are effortlessly pushing towards an extreme, brushing against a boundary of what seems possible.

And while Golden would likely be child’s play for Carey in her prime, at least in terms of hitting those notes, you can feel the way Ejae—the singer behind Rumi—has a much deeper register and, perhaps, a fuller chest, and so she’s at her absolute edge while trying to hit those notes.

You can see it more clearly when you see her do it live where she actually never hits those higher notes.

Now, you might see people marveling at her ability to do this song live, but, I mean, that’s her job. And, like I said, she didn’t even hit those high notes! They’re really beyond her, though you can see her hit them in this later performance on the Jimmy Kimmel show.

The difference in these versions is interesting enough to talk about. While Golden is a very energetic song, this transforms the genre. We get strings instead of synths. The music is slowed, the energy brought down, and the focus of the performance is shifted much more to the vocals rather than the, well, stagecraft of performance. They’re no longer moving around—save that breath for the words—and they drop the light show which is why they stop moving around in this version. You have violins and cellos, a thousand candles, and they’re dressed for the opera rather than a popshow.

The grammar of the visuals shifts your expectations, but also transforms how we think about this song. Rather than another hyperactive Kpop song, they presented it now as fit for the opera, for music’s cathedral. What all this presentation does is focus our attention more on the vocals themselves, which is certainly why Ejae puts all her effort into hitting those high notes. And you feel her reaching, stretching as far as she can to just brush against those notes with her long red fingernails.

You feel it too. The near desperation in hitting those notes. All that control and experience and effort channeled to her vocal chords, to make them vibrate jsut right, just loud enough, at that perfect frequency to make all of us listening nod our heads, maybe glass up our eyes because she did it.

There’s a great humanity in this performance. Taking the biggest popsong in the world that took maybe dozens of attempts to get right in the studio and doing everything you can to elevate it, to perfect it live. To deliver to all those children who loved the movie, to all those parents who couldn’t help but memorize this song, the definitive rendition of the song.

One that will live beyond the movie. Take on a life outside it.

You can see it in the way Ejae leads us into the second chorus. Watch as she works her way up to those notes, slowly sucking in breaths without missing a beat or a word. See her hand flowing, summoning that breath, trying to pull it down to her diaphragm so she can sing from there, from her belly, from the depths of her lungs, and not from her throat and head.

She needs to hit those notes. Needs to prove to you—to everyone—that she can do this. And in that way, there’s a mirroring to the movie’s plot.

But I dwell here because I do find this all worth commenting on and focusing on. Hear her pulling all that wind into her and then stretching her voice to the limits and then past them but managing not to break.

And I could dive deep into the lyrics or the structure of the song, but I think it’s all kind of self-evident. Listen to it. Hear it.

I dare you to not want to sing along.

And while I said up above that Ariana Grande mostly makes songs for the club, I am reminded of her impressions of other pop divas, but also this specific a capella performance, which, by its nature, is all about her voice.

The structure of this song keeps it from really being a belter, because it’s not exactly the type of song that gets a whole room full of dummies on their feet ready to sing at the top of their lungs until they go dizzy from headsinging. The melody also doesn’t really invite you in and make the song stick in your head even when you wish you could forget it.

But this is all vocals, a voice on its own in the wild quiets of an empty room filling every inch and seeping into those walls, a singer reaching deep into her lungs and gut to stretch so wide, to reach so high, to make you sit back in openmouthed awe at the 2:40 mark when she really sucks in breath to belt these words out.

A song that reminds me more of Golden is Sia’s Chandelier.

Despite Sia trying her best to disappear onstage, her voice is so full and resonant and big that she carries you, sweeps you away like leaves in a storm. You can feel her at the edge, and rather than feeling a let down when her voice slightly breaks or fractures, we’re drawn deeper in.

It hits us like heartbreak, like the sharpened shards of a thousand shattered memories of our own lives, of all we didn’t do, of all the love we never shared, of the love that fell apart, left us sobbing in our beds.

The utter humanity of it. Seeing someone reach past the possible. That draws us in, keeps us glued to our chair, but seeing the voice come up slightly short, hearing the rough edges of this beautifully perfect instrument sends chills down our spine to make the tips of our toes go numb.

Having said all this, I don’t know where this genre went where the whole song becomes a vehicle for a voice. But I suspect Golden is bringing it back.

And the question, for me, in this moment, becomes: what English popstars have the voice for this genre?

Can Taylor Swift carry you away with her voice?

Will Adele dust off her microphone and return with a belting ballad to remind us why, at 19, she earned pop’s crown? Will Ariana Grande learn from her time as Glinda the Good Witch to lead with her voice and leave the dancing and thumping beats behind?

Or will it be time for one of those aging divas like Christina Aguilera to return to the popcharts?

Now that we’ve wandered far afield, it’s probably time to return to the task at hand.

But before I get into the movie itself, I want to digress once more to this assumption I had that this was a Korean production. Because when I found out it was all Americans and Canadians, I began seeing the crumbling aqueducts, the Colosseum and Great Wall pillaged for bricks, and I remembered something I told my social studies teacher in 2002.

The American empire will end in twenty years.

Children of Empire

When I got hired to work in South Korea, I had never heard of Gwangju, the city where I was going to live for a year. Along with that, my knowledge of the history of South Korea was rather light. Obviously I was aware of the Korean War—my great uncle fought there—and I knew it was a proxy war between the Soviets and Americans, but I never really thought much about it.

While everyone knows and knew that North Korea became a Soviet dictatorship and one of the most repressive places on earth, few people, at least in the US, seem to know that we installed and backed our own dictators in the South. Less famously repressive, sure, but the US used South Korea as a satellite puppet regime—they even took part in the Vietnam War on our behalf—for our interests in East Asia and for whatever could be siphoned economically from the country. In 1980, the then US backed dictator violently crushed a Democratization Movement protest in Gwangju. US troops were also part of this crackdown. This led to a horribly repressive time but eventually led to an election in 1987, turning South Korea into a democracy for the first time.

Though South Korea had become a democracy, it remained and remains very much in the US sphere of influence and is closely aligned with our interests, even at the expense of its own people.

Take Jeju Island, for example. A US backed South Korean dictator so brutally repressed the people there that some have called it a genocide. Even talking about what happened there could land you in jail or worse up into the 90s, when South Korea was a democracy. Well, the island is known, now, as a holiday vacation spot and especially a place where South Koreans celebrate their honeymoons. It’s also been an island devoted to peace. But that hasn’t stopped the installation of an enormous US naval base right there, despite immense opposition from the people of Jeju and from South Koreans more broadly.

That naval base on Peace Island has been in use for nearly a decade.

Now, what do South Koreans get out of this very close relationship with the US, beyond imperial protection? Well, for one thing, pop culture!

If you’ve never been to East Asia, it really is interesting in too many ways to count, but something that I think becomes immediately aware to Americans who go there is how much the mainstream culture seems influenced by American culture, almost to the point of parody.

Now, South Korea clearly has its own culture and a long tradition of art and so on, but I don’t think it’s possible to listen to Kpop or just South Korean radio and not hear how American this music is.

Korea isn’t alone in this regard. Jpop is really no different. And you hear the influence across the world. The fact that many of the biggest artists out of Europe perform primarily in English is because of how omnipresent American cultural export is.

But to me, there was always something garish about this, at least in Korea. And a big part of this is because of the break in tradition that you can see.

In Europe or South America, for example, you can see that music has sort of traveled the same long tradition. Mozart belongs to Germany and Austria, yes, but he also belongs and belonged to Italy and Argentina and the US. We’re all westerners and our culture reaches back into the same big Euro-goo (with a not inconsiderable amount of that goo slipping along the Silk Road from China and Jerusalem).

But what we see in a place like Japan or South Korea is a completely new culture flooding in from outside after WWII. Today, Japan and South Korea are bigger baseball cultures than the US is. Their post-war music and film is so directly influenced by American culture that it’s difficult to even describe the scope.

But Japanese music from the 1950s is dramatically different from Japanese music from the 1940s and Korea followed a similar trajectory.

Since we’re talking about Kpop specifically, I think it’s time we take a great leap forward though.

Manufacturing and Designing Culture

Ever since four fellas out of Liverpool invented popmusic in the 1960s, studios have been trying to recapture Beatlemania. More than that, they’ve been trying to manufacture it, as if there was some specific equation that could lead to that level of popularity.

The apotheosis of this were The Backstreet Boys and N’SYNC, both invented by Lou Pearlman. Now, I have neither the time nor inclination to go into who Lou Pearlman was but all of this is well known, even for us experiencing the popularity of these two groups at the time they were dominating the charts. There was even a reality show about the process that played on MTV and resulted in the group O-Town.

But to sum it up as simply and succinctly as possible, Pearlman basically held auditions for male vocal groups. When he found the absolute perfect combination of five young fellas, each catering to a different audience (bad boy, heartthrob, etc), he had a team write them songs that then went out into the world.

In a world before algorithms and massive data sets and analysts, he discovered the secret sauce to recreate Beatlemania.

This ran face first into Japanese Idol culture and we saw the transformation of Jpop, Canto and Mandopop, and, finally, Kpop.

Art is a tricky thing. You might think to yourself that anyone can write a good popsong, but I dare you to try it sometime. Honestly, just sit down and try to write a song that will stick in people’s heads even when they don’t even like it. But the words are only one piece of it, and arguably the least important piece (there’s an interesting discussion about the nonsense lyrics propelled by Swedish producer Max Martin, possibly the most successful pop producers in history). Next you need the right kind of beat, melody, and performance.

And while I’m sure Spotify analysts have figured out the perfect algorithmically designed pop song, I bet most of those still don’t become hits.

For whatever reason, the US music industry moved away from manufacturing pop groups. Likely because Pearlman was showing diminishing returns and small indie acts like The White Stripes and random rappers like Eminem were knocking out the pop groups and divas and they were doing it without all the investment required in a group like Backstreet Boys.

I mean, think about it. You need to run a massive, nationwide talent search. That’s money. Probably a lot of it ($3mil just to find the Backstreet Boys in the early 90s, for example). Then you need teams of writers and producers to turn these boys into a group. Then you need to deal with the egos and the inevitable splintering of the group after these four or five random kids shoved together and turned into massive celebrities realize they actually hate each other and begin wondering if they could do this without the other fellas.

Justin Timberlake. Harry Styles. Whoever.

But the Korean music industry took this formula and kicked it into hyperdrive. Kpop vocal groups, male and female, began dominating Korean music. The conditions for manufacturing these groups is even worse than it was here in the US in the 90s for a variety of reasons. Someone should write a book about the subject, honestly, but you can dig around and find stories that stretch from benign to bizarre to brutal.

But the reason I’m laying all this out is to draw a line from the expansion of the American Empire to the cultural dominance of that empire to such a degree that what we might now call the indigenous Korean music, the biggest cultural export they have, is the child of empire.

Except rather than fight against that level of dominance and subjugation, they’ve embraced it and, well, made it into their own.

Because for all that Kpop is obviously indebted to American pop music and the manufacturing of pop groups and popstars of the 90s and early 2000s, they’ve also created a vast and homegrown cultural engine turning children into Idols. Plastic surgery, endless training and rehearsals, stealing lives in order to make these children into famous adults who will generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the companies that own them.

Strangely, the success of Kpop has begun to influence popmusic in the US.

We see that pretty clearly with Kpop Demon Hunters. This is the kind of movie that simply could not exist even ten years ago. Now, it’s the biggest movie of 2025 with several songs dominating American popcharts.

And why this is interesting is actually because this movie and these songs were not made by Koreans, but by Americans.

I am my own Grandchild

Rome fell several times before it finally fell in 1453, and sometimes this meant that people born barbarians became Emperor or co-Emperor. Then they dressed themselves as Roman, called themselves Emperor, and wore the clothes of empire until their Roman subjects agreed. Genghis Khan’s grandson became the Emperor of China and began the Yuan dynasty, all draped in Imperial Chinese, and calling themselves Han loud enough and often enough and with enough swords and spears that all of China agreed.

The periphery came to the center and stood atop it yet donned in the center’s clothing.

Akira Kurosawa was deeply influenced by American cinema and went on to influence generations of American filmmakers. Manga and Anime owe much to American comics but also Walt Disney yet they’ve gone on to influence American culture in myriad ways, including Disney movies (you don’t get Moana without Miyazaki, for example). Most notably, our animation has become colonized by our colonies. While we used to have many different distinct American style of animation, that’s all largely shrinking into anime-flavor and Pixar-flavor.

Beatlemania poured forth from four British kids drenched in American music and culture who transformed those many influences into a wild decade of creative output that went on to influence American pop music for the rest of the century. In my view, they’re probably the single most important musical act of the 20th Century and came to define most American music that followed.

Kpop has infiltrated the US market and now we’re seeing American pop music emulate Kpop.

I’m discussing a hit movie that is literally and metaphorically about the manufacturing of Kpop groups and those manufactured pop groups saving the world.

The difference between Kurosawa and Kpop has less to do with Japan and Korea and more to do with this moment in the US.

The unipolar world is over. This current administration has said as much. Almost tauntingly so. At the same time, we’re behaving as if the rules of the game have not changed. Our military remains belligerent. Our government is not even looking for domestic support let along international partners when they, for example, snatch up the sitting president of another country or assassinate the theocratic leader of still another country.

As someone online recently said, We used to manufacture consent in this country.

While the American Empire is sunsetting, our own culture is gradually becoming dominated by the cultures of what I might ungenerously call our client states.

Americans are increasingly jobless, dying from diseases of despair, with fewer and fewer economic options. Our infrastructure crumbles, our tech sector has stagnated and is about to combust on the big AI bubble gamble. The financialization of every aspect of our lives is turning everyone into a content creator, whether that means selling your body on onlyfans or selling your every waking moment on twitch or youtube or instagram or tiktok. Or, worse, you’re gambling on everything from the length of this essay to who wins the Olympics to the amount of times Trump says beautiful in a speech.

What can save America?

How long will it take for our desiccated husk of an empire to crumble entirely and what will we Americans do in the dustbowl that follows?

Such questions are too large to answer, but what if we all found hope and salvation in hypercommercialized manufactured pop?

Interpreting the Movie

Probably you’ve seen the movie if you have children and if you haven’t seen it then maybe give it a watch. It’s not bad. It’s better than a lot of kid movies. It’s fun, often funny, and is, in some ways, a throwback to 90s narratives about overcoming challenges.

Which is what makes the interpretation of the movie in the Discourse honestly baffling. A not insignificant amount of this is driven by the co-director and co-writer who has described the movie as explicitly queer.

This may surprise you if you watched it, since a major plot of the movie involves a burgeoning heterosexual romance and not a whiff of romance between any same sex characters.

Now, the idea that this is queer seems to be because Rumi is half demon and she grows to accept herself, demon and all. The story is about self acceptance, in a way, but I think, narratively, it’s much more about overcoming trials and tribulations.

And what I really thought when the movie was over was that the whole thing was, well, rather Christian.

When I thought this was a Korean movie, this was interesting but also unsurprising, given the rise in Christianity there.

Part of me feels like this is so explicit that it doesn’t even require explanation or persuasion but I doubt anyone who wants to claim this as a queer coming out story would also want to say that this is a Christian allegory.

With these dueling perspectives, I’m going to take a crack at both of them.

Queerness

From an early age, Rumi is told to hide the demon part of herself. Gradually, this makes her ashamed of this part of her. Her adoptive mother basically tells her that she can overcome this but only by saving all the souls of humanity, which is her purpose in life. She’s meant to hunt demons, save souls, and eventually destroy the big evil demon stealing the souls of humanity.

I see how you can interpret this as a queer allegory. You could say that Rumi’s adoptive mother knew she was queer as a child and tried to pray the gay away, telling her that her only purpose in life, the only way for her to be happy, is for her to be like everyone else.

Textually, I think this interpretation is very muddied, to be honest. Like, you can interpret everything this way, but a lot of it feels messy.

Especially considering the whole heterosexual romance happening.

And I get it. Queerness has become a lifestyle brand rather than an embodied activity or behavior. You see straight couples declaring themselves queer online and I guess that’s fine. To me, it all seems quite shallow, honestly, to divorce queerness from desire, to reduce it to a sort of style or fashion statement.

I mean, Rumi even learns to accept herself through her relationship with Jinu. Knowing that he is a demon and that she falls for him, that he displays kindness and warmth, empathy, and so on, allows her to fully realize herself.

I guess what I’m saying is that if her self-actualization came through romance with another woman, I’d find the movie queer. Having her self-discovery come through romance with a man feels…well, it doesn’t feel very queer!

It feels like what someone might describe as heteronormative storytelling.

Christianity

Demons are real and they prey on the souls of humans, feeding their souls to Gwi-Ma, the king of the demons who is presented as a giant fiery mouth. The way to combat these demons is through song. Hunters came in trios of women who erect a barrier against the demons through song. Once this barrier is strong enough, it will banish demons forever.

Just in that brief summary of the world of Kpop Demon Hunters presents Satan, his army of devils, and a holy three whose rituals save human souls.

Feels quite Christian!

But we continue on to Rumi.

Rumi is half demon and half human. She’s also a Hunter.

Christians among you may be familiar with the concept of Original Sin. We are all born fallen creatures. Our souls are tainted by the banishment from the Garden of Eden because of the first sin of Adam and Eve.

The sins of the father visited upon the sons (and daughters).

We are born tainted. We are born sinners. We must dedicate our lives to overcoming our fallen nature, to cleansing our soul, to overcoming the temptations of the devils, the seduction of Satan, or we will be forever damned, our souls belonging to the king of the devils.

Rumi is born fallen. Evil is in her. She fights tirelessly to overcome the sin she inherited from her father. This fills her with shame all too familiar for any Catholics in the crowd who must ritually shrive themselves in order to purify their souls.

Rumi’s salvation comes not from denying that she is a sinner but by accepting this fact. She is a sinner. She was born a fallen creature. But she does not allow that to define her. Rather than allowing the conditions of her nature bind her and hold her back, her acceptance of herself as a sinner allows her to save the souls of everyone on earth.

I mean, you don’t need to buy this interpretation, but it feels like it maps much more cleanly and neatly onto the character and the narrative of the movie.

It’s basically the message of our current pope, and most every pope who preceded him.

Beyond Allegory

But we don’t have to view art as allegorical.

Besides, there are aspects of the movie that defy both interpretations as well, or at least cast them both in different lights.

Namely, the manufactured nature of all this salvation and the commercialization of it. The Hunters realize that the best way to save souls is to become a Kpop group, which spreads their songs worldwide, allowing them to more effectively erect this anti-demon barrier.

We see how Huntrix become products, literally. Every aspect of their image is commercialized and sold. They’re action figures, plushies, shirts, and on and on.

Perhaps I’m too old. Perhaps the world is leaving me behind. I am nearly forty.

I feel it in my bones.

But I remember a time when we viewed this kind of commercialization as disgusting, as intrusive, as dehumanizing and destructive. But perhaps I’m making too much of a movie made for children about turning popstars into heroes.

It feels unpleasant though. Gross, even. It’s a symptom of Idol culture in Korea but that’s a descendent of our own homegrown obsession with the rich and famous. So much so that we turn the rich into celebrities and then turn those celebrities into, for example, president.

It’s part of this financialization of every aspect of life, of turning every waking moment into a chance for consumption, for consumerism, turning every behavior, every instant of our waking lives into a transaction until we begin to consider relationships transactional, where we begin to view family and friends as transactional, where we abandon duty and responsibility for dopamine hits and self-care.

There was a time when queerness was radical, both as a behavior and politically. But now queerness has become, for many, a sort of social accessory often highlighted by literal accessories, by fandom, by hyperspecific flags to purchase and adorn yourself with. Queerness as costume, as affectation, as consumer habit, as algorithmic recommended shows and songs and disposable fast fashion.

And while Christianity has had many controversies over the millennia related to ostentation and transactional salvation, most Christians would decry the notion that you can buy your way into heaven.

They fought wars over it. A lot of them.

And so the realities of this world, of this version of salvation, presents a bleak view of our present. Where consumerism has won so completely that it has become invisible. It has become mundane. It has become all encompassing.

Worse, consumerism is our new path to salvation.

Perhaps the bleakest thing I’ve ever encountered. The most nightmarish cyberpunk future I could have imagined.

Salvation as lifestyle brand.

Identity as fashion.

Again, though, perhaps I’m seeing too much into an artefact of popular culture made for children. This isn’t exactly the kind of movie that demands a lot of thought. It could be, but it’s just not.

And so let’s return to the on-purpose message of the movie.

Recently, narratives online really highlight self-acceptance. There’s a sense that you are okay as you are. You don’t need to change. Demands that you change are repressive or oppressive. You are good enough.

You do you.

Be yourself.

Et cetera.

But I’m glad that Kpop Demon Hunters treats difficulties as, well, difficulties. More importantly, it treats them as obstacles to overcome through deliberate effort.

If Rumi simply accepted the demon half of herself, that would not be enough. She needed to become a Hunter in order to save humanity. She needed to fight for years, honing her skills, training to become our savior. Her motivation to do this was to escape her own demonic nature, but that demonic nature, that problem, that deficiency, that failing, pushed her to become who she needed to be.

Of course, only then, powerful and capable as she had become, was she ready to see that that problem, that deficiency, that failing was actually a source of strength.

It made her who she was. More than that, by embracing the parts of her that she was ashamed of, she found still more strength.

She worked hard. She fought hard. She overcame.

She saved humanity!

A brief return to Imperialism

A few years after leaving Korea, a woman I knew moved there to be an English teacher. Frozen had recently come out and this woman was so dismayed that all these little Korean girls thought Elsa was so beautiful, that they wanted to dress up like Elsa and belt out Let It Go.

She’d post online about how American beauty standards were destroying Korean girls. It was quite dramatic.

I wonder what she thinks about all the millions of white American girls who dressed as Rumi from Kpop Demon Hunters for Halloween, who long to be that beautiful, that strong.

So what?

Over twenty years ago as an angry, egotistical, and abrasive fourteen year old, I told my social studies teacher that the American Empire would end in twenty years.

My timeline was off, but probably not by too much. I think I was more or less spot on, at least with regard to our prominence as the leaders of the unipolar world. Of course, considering such predictions as meaningful, especially when coming from a toddler in an adult body, is pretty silly. I had no faith, even then, in America, but that wasn’t so strange on the eve of the Iraq War.

But I have been thinking about collapsing empire for most of my life. Not all the time, of course. That would be deranged. But the thought returns again and again as I grow older. Millennials like me have lived our entire lives in this state of collapse so it doesn’t seem strange to me to see it all around us.

Perhaps that’s why watching a movie about lady popstars supernovaed in my head, casting visions of decay, reminding me of the day I spent on the Great Wall, walking along long abandoned sections where trees taller than me grew right from the brick, where big chunks of the wall have been disassembled brick by brick by local people who use those bricks for their own homes or some other purpose.

When I was in Vienna, I saw Roman ruins being excavated beneath a busy street. When I was in Edinburgh, I visited the city beneath the city. In Paris, I walked the catacombs. In China and Korea, I saw where they paved over their history, building highrises over centuries old buildings and neighborhoods. In Japan, I wandered through thousand year old temples.

The earth churns. Cultures thrive and die. Empires rise and fall and leave nothing but dust, though sometimes they leave monuments that seem eternal.

A six thousand year old pyramid. A ten thousand year old burial mound.

A city under the city.

You can despair over living through collapse, through decay, through stagnation, but what is the point of despair?

We have but one life. You may choose to waste it in sorrow for what was lost, for what’s being lost every second of every day, for the grand extinction event we’re living through.

Despair is easy.

It’s not pleasant, but it is easy.

To rise. To stand. To face despair and collapse.

That’s strength.

I don’t ask you to find hope, but you will find strength when you stop looking inward or in the mirror and begin looking outward.

Life is hard. Life is difficult. The challenges never end.

You may crumble and give up and die.

But you could face it all bravely. And while you may not be able to save what was lost, to change what broke, to fix this world you inherited, but you can do your best to fight for those around you, for friends, for family, or for the broad concept of humanity.

Our children and grandchildren will inherit the world we leave them.

We cannot sing our way to salvation like the characters from Kpop Demon Hunter, but we can follow their example. And hopefully teach our children to find strength and hope in this kind of narrative, where insurmountable odds are, well, surmountable, but only if you give everything you have.

And ultimately, I think that’s why Golden is a near perfect pop anthem.

Launching on Kickstarter this afternoon is a surprise RPG setting from me and Tony Tran (the artist who illustrated Horus & Motherfucker). Go check it out! It’s called Briar Bay and it should be a lot of fun.

Onto today’s topic.

Once an indie darling, Rian Johnson has become a filmmaker tied to the culture war, sadly. Liberals love him mostly because conservatives have come to despise him ever since The Last Jedi. While that might be the most controversial Star Wars movies, I remember thinking it was the most interesting one.

Of course, you shouldn’t trust me when it comes to Star Wars.

I don’t even like Star Wars.

This may be why I found The Last Jedi fascinating. But we may get to that another day. For now, I want to talk about Rian Johnson’s newest movie Wake Up Dead Man, which is the third movie in his ongoing Knives Out series.

Now, I like Rian Johnson. I always have. Brick is one of my favorite movies from the early 2000s and I loved The Brothers Bloom and Looper. I was dismayed when he went to make a Star Wars movie, but that’s life and a fella’s gotta eat. But I really enjoyed the first Knives Out when it came out and I don’t remember a single thing about the sequel. I have a growing feeling that filmmakers who go to work for Netflix should be treated like strikebreakers, in part because Netflix and other streaming services are destroying culture, but I stepped into the third one because my wife’s tiktok algorithm had fed her scenes that piqued her interest.

You could say my wife is a woman of faith and this movie about a priest got her interested enough to actually sit down and watch a movie, which is a true rarity.

After some googling around sites of dubious legality, I found the movie and we ended up watching it on New Year’s Eve.

I liked it! She liked it! Was a nice way to bring in the new year.

I may talk about it at length some other day, but I’ll say this for now:

Every movie is about half an hour too long now, especially when they’re made for streaming. This particular movie doesn’t drag when you watch it, but I imagine a non-Netflix version of this comes out to a neat 100-120 minutes and is stronger for it. Like, the long, extended preamble leading us into the case could have probably been five minutes long rather than twenty.

Anyway, I really just want to talk about one scene that takes place about halfway through the movie. At this point, our priestly protagonist Father Duplenticy and our detective Benoit Blanc are trying to figure out who the real murderer of Monsignor Wicks was. The prime and, really, only suspect for the police is Duplenticy, but Blanc knows he didn’t do it, so we’re off to the races.

It’s a bit madcap and borderline silly. They’re racing back and forth, ruffling feathers, digging into receipts and records.

At this point, they discover that someone ordered for the tomb that Wicks is currently buried in to be opened days before he was murdered. This is odd! Suspiciously so! Likely, the murderer knew that this would be needed and so they ordered it in advance. It’s the kind of information that screams pre-meditated but also the kind of blunder that causes these nefarious ne’er-do-wells to be caught.

Well, Duplenticy is talking to this receptionist at the construction company that rents out this equipment and he’s rushing her along, trying to get this information. He’s gotta clear his dang name! And this backwoods oaf just keeps rambling and rambling while Duplenticy and Blanc need to keep their foot on the pedal, racing forward before the local police lock our sweet priest up!

While he’s trying to rush her off the phone, to have her call him back with the information he needs that will potentially clear his name by pointing a big finger at someone else, she’s sort of hemmin and hawin until, at last, we learn why she’s keeping him on the phone.

He’s a priest.

She needs one.

And here is where the movie turns and where it, finally, says something quite interesting. It’s a turn not demanded by narrative expediency but by the reality of the character.

Rather than continue rushing forward, getting off the phone, and racing after a lead to find the real killer, Father Duplenticy slows down. He stops rushing. Finally, he begins to listen to this woman.

He remembers who he is. Or rather, he remembers what he is.

Priests are just people. The movie does much to remind us of this fact. Priests are just like anyone else. They can be vain and rude and petty and venal and they can be dopey and clumsy and foolish. Yes, they are all these things because a priest is just a man.

Except, at the same time, a priest must be more than a man.

And this is what this frustrating woman reminds our young priest.

He has a duty to people. He has a duty to God.

I think another movie made by a different person would lean into the humanity of a priest. Yes, he needs to be a priest but he also needs to clear his name!

Wake Up Dead Man does something far more interesting by having Father Duplenticy turn away from the investigation rather than his duty.

Blanc is frustrated because he needs to solve this case and he needs to clear Duplenticy’s name, but our young priest no longer cares

He is a priest.

His responsibility is not to a detective or to the police but to God and the people who have been entrusted to him.

You don’t often see movies anymore that treat faith seriously or that take the time to honor and respect people of faith. You don’t often see priest protagonists that are sympathetic anymore, unless that priest is having a crisis of faith and potentially leaving the priesthood and his faith behind or having some kind of epiphany that appeals to people who live in New York or LA.

But I think Johnson does something truly interesting here by allowing his characters to lead this story rather than let the caper of the whodunit dictate what happens and when.

The kind of people who call Rian Johnson a libtard definitely would not expect to see how much empathy Johnson has for his priest or for faith, but that’s a problem of polarization, of sucking every possible aspect of culture into the culture war.

And so if you’ve sat on the fence with this movie or turned your back on Johnson entirely, I do highly recommend it. You don’t need to see the other Knives Out movies first. All you need to know is that there’s a detective who solves cases and he’s played by Daniel Craig.

So just sit down and open your eyes and give this a watch.

Wicked is a movie adaptation of a stage musical adaptation of a novel by Gregory Maguire, which is itself a revisionist imagining of the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank L Baum but also of its movie adaptation of the stage musical adaptation of Baum’s novel.

It’s all quite weird and wonderful, this double helixing and compounding variations on what I’d call a two stringed melody.

My wife wanted to see the movie so we saw it a few days before Christmas and then I read the Frank L Baum novel on Christmas Eve and then I read Maguire’s Wicked about a week later and then we rewatched The Wizard of Oz, so every possible iteration—excepting the stage musicals—are fresh enough in my mind that I may as well talk about this. And one may ask: why do all this?

Do you really love Wicked or the Wizard of Oz?

Not especially, to be honest. I mean, I like them well enough! But I suppose it all comes down to my mild obsession with adaptation as a process1. And I think Wicked actually offers something blaringly strange about what may happen during the adaptation process.

But before we get there, let’s roll the clocks back to 1900.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Make no mistake, there’s nothing wonderful about this wizard!

This is a brief and fast moving novel meant for children so there’s not much preamble before we find ourselves in Munchkin Country, with a dead witch under a house. From there, we really get on with it and Dorothy collects her cohorts, but not before first meeting a Munchkin named Boq, which is relevant 90 years later.

You know the story. I needn’t summarize here. The main difference is that there’s more of it here and it’s actually quite a bit stranger than the movie we’ve all seen a score of times by virtue of growing up in the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s. For you younger readers, I don’t know what TV was like after that for I am old and was off doing things better left unmentioned for much of my teenagedom and early twenties.

A few differences are that the Ruby Slippers are silver in the novel and that the Flying Monkeys are bound to another magical item called the Golden Cap, which allows its owner to command them three times. There’s a bit more about the social structure of Oz, albeit implicit and oblique, and there’s quite a bit more stuff after they discover that the Wizard of Oz is, as they say, a humbug.

But most interesting is the political situation of the novel. Or rather, the situation outside the novel, in the real life world.

Dorothy’s Kansas is dry and arid and farmers scrape by to make a living, whereas Munchkin Country is a land of bounty! There’s food everywhere. And in this way, we get contrast. In contrast exists critique.

The late 19th century was one of massive political upheaval. Robber barons ruled the second half of the 19th century and populist progressive movements across the country sought to change that. Anarchism had also been on the rise, along with political assassinations. Even a president had been assassinated! There were multiple financial crashes and America seemed to have become a land of corruption and oligarchy.

One may find a similar state these days, if you have eyes to see, ears to hear.

And so Baum was writing about his own world, but also showing a more hopeful world where food and land were plenty, where tyrants were taken down, where liars and conmen were unmasked.

And, yes, he’d rather have a man of stuffed straw in charge than a thieving conman.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

There are many interesting elements to this movie, but the most obvious is the color. Such vibrant, wondrous color! And such attention put into the sets, the costuming, the singing, the dancing.

While the novel was focused on Dorothy, the movie adaptation (and, presumably, the stage musical that preceded it) has much more of an emotional core. The novel glides over the surface of emotion, to busy darting from place to place, helter skeltering across the land of Oz, which must be quite small, considering how quickly they traverse it. But the movie really brings it all down to the human level and keeps it there.

We live and breath, laugh and cry, by Dorothy.

This is especially apparent if you old men and women like myself watch this with a child. There’s a terror present in the movie that’s not really in the book, and it’s because of the omnipresent danger to Dorothy, the wild and weird spectacles assaulting her.

But, again, this movie came out of a politically volatile time. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl ravished the middle of the country. The robber baron class was finally overthrown and antitrust laws were set in place to protect regular people, but we were also marching to war with the rest of the world.

We could discuss the conditions on set, but perhaps it’s best to let the magic linger in you rather than worry about the brutality of the conditions that ruined a few lives and sent a few to early graves.

The world felt drab and brutal and so we escape, once more, to a magical, bountiful, colorful world with fascinating people and legible morality, where tyrants are toppled as easily as a falling house or a splash of water.

As popular as Baum’s novels were, they would have likely faded from view without the musical. I mean, how many people still read Baum’s novel? How many people are even aware that he wrote more than one or that this movie is based on a book?

And the music is stunning. I don’t need to tell you that. You probably have most of the songs memorized, even if you don’t realize it. But put on the soundtrack or rewatch the movie sometime this week and marvel how deep these songs are inside you.

There was a certain kind of magic to these old movies. The choreography is great, the cinematography is easy and well constructed. Each scene legible. Every scene gives the actors room to breathe and act, rather than the current era of editing where there’s a cut every three seconds. Here, we have long sequences where blocking matters, where the whole body is allowed to act. We’re not locked into close ups of everyone’s faces for 90 minutes but instead able to take in the background, foreground, and the action of the main cast.

I do think the performances are where this is most noticeable, but we’ll get to the contrast in a bit.

What more needs to be said about this weird, wonderful movie?

Wicked (1995)

If you’ve seen the musical, I must say that you have literally no idea what’s in store for you when you open this novel. If you think Baum’s original was wacky and weird, you’re about to be stunned by what happens here.

I’m actually not going to spoil the novel here in the main text (though check this footnote if you want spoilers2) since I imagine most people have not read this. I mean, a whole lot of people did, obviously. It sold well enough to earn several sequels and it became a longrunning acclaimed Broadway musical and now a very successful movie, so it’s not like this is some arcane, obscure text.

But considering the differences between the novel and the adaptation, it may as well be.

Now, I do think this began a trend that I find quite dumb, which is the revisionist story where we learn about why the bad guy from some children’s story was just misunderstood.

Boohoo, et cetera, and so forth.

But what Maguire does here isn’t simply give the Wicked Witch of the West a backstory. No, he invents Oz.

And I mean that quite seriously. For all that Baum did to make an interesting marvelous place, it’s more akin to Narnia, I think, than any lived in reality.

Maguire brings politics and religion to Oz and he does it in fascinating ways. I cannot even begin to fathom how he looked at Oz and saw such fertile ground for a story about revolutionary politics, but I suppose it’s oddly fitting, given the lived experiences and contexts of Baum that went into the creation of Oz nearly a century earlier.

Wicked takes place a few decades earlier than The Wizard of Oz and goes up until the end of the Wizard of Oz, so the Wicked Witch does meet her wet end, but how we get there feels like it’s from another world, despite sharing much of the same roots and actions.

Elphaba, the girl who would become the witch, is born green, and this sets her apart. But rather than this simply being a story about racism, we get something much more interesting. For while her skin sets her apart, it also just becomes another characteristic. I mean, this world is full of talking animals teaching at universities and tiny people and witches and so on. While being green is unusual, it’s not all that sets her apart.

No, what sets her apart is a state of lovelessness.

It is a cruel fate, to be born to the people she was born to.

Her mother was a runaway heiress who married a small time preacher as an act of rebellion and she regrets it almost always. Not that she doesn’t love him, but she also, through boredom, finds infidelity excitement enough to keep her going. Thus and so, Elphaba is born.

And then there’s the whole situation with Turtleheart, but check the spoilerful footnote below if you want to see some of the stranger aspects of the novel. We get a lot of groundwork early on, showing us Elphaba’s childhood, but also dealing with the politics of the world.

Oz was a monarchy but this Wizard who appeared from the sky led a bloody revolution to topple the government. While Oz was struggling with droughts and famines, the Wizard brought technology and industrialization to the land. We see in the Wizard of Oz how this led to bountiful harvests, but here, in Wicked, we see the human toll of this work.

An oppressive, totalitarian regime forms and it devastates communities, leading to what amounts to near genocide for certain regions of Oz. And then there is the Animal question, prominent in the movie and novel, that reduces our speaking, thinking Animals into, well, animals.

Here inside the novel is a metastasized metaphor for Elphaba.

You become what society makes you.

If you are forced to live as an animal, you will become one.

And we see how Elphaba interacts with this pressure. She is an outcast because of her skin, but her actions exacerbate that rather than attempt to alleviate it. While she’s welcomed and befriended by people at Shiz University, she keeps them perpetually at a distance and often ensures her own isolation.

We see this go on in the novel. Her Wicked moniker is well deserved, even if she was unfairly pushed in that direction.

Wicked (2024)

How this is an adaptation of the novel, I will never know! The only commonality, honestly, are character names and the setting. The politics are largely stripped out of the movie or flattened to a very black and white kind of morality.

Elphaba is only misunderstood and demonized unfairly because of her skin.

We can all see the racism analogy or maybe even the homophobia analogy or, perhaps, the trans analogy. Its flatness, its blunt politics make it consumable, relatable, understandable, and, ultimately, toothless.

But no matter! This isn’t really about politics, though it may occasionally wear such clothes.

The novel has a much more nuanced and complicated approach to all this. But that’s for book readers and long talkers, for essayists and floundering intellectuals who spend all their days writing and talking about things like art and politics and their intersection.

The movie is a success despite being one of the most baffling adaptations I can think of. What this has to do with the novel is essentially a mystery, but that’s all right.

This is a fun, funny, and exciting movie. It has lots of singing and dancing and color.

Though my main quibble with the movie is the way it looks.

Apparently all the sets were made by hand. They spent hundreds of hours making these sets. And I’m sure they look great in real life, but the post-production team decided to slap on some effect that makes them look like CGI.

This is absolutely baffling and makes the movie look much worse than it should. Because so much of every movie is dressed in CGI, you can barely find a genre movie where the sets are not greenscreened in. Film has become trapped in big studios, in empty warehouses where actors pretend to be somewhere while they’re surrounded by nothing, and all that nothing will eventually be filled in my CGI.

It makes everything look like shit. And it’s quite sad that the effects team here slapped slop over all the hard work of all those craftspeople.

This bleeds over into the performances. We have choreography that was clearly rehearsed and practiced and looks great, for the glimpses we get of it. Much has been made of the livesinging approach to the musical, where the actors sing live rather than lip sync, but both the choreography and the singing are masked by editing.

The biggest dance number is Dancing through Life, which has dozens of people dancing and singing together. But the camera is constantly in motion, often obscuring the dancing. There are so many cuts in the scene that you may think that the actors only learn the choreography five seconds at a time. And this is a shame, and a stark contrast to The Wizard of Oz, where we really inhabit those performances.

We are allowed to see the dancing, the choreography, and this allows us to appreciate it, to marvel at it.

And this is true of all the choreography. The editing gets in the way and we’re stuck with flashes of choreography, of bodies in motion, rather than a full scene where we can sit back in awe of the performances, of the sheer physicality of a scene where thirty or fifty people are dancing and singing, stomping their feet, belting out with their biggest voices.

And it really is a shame because I think these performances were great. I’m not exactly what anyone would call a fan of musicals, but my wife is. And so I see more than I would if I were choosing solely for myself. But Wicked has moments of greatness and I think it’s too bad that modern filming conventions box it in so often.

Because I do love choreography. It’s why I love Jackie Chan and Jet Li movies. It’s why I love ballet. Dancing is a beautiful, wondrous art form, but the way we film it now makes it almost impossible to experience.

Even so, even despite all this, the movie is a very great time.

What’s all this then?

Well, I don’t really have some conclusion or bigger point to make. But these many versions of the same story fascinate me. From the Baum and Garland versions up through today, we have such strange twists on a world that seems more thrown together by accident than anything else.

But the refraction and interaction of all these visions, of these characters, of this world, imbued with politics and theologies and philosophies make them worth experiencing individually or in concert.

Of course, if you must only experience two, I’d watch the 1939 movie and read Maguire’s book.

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The first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies are all great. We can quibble and argue and all of us can collectively bray like a bunch of dumb goats about this, that, or the other thing, but I think, at this point, it’s fairly well accepted that that is a solid trilogy of movies.

There’s action, humor, adventure, romance, horror, surrealism, and buckets full of silliness that amount to something that kind of serious. And it all works! It’s a kitchen sink full of kitchen sinks wearing a buccaneer costume.

I love it.

And then we come to the fourth movie and the wheels didn’t so much fall off as get ejected into the stratosphere. This is really too bad since it’s kinda sorta adapting a very good novel by Tim Powers, which was a very good fit for this universe.

Alas.

And I know that much of what I’m about to suggest couldn’t happen because of career decisions by Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom but we’re wishing here.

Might as well use as much wishing as can be done.

The focus of the post-trilogy movies should have been the reunion of Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner. As you may or may not remember, Will Turner is now the captain of the Flying Dutchman and so he is locked in the arms of the sea for eternity, only able to come ashore one day per decade. As we see at the end of the third movie, Elizabeth has a son who gets to meet his father for the first time.

Something the movies seemed to have forgotten, too, is that Elizabeth is the Pirate King. Yes, she goes to shore and seems to live her life, but she remains the Pirate King.

And so we pick up with this new story and she is the Pirate King. She grows harder and embittered towards the British Empire, which took so much from her. She raises her son as a pirate and though he’s only a young teenager, he’s already learning the ways of piracy.

He has his own plan in all this. He’s heard stories his whole life about his father and even his grandfather, cursed to the Flying Dutchman. More than that, he’s lived with people who have lived through curses, broken them, and found ways to keep going.

And so he presents a plan to free his father and presents it to his mother.

But she’s been hurt too much by fate and knows the dangers of playing with gods and monsters and curses, so she refuses. Tells him there’s no way. That only a madman would try.

Jump cut to Jack Sparrow doing Jack Sparrow type things.

Henry seeks him out, viewing him as the only possible ally in getting his father back. He finds Jack about to be executed for something debauchery or piracy related. Saving him, they make an alliance to save his father.

Jack has no real interest in this but he does like the sound of getting free and getting back on Elizabeth’s good side. Possibly even rekindling their friendship, or possibly more. But first he sees that Henry has a ship manned by at least a few pirates he knows.

Well, as it turns out, Elizabeth is not happy about her son taking his ship off to find his father and she wants him back, the way any mother wants a wayward teenager back. When she finds out that he’s looking for Jack Sparrow, she’s apoplectic, as people tend to be when discovering anyone likes Jack in these movies.

Jack finds out about this from Henry’s somewhat disgruntled crew who believed there was more in the winning than saving Jack Sparrow, who they don’t especially like. And so Jack makes a plan to mutiny and take Henry back to his mother. At the same time, he begins to like Henry and even feel for him. A fourteen year old boy leading a crew of grizzled pirates, unaware of the hell breaking loose beneath his own feet. And so, even as he plans to betray him, he teaches him what he can and befriends him.

But first they run into Barbarossa, who is now an agent of the crown as a privateer. Barbarossa has also been looking for Jack because people are always looking for Jack. There’s a bounty, as usual, and Barbarossa wants that sweet sweet gold.

Henry’s crew refuses to throw their lives away for him and his quixotic quest or for Jack so there’s no battle and Barbarossa takes possession of Henry’s ship and crew, and Jack returns to the Black Pearl for the first time in fourteen years.

Henry tells Barbarossa that he’s Jack’s son and Barbarossa figures this may as well be true and Henry’s crew goes along with the lie because why not.

Henry has, of course, heard of Barbossa as well and knows he was cursed, broke his curse, was killed, returned to the living, and so on. If anyone can help him deal with his father’s curse, it’s probably Barbossa. And so though he’s a captive, he begins digging for information. He’s a charming young lad, and he discovers this myth of Poseidon’s Trident (borrowing this from the fifth film, because why not). This Trident will allow him to break the curse on his father.

But Henry, though clever, isn’t as clever as he believes, and Barbossa begins scheming himself. He can tell the boy isn’t Jack’s. Even though Jack and the boy clearly have great affection for one another. As the weeks carry on, Barbossa finds he has a lot of affection for Henry as well.

However, he also sees a lot of value in getting on the good side of the captain of the Flying Dutchman. And, barring that, he at least sees the value in coercing the Flying Dutchman to do his bidding the way the East India company had him under their thumb in the third movie. And perhaps the best way to get that is to find this trident. The boy seems to believe in it so strongly, after all.

And the two old pirates begin to father this fatherless boy, each of them plotting to betray him and one another. Because Jack is needling his way into Barbossa’s crew who are less than happy to be working for the crown.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth has learned that Barbossa has captured her son and she raises an army to sink the Black Pearl once and for all.

This all comes to a head as a British fleet, Barbossa, and a pirate fleet all meet off the coast of Ireland with Barbossa cutting and running, leaving the Imperial Navy and the Pirate Armada to fight it out, while he goes to find the Trident.

And we leave the fourth movie there.

The fifth movie picks up right after

We begin with Elizabeth recalling the brief day she’s shared with Will and all that’s changed in her life since then. The brutalities and betrayals, and we see how the other pirates fear her. For she has become a terror on the seas, and she fears facing Will again, knowing how she’s changed.

Rather than fight the whole Navy there, she makes a truce, of sorts.

Let’s not get bogged down in the details.

This movie is all about Barbossa, Jack, and Henry adventuring and forming a strange kind of relationship, with both Jack and Barbossa standing in for the father Henry has never known.

So that’s one thread of this.

The other thread, and the main emotional weight of these post-trilogy movies, is about Elizabeth and her love for Will.

Fate, cruel fate, has kept them apart. They’ve been given a son, but Elizabeth could not give up the sea, the adventures. And for this, she was betrayed by friends like Jack and Barbossa, warred upon by Britain, and forced to fight an endless war on behalf of her son. To give him a future, a life.

It’s all quite misplaced and a bit tragic, especially as she’s now forced to encounter the supernatural monsters once more. The search for the Trident leads them to all kinds of reality breaking encounters and so on.

Eventually, through some chaotic misadventure, Henry falls into the sea and drowns.

There, he is saved by his father.

A father who has also been transformed by the years. Physically, sure, but also emotionally, philosophically. He’s become an eternal being, cursed to his ship, surrounded by the dead and the cursed.

How could he remain a man?

After losing Henry to the sea, Barbossa continues his search for the Trident and eventually finds it on some island where he maroons Jack once more.

And after misadventure, calamity, and the bumbling of Jack Sparrow, the ambition of Barbossa, and the mixture of love and hatred powering Elizabeth, we all climactically run into one another.

Elizabeth and Will are not who they were. Can never be, again, who they were for one another.

Barbossa seeks to control the seas with the Trident but Jack appears with some supernatural nonsense and smacks it out of his hands. Henry, Will, and Elizabeth all reach for it and some more magical nonsense happens and Will is freed!

Oh happy day!

But perhaps not quite, for they cannot simply go back to England—or anywhere, really—to live a happy life as a family.

So we get something a bit bittersweet.

Even roughly sketched as that was, I think it would be a thousand percent better than what we got out of the fourth and fifth movies.

Pirates of the Caribbean, for al the supernatural shenanigans, the Jack Sparrow capering, and the knottiest sort of plots imaginable, are really about Will and Elizabeth. The whole trilogy revolves around their love for one another. So removing them entirely for the fourth and fifth movies and focusing entirely on Jack makes the movies actively quite bad.

So we shift the focus back to Will and Elizabeth, to love and the many complications keeping two people apart.

But you bring them back together and show that it is not a dream. But it can be, if they’re willing to fight for it.

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Since the essays I’ve been planning on writing haven’t been written yet, I’m going to talk about these three movies instead.

It’s been interesting watching these three movies in such close proximity because they’re by directors I think of fondly but also represent interesting elements in what remains of the Hollywood machine.

We’ll start with Civil War.

I’ve been a fan of Alex Garland since reading his debut novel in 2004 or 2005 or whatever year was happening when I was sixteen. I read his other two novels, which were weaker, albeit quite interesting, and I’ve followed his career in Hollywood with excitement. Whether as a writer or director, I think he’s one of the best we have on offer. What that says about Hollywood is an interesting question, but I do think he’s a good filmmaker and a fascinating writer.

Civil War’s premise is the draw. In a time of increasing polarization in the US, many people are talking about the inevitability of societal collapse. In the lead up to 2016, part of me thought that a Clinton victory could spark violence. I didn’t really think it would lead to a civil war, but I think it could have.

And what’s frightening about a civil war in the US as it exists now is that the factions would not be so regional. I mean, a little bit they would be, but every state in the country is split between urban and rural, and this is the axis by which a civil war would play out.

And so every state would have its own localized violence, which is quite a bit more terrifying to me. I mean, if the civil war of 2024 fell along the same boundaries as it did in 1860, I would feel pretty comfortable sitting a thousand miles from the secessionist south.

So we have quite a setup and backdrop to the movie, but then Garland does something quite risky but also more interesting. Rather than take a broad approach and try to describe a society in collapse, the political motivations, the political factions, he zooms waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay in to look at just a handful of people.

Personally, I would have chosen people more disconnected from the violence, but using war journalists as the perspective is a clever move. We get to see the violence close up and we get to meet and talk to a cross section of society at various parts.

I mean, for the most part we’re meeting combatants and the journalists documenting the combat, so not a true cross section of society. But it also keeps it from being a movie of talking heads monologuing about politics, about social topics, and so on.

This is very clever. The execution is solid. It’s not a complete success and sometimes the acting is a bit wooden and awkward, but there’s one scene that stands out above the rest and, I think, justifies the entire movie.

About three fourths of the way through the movie, our journalists are actually having a bit of fun. They run into some Hong Kong based journalists while speeding down a lonely, empty highway, and our two main perspective characters get separated. One of the Hong Kongers gets in Lee’s car while they’re driving and Jessie gets in the other car, which speeds away.

The car Jessie’s in gets caught by some militia men and Lee and her group attempt to save them. And they do this by trying to calmly talk their way out of a situation where a few men with automatic rifles have their friends trapped next to a trench full of bodies.

With the polarization we see everyday in our real lives, people on both sides begin to create narratives about themselves. Everyone believes they would be heroes and stop the nefarious otherside.

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Someone sent me this today. They saw it on facebook where people were talking about the upcoming election.

It’s funny and fitting, having just watched Civil War, because of how obvious the lie is.

If this person saw a guy with a MAGA hat wandering the streets with an AK47, they would not fight that person. They might call the cops (which, if we’re in a civil war, good luck!) but they would not fight them in the streets.

And this scene in Civil War explains exactly why. The militia men who catch them are completely uninterested in the fact that they’re journalists and therefore not combatants. When they dole out violence, it is precise and without scruple. It is so matter of fact, in fact, that it’s one of the most harrowing scenes I’ve seen in anything in a long time.

The terror comes from the understated nature of the event.

Civil War shows hollowed out cities, battered and broken, where small groups of people with automatic rifles shoot at each other. The combatants hardly seem to care why they’re fighting anymore or who they’re fighting against.

But by focusing so closely on these handful of people, we also end up with a movie about politics that is shockingly apolitical. It’s almost astounding how absent politics are from the movie and narrative. The civil war is a backdrop to a story in the same way a zombie apocalypse might be the backdrop to a different movie about violence and friendship.

Which leads me to Oppenheimer.

Like most American men who remember the year 2000, I was a fan of Christopher Nolan. I’ve seen most of his movies and I’ve liked most of them. I find him exhilarating in very specific ways.

I don’t really love any of his movies and think most of them become actively bad the more times you see them, but I’m exciting by the fact that there is at least one director left in Hollywood who can command huge budgets without making a movie about superheroes or some other kind of existing IP.

I mean, he’s made two big swing SF movies from original concepts, or at least original scripts. I’ve written a bit about him already so I won’t go on in this way but I was very excited to watch this movie, finally.

And it is quite good from a technical perspective. I do think it’s fair to say that Nolan’s talent as a director comes from a technical focus. Every shot is great. His attention to detail, his commitment to visuals, his willingness to bet big on what can be done with a camera rather than how many millions can be poured into CGI after the filming is done.

And Oppenheimer really is a technical marvel. It also has just a stacked cast. Going into it mostly blind, the way I go into most movies (I don’t watch trailers because who cares), I was surprised by how many A-listers were here, even if they were basically just dropping in for a scene or two.

But because this movie is packed with great actors and it’s a historical biopic focused on a single interesting figure, it was, of course, destined to have Oscars thrown at the performances.

My question, though, is, should it have won any?

And, honestly, I’d say No.

Well, maybe for Robert Downey Jr. He really is a scene stealer here and gives a tremendous performance.

Which pains me to say, really, because I love Cillian Murphy. I’ve been a fan of his since, like, 2002 and especially since seeing The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Breakfast on Pluto. So I wanted to see him win this Oscar and knowing that he won it, I went in wanting to bask in his performance.

And it is good. It’s perfectly fine. This isn’t a slight against Murphy, mind, but one against Nolan.

The actors are really not given much to work with to bring their characters to life. Despite this being a biography of J Robert Oppenheimer, you might be surprised by how little you learn about him over the course of three hours. We see two romantic relationships that he has. You might wonder what exactly he liked about either of these women or what they saw in him because none of that’s really in the movie. They’re just thrown together and we accept that because, hey, this is a movie.

And besides, sometimes the most powerful stories are the ones that have you fill in the empty spaces.

But I think that approach is actually quite bad for a biography. These two relationships end up revealing almost nothing about Oppenheimer or the women. We get so little about who and what Oppenheimer actually is that when we start dealing with the way the US government attempted to ruin his life, we’re actually not entirely sure why they’re doing it.

Despite the movie being three hours long, it also feels strangely rushed.

And, like, Civil War, this movie that is ostensibly about politics is weirdly absent of politics. Yes, we see a communist party meeting and some names get thrown around, but the political questions of the time are largely a backdrop to the movie.

And so what is this movie about, if it’s not about the politics or even really the man?

Nolan likes concepts. I’d say that he is a conceptual filmmaker. What drives his work and dominates all his narratives are concepts.

Which makes the dialogue oddly painful at times because no one in this movie ever, even once, just has a normal non-plot related conversation. Even when he meets his lover, they’re talking about concepts. When he meets his wife, who was married at the time, we don’t see passion. We see two people talking about science.

Over and over again, people don’t really have personal conversations. They have conceptual monologues and dialogues, with all characterization comes through body language.

Which is, in theory, kind of cool, but it’s also hard to pull off when so much of the movie has the camera a few feet from Murphy’s face.

Now, I’m not going to say this is a bad movie but I will say it’s overrated. I think it succeeds as entertainment that holds your attention tightly, but I think it actually fails at being a movie about a man, or even a movie about a society.

In some ways, it is a perfect contrast to Civil War, because it has such a wide scope. We see dozens of characters who come in to say some sentence about world affairs or politics. And yet, you could come away from this movie feeling as if you learned nothing about the politics of the time or even the nature of the trial at the fulcrum of the movie.

And now we must talk about Megalopolis.

I love Francis Ford Coppola and so I felt almost duty bound to see this movie. Especially when considering the absurd lengths he went to get it made. He sold his winery! He financed this movie himself!

And some people have the audacity to speak about its box office numbers.

Children, if Coppola was looking to make a movie to make money, he would not have spent his own literal fortune to make it.

He could have shit out some movie for Disney and received a fat paycheck.

This is the movie he needed to make. He felt it so urgently that he literally threw away a fortune to make it real. To give his vision to the world.

And what is this vision?

Well, I will say this: it is the most political of these three movies. While the politics are kind of messy and cartoonish, they are at least present. And they are not subtle.

I typically try to only talk about the work. I feel that the text must speak for itself and we can often ignore the author behind it. The biography of an artist rarely interests me and I’m especially not interested in what they were doing, personally, at the time they were making their art.

But I find this to be an example where it’s difficult to ignore the man behind the camera, since he basically dumped a lifetime of money to make a movie that is…

I mean, how to even describe it?

What is Megalopolis?

For one thing, it is wacky.

And I don’t mean that pejoratively. It feels deliberately wacky. A heightened kind of surrealism that makes it feel like it came from a different era, or from no era at all.

Oppenheimer and Civil War are fully committed to the bit.

This is about real life. You can see the dirt and feel the grit in your teeth.

Megalopolis is not at all like this. It’s operatic in ways. Dizzying in its effect.

What are we to make of a movie that begins with the protagonist literally stopping time?

But this strangeness, this unique vision so at odds with trends and everything happening in Hollywood around this, makes it sort of difficult to put my finger on how I feel about it.

I mean, I love it. I love it the way I love Scrubs but also the way I love my dumb cat and old friends who disappoint me often. I love it like I love kitschy baubles I have from thirty years ago or terrible books that mean so much to me because of how and when and why I experienced them when I did.

Is it a good movie?

Who cares.

Is it well made?

Sometimes!

Is it fun or funny or thought provoking?

All three, but not always for the right reasons.

If you missed it in its theatrical run, I bet you’ll see it in ten years at a midnight showing where people are dressed like Aubrey Plaza and Adam Driver and Shia LaBeouf. People will scream the worst lines of dialogue back at the screen to a crowd of laughing and stoned college kids. It’s a movie that seems almost designed to become a Rocky Horror Picture Show kind of cult hit.

But is this what Coppola wanted?

Certainly not!

And what’s strangest about it, I think, is that while it is this operatic and silly and over the top movie, it’s also a very serious movie with moments that are genuinely beautiful and powerful. Moments of societal critique that hit harder than any other contemporary movie, but then that will be sandwiched between critiques so childish and blunt that you feel a sort of whiplash.

What is this movie?

I find myself wondering that even two weeks later. And that’s actually kind of neat.

It’s a technical marvel, it’s a sloppy mess, it’s a powerful look at society, it’s a childish burlesque.

It’s actually my favorite kind of art. And I guess I spoke about this a bit last week when writing about Stephen King’s It. But I love the grand ambition of the cathedrals of this world, but I love them even more when they’re unfinished, crumbling in on themselves, when they amount to so much yet so little.

Unparalleled ambition and unimaginable beauty and undescribable awe.

I love Megalopolis. I love how it interacts with film history. Love the visual language of it. I even love Driver’s commitment to the film and LaBeouf’s utter madness as he traipses across the screen like Caligula.

It’s gorgeous. It’s a collapsing star. A flooded landscape. A cratered mountain.

It’s beauty is in its failure but especially through the shafts of light that are succeeding. Those glimpses of genius piercing through the mad disaster.

And so I’d actually recommend it over Civil War or Oppenheimer, which are both, in a narrow sense, much better movies. Those movies give you what movies are supposed to, or at least what audiences have come to expect when they go to the theatre or stream from their couches.

But Megalopolis is this transdimensional wrecking ball showing us what movies can be. Perhaps, even, what they ought to be.

• Comedy Central Presents: Bo Burnham (2009)

• Words Words Words (2010)

That just makes me laugh every time.

This show is distinctly different from what came before, which makes sense since he had a few years to write it and work it out. In some ways, this is the first one that really feels like Bo Burnham to me.

He comes out with a terrible haircut like usual and seems very awkward and fidgety on stage like he did in the previous two specials.

There are a few things that are very noticeable to me in this as well. For one, his voice is simply better. Less nasally. He has a fuller and richer voice, more capable of holding a melody and tune.

And while the show relies much less on wordplay, he is deliberately offensive from the very first non-musical joke.

Wordplay still drives a few jokes, like his poetry recital, but most of the show moves past this style of comedy and relies more on irony, meta commentary, and visual and editing gags. Which is why this comedy special feels designed to be filmed rather than simply performed. The fact that a joke relies on an editing cut really drives this home.

The entire show is also choreographed very tightly. It’s the first special where blocking matters. And rather than just being him on stage telling jokes and singing song, there’s a lot of pre-recorded bits played over his choreography.

This is pretty odd for a stand up comedy show! I’m not entirely sure anyone else has done that to the degree that Burnham does it here. These pre-recorded bits become an interactive aspect to the special, where Bo has dialogues with the pre-recorded voice.

He’s breaking the fourth wall but also attacking the conceit of a performance and the reality of the situation.

Stand up comedy often relies on relatability for jokes to land, and here he’s taking direct aim at that concept. And so he’s performing stand up while attacking the premise itself and even, in a way, attacking the audience for showing up.

He is a performer aping sincerity while also constantly reminding the audience that this is a performance, tearing down and ripping apart the veneer of reality that this whole thing is meant to rely upon. And in this way, he breaks down the space between performer and audience, between passive and active engagement and participation.

He’s also taking aim at comedians in general, and especially those with a sense of self-importance who believe their job of telling jokes is meaningful in any way beyond the laughter.

And yet Burnham seems furious that his audience is there at all, laughing at all.

And he is way more aggressive here towards his audience. While homophobia, racism, and misogyny have been a part of his show since the beginning, these were always meant to be ironic, in that you were meant to be shocked that he would say these things because you know it’s wrong.

And so he often explains his joke as if you, dear viewer, are an absolute idiot who can’t understand.

Which makes his homophobic, misogynistic, and racist jokes that much angrier. I imagine this comes from realizing that many people listening to his jokes took them at face value.

When Dave Chappelle quit The Chappelle Show, he said part of it was realizing that people in his audience were laughing for the wrong reasons.

Which is quite a thing to experience.

And so Burnham builds a show on a foundation of artifice, of artificiality. He is breaking down the show and comedy itself. There’s a sense of hatred here. And, perhaps, we should take Burnham’s statements on stage seriously in which he describes his collapsing mental health. And there’s reason to believe this is true, based on things he’s said outside of his comedy, in interviews, but, as an audience member in a show about artificiality, with pre-recorded choreographed bits that attacks the idea of fame, of comedy, of stand up, you’d be forgiven for believing this is still part of the act.

Fame kills empathy. Humor is the death of empathy.

He’s in a fight with his audience, forcing them to understand that none of this comedy just spilled out of him in the moment. Rather, it was tightly written, constructed, acted, and directed.

He reveals the artifice of the show, thrives on it, forces us, the audience, to contend with it. To accept it but also to deal with his anger, with our complicity in a system that he tells us is killing us and culture.

In this show that is about him as a subject, in which Bo as a person, as a concept, is at the core of the hour, he also demands that we destroy him. And rather than be relatable, he forces us to understand that we do not know him. That we never will. That we can’t.

That everything you believe you know about any famous person is a lie.

There is no Bo in this show that has an extended joke about the makeup of his brain and about the people he knew, who knew him before his fame, and how even they cannot see him, cannot understand him.

That he has become a canvas for us to project ourselves upon, for us to invent a version of him.

This mask he wears, this constructed persona, moves to the fore and fills the stage. Becomes the Bo that we know and watch.

And all the while he throws spears at us to remind us that the Bo we’re watching is a fake.

That it’s all fake.

He rejects our projection and notion and conceptualization of him.

The desire to be unique. To be seen. To be heard.

The reasons he got into comedy and yet now that all his dreams are in his hands, now that he commands the stage, he finds a vast emptiness inside himself and all around him.

I think we see this most clearly in Out of the Abyss, a sequence of short jokes, and Repeat Stuff.

The reduction of art to commercialism, the manipulation of youth, the way songs written for children are designed in a lab by adults to be addictive and destructive. He compares this to indoctrination and takes it as far and offensively as possible when he gets the crowd singing the chorus along with him and then stands up and sieg heils.

Which is to say that these adults creating culture are using the same tools that Nazi propagandists used to transform Germany into the Third Reich.

This exact topic will arise again and again in future shows.

And rather than simply point this out, he’s also pointing the fingers at himself. He describes his appeal to the youth early on in the special, the importance of relatability, the brand of self, and the control and power this gives him over you, his audience.

And the fact that he designed a show that tells you that this is all a lie becomes part of his brand as a performer.

It’s all quite Mark Fischer of him.

There is no longer a self. No longer a Bo. Only the performance, the brand, the false idol of fame.

And yet along with this, he has also constructed a show about collapsing mental health, about this trap he’s found himself in, that he built himself. His emotional instability requires the strict structure, the tight choreography.

While Bo Burnham has always sounded like an AP Lit kid, he’s using his intelligence to bully us, to overpower us, to indict us for liking the show that he designed specifically for us.

And so rather than find salvation in his own art, in his own show, he instead drags us down into this hellish vortex with him.

The end of the show feels like a thesis, like an explanation to himself, to us.

This deconstruction of self, of fame, of the show itself also just becomes an absolute smashing song tightly choreographed, destroying the artifice of the show, but, importantly, also handing power back to Bo. Which is also something that he leans into in the future.

But this is really, to me, the first real Bo Burnham comedy special. Everything before that feels like it was made on the internet of 2007 by a teenager addicted to the internet in 2007. Here, with what., he interrogates all that he’s done before.

Both rejecting it and all of us who loved it while also drawing a straight line from that older work to where he is now. He wants us with him, yet he can’t stand that we’re here.

He needs us.

He hates us.

He turns this statement of powerlessness, of lack of control, and uses it to tell a story, visually, sonically, in this final song about creating something new. Something beautiful. Taking control and rising through the chaos of expectation, of projection, and leaving us with something strangely resonant after an hour where he all but attacks us for caring, for believing, for hoping.

It is, I think, his most aggressive show.

Watch it here.

• Comedy Central Presents: Bo Burnham (2009)

• what. (2013)

Just a year after his first comedy half hour, Burnham had his first hour long comedy special, which shares some of the same jokes with his 2009 special, which isn’t that surprising considering the timing and the difficulty of filling an entire hour of comedy. And you can feel the thinness to the set.

Still, there is development here, particularly in Bo’s stage presence. While he was mostly awkward and highlighting his youthfulness in his first special with just a hint of biting darkness beneath it all, in Words Words Words he leans more into this biting darkness.

His persona becomes more distant, even as the crowd wants to embrace him more. They shout their love for him and we get the sense that he is caught off guard by this outpouring of genuine emotion. And so like many young people who don’t know how to handle their emotions, his persona lashes out.

There’s a sense of a caged animal here.

He wanted this. Chased it. Found it. Toured the country, sold out theatres, sold out albums, and what he found is that the taste of fame is different than what he hoped for.

Despite all that, he seems and feels far more confident here.

Rather than an awkward boy, he presents and postures more as a prodigy. Like he deserved all this. Like it was fated because of his immense talent and intellect.

A Mozart of dick jokes and offensive ethnic stereotypes.

His jokes in this special still have the dense wordplay of his first special and rely heavily on attempting to shock and offend. Like when he gets the audience to fall into a call and response during a song. As soon as the call and response is in full swing, he shouts at them, telling them That’s how Hitler rose to power.

This edge plays throughout the special. Not only a biting satirical edge, but like Burnham himself is on edge.

He craves the attention and fame but he resents us for giving it to him, for laughing at his jokes about vaginas, about Jewish people.

Burnham has said that his comedy inspirations are Mitch Hedberg, Anthony Jeselnik, and Steven Wright, among others.

Now, I don’t expect everyone to know every comedian, but Jeselnik is, perhaps, best known for outraging audiences and offending them on purpose. Often he begins his joke in a very stereotypical way, using a sort of Seinfeldian observational setup. But instead, he takes this light setup and goes to a very dark place.

A sample joke:

Women are really divided on abortion in this country. Half of them are cool, but the other half I have to drag down there.

If that doesn’t make you laugh, don’t watch any of his special. What makes him work, I think, is that Jeselnik delivers every line with combative arrogance. He presents himself with such supreme confidence that you can’t imagine him giving a shit whether you laugh or not.

You almost feel him wanting you to storm out of the theatre in protest of the offensive shit he’s saying.

Interestingly, I think it’s clear how much Jeselnik owes to Wright and Hedberg who are best known for their one-line jokes.

The first time I saw Mitch Hedberg was on Comedy Central Presents. I watched it alone, which is a recipe for laughing less since comedy and laughter are communal activities. But I was laughing by myself so hard that I was crying and effectively missed the second half of the half hour special because I was still laughing so hard at the first half.

I remember clearly the day he died and how strongly it struck me. Maybe especially because he’s from Minnesota and Minnesotans are obligated to love any famous person from here, but I couldn’t help but feel the loss of the funniest person I’d ever heard.

A sample joke:

I’m against picketing, but I don’t know how to show it.

Hedberg also had one of the strangest stage personas, which was driven by his own immense stage fright. He hid behind a curtain of hair and sunglasses while he stood rigidly clinging to the microphone like a lifeline while he delivered his jokes with a surprisingly casual voice and halting intonation.

Steven Wright is very much in the same field of one-line comedy. His persona has just feels wildly indifferent to the fact that he’s on stage, that you’re there listening, or that any of this is happening. You get the sense, too, that these are all just thoughts bubbling up in the moment rather than something rehearsed and practiced and perfected.

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.

I bring all of this up because you can see Burnham, in a way, as the combination of these three comedians. Burnham’s standup is full of nonsequiturs and wordplay, short bits that are meant to surprise and offend. His persona is a mix of overbrimming confidence, sneering indifference, and obscene levels of stage fright.

The biggest difference is that Burnham’s comedy mostly comes through in song.

But it all feels, instead, like an insufferable prodigy who doesn’t care if you’re impressed or not. Because he’s also not impressed that you’re there, paying him money to listen to him talk and sing.

He expects it.

This best in class or smartest boy in the room persona makes his jokes about other comedians and comedy in general land better. He comes as a liberator, as a transformational figure, and this works because of our culture’s fetishization of young people performing at a high level.

Everyone hears about a debut author who becomes a bestseller when they’re 20 but most people don’t hear about the debut author who’s in her 40s or 50s when she hits it big.

We love to see someone succeed in their field at the highest level when they’re basically still children. Burnham knows this and plays off this expectation.

And while I do think this special is a bit thin—I don’t think he was really ready to hold a whole hour—with a few bits that are overlong, like the haiku and one man show sequences, there’s also interesting growth.

He’s becoming a more confident performer and also discovering and crafting his persona, but his writing also becomes more interesting. And so I want to talk about the most important early piece of Bo Burnham.

Art is Dead.

Art is dead
Art is dead
Art is dead
Art is dead

Entertainers like to seem complicated
But we're not complicated
I can explain it pretty easily

Have you ever been to a birthday
Party for children?
And one of the children
Won't stop screaming
'Cause he's just a little
Attention attractor

When he grows up
To be a comic or actor
He'll be rewarded
For never maturing
For never under-
Standing or learning

That every day
Can't be about him
There's other people
You selfish asshole

It’s hard not to assume that Bo is talking about himself here. He sought fame and attention. He broadcast his desires out to the world and was rewarded for it. Not just a little bit, but immensely. He became rich and famous, was embraced by audiences and Hollywood. He began getting offers, people requesting he write scripts for movies or TV shows.

He was nineteen/twenty when this special came out. He had very famous comedians vouching for him, singing his praises.

Though he started on the very unserious comedic platform of youtube, he was on his way to being embraced by the comedy world. He’d already been embraced by audiences.

And so we see a strong current of self-loathing in this song.

But this is also an outward facing sort of thing. He sees himself in everything he hates and despises about famous people.

I must be psychotic
I must be demented
To think that I'm worthy
Of all this attention

Of all of this money, you worked really hard for
I slept in late while you worked at the drug store
My drug's attention, I am an addict
But I get paid to indulge in my habit
It's all an illusion, I'm wearing make-up, I'm wearing make-up
Make-up, make-up, make-up, make...

What will become a recurring theme for Burnham is the artifice of fame and performed authenticity. He began as a performer in his bedroom but even then he was playing a part.

He knew this. Maybe we all knew it.

But the false intimacy, the manufactured relatability of the medium—talking into your webcam from your bedroom—cultivated this sense that internet stars were just like us. That the only thing keeping us from being on that side of the screen, pulling up thousands or millions of views, was that we never pushed record.

Unlike so many who have claimed and crafted a narrative of hardship paving the way to fame, Burnham just undresses that narrative and stands nakedly there on screen telling us that his job is easy. Not only that, but that it’s more an extension of neuroses than anything else.

But, at the same time, he’s literally playing the piano and singing.

This is a performance.

Even the words.

And I think this is the secret sauce of Bo Burnham. The way he layers—well, let’s be patient for now. There’s more of this down below.

Art is dead
So people think you're funny, how do we get those people's money
I said art is dead
We're rolling in dough, while Carlin rolls in his grave
His grave, his grave

The show has got a budget
The show has got a budget
And all the poor people way more deserving of the money
Won't budge it

'Cause I wanted my name in lights
When I could have fed a family of four
For forty fucking fortnights
Forty fucking fortnights

I am an artist, please God forgive me
I am an artist, please don't revere me
I am an artist, please don't respect me
I am an artist, you're free to correct me

A self-centered artist
Self-obsessed artist
I am an artist
I am an artist

But I'm just a kid
I'm just a kid
I'm just a kid
Kid
And maybe I'll grow out of it

Rather than continuing to dissect this song since you can read the words for yourself and hopefully understand them as clearly as I can, I think I’ll just repeat this very important sequence that may hold the key to this whole special and Burnham’s relationship with his audience, with fame, with the internet.

You can watch this special here.

Free books

• Thoughtful Science Fiction

• Take the Darker Path

• Late Summer Genre Fusion

• Beastly Books

• Dystopian Fantasy Books

This is about Bo Burnham, who I think is a good case study in the way the internet has infiltrated and shaped our lives. Though it’s more accurate to say that this is a part of a part because the whole bit about Bo Burnham is about the length of a short book on its own.

And so I’ll be releasing this little investigation into Bo Burnham over the coming months.

Will it end up in the actual book? Who knows!

Probably not.

• Words Words Words (2010)

• what. (2013)

A little thin. A little awkward. A nasally voice that’s a mix of untrained and obnoxious. A shy young kids who looks like a little boy, yet occasionally sneers with condescension at the audience.

At his audience.

His stage presence is a mix of self-deprecation, antagonistic sneering, aw shucks humility and awkwardness, and he uses this to try to jar you with vulgarity and offensiveness.

Which interestingly works pretty well. There’s something about an awkward teenager so clearly from an affluent suburb with an oversized intellect bombarding you with overt sexual wordplay while he raps or sings.

Bo Burnham became, perhaps, the first real viral youtube star and he managed to transition this into a comedy special when he was eighteen.

Life sure was different between 2006 and 2009.

I remember when this special came out because I remember discovering him on youtube, the way millions of others did.

In his Comedy Central special, he really plays up the awkwardness of being an eighteen year old kid on stage performing comedy for adults. And, I mean, this may have helped cover up a lot of the potential terror of being on stage and performing for people who paid money to see you play the songs you first gave away for free that you recorded in your bedroom when you were sixteen.

And I do think this is an important aspect of understanding Bo Burnham.

As a teenager, he began recording himself and then sharing these with the world. With the novelty of youtube and the ability to easily share these videos with other people, he became famous on college campuses and high schools.

Not famous like an actual movie star or comedian. No one was confusing these songs with, like, a Chris Rock special.

But these unadorned, lofi, humble performances invited us into Bo Burnham. We were literally in his bedroom. His bedroom was in millions of other people’s bedrooms.

Seeing him move from his bedroom, from youtube, to Comedy Central felt like watching your high school friend become famous.

Some of you might have been eaten by jealousy over that, but even you would probably also feel a sense of ownership over his fame.

I was there when he was nobody. Look at him now.

That’s a surprisingly resonant feeling.

Enormous, really.

The internet made Bo Burnham famous. It gave him a career. Gave him the life he has. Which, in a way, means all of us who shared his work, who watched it, who laughed along to it, paved the way for him to leave his bedroom and see his name in lights on auditoriums across the country.

For those of you too young to understand what Comedy Central meant in the 90s and 2000s, this was basically the proving ground for comedians. Especially Comedy Central Presents, which featured the first recorded performances of some of the biggest current names in comedy, from John Mulaney to Nate Bergatze and Jim Gaffigan and all the way back to Wanda Sykes and Mitch Hedberg and on and on.

I remember sitting with friends in my parents’ basement and watching Comedy Central Presents, excited to see who came on. Excited to discover a comedian we’d never have heard about otherwise.

It’s worth noting the kind of content of Burnham’s early songs. They were deliberately offensive and reliant upon certain kind of cultural signifiers. But I think they also relied upon something that’s very real.

Take My Whole Family… which may be the true breakout of the youtube era, which culminated in this Comedy Central Presents special.

If this doesn’t feel funny to you now, in 2024, well, I think we can all recognize how culture has shifted in the last fifteen years. Also, this kind of humor plays different when you’re seventeen or twenty compared to when you’re over thirty.

But he begins his special with this song and then brings attention to the rainbow tiedye shirt he’s wearing.

You guys like my shirt?

Back home they called me the tiedye shirt kid. Well, that and faggot. So on that note I’m gonna rap.

Now, reading that may feel quite jarring! While no one uses the f-slur much these days, I don’t think I went a single day in high school and middle school without hearing it. And I’m just three years older than Burnham. I can’t imagine his experience growing up was much different.

I was a generally well liked person in middle school and high school despite being an absolute disaster of depression and I sometimes joked, once upon a time, that my nickname in high school was faggot. I’ve mentioned before how a coach at my high school called me that word to my face in front of a bunch of people and no one—even other adults!—batted an eye at it.

But if reading that word used twice in a few sentences made you cringe, I got bad news for the kind of content Bo Burnham built his career on.

I do think there are things to appreciate still in this early work.

And I think, even though he’s deliberately trying to offend and shock, there’s a certain kind of honesty to this. Like, I can tell you without a doubt that Bo Burnham probably had people calling him a faggot almost daily.

I can tell just from looking at him because I was there, babies. Some people meant it cruelly, some meant it as a joke, or even used it as a term of endearment (a girl I loved, who kind of loved me in 2005, called me faggy as a pet name).

But time marches on, changing how we relate to certain words, and no one really says that anymore.

I mention all this because Burnham, even as a teenager, was grabbing something very real about daily life, and especially about language usage. And his early work is very linguistic. There’s a real AP Lit kid feel to much of it. I can recognize every reference he makes and I could do it when I was twenty because I was only a few years removed from the exact same kind of education he had. Gifted and talented—wow! How novel!

And I think this is part of what resonated with us when Burnham came over our laptops while we sat in dorms. So many of us took the advanced classes, received college credits, and we grew up on a select kind of signifiers, of books and poems and ways of thinking that was common to AP Lit programs across the country in 2006-2010 (and maybe even still).

I grew up lonely and depressed and the things I knew and the grades I performed sent me in different directions through high school and so when I entered college as a Freshman, I was almost a Sophomore.

And even though college was bright and full of new people and possibility, I remember wandering empty streets alone at 3am because I hadn’t slept in days.

When I looked at Burnham then and when I look at the kid he was now, I see the kid I was. A mouth full of big words and grand concepts set to the Eminem style of insulting vulgarity of the Marshall Mathers and Slim Shady LP era.

It’s all about the sound and shape of words and the ways multiple meanings can stack to surprise and delight and offend and shock.

There’s a lot of wordplay and a powerful density of language happening in some of these jokes. The way he begins his album telegraphs what kind of comedy you’re getting into.

He’s ironic and satirical and self-deprecating and trying to keep you linguistically on your toes while also making frat boys laugh and other people cringe.

Ultimately, it’s all a bit thin. He didn’t have a lot to say, which is fine, honestly. I don’t think comedians need to do anything besides make us laugh, and this was very funny to people in 2009, and especially for people between the ages of 14 and 22.

Is it still funny?

Well, maybe not, especially if you’re getting old like me. But if you’re sixteen or twenty, you may laugh a lot.

And that’s really good enough. I don’t really recommend going back to revisit this performance, but it is an interesting artifact in time. A snapshot of a young man finding his voice and trying to figure out what works in real time.

But if you do want to watch it, you can find it here.

Next, we’re onto Burnham’s second special Words Words Words which you can watch here.

2015 is the 30th anniversary of the founding of Studio Ghibli and, according to Hayao Miyazaki, it may also be one of its final years as a studio. Because this is one of my favorite films studios and Miyazaki is one of my favorite artists, who’s made some of my favorite films, I’ve decided to go through the history of Studio Ghibli one film at a time.

If you’re looking for the discussions of the previous weeks:

• Laputa: Castle in the Sky

• Grave of the Fireflies

• My Neighbor Totoro

• Kiki’s Delivery Service

• Only Yesterday

• Porco Rosso

• Pom Poko

• Whisper of the Heart

• Princess Mononoke

• My Neighbors the Yamadas

• Spirited Away

• The Cat Returns

• Howl’s Moving Castle

• Tales from Earthsea

This does, however, mean I won’t be discussing Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which was made before the founding of the studio.

I’ll also only be discussing the Japanese audio version of the films, though that doesn’t mean the dubs are bad or not worth seeing. They’re just slightly different. I’ll also be discussing these with the assumption that they’ve been seen by you. So, yes, spoilers are below.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, or just Ponyo, is a visual masterpiece. As a Miyazaki film, it’s not my favorite, but it does offer some amazing moments, some surprisingly big ideas, and just so much fun. It would best be described as a children’s movie, and is probably the most child oriented Miyazaki film since Kiki’s Delivery Service, but there’s also a subtle darkness to this film that really only exists if you take a step back and think about what you just experienced.

That’s the part that’s most interesting to me, but we’ll get to it later.

Ponyo is a retelling of The Little Mermaid, though with a lot of Miyazaki and Japanese influences. It begins stunningly. Those first five minutes where not a single word is spoken is so beautiful, so simple. The underwater world Miyazaki created is magical, beautiful, natural, and effortless. Immediately, it gives us a lot to look at, puzzle over, and just smile about. And sometimes we’re doing all of those things at the same time.

The environment is a character in the film and we quickly see one of the conflicts of the film. Ponyo is captured in a fishing net, which is drudging up all kinds of garbage humans have spilled into the ocean. She escapes the net stuck in a bottle only to be discovered by a young boy named Sōsuke who takes her ashore, drops her in a pale full of water, and gives her the name she’s known for. In bringing her ashore, the ocean waves rise to take her back and her father comes ashore, spraying the ground with ocean water to keep himself from drying out.

It’s one of the most awesomely peculiar moments in any Ghibli movie. Watching this redhaired man dressed so oddly using some kind of pumpsprayer to keep the ground wet while he walks around on land.

Lots of adorableness follows, with just great animation, and then some adult moments indicating at least a bit of marital tension between Sōsuke’s parents. This film gets closest to the wide eyed wonder of being a child better than anything besides maybe My Neighbor Totoro. The way Sōsuke runs away from people when he thinks they’ll get him in trouble. The way he hides and covets Ponyo. It’s so utterly fantastic.

The film is kind of impossibly gorgeous but one of the best animated moments, I think, is watching Sōsuke walk down the stairs to hide from his mother while carrying the pale that holds Ponyo.

Anyrate, the ocean does rise to take Ponyo back to her father, Fujimoto. He’s the redhead with funny clothes. We also discover Ponyo’s real name, Brunhilde. Fujimoto is mostly concerned with keeping nature and the world in balance, which he does through magic and potions. Keeping Ponyo in the ocean is also an important aspect of this, but Ponyo desperately wants to be human and be friends with Sōsuke. Fujimoto manages to keep her trapped and reveals that he was once human before giving himself to the ocean. He worries for Ponyo because she’s now tasted human food and the blood of a human, and she’s young but incredibly powerful and will soon be too powerful for him to control.

Ponyo’s sister’s break her out and also disrupt the balance of the world. Ponyo transforms into a human, creates a tsunami, and finds Sōsuke once more.

It’s a moment of elation and beauty. We’re thinking that Fujimoto is being an overprotective dad or just kind of a jerk, so Ponyo’s escape is invigorating, in part because she causes an insane flood just to get to Sōsuke, which sort of softens once they’re reunited. The ocean still roils but it’s no longer rising.

More adorable childness follows and these moments are so great. Ponyo, Sōsuke, and his mother weathering the storm. Ponyo’s delight in everything is infectious. Using her new body, touching, tasting–everything amazes Ponyo. Watching her play with Sōsuke, eat, and run around is just great, and the animation is beautiful.

I mean, this kind of stuff is hard not to just absolutely love, even if you hate animated films or anime in general or just movies about kids made for kids, or even if you’re some sort of heartless monster unable to believe in magic.

Sōsuke’s mother runs back to town to help the elderly at the center she works at, leaving the children alone. Then here comes the goddess of the ocean, in all her power, majesty, and terror. Meanwhile, Fujimoto just can’t catch a break. His daughters keep defying him, his lover starts spilling magic all over the place, and Ponyo has become a human.

Fujimoto and the goddess of the sea talk about their daughter, the balance of the planet, and its seeming imminent destruction, but the goddess decides to put their child and Sōsuke to the test. The world and Ponyo’s life literally hang in the balance, and the goddess wants to see if Sōsuke and Ponyo’s love is pure enough to turn her human forever, which will rebalance the world. If they fail, however, Ponyo becomes seafoam and maybe the earth is permanently thrown out of balance, ripping satellites and the moon from the sky.

So, yeah, despite the adorableness of everything, the stakes are shockingly high.

Ponyo and Sōsuke wake to the ocean at their door and Ponyo uses a bit of magic to turn a toy boat into a real boat that they can ride, which is adorable and funny and fun. Ponyo is literally an out of control insanely powerful monster, but she just wants to play with Sōsuke. Her power waxes and wanes, though, and all her magic stops working once she gets sleepy, which she’s prone to doing. It’s all quite awesome to watch, but it’s understandable that Fujimoto is seriously concerned.

Fujimoto is protecting humanity underwater with these kind of giant bubbles of magic. This is also the site of the Sacred Test of Love between Sōsuke and Ponyo.

As Ponyo and Sōsuke approach, Ponyo’s sleepiness causes her humanness to gradually fade until she’s the little water creature we first met, leaving Sōsuke alone in a drowned world where Fujimoto finds him.

He tries to lead Sōsuke away in kind of the creepiest way possible, which isn’t surprising since he’s an odd looking creep. In his desperation, he starts losing it, because the moon is literally on its way to crash into the earth, so Fujimoto ends up taking them rather dramatically to the Sacred Test of Love under the ocean.

Sōsuke and the goddess discuss the actual future of the planet and whether or not it will survive, with all of it depending on the love of children, which is a love so pure and profound that it transforms Ponyo into a human permanently.

And so the world is saved in the cutest way possible.

It really is a beautiful film in every way, from characters and story to animation. It holds onto its childishness with gorgeous magic and the love children share without even trying.

The goddess leaves, restabilising the planet.

Life begins again, as she says.

But let’s talk about those other elements. The ones underneath or at the edges of the film that really make this something more than a children’s tale.

I’m talking about Fujimoto, who is, I think, one of the most interesting characters Miyazaki’s ever created.

Fujimoto began life as a human. It’s unclear what happened, but something caused him to give his life to the ocean. Likely, it was that he fell in love with the goddess of the ocean. This turned him into a sort of ocean god. His responsibility is, simply, the world’s balance, which is no easy task when you consider Ponyo’s behavior and the behavior of her many sisters. His war is against humanity’s pollution, which we are forced to confront very early in the film and then a few times throughout. This has turned his heart against humanity, despite being once one of us. He hates humans because we spoil the earth, we flood the seas with garbage, and we kill habitats and species by the thousands through our carelessness.

I’m not much a fan of us when I think about this either.

Look at this beleaguered weirdo.

But Fujimoto must deal with it every day. He must fight against the pollution with his magic, to keep the earth balanced. Because he’s not a native to the ocean, his power seems considerably less than that of his lover or their daughters.

His lover is the goddess of the ocean, the Mother of the Sea, as humans name her. It can be assumed that he fell in love with her and that she loved him. It can further be assumed, I think, that he chose the ocean and her over the world of land. In this way, he and Ponyo went on parallel journeys in opposite directions. Ponyo gave up the ocean and magic for love. Fujimoto gave up his humanity and his life for love.

But what is his love?

To me, it’s a sorrowful, lonely kind. His lover, the Mother of the Sea, is often away from him, and he longs for her. He misses her, and it breaks him, but he must keep the balance, raise their daughters, and keep the world going. In many ways, it appears that his lover has abandoned him and isn’t especially concerned with his well being.

We see this in the single scene they share. He opens his heart and concerns to her and she just kind of waves them away, then ignores him for the remainder of the film.

His concerns are valid, I think, on a few levels. For one, he is Ponyo’s father. Ponyo is still very young and he fears she doesn’t understand the choice she’s making. Further, she’s choosing what he ran from. She’s choosing to be human, which is something he hates and fears and fights against every day.

However, because of the perspective of the film, he seems almost like an antagonist. He wants to trap Ponyo and deny her freedom. When she escapes, he expends a lot of energy to take her back. Even when he goes to take Sōsuke and Ponyo to the Sacred Test of Love, he comes in a way that is sort of frightening, especially if you’re a young boy trying to save your best friend who you just watched transform from a human to a sea creature.

Fujimoto is essentially a single working father trying desperately to do his best, but he’s so overworked and spread so thin that he can’t really reconcile what he knows with the desires of his daughter.

In some ways, this is even reflected by Sōsuke’s mother, who is going through some difficulties in her marriage, due to the fact that her husband must spend a lot of time away from her and Sōsuke.

In Fujimoto we have a very complex character whose entire story is only briefly alluded to and he remains on the periphery, seen by many as mostly a narrative obstacle. And even in his life, he’s shoved to the side by his lover, the Mother of the Sea, the ocean itself. He is a man caught between the infinite and the mortal, between creation and destruction, and he is floundering.

This is the kind of power Miyazaki has. In just a few minutes of screentime, he creates Fujimoto in whole. He’s a footnote on Ponyo’s story, but his own is one of tragedy, sorrow, and infinite love for those who seem to ignore him. Even his hatred of humanity is because of his love for them. He keeps the balance of the world for their sake too, but they continually fight him over it. He sees them as a species racing towards destruction, and their destruction will, unfortunately, also destroy the planet by careening it off balance.

There’s no antagonist here, much like all of Miyazaki’s films. Rather, there is a complex relationship of power being explored.

Fujimoto, Ponyo, Sōsuke, and Sōsuke’s mother are all heroes here, but Ponyo and Sōsuke are highlighted, pushing the others to the sidelines.

Miyazaki creates a fun, adorable, and beautiful film for children, while also packing it full of big ideas and real concerns. He’s giving us the complexity of family, the intersection of environmentalism and capitalism, the power of love, and what it means to be a child in a world balancing precariously on life and death, where every choice resonates through the global ecosystem.

So Ponyo is not my favorite of Miyazaki’s films, but it might be his most masterfully subtle and complex.

On the surface, it’s a simple family film, but this film is deep as the ocean. Once you look past Ponyo, you begin to see an immense world of huge conflicts that have no easy solutions.

What you have is one of the most powerful and complex films about family, love, and the environment made in the last decade. And it’s meant for children and children will love it.

It’s 2018 and the TV’s on in the living room even though no one’s there to watch it. The house has always been like this. The TV plays whether anyone is there to keep it company or not. Often replaying Sportscenter or Simpson or Friends reruns. The phone rings on the wall and you ignore it because it’s not really your house. You just live there.

You pick up the remote and flip through channels, punching past Chronicles of Riddick and Highlander and other movies that seem to always be on but you only ever find halfway through, and you happen to hit the time just right to catch the opening monologue in a deep voice and then you see a big green CGI dude who actually looks pretty good.

You sit down and let it pour over you, getting snacks at the next commercial break and using the bathroom at some later commercial break, and after a few hours the afternoon’s just about done even though you’re still home alone. You go to the phone on the wall and call up your friend to make plans for the evening now upon you and you can’t wait to tell them about this weird ass movie you just watched based on a videogame.

hoarding the bonfire’s ash

The streaming era has been a disaster for the film industry. It’s been very convenient and even quite good for consumers. We have more to watch than ever before at cheaper than ever before and some of it is even better than just about anything that came before, but the cost, hidden from us at the time, was that the wheels are falling off and this is all grinding to a halt.

Streaming has decimated film profits as they rush to compete with Netflix, which was propped up for about a decade by tech investors and tax schemes that allowed it to run at a loss even while it grew exponentially. This has led to industrial consolidation as profits got choked and disappeared. It’s also destroyed the midlist movie, which is a movie that doesn’t cost a lot (relatively speaking) and probably won’t win an award or become a run away blockbuster smash. Movies that cost maybe $10-40mil and make maybe $40-100mil at the box office.

Back before streaming, even if these movies ran at a loss, they’d often make that up in rentals or syndication deals. Which is why, back in the 90s and 2000s, you might run across a bunch of not very good movies on some cable channel. Some of these seemed to be constantly on TV and so you ended up seeing The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift, for example, seven times, though never from start to finish, over the course of a few years. Maybe you’d catch the first half hour on Monday and then the back half the following Tuesday and eventually you’d catch the ten or twenty minutes you missed, but the following Thursday you stumble into the last half hour and decide to watch it just because it’s on.

Instead, now, we have the indie movie that studios hope wins an award, which will cause them to hopefully blow up at the box office or in Bluray or digital sales, or you have blockbusters that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, a hundred more to advertise, so studios need it to make half a billion to break even.

The fact that several of the big studios chased Netflix into streaming and so sunk billions of dollars into loss without hopes of getting enough subscribers for these to turn a profit has accelerated the demise and consolidation of studios.

brimming with promise

David Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones, had a promising career. He directed Moon, which was a micro-budget SF movie that was massively influential and acclaimed, nominated for and winning some awards.

It also, most importantly, turned a profit.

So he followed the normal Hollywood trajectory, which is that they gave him a chance to make a movie for them as a director for hire. If this was a success, he’d get the budget to make one for himself.

And Jones had big ambitions.

Source Code, his sophomore movie, was a critical and commercial success and so the studios gave him a shot at an enormous budget to make the movie he wanted: Warcraft.

Warcraft, for those somehow unaware, is a videogame franchise. World of Warcraft essentialized the MMORPG and is still going strong twenty years later.

An up-and-coming director on a hot streak attaching himself to one of the biggest media franchises felt like a stroke of genius. Especially since the fantasy genre had never been so hot (Game of Thrones was at its peak when this was released) and with every studio trying to will into existence another Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, this just looked like a license to print money.

Of course, the fight it had against it was that there had never really been a well-received videogame adaptation (though sometimes they were financially successful enough to warrant a sequel).

And, babies, I would love to say that Warcraft was the first one.

And it did pretty well at the box office! Earning $400mil! But that number made it a failure since it needed to earn half a billion dollars just to break even.

And so its failure capsized Duncan Jones’ career. He got another chance at a Netflix exclusive movie that was a dream project for him that he had been trying to get made for a long time.

But it was a critical failure and while Netflix doesn’t release streaming numbers except when it feels like it, it’s safe to say it didn’t lead to a spike in new subscribers.

It looks like he’s finally getting another shot with an animated movie due out next year. But if it fails as well, it may be the end for Mr Jones.

But there was a possible version of events where Warcraft had a long tail.

what could have been

In another version of reality where streaming never happened, Warcraft would’ve become a massive cult hit. In this version of reality, Warcraft breaks even or turns a profit in rentals and then grows into one of those movies that gets thrown onto cable and has a long, long life where a generation of people end up seeing it a dozen times on accident.

A movie that seems perpetually on in the background where you start learning all the dialogue just because it keeps happening in earshot. Where most of the scenes become iconic, not because of their quality, but because of the quantity of times you’ve sat through them.

It’s a movie almost designed to fill twitter and instagram with reactions images and gifs for memes, and yet it has instead no cultural impact.

Part of this is because it never got released widely on streaming. And so after its financially unsuccessful theatrical run, it just got buried. There was no way to watch it unless you wanted to buy the Bluray or pay for digital rentals.

Digital rentals are definitely convenient but I can’t imagine they come close to how successful the rental market that I grew up with was. Why spend $3.99 on a movie when you have literally thousands of movies already included in your subscription for no additional charge?

And so Warcraft, like many other movies, just got lost.

Which is really too bad because I do think there’s a lot to like about this movie.

there’s gold in them hills

The number of unsuccessful or critically derided Hollywood adaptations of videogames is about as long as the list of videogame adaptations itself.

It was, in many ways, a cursed prospect. Seemed like a goldmine but one where no one managed to actually find any gold.

In the last few years, this has changed. Spearheaded by HBO’s critically acclaimed The Last of Us adaptation and the billion dollars Mario made at the theatrical box office, we finally seem primed to find the potential here in videogames becoming movies and TV shows.

And I do think this will be the next goldrush in Hollywood.

If the last twenty years belonged to superheroes and comics, I think the next decade or more may belong to videogame adaptations.

The videogame industry, in terms of sheer dollars, stands like a colossus beside the human-sized film industry. And so the market is there, in terms of built in audiences. We’re talking tens of millions of potential viewers for every major videogame franchise. And we’re beginning to see studios identifying this potential ocean of profit, with dozens of franchises getting optioned.

The problems, I think, with many videogame adaptations come in a few different flavors.

1. Made by people who don’t care about the franchise

2. Made by people with too much devotion to the stories already told

3. Made for people who don’t like videogames

The first category sort of sums up the vast majority of videogame adaptations thus far. This is often the failure of live action adaptations of anime. You get people who are excited to tell their own story but some studio executive says: Could you map that over this IP that we have the rights to?

And you end up with an adaptation that manages to make no one happy.

The second actually includes the critically acclaimed The Last of Us adaptation. Which is also why I haven’t bothered to watch it. Watching it takes longer than it does to play the dang game.

No thank you.

But this also summarizes the problem with Duncan Jones’ Warcraft movie.

The Last of Us adaptation also fits into number three. In order for people to take the adaptation seriously, they had to assure you that this was a real work of art made for big boys instead of little babies.

But outside of The Last of Us, which is made by people who care with slavish devotion to the source and aims at people who never played the game, the recent successful videogame adaptations are instead made by people who care about the games but are more interested in using those worlds and characters to tell their own stories.

The Mario movie is never for a single moment anything but a Mario movie, yet it’s also not trying to retell the story of some specific game. Instead, it takes the buoyant joy of Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom and chooses to make an original story that hits very well for parents and children, all of whom already recognize Mario.

The Fallout adaptation is a whole lot of fun and hit perfectly for me, and I’ve never even played the games! But rather than try to adapt Fallout I or II or IV, it just took the tapestry of that world developed over the various games and gave us a whole new and distinct story that feels at home in that world.

Even the Sonic the Hedgehog movie, which seemed perilously terrible from the trailers, manages to be charming and fun. And they got there by using the textures and essential elements of the game and its characters and then using them to tell a new story that will satisfy kids who are just discovering Sonic and all of us old dummies who remember Sonic mostly as a time of day, as the afterglow of childhood.

bottling a dragon

After all these words, you’re probably expecting a glowing review. If you’re still reading, I don’t have that kind of twist here.

Jones took an interest approach to the world of Warcraft. Rather than try to tackle its most popular incarnation (World of Warcraft), he was setting up an entire franchise to adapt. And so he went back to the story of Warcraft I. Had this been a success, I think it’s clear he would have tried to then tackle them in order.

This was not a bad idea, in general. Though I think there are practical reasons why this didn’t work.

For one, Warcraft the game is simply too big to fit into two or three hours.

There’s too much we need to figure out and care about and all of it unfamiliar unless you know the game well. And, granted, like I said, the built in audience for something like this was already in the tens of millions. So even just getting all of them along with some others would have made this a success, probably.

But trying to pack so much into a single movie makes it feel both lethargic and like it’s sprinting through important things that you imperfectly understand.

When you play Warcraft, the game takes about twenty hours or so, which means that you incrementally learn more and more about the world and the plot and the characters as you move forward. Spending all that time with them, controlling them, allows you to make sense of everything and, more importantly, it makes you care about their fates.

On top of that, Warcraft is kind of silly!

This is on purpose, mind. The games have a sense of humor.

This is a core aspect to the games. And humor, as I’ve often said, is something that makes us care about characters. It’s how we connect to their humanness.

But the movie is just kind of a mess in general. There’s too much plot, too little character, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a lot of fun. Because it is! It’s a fun movie! It’s fun to let it wash over you in all its silly grandiloquence!

And I think, had it come out in 2006 instead of 2016, it would have had a long cultural and financial tail. I worked at Blockbuster back then and this is exactly the type of movie that would’ve flown off the shelves. Friday and Saturday night of the first available rental weekend would’ve filled with teenagers already reeking of pot who would giggle and be awestruck by the movie in equal measure. In a year, it would have been all over cable TV and I would’ve stumbled across it random hungover Sunday mornings where I would’ve laid there near comatose and let it rain down upon me.

But I do think a better tactic would have been to tell smaller stories within this world. Rather than tell the story of interspecies war at its highest level and from the highest level, we could have learned about smaller scale conflicts.

Remember, we only have two hours here!

Tell me the story of a single squad in a single battalion in a single army on a single campaign and let me see this conflict—in a close, personal way—from their vantage point.

Or give me a story of political intrigue that never leaves the palace!

But these are all wishes and wants and hopes.

Though, if you’ve been contacted to write a screenplay adapting something, give me a call. I’m very cheap and my schedule is open.

And despite all that I’ve said here, the movie is well acted and the CGI actually looks good! And for those who have read my recent movie reviews, you probably know how infrequently I say such things. But I like the way the orcs look!

I do think that if the movie had been just a bit better it would’ve broken even and we would have had a sequel or two by now. Because had it just been 10% better, word of mouth would’ve pushed just enough more people to go see it.

But, really, this is a story of how Hollywood has changed and why it’s in freefall. The dollar amounts are just too high and too risky to be sustainable.

But also I just wish that a movie like this had succeeded. Had it had a rental and syndication run, it would’ve turned a profit and then some, and possibly made a sequel that became as big as the Avengers.

Though its failure is also a cautionary tale, not only to those adapting games, but to anyone interested in telling a story in a movie: be a bit more modest and focused.

Tell a closer story. Something more personal.

There’s heart in this movie. Even a real tragedy at its core, which appeals to me quite a bit. But it’s wrapped up too tightly in devotion to the source material, which overcrowds what’s beautiful and great about this adaptations.

So it goes.

Catch up on Shogun:

• Shogun (1980)

• Shogun Episodes I & II

• Shogun Episode III

• Shogun Episode IV

• Shogun Episode V

• Shogun Episode VI

• Shogun Episode VII

• Shogun Episode VIII

• Shogun Episode IX

I told my wife that Mariko was Crimson Sky so it was interesting and kind of funny to have Toranaga confirm that forty minutes after I said it. I only bring this up because I never know things before a book or TV show tell me.

What we feel in this episode is absence.

The immense loss of Mariko.

She haunts every scene. I said Mariko is the real main character previously, and I think this episode solidifies that. Because the show feels far emptier and lifeless without her. This is a credit to Anna Sawai (give her a dang award!) but also to the writing of her character.

Blackthorne survives because of Mariko and he is now trapped in near silence because of her. She died and now he can only communicate with other people the way a toddler might as they learn to speak.

Short limited phrases while everyone around him speaks in sentences and paragraphs where he catches a few words here and there as they fling past his ears, trying to understand what the torrent of language means at its most bare and essential.

What I imagine most people felt was also the absence of the promised war.

We spent 9 hours leading up to a war and now, in the final hour, we follow Blackthorne’s sad, lonely existence in Japan rather than head off to the battlefield where armies clash.

But this is a strength.

You don’t actually want to watch armies fight. Men swinging swords and sprays of blood.

You think you want that, but you don’t. You really don’t.

No one does.

There’s a reason why Game of Thrones only had a few actual battle scenes over most of its 70 episodes. What we wanted from Game of Thrones was not The Battle of the Bastards or the Battle of Winterfell. We wanted the Red Wedding. We wanted Joffrey’s Wedding and a dozen other episodes where violence is personal and directed rather than widespread.

The big battle episodes are nice. Kind of a treat. But if there were twice as many battles, the show would become tedious and boring.

Think of House of the Dragon and how it succeeds without any wars or even really violence.

So while the promise of war may have kept you engaged, kept you tuning in, the truth is that the show is better without a big setpiece of blood and violence and glory where Toranaga stands atop his enemies.

Because, you see, the moment Mariko entered Osaka, he already stood atop his enemies. He won.

He used people, spent their lives, allowing those close to him, who he loved, to die. And he did it to make the war unnecessary. Which leans back into his statement from many episodes ago when he said he wants an end to the bloodshed. Well, he found a way to end the warring period, to usher in peace, and it required him taking control of the country, consolidating power underneath him.

He had to become Shogun.

Those with a cursory knowledge of Japanese history may be interested in hearing that Toranaga Yoshii is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu , which is who the Tokugawa period is named after. Interestingly, Oda Nobunaga, who may also be familiar to anyone who’s played Civilization, is Ochiba’s father who Mariko’s father assassinated.

Blackthorne is William Adams. Mariko is Hosokawa Gracia.

Anyway, I do quite like this finale. While I’ve been less positive on the last few episodes, I think the ending is landed so solidly that this will be remembered as the best show of 2024 and maybe one of the best shows in years.

I especially enjoyed how they handled Toranaga revealing everything at the end. Tadanobu Asano’s Yabushige is just delicious on screen so anytime he gets to be there is a treat. But having Toranaga explain everything to him and to us makes for a great scene. It also pulls everything out into the open, which is a contrast to the 1980 version, where this is all revealed very rapidly in the final minutes by a sudden internal monologue by Toranaga.

It’s an excellent scene and a far better use of our time than showing us a long battle.

Because one of the real showcases in this show is the acting. The cinematography is interesting, especially the peculiar use of fisheye lenses and the idiosyncratic use of focus, but giving the actors space to just, well, act is what makes this show stand alone in the sea of television mediocrity that we’ve lived with since season four of Breaking Bad or Mad Men (though House of the Dragon is also a great acting showcase).

And I do think this show is a real achievement. I like many of the choices made in this adaptation. But despite everything, I actually think the 1980 version tells this story better, so I encourage anyone interested to check it out now that you’ve finished this newer adaptation.

The 2024 adaptation sort of bookends the show by grounding us in Blackthorne, but because he’s sidelined for so much of it—Toranaga even agrees with me that the show didn’t need him!—we don’t feel the loss to the same degree that we should. That’s not to say we don’t feel it!

But when Mariko and Blackthorne have spent the majority of the series having a passionate romance, her absence feels like a knife in our ribs. When the show is so closely tied to Blackthorne’s experience, we also feel the brutality of his isolation in Japan.

And I’ve been thinking about it since the end of this adaptation on Tuesday night and I think that when I rewatch Shogun at some point in the future, I’ll likely choose the 1980 version over this one.

And part of that is because it has a greater focus on the characters and relationships. The trade off for that is that we understand the politics less. We understand Toranaga almost not at all until the end, when we realize how he has masterminded everything, how he’s used Blackthorne and everyone else like marionettes in his quest to become Shogun.

But I think of all that we didn’t get in this adaptation. Father Alvito is barely in it. Instead, we get a great deal of Lady Ochiba and the Christian Regents (though we also never really come to learn about Kiyama and Ohno). And I like Lady Ochiba! I think the actor did a phenomenal job. But I also don’t think she is as essential to understanding this story as the Catholic Church and the Portuguese are. Instead of getting Rodrigues and the captain of the Black Ship, we get a whole lot more Yabushige (and, man, I really really love this character and especially Tadanobu’s depiction of him—give the man an award!). But, again, I think the Catholics and imperial powers are an important aspect to this story that essentially gets set aside and ignored.

I do appreciate how much better we understand the politics inside Japan in this adaptation. That is undoubtedly good and I think it offers an interesting texture to this adaptation.

But I think we lost a lot of the personal stories and relationships that make a story worth telling. I mean, we have relationships and so on, but we don’t have the depth of relationships here.

Even Toranaga saying that he keeps Blackthorne because he makes him laugh feels somewhat hollow or condescending, whereas in the 1980 adaptation (and real life), the two men seemed to have a real admiration and affection for one another. In this version of the story, we only have Toranaga’s word to take for it, because none of the scenes Blackthorne and Toranaga share include laughter or joy. Instead, Toranaga treats him the way he might treat a yappy dog. Which is interesting in its own way, but you don’t get the sense that Toranaga likes Blackthorne. And since he doesn’t and didn’t need Blackthorne, why does he keep him? What is his purpose for trapping him in Japan?

It feels more like spite than amusement, though I suppose a warlord may find amusement in that kind of spite.

I could go on and on, I suppose, but I do really like this adaptation. I have issues and quibbles and, ultimately, I think the character work suffers here, despite the acting being some of the best I’ve ever seen in a TV show. I mean, seriously, there’s not a weak actor in the bunch. Every single person on screen is putting out top tier performances.

Which is absolutely wild!

I mean, I’d happily watch ten hours of Toranaga and Yabushige just hanging out!

But I think the shift in focus to this larger narrative of Japanese history forces us to lose the tight focus on the characters that would elevate this to one of the best shows of all time.

And, again, this show is great. It’s a wondrous achievement. I loved watching it. Loved writing about it. And so these complaints are more because I see how a few different choices could have made this already great show even better.

We finish on a brutal yet beautiful note, with Fuji and Blackthorne. Every moment between these two in this final episode is heartbreaking and beautiful (give them awards too!).

So while I may wish that this adaptation did more, that it focused more on these people as people and their relationships, I’ll also be thinking about it for a long time. I love it and know that it’s great.

Could it be better?

Couldn’t everything be better?

For what this is, it’s damn good. One of the best. And, sadly, I don’t think we’re likely to see a show this good for a long time.

Over the next month, I’m going to read the novel Shogun because I guess this is what I’m doing this spring. I do think experiencing three versions of the same story over the course of a few months will be an interesting journey. Just watching these two adaptations back to back has been a delight and offered an interesting point of analysis.

So I’m excited to see what I think once I read this very, very long novel from fifty years ago.

Until then, we’ll say goodbye to Shogun. I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of weekly reviews. I really do find them fun and sort of an easy way to structure my projects, but we’ll be back to the regular old format here where I write an essay about whatever comes into my little head.

But if you have something you’d like to see me cover like this, let me know.

My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King

Catch up on Shogun:

• Shogun (1980)

• Shogun Episodes I & II

• Shogun Episode III

• Shogun Episode IV

• Shogun Episode V

• Shogun Episode VI

• Shogun Episode VII

• Shogun Episode VIII

• Shogun Episode IX

• Shogun Episode X

Well well well, so it finally happened! My wife and I have been waiting for when the romance would begin in this new adaptation and I guess the answer was: as late as possible.

I can’t say if this is more or less faithful to the novel, but I do think it’s a weakness in the storytelling. In the 1980 adaptation, this was an integral part of the story, and I think for a very good reason.

In many ways, the real story of Shogun is one of cultural transformation. Even before Blackthorne arrives, we have the Portuguese in Japan trying to rewrite and reshape the rules of their society. But our three main characters are all, in their way, chafing against Japanese culture.

• Blackthorne: He came as a stranger but through observation and curiosity, he adapts to his new conditions. He begins to learn the language and even finds an affection and affinity for the culture. He meets setbacks that remind him how foreign he is, yet when he encounters his own people once more, he finds them newly foreign to him. And so he finds himself as something new: neither European nor Japanese but a man caught in between.

• Mariko: She is bound to a man who despises her, who she hates. She has found the Christian God yet seeks a samurai’s death. She meets this barbarian and finds love for him. Her heart, long broken and withered, she believed there would never be a healing for her. And so she, too, finds herself caught between worlds of tradition, warring with one another. Her new faith demands she give up some amount of her Japaneseness. Her Japaneseness demands she defy her new God’s laws. And there, amidst it all, is Blackthorne begging her to defy both.

• Toranaga: He wants to change Japan. He wants an end to the pointless deaths but he also wants peace. He wants neither the warring period he lives in nor the one the Christians promise him. He wants his own peace. A Japanese peace. And so he will break the political backbone of Japan to get it.

The love story has little to nothing to do with Toranaga so I’ll shift her solely to Mariko and Blackthorne.

But do you see the ways their individual journeys demand a binding agent, a grounding factor?

I’ve known many people who have lived in countries where they didn’t speak the native language. One of the best ways to learn a new language, if you ever find yourself wanting to, is to begin a relationship with a native speaker of that language while you’re in that country. I mean, don’t be a weirdo who seeks specifically that just for your own linguistic development, but it’s simply true that your affection for a person of a language and culture will scaffold your ability to learn. There are many other factors involved, of course, but spending time with someone of another language and culture—especially if you love them—will pull you deeper into that culture because your love for them as an individual will sort of transpose itself upon the language and culture as well.

There’s nothing scientific about it.

This is part of the tragedy of Mariko’s death for Blackthorne, honestly.

His story and her story are better served by them being in love. More than that, the breaking transgression of taboos and the breaking of norms is integral to their character development. Blackthorne turning his back on his entire life makes more sense when he is in love and in a loving romance with Mariko.

Mariko becoming more confident and certain of her own path makes more sense when we see her as transgressing Japanese and Christian norms by having an affair, especially one with a foreign barbarian. She is shrugging off her past, her society, her faith, and forging her own way.

In this new adaptation, we’re given the shape and texture of their romance in brief looks, in almost touches, and, finally, in a night of passion after he agrees to chop her head off.

And so those without knowledge of the series may not question this trajectory, but I felt that they didn’t really do enough to establish the romance or even Mariko’s attraction and affection for Blackthorne.

And while this plays into a concept established in the show of the eightfold fence, the way the Japanese guard their heart from everyone. And so this muted love may scorch in a certain manner, but I do think it’s weaker for the following reasons:

• The show makes it as clear as possible that Mariko hates her husband, and so betraying him means nothing to her

• Blackthorne is lonely and alone in a hostile, foreign world

With this in mind and shoved towards the viewer, this romance seems more like one of desperation rather than one of love and passion.

Neither character is swept away by love. No one is swept even off their feet!

And maybe that’s enough for you. For everyone.

But seeing what it could have been from the 1980 adaptation leaves me a bit unfulfilled.

I think it also weakens Mariko’s sacrifice that ends the episode.

She has longed for death for nearly twenty years.

In this way, she’s finally escaping.

Rather than Blackthorne giving her a new reason to want to live, a reason for life, he becomes a mere witness to her choosing death and rejecting life.

So why is the romance so muted and underdeveloped in this adaptation?

Well, it’s possible that this is truer to the novel. I suspect this is not the case, but I won’t know until I read it, I guess.

Assuming that the romance is more fleshed out and fully formed in the novel, I imagine the reason we’re given so much less romance comes down to a few reasons:

• They wanted Mariko to be a more independent woman who don’t need no man

• Big serious Prestige TV Dramas don’t need no romance

• Fearing the omnipresent claims of White Savior Narrative, they wanted to sideline Blackthorne further from the core of the narrative

There may be other reasons, but I do find it interesting that a TV miniseries from 1980 was sexier, racier, and more emotionally resonant than one made in 2024 where they’re allowed to show nudity and say fuck.

But, as many have pointed out, popular culture is becoming increasingly sexless and romance has begun to shrink from mainstream stories. Whether it’s Frozen or even action movies, which once seemed to always include some sort of love interest. We no longer have romantic comedies and romantic movies have mostly been relegated to Lifetime quality movies and TV shows that your ageing aunt still watches.

Meanwhile, romance as a fiction genre continues to boom.

But for whatever reason, our visual mediums have given up on showing us romances. One of my favorite filmmakers, Wong Kar Wai, spent a career making gorgeous romances but he hasn’t made a movie in over a decade, though I spent quite a lot of time writing about them last year.

And so while this Shogun adaptation is the highest budget, the most sumptuous, with lots of craft and attention to detail, it began to leave me a bit cold during last episode and that continues into this penultimate episode.

The quality of the show is still very high. Anyone can see that. But I’ve felt a sort of stagnation over the last two hours and a sort of neutered approach to emotion and relationships. And it makes me ask about what this story is.

Toranaga is playing a deep and brutal and cold game of political calculus which will lead to the deaths of thousands as his war wages across the countryside or falls wholly onto Osaka castle.

There was hope in this episode that perhaps Ochiba and Mariko’s relationship would lead to some resonance, yet it closed off rather abruptly, leaving us only with a recognition of a relationship rather than feeling the relationship vibrate and thrum through us.

And this is sort of the issue with every relationship in the show.

Who is Blackthorne connected to?

Mariko, of course, but does he have any bond with Toranaga or Yabushige? Even his antagonistic rivalry with Father Alvito and Rodrigues from the 1980 adaptation is largely lost in this adaptation.

In a sense, as things stand now, we probably could have removed Blackthorne from this show to no real difference. Which is…curious.

Again, I understand everyone in Hollywood and beyond is afraid of being accused of telling a White Savior Story in case the cultural writers addicted to twitter convince enough filthy peasants to ignore a commercial product with a budget in the tens of millions or more, but they’ve so successfully sidelined Blackthorne from anything and anyone that actually matters to the story that I’m left wondering about these choices.

And, for the record, I think understanding the 1980 adaptation as a White Savior Story is a profound misunderstanding bordering on illiteracy. And not just because this is based on real life history of real life people.

As it is, the shape of this narrative remains obscure. Which is interesting and strange, since I’ve already watched an adaptation of this story. But there, in the 1980 version, I felt that everything worked in concert to tell a beautiful and resonant story about people. This adaptation seems to be more interested in telling a story about Japan, which isn’t a bad direction to take.

But I wonder how much this is really coming through. Too, I think a narrative always works better when it remains focused on the people.

In some ways, this adaptation really becomes Mariko’s story. She’s the main character here. And, in theory, I like this shift. But, again, I think removing the romance from her narrative, from her story of transformation and growth, makes her story weaker and more opaque. Her motivation in this adaptation is instead about her father and gaining vengeance against those who killed him.

But it remains obscure to me who exactly this vengeance is against. Not Ishido or Ochiba, at least not directly. Ochiba was too young to have anything to do with her father and I don’t think Ishido was old enough or powerful enough, at that time, to have had much say in anything.

And maybe this is me being a big ol dummy and just not understanding which enemy Mariko is pointed towards, who Toranaga sends her to fight, but without ever stating it clearly or giving her some face to face meeting with her antagonist, it all feels difficult to grasp.

At least for me.

And so when she dies in this episode, it does feel surprising as it’s meant to, but it doesn’t feel tragic the way it did in the 1980 adaptation. There was a cruel boldness in experiencing her death through Blackthorne’s eyes and heart. Especially because we understood in that adaptation how much Mariko wanted life.

I’m curious how this final episode will land. I remain hopeful because I do think the first half of this adaptation was a tremendous achievement. In some ways, the choices made improved upon the previous adaptation. But I do fear that they’ve been staggering for a few hours and may now stumble here at the very end.

Thankfully, we only have to wait for about 48 more hours.

My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King

Catch up on Shogun:

• Shogun (1980)

• Shogun Episodes I & II

• Shogun Episode III

• Shogun Episode IV

• Shogun Episode V

• Shogun Episode VI

• Shogun Episode VII

• Shogun Episode VIII

• Shogun Episode IX

• Shogun Episode X

Consider Toranaga.

Remember Toranaga’s face as his best and only friend commits seppuku before him and all his vassals.

A pitiless death.

Many would have broken. Many would break. Many would have stopped the madness before it came ot this.

Toranaga thanked his son, essentially, for dying, for giving him time.

Who is this man?

Who is Toranaga?

Should we love him or hate him, admire him or despise him?

Does such a question even matter, ultimately?

We are captivated by him.

Enraptured.

We cannot look away.

And so they forced him out of our sight for much of the episode. An episode that is most pointedly about him.

We do not see him mourning and we do not see him fighting with advisors or even contemplating his own next move. Rather, we see him cloistering himself. He is Prospero, crafting an illusion, a grand play for Ishido and his backers. All the world a stage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But on Toranaga’s stage, people kill themselves. People die. He sentences them to death, even, while forcing others to live.

The lengths Toranaga goes to convince his enemies that he has given up is staggering. A tremendous, brutal act of will. A man without counsel, without equals, without friends.

A man alone, atop his own mountain, where none can touch him, where all must judge him.

I do have issues with this adaptation the further we go. I’ll drop them in this footnote1 and this one2 because there are spoilers for the 1980 series, which may have eventual relevance here. Who can say.

We don’t know where this story leads (well, I do and anyone who knows the history also does) or what Toranaga will do, but we’re presented some possible paths.

Ally with Lady Ochiba.

This seems difficult to figure out since we know so little about Ochiba, but if the heir is Toranaga’s son, as I hypothesized, this would be an interesting turn of events. He’s sending Yabushige and Blackthorne to Osaka—though the two of them believed they were escaping together—which may lead to some interesting developments. Possibly even Blackthorne using his ship and canons effectively as a weapon from the port.

The death of Nagakado allows Toranaga to gather his forces in Edo, which seems almost ideal for his plans. Now all his vassals and soldiers are together, united in a single place. That he may take the land journey, along with his army, across most of Japan would not go unnoticed, but it may allow him to gather strength as he approaches the castle.

But we can only speculate for now.

In the meantime, Mariko has denied Buntaro any affection, seemingly for the last time. Since nothing has happened between Mariko and Blackthorne, Buntaro can only seem jealous.

But there was a cold brutality in this scene that took my breath away.

Perhaps only I would see love in this scene. Buntaro, who denied Mariko love and affection for so long, now attempts to rebuild and salvage what he broke.

But he finds that he is too late.

Blackthorne finds his old crew and is disgusted by them and finds that he belongs neither in Japan nor with them.

And so we’re at a point where our position characters are lost.

Well, except Toranaga, who plays a game none but him understand.

Yabushige feels trapped by circumstance, as do Blackthorne and Mariko. But all of them must choose, and in choosing, they hope to break free.

And Toranaga sees them all. Knows what they’ll do. Or at least he believes he knows what they’ll do, since he so accurately and simply predicted exactly what Yabushige and Blackthorne did.

But will his plan fall to pieces, or will it remain in hand?

This is the magic, yes?

And so we return to Toranaga’s face as Hiromatsu slits his belly open, while Buntaro cuts his father’s head off. He caused this and Hiromatsu, understanding the play at hand, fulfilled his role, sacrificing everything to Toranaga.

And Toranaga sat there on the edge of breaking to pieces. But he held firm. Held strong as he stared at his best friend’s severed head.

All my ebook editions of my novels are on sale. You can click on them below. You can check out other books in this sale right here.

My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King

Catch up on Shogun:

• Shogun (1980)

• Shogun Episodes I & II

• Shogun Episode III

• Shogun Episode IV

• Shogun Episode V

• Shogun Episode VI

• Shogun Episode VII

• Shogun Episode VIII

• Shogun Episode IX

• Shogun Episode X

We’re at the all hope is lost part of this story. And they’re making us sit with it for a whole week.

Dastardly, I must say.

In the age of binging, it feels almost obscene to not let us know what happens next. To not let the next episode roll over after the typical five seconds forces us to sit with what we just witnessed.

Nagakado, dead.

Poor boy.

He never had a chance, did he?

Episodes VI and VII shifted our focus from Blackthorne or even the larger political struggle to family matters and to individual character motivations. We saw last week how Mariko became who she now is, and even how Lady Ochiba became who she now is.

A fate bestowed upon them because of family. Because of what their families did and what was done to them.

And here we see Nagakado, forever in his father’s shadow, and Saeki, trying to escape his half-brother’s shade, collapsing towards one another in a brutal yet stupid and absurd moment.

It’s so stupid, so meaningless, that it feels as cruel as real life.

Why wouldn’t Nagakado die this way?

Slipping and cracking his skull open while trying to murder his uncle.

Such a stupid, useless death.

In a different kind of story, this would be the moment where Toranaga will defy all odds and wage war against impossible odds and fight his half-brother.

But this is Japan in 1600. At the beginning of this show, we watched him order the death of a man and his infant child.

What does it matter that his own son die, uselessly, foolishly?

Toranaga surrendered and Nagakado believed he could murder his way out of it, which is a staggering misapprehension of his father but also of the society they live in.

This episode is a moment of stagnation. We believed, when Saeki showed up, loud and brash, that we would see a new sun rising. A new sort of levity to bolster Toranaga’s army defeated by the earthquake. Instead, Saeki is his jailor, his replacement on the Regency Council, who hopes to finally escape his brother’s towering shadow.

And the episode begins with a demonstration of who Toranaga was. A successful warlord while still a child. His legend grew and flowered and now, fifty years later, his legend ends.

Curiously, it’s Gin, the aging courtesan, who makes note of Toranaga’s plans. She asks why would he allow himself to be captured this way, and there’s no answer here.

As a viewer, we are meant to feel the trap. But, here, we have a clue that this sudden trap sprung upon him was not so sudden.

Perhaps expected.

And if expected, then why?

Why would Toranaga allow himself and all his people to be captured in this way? What is his goal?

He’s to be brought to Osaka Castle where he’ll be forced to commit seppuku, along with many of his vassals. Including Yabushige, who is less than thrilled about the prospect.

And then there’s Blackthorne, trapped in this war he cannot and doesn’t understand. He can see his ship in the harbor but he cannot get there. Cannot escape.

His fate tied to Toranaga.

Toranaga, who will not explain himself or explain to Blackthorne what this is all for or why he, too, must fall with him.

To Blackthorne, the true enemy is obvious: the Portuguese.

But Toranaga is less concerned with an empire half the world away and far more concerned with the politics of his own land. Which is quite normal.

How could he care about anything else?

And so I find I don’t have much to say about this episode, except that I see the weakness in it. It is, in a way, a required weakness.

It’s a setup for the finale. The conclusion begins in earnest next episode, I suspect, and we’ll race forward at a breakneck pace.

And so the showrunners are forcing us to sit in anticipation for a week. Brooding on the dissatisfaction of this episode. No one even got shot with a cannon! Toranaga’s war ended and only one person died: his son.

Many of our favorite characters took a bit of a backseat while we spent time watching Toranaga deliberately not decide or act.

But next week—I’m very excited for this upcoming episode. I’ll leave it there, for now.

My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King

Catch up on Shogun:

• Shogun (1980)

• Shogun Episodes I & II

• Shogun Episode III

• Shogun Episode IV

• Shogun Episode V

• Shogun Episode VI

• Shogun Episode VII

• Shogun Episode VIII

• Shogun Episode IX

• Shogun Episode X

We may as well call this Mariko’s episode. I’m going to try to avoid spoilers but will include them in the footnotes, so if you don’t want to know how this story went in the 1980 version…don’t look at the footnotes.

What we see if a young Mariko becoming friends with the child who will one day be Lady Ochiba, the heir’s mother. We also see the execution of Mariko’s father’s allies. Later, her father would kill Nobuhisa, the previous unifier of Japan before the Taiko.

Back in the present of 1600, Blackthorne is honored and promoted by Toranaga, putting him in command of the recently promoted Omi and Yabushige. We also get a survey of the earthquakes devastation and what this must mean for Toranaga’s plans.

But let’s cut to it, yeah? You watched the episode.

Your eyes were open.

You can understand moving pictures in front of your face.

Why does Toranaga insist on making Mariko remain with Blackthorne during his visit to the courtesan?

Initially, I thought it was to split Mariko from Blackthorne. By forcing her to translate, even while he pillows with the courtesan, he would force a break in any potential attraction between the two1. But as the scene unfolds, I wondered if Toranaga meant for them to come together.

The shattering of inhibitions. Creating a private world where there are only those two.

Mariko and Blackthorne.

The whole episode seems to lead to their romance blossoming. From the prayer in Blackthorne’s home on either side of the screen to their constant companionship to all the things said and unsaid.

The filming of this scene at the brothel was just spectacular.

The courtesan, so utterly perceptive, understands the desires of those before her. She knows Blackthorne doesn’t want her, isn’t there to have sex with a beautiful courtesan.

As the kids say, she understands the assignment.

Her role as courtesan is to give her client a fantasy. To fulfill their desires.

And so while Mariko translates for her, she moves behind Mariko, forcing Blackthorne to look at Mariko while she speaks. Turning a translated conversation into one between potential lovers, between broken hearts yearning for wholeness.

And when she instead turns away and leaves Blackthorne to the courtesan, Blackthorne touches her.

It is, I think, the first time he’s touched her.

Just fingertips. A grazing touch on her hand. Her skin.

Mountains of desire in so brief a space.

He wants her. He believes she wants him too.

And when he goes to the courtesan to do what one does with a courtesan, he will still be enraptured by Mariko, still hearing her voice, still seeing her face.

It’s a beautiful moment.

A devastating one.

All these walls. These barriers.

Society, culture. War. Honor. Obligation. Duty.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera

One of the key pieces of information given to Mariko is that her father wanted her to marry Buntaro and survive what he did to continue his war. Mariko buckles at this news, discovering that her seeking death has flown in the face of her father’s wishes.

Wishes never uttered.

Such is the society of Japan at this time. The many faces and hearts. The eightfold fence. The versions of ourselves, public and private and most private, that we hope will be understood or concealed.

Toranaga, instead of admonishing Mariko, gives her a purpose.

To keep fighting.

What does this mean, exactly? And who is she meant to fight against, in particular?

Well, perhaps I missed it, but this remains unclear to me. Presumably this will line up with Toranaga’s military goals so the narrative congeals as one large conflict, where the personal and the national come together.

Back in Osaka, Lady Ochiba is taking control and has imprisoned all the regents and their families with Lord Ishido’s help. They claim this is necessary because of a plot against the heir’s life.

We know it’s not real. Everyone in Osaka knows it’s not real.

Yet honor demands. Culture weighs.

The regents grow more and more mistrustful of Ishido and they abandon the regency meetings one by one. When Sugiyama attempts to flee Osaka castle, Ishido and his men annihilate them.

Most importantly, we learn of Ochiba.

The Taiko could not conceive an heir, even after hundreds of consorts. The problem is likely obvious to modern viewers: he was infertile.

But Ochiba produced an heir!

We must ask ourselves: whose child is he?

We also learn that she hold Toranaga responsible for her father’s death. I wonder, too, if Toranaga may be the heir’s father. I have no real reason to believe this except that it would be narratively convenient. And since all the Japanese political aspects were absent or un-understandable in the 1980 adaptation, I really don’t have any insight into what’s happening here.

Back in Anjiro with Toranaga and his war council, we learn of the Crimson Sky plan, which is to take Osaka castle by force.

It seems, honestly, insane. But such is life.

He knows a new regency council will be formed and they will demand Toranaga’s death, so he must act while he is still able to act.

If he succeeds, he will become Shogun, a title and role he is adamant in not wanting. Further, he is adamant that the heir must be protected and does not trust Ishido to protect him.

And so when he learns of Sugiyama’s death, he prepares for war, for the Crimson Sky plan.

Of course, with these cannons, his plan to assault a castle becomes much more feasible. He’s no longer sending men at walls, but attempting to knock those walls down in order to get his men through. His army is small, devastated by the earthquake and facing the might of the rest of Japan, but he believes his army will grow as he goes.

And so now, six hours into this ten hour show, we prepare for war.

And we wonder about love. About duty. About what it means to be trapped in a foreign place in a war you don’t understand. About what it means to be bound to a man you believe will lose this war.

And no one reveals what’s in their heart to anyone.

Instead, we all must carry the weight of ourselves.

My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King

Catch up on Shogun:

• Shogun (1980)

• Shogun Episodes I & II

• Shogun Episode III

• Shogun Episode IV

• Shogun Episode VI

• Shogun Episode VII

• Shogun Episode VIII

• Shogun Episode IX

• Shogun Episode X

Everything is far more intense in this adaptation when compared to the 1980 adaptation. There was a brightness and even lightness to much of the 1980 adaptation, including the events that overlap with this newest episode in 2024.

Buntaro is a terrifying warrior but there’s almost something companionable about their drinking contest in 1980.

Not so here!

There’s a vicious undercurrent to Buntaro. He is the ultimate badass. The kind of samurai people think about when the word samurai conjures images in their mind. A man built for war, for killing, with profound expertise with his weapons. Buntaro is famous for his archery and he proves it here while also demonstrating his regard for Mariko, his wife.

Which is to say, he threatens her and demeans her.

We see the near panic Mariko feels when she discovers Buntaro survived. A daring escape where he and a handful of ronin cut through Lord Ishido and Kamiya’s samurai and then progressed on a daring, harrowing journey through enemy territory where only two survived.

One of them being Buntaro.

And I linger on this scene because we see, at the beginning of this episode, how Blackthorne feels almost comfortable in Japan. He has a house. He has people who serve him, who keep up his home, and he’s learning more and more Japanese, able to finally communicate with the people around him. He wears his kimono as if he always had. He bathes and removes his shoes and on and on.

Japan is coming to feel like a home. Not his home. But a home.

I remember this feeling well when I lived in Ireland and Korea.

They would never be my homes. I would never become Irish or Korean.

And yet, I found a sense of peace and home at both places.

But the rest of the episode is a lesson to Blackthorne that he knows nothing. he understands so little. He misunderstands so much.

That Buntaro dislikes him is easy to tell, easy to see. But Blackthorne thinks his affability can soften him or that giving him a chance to brag will bring something out in him that he can flatter into a sort of softness, a warming of the frigidness between them.

Too, he believes he can understand Mariko. Believes, even, that he can save her from this cruel marriage, this hollow life they share.

Despite everything he’s seen and everything Mariko has told him, he still views the world like an Englishman. And how could he not?

But he believed he was understanding. Believed the Japanese could be understood as easily as if they were the Dutch he sailed with.

And they could be, can be. But not by the very first Englishman in that part of the world. A man who knew nothing of Japan except the word Japan. And even as he’s spent several months there, learning rapidly, concertedly, what he’s learned hasn’t sunk in.

And so he asks Toranaga for permission to leave.

He realizes he understands nothing. More than that, after seeing Mariko beaten by Buntaro and his gardener murdered through his misapprehension and insufficient communication, he decides that he does not want to understand.

The cruelty of Japan is too much for him. Too baffling.

And I think we see this most clearly when he chases after Buntaro.

He wakes in the night, still drunk, hearing Buntaro shout at Mariko and Mariko scream. He rushes through the house and finds her beaten and bleeding from the mouth.

She screams at him further to leave her alone. He cannot understand how simply witnessing her like this shames her so much further or what it means to her that she has broken the harmony of his house. And perhaps I could include an entire essay here about the important of harmony but there will never be time for that.

Furious, Blackthorne chases after Buntaro with the intention of killing him.

And I think this is where Blackthorne demonstrates his misunderstanding and misapprehension the most.

Buntaro knows that he has shamed himself by disturbing the peace of the house. This is why he leaves and does not want to face Blackthorne. If they meet, he must beg forgiveness.

To beg forgiveness from a barbarian.

How deep must the shame be to bow and beg forgiveness from this uncivilized foreigner?

But Blackthorne chases him, gun in hand, and forces him to stop. For a moment, Blackthorne believes Buntaro will attack and so he levels his pistol. And, for a moment, even we think we’re about to see what happens when a samurai comes up against a pistol. And because Buntaro has survived what he survived and is an expert with sword and bow, we wonder, ever so briefly, if he can get to Blackthorne before he’s shot down.

But, instead, he sets down his sword and lowers himself and bows and begs forgiveness.

This disarms Blackthorne more than anything else. He was prepared to kill Buntaro but he cannot shoot an unarmed man bowing down and apologizing.

But Blackthorne doesn’t see what happens when he turns and walks away.

For Buntaro will never forgive Blackthorne for shaming him this way.

The show often reminds me of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. For those who haven’t read it, it’s a story, essentially, of cultural misunderstanding. Our protagonist finds himself stumbling into political plots that he does not understand or even recognize. And because he himself acts in inscrutable ways to the native people, they assign great meaning to certain things he does without him even being aware.

And when the novel ends, the chasm between peoples makes us gasp.

Blackthorne finds himself in much the same situation.

He understands so little. And even when he believes the ground is stable and solid beneath his feet, it shifts away from him, like a mudslide in an earthquake.

Does Blackthorne try to save Toranaga out of bravery or friendship or some deeper plot, to bring himself closer to one of the most powerful men in the country?

Or does he save him simply because that’s the kind of man he is?

A pirate, yes. Murderer. Pillager.

And yet we understand that Blackthorne is a good friend and a kind man to those in his life.

And so he leaps into danger to save Toranaga and he immediately gives him swords to replace the ones lost and buried somewhere in the earth. Again, this is not out of guile. Or at least I don’t believe it is. Rather, he understands the signifier of the sword.

Toranaga cannot be seen without his swords.

And so he gives Toranaga swords.

He likes Toranaga, which is certainly part of it, but I think he would have done this even for Yabushige or Buntaro. While Blackthorne understands very little, he has also come to grasp quite a lot.

And that we’re presented these together in the same episode is a tremendous gift.

Consider the shape of Blackthorne’s narrative this episode:

Beginning to feel confident in his knowledge and ability in Japan.

He is struck in the face by all he doesn’t understand.

He gives up on Japan and simply wants to abandon everything, all of this.

A moment later, he demonstrates just how much he has come to learn and understand.

This is what makes Shogun—both adaptations—so intoxicating.

There’s a complexity to everything. There are layers of meaning and some of them are buried beneath ritual and custom that neither we nor Blackthorne understand.

Too, there are so many others who don’t understand all the layers they’re playing with.

Toranaga must admonish and punish his son for his foolishness in attacking Ishido’s messenger and vassal, telling him that he can have command once he can understand what it is to rule over men. He immediately understands that Yabushige likely manipulated his son, so he goes to confirm this.

Yabushige being the duplicitous dissembler he expects, he comes to learn what he wants, but he also uses this to punish Yabushige. Yabushige blames his nephew to try to keep his own head and offers to punish Omi, only to have Toranaga essentially promote Omi for his cleverness.

Toranaga understands and sees what Yabushige has done and he is trying to outmaneuver him by pulling away Yabushige’s nephew and bringing him into his circle of control. Even, in a way, putting him above Yabushige.

It’s like making a net. He holds it out into the water and Yabushige is the fish that darts straight into it, thrashing uselessly against the tightly bound ropes.

The episode ends with Lady Ochiba, the mother of the heir, essentially laying claim to the council of Regents. I’m very curious what this will mean, because all the Japanese politicking was incredibly opaque in the 1980 version, to demonstrate just how little Blackthorne was aware of and how little agency or power he had.

And so it’s been a treat to have so much clarity given to us as we watch.

But I think it’s the layers that stick with us, that keep us dazzled.

We are presented with the layered heart of Japan and, like Blackthorne, we believe we can kick through these fences to understand everything inside, not realizing that we’re only two layers deep and there are several more to go.

My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King

When the war parties from Gas Town and the Bullet Farm join Immortan Joe in his pursuit of Furiosa and his stolen wives, Furiosa drives the war rig into a canyon where she’s arranged for a trade with the gangs there.

Oil for passage and protection.

There are a thousand things I could discuss about Fury Road, but I want to linger on a very specific moment that happens here as she prepares to show herself to the gang of canyon bikers.

Furiosa wears grease, as do the other Imperators, but over the course of her attempted escape from Immortan Joe and her journey through the sandstorm, the grease comes off.

For those who have never seen Fury Road…um…go watch it. For those who need a reminder: she’s stolen Immortan Joe’s wives, fought a band of scavengers, an entire battalion of War Boys after Immortan Joe emptied the Citadel to get his property back, and she’s doing everything she can to keep these girls alive, to keep them safe.

Furiosa must be hard.

She has made of her heart a stone.

Everyone in this postapocalyptic desert must be hard. Everything hurts and it hurts all the time. But the further she gets from the Citadel, the more her softness rises to the surface. We see it first when Splendid emerges, revealing the first glimpse of a wife to the viewer.

And we see it when she asks Max his name.

Here, Max does not yet trust her. He’s still mad, driven insane by grief and the wasteland. And so he does not tell her. Refuses to connect to her as a person, for he is not yet human. He must be bathed in hope, first.

She turns away from him, accepting, and prepares for the next fight in this war for salvation, for freedom.

Here, at this moment, chased by three war parties, trying to work a deal to get past this final gang to make her way to the Green Place, she once again applies the grease to her face. A thick black smear over her eyes and all the way to her hairline.

Warpaint.

She puts on the mask of Furiosa.

And we see her give this minor look into the rearview mirror. It’s only a glimpse. A second.

But this moment carries weight.

And you, dear reader, dear viewer, are going to carry that weight.

Brief in its presence, momentous in its significance.

In a movie driven by action, by movement, with almost no dialogue, moments like this hold hundreds of words of dialogue within them. Whole scripts of movies could fill in the space between her putting on the grease, glimpsing at the mirror, and looking away. And maybe this scene wouldn’t work without Charlize Theron’s acting or George Miller’s direction or John Seale’s eye, but I was struck by all that her eyes communicated.

I am Furiosa but I am not his.

Immortan Joe has made her the Imperator. Has made her Furiosa.

But he does not own her.

We are not things, the wives repeat like a mantra, and we can feel it bellowing out of Furiosa here.

For Furiosa has lost everything. She was abducted from her matriarchal homeland flourishing with green and taken to the wastes, to the desert, where everything is oil and blood, overseen and constrained by a brutal and parasitic patriarchy. In this land of violence and masculinity, she has carved out a space. It cost her an arm, but she, at least, has not been made into one of Immortan Joe’s wives, forced to be raped repeatedly by him until she can birth him a son.

The fact that she is the only female Imperator is significant on its own and sets her apart. Yet she has also erased all femininity from her appearance. At first glance, you could see Furiosa as a man walking tall and proud, confident in her ability to inflict violence.

But here, for a brief moment, she is a woman.

And these wives are her girls. Her daughters.

We are not things.

You, Immortan Joe, do not own me.

I will escape.

I have escaped.

I have taken what is most precious to you and I will give them freedom.

Hope.

A green place.

My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King

Catch up on Shogun:

• Shogun (1980)

• Shogun Episodes I & II

• Shogun Episode III

• Shogun Episode V

• Shogun Episode VI

• Shogun Episode VII

• Shogun Episode VIII

• Shogun Episode IX

• Shogun Episode X

Who is Yabushige and what does he want?

This may be the central question of the series moving forward. What does Yabushige want?

I think what we’ve seen from Yabushige demonstrate what we can expect from him, and what we should expect from anyone in this situation. Of course, this expectation flies in the face of what we’ve seen people already do in this show.

Toranaga’s samurai killed himself and his son because of the way he dishonored his lord.

At this point, we believe that this is what we should expect from a Japanese samurai. As if to punctuate this for the audience—or at least remind us—Yabushige asks Toranaga if he’s going to commit seppuku now.

Toranaga, like Yabushige, does not intend to follow the customs of Japanese honor. At least not in this.

Which has been hinted at already. He’s against all the death he sees in society. He wants to change the way Japan is. We understand that Toranaga is a bit unusual in this regard. It’s why his seeming alliance with a powerless foreigner begins to make a bit of sense. Especially if you consider him as a fulcrum of power leery of the Portuguese and the Christians.

In the 1980 version, all of this was far more opaque. The only sense of any of this that we got was Father Alvito saying that the Portuguese needed Toranaga and so they did not want him to die.

Why did they need him?

Unclear! But we assume this would be clear if we could speak or understand all the spoken Japanese floating around.

But Toranaga’s peculiar relationship with tradition and his own culture may go some way to explain his relationship with Yabushige.

Can he trust him?

No, not really. But he knows this. And, as I said, he trusts Yabushige to do what’s in his own best interest.

And I think this is reflected in Toranaga.

It serves Toranaga well to force Yabushige’s army to honor him, to view him as their lord, and so he allows them to exult him. But he also keeps his distance and his own counsel, departing to do…something before he wears out his welcome.

He leaves his son there with Yabushige, sort of as his eyes and ears, I imagine, but also as his representative.

We also get an interest look at the layers of Japanese society. Omi, Yabushige’s nephew and lord of the town, strains under Yabushige’s authority. He would prefer for his uncle to go on his way so that he can have his freedom back.

We see this exact relationship with Yabushige and Toranaga. Yabushige didn’t want Toranaga in his region and he doesn’t want to have to stand underneath the authority of his lord.

I imagine, in some ways, it’s similar to when you return to your parents house. You’re an adult with a life of your own, but you’re also the child of your parents and so you fall back, in certain ways, to that power dynamic.

And even if you like your parents, you may chafe at this.

Along with all this, we get Blackthorne chafing under what he considers a new type of imprisonment. He’s been honored, made a samurai, and so, to accommodate his new status in society, he’s given a home and household staff. This includes Usami Fuji as his consort, which he especially finds unpleasant. Even more unpleasant when he discovers that her husband and son were forced to die because they embarrassed Toranaga.

Everyone strains under these social rules, giving us a reason to desire Toranaga’s success, beyond just a matter of perspective.

I mean, Toranaga did order the death of an infant. He’s not exactly the type of character we’re primed to sympathize with.

But even this was forced on him, in a way, through the system and power structures of Japanese society.

Mariko attempts, once more, to explain to Blackthorne the layers of the heart of the Japanese. There is their public face, their private face, and then the face so private it’s meant for no one.

This is a function of this society.

Blackthorne resents being trapped in this town for six months while he waits for Toranaga to decide what to do with him. He believed his new status meant he’d be given freedom. The freedom of his ship and crew, most importantly.

But these are the last things Toranaga wants to give him access to.

There’s a lot of sweetness and humor in this episode, which I very much appreciated. His growing relationship with Mariko feels very natural here. The gifts he gives to Usami Fuji, the family swords she gives to him, and the way he learns Japanese more and more through observation, attention, and desire. Not to mention the way he digs into the cuisine.

And this is especially important because it comes after he rages about him being trapped in a place that he doesn’t understand.

Rather than continue sulking, Blackthorne decides to embrace his new situation. It’s not hurt by the fact that he’s an honored guest given power and privilege. But he could keep being a little baby about it. Instead, he chooses to make the most out of this.

We also watch as Blackthorne begins to prove his worth to these people who despise and distrust him based solely on his foreignness.

While Toranaga wants him to train troops, Blackthorne must admit that he’s not a soldier. He’s a sailor. He doesn’t know land tactics and wouldn’t be able to train a regiment even if he wanted to. But he does know artillery and he does have cannons.

And here we see, in explosive fashion, why Toranaga (and Yabushige) want this barbarian.

We also see the wily cunning of Yabushige and even Omi. Lord Ishido wants to trap Yabushige, forcing him to either kill himself or abandon Toranaga, but Omi comes up with another possibility.

Without ever telling him what to do or what not to do, he manipulates Toranaga’s son, convincing him that he must do something to protect his father, to prove himself to his father.

And the explosive (literally!) resolution is fascinating because it effectively backs everyone into a corner.

By killing Ishido’s messengers, Ishido must not act. This means Toranaga and Yabushige must also act.

And all that action, as Mariko immediately understands, will lead to war.

I love the web being woven before us here. I love how legible and clear this version of the story is.

And I especially love the way it’s embracing the humanity of this story.

This was the real strength of the 1980 version.

We come to experience and know Blackthorne, Mariko, Toranaga, and Yabushige as people. Their relationships blossom, not simply through dramatic dialogue and shared interests, but through moments of quietness, of silliness, of compassion and love, of disgust and fear.

Seeing that the show is now embracing this part of the narrative makes me very excited.

My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King

Catch up on Shogun:

• Shogun (1980)

• Shogun Episodes I & II

• Shogun Episode IV

• Shogun Episode V

• Shogun Episode VI

• Shogun Episode VII

• Shogun Episode VIII

• Shogun Episode IX

• Shogun Episode X

I love the start of this episode. The fatalism of this society where the only punishment is death. Yabushige is writing his will and describes it as the best one yet, which is harrowingly funny. And oh so appropriate for a man who bends with the wind.

What I’m saying is there’s a lot packed into this moment.

Yabushige, in this single sentence, tells us much about who he is and how he is perceived by his peers, lords, and vassals. He is a man who has often faced potential death due to things he’s chosen to do. So far, he’s escaped.

When he meets Toranaga, believing he will be killed or forced to commit seppuku, he defends himself in an intriguing way. He doesn’t appeal to his loyalty, which Toranaga and everyone else must doubt, but to his own self interest.

Toranaga knows Ishido met with Yabushige in order to pull him into his sphere of influence. Yabushige doesn’t deny it. Even openly and honestly says that Ishido offered him Toranaga’s seat on the council.

But Yabushige doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want to be a great lord, ruling over the realm.

He just wants to be the lord of his own territory and to expand it.

An honest liar. That’s how I’d describe Yabushige and I believe that’s how Toranaga understands him. He cannot trust him and yet he must. And, too, despite his flexibility with regard to loyalty, he believes he can trust Yabushige’s self-interest.

Yabushige is in this life for himself.

Not for Toranaga. Not for Ishigo. Not for Japan.

He has but one life and he chooses to live it for himself.

Maybe not the best ally, but possibly one you can rely on.

And so Toranaga wants him to take Blackthorne and Mariko and Lady Kiri back to Anjiro, where the show began, where Blackthorne’s crew remains imprisoned.

Meanwhile, Captain Ferriera, the captain of the blackship, decides to set sail for China even without Toranaga’s approval, putting the entire silk trade at risk. Of course, from his view, the Japanese are subservient to the Portuguese crown. If these lords won’t obey, an army can come to make them obey.

This puts him in opposition to the church but he also doesn’t care about that, understanding that the church is there, really, only to make his job easier.

Despite what the Jesuits may want to believe, their role is not the conversion of souls but the pacification of a people.

We also meet Buntaro, Mariko’s husband, who turns out to be an ultimate badass samurai. He’s also rude to Mariko and seems to hold her in low regard

We’ll find out why eventually.

Buntaro is among the samurai escorting Blackthorne and Yabushige away from Osaka. While the party prepares for departure, Lord Ishido arrives unannounced and inspects the travelers to ensure they are who they say they are. Since noble women travel in closed carriages, it would be possible to swap one person for another.

Which, of course, is what happens after Ishido’s inspection.

I must say that I vastly prefer the way this is handled in the 1980 miniseries. I don’t know which one is more true to the novel, but the 1980 scene creates a grand comic moment when Blackthorne throws himself in the way to protect Toranaga, who is now sitting in one of the woman’s carriages, sneaking out of Osaka castle in order to escape execution.

If he’s caught, he will die. And he’ll bring death upon everyone else as well.

Here, in the 2024 version, the tension remains very high. And while there is some amount of humor in it, the scene is not meant to break the tension of the show and add levity but to ratchet the tension higher.

This is a problem, I think, in all modern dramatic storytelling.

People don’t understand the importance of register shifts, of breaking tension, of waxing and waning. And so everything remains tense all the time.

And while I prefer the overt silliness of the 1980 miniseries, the scene still works here. It, once again, demonstrates Blackthorne’s perceptiveness. He’s a clever man, a keen observer, and he’s brave.

Possibly to a fault.

Because he could have bene killed right there to protect Toranaga, a man who he barely even knows. A man who is keeping him trapped in Japan.

What’s important is that Toranaga does escape Osaka castle, but he’s escorted by Ishido’s men down to the harbor. Also worth noting is that Blackthorne is the only one who saw the swap and understands that Toranaga is sneaking out of the castle and to safety.

The entire company is ambushed by Kiyama, one of the Christian regents. Their goal is to kill Blackthorne but then they realize Toranaga is present when he starts slashing through fools with his sword.

This leads Ishido’s men accompanying Yabushige’s entourage to turn on Toranaga’s men, which causes Blackthorne and Mariko to join the fight while Kiyama’s men continue to fire arrows upon everyone, sending word back to Osaka to let Ishido know that Toranaga has escaped.

I’m going to pause here to mention that the fight choreography is very bad in this scene, sadly, except when the main cast is off screen.

Anyway, they escape, but this relies on Buntaro staying behind, keeping Ishido’s men from stopping Toranaga’s escape. We assume he dies, which is a departure from the 1980 series.

All of this is great and what I love about it, especially after seeing the 1980 miniseries, is how legible everything is. In the 1980 series, because we only know what Blackthorne knows (unless you speak Japanese), we are completely in the dark with regard to who is attacking Toranga’s people and why.

I assumed Ishido discovered the plot, but that was a pure assumption. We also discover in this version that Yabushige had no idea Toranaga was with him, but he adapts well.

The clarity of the politics is a big improvement here. Or, not improvement, but it gives more dimensions to the story. While I love the closeness and claustrophobia of the 1980 miniseries, there is much to be gained by allowing the viewer to understand what is happening and why.

And so the negotiation on the blackship is also different, but I like this version better. Rather than have Blackthorne a passive part of his escape from Ferriera and the Jesuits, he, in a sense, saves himself. Still, with the help of Rodrigues.

We also see that Toranaga is willing to sacrifice Blackthorne in order to save himself, which he must do and does do in both adaptations.

In the 1980 version, though, Rodrigues gets Blackthorne drunk and throws him overboard to protect his life, while here the two pilots have a literal race.

Which is quite thrilling!

They still have their antagonistic friendship and mutual respect, but there’s more edge here than friendliness, which I think serves the story and characters better.

Of course, in order to be freed from Ishido and Kiyama’s pursuit, Toranaga must give something to the Jesuits. He promises a church in Edo (Tokyo, someday), as well as a lot of money and freedom for the blackship.

Interestingly, though, the Jesuits allow Kiyama’s men in the harbor to be drowned, their ships destroyed.

Again, this shows the limits of the Jesuits and their aims. If it was purely religious, this would have happened differently. They would not have sacrificed Christians to save Toranaga.

And yet.

Once free and on their way to Anjiro, Toranaga raises Blackthorne to the status of hatamoto, which is a samurai. He also asks him to train a new regiment in Western tactics with Western weaponry.

Back in Osaka, Toranaga’s vassal gives the regent council a letter from Toranaga announcing his resignation from the council. With only four men on the council, the council can no longer make decisions, because they’re bound to vote on nothing without all five positions filled.

This buys Toranaga time. How much time? Probably very little! But any amount of time is needed.

Back on the ship, we see Blackthorne teaching Toranaga how to dive and they then swim a race to shore.

I love moments like this, which show the growing friendship between the men, as well as bringing some amount of levity to the show. I like how this Blackthorne looks more like a pirate as well.

In general, my only complaint for this episode is that much of the humor and levity of the 1980 miniseries is stripped away, leaving just bits and pieces. Largely, the show is much more dramatic and has a sharper edge.

But I think that risks a sense of monotony to the whole thing. But there’s time for this to change as well.

There’s a scene that I think was meant to happen already or is happening soon and it was one of my favorite scenes from the 1980 adaptation. I’ll have to wait and see if this happens.

Until next week!

My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

And it’s real good.

Maybe the best show I’ve seen in years.

Spoilers ahead, not only for the first two episodes, but for the whole series.

• Shogun (1980)

• Shogun Episode III

• Shogun Episode IV

• Shogun Episode V

• Shogun Episode VI

• Shogun Episode VII

• Shogun Episode VIII

• Shogun Episode IX

• Shogun Episode X

I mean, this is sort of said while assuming historical events are spoilers for a show. Anyway.

Episode I

I was cautiously optimistic but my wife and I were secretly expecting the worst elements of modern filmmaking to make this almost unwatchable.

Maybe most noticeable for those who fear and hate the darkness of modern filmmaking, the show remains bright enough to be legible even in scenes that should be pitch black. And this makes an enormous difference.

Now, I’m not one of those haters of the intense darkness of modern movies and shows. This kind of aesthetic is somewhat cyclical and maybe Shogun is a sign that we’re moving out of the darkness and towards artificial light to make night scenes more viewable.

Of course, Dune II comes out tomorrow and that will likely be wildly dark, so who knows.

But talking about lighting is the least interesting part of this adaptation, though I do think it signals something important about this adaptation.

The new adaptation is noticeably different. Rather than understanding the story solely through John Blackthorne’s eyes, we get a broader view. Some things are even done in a different order. It’s not entirely clear to me why, but I assume this was to sort of massage over some of the things in the original that they thought audiences wouldn’t buy, or that threatened to break the realism of the piece.

We skip the storm that leaves Blackthorne and the Dutch stranded in Japan and instead see the Japanese board the ship and find the crew barely alive.

Rather than Blackthorne waking up in a nice bed, we see them first in a hole in the ground.

This is a departure from the book and the 1980 miniseries, but I actually think it’s an improvement. It makes more sense to me—and likely most viewers—to have him in prison first and then taken out and cared for, rather than given care and then tossed into the hole.

Life doesn’t follow sense and so I do like the other ordering of things, but this shifting didn’t lead to any significant change, I think.

The biggest change happens very quickly in that we see Lord Toranaga for the first time within minutes of the show starting. He’s far away and heading to Osaka Castle, which is a trap laid out for him.

Inside Osaka Castle, the plotting against Toranaga begins and the political dimensions of the series are laid out more clearly in this scene than they were in the entire 1980s miniseries.

And while I did like that aspect of the 1980 series—the way we’re as lost as Blackthorne, completely in the dark—it’s also interesting to see the cards laid out before us. This will allow us to see and understand Toranaga’s political machinations and movements.

You see, the original show is really driven by Blackthorne’s competency and cleverness. The way, piece by piece, detail by detail, he observes and learns and begins using what he learns to his advantage.

This is why the Thomas Cromwell novels by Hilary Mantel work so well.

This is history. We know the ending. We know exactly where this goes.

But watching someone competently cut through their adversaries and adversity is strangely intoxicating and compelling.

This 2024 adaptation of Shogun promises to not only show Blackthorne’s cleverness, but also Toranaga’s.

And I am absolutely delight and enthralled by this.

He’s one of the most compelling characters from the 1980 miniseries, and he’s really not on screen that much. Part of this powerful presence is no doubt due to Toshiro Mifune, but another part is the mystery. We don’t exactly understand what he’s doing or why, what he wants from this barbarian from the West or how this barbarian can possibly be an advantage.

And it’s really not until the very end of the miniseries, those final few minutes, that we see what Toranaga’s done, and it causes us to re-examine the show we spent 9 hours watching.

This new adaptation is going to ground us in Toranaga’s narrative, which is thrilling. At least to me.

We move back to Blackthorne at Anjiro, where he shipwrecked, and Yabushige (wasnamed Yabu in the 1980 series and novel: the name change was apparently to make his name more Japanese sounding) played by one of my all time favorite actors, Tadanobu Asano(!).

Yabushige was one of my favorite elements of the 1980 series so it’s such a tremendous joy to see Asano take on this role.

Yabushige is a brutal and wily man who is obsessed with the moment of death. He takes a keen interest in Blackthorne, in part because Blackthorne so hates the Portuguese Jesuits fluttering around Japan.

This saves his life.

Now that the Japanese aspects of the narrative are pushed to the front of the show, we understand much more of what’s going on, but also get to see the fullness of these characters. We see the chaotic glee of Yabishige, for example, who seems absolutely delighted by a barbarian who hates the priests and Christians as much as he does.

All the same, he kills one of the Dutchman locked up and listens to hear what happens at the moment of death.

Now, there are certain things that are a bit lost by showing the Japanese perspective so early. For example, when Blackthorne witnesses a samurai murder a peasant, seemingly at random, we aren’t given that moment of disequilibrium.

This is something that happens here.

By grounding the knowability of the Japanese, we’re still shocked but the shock is less jarring.

The same is true when Toranaga orders a man to commit seppuku along with his infant son, ending his line.

We understand the brutality and we see the brutality and the intense hierarchy of 1600 Japan, but the effect is not really the same.

Still, though, that’s a minor quibble and I think what we’re gaining is making up for it.

Toranaga in Osaka learns, through a spy in Anjiro, about the arrival of the barbarians from the West and he sends one of his vassals to go collect them.

At the same time, Yabushige is seeing the advantage of this Western ship full of guns and cannons. Now that Toranaga, his lord, is in Osaka Castle, he believes Toranaga is a dead man, which means his life may also be forfeit. The guns and cannons will allow him to fight back.

Of course, this is immediately followed by Toranaga’s vassals arriving and taking ownership of the ship and the crew. And they take Blackthorne with them to Osaka. A Portuguese pilot names Rodrigues mans the ship to Osaka.

Now, this is another point where we were extremely skeptical. Rodrigues is played by John Rhys-Davies in the 1980 miniseries, and though Rhys-Davies is anything but Portuguese, he’s such a big presence on screen that it’s hard to imagine someone else taking on this role.

And yet Nestor Carbonell is at his best here, and playing way out of character from what I’m used to.

What happens on the ship and after is also a departure from the 1980 series.

Rodrigues falls overboard. In the 1980 miniseries, Blackthorne jumps over to save him with Yabu jumping over to save both of them.

This is an important moment because it shows two things:

1. Rodrigues did not matter enough to the Japanese to be saved

2. Blackthorne matters so much to the Japanese that they risk lives to save him

This is an important discovery for Blackthorne, and it’s absent here.

I imagine, in part, because if a storm is bad enough to knock people overboard, it’s probably too treacherous to just swim through. And producers feared this would break the reality of the scene, and so they shifted.

Blackthorne steers them to shore and then demands they go find Rodrigues. None of the Japanese are interested in doing this and they don’t understand him anyway. But Yabushige gets the idea and they go search for Rodrigues. They find him at the bottom of a cliff face and Blackthorne attempts to go down to save him.

Here, now, Blackthorne learns about his indispensability. They refuse to let him even consider putting his life at risk. Blackthorne, though, has picked up a bit on how honor works here already and essentially forces Yabushige to do the rescue then.

Yabushige sees what he’s doing and though one of his samurai offers to go in his place, Yabushige takes the plunge. It doesn’t go well!

Though he saves Rodrigues, he nearly drowns until a descending rope saves him.

Curiously, to Blackthorne, Yabushige drew his sword when he discovered survival was hopeless and that he would drown. He prepares to kill himself rather than drown, which is when the rope falls.

And Yabushige is saved and the episode ends.

Now, we had planned on only watching one episode, despite both being available. But, goddamn. We were hooked.

Enthralled.

And I want to take a moment to discuss the actor playing Blackthorne.

I’d never heard of Cosmo Jarvis. Maybe you haven’t either. But our expectations were quite low. Richard Chamberlain is such a charming and charismatic Blackthorne that it seemed difficult to imagine anyone else filling those shoes. Especially one who looked like Jarvis, who seems much harder and rougher.

And so he is.

But, weirdly, that works just as well.

My first thought upon watching him is that he’s playing Tom Hardy, which is kind of funny. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a very Hardy-esque performance, even down to the way he delivered his lines.

And though he’s rougher and possibly more sinister in his rendition of Blackthorne, I think this works very well. With Chamberlain, it is a bit difficult to believe someone so charming could be a pillaging pirate, but with Jarvis, I have no trouble there.

Judging books by covers, fool me.

Gone is the affability of Chamberlain, but instead we get a stony determination.

And I like it.

I like it a whole lot.

Episode II

We’re immediately thrown to a year before, when the Taiko lies dying. He tells Toranaga that he would hand the regency solely to him, but Toranaga believes this would lead to his rivals rising together to murder him.

Which is exactly what we see happening in 1600, despite the order the Taiko gave for the creation of a council of five regents.

Lord Ishido has turned the other three regents against Toranaga and now Toranaga faces death.

Back in the present, we see Rodrigues present the Jesuits with the rutter from Blackthorne’s ship, which reveals them to be, essentially, pirates, just as suspected. The Jesuits debate whether this should be shared with the Japanese, but decide against it since it also contains the Spanish and Portuguese alliance, which partitions the globe between them.

We also meet Mariko, who is fluent in Portuguese and Latin, making her a potential translator for Toranaga when he speaks with the barbarian, Blackthorne, now given the name Anjin, which means Pilot.

Blackthorne is brought before Toranaga and Mariko, but Mariko is not yet the translator. Rather, the translation happens through Father Alvito, a Portuguese Jesuit.

The editing of this scene is great. We begin with full translations and we see that Alvito, despite Blackthorne’s mistrust, is translating faithfully, but gradually shift to Toranaga speaking directly to Blackthorne, each in their own language, with the audience simply understanding that the translation is happening in between.

It’s a clever use of editing, which also draws a connection between Toranaga and Blackthorne.

Lord Ishido interrupts this interview and Toranaga dismisses the whole affair, sending Blackthorne to prison.

Ishido wonders why Toranaga is wasting his final days of life talking to a barbarian, and Toranaga demurs.

And Blackthorne pays the price.

In prison, he meets a Franciscan who was put there by the Jesuits. In the 1980 miniseries, this is a neat little friendship that we get to see and where Blackthorne learns more and more about Japan and the culture and even the language.

Things are a bit swifter here, though Blackthorne does learn about a Portuguese base in Macau, where the Black Ship connects Japan to the Silk Trade. This makes Portugal obscenely rich and Japan…well, not so much. It also highlights the way Portugal is building a military apparatus to potentially rival and overthrow the Japanese.

We’re led to understand this is exactly what happened during the previous Taiko’s life.

We learn of Toranaga’s plans for Blackthorne as well, using him as a wedge between the Christians on the regent council and Ishido, who is not Christian. The Christians, through the influence of the Jesuits, want Blackthorne executed immediately and will not vote on Toranaga’s fate until the heretic is dead.

This matters because Toranaga must be expelled from the regency unanimously by the other four regents. And so the introduction of the heretic both delays this vote but also potentially divides those unified against him.

Ishido arrives at Yabushige’s rooms and is surprised that Toranaga has not invited his vassal into his part of Osaka castle. Yabushige plays this off nonchalantly and then they get down to talking about Blackthorne. Ishido, of course, wants to know what Toranaga wants with him. But Yabushige doesn’t really know, though he does say that Toranaga believes the Christians are trying to take over the regency and, eventually, all of Japan, which makes Ishido warry of the Christians on the regency council.

Well, Blackthorne is sentenced to be executed and Yabushige, through some underhanded dealings, manages to save him and bring him to Toranaga, where Mariko now translates for him.

And here comes my favorite scene, both from the 1980 miniseries and, so far, from this one.

Toranaga is aware that he is ignorant of much of the world and he demands information from Blackthorne. In explaining why he’s there, providing himself with a defense, Blackthorne also reveals the Portuguese base in Macau, implies there are many others with Japanese Christian troops, and, most importantly, tells Toranaga that Spain and Portugal have partitioned the New World between themselves.

And Portugal has claimed ownership of Japan.

Shit, as they say, hits the fan.

I love it.

It’s a great moment and it’s captured so well by Jarvis, Sanada (Toranaga), and Sawai (Mariko). The texture of the scene is much different than the 1980 miniseries. The drama and tension is tighter, ratcheted higher here, and I think it allows this moment to become more explosive.

I want to watch it again right now!

The fall out is almost immediate. While Blackthorne is brought into Toranaga’s protection and into his lodging, Toranaga refuses to let the Black Ship sail. The Christian regents and the Jesuits—especially the captain of the Black Ship—need Blackthorne out of their hair so they can keep making the profit for empire.

An assassin is hired and she cuts through Toranaga’s rooms with ruthless and brutal efficiency. An alarm is raised and everyone fears for their lord Toranaga, and guards and samurai move to protect him.

Blackthorne wakes as well and runs towards the chaos, which leads him to the guest rooms, where he should have been staying.

There he finds Toranaga and the assassin. Toranaga has already sliced into her neck. She’s dead, though she fights on anyway, bleeding to death, and manages to cut Blackthorne before she succumbs to her wound.

And here, when his household is gathered round her, telling him he must wage war against Ishido, he tells them all that he was staying in Anjin’s rooms. That the assassin was for Anjin.

As if he expected this from the Jesuits.

Which leave sus in a curious place!

And I really feel that I must say how riveting this rendition of the story is. I’ll remind you: I watched the miniseries just a few weeks ago. I remember exactly what happened, and yet I was still on the edge of my seat.

I’m sure many people have various quibbles with this show because of how it differs from the older miniseries or the source material, but my only want from an adaptation is that it be good.

And Shogun is proving itself to be one of the best shows in years.

The acting is superb. The fight choreography is clear and legible. The worldbuilding and cinematography are about as good as you can hope for right now.

And, at its foundation, is just a fucking great story.

My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

Some free books for your trouble:

February Book Bonanza

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Not a Damsel: Epic Women in SFF