Even if I drew on your face with a pen

[sovay]

This post is not actually about The Last Jedi (2017), which I still haven't seen. I just happened to be reading Film Crit Hulk's "The Beautiful, Ugly, and Possessive Hearts of Star Wars" when I hit a small emotional minefield. An entire section of the essay is devoted to the self-seriousness of toxic fandom, with its complaints about too many jokes and juvenile humor unbecoming the franchise and failure to treat the characters with the respect they deserve:

But it's all very simple: if the movie feels silly, then they feel silly.

And they do not want to feel silly one bit. Make no mistake, a lot of people watch movies and live vicariously through the characters. They go "I'm Luke Skywalker!" or "I'm Spider-man!" and they do this because these movies are really good at making us feel this way. So it's not just about escape, but an empowerment fantasy. They want to hold a lightsaber or web-sling around New York City. They want to feel awesome. They want to feel badass. But they definitely don't want to feel like the butt of a joke. It's exactly why Christopher Nolan endeared a certain kind of superhero fanboy who wanted to dress up their dark affinity for Batman in an intellectual, very serious packaging. While I will certainly go to bat for those films, there is nothing inherently "mature" about this fan approach. As I've argued before, most fan posturing has nothing to do with maturity, but instead the desire to shed their kid-like sensibilities and child-like interests, all by catering to juvenile stories.

There's a reason the Star Wars petitioner personality gets saddled with the "basement dweller" stereotype. It's not a fair one and probably not even accurate (which is scary, imagining them as full-grown adults with jobs and stuff), but it happens because making those comments are absolutely the tonal equivalent of a self-serious tween boy yelling, "MOM, GET OUT OF MY ROOM, I'M SUPER SERIOUS." It is always in the desperation to be taken seriously that we make ourselves the joke. But embracing our kid-like sensibilities, along with all the sadness and range life has to offer, is maturity itself. It's understanding we can be silly and make fun of ourselves just as much as we can be anything else.

By nature I take things seriously. I had to learn to understand a lot of jokes. (I still don't get entire classes of them. I believe that other people find them funny, but they don't produce the same reaction in me. I don't feel bad about it.) Even as late as college, I'd get accused of not having a sense of humor, not knowing how to have fun, not knowing how to lighten up, not knowing how to relax. (Scotty, with technical journal: "I am relaxing!") And I spent a lot of my childhood and my adolescence being made fun of. Big news. I survived to the age where I could have conversations with my peer group and my life got a lot better. But I realized while reading the paragraphs cited above that it is still extremely difficult for me to disentangle learn to have a sense of humor about yourself as part of the process of becoming a healthy adult from be a good sport, what's wrong with you, can't you take a joke? I know they are two different things. One is legitimate life advice; the other is bullying. I even think I managed the first somewhere in my decades of brute-forcing social skills into my brain. [edit: Okay, Tiny Wittgenstein, back off.] But the second is so often passed off under guise of the first that when I encounter the life advice in the wild—not even directed at me! I haven't seen The Last Jedi and I'm not an entitled cishet fanbro!—apparently some unexploded ordnance goes off in my head and I wind up re-reading the section several times to make sure it's not accidentally punching down in its attempts at uplift. There's a lot of mainstream fan culture I have no affinity for, but stop taking that silly thing so seriously is one of the few overlapping hills I will die on.

Anyway, I went to look at some other parts of the internet to get my heart rate back down and saw that handful_ofdust had tagged me WWII AU Newt Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb, which definitely helped. The link in comments is dead, but I am delighted that I am not the only person who wanted to cast Burn Gorman as Alan Turing after seeing Pacific Rim (2013). I feel validated like five years after the fact. I don't feel bad about that, either.

Comments

[moon_custafer]

This has decided me – if I’m tempted to pursue friendship with a person, I will first ask myself “is this someone to whom I’d confide my belief that to watch What’s Opera, Doc? (1957) is to experience the Sublime, or that there are connections to be drawn between Shakespeare’s Bottom, that guy from the “Double Rainbow” meme a few years back, and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich?” They don’t necessarily have to agree, they just have to not look at me as though I’m crazy for even bringing it up. Admittedly, Friedrich, going by his expression in portraits, would probably think I was crazy.

[sovay]

or that there are connections to be drawn between Shakespeare’s Bottom, that guy from the “Double Rainbow” meme a few years back, and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich?”

I have totally not heard this proposition. Who is the guy from the Double Rainbow meme?

Admittedly, Friedrich, going by his expression in portraits, would probably think I was crazy.

I think with Romantic painters you can consider one another crazy and still have great conversations about the sublime.

[moon_custafer]

A few years ago, a video of a double rainbow in a national park went viral, largely because of the exclamations from the man behind the camera who kept asking himself in a wondering tone “what does it MEAN?” and eventually, crying and laughing with excess emotion. And it was funny, but when I thought about it, it seemed to me that guy was having some kind of experience that most 19th-century Romantics would kill for; I though of the paintings of Friedrich first off. It wasn’t the fault of the man in this case that he couldn’t express his feelings eloquently — in any case, even a poet would likely have said something similar in the moment, and only been able to recreate the experience for others afterwards, once they’d had time to calm down and process it. When, a while back on this journal, I saw your description of Cagney as Nick Bottom (you write review something like “not even by synesthesia can he describe his experience”), I wondered whether Friedrich’s figures have their backs to us, not only so we can imagine ourselves in their place, but because any expression on their faces would seem ludicrously inadequate to the beauties they are observing.

[sovay]

largely because of the exclamations from the man behind the camera who kept asking himself in a wondering tone “what does it MEAN?” and eventually, crying and laughing with excess emotion.

That does sound classically Romantic. Stendhal syndrome if you faint and otherwise just a relatively usual reaction to the beauties of nature.

When, a while back on this journal, I saw your description of Cagney as Nick Bottom (you write review something like “not even by synesthesia can he describe his experience”)

I had to go looking because I remembered the performance but not the date of the description and found a comment on poliphilo's LJ, not mine. I wonder if I reposted it or just linked.

I wondered whether Friedrich’s figures have their backs to us, not only so we can imagine ourselves in their place, but because any expression on their faces would seem ludicrously inadequate to the beauties they are observing.

That makes a lot of sense to me, and I like it.

[kore]

to watch What’s Opera, Doc? (1957) is to experience the Sublime

Oh fuck yes.