A Socialist View of “Perfect Days”

I recently saw the Oscar-nominated film Perfect Days at the urging of multiple family members. Directed by Wim Wenders, an auteur I frequently pretend to have heard of at parties, the film stars Japanese screen legend Koji Yakusho as Hirayama, a middle-aged man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo. As the movie unfolds over two hours, Hirayama’s meticulous daily routines are upended by various interferences — his co-worker needs money, his niece appears out of the blue, he may be developing feelings for a bar owner, and so on.

Any of these could serve as the hook for a movie of their own, but none of them develop to crowd out the others. In an exceptionally realistic way, life simply goes on. In fact, while watching Perfect Days, I found myself thinking that the camera could have wandered away from Hirayama in any scene, following another character into an equally compelling narrative. This is not meant to denigrate the story we do see; I just mean that Wenders’s depiction of everyday life ennobles everybody who crosses before the camera.

I liked it a lot, in other words. However, I recently came across a review by Eileen Jones in Jacobin which challenged my reaction. Normally I enjoy Jones’s work — she’s one of the best working reviewers for pointing out which emperors have no clothes (for example, she was one of the few critics to lambast Oppenheimer). But I think that she missed the mark on Perfect Days, and moreover, that she could have better represented Jacobin’s socialist perspective.

Jones’s review argues that Hirayama’s spare, minimalist existence does not resemble any real working-class lifestyle. Most people with minimum wage jobs cannot afford to eat every dinner at a restaurant (as Hirayama does), visit a public bathhouse every afternoon (as Hirayama does, though this may be more affordable in Japan), or own a van better stocked with toilet-cleaning equipment than John Wick’s basement is with guns. Poor people have families to feed. They’re often in debt. They may be too disabled to work, surviving off meager government assistance.

In Jones’s own words: “Rich people can afford to have that one perfect sweater that wears like iron and always looks wonderful, among their other well-made and lovingly maintained objects, which have aesthetic status as well as lasting functionality. Working-class people are inclined to live in more confined spaces and have a lot of crap heaped up all over the place. Their belongings tend to be cheap and always breaking down or wearing out fast and having to be replaced by more crap, and there’s so much pressure involved in making a living, just keeping things in any kind of rough order is tough. Nobody’s sitting around lovingly tending their one precious object per shelf.”

Jones goes on to assert that rich people love to imagine how simple and carefree their lives would be if they were virtuously poor. This didn’t start with Marie Kondo — I remember guffawing with members of my freshman seminar about Seneca advising a wealthy Roman to set aside a wing of his mansion where he can practice being poor. These fantasies can become politically pernicious: if the poor demand better wages, the rich can accuse them of being too spiritually impure to be happy with less.

It’s a compelling argument, and it may do something to explain the festival-circuit success of Perfect Days. However, Jones has failed to mention a pivotal sequence that upends the perception of the film as a minimalist fantasy for the well-off.

Toward the end of the movie, Hirayama’s co-worker Takashi abruptly quits the toilet-cleaning gig minutes before the start of his shift. With no time to find a replacement, Hirayama’s unseen boss tells him he’ll have to hit twice as many bathrooms. It’s unnerving enough to see Hirayama yelling into a cell phone — in stark contrast to his usual monastic serenity — but it’s just a taste of what’s to come.

By this point the viewer has come to know Hirayama’s routine almost as well as Hirayama himself must. He cleans each bathroom carefully, pauses for a lunch break at a shrine, takes pictures of trees, searches for plants to bring home, occasionally helps a passer-by, and finishes with time to relax in the bath and then enjoy dinner. However, because of the whims of his faceless employers, he no longer has room to enjoy any of that. Even by rushing through each cleaning, jettisoning the pride he usually takes in a spotless toilet, he still can’t finish before dark.

This sequence is the heart of the film. It tells us that Hirayama’s ability to thrive on his routines doesn’t derive from being some sort of unique saint. Rather, his contentment is founded on having the time and space to become content. If he had to take a second job, or come back home to keep house for a family, or do any of the hundred other things the global working class must do to stay afloat, his routine would squeeze out all his appreciation for life, like pulp from an orange.

More than any other character, Hirayama reminds me of Platon Karataev, the Russian peasant who makes a brief but vital appearance toward the end of War and Peace. Karataev teaches Pierre Bezukhov his philosophy of loving the suffering that defines life — half Stoic, half Buddhist. Though Karataev’s teaching finally provides Pierre an answer to lifelong dilemmas about how he should live, Pierre proves more comfortable with an image of Karataev than with the man himself. As Karataev grows ever sicker from a festering wound, Pierre begins to avoid him. In the end, he doesn’t even see the moment his friend dies.

The death of Karataev and the double-shift sequence of Perfect Days lead us to the same conclusion. Eileen Jones is right that the upper classes love a working-class saint — look how the peasants sing as they labor! — but you can’t transform a person into a symbol without doing incalculable violence to that person’s humanity. Hirayama’s boss may have thought that he wouldn’t mind working a double shift, since he loves cleaning toilets so much. In a movie so concerned with the humanity of every character, that dehumanization is the greatest crime.

So, what’s the message? Everybody needs time off. Everybody needs a wage on which they can not just live but thrive — nobody should be forced to sell precious possessions just to fuel up their van. Finding contentment like Hirayama does should be a choice, not a demand we make on the working class. In a society that paid toilet cleaners $30 an hour for a four-day work week, Hirayama’s zen existence wouldn’t be an anomaly that set off Eileen Jones’s BS detector. It’d just be existence.

My Top 20 Onion Articles

I’ve been reading The Onion since it had a print edition, which was in the era when “fake news” was still a genre of comedy and not a direct threat to democracy. When you crank out as much material as The Onion has over the past few decades, much of it is bound to fall flat, but there are just as many triumphs. On a lark, I recently tried to list my 10 favorite articles, only to quickly come up with 20.

Surprisingly, very few of them are directly political: my hot take is that The Onion, much like Saturday Night Live, is a lot funnier when it isn’t trying to be relevant. Instead, these articles delve into the weirder, goofier, and more creative side of fake news.

Here’s my list with links, presented in no particular order. Once you’ve read, I’d love to hear about yours.

Frustrated Novelist No Good At Describing Hands

No matter how many times I read it, novelist Edward Milligan’s awful attempts to comprehend human appendages utterly slay me. From “glorious gripping machine” to “bony ball-sticks” to “flabby pink-tan logs, but a bendy kind of log,” the hits come thick and fast. I also felt a deep sympathy with Milligan’s use of shortcuts, like populating entire stories with amputees, or asking Philip Roth to explain how he does hands.

Milligan is one of The Onion‘s recurring characters, also featured in “Novelist Has Whole Shitty World Plotted Out.”

BREAKING: Imperial Inspector To Arrive By Railcar This Very Afternoon

I love when The Onion does worldbuilding, and this one makes me more certain than ever that someone on staff is working on a fantasy novel. There aren’t really any jokes, except the overall joke that this was printed in a newspaper at all, but there are so many enticing details that I don’t care. Who is the Captain of the Dragoons? How does the Imperial Inspector’s young bride feel about being wed to “a severe man not given to humor”? Has the Armada really been as successful in the provinces as the propaganda would have us believe? And what one mistake by our protagonist will condemn his hometown, beginning an adventure that will take them to the very heart of the imperial fortress?

My Reclining Squirrel Kung Fu Stance Is Eminently Defeatable

OK, there’s only one joke in this, but goddamn if it isn’t hilarious. Quaking Rodent, Master of Losing at Kung Fu, taunts his rival Stunted Duckling with florid boasts about how much he, Quaking Rodent, sucks at martial arts. If you’re not howling by the line “I have journeyed for almost a day, detouring several miles to avoid the frighteningly high bridge over the Yue Jiang river,” you will be by the time Rodent admits to killing his own master.

I’ve Never Been So Accurately Insulted In All My Life

I admit I mostly find this funny because my cousin once read the whole thing to me in a note-perfect snooty character voice — Kelsey Grammer couldn’t have done a better reading of lines like “You sliced me to helpless ribbons, the English language your scalpel!” Since then, it’s a rare Chapman family gathering that goes by without someone saying “lose 30 to 35 pounds!”

Deciding Vote On Wetlands Preservation Bill Rests With The Littlest Senator

The best Onion articles are the ones that commit to a bit and ride it all the way to the end, and few do it better than the tale of Rhode Island Senator Dwight Q. Peabody. Though the big, mean senators bully him, Peabody finds his courage and learns that the littlest senator can make the biggest difference of all.

Ask An Elderly Black Woman As Depicted By A Sophomore Creative Writing Major

I’ve read submissions for a few issues of a literary magazine, and you’d better believe I’ve met Mrs. D’Lulah Jessups more than once. This article nails the specific cocktail of paternalism and performative allyship that arises when writers without imagination or life experience try to tackle weighty issues. Fictional author Brian Kirby gives Mrs. Jessups a grating dialect, an endless supply of southern-fried cliches, and a cheerful subservience to her employers.

Kirby’s satisfaction with his own open-mindedness oozes riotously from every line of “The Sun Behind the Sky.” I can easily imagine him sitting down at his keyboard after reading about the George Floyd protests, deciding to solve this gosh-darn race problem once and for all. It’s an expansion of my favorite ever entry in the Lyttle Lytton Contest: “‘Your life matters!’ I cried in solidarity, tenderly hugging the POC.”

Nation Afraid To Admit 9-Year-Old Disabled Poet Really Bad

Take note, conservatives: this is an example of actual transgressive comedy done right. It works because, while we’re invited to laugh at Luke Petrowski’s execrable poems, he’s not the ultimate butt of the joke. The article’s true targets are the hordes of well-meaning adults who flock to put Luke on a pedestal and refuse to engage with his work on its own merits. It reminds me of The Fault In Our Stars, which also points out the dehumanizing nature of the “inspirational sick child” trope.

Veteran Cop Gets Along Great With Rookie Partner

Nothing too special here — just an article challenging itself to take the piss out of as many police movie tropes as possible in 800 words. Vincent Tate’s unorthodox methods and lack of a drinking problem pair perfectly with Jason Hepplewhite’s fancy education and lack of a tragic backstory. I haven’t laughed so hard at a pair of cops since Danson and Highsmith leapt to their deaths in The Other Guys.

Pete’s An Asshole vs. Aw, C’mon, Pete’s An All-Right Guy

In the greatest example of the Onion’s oft-used point-counterpoint format, two friends argue over the pressing question of whether Pete sucks. The second part has a hilarious and surprisingly nuanced arc as the author sets out to defend Pete, only for each justification to push him further toward realizing that Pete is, in fact, an asshole.

Sci-Fi Writer Attributes Everything Mysterious To ‘Quantum Flux’

OK, I may be slightly biased toward the ones about writers, but this is just so dang funny. Writing a novel without an outline is a dangerous activity, and Gabriel Fournier’s over-reliance on quantum flux to solve all his self-inflicted problems spirals rapidly out of control. It’s even funnier when he tries to pretend he did it all on purpose for thematic reasons. I have to admit, though, that I’m curious about what will happen at the end of A Flux Quantum.

I’m Sure That Out-Of-Control Water-Skier Will Avoid Our Outdoor Wedding

The tale of Penelope Stodgeworthy’s soon-to-be interrupted wedding is one of the rarest things an Onion article can be: truly heartwarming. Penelope builds tension by describing her increasingly precarious nuptials, then releases it in one gloriously long sentence that reveals she never wanted to marry Walter Priss in the first place — and gives her one more chance at happiness with her working-class lover Patrick.

‘The Case, Mr. Kerry, Give Me The Case,’ Demands Malaysian Ambassador Holding Dangling John Kerry From Petronas Towers Skybridge

For a while, The Onion was doing a bit where Secretary of State John Kerry was an international man of action and intrigue who fought tyrannical Russian oligarchs and seduced Arabian princesses. Every single one of these articles is gold, from Kerry disguising himself as Vladimir Putin’s masseur to saving his Moroccan companion Drumstick from quicksand. This one stands in for all of them because it’s fun to shout “The case, Mr. Kerry! Give me the case!”

You Shall Make An Excellent Queen

Most of The Onion‘s regular contributors are hit-or-miss for me, but one never wore out his welcome: Gorzo the Mighty, Emperor of the Universe. After taking over the universe sometime in the 30s, Gorzo lives only to destroy his nemesis Crash Comet, Space Commander From The Year 2000. In this thrilling vignette, Crash Comet rudely crashes Gorzo’s joyous marriage ceremony (in what I’ve just realized is the second fucked-up wedding on the list).

Love On A Budget

We can’t forget the other greatest regular contributor: Smoove B, Love Man. Smoove’s bit is that no matter what he starts out talking about, his columns always degenerate into long descriptions of elaborate dates that culminate in him freaking his woman doggy-style. In this column, Smoove finds himself short on cash and must treat his one true woman to a picnic and sneaking into a drive-in movie.

Loved Ones Recall Local Man’s Cowardly Battle With Cancer

I’ve always imagined that cancer patients, much like members of the armed forces, get tired of people constantly praising their bravery. If that’s true, reading this article must be cathartic for them. Russ Kunkel may be so deeply craven that his four-month prognosis turns out to be wildly optimistic, but in his own way, he’s taking a brave stand by refusing to conform to expectations.

If You Want To Date My Daughter, You’re Going To Have To Date Me First

I find the whole “shotgun dad” meme to be absurdly creepy and off-putting, so this article was a breath of fresh air. Lloyd Rutledge refuses to let his daughter Katie date until he’s dated the boy himself to make sure he’s worthy. It’s a lot more commitment than just threatening to shoot the date, and I commend Lloyd for it.

Jurisprudence Fetishist Gets Off On Technicality

The Onion‘s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Bonus points for the perfect picture.

Oh, Area Man’s Aching Back

Where would The Onion be without Area Man? As newspapers become steadily less local, Area Man has become an anachronism, but he still resides in our hearts as the lackluster everyman hero of a hundred Onion articles. I like to think of him as Florida Man’s slightly quieter brother.

Ask A High-School Student Who Didn’t Do The Required Reading

“I would say that using animals to represent communists was a pretty good idea, because, historically, communists tried to do a lot of animalistic things, like aim nuclear bombs at America, and that is like something an animal on a farm might do.”

The Definitive Ranking Of Everyone In This Chinese Dragon Costume

I’m cheating a bit to get to 20, because this isn’t actually an Onion article — it’s from sister site Clickhole, which mocks clickbait sites like Buzzfeed. This is some of Clickhole’s best work. Not a week goes by when I don’t find some opportunity to say “Being in the dragon is about being part of a team” or “Listen, Gene, this isn’t a fucking conga line.”

Thanks for reading! And let me know if the Imperial Inspector guy ever writes that novel.

100 Alternate Histories

I love alternate history. It’s not even entirely a writer thing — just a really fun hobby. Nothing beats getting together with a bunch of history-buff friends and wiling away a dinner or a road trip trying to figure out what would have happened if Genghis Khan was a woman or France won the space race.

Alternate history is simple. You pick an inflection point, either a discrete event or a larger trend, and imagine it going a different way than it really did. Since a great deal of history comes down to happenstance and chaos theory, there’s a lot of fodder for believable new worlds here.

With that said, I’m going to get fired from my own blog if I don’t start complaining by the third paragraph, so here’s what bothers me. In popular culture, “alternate history” is far too identified with two specific hinge points: the South winning the American Civil War, and the Axis Powers winning World War II. I’m sick to death of both of these. They’re overdone, and worse, the only possible outcomes involve horrific suffering for ethnic minorities.

I’m not opposed to imagining how things could have gone worse — it’s always nice to remember that we don’t actually live in the Darkest Timeline — but those two alternate histories are played out to the point where they’ve become a common shelter for actual racists.

But good news! There’s a fractally infinite amount of history out there. So, whether you’re writing a story or just looking for a conversation starter, I thought I’d share 100 of my favorite pivot points to kickstart your alt-history imaginings. Here goes (arranged in roughly chronological order).

1. Homo sapiens evolves on Pangaea.
2. Due to a paleolithic mutation, human fatty tissue stops accumulating heavy metals, so lead and mercury are no longer toxic.
3. Agriculture does not become widespread after the end of the Younger Dryas.
4. Humans never domesticate dogs.
5. Humans never domesticate horses.
6. Humans domesticate bears.
7. The land bridge to North America is never discovered.
8. Minoan civilization survives to interact with classical Greece.
9. Siddhartha Gautama lives and dies as a minor noble functionary.
10. The teachings of Confucius never receive official sanction in China.
11. Xerxes conquers Greece.
12. Socrates escapes from prison and writes several books of philosophy from exile.
13. Phoenician sailors reach the Americas in 350 BCE.
14. Researchers at the Library of Alexandria develop the printing press.
15. Alexander the Great’s empire does not disintegrate.
16. Hannibal sacks and destroys Rome.
17. Germanicus Caesar survives to become emperor.
18. Saul of Tarsus never converts to Christianity.
19. Qin Shi Huang succeeds in establishing a long-term dynasty.
20. China establishes diplomatic and trade relations with the Roman Empire.
21. Julian the Apostate successfully re-establishes Roman paganism.
22. Instead of Christianity, the Cult of Antinous becomes the Roman state religion.
23. Emperor Aurelian ends the Crisis of the Third Century.
24. Stilicho reunites the Eastern and Western Empires.
25. The Council of Nicea never occurs, leaving the Church as a loose network of several competing creeds.
26. The Roman recipe for mixing concrete is never lost.
27. Al-Rahman defeats Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours and annexes France for the Umayyads.
28. Scandinavians colonize Vinland in large numbers.
29. Pope Leo IX resolves the Great Schism instead of aggravating it.
30. Rebels unseat William the Conqueror and return England to Saxon rule.
31. The White Ship returns to land safely.
32. The Crusader States are entrenched by repeated battlefield victories in the Holy Land.
33. Young Henry overthrows his father, Henry II, becoming king in place of Richard I.
34. The Vivaldi Brothers arrive in North America.
35. The Mongols invade and conquer Japan.
36. Ogodei Khan survives, allowing the Mongols to continue invading Europe in 1223.
37. The Bubonic Plague mutates into a more harmless strain soon after first appearing in Europe.
38. Urban VI wins over the cardinals and prevents the Avignon schism.
39. The Malians are the first to reach North America.
40. First contact is made by Haudenosaunee sailing east.
41. Before 1492, the population of the Americas is inoculated against Eurasian diseases by prior plagues.
42. North America is settled from west to east by colonists from Asia.
43. Henry VI refuses to marry Margaret of Anjou.
44. Martin Luther’s protests lead to reform instead of a split between Catholics and Protestants.
45. The Ottomans win the Battle of Lepanto.
46. Atahualpa evades capture by Pizarro at the Battle of Cajamarca thanks to the Inca developing gunpowder from guano deposits.
47. The Northwest Passage exists, and is discovered by John Cabot.
48. Ivan the Terrible resists killing his son, leading to a much stronger succession.
49. Cheap, effective birth control becomes widely available in 16th-century Europe.
50. Yi Sun-Sin falls in battle, allowing the Japanese to conquer Joseon Korea.
51. Martin Frobisher discovers rich gold mines in Greenland.
52. The Spanish mount a ground invasion of England in 1588.
53. William Shakespeare’s contemporaries do not save copies of his plays.
54. The Dutch refuse to sell New Amsterdam to England.
55. The English Commonwealth establishes a stable succession plan, making Charles the last king of England.
56. Metacomet defeats the New England Confederation in 1675.
57. The Ottomans capture Vienna in 1683.
58. Enlightenment philosophers become obsessed with Arabic thought instead of Greek and Roman.
59. Instead of tea, cannabis becomes the British Empire’s import of choice from India.
60. Catherine the Great’s coup against her husband Peter III fails.
61. Revolutionary France does not declare war on Austria.
62. The Thirteen Colonies win independence from Britain without ever uniting into one political body.
63. George Washington is killed by a stray bullet while leading troops during the Whiskey Rebellion.
64. Napoleon decides not to invade Russia.
65. Fear of the Haitian Revolution leads the United States to pass the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments in 1804.
66. The United States surrenders to Britain in the War of 1812 and becomes a Crown colony again.
67. Simon Bolivar succeeds in establishing the state of Gran Colombia.
68. The cotton gin is never invented.
69. The sewing machine is never invented.
70. The June Rebellion of 1832 overthrows King Louis Philippe.
71. The Great Famine leads to an Irish revolt that shakes confidence in Queen Victoria’s government, causing Britain to revolt in 1848.
72. Russia revolts against the Tsar in 1848.
73. Hong Xiuquan does not assassinate Yang Xiuqing; maintaining unity, the Taiping Rebellion overthrows the Qing Dynasty.
74. France defeats Mexico at the Battle of Puebla.
75. Abraham Lincoln survives and presides over a much stronger Reconstruction effort that withstands the Southern backlash.
76. Chester Arthur works against the Civil Service act, keeping the U.S. patronage system in place.
77. Thomas Edison consolidates power over the film industry and keeps it in New Jersey.
78. Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower project is a success.
79. The American government does not break up Standard Oil.
80. Anastasia Romanov survives and becomes a rallying point for the White Army.
81. Woodrow Wilson suffers his stroke two years earlier, preventing the United States from joining World War I.
82. J.R.R. Tolkien dies at the Battle of the Somme.
83. The Treaty of Versailles does not hold Germany responsible for the war, and demands no reparation payments.
84. The anti-treaty faction wins the Irish Civil War and continues fighting the Crown.
85. Lenin has Stalin killed shortly before his own death in 1923.
86. Charles Lindbergh crosses the Atlantic in a dirigible, reigniting interest in lighter-than-air flight.
87. The 1933 attempt on Franklin Roosevelt’s life is successful.
88. Instead of a nonviolent independence movement, the British Raj in India is overthrown by a violent revolution.
89. Instead of attacking Pearl Harbor, Imperial Japan signs a peace agreement with the United States.
90. The 1944 attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life is successful.
91. In 1945, a spy network distributes the secrets of nuclear weapons to dozens of nations worldwide.
92. Britain, France, and the U.S. do not merge their zones of control in Germany.
93. The postwar Jewish homeland is established in Suriname.
94. The Soviet Union is the first to put a man on the moon in 1968.
95. Instead of space, the US and USSR become embroiled in a race to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
96. Martin Luther King Jr. is not assassinated and continues working as a labor organizer.
97. Richard Nixon escapes consequences for the Watergate scandal.
98. Jimmy Carter defeats Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.
99. The US government locks down the internet as a military secret, preventing any civilian access.
100. Acting on allied intelligence, the Bush administration intercepts al-Qaeda and prevents the 9/11 attacks.

I hope those jumpstart some interesting thoughts! If you liked this list, please share a few of your own — especially in areas outside of Europe and North America where my knowledge is less strong.

A Rebuttal to the Top 25 Conservative Movies (part 2)

Continued from part 1.

Twenty-five movies and ninety percent of my sanity later, here we are. Have we learned anything about American conservatism? Or is it lost in a wilderness of mirrors, screaming at enemies that always turn out to be its own reflection?

As I read through the various blurbs, I noticed that many of them were echoing the same arguments. On a reread, I was able to group them into four broad categories of American conservative thought. A few films could fit in multiple categories, so I tried to pick the one the NR author seemed to be driving at.

Anti-totalitarianism (The Lives of Others, Gattaca, Brazil): The government should not force itself into the private lives of its citizens.

Objectivism (The Incredibles, The Pursuit of Happyness, Ghostbusters): Some people are naturally better than others. The nation should be organized in ways that allow those people to thrive.

Traditionalism (Metropolitan, Forrest Gump, Groundhog Day, Juno, Blast from the Past, A Simple Plan, Master and Commander, Team America: World Police, Gran Torino): There exists a set of timeless values that Americans followed in the past, but we’ve been led astray from them by our own worst impulses. We should return to those values.

Militarism (300, Lord of the Rings, The Dark Knight, Braveheart, Red Dawn, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Edge, We Were Soldiers, Heartbreak Ridge, United 93): The American military is the supreme moral arbiter of foreign policy; any war we fight is necessarily good. Furthermore, the country and the military are inseperable, so anybody who is against an American war must also be against America.

No matter how long I stare at these, I can’t get them to resolve. If the U.S. re-instituted a mandatory draft, would it be good because the military is good, or bad because the government is making people’s private decisions for them? If the son of a farmer became a multi-millionaire by founding a chain of strip clubs, would that be bad because it’s against traditional values, or good because he’s a self-made man?

The disjointed nature of the list reflects the conservative identity crisis. I’ve already remarked on numerous entries that directly contradict each other, but here’s an incomplete list:

• The government should not regulate people’s private lives (Brazil), but society only works if everyone remains in a rigidly defined box (Master and Commander)
• Surveillance is bad (The Lives of Others), but it’s also good (The Dark Knight)
• America needs a rarified upper class with inherited wealth (Metropolitan), but people should be free to rise through the social ranks on merit (The Pursuit of Happyness)
• Guerilla insurgents are heroes (Red Dawn), unless they’re North Vietnamese (We Were Soldiers)
• Massacring people over political disagreements is bad (United 93), unless they’re Hollywood stars, in which case it’s hilarious (Team America: World Police)
• Private-sector innovation should be rewarded (Ghostbusters), but new social values are bad and should be rejected (Blast from the Past)
• Clint Eastwood going to war is awesome (Heartbreak Ridge), and also gives him debilitating PTSD (Gran Torino)

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

What am I supposed to make of this? The movie reviews were written by multiple contributors, each with a different perspective on conservatism. But surely the list had an editor. Somebody read this through before publishing it and decided to greenlight it anyway.

I can think of four possible explanations for that.

1. The editor didn’t notice the conflicts. Very unlikely. If I noted how each entry contradicts at least three others, someone who does this for a living must have seen them too.

2. The editor noticed the conflicts, but did not believe they counted as conflicts. Possible, but only if the editor was such a true believer in the conservative baseline that they never thought critically about it. That still raises the question of how the contradictions arose to begin with.

3. The editor left the conflicts in the article in order to appeal to a broad base of readers. In this scenario, the editor knew that many types of conservatives read the National Review, and sought contributors who would throw a bone to each segment: the Buckley traditionalists, the Bush warhawks, etc.

4. The editor left the conflicts in the article to toe the conservative party line, which was (and is) inherently full of contradictions. This suggests that the perspective we call “conservatism” literally can’t be summed up in non-contradictory axioms anymore. It hasn’t just drifted far from the philosophy we associate with G.K. Chesterton and Aldo Leopold; it’s diffused so far that its various precepts are now impossible to reconcile.

None of these are mutually exclusive. If more than one editor was involved, all four could have happened at once. But when considered together, they do finally lead us toward an explanation of what happened to “conservatives” in America.

Here’s my theory.

When it first became known as a philosophy, conservatism had admirable qualities — even some I could have agreed with. Conservatives questioned progress for its own sake, arguing that the role of human society should be to protect timeless things. That kind of conservatism, close to the Tolkien version, opposes needless wars, unrestricted development, and the wanton destruction of nature. I agree with all of those things.

But the beginning of American conservatism carried a bad seed. It started with Thomas Jefferson, who praised the self-reliant values of southern planters while glossing over the millions of slaves who suffered and died while building those plantations. There were economic incentives to preserve American chattel slavery, so to sanitize themselves morally, conservatives entangled it with traditionalism.

It worked so well that they came to believe it themselves. When the Civil War nominally ended slavery in America, conservatives perceived not the too-late ending of a centuries-long crime against humanity, but an attack on their “timeless values.” That’s how modern conservatism starts: as a defensive reaction to the dismantling of slave culture.

Certain adherents stopped thinking critically about the preservation of long-standing values, instead assuming that everything old must be good. Logically, then, anybody trying to change things quickly must be bad. Conservatism stopped being about preserving worthwhile institutions, and became about preserving all institutions, period.

That’s the one thing uniting the four seemingly disparate perspectives expressed by the choices of movies for this list: all four are fighting against a perceived decline of some important social value in America.

• Anti-authoritarianism: People have forgotten the value of self-reliance, and have turned multiple aspects of their lives over to government control.
• Objectivism: People have forgotten the value of hard work, which should be the only way to rise through the social ranks.
• Traditionalism: People have forgotten the value of knowing one’s place and respecting those of others, leading to a rudderless society.
• Militarism: People have forgotten the value of bravery, attacking those who fight to defend them.

As we’ve seen, all four of these statements are contradictory, but that doesn’t matter to conservatives. All they know is that something which used to be strong is now weakening.

Not only is it weakening, but people don’t seem to acknowledge that. Everyone around them is acting like it’s the end of history, the best possible time to be alive. That drives conservatives to seek solace with people who agree with them. Meanwhile, an unscrupulous legion — politicians, Fox News hosts, megachurch pastors — stokes and manipulates these feelings to siphon away votes and money.

In the 21st century, everything in the life of a conservative is a battle. They’re exhausted, jumpy, and angry all the time, watching things slip further and further out of control. They’ll do anything to get that control back. It’s more important than anything, including what originally started the conflict: the desire to defend timeless things.

“It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it” is not a quote you’ll find in We Were Soldiers, but it’s at the heart of how the National Review can describe four mutually exclusive perspectives as “conservative.” We had to radically alter American society through the Patriot Act in order to save it from itself. We had to destroy Christian values, by electing Donald Trump, in order to save them.

Where does all this leave us?

In 2022, it’s clear that aggrieved conservatives are ready to tear down America itself in order to save it. Out of fear of an authoritarian takeover, they’re gleefully submitting to one.

After thinking about their perspective for long enough to write this post, I still don’t agree with it, but I’m closer to understanding it. Conservatives see evidence of society’s inexorable decline everywhere they look. They conflate every change in the world with the loss of whatever they’re grieving for. It’s so easy to fall into that downward spiral. I wrestle with it myself.

What they miss — and what I need to constantly remind myself — is that neither progress nor decline are linear. Society is complicated as hell. It’s possible to accelerate decline by adopting conservative ideals, like dismantling the social safety net because we imagine it’ll turn more people into self-reliant farmers. But it’s also possible to evolve forward into a greater respect for the past.

Consider a statement I believe to be true: the further a society advances, the more it cares about its past. The height of civilization is sending archaeologists to a construction site before work can begin. We intentionally hold back progress out of respect for those who came before us. That’s what conservatism should be, not chest-pounding and flag-waving.

With that in mind, I’d like to conclude by proposing my own list of 10 movies. I urge American conservatives to watch and understand these films, which will help them reunify their movement around a strong foundation. The films on my list encourage the contemplation of timeless values that face competition from the ideology of continual growth and progress.

• 12 Years A Slave: Any defensible modern conservatism needs to start by understanding the consequences of lining up behind institutions for their own sake. Some things aren’t worth defending.
• The Biggest Little Farm: In this documentary, a Hollywood director and his wife leave the big city to spend 10 years rehabilitating a fixer-upper farm. Demonstrates that true progress means returning to the land, not abandoning it.
• Seven Samurai: The ultimate film about how elite, exclusive cultures with systems of high ideals can’t match the virtues of working hard, knowing the land, and building community. Of course it’s more complex than that — the farmers would never have survived without the teachings of the warrior samurai — but part of what we’re trying to do is introduce complexity.
• Bajrangi Bhaijaan: A Bollywood blockbuster starring Salman Khan as a man helping a young girl cross the disputed territory of Kashmir to reunite with her family. Conservatives will appreciate how Bajrangi’s religious faith serves as a guiding star as he faces a series of moral tests. The fact that he worships Hanuman and not Jesus should be neither here nor there.
• First Reformed: Ethan Hawke won acclaim for playing Ernst Toller, a minister wrestling with several interconnected crises, from grief and terminal cancer to a parishoner driven mad by climate change. While Toller doesn’t exactly model healthy coping mechanisms, his story should at least provide catharsis for conservatives who fear a world changing faster than they can keep up with it.
• Saving Private Ryan: This WWII movie argues powerfully that war should be waged only to protect the sanctity of human life, not to puff up a nation’s ego (fuck you very much, Heartbreak Ridge). What’s the point of the chest-thumping and bloated defense budget if you can’t get a son back to his grieving mother?
• Lonely Are the Brave: A Western from Dalton Trumbo and Edward Abbey, two all-time great writers the National Review would probably call Communists. Fifty years after the Old West, Kirk Douglas is the last true cowboy, fighting a society that wants to keep everyone behind a fence. The tragic ending demonstrates what we lose on the passage into modernity.
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Steve Rogers, a man with strongly held ideals, is forced to reckon with a world that no longer respects them. Instead of compromising his morals, Captain America draws strength from them. The film also manages to be pro-warrior without being pro-war, as Cap finds support from Falcon and Black Widow, two very different people who are nonetheless fellow soldiers.
• Minari: It wouldn’t hurt for conservatives to start learning about the American immigrant experience from the perspective of actual immigrants. Minari dramatizes the conflict between family and success in a microcosm of the conservative intellectual divide. Ultimately, the Yi family can only resolve their dilemma by seeking answers from the past, represented by their unconventional family matriatch.
• The Karate Kid: Menaced by toxic modern masculinity, and in danger of falling victim to it himself, a teenager finds refuge in a centuries-old tradition. A fist-pumping good time to round out the list and prove there’s still life in some of the old ways.

After all that, watch Lord of the Rings again, and fucking pay attention this time. There’s a reason Boromir isn’t the hero.

A Rebuttal to the Top 25 Conservative Movies (part 1)

There’s an old parable people sometimes use to demonstrate the difference between liberalism and conservatism. A liberal and a conservative are walking down a country lane when they see a fence built across the path. The liberal says, “I don’t know why that fence is there. Let’s get rid of it.” The conservative replies, “I don’t know why that fence is there. We can’t get rid of it.”

This scenario is clearly set up to favor the conservative. Not only do they get the last word, but their opinion is treated as the one that required deeper thought, while the liberal’s comes off as a knee-jerk reaction. But I still sympathize with the liberal. The fence is inconveniencing people right now. We can’t afford to avoid changing anything we don’t understand perfectly. If it turns out the fence was important, we can always put it back later.

However, there is one reason I appreciate the parable of the fence: it actually tries to define conservatism as an intellectual perspective. Today, the definition is usually either “whatever Trump wants” or “anything that vaguely sounds like something William F. Buckley would have liked.” I’m not a conservative — I’ve voted for Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden — but I do wish the right wing of the United States government had something consistent I could argue against, instead of an unholy mess of nationalism, evangelicalism, and fragile white masculinity.

Enter the National Review list of the top 25 conservative movies of the last 25 years. The conservative magazine put this article together in 2009. It’s now behind a paywall, and I’m not about to hand them any of my money, so I cribbed the list from The Pendragon Society instead.

This list is a disaster. Put together by multiple contributors who evidently never met in the same room, it’s a microcosm of the right-wing American identity crisis, making it obvious that conservatives don’t agree on or believe in much of anything anymore. The only consistent argument is an ouroboros: “conservatives are people who like good things, and therefore these good things that we like are conservative.”

This will be a two-part post. In this installment, I’m going to go through the list in order from 1 to 25, and pick each entry apart. In part 2, I’ll try and figure out if anything meaningful remains in the smoking ruin of American conservatism.

1: The Lives of Others (2006)

What it’s about: A Stasi agent in Soviet-controlled East Germany is ordered to spy on a playwright suspected of anti-government activity, but finds himself sympathizing with his target.

Why they think it’s conservative: It’s about abuses of power by a communist government, and a few brave individuals taking a stand against it.

Why that makes no sense: This movie is about totalitarianism and military occupation, not communism. There’s no direct, necessary link between the idea of communism and the East German surveillance state, and no attempt to draw one — The Lives of Others is not about economic policy. Abuses of power can happen under any form of government.

One wonders what National Review thinks about The Conversation, a movie with a similar plot set in the United States. Probably that it’s just more Hollywood liberal fearmongering.

2: The Incredibles (2004)

What it’s about: A superhero is forced into retirement after public opinion turns against superpowers. Years later, he gets a chance to save the world again, this time with his family along for the ride.

Why they think it’s conservative: “When everyone is super, no-one will be.” For NR, The Incredibles is an attack on the idea that everyone is special, arguing that extraordinary individuals are held back by a jealous, grasping society. It’s basically Atlas Shrugged for kids.

What that makes no sense: Except it’s not. Viewing The Incredibles as Randian is the shallowest take possible. An objectivist would treat Bob Parr’s desperate need to be special as a natural human impulse. The film treats it as a character flaw. Yes, the Incredibles save the world from a deadly threat and are hailed as heroes again, but the threat would never have been there in the first place if Bob — and dozens of other superheroes — hadn’t valued their own exceptionalism over their communities.

Over the course of the movie, Bob not only learns to appreciate his family, but also comes to understand that being extraordinary is meaningless if you don’t use your talents to help others. Conservatives also conveniently forget about the scene where a civilian Bob loses his company money so he can help an elderly customer.

3: Metropolitan (1990)

What it’s about: A middle-class Princeton student befriends a group of Upper East Side socialites and falls for a Jane Austen fan among their number.

Why they think it’s conservative: The main character is a socialist, but abandons those ideals when he gets a chance to hang out with the upper classes. The movie demonstrates that evolving into a classless society would mean a loss of beauty and heritage from the fabric of America.

Why that makes no sense: NR simpers that Metropolitan “brings us to see what is admirable and necessary in the customs and conventions of America’s upper class.” Except it doesn’t. By the end, the movie’s rich characters realize that their way of life (which only really exists in part of New York anyway) deserves to die.

What interests me about this entry: a leading voice of the American right praising a film that (NR believes) extolls the virtues of embedded aristocracy. None of the characters are shown participating in capitalism; they all inherited their wealth. Is it really the Jeffersonian ideal to build an entire economy around propping up a few superfluous people?

4: Forrest Gump (1994)

What it’s about: Forrest Gump, a mentally challenged man with a gift for running, accidentally changes the course of the 20th century several times as he bumbles through life.

Why they think it’s conservative: Forrest Gump is rewarded for ignoring counterculture movements at every turn, while his love interest Jenny becomes a hippie and gets punished by contracting AIDS.

Why that makes no sense: I hope that last sentence hurt as much to read as it did to type. Ignoring the AIDS crisis is near the top of Ronald Reagan’s long list of failures. The fact that the National Review has the sheer stones to blame it on hippies is the most punchable thing I’ve seen in weeks.

Forrest Gump is relentlessly apolitical. It’s a Rorschach test of a movie: you could call it conservative because it turns Abbie Hoffman into a clown, but you could just as easily call it liberal because Forrest inspires “Imagine” or jumpstarts the Watergate scandal. Ultimately, it’s a film about nothing.

5: 300 (2007)

What it’s about: A dramatization of the historical Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartan soldiers stood against a vastly superior force of Persian invaders.

Why they think it’s conservative: This movie is a neocon’s wet dream, and I’m not just talking about all the glistening oiled muscles. NR sees the Spartan army as the defenders of “the West’s fledgling institutions” against a slavering horde of brown people, casting liberals in the role of appeasers and sympathizers.

Why that makes no sense: I could (and maybe will) write a whole post about this alone. To see the Battle of Thermopylae as a parallel to modern geopolitics, in any way, requires a staggering amount of misled assumptions. Instead of trying to list them all, I’ll focus on the NR’s assertion that 300 has anything to do with “the heroism of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

I was eight years old on 9/11, and I still remember how many people seriously thought it was the prelude to a ground invasion of the United States. “If we don’t get them, they’ll get us” is one of the most evergreen justifications for war. Never mind that the last time a US state was invaded, 150 years ago, the invaders were other Americans; never mind that Saddam Hussein was about as likely to invade the US mainland as Darth Vader was. A sizable chunk of our population still lives in fear of the horde, and believes our troops man the walls to protect them.

Is that all conservatism is? Terror of the horrifying other? Maybe now, but at one point, it had to mean something more. Let’s press on.

6: Groundhog Day (1993)

What it’s about: A curmudgeonly weatherman is trapped in a time loop in a small town in Pennsylvania, cursed to repeat Groundhog Day until he becomes a better person.

Why they think it’s conservative: “For the conservative, the moral of the tale is that redemption and meaning are derived not from indulging your ‘authentic’ instincts and drives, but from striving to live up to external and timeless ideals.”

Why that makes no sense: Remember the fence story? The NR’s Jonah Goldberg is arguing that Phil Connors starts the movie as a liberal, wanting to tear down the fence because of his ironic hatred for everything traditional and simple. At the end of the movie, he’s a conservative, protecting the fence because he’s learned to care about things other than himself.

Except that’s bullshit (a phrase that could have been the title of this post). There are plenty of selfless reasons to get rid of the fence. What about the scene where Phil tries to save a homeless man’s life? Doesn’t that argue definitively for a stronger social safety net?

This entry brings the conservative ouroboros into clear focus: because conservative things are good, Phil must become conservative by the end, because he becomes a better person. But I think this is one of the most liberal movies on the list. The American right wing praises individualism, but indulging his invididual desires gets Phil nowhere. It’s when he puts his energy into his community that he starts to make progress.

7: The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

What it’s about: The true story of how single father Chris Gardner went from living on the streets to being a millionaire stockbroker.

Why they think it’s conservative: This story about a self-made man who works hard and lifts himself out of poverty is evidence that the American Dream is not dead.

Why that makes no sense: The National Review chooses to focus on Gardner’s uplifting story, and not the sheer improbability of the events that save him and his son from homelessness. If he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, then anybody who still lives in poverty must just be lazy. All they have to do is meet a stockbroker in a taxi, slave away in an unpaid internship, beat out 19 other people who could all be equally poor, and presto!

It’s interesting to set The Pursuit of Happyness against Metropolitan, which (allegedly) argues that America needs people who did nothing to deserve their wealth. The only commonality between the two arguments is that America is already perfect and we don’t have to change anything. Isn’t that convenient?

8: Juno (2007)

What it’s about: An ordinary high school student struggles with an unplanned pregnancy.

Why they think it’s conservative: Juno chooses not to get an abortion, and carries her baby to term.

Why that makes no sense: As with The Pursuit of Happyness, National Review latches onto a single anecdote to discredit an entire argument. This time, instead of “we don’t need a social safety net because people can just work harder,” it’s “abortion doesn’t need to be legal because you can just give your baby up for adoption by a rich white woman.”

Frustrated by abortion opponents praising the film, star Elliot Page disagreed that it’s pro-life, stating that “the most important thing is the choice is there.” I love that. Juno doesn’t get an abortion, but not because she finds it immoral. She just doesn’t want to. From that perspective, Juno is literally as pro-choice as you can get.

9: Blast from the Past (1999)

What it’s about: A man who has lived his entire life in a fallout shelter, believing that the United States was destroyed in a nuclear war, must venture out into the real world.

Why they think it’s conservative: It’s about the superiority of 1950s values over modern developments, including *sigh* feminism.

Why that makes no sense: I’ll admit I haven’t seen this movie. It was a box-office bomb (lol) and frankly sounds terrible (poor Brendan Fraser got handed two good scripts in his entire life, both about mummies).

But if “50s values” made the main character a gentleman, they also produced the Cold War paranoia that led his parents to lock themselves in a bunker for 35 years. Like many other people who praise the 50s instead of just the 50s aesthetic, the NR also seems to forget about a) racism and b) the extremely high marginal tax rates of that decade.

10: Ghostbusters (1984)

What it’s about: Three paranormal researchers start a ghost-hunting firm and contend with a supernatural invasion of New York City.

Why they think it’s conservative: “You don’t know what it’s like in the private sector. They expect results.” Also, the villain is from the EPA.

Why that makes no sense: Walter Peck was absolutely right. Fine, it may not have been a good idea to just throw the switch like that, but the ghost-hunting grid was extremely unstable. Building a machine with a lever that makes it explode is not good engineering. If the Ghostbusters had followed regulations, it could have prevented disaster.

11: The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)

What it’s about: These three films adapt J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy about a hobbit who must destroy a magic ring to stop the rise of evil.

Why they think it’s conservative: National Review claims Tolkien was a conservative. Furthermore: “The debates over what to do about Sauron and Saruman echoed our own disputes over the Iraq War.”

Why that makes no sense: Oh, hell no. I’m trying to remain dispassionate here, but if you’re going to claim Tolkien would have been in favor the Iraq War, you can fuck all the way off into Mount Doom. Tolkien served in World War I, one of the most horrific military conflicts in history, which was fought for essentially no reason. The idea that he would have supported the baseless invasion of Iraq is ludicrous.

Tolkien was a conservative, but not in a way that bears any resemblance to conservatism in modern America. His conservatism was local and grounded in Catholicism. He was against progress for progress’s sake, as evidenced by his villains destroying ancient forests to build factories. Today’s conservatives celebrate the destruction of forests, and would probably praise Saruman as a job creator.

12: The Dark Knight (2008)

What it’s about: Batman allies with district attorney Harvey Dent to battle the Joker, who’s bent on collapsing Gotham City into chaos.

Why they think it’s conservative: Batman fights a dangerous enemy, creates a surveillance state on the fly, and does his job despite the hatred of the public, just like George W. Bush did.

Why that makes no sense: This list began with The Lives of Others. From that, I assumed conservatives believed surveillance to be a bad thing. As it turns out, they’re only against it when people they don’t like are doing it.

There’s only one thing that resolves all the inconsistencies on this list so far: a feeling of persecution. To be a conservative in modern America is to have your very way of life under constant assault from the moment you wake in the morning. This list came out in 2009, but you can already see the seeds of the Trump presidency.

13: Braveheart (1995)

What it’s about: This historical epic follows William Wallace, a Scotsman who leads a rebellion against the occupying English.

Why they think it’s conservative: It’s about how freedom is worth killing and dying for.

Why that makes no sense: Actually, it does make sense. Mel Gibson is Mel Gibson, so it’s not hard to believe he really does see William Wallace as a modern conservative hero.

And that’s illuminating, isn’t it? Remember, the one thing we know about conservatives so far is that they feel persecuted and attacked for their beliefs. Their enemies are effete intellectuals who wield power in cowardly, unmanly ways, and can only be defeated with violence.

Braveheart is an act of conservative mythmaking. It doesn’t have anything to do with modern America (once again, the National Review acts like Iraq was going to invade us if we didn’t invade them first), but that’s never stopped them before.

14: A Simple Plan (1998)

What it’s about: An ordinary man finds a suitcase full of money in the forest, and descends into a moral nightmare as he must kill to protect his discovery.

Why they think it’s conservative: The movie proves that there are such things as permanent, unchanging moral truths, and that violating them is dangerous.

Why that makes no sense: Jonah Goldberg, the guy who got Groundhog Day wrong, is at it again, arguing that if something is timeless and unchanging, it has to be conservative. His argument is on shaky philosophical ground again for the exact same reasons.

Conservatives believe that their liberal opponents are all about moral relativism. There’s no such thing as morality, all ethics are self-determined, and anything can be justified. What they miss is that philosophers have been trying to define morality for thousands of years. Just pick up any Plato dialogue. It’s complicated as hell.

Yes, “don’t murder people for money” is a pretty uncontroversial statement. But just because some moral claims are easy to make, doesn’t mean all morality is absolute and unquestionable. A healthy society constantly revises its value systems; that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have any.

15: Red Dawn (1984)

What it’s about: A group of high school students launch a guerilla rebellion when a coalition of Communist forces invades rural Colorado.

Why they think it’s conservative: It validates the entire Cold War, especially Ronald Reagan’s choice to escalate hostilities after several quiet years.

Why that makes no sense: Once again, we’re dealing with the conservative belief that opposition to foreign wars somehow equals an unwillingness to fight defensive wars on one’s own home territory.

I won’t rehash my arguments from 300, Lord of the Rings and Braveheart again. I’ll just mention that I think many conservatives would be excited to see Commie parachutes dropping from the skies. They spend so much time inventing enemies that a real one would save them a lot of trouble.

16: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

What it’s about: Naval commander Jack Aubrey fights a Napoleonic warship off the coast of South America.

Why they think it’s conservative: The world of the ship is a place of clear rules and defined roles. It illustrates the power of rigid hierarchies to help people accomplish things they couldn’t do alone.

Why it makes no sense: Master and Commander is one of my favorite movies, so I take special exception to seeing it show up here.

Despite the endurance of the “ship of state” metaphor, a ship is a terrible metaphor for a democracy. A ship is a tightly enclosed space where everything aboard has to have a purpose. A democracy, by contrast, exists to protect opportunity. Society should be constructed so that people are free to live their lives.

Aren’t conservatives supposed to be fighting for freedom? If so, why assert that society should be based on the rigid environment of a man-o’-war? It’s liberals who protect freedom by establishing social safety nets and regulating industry, giving everyone more choices about where and how they make a living.

One more note about this one: in the book this movie is based on, The Far Side of the World, Jack Aubrey isn’t hunting a French ship but an American one. I wonder if this movie would have made the list if they’d stuck with that plot point.

17: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrode (2003)

What it’s about: Four children are pulled into the magical world of Narnia, where the evil White Witch has cursed the land to eternal winter.

Why they think it’s conservative: “The good guys, meanwhile, recognize that some throats will need cutting: no appeasement, no land-for-peace swaps, no offering the witch a snowmobile if she’ll only put away the wand. Underlying the narrative is the story of Christ’s rescuing man from sin — which is antithetical to the leftist dream of perfected man’s becoming an instrument for earthly utopia.”

Why that makes no sense: We’ve got two statements here, one boring and one intriguing. The first one is the bog-standard “liberalism = appeasement” canard that we’ve already seen at least four times. Once more for the people in the back: preferring diplomacy to war does not mean you wouldn’t defend your loved ones.

The second statement is the first openly Christian argument on the list. I’m no theologian, but I’m pretty sure that Christ believed people could be instruments for making the world better — why bother teaching them if it didn’t matter what they did?

I’m not a Christian. I believe Christ did his most important work before he died. But I will point out that there’s a strong tradition of Christian socialism, even among people who wholeheartedly accept the resurrection.

18: The Edge (1997)

What it’s about: Two men must put aside their suspicions of each other to defeat a relentless grizzly bear in the Alaskan wilderness.

Why they think it’s conservative: I genuinely don’t know. Apparently some people think it’s about the Cold War because the villain is a bear? If so, Jaws must secretly be a diss track about the San Jose Sharks.

Why that makes no sense: Talk about a space-filler. There’s literally nothing here beyond “The Edge must be conservative, because I am a conservative, and I like it.”

19: We Were Soldiers (2002)

What it’s about: The true story of the battle of Ia Drang, the first engagement between American ground forces and the North Vietnamese army.

Why they think it’s conservative: “It treats soldiers not as wretched losers or pathological killers, but as regular citizens.”

Why that makes no sense: It’s Mel Gibson again, so it does make sense this time.

But here’s something that doesn’t: why did We Were Soldiers make this list instead of Saving Private Ryan? The latter is undoubtedly a better movie, it’s within the 25-year boundary, and it’s also about humanizing soldiers and showing the brutality of war.

My guess is it’s because most Americans agree with the decision to invade Europe in 1944. Sure, there was (and is) some dissent, but the anti-war movement didn’t really get going until Vietnam. You can’t tweak many liberals by praising a movie about World War II. And for a certain strain of conservative, there’s nothing more important than tweaking liberals.

We Were Soldiers can also be used to thumb one’s nose at classic Vietnam films like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket. Though WWS has moments of gruesome violence, it never wavers from the idea that the war was basically a good thing.

20: Gattaca (1997)

What it’s about: In a dystopian future ruled by eugenics, an aspiring astronaut tries to buy a new identity to achieve his dream.

Why they think it’s conservative: Because progressives want to do eugenics, I guess.

Why that makes no sense: Like so many other movies on this list, Gattaca is only conservative when opposed to a progressive straw man that’s been warped and demented beyond all reason. I could just as easily say that The Hunger Games is a liberal movie because conservatives love televised death matches, or American Beauty because you’d have to be conservative to want to sleep with a minor.

21: Heartbreak Ridge (1986)

What it’s about: Ronald Reagan’s 1983 invasion of Grenada, in which U.S. forces expelled the Cuban military from the island.

Why they think it’s conservative: “A welcome glorification of Reagan’s decision to liberate Grenada in 1983, the film also notes how after a tie in Korea and a loss in Vietnam, America can finally celebrate a military victory. Eastwood, the old war horse, walks off into retirement pleased that he’s not ‘0–1–1 anymore.’ Semper Fi. Oo-rah!”

Why that makes no sense: There are no goddamn words. I can’t believe I have to share a species with the person who wrote that paragraph. It’s the most repulsive passage in this article since “all hippies deserve to get AIDS” back in Forrest Gump.

How can they shame Hollywood for making war movies that “dehumanize” soldiers, then turn around and reveal they don’t know the difference between an actual, literal war and a fucking football game?

22: Brazil (1985)

What it’s about: A satirical portrayal of a grim future where a totalitarian bureaucracy controls humanity.

Why they think it’s conservative: Brazil is the ultimate parable about the evils of big government.

Why that makes no sense: Sadly, this one fits. Director Terry Gilliam is one of the many formerly-beloved British entertainers who now spend their time making nasty “jokes” about how some people are transgender (see also J.K. Rowling, Ricky Gervais, and Graham Linehan). It seems being a member of the most beloved comedy group of all time wasn’t enough to teach Gilliam how to be funny.

In defense of Brazil, however, I’ll point out that it also satirizes rampant consumerism, a fact the National Review conveniently ignores. Also, complaining about “government use of torture” is a bit rich from an article that just compared George W. Bush to Batman.

23: United 93 (2006)

What it’s about: The true story of the passengers who stopped United Airlines Flight 93 from crashing into the White House on 9/11.

Why they think it’s conservative: Probably because they think liberals would have wanted to negotiate with the hijackers instead of fighting them…

Why that makes no sense: …an assertion that appears nowhere in the film itself. One passenger does argue for diplomacy, but he’s not identified with progressivism in any way. You guessed it: this is yet another repetition of the false equivalency between conservatism and physical combat.

The more times I read this entry, the more I realize it’s quietly one of the worst in the bunch. Take this line: “the hijackers’ frenzied shrieks to Allah mingle with the prayerful supplications of United 93’s passengers.” It’s like the terrorists praying to God by a different name is worse, in this contributor’s eyes, than their murder of 3,500 people.

The passengers on United 93 didn’t give their lives to support some asshole’s political views. Calling their heroic sacrifice “the first counterattack in the War on Terror” takes a giant shit all over their graves.

24: Team America: World Police (2004)

What it’s about: In this parody film from the creators of South Park, a team of action heroes fights a plot to destroy the world.

Why they think it’s conservative: Because of its “utter disgust with air-headed, left-wing celebrity activism.”

Why that makes no sense: At least NR admits this one is a stretch. The movie spends its entire runtime taking the piss out of the War on Terror, lampooning Bush-era conservatives for thinking of themselves as badass action heroes. They blow up some Hollywood stars as well, but only because Trey Parker and Matt Stone are libertarians, and thus contractually obligated to hate everybody.

25: Gran Torino (2008)

What it’s about: A racist Korean War veteran befriends his Hmong neighbors, who are menaced by a gang from the same country of origin.

Why they think it’s conservative: Because it is. Gran Torino is a perfect picture of the two-pronged neocon view of immigrants: those who assimilate perfectly deserve patronizing head-pats, while all others think of nothing but the violent murder of white Americans.

Why that makes no sense: It does, so I’m just going to focus on the awfulness of the blurb, which was contributed by no less a gutter-dweller than Andrew Breitbart himself.

“Kowalski comes to realize that his exotic Hmong neighbors embody traditional social values…” Even when he’s trying to say something nice about them, he has to call them exotic.

“Dirty Harry blows away political correctness…” If you believe there truly is a massive problem of violent immigrants, it makes sense that you’d get mad at “political correctness” for seeming to say you can’t talk about it. But there is no such problem, so you just sound like a fuck shovel.

“He even encourages the cultural assimilation of immigrants…” I thought we respected their social values?

“It feels so good, you knew the Academy would ignore it.” This whole list is obsessed with the Oscars. When the Academy agrees with the National Review, it’s presented as an unbiased arbiter of quality. When it doesn’t, those elitist Hollywood liberals just don’t understand real American movies.

And that’s the list! Join me again for part 2, when I’ll try to draw some meaningful conclusions from all of this.

The Definitive Ranking of Every Super Mario 64 Level

We’re all choosing to celebrate the Fall of Trump in our own way. Some people are dancing in the streets. Some are shouting from the rooftops. For my part, I’m writing an entire blog post about Super Mario 64, because it feels like the world has once again become just friendly enough that I can waste time on stuff like this.

Super Mario 64 was my first video game. It holds a special place in my heart because it seemed like I was always fighting someone for the controller — no matter where the Nintendo 64 was located, it was forever someone else’s turn. Until it was re-released as part of a collection on the Switch this year, I never once got to play it all the way through.

Now, 120 stars later, I’ve decided to tackle a long-standing question: which of Super Mario 64‘s 15 levels is the best, and which is the worst?

Prepare yourself, dear reader, for some controversial statements.

15: Dire, Dire Docks

Dire, Dire Docks is a clone of Jolly Roger Bay, which already isn’t great. There’s nothing above the water in the first section, and hardly anything below it in the second. Most of the stars involve just sort of swimming around until something happens.

I’ve ranked some levels low on the list because they’re frustrating, but Dire, Dire Docks is the only one that’s out-and-out boring.

14: Tiny-Huge Island

I remembered hating Tiny-Huge Island as a kid, but couldn’t remember why. As an adult, it all came rushing back to me.

Every single moment in this level seems to be some manner of godawful precision challenge. From trying to step on tiny Goombas, to inching along narrow planks, to that one jump where you have to hurl yourself into a pit and hope the wind blows you the right way, Tiny-Huge is all pain, no fun. It’s a shame, because the gimmick is cool.

13: Jolly Roger Bay

Look, it’s time to face facts: swimming in Mario 64 just isn’t fun.

Trying to control Mario underwater is sluggish and stressful. It’s baffling that Nintendo decided to hang not one, but two entire levels on this mechanic. You’re constantly drowning, you can never move fast enough to avoid anything, and if you make a mistake and get hit, you’re that much closer to doom.

Jolly Roger Bay does, at least, manage to nail the atmosphere, with its pirate treasure and iconic music. But I’ve still never figured out what the hell gets that eel to leave its cave, other than just swimming right into its teeth.

12: Tall, Tall Mountain

Beyond this point, all the levels are fun to play. However, they don’t all have that Mario 64 x-factor — the sense of being a joy to explore despite being built on ancient technology.

Tall, Tall Mountain is a perfect example of a course that’s competent without being enchanting. It does nothing new or exciting. Instead of thinking “What’s around the next corner?” the player’s reaction is more likely to be “Haven’t I been here already?”

11: Cool, Cool Mountain

If you’re going to build an entire level around one mechanic, sliding is a better choice than swimming. At least sliding is entertaining. But it’s hard to escape the fact that no less than 4 of Cool, Cool Mountain’s stars are 90% slip-n-slide (and 2 of them occur in the same featureless void).

Also, if that baby penguin doesn’t shut up, I swear to Miyamoto I’m going to leave him in the snow.

10: Wet-Dry World

It would be easy to write off Wet-Dry World as just another swimming level, but in truth, it’s more like the Water Temple from Ocarina of Time — except less of a headache.

Yes, the scenery in this stage is as dull as it gets, but the gimmick makes up for it. Changing the water level using switches must have given players in the 90s a dazzling sense of control over the environment. While we’re all jaded today, it still makes for fun puzzles, and the discovery of “downtown” retains the power to thrill.

9: Tick Tock Clock

We have to admit, collectively, that Super Mario 64 is not ageless. Far too many of its challenges come not from the smart level design, but from fighting the clunky controls.

On some level, the team seems to have been aware of this. For the most part, there’s not much difficult platforming in this game…until course 14.

Tick Tock Clock is where Mario 64 finally lets down its hair and allows the platforming to get freaky. And it works. While the controls and camera get in the way from time to time (pun intended), it’s by and large a smooth, exciting challenge. The only reason I’ve left it at #9 is because of stiff competition, and because it doesn’t feel like a cohesive world the way some of the other stages do.

8: Snowman’s Land

I predict this one is going to court controversy. Some people hate Snowman’s Land, and I do see where they’re coming from, especially when you have to hide behind that penguin to get across the ice bridge.

It’s always been a personal favorite of mine, though, because of its sheer density. There’s so much going on in a relatively small space: secrets, tricky jumps, cool uses of the wintry theme, and great opportunities for shell surfing. The only thing it’s missing is a decent boss fight.

7: Rainbow Ride

This level might be responsible for more broken controllers than any of the others, but I can’t resent it for the same reason I like Tick Tock Clock: it’s ambitious.

Rainbow Ride goes all the way and then some. Every star involves exploring a completely new section of the stage, and soaring through the air ramps up the epic factor. It’s challenging, but unlike Tiny Huge Island, the frustration feels earned.

What could move it higher? Perhaps one or two more chances to take a breath. Being required to stay with the magic carpet lest it disappear means you’re constantly sprinting — you never get time to luxuriate in the setting.

6: Lethal Lava Land

Mario 64’s only lava level that isn’t a Bowser course, Lethal Lava Land is where the game starts to get serious. If you’re looking for opportunities to set Mario on fire, you’ll find them in spades here.

My biggest gripe is that it’s a bit linear, but unlike Rainbow Ride, being on rails complements the theme instead of diminishing it. Rainbow Ride should feel freer than it does; Lethal Lava Land feels exactly as dangerous as it needs to.

5: Bob-Omb Battlefield

The very first level of Super Mario 64 is hard to rank objectively, given how steeped in nostalgia it is for so many of us. It’s bigger than it needs to be, and has some stretches that don’t add much value. However, nostalgia goggles or no, Bob-Omb Battlefield hits its one job out of the park: making us excited for what’s to come.

There is SO MUCH to play with in here — cannons, koopa shells, wing caps, teleporters, a boss fight, Chain Chomp, giant rolling death orbs, and more. It’s an absolute Disneyland of 3D platforming goodness, and never fails to get me hyped for the rest of the game…even when I know that game contains Dire, Dire Docks. Now that’s a feat.

4: Big Boo’s Haunt

This sinister mansion shows a strong grasp of horror conventions. Some rooms are completely empty, building suspense for what’s to come. Others seem quiet and tranquil, until a haunted piano comes to life and shortens your lifespan by 10 years.

Fine, it’s not exactly Resident Evil. But it’s a serious accomplishment to achieve any chills at all with graphics that look like a Windows 95 screensaver.

Want more proof? Big Boo’s Haunt left such an impression on gamers that it spawned an entire spin-off series. The Luigi’s Mansion games are clearly direct sequels to this level.

3: Hazy Maze Cave

Along with Big Boo’s Haunt, Hazy Maze Cave foreshadowed the levels of Super Mario Sunshine, the direct sequel to 64. The tropical destinations of that game strove to feel like functional worlds, as opposed to just playgrounds for the protagonist.

Big Boo’s Haunt felt like a real haunted mansion. Arguably, Hazy Maze Cave does an even better job of feeling like a legitimate abandoned mine shaft — all without sacrificing any traps, secrets, or platformy goodness. There are hastily-scrawled warning messages, rusting machines, hazardous rockfalls, and poison gas. And like all good labyrinths, there’s even a monster at the center.

2: Whomp’s Fortress

There’s a reason Nintendo chose this level to recreate for the Throwback Galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy 2. Whomp’s Fortress is the absolute essence of Super Mario 64.

It’s a blast to explore, with a fun level design that packs big events into a small space. Pushing walls, moving platforms, Whomps, Thwomps, and sleeping piranha plants are crammed in nuts-to-butts with other unexpected goodies.

Tighter than Bob-Omb Battlefield, more eventful than Jolly Roger Bay, and more varied than Cool, Cool Mountain, Whomp’s Fortress is an early fireworks show that guarantees the staying power of Mario 64.

1: Shifting Sand Land

Just grab a wing cap and fly over Shifting Sand Land, and you’ll see why I’ve named it the pinnacle of Super Mario 64 level design. It’s simultaneously a sprawling wonderland and an action-packed thrill-ride. The quicksand pools are threatening, Tox Box obstacle course is heartstopping, but the mysterious structures, oasis, and pyramid are enchanting.

Then you get inside the pyramid, and there’s basically a whole other level in there. Add to that my personal favorite star in the game, “Stand Tall on the 4 Pillars,” and a “secrets” star that actually manages to be a puzzle, and you’ll understand why this is the only course where I always, without fail, play all 7 stars straight through.

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So that’s my list — I’d love to know yours! I probably won’t be doing Sunshine, because I don’t like it very much, or Galaxy, because the levels there can’t really be compared. Next post, as usual, coming whenever!

Is it Time to Give Up on Harry Potter?

There’s nothing like Harry Potter. Literally nothing.

With the possible exception of Star Wars, I can’t think of a single fiction that has made more of an impact in the past 100 years. The four Hogwarts houses, “muggle,” and “death eater” are English dictionary terms now. J.K. Rowling’s work has birthed sports, religions, and entire genres of literature.

And yet, over the past couple of years, I’ve noticed a marked shift in the way people talk about Harry Potter. Maybe it’s because the people who grew up with the series are adults now, and are beginning to look at their childhood passions with a more critical eye. Maybe it’s because of the relentless bad behavior of Rowling herself, from trying to retroactively add diversity to the series to blithely appropriating Native American myths to openly endorsing gender essentialism.

Or maybe it’s all because Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald was so bad. I don’t know for sure, but it’s clear to me that it’s time to have the discussion about whether Harry Potter deserves the influence it wields. I thought I’d throw my two cents into the debate with a few reasons the Potterverse deserves to remain relevant, and a few reasons it should be consigned to the literary dustbin.

Why We Still Need Harry Potter

1. It’s a relevant political and social allegory.

Is there ever going to be a time when battles between good and evil aren’t relevant? Only when we run out of evil, and that’s as unlikely to happen as us running out of good.

So Harry Potter doesn’t map perfectly onto any real-world struggles. Who cares? It was never trying to. Instead, the books teach kids an important truth: that a few people in the world straight-up suck, and that makes it all the more crucial for the rest of us to stick together.

As ridiculous as it is to claim that Harry Potter is Holocaust literature, it is true that Voldemort and the racist fifth column he leads are the first form in which many children encounter evil. I particularly remember the scene in which Dumbledore explains to Harry what the protection of his parents’ love really means, and how important it is when fighting Death Eaters that you not start thinking like them.

With an ever-growing menu of hateful ideologies out there to corrupt young people, prioritizing love is a non-trivial message. In the U.K. where Rowling started to write, with Margaret Thatcher barely in the rearview, the idea of caring for people regardless of their origin was even more relevant — and has proven prescient in the Brexit era.

Harry Potter expresses its positive values in other surprisingly prescient ways. Harry never demonstrates a whiff of toxic masculinity. The fact that his signature spell painlessly disarms his enemies makes him something of a precursor to Steven Universe. The use of Dementors as an allegory for clinical depression also holds up, with Harry seeking out therapy from Professor Lupin rather than toughing it out.

Also, it works. Research shows that people who read Harry Potter display more empathy and less prejudice than those who don’t. Basically, it’s the opposite of Fox News. Isn’t that reason enough to keep it around?

2. Rowling’s behavior should not influence how we read the books.

The concept of “death of the author” is controversial, but it applies here. To avoid getting too jargon-y about something I don’t fully understand myself, “death of the author” is the idea in postmodern literary criticism that the author’s intentions are irrelevant to the meaning of a text. Instead of trying to decode what the author was trying to do, we should look only at the words themselves.

Yes, J.K. Rowling has repeatedly espoused colonialist and trans-exclusionary views in public forums. But the whole basis of modern literary criticism is that books can hold meaning not imbued by their authors. Jane Austen probably never intended for anyone to apply Marxist theory to her books, and Shakespeare didn’t write Twelfth Night as queer lit, but both of their bodies of work are elevated by those interpretations.

Fuck J.K. Rowling. She may have written Hogwarts as a TERF utopia for magical aristocrats, but she can’t make any of us read it that way.

3. They are still really good books in a lot of ways.

It’s easy to forget that it’s been 13 years since a mainstream Harry Potter book was published. In that time, the Discourse surrounding them has grown so fervent that it often eclipses the actual events in the story — which is a shame, because it’s well-told.

Each Harry Potter book combines a dramatic plot with charming slices of wizard life, featuring a cast of characters that leap off the page. There are hair-raising twists (who can forget the first time they read It was Quirrell?), boo-hiss villains, stomach-churning setbacks, and plenty of humor. The installments are anything but formulaic: after realizing that Chamber of Secrets hewed a little too closely to the story beats of Philosopher’s Stone, Rowling never repeated the same plot twice.

What I mostly remember about Harry Potter, though, is the detours. The books don’t have dramatic, tightly wound plots that race toward the finish line, and I am completely OK with that. It’s the little things that make them unforgettable to me.

The magical closet filled with the garbage of a thousand years of Hogwarts students. The Weasley Twins spending all of Goblet of Fire blackmailing a magical gambling commissioner. The Three Amigos having a casual conversation while firing pillows across a classroom. Everything about Quidditch. Everything about Luna Lovegood. The scene from the Prisoner of Azkaban movie with the Gryffindor boys popping chocolates that make them roar like wild animals.

It’s imaginative. Gloriously so. It doesn’t always make sense, but that’s imagination for you. I see too few books like that in today’s brutalist publishing world.

You can argue that the prose is a bit workmanlike, but I didn’t notice that on the first read-through, and neither did you. The very fact that we’re still talking about Harry Potter proves that the books are damn good. Good books should have a place in society.

4. Harry Potter is proven to get kids reading.

A blog post featured on Potter fansite the-leaky-cauldron.org describes in detail how Harry Potter almost single-handedly reversed a decline in the world’s readership. Prior to the Potter phenomenon, reading books had become a niche hobby, with children and teens especially almost never reading unless forced to by school.

After Potter hit, that trend was reversed. Reading was cool again. Teens were racing home after school to pick up books. Once they’d read the covers off their Harry Potter books, they went to libraries and bookstores and looked for other stories that would make them feel the same way.

For so many of us, this series opened the door to the entire world of books. It happened to me too. I remember I didn’t enjoy reading as a child because I thought Roald Dahl was the only author in existence, and his weirdly gruesome kiddie revenge fantasies failed to grab me.

Hogwarts was different. It felt like a world that was mine, even though I knew it belonged to millions of other kids too. For a kid who shared a room with his brother until the age of 16, that was not a small thing.

5. It’s possible to acknowledge that a work is problematic and still get positive things out of it.

When I was editing the opinion page of the Whitman College Wire, one of my regular contributors wrote an excellent column about her complicated relationship with Gone With the Wind. It was her favorite book as a teenager, and despite now understanding how deeply racist and sexist it is, she found herself unable to let go of her happy memories of the story.

I agree that, as you grow older, it’s proper to re-evaluate the things you loved as a child. It’s rare, though, that anyone can let go of those things completely, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. A book you read and love when you’re young is part of you. You can no more negate its influence than you can forget a memory on purpose — it’ll only come back stronger in the end.

Instead, it’s best to critically interrogate how the story influenced you, and keep the good lessons you learned while casting off the bad. Many of us Potter fans are learning to do that in real time, thanks to Rowling’s ever-escalating personal shittiness. In fact, it’s because we internalized the Potter saga’s messages of tolerance and love that we’re now able to understand the coldness of some of its other messages.

6. The Potter fandom is bigger than J.K. Rowling or the original canon.

If I had to pick only one reason we shouldn’t cancel Harry Potter at the same time we cancel its author, it would be this.

The Star Trek fandom invented the modern art of fanfiction, but the Harry Potter fandom perfected it. There are concepts for Potter fics that have evolved into entire genres of their own. There are what-ifs, do-overs, time-travel fics, missing-moment fics, and every imaginable ship.

Once, my brother, my cousin, and I got on Fanfiction.net (this was in the days before AO3) and tried to find the most outlandish Harry Potter slash on the internet. After wading through the usual suspects — Harry/Hermione, Harry/Draco, Neville/Luna, Dumbledore/Grindelwald, James/Sirius/Remus — we discovered an imagined letter sent from Professor McGonagall to Hagrid’s brother Grawp, begging him to satisfy her animal lusts. That’s when we decided to back off and read some HP/Super Mario Bros crossover fic instead.

Potter fics have taken on lives of their own. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality spawned a radical fanbase and a new movement for “rational” fiction (while I hate that story with an intense passion, I can’t deny its influence). Dumbledore’s Army and the Year of Darkness showed how a different tone can have an enormous influence on the basic Potter tropes. The Draco Trilogy launched the career of another famous YA author, Cassandra Clare. And who could forget My Immortal, a sprawling, nuanced epic famous for its unflinchingly real portrayals of teenage sexuality?

I’ve met people who’ve read so many Potter fics that they can’t even remember what happened in the original books. That’s as it should be. Stories, once sent out into the world, don’t belong to their authors anymore. By desperately trying to remain master of her universe (see point #3 below), Rowling is only making that more clear.

Storytelling is not about devotion to a canon — it’s about how we make these tales our own. Harry Potter now belongs to too many people to cancel outright. It’s those fans, not J.K. Rowling, who will build us a better Hogwarts.

Why Harry Potter Should Be Forgotten

1. The politics in the story are vastly oversimplified.

While it’s now popular to interpret it allegorically, Harry Potter was never written as an allegory, and it shows. Saying “Voldemort is Donald Trump!” misses the fact that Trump came into power due to a perfect storm of social and political factors we still don’t fully understand. Meanwhile, Voldemort came to power because he’s the child of rape and therefore incapable of love (Yeah, that’s not great either, but we’ll get to it in a minute).

Remus Lupin claims that “the world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters,” but in Harry Potter, it is. Every time a character is opposed to the protagonists, you can count the chapters until they join the wizard Nazis: Lucius Malfoy, Draco Malfoy, Walden MacNair, Umbridge, Snape…by the end, the only reason the Dursleys aren’t Death Eaters is that they don’t have wands.

To be fair, there are a few characters with moral complexity, but on the whole, everyone who was good at the start is good at the end. Same with the bad — Dudley and Narcissa are the closest things we get to a heel-face turn.

What’s worse than that: everybody who disagrees with Harry is ultimately proven to be, if not evil, then at least wrong. Schoolmates, teachers, government officials…across seven books, I can count on one hand the number of times someone is allowed to have a legitimate grievance against Harry (to give Rowling some credit, one of those times is when Ron calls him out for being blind to the privilege Harry derives from his enormous Gringotts account).

Even worse: Harry himself is a staunch defender of the status quo. He sees no problems with the way the wizarding world conducts its affairs, save that the Ministry isn’t aggressive enough about dealing with terrorists.

It’s just not possible to meaningfully apply this black-and-white world to the hairy snarls of modern politics. The good and bad guys in our world are not as clear-cut. To pretend they are is harmful and reductionist.

2. Several plot and world details are downright troubling.

There are too many to list all of them, but something probably popped into your head when you first read this section heading. Perhaps the entire enslaved race of sentient creatures that’s portrayed as happy and carefree in their enslavement, while Hermione wanting to free them is treated as a character flaw? Children as young as 11 being allowed to play a sport that regularly kills adults? Umbridge getting raped and her PTSD being played for laughs? Fred and George not being called out for openly selling magical roofies to teenagers? Literally everything about goblins?

Lately, the one that’s been most troubling for me is the secrecy angle. Wizards could solve most muggle problems, but refuse to, because they don’t want to talk to muggles. Canonically, they can cure every muggle disease, so no wizards are getting COVID-19 (Hogwarts has to close for basilisk attacks, but not pandemics).

But they don’t distribute the potions to muggles. Why? The only explanation we get is from Hagrid: “Blimey, Harry, everyone’d be wantin’ magic solutions to their problems.” And…yeah. People do like getting their problems solved. Not exactly a hot take, Hagrid.

It’s later suggested that witch-burnings and religious persecution were to blame, but that point is relegated to supplemental material like The Tales of Beedle the Bard. In the main series, it’s just taken for granted.

They don’t even have to reveal themselves to make the potions. They could just Imperius a medical researcher and have them come up with a brilliant new treatment. Now that I’m a radicalized adult, it really chafes me that Harry never calls the wizarding world out for its callousness. How can you preach tolerance while still believing that 99.99% of the population are hopeless sheep who can only be guided and protected, not taught or valued?

You might say that grand structural change is beyond the scope of the series, but it  wouldn’t have been hard. The first Percy Jackson arc ends with the heroes standing up to the gods themselves and demanding they stop treating certain demigods as second-class citizens. How much more thrilling would it have been to have Harry defeat Voldemort by dramatically destroying the International Statute of Secrecy?

Come to think of it, after reading Rowling’s sickening essay in which she tries to pass off her bigotry as love — seems, on some level, to genuinely believe it is love — her wizards’ patronizing opinions of muggles now feels like ominous foreshadowing. “We should love and protect these people, but without helping them, or changing any of the things that are hurting them.”

3. The author is far from a revolutionary.

When J.K. Rowling came out with her infamous “sex is real” tweet, many of her longtime fans took it as a personal slap in the face. Rowling publicly took the side of people who think transgender women are not women, building on a perspective she’s endorsed before by retweeting transphobic accounts.

Travis McElroy memorably tweeted that all of Rowling’s characters would be ashamed of her. Ashly Perez reminded Rowling that she put the words “Never be ashamed” in Hagrid’s mouth.

But perhaps the most heartbreaking tweet came from an account called @notafootstool, who said that Harry Potter got her through her difficult childhood as a trans woman, and that its author’s support for gender essentialism had brought her to tears. “Why. Why?” she asked.

This opinion article in the New York Times goes some way toward answering that question. In the column, Dr. Sophie Lewis argues that American social justice movements, while far from perfect, have done a much better job of becoming intersectional and inclusive than their British counterparts. In the UK, upper-middle-class white activists have used their privilege to advance their narrow concerns, while crowding other voices out of the room.

That’s how you get people who complain that trans women are just forging their identities so they can invade the ladies’ room (the exact argument used by American right-wing evangelicals), and still call themselves “feminist” without seeing any irony. That’s how you get J.K. Rowling. She’s a firm believer in women fighting for an equal position in society, but only in a way that challenges gender roles, not gender itself.

The idea that humanity is composed of nothing but cis men and cis women is a foundational axiom for a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF). TERFs consider people who were assigned male at birth but identify as women to be no different from Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who infamously “identified as black.” They see trans women as “men in dresses” who want to steal their achievements, de-legitimize their movement, and invade their spaces, and trans men as “women in trousers” who want to betray their gender and join the patriarchy.

This philosophy is wrong. Understanding where it comes from doesn’t make it any less wrong. This is only meant as an explanation for who J.K. Rowling has always been: a writer whose beliefs might once have been radical and empowering, but who has chosen to cling to her privilege rather than evolve with the times.

All of this wouldn’t be as much of a problem if she was able to step back from her creation, but J.K. Rowling refuses to let Harry Potter go. She wrote a play. She wrote screenplays. She presides over Pottermore, which tweets out unwanted worldbuilding information, like that wizards spent untold centuries crapping themselves constantly. She’s a lead weight keeping the story locked firmly in the past, and any more positive fan interpretations have to compete with her infallible word. It’s too much to bear.

4. The franchise is becoming bloated and unnecessary.

In her video about Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Jenny Nicholson points out that you can spoil any of the Harry Potter books in a single line. Voldemort comes back. Sirius dies. Snape kills Dumbledore. Harry is a horcrux.

To spoil that movie, though, you’d need about 20 minutes, a flowchart, and a copy of the Lestrange and Dumbledore family trees, and by the time you were done nobody would care. Same with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, unless “the Hogwarts Express food cart witch is an immortal god-like being” counts as a spoiler.

I get why Bloomsbury and Warner Brothers won’t let Harry Potter go. It’s a golden goose. I was even a fan of the first Fantastic Beasts movie. I thought it was exciting, perfectly cast, visually stunning, and refreshing as a Potterverse story without any Potters or Dumbledores.

That’s what I wanted the franchise to turn into. I wanted a trilogy of books about the Hogwarts founders. I wanted stories about wizards in China and South America who didn’t even hear about the Voldemort incident until after it was over. I wanted A Knight’s Tale but for Quidditch.

Instead, I just got Star Wars again, a universe where everything important happens to two families in three locations. If the people who own the Potter IP don’t want to take any risks with it, they should either give it to someone who will, or let it die.

(Imagine a Wizarding World film by Taika Waititi, or Rian Johnson, or Guillermo del Toro, or Danny Boyle. Or Alfonso Cuaron — oh wait they already did that and it was the best one. Maybe learn something from that, WB.)

5. Even considered on their own, the books have a lot of flaws.

Remove all the troubling political and cultural implications from Harry Potter, and the books still have some issues on the literary level. This Business Insider article lists several plot holes left unaddressed by the end of the series, including:

• Why James and Lily couldn’t have made each other the secret-keepers for their Fidelius Charm;
• Where non-prefects bathe at Hogwarts;
• The fact that the Marauder’s Map could have revealed most of the twists ahead of time, including the true identities of Scabbers and Mad-Eye Moody, if anybody had bothered to use it;
• The incredibly convoluted plot to bring Harry to Little Hangleton in Goblet of Fire, when Crouch Jr. could easily have just grabbed him in Hogsmeade and disapparated;
• How Sirius got his wand back after escaping Azkaban;
• Why Voldemort doesn’t require an Unbreakable Vow as a condition for being sworn in as a Death Eater, especially since no less than three of them later betray him;

And on, and on, and on. Once you start thinking about these, you’ll keep coming up with them all day, and half of them will relate to stupid decisions made by Voldemort. A lot of them seem to stem from Rowling having a cool idea for her universe, and throwing it in there without considering its broader implications on either the story or society.

Then there’s the often-suspect characterization. In her first appearance, Ginny is a nervous waif who can hardly speak; she then disappears for two books and comes back as an outspoken dude magnet and Quidditch champion who specializes in offensive hexes. Neither version of her is a bad character — what’s jarring is the lack of any intermediate stages.

There’s more. How the hell are we supposed to feel about Slytherin? Are we meant to feel sorry for Snape because he’s a victim of bullying, when on the next page he shouts the wizard equivalent of the N-word at the woman who’s supposed to be his closest friend? What are we supposed to make of the fact that Harry’s very real child abuse at the hands of the Dursleys is treated as comedy? Or that Dumbledore is objectively awful at his job?

None of these things would be dealbreakers if Harry Potter wasn’t the most culturally significant work of art from the last 50 years. Since it is, flaws we could otherwise forgive should be held up to a lot more scrutiny. When we examine the series in light of its later impact, we find a few slight stories that were never intended to bear such a load.

Conclusion

It’s obvious, and perhaps not surprising, that I still have a lot of feelings about Harry Potter. Watching J.K. Rowling reveal herself as a bigot in real time, I understand how my parents’ generation felt after learning from Go Set A Watchman that Atticus Finch was a patriarchal racist — although worse, since Rowling is a real person with real power.

With all that said, it’s impossible to “cancel” things. If it didn’t work in Ancient Rome, when they tried to damn the memories of hated leaders by destroying all their statues, it definitely won’t work now that we have the internet.

Not only that, but very few people (certainly nobody I’ve met) actually want things “cancelled.” They just want the components of our culture not to be worshiped uncritically. Can you still read Harry Potter? Absolutely. Will it ever be the same? Absolutely not. We’ll never again have that feeling of benevolent Auntie Jo reading us a magical story of wizards and curses, of evil people and the good people who fight them.

But I, for one, don’t think that’s all bad. There comes a time when every generation has to take control of their own stories. Oppressed groups are now standing up and demanding that stories include them, and if authors refuse, those groups write their own damn books.

On that note, I’d like to close by sharing this list of new speculative fiction books by black authors. Happy reading, and stay angry.

The 10 worst Britons in history — and what they can teach us about writing villains

CORONAVIRUS!

Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s talk about baddies.

Scroll through r/writing or any other writing-focused forum, and you might be struck by the number of questions people have about how to write their villains. I don’t find this surprising, given how many kinds of stories are only as good as their bad guys — murder mysteries, spy thrillers, superhero smash-ups, and fantasy epics all come to mind.

Villains are tough to get right. Make them too evil and they’re boring. Make them too sympathetic, and they’re not villains anymore. Too weak, and there’s no conflict; too strong, and the audience might roll their eyes at anything your heroes do to defeat them.

By far, the most common piece of advice I see people giving new writers is some variation on this theme: “A good villain should think that he’s the hero.” Yet while this is useful advice for some stories, it isn’t always true.

Think about the most iconic villains in history. Does Darth Vader think he’s the hero? Does Iago? In the final episode of Breaking Bad, doesn’t Walter White admit that his noble reasons for becoming a meth kingpin were a sham, and that it was all about his own ego?

This is not to say that it’s bad advice to give your villain understandable motives and a reason to behave the way he does. I’m only saying this isn’t the only way to write a good villain.

Enter a surprisingly helpful resource: BBC History’s official list of the ten worst Britons of the last millennium. UK historians nominated their favorite utter bastards, and the BBC chose one from each century to honor above (or perhaps below) the others.

How can this help you write better villains? Truth is stranger than fiction, so studying true stories is a great way to get story ideas. Once you dive into the characters of these horrible Brits, you’ll find each of them has a different lesson to teach about ways villains can be made interesting.

After all, if they weren’t interesting, would we be talking about them a thousand years later?

1000-1100: Eadric Streona

Lesson: Sometimes a villain is interesting because of the sheer brazenness of his evil.

Eadric Streona was an Anglo-Saxon nobleman who advised three kings of England: Aethelred the Unready, Edmund Ironside, and Cnut the Great. I say “advised” charitably, because the proper term is “betrayed every single one of them, sometimes more than once.”

Eadric, whose cognomen streona means something like “the grasper,” was obsessed with gaining power by any means necessary. Starting as a thane — little more than a prosperous farmer — he murdered, lied, fled battles, and switched sides until he ruled a huge swath of England.

He’s a fascinating figure who teaches us that one way to write a great villain is to create a character who’s so evil, we keep watching just to see how bad he can get. While we hate him on one level, on another, we love to see his schemes and conspiracies unfold. There’s nothing good about him except how good he is at being bad.

A word of warning: a character like this needs to be smart. You can’t get the same effect by making everybody around them dumber instead.

1100-1200: Thomas Becket

Lesson: Villains are often the most compellingly evil when they have good publicity.

It’s a testament to Thomas Becket’s villainy that I was shocked to even find him on this list. I had only ever known him as a saintly martyr who was unjustly murdered by a wicked king — mostly due to Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, which portrays him as an out-and-out hero.

I had never been introduced to the opposing perspective that Henry II was trying to create a more equal England, and resented Becket and the church constantly meddling in his affairs. According to the Worst Britons list, Becket was an embezzler and a hypocrite who was in love with the temporal power he gained from his position as God’s representative on Earth.

How did a man like this achieve sainthood? Apparently, through a magnificent gift for PR. While Eadric Streona’s genius lay in convincing powerful people that he was on their side, Becket mastered the art of always looking like the good guy to a public that only saw him from a distance. And when is a villain more frustrating and compelling than when only the reader, and a few heroes, know what a douchebag he really is?

1200-1300: King John Lackland

Lesson: Your villain doesn’t have to be boring just because they’re in a position of authority.

Lots of people might find King John familiar as a recurring villain in the Robin Hood mythos, where he usually plays the grasping, tantrum-throwing foil to his noble brother Richard the Lionheart. While Richard was also pretty crappy (a truth understood by the pinnacle of Robin Hood fiction, Robin of Sherwood, comments are closed), he was never directly crappy at home. It’s easy to see how his abusive neglect of England has aged better than John’s abusive abuse.

John murdered his nephew to keep him from the throne, lost all his family lands through mismanagement, bullied his own subjects, and was generally such an ass that his nobles forced him to sign the Magna Carta to ensure he’d never happen again. He was, in every way, a real-life Evil King.

What can we learn from him? The Evil King is a much-maligned archetype, lambasted as a stock villain lacking depth or originality. But John proves he doesn’t have to be. Try creating an evil ruler, but fill him with surprising anti-charisma, relatable insecurities, and a fanatical drive to make everyone’s life worse. That’s much more exciting than having him just sit on a black throne telling people not to fail him a second time.

1300-1400: Hugh Despenser the Younger

Lesson: “Thinking you’re the hero” can involve a lot of cognitive dissonance.

As I said: I don’t think the advice “the villain should think he’s the hero” is bad. I just think it can lead to some limited ideas of what is “allowed.” It’s often nice to see an antagonist with such a believable motivation he could easily be the hero in a different story, but to me, that doesn’t manage to express all the ways that people can be evil in real life.

Hugh Despenser the Younger was not the hero. He was a court favorite of Edward II who wielded tyrannical power, and mostly used it to increase the size his own lands. Torture, unlawful imprisonments, unlawful executions, and violence against women were all in a day’s work for him.

However, like Thomas Becket and Eadric Streona (though less like John Lackland, whose evil seems to have expressed itself mostly in the form of Trumpian tantrums), it’s easy to see how he could imagine himself as the good guy. “I was just living according to the values of my time!” one might imagine him screaming as he’s dragged off to the gallows. “Great men have great possessions! Mighty lords need mighty lands! Any of you would have done the same!”

Hugh’s lesson is all about how to apply the advice that the villain should think he’s the hero. It’s not synonymous, in any way, with the villain being a good person.

1400-1500: Thomas Arundel

Lesson: One of the best ways to make a compelling villain is to have them make life difficult for the good guys.

Thomas Arundel is almost certainly the least evil man on this list. He didn’t kill anybody, personally or otherwise (though Terry Jones — yes, that Terry Jones — believes he was at least responsible for the death of Geoffrey Chaucer). He probably didn’t have anyone tortured, he didn’t profit from horrific crimes, and he doesn’t even seem to have been a hypocrite like Titus Oates or Thomas Becket.

What Arundel did, instead of committing horrific acts, was spread around an enormous amount of low-level misery. As Archbishop of Canterbury, his most prominent stand was refusing to allow laypeople to read the Bible in English, which cemented religious interpretation as a magical power allowed only to a select few. He subjected free thinkers, who only wanted to find faith on their own terms, to a campaign of inquisitorial harassment, banishing many of them from the religious schools at Oxford.

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, who do you hate more: Voldemort or Dolores Umbridge? Yeah, Voldemort’s out there, being all creepy, doing a few murders, but it’s Umbridge who’s actively making life hell for our protagonists. In The Name of the Wind, the Chandrian may be the source of all evil, but it’s Ambrose Jakis who’s putting in the hard work of being a persistent prat. In Pride and Prejudice, Lady Catherine de Bourgh might be responsible for more of Elizabeth Bennet’s suffering, but oh my god will you shut up, Mr. Collins.

There are endless examples, but one last incidence I’ll point out is the sinister gentleman with thistle-down hair from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. In a lesser book, he would have been responsible for killing Strange’s parents or something. But that’s no lesser book. He’s in the weeds, every day, rolling up his sleeves to ruin the lives of as many characters as possible. The gentleman has serious Thomas Arundel energy.

1500-1600: Sir Richard Rich of Leighs

Lesson: Let your villains act without moral restraints.

Why is it that so many writers claim they enjoy writing villains more than they do heroes? Personally, I think it’s because villains are more free to act. Heroes tend to be bound by morals, or at least to have some kind of code. Villains do whatever they want.

I strongly believe this doesn’t mean heroes have to be boring. You can have standards without having restrictions. I prefer to write heroes who are trying to change the world, with my villains tending to defend the status quo. But here’s the catch: while my villains’ actions are restricted, their ethics are not.

Lord Rich of Leighs was famous for his lack of moral principles. He was the archetypical slimy lawyer, and in the Tudor conflict between Catholics and Protestants, he switched sides enough times to make Eadric Streona jealous. He also had a taste for torturing people and burning them at the stake.

Lord Rich was a perfect example of what D&D calls “lawful evil.” Working within the establishment of his time, he perpetuated countless crimes — and while everyone from his contemporaries to later historians hated him, he died in bed at the age of 70. His example teaches us that it’s not social rules but moral rules that mark the difference between a villain and a hero.

1600-1700: Titus Oates

Lesson: There’s nothing worse than a talented liar.

Many will debate whether or not this century’s baddie should have been Oliver Cromwell (I personally do, on the grounds of his ravaging of Ireland). But there’s one thing all sides of that argument can agree on: Titus Oates was a real piece of shit.

Oates was a failed scholar who had only two real assets in life: an eidetic memory, and a knack for making false accusations for personal gain. His memory made his accusations more believable, especially when he perpetuated his greatest con, fabricating — out of whole cloth — a plot to assassinate King Charles II. His claims of “uncovering” the plot he himself invented won him praise, influence, and financial gain, while innocents were gruesomely executed on his testimony.

If you were stuck for an idea for your antagonist, you could do a lot worse than a gifted liar who upends your protagonist’s world with his endless supply of silver-tongued falsehoods. There’s no reason to believe Titus Oates “thought he was the hero,” except in a twisted Hugh Despenser sort of way — what makes him a compelling villain is not his motivations, but his powers.

1700-1800: Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland

Lesson: A lack of principles makes a villain, but hatred can make one just as easily.

Many of the Brits on this list are there because of their moral bankruptcy. That charge can’t be leveled so easily against Prince William Augustus. Instead, the question surrounding “Stinking Billy” is that which must be asked of every genocidal maniac from Cato the Elder to Adolf Hitler: was their hatred a power play, a deeply held personal belief, or a mixture of both?

Not that being truly committed to genocide makes it less of a crime against humanity, but these questions are the bread and butter of history. William Augustus despised the Scottish Highlanders so much that he punished his own officers for not persecuting them enough. His aim was nothing less than the total destruction of Highland culture, to the point where he argued for deporting entire clans for the crime of being related to Jacobite rebels.

Villainy is a vast spectrum. Giving a villain no true beliefs beyond their own personal gain is a great way to create a threatening enemy. But another way to make your antagonist truly frightening is to give them a goal to fight for other than their own aggrandizement — a goal with far more terrible ends.

1800-1900: Jack the Ripper

Lesson: Your villain doesn’t always need a face.

I’m a big fan of “force of nature” villains. These antagonists either have no complex motivation at all, or have one that’s impossible for the other characters to understand. They never seem to eat or sleep, being stabbed just pisses them off, and the fears they invoke are utterly primal. The implacable man is a figure that shows up everywhere, from Stoker’s Dracula to Jon Hamm’s character in Baby Driver.

Jack the Ripper is the one figure on this list who needs no introduction. He’s the original serial killer. While many fictional stories about Jack focus on attempts to unmask him, he’s endured in the popular imagination — despite many more prolific killers following in his wake — precisely because in real life, he’ll never be caught (and no, the Daily Mail‘s opinion doesn’t count).

Jack the Ripper is more a feeling than a person. He’s inseparable from the fear of being alone in dark city streets. Some of the best villains follow that example: we don’t need to know who they are, or why they kill, only how to stop them.

Side note: Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five is a fantastic work of nonfiction that takes the focus off Jack to tell the stories of the women he killed. It’s great to see the often-anonymous victims regain their voices, and I highly recommend it.

1900-2000: Oswald Mosley

Lesson: Control the ways that your heroes react to the villain.

According to the article, English fascist Oswald Mosley once displayed a Nazi salute in Parliament. An anonymous member of the crowd shouted out, “Yes, you may go to the lavatory.”

Much has been written on the effectiveness of ridicule as a weapon against fascism. As a movement that relies on grandeur and myth-making, nothing punctures its balloon like mockery. But as Mosley grew into a greater threat, it took more than jokes to answer him: the good guys also needed fists, stones, batons, and the gun, as listed in the absolutely banging anthem “Ghosts of Cable Street” by The Men They Couldn’t Hang.

Just as important as your villain’s character is the ways that your heroes react to their presence. In Redwall, Cluny the Scourge is made to look ridiculous several times, but the heroes’ laughter at him also expresses their growing desperation at his siege. In Master and Commander, Lucky Jack Aubrey toasts “confusion to Boney!” but takes the threat of a French warship incredibly seriously.

Any character is drawn through others’ reactions to them, but an antagonistic force most of all. Oswald Mosley is all the scarier for being a figure of both menace and ridicule. Plenty of people were probably making jokes about Jack the Ripper during his reign of terror. As cool as your baddie — Lord Deathstrike, Commander of the Imperial Star Ravagers and Wielder of the Proton Sword — might be, plenty of people would surely refer to him as Baron von Capeface.

A realistic reaction makes a realistic threat, and that’s the sort of villain people remember.

Conclusion

Don’t sweat villains. There’s only one kind readers most often complain about: ones that don’t seem to have anything to them, who sit around and bark orders and twiddle their thumbs. These rules aren’t meant to tell you what you can and can’t write. On the contrary, I hope I’ve encouraged you by illustrating how many different ways there are to do villains right.

Happy writing!

The Stupidest NaNoWriMo Hot Take

I was recently unlucky enough to come across what must be one of the most egregious examples of the unfortunate “Actually, X Is Bad” genre. Published on Salon.com, it boasts the highest level of patronizing, classist wrongheadedness of any writing outside the Wall Street Journal opinion pages. It’s called “Better yet, DON’T write that novel,” by Laura Miller, and while it is from way back in 2010, terrible assumptions must be challenged whenever and wherever they are encountered.

The article’s thesis is that NaNoWriMo, the annual event where people join a global community to write an entire novel over the course of a single November, is a waste of time and energy because people should be reading novels instead of writing them. Despite the fact that book sales are increasing, the author purports to sound the alarm about a looming crisis in the book world, where so many people will be writing books that nobody reads them anymore.

The fact that Miller stitches evidence of this crisis together from scraps of anecdotal evidence is, surprisingly, not the worst thing about this column. That title has to go to the way she misunderstands every aspect of NaNoWriMo with such willful antagonism that she manages to insult everybody who’s ever participated in it. So for this week’s post (and in the interest of procrastinating my own NaNo project), I want to take her argument apart quote by quote.

I am not the first person to point out that “writing a lot of crap” doesn’t sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November.

It may come as a surprise to people like Miller who assume that all great art is produced by a tiny circle of muse-touched geniuses, but as everybody else knows, writers are anxious people. We always have been. From Marcel Proust taking 20 years to write a single book, to the Bronte sisters publishing under constructed masculine identities, to Franz Kafka begging his friend from his deathbed to burn all his work, to George R.R. Martin being driven to madness by the desire to please his fans, most writers wield a command of insecurity that would make their most screwed-up characters tremble.

The result of this is that most writers, whether unpublished or wildly successful, have a really hard time finishing things. We burn out. We get distracted by other projects. We procrastinate with endless worldbuilding and character sketches. And underlying all of it is the belief that if we never finish anything, we never risk anything. Procrastination is a security blanket.

NaNoWriMo forces us to shove that blanket in the closet. By emphasizing the freedom to write first drafts that aren’t perfect, NaNo teaches us to take chances with our writing. The result is that more people finish more interesting stories.

“Big deal,” Laura Miller might say. “The stories are just going to be crap anyway. If it’s so hard for them to finish anything, why don’t they quit bothering and read something instead?”

I will concede that this article does make at least one good point: people finishing their NaNo projects and immediately querying agents with them is a real problem. I do sympathize with agents who dread the flood of unrevised, 50,000-word manuscripts people try to sell them in December.

However, assuming that the people who send those queries represent all NaNoWriMo participants is one of this hot take’s grandest acts of missing the point.

Why does giving yourself permission to write a lot of crap so often seem to segue into the insistence that other people read it?…But even if every one of these 30-day novelists prudently slipped his or her manuscript into a drawer, all the time, energy and resources that go into the enterprise strike me as misplaced.

I thought this was obvious, but apparently it needs to be said out loud: not everybody who writes stories is trying to publish them.

What Miller doesn’t seem to understand is that she’s oozing distaste for thousands of personal passion projects. Would she visit a friend’s house, see a pillow cover they’d crocheted, and scoff, “Well, that’s garbage. Why did you waste time making that when you could have supported somebody who’s good at crochet?” When they sit down to dinner, would she taste the meal and say, “Ugh! You really just made this for a few of us to enjoy? It’s not even perfect! Why did you bother?”

Of course she wouldn’t. Outside of my distaste for one family of her opinions, I’m giving Laura Miller the benefit of the doubt by assuming she’s a kind, intelligent person who loves her friends and doesn’t get kicked out of dinner parties. But she clearly doesn’t have any friends who write fanfiction, or homebrew RPG campaigns, or work out their feelings with poetry, or are writing their memoirs for their families to enjoy.

In this column, the idea of literature having value if it isn’t commercialized doesn’t even seem to occur to her. Somehow, she’s completely missed the idea that writing can be just a hobby, which mystifies me: how can an author responsible for two separate books about falling in love with fictional universes not understand that some people survive by creating their own paracosms?

The reason I’m spending so much energy on this is that I’ve met so many lovely people through NaNoWriMo, and I’m afraid that one day, one of them will find this column and see an established writer telling them that all they’re doing is churning out unnecessary crap. I want to make sure their spirits don’t get broken.

When I recently stumbled across a list of promotional ideas for bookstores seeking to jump on the bandwagon, true dismay set in…It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.

It’s possible the column is aiming to be self-deprecating here, but in light of the previous paragraphs, it misses the mark. Widely. I’m left asking whether Miller knows she’s writing right now, and how she thinks books get written.

“People would come up to me at parties,” author Ann Bauer recently told me, “and say, ‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book. Tell me what you think of this …’ And I’d (eventually) divert the conversation by asking what they read … Now, the ‘What do you read?’ question is inevitably answered, ‘Oh, I don’t have time to read. I’m just concentrating on my writing.'”

For now, let’s leave aside the fact that one author having a couple of bad experiences at some parties is not evidence of an overwhelming trend. There are a couple of reasons somebody might have said this to Bauer: either they write as a hobby, as described above, or they are misguided.

If the latter is true, so what? There’s nothing mutually exclusive about reading and writing. Quite the opposite: you can’t be a good writer if you don’t read, any more than you can be a musician if you never listen to music. I just fail to see how it’s NaNoWriMo’s fault that some people don’t get that.

If somebody who never reads wants to try and publish a bad book, let them. Either they’ll learn their lesson or they won’t. It’s not our place to try and save them from error by lambasting hobbyists who are just trying to do what makes them happy.

Frankly, there are already more than enough novels out there — more than those of us who still read novels could ever get around to poking our noses into, even when it’s our job to do so. This is not to say that I don’t hope that more novels will be written, particularly by the two dozen-odd authors whose new books I invariably snatch up with a suppressed squeal of excitement…Furthermore, I know that there are still undiscovered or unpublished authors out there whose work I will love if I ever manage to find it. But I’m confident those novels would still get written even if NaNoWriMo should vanish from the earth.

In this paragraph, Miller at last takes the cover off and shows us the machinery inside. She objects to NaNoWriMo because she doesn’t believe that most people deserve to put pen to paper. It’s a sadly common worldview: some people are geniuses, most people aren’t, and if you’re in the latter group, tough luck, your only role in life is to squeal at the people in the former.

Genuinely talented people use this argument to put themselves down so often that it enrages me when anybody uses it to denigrate others. Miller gives no credence to the role of practice, dedication, and perseverance–all critical traits for an author, and all skills that NaNoWriMo teaches. None of that matters to her. Two dozen people, and maybe some others hiding in the shadows, are good at writing. The rest of you can fuck off and start squealing.

Hard work has written more great novels than natural talent ever will. It’s also painted more great paintings, cooked more great meals, made more great scientific discoveries, led more great governments, raised more great children, and landed on approximately infinity percent more moons.

So I’m not worried about all the books that won’t get written if a hundred thousand people with a nagging but unfulfilled ambition to Be a Writer lack the necessary motivation to get the job done. I see no reason to cheer them on.

This was the part where, on first reading, I had to step out on my balcony and listen to the sounds of the city until my anger subsided.

When it did, I was left scratching my head and wondering why any art lover would denigrate a trend of more people participating in the art they love. Yes, if you’ve constructed a false dichotomy where every person is either a writer or a reader, then more writers means fewer readers–but there’s no proof this is accurate in any way.

One other thing I will agree with Miller on is that people who want to “be a writer” more than they want to actually write can be obnoxious. Yet that’s the beauty of NaNoWriMo: it forces all those people to shit or get off the pot. If you prefer telling people you’re going to write that novel someday to writing that novel now, you will lose. That’s the only rule of the game.

Consider turning away from the self-aggrandizing frenzy of NaNoWriMo and embracing the quieter triumph of Kalen Landow and Melissa Klug’s “10/10/10” challenge: These two women read 10 books in 10 categories between Jan. 1 and Oct. 10, focusing on genres outside their habitual favorites. In her victory-lap blog post, Klug writes of discovering new favorite authors she might otherwise never have encountered, and of her sadness on being reminded that “most Americans don’t read ANY books in a given year, or just one or two.” Instead of locking herself up in a room to crank out 50,000 words of crap, she learned new things and “expanded my reading world.” So let me be the first to say it: Melissa and Kalen, you are the heroes.

Writers take a lot of crap. People tend to assume we’re unpublished, unemployed, living in our parents’ basements, plinking away at unreadable works that will never be finished (when I’m clearly semi-professionally published, self-employed, living in my own apartment, and plinking away at an unreadable work that will be finished).

November is our month to destroy those stereotypes by coming together. Far from “locking ourselves up in a room”–which seems like a weird complaint given that this column was just grousing about how writers are taking over public spaces–we all take joy in gathering and lifting each other up. Nobody is claiming to be a hero. We’re just happy to be together.

Yesterday, at a “write-in” event, I met a woman who was writing an alternate-universe fanfic of Pride and Prejudice. The Bennett sisters are the five baristas at a coffee shop, and Darcy and Bingley are tech bros trying to found a startup in the same mall. I was floored by the implications. Here, two centuries later, an intrepid modern author was finding new ways to appreciate Jane Austen’s masterpiece. Writing was how she showed her love for the people that wrote before her.

This is the kind of adventure we miss out on when we turn writing into an aristocracy. Art isn’t about standing in awe of a few perfect gems. It’s about blind alleys, bad ideas, slurrying inspirations together with no clue how it’ll turn out. That’s what NaNoWriMo is about, too.

While it is sad that most Americans won’t read a single book this year, the truth is that most of them won’t write one either. Blaming a (nonexistent) decline in book sales on amateur writers is illogical, insulting, and harmful. The bottom line here is the golden rule of internet discourse: for gods’ sake, let people enjoy things.

Best Non-Scary Movies for Halloween

It’s no secret we’re in a golden age of horror movies right now. From Jordan Peele to Ari Aster, every month seems to bring a new vision of terror from a new auteur of fright. If you’re a fan of being terrified at the movies, and contemplating the depths of the human experience while you lie awake that night for fear of getting existentially murdered, it’s a great time to be alive.

If you aren’t a fan of that, it kind of sucks.

Horror seems like the only genre where you’re allowed to be creative anymore, but my annoyance at that is a whole separate post. Put bluntly, I don’t like scary movies. Every one I’ve seen has been either excessively cynical about human nature, needlessly gory, or weirdly Puritan, and half the time they don’t even end.

And yeah, I’m a wuss about jump scares, but I don’t feel that “dislikes paying for the privilege of being ambushed by nameless horrors” is a character flaw I need to apologize for.

Despite my dislike of horror in general, I love Halloween. It’s not a contradiction — I just find mysterious spirits of the night to be enigmatic and cool, rather than scary. In fact, that’s pretty much my religion.

Movies, much like the holiday itself, can be themed around paranormal, supernatural, and chilling motifs without being focused around terrifying the viewer. So, in case you’re looking for a season-appropriate film that you can actually watch without having to hide behind the couch, I thought I’d list out ten of my favorites.

1. The Mummy (1999): Everybody fondly remembers the movie they wanted to watch as a child whenever they were sick–this is mine. Starring Brendan Fraser as one of cinema’s most believable action heroes, and Rachel Weisz and John Hannah killing it in supporting roles, this ’20s-set monster flick is still the bar I measure all other action-adventures against.

2. Over the Garden Wall (2014): Technically a 10-episode miniseries, but clocking in at almost exactly movie length, this is one of the most original, daring, and beautiful works of animated fiction ever. Following anxious Wirt (Elijah Wood) and blithe Greg (Collin Dean) as they try to find their way home through a world inspired by old Americana postcards, Over the Garden Wall is just like Jason Funderbirker–it’s the whole package.

3. The Shape of Water (2017): Romantic sorts have it very good on Halloween. The Shape of Water won the Oscar, so you don’t need me to tell you how captivating this tale of fish-meets-girl is. But if you somehow missed it, tonight is the night to catch up. Afterwards, check out Guillermo del Toro’s equally season-appropriate Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth.

4. What We Do in the Shadows (2014): Recently adapted into a TV series, Taiki Waititi’s loving parody of all things vampire gets funnier every time I watch it. From the Circle of Shame to Vlad the Poker doing his dark bidding to Stu the actual real-life IT guy, this mockumentary did half the work of making vampires once again cool.

5. Let the Right One In (2008): And here’s the film that did the other half of the work. Swedish import Let the Right One In is very different monster love story than The Shape of Water, but no less lovely–in fact, it’s the most heartfelt movie about murder and blood-drinking you’re ever likely to see. Bonus points for having an American remake, Let Me In, that’s actually good.

6. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003): “You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner. You’re in one.” There’s a reason Hollywood can’t let the Pirates franchise go. This first installment is a note-perfect blockbuster: the iconic music, the thrilling action, the endlessly quotable script, and Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa deep-throating the scenery every moment he’s onscreen. It’s enough to make me not mind having to deal with Johnny Depp for two hours.

7. ParaNorman (2012): ParaNorman isn’t a horror movie, per se, but it is definitely a scary movie. This “PG” film about social outcasts, persecution, and mob violence manages to be even darker than Coraline. For me, it’s also a movie about the spirit of Halloween itself: learning to process fear and discomfort in a healthy way, rather than lashing out at things we don’t understand.

8. Ghostbusters (1984): I don’t really need to convince you to watch Ghostbusters, do I? Come on. Bustin’ makes everybody feel good. Nobody is afraid of no ghosts. We all know who we gonna call. Pop the damn thing in already.

9. Shaun of the Dead (2004): If you aren’t sold on Shaun of the Dead by the time Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are going through their record collection and deciding which ones are bad enough to throw at zombies, we’re just never going to agree on comedy. This is also probably the goriest movie on the list, but the graphic moments are usually easy to see coming.

10. Young Frankenstein (1974): Who said movies can’t be both atmospheric and funny? Just because your movie is primarily a comedy, that’s no reason to water it down. Mel Brooks gets that–his movies are both hilarious and surprisingly competent genre pieces in their own right (Men In Tights is one of the top three Robin Hood movies, prove me wrong). Young Frankenstein is almost certainly his magnum opus, a ludicrous gothic masterpiece.

If you’re in the midst of a ghastly movie night and at a loss for what to watch, I hope my list helps you out. Have a spooktacular evening!