Microsoft’s Big Adventure – What Are Console Wars But Corporate Competition Persevering?

This is about framing news and then finding indignation at similar but distinct framing.

I avoid criticizing games journalists as a class of workers or writers because I try to avoid denigrating generalizations, especially about types of work I respect and they get enough stick from tribalist gamers whose identities are wrapped up in affiliation with a commercial brand.[1] In fact, that group, the veterans of the console wars, are among our focal subjects today.

It’s funny (if not completely without reason) that some forms of consumption, including of art and media, are looked at as superior to others. Calling someone a “cinephile” doesn’t quite rate as an insult, but “film bro” does. I know there are TV critics that love the form, but I haven’t ever heard anyone call themselves “a TV fan,” though I am sure they exist. But gamers, well… Gamers specifically have a tattered reputation based in one part on their (our? I’ll return to that question in a second) medium of choice being considered an object for children and in another part on longstanding cultural practices of casual sexism and racism that have ratcheted up in the past few years, after being mainstays over the last several. This reactionary ratcheting is in part a response to these cultural markers being challenged by serious game writers in the Trump years and since, not that the problem or the challenges to it are as young as eight years old. I remember once (here we are returning to that question) on Waypoint several years ago, the crew were responding to a listener question about whether they consider themselves “gamers.” The answer boiled down to that it depends on the audience: when games media people are talking about “gamers” they may be talking about the consumer-identity group with the soiled reputation of misogyny and other bigotry that want the form to be respected but don’t want it to be criticized as a serious artform should be, but they wouldn’t necessarily respond with concern if people within their family that don’t play videogames referred to them as such. The well-earned bad reputation of “gamers” is partially maintained through the constant and perpetual slandering of games journalists.[2]

In general, journalism in the United States has a bad reputation. I don’t think it’s unique to here, but this is where I live. Some of this reputation is because of the corporate capture of the media through increased consolidation. Some of it is because the most well-paid of them are frequently stenographers and propagandists for the powers that be, such as police departments and large multinational conglomerates. Some of it is because the most powerful and least morally upright are good at depicting everyone else as “the media” and themselves as brave truthtellers.[3] Of course, the tendency to critique a group of which you are part by naming that group as if you are outside of it is a common enough tactic, whether done as good faith self-criticism or generalizing putdown.[4] I say all that to mention that I am also not trying to come across as a games journalist speaking truth to the power of more mainstream games journalists. I’ve done very little games journalism, and none recently. This is commentary.

This is all preamble to discuss recent rumors out of Xbox, and how they have been handled. After a merger with Activision-Blizzard that took two years among legal scandals, related labor trouble, and regulatory hurdles, Microsoft’s gaming division swiftly laid off over 1900 people last month. Early indications are that this year will see a contraction of the workforce across games (AKA the disciplining of labor by capital) at a rate even worse than last year, which was an absolute bloodbath.

Microsoft’s gaming division has three subsidiaries – Xbox Game Studios, ZeniMax Media, and Activision Blizzard which have over forty subsidiary studios between them and around 20,000 employees. They own some of the biggest names in gaming after more than a half-decade of acquisitions.[5] They compete with Sony while Nintendo does their own thing. After “losing” the last console generation to Sony’s PlayStation 4 with the confusing vision of their Xbox One, it was the hope of Microsoft’s games division and fans of their games that all these acquisitions would turn into some console-selling, culture-driving games. That has yet to be seen. It was, however, briefly rumored that Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, two Xbox exclusive games, are going to come to Sony.[6]

The initial reactions to this I saw out of games media were a combination of “why do stans care so much about this” and “wow, looks like X-Box is falling apart,” sometimes in the same article.[7] This reads as at least a little bit disingenuous, though it is worth noting that the author of that article, Luke Plunkett, pointed out to his cohosts on the Aftermath Hours podcast that shortly after saying it didn’t matter, they said they need to buy PlayStations. On the February 16^th follow-up episode, guest Ash Parrish (The Verge) pointed out that they collectively transitioned from saying Xbox minimizing exclusives wasn’t a big deal to highlighting the success of PlayStation semi-exclusive Helldivers 2 (it’s also on PC, but not Xbox or Switch). To keep it very simple, Sony has a lot of appealing first-party games that do not come to Xbox. If the big first-party games that were exclusive to Xbox are now coming to PlayStation, why didn’t I just buy a PlayStation to begin with? Now, for one thing, I quite like Game Pass – it’s introduced me to games I otherwise might never have bought, like Katana Zero, Weird West, The Ascent, and Hades. For another thing, I skipped a generation; while we were an X-Box household for much of my childhood, I have affinity for the console (my first console was a PSX, then a PS2, and I currently have a PS2 and PS3 in addition to my Xbox, so I’m hardly a gaming monotheist).[8]

More important, perhaps, than the qualitative value of understanding my lens is the recurrent framing that produces these discourses. If you always frame what is happening in games as a competition between corporations, how else are game players, games enthusiasts, “gamers” supposed to see it? Having a corporate-aligned identity is a bad thing, but having a perspective framed within corporate competition is unavoidable if that is how even the least corporate-aligned publications see the thing. And they’re not wrong to see it that way: games is a big industry made up of big businesses. But if you, as a member of the games media, see Xbox putting some games on PlayStation as possibly foreshadowing the death of their console business, how out of line is it for the game-playing public to see it that way? Acting as if the sky is falling is out of hand, but seeing what everyone else sees doesn’t make you imperceptive.

Whether moving all their first party games to other consoles is in line with Microsoft’s vision as established over the last several years with Game Pass is up for debate, but it feels desperate as the Xbox is being outsold about 2.5-to-1 by the new PlayStation and Microsoft has all these developers they need to do something with. One of my overriding concerns is what will happen to those people if Microsoft decides to contract; certainly all the people involved in hardware development have to be looking around wondering what’s going to happen with their jobs.

There were statements made by Microsoft gaming President and CEO Phil Spencer around the launch of the Xbox Series X and Series S that denoted that was their general direction – they want people playing their games in as many places as possible; that could mean bringing Game Pass to console competitors. Patrick Klepek at Remap Radio argues that it’s likely the subscriber numbers have stagnated and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella doesn’t want to be in the business of console exclusivity anymore. The team over at GamesIndustry.biz argue that it’s aligned with their longterm strategy of putting all their X-Box exclusive games on PC long before Game Pass. Frankly, I think that’s going a bit soft on them for the sole reason that Microsoft is a software company that already has market share on most computers – they own the most popular (as in most-used not most well-liked) operating system in Windows and most popular (see above) suite of electronic work tools in Office. They cannot lose out on market share by making their games available on PC (as they have for two decades) because they already make money on PC hand over fist in the bigger parts of their company. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that someone that does not use their PC primarily for gaming will play an Xbox game on PC and later buy an Xbox (though it may be increasingly less likely to need to do that as they position themselves as the lead cloud-streaming games company). It’s not a concession the same way Sony putting their games on PC is, or Microsoft putting major first-party releases on PlayStation and Nintendo would be.

In any case, one thing I think is funny about games media is that, like all media, the need to constantly be telling people the news means that your work sometimes feels like it has a short memory or a short attention span which provokes hot takes and hyperbole.[9] The easy comparison for me is always sports. The Football Ramble (my favorite soccer podcast) has had a decent amount of narratives about Chelsea F.C. over the course of the last several months.[10] But with sports there are seasons, so there comes a point where you do have a complete narrative. With games, the attention and memory is as short, but there aren’t real seasons with firm lines; there are generations (which are averaging about six years before turnover) and there are years.

I wrote the bulk of this two or three weeks ago. I thought about not posting it. Then Jeff Gerstmann (formerly of Giant Bomb) posted this Tweet and it made me feel insane.

“The fanboy stuff was already out of control but I gotta say I’m really not looking forward to this new wave of Xbox Flat Earthers who will take every single move the company makes from here on out as a sign that they’re quitting the console business.”

Like, not for nothing, but Gerstmann used to be coworkers with Patrick Klepek. Patrick Klepek, Rob Zacny, Janet Garcia, and Ricardo Contreras at Remap are not Xbox Flat Earthers. And I don’t think other journalists considering the possible ramifications of Xbox ending exclusivity or stopping making consoles, whether it’s Danny O’Dwyer and the rest of the gang at NoClip, Jordan Middler, Andy Robinson, and Chris Scullion at Video Games Chronicle, or the aforementioned Aftermath Hours folk, or so on. And I guess finding this all so frustrating is a signal about me not being a games journalist any more than I’m a Gamer:

I will concede that capital-G gamers produce myriad problems as an extended internet community. And, moreover, I recognize that my experience online (mainly Twitter) is so different from what big name video games journalists experience as to be a world apart with just the occasional crossover. I concede that the more concentrated around a given subject your Twitter feed or your professional life is, the more likely you are to see its deranged dregs. And some many factors about the digital communities around games contribute to them being perpetually generally hyperbolic, rude, and toxic toward games journalists.[11] So, I am saying, I understand that this framing feels self-contradictory to me because I am not in the same gauntlet as these folks; I mostly only see opinions about games and gaming from games journalists, games critics, or other writers or fans that I follow because I think that they have interesting opinions.

Irrespective of that, as long as the headlines, articles, and podcasts are framing these changes as breaking news which needs immediate response, even if some of that response is about telling hysterical fans to pipe down, you are still contributing to the framing of competition through which the industry is seen. That said, games enthusiasts, fans, the gaming audience, game players, gamers, are not obligated to pick a team. It is no doubt somewhat the fault of the consumer if they (we?) cannot separate the framing of corporate combat from console wars. But even if they don’t have to pick a team, they do have to pick a thing to buy to play videogames on, and it makes sense that if you spend $600 on one machine and are told afterward that, because of change in corporate direction, you will not be able to access what’s available on the other machine, but the other machine will be able to access what you thought you were trading-off for, some level of disappointment is acceptable if not laudable.

I also think that, aside from being inundated with overreactors, journalists are inundated with news. Exposure to a lot of it means you have a better gauge on what is important, how to read and examine it critically; that’s kind of the job.

Now, not to be outdone for bad news, between Microsoft rumors three weeks ago and a Microsoft podcast two weeks ago that announced Starfield and Indiana Jones are not among the first four games to go multiplatform and that Microsoft is staying in the console business for the foreseeable future, Sony announced that their initial expectations for PlayStation 5 sales are coming up short and they’re in the latter half of the console’s lifecycle. Which in turn began discourse about how the PS5 doesn’t have any games as well as a more interesting discourse about the unsustainability of these current trends in game development and console manufacturing. Or maybe it was just Marc Normandin having an idea I agree with and folks at various podcasts arguing that we don’t need to move to the next consoles when we’ve barely seen what the current ones can do. Their ridiculous hardware specifications have hardly been tested; the current length of AAA game development means major series are skipping generations for their releases. Why not extend the window and the console lifecycle?

Obsidian’s Grounded and Pentiment are coming to PlayStation and Switch. Hi-Fi Rush (Tango Gameworks/Bethesda Softworks) and Sea of Thieves (Rare) are coming to PlayStation. The new fights are the same as the old fights and console wars are stupid, but corporate competition is the framework of discourse around game news.[12] And this is already old.

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[1]There is a society-wide problem with people not recognizing that journalists exist to defend their interests to those in power. This is true in politics, in sports, in entertainment. There are a lot of reasons for this (such as journalists who claim to be doing that when they’re very much not), but the overarching reason under whose umbrella all other reasons fall is that it is the way people with money and power want it – they want the average worker-citizen-consumer to think of themselves as a consumer first and a worker last and to identify with corporations over their fellow workers within those corporations or critiquing those corporations. Sports are a great example of this because you can see how angry, for instance, college football supporters get at journalists who rightfully critique their sporting organization of choice (typically a state-funded university) for, for instance, hiring a mediocre defensive coordinator under whose watch a player died at practice. Many of the people that run and own media corporations also fund political campaigns. See this article from 2021 at USA Today: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/09/08/tracking-media-owners-political-donations/5719743001/

[2] It is worth noting that however someone self-identifies within the realm of being a casual, enthusiastic, critical, or enthusiastic and critical consumer of games, there are overlapping and sometimes oppositional media for them to consume, as well as different layers of journalists, influencers, and critics that they consult, and circles that work concentrically or in Venn diagrams on the internet. This is because experiences aren’t monolithic, and perhaps also because that enthusiasm can breed contempt for people with different perspectives, even if given internet communities or forum boards or what have you have internal conflicts. This is part of a wider hypothesis (part of it is around how communities and outlets coalesce around viewpoints sometimes incidentally if not accidentally) I will explore when I finally get down to detailing some podcast recommendations, and I probably need to finish the two McKenzie Wark books I’ve started (Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory) to tease this out some more.

[3] Take for instance the way “content creators” and “influencers” cultivate the goodwill and loyalty of the gaming public while taking money to use reviews as marketing as far as this topic, or, in the realm of politics, the most watched cable news network in the country referring to less-watched channels as “the mainstream” or “lamestream” media.

[4] Some of my favorite examples of this are “white people,” “Western leftists,” and “Film Twitter”

[5] ZeniMax media is the holding company for Bethesda Softworks (a publisher with the development division Bethesda Game Studios), known especially for The Elder Scrolls and the post-2005 iteration of Fallout. ZeniMax also holds Arkane (known for the Dishonored games and Prey and currently developing a Blade game for Marvel) and id Software (known for the Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein series, among others), MachineGames (who has mostly been a support studio on Wolfenstein games by id and Arkane, and Quake games, and is now developing an Indiana Jones game), Roundhouse Studios, Tango Gameworks, and ZeniMax Online. Xbox Game Studios comprises fifteen studios, including inXile (developer of Bard’s Tale and Wasteland 3 among others), Obsidian (developer of Knights of the Old Republic II, Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and others), Rare Limited (GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, among others), 343 Industries (the Halo developer successor to Bungie), and several others. Activision Blizzard owns Activision (which has several subsidiaries including Raven Software and is primarily known as the Call of Duty studio), Blizzard Entertainment (the World of Warcraft studio), King (the Candy Crush Saga studio), Major League Gaming Corp (a professional esports organization), and a film corporation. Microsoft bought up all these companies in the hopes of becoming a bigger player in gaming.

[6] Most speculation about this points to Starfield coming at a later date, the way Ghosts of Tsushima, The Last of Us, and Spider-Man came to PC from PlayStation.

[7] “While the idea of releasing Xbox-exclusive games on PlayStation might seem incendiary to anyone whose brain has been turned to paste by decades of console war, it’s also the only possible outcome here.” Followed a few paragraphs later by “But if, as these reports suggest, big changes are afoot–these games would be just the first wave–then what even is Xbox anymore?”

[8] It also gives access to EA Play and has some limited crossover with Ubisoft’s Uplay. It’s a great service, and I’ve tended to buy indie games that come off of it, like all of the ones mentioned in this sentence, though I do also worry about its long term affects undercutting real sales.

[9] Kat Bailey on another of my favorite games podcasts, “Axe of the Blood God,” said that this console generation was four years old; the PS5 and Xbox Series X and S came out in November of 2020; it is barely over 3 years old.

[10] Inconsistent results, losing streaks, a brief winning streak… we lost to Liverpool in the Carabao Cup Final today.

[11] (the medium being explored exclusively electronically, frequently online, the median and mode ages skewing younger, the cyclical or symbiotic relationship between the worst of tech culture and the habits of game culture, other material and social factors beyond my immediate grasp)

[12] Some of the podcasts I listened to and am responding to or otherwise have affected my thinking obviously include Remap Radio, Aftermath Hours, GamesIndustry.biz, Video Games Podcast (VGC), NoClip Crew Cast. I’m behind on Nextlander, but I tend to like their thinking as well (which is not the same as ubiquitously agreeing with it, which I think should be obvious to point).

Fargo Season 5 – On the Confused Politics of Billionaire Matriarchs

There have been five seasons of Noah Hawley’s Fargo show based on the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo.[1] I have seen four of them (not season three, because I didn’t know it existed until four was already out). At some point I’ll rectify that, but today we’re going to talk about my positive but mixed reception to season 5, the most closely related to the first film in plot and theme since at least the first season.

Fargo season 5 follows Juno Temple’s Dorothy “Dot” Lyon on a breakneck adventure that takes the premise of the original film and tilts it, illustrating the American rightwing militia movement’s connection with “constitutional sheriffs” as backdrop to a story about domestic abuse. After a brawl breaks out at a PTA meeting, Dorothy is briefly arrested by Scandia, Minnesota police officer Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) before being bailed out by her beloved kindly husband Wayne (David Rysdahl), owner and manager of a car dealership. Dot has a strained relationship with her mistrustful billionaire debt baroness mother-in-law Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who nonetheless loves her tomboy granddaughter Scotty (Sienna King). Not long after seeing them pose for a Christmas card that looks like it’s for a Republican politician’s campaign (rifles in hand all), we see a sort of recreation of the kidnapping scene from the film.

Dot is knitting and watching TV when men arrive, peering threateningly through her windows. Unlike the film, she hides before they enter, then scars and maims the men, and her husband isn’t in on it. Rather, these kidnappers were sent by her ex-husband, Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), an abusive psychopath rancher who runs the Stark County, North Dakota sheriff’s office like an organized crime syndicate, purchasing surplus military hardware from the federal government to hand off to his militia leader father-in-law (Michael Copeman as Odin Little). Tillman is supported in this role most closely by his son and deputy Gator (Joe Keery) and ranch foreman Bowman (Conrad Coates).[2]

In any case, the kidnappers get stopped on the highway in North Dakota just like in the film and an officer is killed just like in the film, but there are two major differences – for one thing, the officer has a partner this time (Lamorne Morris as Whitley “Witt” Farr); for another, they’re alerted to the situation by Dot jumping out of the car and running away. She’s a wily one, later described by the Welsh kidnapper Ole Munch (pronounced “Oola Munk,” played by Sam Spruell) as “a tiger.” After Dot kills the other and wounds Munch, who had shot Witt (whose bleeding she helps staunch), she returns home claiming she wasn’t taken, she just needed to blow off steam. A big presence in the story throughout the season are the psychological ramifications of Dot’s past suffering – she’s optimistic and sometimes delusional, wanting to simultaneously safeguard her home while claim nothing happened. She just wants to forget, to make the past disappear; unfortunately, it cannot, though she finds her freedom in the end.

Ole goes to settle his debt with Roy and Gator, who try to double-cross him and incite a vendetta that carries through the season. Munch, it turns out, is a centuries-old Welsh sin-eater. For reasons still unclear to me, every season of Fargo except the first one has a supernatural or extraterrestrial element. This one works within the story better than season 4’s (there it felt a bit deus ex machina, in season 2 it was mostly an aside; here it felt like an added wrinkle to an effective murderer). Meanwhile, Roy and Gator continue their pursuit of Dot, culminating in violence at Halloween, Wayne getting shocked by some windows Dot had booby-trapped, and Lorraine having Dot committed to a mental ward, which she quickly escapes. At the same time, Indira’s life is weighed down by debt from her feckless, useless husband Lars (Lukas Gage) and is drawn into chasing Dot alongside Witt, while FBI Special Agents Joaquin (Nick Gomez) and Meyer (Jessica Pohly) investigate Tillman.

This culminates in a ranch showdown with murder and maiming. The tension in the story revolves around a few topics – one is policing and its purposes. When Lorraine is first interviewed by Officer Olmstead and her superior officer about Dot’s kidnapping, she returns a confrontational question: “What purpose do you serve?” going on to state that the cops’ job is to keep a “certain element” in line and support the status quo. The Tillmans use the sheriff’s office to enforce a traditionalist patriarchal ideology based on violent and regressive interpretations of the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. Farr tries to be everyone’s conscience, pursuing Dot to protect her, motivating Olmstead to do the same, and – like Olmstead – treating with the FBI agents in the interest of protecting Dot rather than focusing solely on a pursuit of Tillman.

Another axis is that of women’s rights and roles in patriarchal society – that hasn’t been completely absent in past seasons of Fargo, but everything flows through and around gender roles here. This season might have more to do with the movie aesthetically and thematically than any of the other season’s, with only the first season near as close. But part of its intrigue stems from altering the movie’s premise not just in the provenance and root of the kidnapping but the capacity of the wife as well as making the untrusting billionaire parent the mother-in-law. Jennifer Jason Leigh gave an able performance, but there were occasions where the writing felt confused about what it was trying to say about Lorraine. In painting a portrait of complexity, it struggles to make a clear point. Part of Lorraine’s arc with Olmstead and Dot includes getting Olmstead to come work for her as security chief after Olmstead stands up to her while advocating for Dot. This leads to some sweet and reconciliatory moments, but they stay within the tone of the character – she is clearly a woman who has fought and struggled a lot to get her position, and dealt with a lot of sexism while nonetheless being a ruthless businesswoman.[3]

This arc also includes an argument with Roy that sees Lorraine snipe at his politics for not believing in the social safety net among his general libertarian feelings as a Constitutional Sheriff of not needing to contribute to society beyond his own domain. It strikes as unlikely that a woman enriched by taking advantage of other people’s financial vulnerability and who looks at police as tools to discipline rabble cares much for the social safety net, especially because (before seeing the battered pictures of Dot) she says that everyone in our society wants to claim to be a victim. She is a modern-traditional center-right capitalist; as broader social ideas go, she calls her tomboyish granddaughter a “crossdresser” but doesn’t insist on her changing when they shoot the photo early on, and also says she’s “fond” of her. If she’s racist, it’s never explicit. Her husband is a silly drunk and she dresses down two misogynists whose bank she is trying to buy. She later destroys the life of one of them after he pulls out of the deal because he’s assaulted by Tillman. At the same time, she tries in the first episode to convince Dot to take a less hands-on approach to social betterment (i.e., philanthropic board roles rather than in-person planning to save libraries and protect vulnerable/controversial books), implying that she has an older liberal conception of the role of the wealthy in relation to society at large. Lorraine Lyon also has close relationships with important politicians in the region and is able to pull state and federal strings toward the big showdown at the end (it’s heavily implied she donated to Trump, though he is not named; referred to as “the Cheetoh” or some such).

Juno Temple is very compelling as Dot/Nadine, a wily action hero and survivor of grooming and abuse. Her combination of ingenuity, optimism, and delusion is captivating work. She is fun to follow and, despite her capabilities, we never lose dramatic tension; there’s ample concern for her wellbeing the whole way. The show avoids being too neat in its conclusion, and her final confrontation with Munch is very funny. Sometime after Ole helped Dot escape at the ranch, she returns home from errands with Scotty to find Ole with Wayne (who is as affable and admirable a car dealer I’ve ever seen on screen, saved from being completely unbelievable by his occasional cluelessness and his brain injury).[4] He feels they have unfinished business; she talks him out of it and conscripts the confused 500-year-old killer into helping make biscuits for dinner.[5]

But there’s one other thing that really bothered me – Witt Farr’s death, not as a matter of its execution, just that the only black main character dies, a martyr to the concept of a kind and caring police officer. Perhaps this specific tragedy is supposed to underline the current of injustice around which the show is built. He is unwaveringly honorable throughout the show, but not in a completely unbelievable fashion.[6] My point is that he’s not a paper-thin or two-dimensional character, exactly. He’s a bit of a boy scout but not eerily optimistic or anything. His death, then, feels a bit like it falls into an old trope (culturally ubiquitous in understanding if not in practice) of black characters being damned from the jump, serving as moral upholstery for white protagonists. That’s not the most generous reading, and I still think the show is worth watching. I stayed up until 3 or 4 am a few weeks ago watching the last three or four episodes in a row after taking ample time getting to that point. I guess it just makes me think about current and ongoing trends in television. The rise of prestige TV after the rise of miniseries has created a high standard of quality among some genres, and for this high value of set design and writing we wait several years for a substandard amount of episodes.[7]

Contemporary conversations about this shift over the past two decades have led to audiences and critics lamenting the lost age of 22-episode runs, and many of us squinting to figure out what determines what gets branded a drama and what gets branded a comedy and how that mixing of genre and the air of importance contribute to elevating [in prestige] works that aren’t necessarily “better” (more artistically interesting, narratively satisfying, or “important”).[8] Part of it is a process of trying to turn television into movies and vice versa, but I don’t have a hard stance on whether that’s a perversion of form or whatever.[9] What I find is that, in conjunction with a social media emphasis on enforcing consensus that is also tied to an addiction with objectively quantifying the subjective experience of engaging with art via numeric rating scales, people sometimes feel they’re being had and that we’ve lost something important, in part because the shows that take themselves very seriously don’t always pull it off.[10]

Fargo season 5 succeeds at being a captivating crime dramedy-thriller. It made me laugh, and occasionally gasp, and it got me to binge-watch, something I avoid doing with all sorts of highly-rated shows. I just wish it had also avoided making me scoff or roll my eyes in a finale that was, overall, well executed.

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[1] I haven’t seen all their movies so I’m far from a definitive ranking. I did enjoy No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, and Hail Caesar! quite a bit. Anyway, I recently reviewed Ethan Coen’s new movie Drive-Away Dolls for Paste

[2] Gator is not infrequently racist when he crosses paths with North Dakota state trooper Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris) and Tillman’s deeply connected to rightwing militias, but there’s one person of color he apparently trusts. I don’t know how contradictory this is, but it is aesthetically significant – the relationship feels like an almost unwitting nod to Clarence Williams III in Hoodlum, if more respectful in personal conversation between Roy and Bowman. It could be the case that it was colorblind casting and all the imagined significance is created by this contrast but never explored.

[3] Jan Bos appears as her husband Wink Lyon in a few episodes to check on their injured son and provide a bit of comedy, but he’s otherwise a non-factor.

[4] It should be noted that when I say “believable” I don’t just mean “Oh, this could happen in real life.” I mean the character fits into the world that is constructed in a way that does not disrupt my ability to embrace the story and enjoy the narrative.

[5] After he gives a stirring and unsettling (and arguably inscrutable to the characters in the scene, who have not been watching this whole thing play out like the audience) monologue about how he came to North America in one wave of European settlement and was displaced by another, and can subsist without eating since eating the sin-tainted food that granted him immortality, he breaks into joyous tears at the experience of eating something baked with love.

[6] well, so far as you can believe any police officer going out of his way to do good

[7] I think the prestige model works for some shows – I think it’s fine that Fargo comes out every two years or so and only runs 10 at a time. I think it is substantially less well-suited to Disney+ Marvel and Star Wars shows. I am impressed that The Bear has just kept up year-over-year instead of making us wait a long time.

[8] Genre is a fluid think in the simplest of times, and I think of The Bear as a drama and Succession as a dark comedy, but runtime seems to determine awards categorization as much as anything else.

[9] Except with the Marvel stuff. That should all clearly be like 13-22 episode shows, as evidenced by the fact WB-DC did it successfully under Greg Berlanti’s stewardship, but because it came out of a movie universe they’re all structured like movies with cutting room detritus left in.

[10] See Watchmen, Lovecraft Country, and various seasons of anthology shows.

Formula 1: Drive to Survive (The First Three Seasons)

According to my mom, some of the first words I said as a child were car marques like Mitsubishi and Toyota. When I was little, I played games like Gran Turismo, Midnight Club, and Need for Speed. I watched movies with my family like Driven, Gone in Sixty Seconds, and Fast and the Furious. I wanted to race cars, I wanted to work on cars. These things did not come to pass, but deeply instilled passions die hard, and in a world of endless content, it takes only moderate means to find ways to tickle those parts of the brain. After watching Ferrari (and movies from Criterion’s 70s Car Movies collection like the original Gone in 60 Seconds and Steve McQueen’s Le Mans) I’ve had a hankering. And I’ve found myself drawn into Formula 1: Drive to Survive and I have been absolutely devouring it.[1]

In little over a week, I’ve watched three full seasons of the show. You’ve probably already heard all about the Netflix documentary series that shines a spotlight on the top level of international open-wheel racing. I became vaguely aware of the show because hosts of two of my favorite videogames podcasts (Rob Zacny from Remap Radio, as well as Three Movies Ahead and A More Civilized Age, and Danny O’Dwyer from NoClip) as well as a videogames journalist you may know from a much-used internet meme (Drew Scanlon) host the podcast Shift F1 and from when I used to listen to Bill Burr’s podcast religiously. But, like I said, I’m just absorbed and obsessed now.

Coming off the first season, two of my favorite drivers were the Spanish Carlos Sainz Jr. (son of rally world champion Carlos Sainz) and Australian Daniel Ricciardo. Daniel left Red Bull racing across from now-repeat champion Max Verstappen to join Renault, and Sainz got moved out from Renault and moved to McLaren after the first season; by the end of the third season, we know Ricciardo has already accepted terms to move to McLaren, where Sainz has taken an opportunity at Ferrari. One of the problems with the show is that its interest in showing each season from multiple angles, while providing a depth of feel for each driver, makes chronology confusing, especially in this case. Renault team principal Cyril Abiteboul was surprised and disappointed that Ricciardo had made his move before the season even started, and McLaren principal Zak Brown felt similarly about Sainz, but it isn’t exactly clear which of those two moved first (it follows that Ricciardo followed Sainz as opposed to Sainz being kicked out by Sainz a second time, considering no big muss was made of it within his personal storyline, but that isn’t presented explicitly). It’s fun trying to navigate external knowledge, trying to avoid spoilers from real life events, and then listening to the Shift F1’s preview for the 2024 season of F1 and learn how much has changed in the time between, how much I still get to learn.

What makes the show intriguing is the combination of the personalities of drivers and team principles (combination general manager and head coach, depending on your sports reference points) as well as the wheeling and dealing that determines driver lineups and sponsorship deals. There’s a lot to do with internal politics, though external politics are largely absent. The closest thing we have to that is dealing with COVID in the third season (set during 2020) and national pride – little outright and explicit nationalism – but we’ll get back to that.

What makes the sport interesting is that it’s high speed, high stakes, big money racing in beautiful locales – from Austrian forests to the Mediterranean principality of Monaco. And also that it’s composed of teams of two drivers, most of whom do not like one another. Many of them have driven together for years, back to their days in carts; on occasion, guys are friends outside of the sport but less on the grid (like Monégasque Charles LeClerc and French Pierre Gasly, who I think are no longer friends). Many of the guys can be respectful to one another between races, while competitive to borderline point of violence on the track. But the biggest rivalries are within the teams – it’s like if every football team had two quarterbacks that they were trying to score points against, or if the two most talented players on the same soccer or basketball team sometimes had to guard each other. Again, your sporting points of reference may vary.

I could go on about the drivers who have and haven’t endeared themselves to me. It is easier to feel sympathy for the guys like Esteban Ocan who didn’t come from money than guys born with money like Lance Stroll. In the first three seasons, the only nonwhite drivers are multi-repeat champion Lewis Hamilton (one of the best in the history of the sport), British-Thai Alex Albon, and Sergio Pérez (the sole Mexican driver). I’m generally fascinated by the absolute level of aptitude. Almost all the drivers are *at least* bilingual. Their job is to sit in and drive a car, but the physical strain of that requires physical training like any other athlete – a surprising amount, in fact. But there are other dynamics at play within the structure and the sport and the structure of the show that I think are worth mentioning.

As the sport goes, being the sort of person I am, I can’t help but wonder about, you know, the utility in the face of the constant suffering that our world is built on. All of life is worthy of critique, and besides that I feel guilty for ever experiencing joy, so Formula One must be contextualized within the world it exists in. It’s a gas burning sport in a world with an environment being ravaged by manmade climate change. It’s a machine wrecking sport in a world where some people don’t have homes. That’s hardly the fault of the drivers; it’s just the sort of observation I always find myself making. It’s hard for me, always, to avoid thinking about the current global order as a sinking ship with insufficient lifeboats.

We crave spectacle, and these events are indeed spectacular. Competition is always interesting, but especially exaggerated with these rocket-like cars moving at death defying speeds. Many people have died in automobile racing, including in Formula 1 and its immediate lower tier Formula 2. The FIA have canceled the race in Sochi the last three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the race in Azerbaijan continues despite the ethnic cleansing campaign that recently took place there. [2]

I think there is something to a transnationalism in sports like F1 and soccer, if we separate it from the international competition between teams bearing national flags during World Cups and the like. And much like the World Cup, it is an interesting showcase for transnational identity – most of the racers speak multiple languages, many of them have multinational identities. Daniel Ricciardo’s father was born in Italy, his mother’s parents were born in Italy; Esteban Ocon is French . It’s also a showcase for globalization and the easy movement of capital. Everything we enjoy doing or watching costs money, and that money goes wherever money can be made. Italian racing team Scuderia Ferrari has a logo for the Dutch oil company Shell and had American tobacco company Philip Morris as a title sponsor with the subliminal name “Mission Winnows.” They have a racing driver from the city-state principality of Monaco and the country of Spain. F1 is headquartered in England, and therefore so are many of the teams, like Red Bull, owned by the Austrian energy drinks company that also owns soccer teams in at least three countries (German Bundesliga’s RB Leipzig, Austrian Bundesliga’s RB Salzburg, and Major League Soccer’s New York Red Buls). Red Bull’s team principle is English. Mercedes Benz-AMG Petronas’s team principle is Austrian. McLaren’s now-former team principle was American. The Haas team, owned by industrial automation magnate Gene Haas who also owns a NASCAR team, was run by a German.

At the end of season three, British auto manufacturer McLaren has teamed up with American oil company Gulf as a sponsor on their car. Racing Point team owner Lawrence Stroll (father of driver Lance Stroll), became an investor in Aston Martin and they became a title sponsor of that team – while it’s clear this is distinct from their former partnership with Red Bull, it isn’t clear how because it’s all spoken about as “Aston Martin returning to racing” and the like, even right before switching to talking about Red Bull and showing highlights where they have the Aston Martin insignia on their uniforms. It’s clear there’s a distinction, but we’re not privy to the details.

Something else I found frustrating about the end of season three was that Lewis Hamilton’s political speech felt like it wasn’t given sufficient coverage. Now, the first season was focused almost entirely on the lower-tier and mid-tier teams, except for Red Bull, who finished third; Ferrari and Mercedes drivers and principals didn’t interview. That changed in the second and third season, especially as Ferrari fell into the pack because of a bad car design. When COVID was the focus in the first episode as things shut down and then reopened with social distancing, it was mentioned in an early press conference that Hamilton had been outspoken about COVID before the season started, and he says on stage with a mic in his hand that he doesn’t know why any of them are there. But anyway, the episodes that did focus on Mercedes didn’t talk much about Lewis Hamilton’s political speech until the last episode of the season. The biggest flaw in execution here is that they show just enough (Hamilton leading his competitors in kneeling at the starting line before races, Hamilton wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts under his racing suit, and leaving the suit unzipped and hanging so his “ARREST THE COPS WHO SHOT BREONNA TAYLOR” shirt was visible when he makes the podium) that it is very apparent that this was not a one-time thing for him. His last words on the season, and I think the last words of the season at all, were him saying he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to use his platform and influence to do something positive and meaningful (after also showing highlights from his childhood where he and his father talk about avoiding racists and not being outspoken when they were trying to come up).

It felt like Netflix and F1 weren’t trying to minimize it exactly, but that it was certainly worth more than five minutes at the end of the season. It is a compression due to the focus of the series – what they are allowed to do is to focus on what is happening among the teams in a way that stirs up drama to entice and delight the audience, but there is a lot that gets avoided. Reserve drivers are a part of every team, but we don’t always know who they are, even if they’ve featured in a season of the show before.[3] There are also junior driving schemes racers get put on, but it is unclear to me how similar this is to an American football team’s practice squad or a Premier League team’s academy out of which other teams can sign players. There’s occasional lack of clarity regarding chronology because each episode tends to focus on one or two teams or racers. I still don’t know just about anything about how cars are designed – I know there are good cars and bad cars and that Racing Point seemed to steal the 2019 Mercedes design for their 2020 design, but the show doesn’t get into that too much. [4]

Formula 1: Drive to Survive, is an effective marketing vehicle for Formula One racing. I do not know if it is unparalleled in quality among Netflix sports docuseries (Last Chance U was definitely more critical of its sources) but it has me in a chokehold. It has got me playing Need for Speed and Forza again and seeing when the open-wheel, stock car, and sportscar races are happening all over.[5] It has me intrigued and fascinated, thinking about how cars and teams are constructed. I look forward to continuing watching it, and I remain curious in what new ways the show will shift its revelatory gaze.

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[1] In fact, my film watching dropped off considerably between January and February mostly, I think, because of work… but I also watched three seasons of this show, so I am hoping I can make up some lost ground before the end of this month. And anyway I feel like anything I consume I need to write about, but also this show and sport just inspired me to think about so much.

[2] I read somewhere that sports have become a contemporary substitute for war, as national pride is worn during international competition as an outlet instead of killing one another on battlefields. I’m simplifying the hypothesis in a way that underlines its stupidity. For one thing, war hasn’t gone anywhere. For another, little in the way of resources or territory are managed or directed by who wins the FIFA World Cup or who takes gold at an Olympics competition. There is a more interesting argument to be assessed in the context of “sportswashing,” but only slightly; Anglo and American journalists are keen to point to the hosting of international competitions in Russia or China as exemplifying a tendency of “authoritarians” to downplay internal despotism by putting on a global extravaganza. These journalists are less likely to critique the same thing happening at large in their own countries; we have sports facilitated by universities that pull in billions collectively while not paying their players, while several public university systems are being neutered of intellectual value, HBCUs go underfunded for over a century, and public education at large is suffering for funding. Simultaneous to the Super Bowl, the Israeli government stepped up their bombing in Rafah in the south of Gaza, after ordering Palestinian civilians to evacuate in that direction from further north in the strip, continuing their genocidal campaign while the U.S. government sends them money, weapons, and international sanction. But I go on. I will revisit some of this in other pieces.

[3] I’ve mostly found them when going on Wikipedia looking for details on a season I’ve already seen

[4] they paid Mercedes for information on brake duct design, which was protested by multiple teams, then they were fined but allowed to keep using them, but the body overall looked a lot like the previous Mercedes… Yes, I know, I need to read Adrian Newey’s How to Build a Car

[5] Dayton is ongoing as I type this and I remember my opinion of NASCAR changing for the positive after I watched a Top Gear episode and I think I’m going to have to watch the new Netflix NASCAR docuseries after I finish up Drive to Survive because, without the turns and chicanes, it’s a little bit harder to understand strategy… plus the

Cultural Critique and Knowledge Production, or Thinking Critically in Public

We are all writing criticism because we want to contribute to the collection of thoughts about art, to help make art better, whatever we consider “better” to be. This is some of why I find that important and interesting.¹

One thing about criticism is that it isn’t always directions on how to improve something; sometimes it’s just observation about how something must exist in the world in its current form. The purpose of all cultural critique isn’t to create frictionless art or art without problems; it’s to have a more thoughtful experience of art. You can see the limitations of something and not consider those limitations to be flaws. Or you can see those limitations and accept that nothing is perfect. You can see an artist respond to criticism in subsequent pieces (paintings, books, films, games, what have you), either trying to prove doubters wrong, answer challenges posed, or something else entirely.

I’m mentioning this in part because I’m thinking about an article I wrote a few years ago about whether Batman stories have to be copaganda; some people think landing on “yes” is as shortsighted as saying that Starship Troopers is bad satire of fascism because some of the fascists look cool. I, perhaps obviously, disagree. I think Starship Troopers is successful satire because of its aesthetic choices, many of which are obvious. And I think the question of superhero stories being pro-police propaganda is part and parcel of the nature of superhero stories under our current social construction. That does not mean they cannot have value as art, media, craft objects, or whatever phrase we want to use. And it is subject to what you think propaganda is and how deeply you need to feel its effects to consider it real.

One of the stories I wrote about when I wrote that piece (prompted by the release of The Batman, one of my favorite Batman movies) was Batman: White Knight, a book written and drawn by Sean Murphy whose ending undercuts its critique of Batman by having Bruce Wayne secretly having started a fund to make up for the property damage undertaken in Batman’s work. Sometimes art struggles to incorporate critiques, sometimes it isn’t structurally possible, sometimes it turns into lampshading, often but not always in the case of preemptively telling an audience that a story’s creators know the story is dumb.

Sometimes you just need to accept a premise and not be reminded of it. Sometimes a premise works for you, and you accept it and work through the piece from that lens. Sometimes you cannot accept a premise and a story never has a chance. Sometimes you accept a premise, but something happens within the story which disrupts your ability to continue existing within it.

Taste is subjective, as are the grand majority of our experiences moving through reality. I’m trying to read Fredric Jameson’s critiques of postmodernity to cut through some of the relativism I find myself just absolutely drenched in; it evades the dialectic at times. In fact, I find myself at times wondering why people can’t just chill out a little bit about their opinions on art because I wonder if it is so necessary to presume that everyone that feels differently than you about a given piece of art is a numbskull or your political enemy. But then, if no one ever took these things “too” seriously, they would never improve, we would never grow. I am, generally, open to arguments I don’t agree with if I find them compelling to read. That is the work of it, right?; staking out a claim with sufficient evidence or flair as to make others believe that either what you say has some great truth and wide applicability OR AT LEAST that you truly believe it and therefore are showing people another way to look at the world which, if they do not adopt, they at least now know exists and can try to apply or consider from time to time…

I was reading Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp. In the early going, she writes:

“Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion – and there is taste in acts, taste in morality.

Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It’s rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)”

This last point ties into what I was just saying about subjectivity. You may find in your life that there are people you interact with who think, speak, and write in ways you find brilliantly about one subject and on another are just so flat, so rote, so boring that it completely disrupts any idea you might have had about genius being universalizing. Of course, an individual’s artistic tastes in one medium not translating to the same level of rigor in another is not necessarily the same thing as being so myopic in their interests that they think they have something interesting to say when they don’t – a sort of persistent self-aggrandizing blandness born from a flattening of art that comes from a pursuit of truth and kindness that leads to seeking comfort, perhaps. That’s maybe not the most generous reading; but sometimes you’re not seeking comfort in the art, you’re seeking comfort in your tastes, confidence in your perspective.

The rest of what Sontag was saying is more to my general point here. Something that changed in me as I got older, and pursued a second History degree, was that I felt myself thinking much more critically about what I was writing. I felt humbled being exposed to new information about the world that let me know that I should be careful about my blanket statements, that I had much more to learn. I think, before that, I had a tendency to be more cutting. I am trying to build that back up. Sometimes art is shit, no matter how hard people worked on it. And if we’re not honest when we find art shitty, it can’t get better. We must have the confidence to say when we really think things are good and really think things are bad, even if good and bad are matters of taste, and even if I find rating them numerically to be frustratingly counter to my perspective.

The subtitle of this blog, PC Vulpes, is “Critical thinking in public.” That’s taken from a discourse that has transpired over the last seven years about critical thinking and the value of the humanities. This discourse has spurred as the general deprivation of the United States specifically and the Western World/Global North more broadly has become apparent to the professional and intellectual layers of the working classes because of a rising tide of rightwing populism or fascism and fascism-adjacent policies with the added level of a lack of etiquette (for those with the decency for the lack of etiquette to not be the most important part, it is at least a prompt for considering the rest of it). Education is generally being devalued outside of STEM (also inside of STEM and some would argue really just outside of business schools) and part of the argument on behalf of humanities has been to discuss their schools and departments as being places where you can learn “soft skills.” [1] Soft skills are not without value (I not too long ago worked at a nonprofit where my job involved helping kids develop them), but you don’t study English or History to learn how to write an email. You study them because you think they are interesting and that the pursuit of knowledge about them holds inherent value.[2] But critical thinking *is* a value I believe in. What it means to me is to think through critique, to question the sources you are reading and being pointed to, to analyze the tone and word choice of what you are reading or hearing, to question the world around you and not accept it at face value because every person, place, thing, and action is imbued with great meaning even if it is not always intentional.[3]

Another time, I will talk about how things have politics, and the differences between intended and interpreted meaning and context. I will undoubtedly harken back to different arguments I have read over the years about critique and critical thinking in games, movies, books, and other things. But I felt a need, in any case, to explain what I’m trying to do here.[4]

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[1] One of the prompts for my recent consideration of critical thinking and knowledge production was Tyler Austin Harper’s piece “The Humanities Have Sown the Seeds of their Own Destruction” from The Atlantic, but I am also considering Merve Emre’s piece from The New Yorker “Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?,” Erin Bartram’s “The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind” from her blog, Harper asking on Twitter what people mean when they say “critical thinking,” online discourses and in-person discussions around these topics, and probably some other stuff not immediately coming to mind.

[2] For my part, I think that your undergraduate degree should primarily be based on what you find interesting, not going into that field necessarily, because doing professional-level work in humanities and social sciences tends to require some sort of terminal degree anyway.

[3] Dictionary.com says “disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence”

[4] Here is the three-part series I wrote on criticism last August and September at Substack

1. I do think it’s worth mentioning that, for me anyway, it’s frequently difficult for any of this to feel important when there’s a genocide going on. ↩︎

What I wrote last year

Hi, I’m Kevin. I’m a writer, sometimes I get paid for it. As this blog is a new venture, I thought I would give links to various parts of my portfolio from last year. If you haven’t had a chance, you can see some of what I’ve written on movies and games in 2023.

February 2023 – preview of bleak sci-fi RTS Chaotic Era, a really fun and creative game, and a list of The Best Movies Featuring Wrestlers, both for Paste Magazine

March 2023 – review of John Wick: Chapter 4 and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves for Vague Visages.

April 2023 – I wrote about how crass I found the corporate-worshipping nostalgia of Air, a well-directed and well-performed film in service to making Nike into some sort of an underdog story. It’s one of my favorite things I wrote last year. I also reviewed Beau Is Afraid, one of my least favorite films of last year, for Vague Visages.

May 2023 – I wrote about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 for Vague Visages, one of the best of the late-period Marvel films (so not, like, great, but not terrible). I also reviewed Fast X for Paste; it’s in the lower tier of Fast & Furious movies for me, with 2, 4, and 8… I always have trouble figuring out how to order 5, 6, and 7… 9 is worse than those but better than that other group… 1 and 3 I switch around a lot. But X is not good, though I did enjoy Jason Mamoa’s character. For Vague Visages, I also reviewed You Hurt My Feelings, a movie about professional class anxieties, a comedy I quite enjoyed.

June 2023 – In June, for Paste, I reviewed a Transformers: Rise of the Beasts movie that had less going on than the Michael Bay films but felt like a half step between those movies and the Bumblebee movie. It was a mixed bag overall and I really hated the ending. I also wrote about the problems with Man of Steel and how I prefer Batman v. Superman for Man of Steel’s tenth birthday, and about how Hulk is colorful and kind of underrated for its twentieth. For Vague Visages, I reviewed Joy Ride, one of the most underrated films of last year, which makes a compelling case that we need more raunchy women-led road movies.

In July, I reviewed Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, a wonderful movie with a bit of strangeness to it. Mission: Impossible are the Fast movies’ more competent and coherent older sibling. I was really anticipating that one, and it delivered, with just a twinge of odd cultiness. I also reviewed The Fielder’s Choice for Baseball Prospectus, a fun choose-your-own adventure game, and wrote about Knights of the Old Republic as a bridge between two eras of BioWare RPG for its twentieth anniversary.

Evidently I was too busy with the day job to do anything for money in the late summer and early fall of September or August, but I did review The Last Voyage of the Demeter on Substack, and do a three-part series on purposes of criticism.

In October, I went to the Philadelphia Film Festival, where I reviewed Kubi (one of my favorites from last year, a very violent, very gay, dark comedy about samurai) and Chinese children’s adventure film Deep Sea for Vague Visages and Foe for Blood Knife.

In November, I wrote about museums in Starfield representing Bethesda’s longtime ideas about the use of history in the formation of cultural political identities.

In December, I reviewed The Iron Claw, one of the most entertaining films I saw last year, but which feels dishonest at times. I also reviewed American Fiction, which I liked more than when I saw at the Film Festival, but may have more problems with now than when I sat down and saw it in December.

Here are some of my favorite pieces from a much busier 2022:

New Mockumentary Players Is The Last Dance of Esports about Paramount+’s League of Legends show

Halo, Witcher, Obi-Wan: Should TV Adaptations Bother Appeasing Legacy Fans?

Before the Dark Times, Before the Empire: How Attack of the Clones Changed Star Wars Before Disney Owned the Canon

Does Batman Have to be Copaganda? – Batman’s Complex Relationship with Law Enforcement, On Page and Screen

The Guardians of Justice (Will Save You): Bizarre, Loud, Fantastical Pulp That Rises to the Moment

Story Mode Is a Smart, Essential Study of the Relationship Between Games and Their Audience

Also, you can find me on Letterboxd here. And my former newsletter at Substack (which I will probably periodically link to) is here. And I have a now-defunct blog that I’ll occasionally repost things from.

Alright, you’re more-or-less caught up.

Ferrari (2023)

Sometimes you walk away from a movie and it grows on you and you realize you don’t just like it, you love it. One of the reasons that I hate numeric ratings is that I find my feelings can change about a movie even if my thoughts about it don’t; I mean, those thoughts can shift too, but that seems more forgivable, somehow.

To quote a Twitter acquaintance, no sport works as well on film as auto racing. Like many of director Michael Mann’s films, Ferrari is about work – how people (usually men) go about their day to feed themselves and their families, and the contradictions of ethics and morality that comprise their daily comings and goings. In the case of Ferrari, the story – adapted by screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin from the biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine by Brock Yates – follows Adam Driver as the race car driver-turned-entrepreneur as he pursues the Mille Migla (“thousand mile”) open road endurance race to buoy the strained finances of his namesake car company; win the race, attract partnership investment to avoid bankruptcy. The competition for resources and attention between the manufacturing and racing divisions of Ferrari are one part of Enzo’s conflict with his wife and business partner Laura (Penélope Cruz), who resents him for the death of their son Dino as well as Enzo’s “whoring.” Meanwhile, at an estate he has maintained in secret, Enzo has a second family with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and their son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese), a young boy uncertain about his identity as he approaches his first communion. Ferrari is in large part a film about grief, responsibility, and old-world patriarchal moral duty.

The film opens with a grayscale portrayal of Driver as young Enzo in a racing car. Then, we see him awaken in bed beside Lina, check his watch, check on Piero, and head to his primary home. Laura says she will abide his whoring but that he is required to be home when she awakes, shooting the wall beside his head in their bedroom – Mann has established their relationship, the understanding between them, the festering grief and malignant passions. Next, they take separate cars to visit the mausoleum where Dino (Benedetto Benedettini; later Gabriel Noto at seven years old and Edoardo Beraldi at three years old in flashbacks) is interred. When the camera looks at Enzo while he speaks to his late son, the background shows that Enzo’s brother Dino, who died during World War I, shares the space. It is brilliant work by Mann and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt to establish the trauma the family has experienced and the guilt that animates Enzo’s ambitious drive. The second World War is also invoked as a shared backdrop of the film – Enzo’s factory was destroyed then, and it’s when Piero was conceived.

Milan native Daniela Piperno portrays Enzo’s mother Adalgisa, who has a confrontational relationship with Laura – she is a sort of archetypical shuffling-and-muttering mother-in-law who does not believe Laura should question Enzo, and believes Enzo has a right to an heir, rubbing the death of one Dino into her face while continuing to bear the wounds of his namesake predecessor. Adalgisa and Laura arrive to the gravesite as Enzo is leaving, and many of the film’s emotional conflicts have been established.

Shortly thereafter we see all these characters at mass – Enzo and his team of strategists and engineers have brought stopwatches as they listen through a homily which uses engines as a metaphor (further establishing the connection between the municipality of Maranello, province of Modena, and the profits of Ferrari and rival Maserati) for the sounds of Ferrari’s and Maserati’s test drivers starting and finishing. We see a man die testing a Ferrari not long after, as Alfonso de Portago (Brazilian actor Gabriel Leone as the aristocrat motor sportsman) pursues a racing gig with Ferrari and becomes his replacement. The violence of the afternoon (this death is not the last we see on screen) is in slow motion – the drama coming from knowing that everyone present is witnessing a tragedy about which they can do nothing. The emotion is palpable as the driver’s girlfriend or wife watches on. Enzo wants to provide the woman a sort of widow’s pension. Laura takes exception to this, establishing her nature as a serious businesswoman, with all the coldness that implies; antipathy to the losses others suffer as part of their alignment and association with Ferrari, even as she manages her own abiding grief.

Some of the tensions at play here are highlighted in the film’s most emotional scene – a night at the opera where Linda sits in the balcony and can see down to Ferrari’s seats, where Laura has decided not to accompany Enzo. As the music soars the various characters are transported away to moments in their past. Laura and Adalgisa, both hearing the music from the estate, remember their sons. We see Enzo and Laura young and happily in love, with their boy playing in their bedroom. Adalgisa watches *her* Dino walk to board a train to join the fight in The Great War, walking through the fog never for her to see him living again. It is an intense series of images, showing love and laughter to establish how much has been lost. Enzo, while still strong and brilliant, is gray now. Laura, still beautiful, has circles around her eyes and moves through each day haunted and full of fury.

Another emotional highlight to establish emotional stakes and foreshadow coming tragedy takes place between Enzo and his racing team. After a later race where Enzo is uninspired by his team’s performance, he explains to his drivers (the aforementioned de Portago alongside Jack O’Connell as the English Peter Collins, Patrick Dempsey as the aging Italian Piero Taruffi, and Wyatt Carnell as the German Wolfgang von Trips) that he wants more from them – he wants them willing to risk their lives, to take the hard chances. “Two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time,” he begins, before warning them they must accept the danger of this violent sport, their “deadly passion,” their “terrible joy.” They need to be willing to put their life on the line for victory. “You get into one of my cars, you get in to win.” The drivers must decide, Enzo says, if they are hungry competitors like the men at Maserati (Derek Hill as Jean Behra among them) or just gentlemen sportsmen. At the Mille Miglia, Enzo warns de Portago that his job is to just finish the race alive – it’s his first run, unlike the other men. There is a scene the night before the race where the drivers solemnly write and seal letters for their loved ones, in case they do not return. In the typical fashion of the young and hearty, de Portago heeds the one of these warnings that is a challenge rather than that which is intended to preserve him.

Class, culture, and labor figure interestingly into Ferrari. Enzo sells a car to the king of Jordan, he has a second house for his mistress, the municipality and the region depends in part on his decision making. By one metric, he carries them all with him, by another they are the tools of his success, laborers and peasants at the whims of an industrialist baron. He watches a race with his lead mechanic while everyone else has the day off. The idea of Enzo having or deserving an “heir” and the question of his obligations and responsibilities to his wife are wrapped up in culture and psychology but also in material reality – the rules are different, generally, for rich and poor, as are the concerns. Death happens around Enzo, some of which (like his older brother and eldest son) he cannot control, but others for which he is more, if not directly, responsible. He tells others he learned long ago to harden himself or find another line of work; the fickleness of death and destiny haunt him. Today, motor sports are much less dangerous because of advancements in technology and development of new rules; but this is a relative term – an F1 driver died in 2017.

Ferrari, like all car films, exists in part to explore the hubris of human experimentation with physics and mechanics. There’s hell to pay and it only takes one currency. The hubris, the pursuit, even manifests in a philosophical tension – Ferrari claims that he sells cars to race whereas Maserati races to sell cars; it is a symbiotic thing, not an either-or proposition, but there is a ratio here, a shifting scale of priority and value, and an inherent question of the purpose of capital and the process of capitalism. Is the acquisition of wealth and status a tool to pursue other things, or are other pursuits always means to the end of wealth? Where does contentment come from? What do the rich want? Men like Ferrari get to ask questions of society, of social structure, and of reality that the rest of us do not. Some of their comeuppance is in questions of reputation, which determine things like the stock value of a publicly traded company, the sale value of a sports car, or the stock and trade of the paparazzi that investigate, or are bribed and threatened by, a luxury car magnate because of personal and professional scandal.

Ferrari is a good biopic because it makes decisions that can be met as divisive. It stops short of hagiography – this is not a feelgood story about a noble man, though it is about a man’s greatness, how he pursues and deploys it. It is a portrait of a man at a crossroads; a former racer, an established businessman, trying to save his company. It is for the viewer to decide whether that was a prize worth the price paid for it. That company still exists – Scuderia Ferrari, the racing division, just made one of the highest profile transfers in motorsports history with seven-time Formula One championship winner Lewis Hamilton coming over from Mercedes[1] – but many challenges were ahead in the 1960s. The race Ferrari won in 1957 (his drivers finished in the first, second, and third place) no longer does; that was the last Mille Miglia that ever ran in that configuration because of the tragedy they were at the heart of simultaneous to their success. Epilogue-style text lets us know that Piero eventually took the name Ferrari and became Enzo’s heir; it does not mention that Ferrari had further financial troubles in the late 1960s, or that Enzo provoked several of his top engineers to leave and form their own company in the mid-1960s. This isn’t a failing of the movie, but it does end rather abruptly, perhaps stopping short altogether. Nonetheless, Ferrari strikes me as beautiful and emotional. Because of its subject matter, there is ample action, but there is a lot of drama, hot blood coursing through it, a heart beating as strongly and rapidly as an engine.

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[1] Hamilton will start at Ferrari in 2025. He will race for Mercedes in 2024

Echo

I really wanted to like Echo, but I can’t, because it’s not very good. Its premise is one of inclusion and diversity within the crowded market of superhero origins – Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) is a Native American vigilante born deaf and made an amputee through a tragic childhood accident. As has become the case frequently in the later part of Marvel’s blockbuster reign as they have transitioned into television, the scaffolding of diversity does not inherently lead to interesting storytelling, though at least it wasn’t marred by the offensive patriotism of Falcon and the Winter Soldier.[1] Marvel’s most recent(ish?) Disney+ series left much to be desired. I deluded myself into thinking I should have any expectations of quality at all, a misapprehension that was resolved by the end of the first episode. Once I let go of the idea that it would bat above Marvel’s average, I had a decent time, even if I was laughing more at than with the show toward the end.[2]

The positive expectation was mostly based on Echo being rated TV-MA for violence and an unfounded hope that exploiting indigenous heritage and culture to claim artistic importance would mean Disney-Marvel would treat that heritage carefully by building an interesting story around it. As to the rating, Echo is just a teen show with a bit of blood. But that’s not a sin; it’s superhero fiction, after all. And its use of Native practices and beliefs doesn’t feel reckless, even if it is a bit clumsy. No, the problem is it feels stapled together and too neatly resolved. Echo reminded me of Watchmen, HBO’s miniseries that serves as a pseudo-sequel to the 1986 comic maxiseries, because it felt a bit like important history was stapled onto a comic book adaptation. However, Echo’s production values were inferior while its story cohered slightly better by way of avoiding mystery box-style set-up.[3] Still, Echo didn’t give its ideas adequate breathing room or development in a total runtime around 200 minutes.

The show begins with a check into the supernatural mythological origin of the Choctaw (starring Julia Jones as Chafa). This set me up to expect a further exploration of those ancient beliefs. Echo quickly lets go of the supernatural and mythological while taking snippets of historical and prehistoric experiences as cold opens which intend to represent dreams of the protagonist. That narrative context doesn’t make much sense for reasons of visual perspective – besides being all in third-person, one of the sequences, starring Dannie McCallum as Tuklo, is black-and-white with silent movie dialog placards, while Morningstar Angeline plays Lowak in a scene focused on Choctaw stickball which spends some time away from the protagonist completely – and the explanation at the end feels almost too convenient. It detracts from what’s artistically interesting about the sequences by giving them a narrative explanation that doesn’t make more narrative sense. The first episode is mostly comprised of summarizing the early life of Choctaw protagonist Maya Lopez (played by Darnell Besaw as a child), from her childhood tragedies (losing her mother Taloa, portrayed by Katarina Ziergovel, in the same car accident where she loses her foot) to her adoption into working for Daredevil/Spider-Man villain Wilson “Kingpin” Fisk.

Played by Vincent D’Onofrio here, Fisk splits his time approximately 90/10 between antagonizing Daredevil and Spider-Man in the comics and cartoons. He’s also one of the primary antagonists in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. In the MCU’s spin-off TV shows that started on Netflix, D’Onofrio-Fisk was primarily a Daredevil villain before he was reintroduced in last year’s Hawkeye series. That show ended with Maya – who was heading a gang of mechanics and martial artists known as the Tracksuit Mafia – attempting to kill Fisk. She was seeking revenge for the death of her father (who Hawkeye killed) and was convinced by Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) that Fisk set up her dad. Later in Echo, Maya is eventually reunited with Fisk, who survived a point-blank gunshot wound in his skull. He offers to make her his successor if she will come home with him.

You see, she returns to Tamaha, Oklahoma, not to see her family but to destroy warehouses connected to Fisk’s New York-based criminal empire. It is not readily apparent to the viewer how – without any alliances or organization, as the Tracksuits have been dissolved – Maya putting wrenches into the gears of his organization would bring her closer to that goal if Fisk is dead, which she believed him to be until he turned up at her family home. Perhaps she just hopes to be on top as “queenpin” in the sense of destroying his legacy.

The other main emotional arc involves Maya reconnecting with her family and her heritage. The heritage mostly comes in the way of flashbacks, though the audience is treated to references and allusions intended to integrate us into the life experience of Native American reservations as well as portraying an illustrious Choctaw Powwow. Maya never showed any rejection of her culture so much as rejection of her family, so one part is being resolved for the character while the rest is just being put on display for the viewer. In a way, this show is like Watchmen crossed with Reservation Dogs, especially because of shared actors from the latter. Dallas Goldtooth (William “Spirit” Knifeman in Rez Dogs) plays a local community leader in a bit part alongside Jana Schmieding (Bev in Rez Dogs). Zahn McClarnon (“Big” in Rez Dogs) briefly appears as Maya’s late father. Her maternal grandparents figure prominently in the show – rare goods, antiques, and junk salesman Skully (Graham Greene, also in Reservation Dogs) and Chula (the inestimable Tantoo Cardinal, who also figures prominently in Killers of the Flower Moon). Chaske Spencer plays Henry Black Crow Lopez, her paternal uncle that abandoned her in New York and is slow to come to her aid in Tamaha.

It is a collection of quality actors with too little to do. One problem is that, like in Watchmen, the protagonist’s arc is about letting go of anger that is righteous through the powers of a poorly defined resolution (though, unlike in that show and Falcon, it’s not staged like a dismissal of an oppressed group’s deservedness for justice). Maya’s mad at Kingpin for setting up her dad and mad at her blood relatives for abandoning her in her various stages of childhood. Through several conversations with Kingpin, she never really confronts him about that, he just angrily confesses unprompted in the climax while threatening the rest of her family.

The best dramatic scene in Echo is an emotional sign language conversation between Maya and Chula about how Chula’s anger at William over the death of Taloa led her to resent and ignore Maya. Maya storms away but later saves Chula’s life with newfound super-powers in a very goofy scene, so I guess all is well that ends well. She uses these same vaguely defined powers to give Kingpin a psychic shock and stop him from reliving his violent vengeance against his abusive father. Stepping in to stop his father beating his mother is easily the most defensible violence he ever committed, and it is unclear why she feels the need to stop him except to heal him from his trauma. But it’s not like he’s all better afterward, repentant of his violent ambitions, he’s just momentarily shellshocked and leaves Oklahoma to pursue the New York mayor’s office.

In this scene, she is wearing a superhero costume that her grandmother made for her inspired by their ancestry which the ghost of her mother led her to. Never mind that her grandmother has had one conversation with her in the past twenty years, it looks kind of cool and is meant as an apology. Throughout the series, Maya frequently wears a harness with no apparent practical application except that it looks like a comic book costume – it would make more sense if it was a dual shoulder holster, but it is not.

Underpinning this odd resolution of the Kingpin relationship there is, of course, the socially saturated idea that violence is never the answer which continually crops up in these movies and shows which also work from an action movie premise that requires viewers uncritically accepting that violence usually is the answer. I hate when people use “schizophrenic” to describe cultural phenomena of self-contradicting narrative theses, but we need some phrase for this strange recurrence that isn’t constricted to the MCU but is most highlighted in these moralistic action blockbusters. It’s at very least cognitively dissonant. [4]

The most interesting relationship with the most well thought out premise is that with her maternal cousin [whose parents we never meet] Bonnie (Devery Jacobs, an actor and writer on Reservation Dogs who coincidentally plays and helped create Kahhori in the new season of Marvel’s What If…? series). Bonnie reached out to Maya when William died, and Maya has been ignoring her. Unfortunately, this relationship gets the least screentime: the only real conversation between the characters happens while they’re held captive and Maya punches Bonnie in the face as a distraction. It is unclear within the scene why this is the distraction she chose, to say nothing of Bonnie being both the youngest member of her immediate family, besides comic relief Biscuits (Cody Lightning), and the only one who didn’t abandon her. It’s just a colossal waste of a talented and up-and-coming performer and the relationship dynamic that seemed it would become most central when Maya got to Oklahoma.

That same episode features the action highlight of the show, Maya beating some bounty hunting assassins to death or near-death in Black Crow’s roller-skating rink. There are other fight scenes, like one in the first episode with a Daredevil cameo, but the other main action set piece of the series involves Maya jumping on a train to set up the warehouse explosion. The CGI compositing isn’t the worst I’ve ever seen, but it never tricks you into thinking it’s real. Visually, the show is regular at best; the editing and camera work made motorcycle riding feel boring, which is a sin. There’s one dynamic go-pro backpack shot that they immediately cut away from to go back to the mid-distance advertising look; it’s a real shame. The fight scenes are fine; the cultural obsession with close-combat and fake-one-shots started by the Bourne movies and exacerbated by the Wick films is not at its best or worst here. Cox and her stunt stand-ins put on a good show, and both her deafness and artificial limb play into the action and drama in sensible and entertaining ways. The use of ASL and silence are among the show’s more interesting technical aspects, though a more experimental sound design might have nailed the second part better. In any case, a superhero show (if that is indeed what Maya is by the end) where most of the conversations are done in ASL is a nice concept.[5] There is also an incorporation of contemporary indigenous music as needle drops as the series goes on.

All in all, like most MCU shows I’ve seen it would have been better served as either a two-hour movie or a thirteen-episode series, but they had too many ideas for the former and too few for the latter. An interesting premise means little without excellent execution. Echo doesn’t feel alternately stretched and compressed in the exact same ways as Loki or Falcon and the Winter Soldier, in part because it had even less time to put forth its vision, but the payoff for the cold opens felt flimsy and the emotional issues are poorly resolved. If you take nothing else from this, remember: Echo is a show about a girl who was abandoned by her family having to learn to forgive her family. The whole path to resolution is crammed into a finale which is coincidentally the shortest episode.

Echo got a backdoor pilot in Hawkeye and it features a Daredevil cameo that makes me anticipate the new Daredevil show more when I should really just watch the old one. We have a new character developed and I’m not sure what their plan for her is. The problems with this show were in the writing and editing rooms; wherever Marvel sends the character “Echo” next, I hope there’s more clarity of vision, because performances weren’t the problem and I wish Alaqua Cox success. I am glad Disney-Marvel collaborated with and thanked the Choctaw Nation. I hope that, as cultural inclusivity leads to more diverse mainstream Hollywood projects, we as viewers also explore the independent Native and indigenous artists that have been doing more interesting work for a long time, including many of these same actors.

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[1] Whether or not patriotism is inherently offensive is not my argument. I am saying part of the show’s resolution of racial reckoning involves the protagonist telling a predecessor who was tortured and imprisoned by the U.S. government for working for the U.S. government that “just because this country did wrong by you individually and my people historically doesn’t mean I should fight for it” is, at very best and my most generous, extremely reductive and shortsighted, not just considering the past and present of the U.S. (there are black people in the police, military, and so forth, after all), but the context of the story in which the claim is made. There is no real conversation of reckoning, just a hearty dismissal.

[2] I will admit, I skipped Ms. Marvel and didn’t watch the second season of Loki or finish the first season of What If…? I liked Hawkeye, more or less. Marvel has stopped being appointment viewing for me and I am better off that way.

[3] In a way, it almost feels like the show has a mystery box without a mystery. Like I think we’re supposed to be surprised when Kingpin shows up, but it was part of the marketing. I suppose the bigger mystery box is the cold opens but my disappointment with them is more of a structural/stylistic unevenness issue.

[4] This could broadly speaking be said to be a problem of all action movies with peaceful resolutions, back at least to Darth Vader’s redemption in Return of the Jedi (they sure killed a lot of Stormtroopers that day, didn’t they?). But just locking into Marvel television, I’m almost retroactively surprised Hawkeye wasn’t rated TV-MA. There’s a lot of death in it; when do and don’t they matter? Meanwhile, they removed some blood in Falcon and the Winter Soldier to make it seem like the gun shots in the escape from Madripoor were nonlethal; U.S. Agent Captain America gets in trouble for killing someone on camera but the series started with Falcon doing off-the-books military missions via drone strike. There’s very little in the way of consistency; it’s worse than being jingoistically propagandistic, though it’s sometimes also that – big names get mercy because the plot requires it.

[5] Is she a superhero? She starts off as a vigilante on a revenge mission and ends by saving her family from her old crime boss, so I guess so. We don’t see her really *save* people as, like, part of her deal.