Disappointing v Uninteresting v Meh

A Review of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

"Nobody cares about Clark Kent taking on the Batman." - Perry White

I first started writing a different post in an effort to decide whether "Uninteresting" captured my reaction to this film. It tested a lingering weakness in the ten-point scale that I developed over two years ago: whether an "uninteresting" cultural text merits a rating at all (putting it in a rather damning undefined space) or if it sits uncomfortably between "OK" (Rank 5) or "Bad" (Rank 3). After all, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice did prompt a response from me. It kept my interest, in fact, for the full, overlong two-and-a-half hours. In some ways, "disappointing" would be a better description, but that implies more that I had higher hopes for the film in the first place.

Now I just feel disappointed that I had such hopes.

The Unipolar Moment

A Review of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season One (1987-1988)

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "The only person you're truly competing against, Wesley, is yourself."
Wesley Crusher: "Then you're not disappointed?"
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "Wesley - you have to measure your successes and your failures within, not by anything that I or anyone else might think. But, erm... if it helps you to know this... *I* failed the first time, and you may not tell anyone!"

-Picard and Crusher discussing his Starfleet Academy test, from the episode "Coming of Age"

My long-term study of Star Trek continues apace. I completed Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Animated Series (too short and uninteresting to review, sadly, other than providing a quick rating of 5 out of 10 right now), and the Star Trek films through Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Last month, I began watching an episode of TNG while riding the exercise bike each weekday morning. (Ok, just Monday through Thursday. Friday's my day off.) And although Season One is considered among the worst of this celebrated series' offerings--other than the dreaded Season Two, of course--I have to admit that my reaction here is surprisingly positive.

An Unambiguous Utopia

A Review of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974)

"True journey is return..." - Shevek

Even though I never seem to remember its author's name, William G. Perry's scheme for cognitive development comes to mind nearly every day. It shares common traits with Milton Bennett's developmental model of intercultural sensitivity, as well as Carol Gilligan's stages of the ethic of care and Lawrence Kohlberg's model of moral development, both of which Jean Piaget's constructivist work deeply influenced. (Geek snort.) As a humanist, I find much social science inherently problematic, reliant upon assumptions that elide contextual differences. These criticisms equally apply to Perry, Gilligan, Kohlberg, and Piaget, of course, as the extensive literatures on educational psychology illustrate. But these theories, and particularly Perry's, continue to undergird my philosophical metanarrative of life in powerful ways.

Written at roughly the same time as Perry's model, science fiction master Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed reads like a fictionalization of one individual's pursuit of full cognitive development. The book's (mass market paperback) cover strikingly describes it as "an astonishing tale of one man's search for utopia." It's misleading in a very clever way. This book is not about "utopia" as the elusive, perfect place, that "no place" of Thomas More. Le Guin's vision of utopia is a state of mind, of cognitive enlightenment, of the realization that the perfect place--the state of true freedom--is nowhere but in ourselves, an epistemological nirvana. 

Is There In Trek No Truth?

A Review of Star Trek (The Original Series) (1966-1969)

Dr. Miranda Jones: "The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity."
Mr. Spock: "And the ways our differences combine, to create meaning and beauty."
From "Is There In Truth No Beauty?"

I first experienced Star Trek through the original films: Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek: The Voyage Home, and Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. My brother Mike was a huge fan. As a child, I quietly observed him sharpen his considerable drawing skills on a Crayola marker portrait of Klingon phaser fire and photon torpedoes blasting through the U.S.S. Enterprise A. But at that time Star Trek was an unknown quantity to me, something violent and loud, and even slightly scary, to my seven-year-old mind.

Wibby-Wig

A Review of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004)

"Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world." - Adam Ewing, Cloud Atlas, 508.

Sociologists like my partner like to deploy the Thomas theorem as shorthand for the idea that "what you believe is what you get." In other words, what we interpret to be reality is, in fact, reality, insofar as we act on our beliefs and therefore shape reality in the process. The phrase "self-fulfilling prophecy" comes close to the point, if missing some of the meaning. I guess you could adapt the WYSIWYG acronym appropriately, to result in WYBIWYG. Or how about the cuter "wibby-wig"?

Cloud Atlas is such a massive tome of ideas that it needs a shorthand adjective, and "wibby-wig" is it for me. To avoid such extreme reductionism, a simple legend of themes (a tapestry metaphor came to mind, but let me stick with maps) is helpful in the effort to decode David Mitchell's complex atlas: themes like belief, but also the human condition, narrative, truth versus Truth, the unity of time and space, the number six, comets, clouds (of course), and--as Mitchell divulged in an interview, "predacity." What I take away most from Cloud Atlas, though, was a wibby-wig view of life that, not to my surprise, reflects my own perspective. What we believe shapes who we are and what we do. This is the case to a large, if certainly not total, extent, because what we believe is not always a choice we make ourselves. Rather, society and its many elements--our parents, peers, children, friends, co-workers, politicians, media overlords, et cetera--often make them for and with us.

Walton; or, The Early Modern Humanist

A Review of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

"You throw a torch into a pile of buildings; and when they are consumed you sit among the ruins and lament the fall. Hypocritical fiend!" - Captain Robert Walton, to Frankenstein's Monster, Volume III, Chapter VII

The conflict within young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's mind is readily apparent throughout her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Here at once was a highly educated and privileged eighteen-year-old woman; a passionate Romantic; a British conservative; a liberal feminist; a lover of Percy Bysshe Shelley; a daughter of two famous (or infamous, to many) public intellectuals; and a mother who suffered the death of a child. All of these identities intertwined to produce a very human writer and her equally human novel, about the very human Victor Frankenstein and his equally human Monster, in what most observers rightfully identify as a classic Gothic novel and founding text of modern imaginative fiction. It's odd to feel this way, but I really don't think Mary intended a clear, cogent message with her "ghost story." If there is an ultimate theme, it's the assertion of humanity amid the ambiguity of modern (here, early industrial) life. But I see this message in pretty much everything, so like all good art, maybe Frankenstein simply reflects back a thoughtfully distorted image of our own current selves. At any rate, it deserves a place among the best of fiction--literary, genre, or otherwise.