Memorial Day Musings #2: The Godzilla Movie
The fascinating thing about the new Godzilla movie: the things people complained about were things I saw as strengths.
For example, people complained there weren’t enough monster-on-monster battles, and that they kept cutting away from the monsters or showing them in parts. For me, big monster battles are like Chinese Five-Spice – I like them, I really do, but I can’t have a meal of all Chinese Five-Spice. I need a palate-cleanser between courses, and so a little monster goes a long way.
I liked the way we hardly ever got good, long looks at the monsters. It made them seem fucking huge. Seeing just a foot or an eye kept me thoroughly rooted in the human perspective, forcing me to keep in mind that this is a 300-foot tall lizard, and holy crap is he big.
And I like the way we only got flashes of the monster battles. I would have been pissed if we’d ultimately gotten no monster battles – but again, there’s only so many times I can watch Godzilla stomping through a city before it gets old. And by the time we got to the end, where there is one huge-ass unrelenting pounding, I was entirely thrilled with it. Plus, as mentioned before, thanks to all the glimpses of Godzilla, when we finally saw him cut loose he looked gigantic, a mountain to me, amazing.
People complained that the humans didn’t do anything. I loved that, too. We had one hope, Godzilla, and all of our weapons really didn’t work. I actually hated the one moment where a monster noticed a human in any significant way – I adored the way they didn’t even acknowledge us, that they were so huge that all our weapons couldn’t even get their attention.
People complained that the plot was lame. Which it was. But it was lame in that kind of stupid, it-knows-it’s-stupid way that Pacific Rim was, where the movie pretty much flat-out acknowledges that this wouldn’t happen, but let’s all take it with maximum seriousness because goddamn, don’t you want to see a giant lizard eating Las Vegas? With today’s technology, I’m not actually sure how you would make a serious Godzilla film.
But that’s my weakness: I’m not a Godzilla fan. Yet for all that, Godzilla may be an entertaining movie, but be a terrible Godzilla movie – in much the same way that Man of Steel was a great “superpowerful aliens invade America” film, but a pretty crappy Superman movie. Godzilla fans have certain expectations, and I can acknowledge that maybe this didn’t do it for ’em. My friend George Galuschak wasn’t impressed, and he’s a huge Godzilla fan, so I’m willing to admit that maybe it didn’t live up to established expectations.
Still. Worth my $9.50. Totally worth it.
Memorial Day Musings #1: This Is Why DC Sucks At Movies
This is what David S. Goyer, the guy who’s writing the DC movies, had to say about Justice League stalwart The Martian Manhunter:
And then goes on to explain that the Martian Manhunter is lame, and they’d have to rework him from the ground up. And the focus of Goyer’s comments has largely been on his nerd-shaming, but I think the real issue here is the underlying attitude of DC:
You haven’t heard of the Martian Manhunter? Well, fuck him, he must not be important.
Whereas Marvel went, “Oh, you haven’t heard of Hawkeye and the Black Widow? Oh my God, you guys, you’ve got to get to know these people, they’re awesome. Here, let’s make a movie where they stand next to the heroes you already know and love, and show them doing awesome things!”
DC’s attitude? “You don’t know this guy? How embarrassing, that must mean he’s not very interesting. Who do we have that you’ve heard of?”
Meanwhile, there’s a whole generation of moviegoers who are clamoring for a Black Widow movie and a thousand folks who hadn’t heard of Hawkeye in 2011 but fucking love him now.
Marvel, proud of their characters, is expanding the love. DC, shamed of their geeky origins, is contracting, contracting, contracting.
My Memorial Day Tradition, Plus A New Tradition: A Love Letter To Those Who Kill
Every Memorial Day for the past decade, I have linked to my Memorial Day essay: A Love Letter To Those Who Kill.
Yet today, perhaps inspired by Jon Stewart’s recap of our country’s long history of screwing over our veterans – seriously, watch it, it’s both amazing and damning how long we’ve called people to sacrifice and then abandoned them – I’ve decided to institute another tradition:
Thanking soldiers for their service with more than words, by actually donating to a charity that helps them.
This year I donated $50 to Fisher House (A+ rating on Charity Watch’s list of veteran’s charities), mainly because they fly families to injured soldiers and I think it’s important to help the folks in the field. But I could just have easily donated to Intrepid Heroes, which helps veterans who’ve returned home. If you choose to donate to either place, the money wouldn’t be wasted.
A word on the essay: A few years ago, someone expressed concern about the gendered language of this essay, of the repeated usage of “our boys” when there are, in fact, a lot of women in the military risking their lives as well. She felt that using the term “our boys,” though traditional, renders women invisible. She asked me to revise the essay to change this.
Unfortunately, a combination of “this is a snapshot what I said then, no matter how dumb it may sound to me now” and “I’ve watched George Lucas edit his shit into horror” and “I’m not sure in editing I wouldn’t change the meaning/introduce other errors which would then also need to be edited” makes me have a rule that I don’t edit an essay at all once it’s been up for a day or two. (Otherwise, I would doubtlessly edit some of my more controversial essays into such well-reasoned processes that people would wonder what the fuss was about. And the job of this blog is not to always make me look good or enlightened.)
But she raises a good point. I also raise a glass (and lend a hand) to the women in our services. Thanks to everyone, all genders and races and religions and beliefs, who serves.
In any case, flaws and all, here it is.
Your Partner Is Not A Backstop, Or: How Not To Have A Relationship
Most happy relationships are spackled together by healthy doses of compromise. And in the happiest relationships, that compromise arrives prenegotiated.
Which is to say that after you’ve been dating for a while, you know what’s going to make your partner feel unloved, and then you set out to proactively fix that. I know, for example, that Gini gets upset whenever the trash bag gets too full.
Now me? I hate taking out the trash. And being more tolerant of messes than my wife is, a teetering stack of garbage doesn’t bother me overmuch as long as it all stays in the bin – a kind of Garbage Jenga, where I can balance three magazines on top of a milk carton for days at a time.
Yet even though to me, bagging that all up is “a chore I have to do prematurely,” I think, “Oh, I know that trash will bother Gini if she sees it – I should suck it up and take the garbage out for her!”
So I do. And Gini is happier.
Our lives are filled with little “head that off at the pass” moments like that, where Gini calls in if she’s going to stay out late so I can sleep without worrying about her, and I try to put the dishes away before the sink overflows too, and Gini consults with me before reorganizing the bathroom to suit her tastes, and so forth.
What I do not do is wait around for Gini to complain before I do it.
What I do not do is figure, “If Gini really wants it, she’ll ask.”
If I abandoned all responsibility for managing Gini’s needs and thought, “I’ll take it out when Gini yells at me,” I would make Gini feel really isolated in our home. Because what I’d be saying, in a very real sense, would be, “I care so little about my wife’s feelings that I’m not going to even *think* about what makes her unhappy until she forces the issue.”
Then our dynamic changes from adult/adult to parent/child – I’d be not a partner, but a kid at bedtime, where Mom has to show up every five minutes to go, “Fifteen minutes to bedtime,” then “Five minutes to bedtime,” then “One minute to bedtime,” excruciatingly aware the entire time that if they weren’t consistently enforcing this impending bedtime the kid would play until three in the morning.
(And be an absolute monster the next day at school. Which, as the parent, would be yet another mess that you had to clean up.)
And our relationship would suffer, because Gini would have all the responsibility for making herself happy. I’d have told her that it wasn’t my job, anticipating her needs, it was her job to show up like some sort of human alarm clock to wake me from my lazy dozing. And she’d feel stressed all the time, because hey, if she wasn’t constantly putting in the effort then nothing she wanted would get done.
I might be more content. But Gini would be a wreck. And if that happened, we’d have to ask the vital question: Do I actually love Gini, or just love the shit she lets me get away with?
I think the answer would have to be that I didn’t actually love Gini all that much, if I could let her suffer for my convenience.
Look. Part of being a good partner involves internalizing my lover’s needs, and not forcing them to ask me for every thing they require to feel loved. I have to be an active partner, investigating today’s case of “So what’s going to make them happy?” and to address that proactively.
And addressing their needs proactively doesn’t take the form of bowing to every desire they have. Gini would prefer that every surface in the house be empty, a kind of Zen clearspace where nobody left a magazine or a drink on the table. I’ve addressed that proactively by telling her that kind of thing makes me feel like I’m living in a hotel, not a home, and sometimes I leave a magazine out on the bathroom counter because I was reading an article and I’ll go back and read the rest of it the next time I brush my teeth, and to me that’s the advantage of a home in that I can trade a little cleanliness for convenience.
That’s an active approach! But what would be spectacularly shitty is if I shrugged and said, “Yeah, we should have a cleaner house” and then left the magazine in the bathroom and waited for her to nag me before I handled it.
This is why polyamorous relationships often fail in that first wave of New Relationship Energy. Your lover finds someone new and goes, “Awww, this feels so good being with New Person, Old Person’s stupid old needs would stop this fizzy flow of love, so… I’m just going to stay here and smooch until Old Person yells at me to come back.”
And no. Even in the throes of NRE, you gotta keep Old Partner’s happiness in mind, because otherwise you’ll stress them the fuck out. You’ll make them feel like that bedtime parent, saying, “Five minutes,” knowing you’d stay out all night if you let them, knowing their needs are irrelevant because ZOMG IT’S PLAYTIME AND WHEN IT’S PLAYTIME I DON’T THINK ABOUT OLD PARTNER.
Hey, maybe five minutes isn’t enough. But rather than losing yourself in bliss and waiting for Old Partner to nag you, you should pull your head out of the clouds to call up and say, “Look, I’m having a really good time at New Partner’s house, I know you expected me home earlier, but I want to stay late. We’ll do something cool tomorrow to make up for it. Is that cool?”
Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But either way, you’ve sent a clear message: Old Partner’s needs still matter on some level, and maybe you gotta negotiate a path between your needs and theirs, but at least they know you were thinking of them.
Sometimes, that’s all it takes.
Having A Dog Is Its Own Excuse
Have some adorable pictures of our dog:
That’s it. That’s all the content you need.
Why I'm Not Friending You On Facebook (But It's Not Your Fault)
About six months ago, my friend’s beloved grandmother died. Really broke her up. She still hasn’t recovered. This was her most momentous moment in the past year.
Yet when I ran into her at a party, I had no clue this tragedy had befallen her.
“Didn’t you see my posts?” she asked. “On Facebook?”
No. No, I didn’t.
What I saw was the usual toxic stew of Buzzfeed posts, and “What Firefly character are you?” and “These four thousand photos will restore your faith in humanity. #568 will break your heart” and image memes… but the information that my friend’s grandmother had died, her posts about the funeral, her occasional dark night of the soul as she mourned?
Facebook’s algorithms had decided her life was not of interest to me.
Which is happening more and more often lately – I’ll finally catch up with a friend somewhere in real life, and discover that they’ve graduated from their Masters, or gotten married, or quit their job and moved to Tibet, and out of all the information Facebook could have shown me from my hundreds of Facebook friends, their computers went, “No, not that. You know what Ferrett wants to see? Another webcomic link.”
Yesterday, it hit the fan when Facebook begun showing me images from people I didn’t even know, but random friends had commented on. And I thought, “Why the fuck are you expanding your range to show me a picture of some other person’s book when you didn’t even tell me about my friend’s divorce?” The answer was sadly obvious: since my friends knew this person, Facebook hoped maybe I knew this person, and was hoping that I’d friend him and thus expand their social network range.
That’s when I realized: Facebook was broken.
I signed up to catch up with old friends, so I could have some idea of what’s going on in their lives. And yeah, sometimes those old friends are irritating political cranks, but more often I found that hey, they’re having kids, they’re celebrating wonderful things, they’re enjoying life’s milestones….
….and in its push to churn out linkbait, Facebook is increasingly failing in its job to tell me any of that.
So I’m not accepting any more friends’ requests on Facebook. Why should I? It doesn’t tell me the things I want to hear about the people I currently have, so why would I stack one more person on the pile?
Now, some people will claim that if I rejigger these settings to mark my “important” friends, and create groups, I can make Facebook usable – which is at complete odds with my point. I know what my “important” friends are up to – I see them regularly. I want to know what my quote-unquote “unimportant” friends are up to, the folks who I haven’t seen in years but still have affection for. I would by far rather know my friend got a kitten than see the latest funny Onion article.
Yes, I can make settings (which Facebook often undoes by default) or devise workarounds, or download Facebook Purity to cleanse my page, but:
I should not have to work this hard to cut through linkbait to get at people.
Others will snarkily point out that Facebook is free and I should expect no better. No. Since Facebook is free, I recognize I am the product that Facebook is selling to other people – and I’d be fine with that if Facebook actually served my needs. As it is increasingly becoming a monstrous Buzzfeed-plus, this repository of dreck and quizzes, I have the right to say to Facebook, “Hey, the less usable information you give me, the less usable information I will provide to your customers.”
So I’m not accepting any more Facebook friends requests. Furthermore, I’m not going to click on any articles in Facebook – if I see something I’m curious about, I’ll instead go to Google and look it up directly, short-circuiting any data that Facebook gets from me. (Google can have it. I at least like their mail program.) I will refuse to “like” anything that is not a status update or a picture posted directly by someone I love.
I will starve them of as much information on me as humanly possible. You may wish to do likewise.
I’m not leaving Facebook, as they hold my relatives hostage. It took forever to get my beloved Aunt Peggy somewhere that I can keep up with her, and I adore seeing my cousins on there; the likelihood of them going and registering at WeHaveOnly500UsersButWePromiseWeWillGetBigger.com is next to nil. Facebook is a de facto standard of the Internet for now. This is not a flounce.
But if you find what I say interesting, share this thought. Agree to do it. Try, via what you claim to love on Facebook, to bring some sanity back to it.
Because until Facebook starts showing me my friend’s funerals again, I have zero need to know the Top 10 Celebrity Divorces.