Like Tears in Rain: Meditations on Science Fiction Cinema (7 page)

The Star Wars

My first fan letter to Dark Horse Comics

Read the first issue of Dark Horse
Comics’ new adaptation of 
The Star Wars
 last night, and in a fever of fannish passion unlike any I’ve felt in ages I composed the following e-mail:

from: Alex Kane

to: [email protected]

date: Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 9:12 PM

subject: The Star Wars #1

I’d like to congratulate everybody at Dark Horse for their phenomenal work on 
The Star Wars
 #1. Although I only got into reading comics a few years back, while in college, George Lucas’s universe has been a part of my life since I was just old enough to operate my parents’ VCR. When my dad took me at age seven to see 
Empire
 and 
Jedi
during their Special Edition rereleases, at my hometown’s now-defunct Rivoli Theatre, Darth Vader’s revelation on Bespin felt like a religious experience. The Emperor and his Force lightning, given my vague understanding of the Dark Side, left a similarly lasting impression.

Not long afterward, the three-year wait between
 
The Phantom Menace
 and 
Attack of the Clones
 left me feeling starved for the Force. So, like a lot of fans, much of my childhood was spent scouring the Internet—in its dialup-modem era—for whatever artifacts I could find from that galaxy far, far away. One of them was a .txt file alleged to be Lucas’s original draft of a screenplay called 
The Star Wars
, and it began precisely as the first issue of last month’s comic does: with a “Jedi-Bendu” named Kane Starkiller and his two sons encountering a Sith warrior.

I never gave that plain-text file much credence. Half of me assumed it to be fake, maybe the longwinded imaginings of a zealous fan. And it didn’t feel like the
 
Star Wars
 I knew and loved anyway; its DNA seemed . . . 
different
, somehow.

Your comic succeeds so admirably in this regard. You’ve managed to take the rough draft of the story we all know and treasure and imbue it with the life that Ralph McQuarrie, Joe Johnston, Dennis Muren, and so many others gave to Lucas’s seminal vision back in ’77. Nick Runge’s gorgeous cover simply oozes Tauntaun blood—in the same way that his incredible movie posters always have. Mike Mayhew’s drawings? They cut to the heart like a lightsaber, sharply rendered and bursting with the power of the Force. And writer J. W. Rinzler, as always, speaks Galactic Basic with that distinct Coruscanti accent; his is the voice of a fan as well as a writer.

My wholehearted thanks to Dark Horse, for making that faraway galaxy seem suddenly so much closer.

Sincerely,

Alex Kane

I recently rewatched 
The People vs. George Lucas
, which I think is a fabulous documentary about geek culture and the Star Wars phenomenon in particular, and it gets at the heart of some of the places where Lucas went wrong with his franchise. But I have to say this: when we see Dark Horse or Lucasfilm doing something that reminds us why we were fans in the first place—things like 
The Force Unleashed
, 
Knights of the Old Republic
, or a novel by somebody like Drew Karpyshyn or Matthew Stover—we really ought to let the creators know about it.

If all the fans ever do is complain, well, I don’t think that’s very healthy for either the property or the people who seem to have this immense love/hate relationship with it. Personally, I don’t have much use for all the negativity that comes with being a Star Wars fan. Life’s too short to begrudge somebody like Lucas, who’s given so much fun and creative energy back to the world, the occasional artistic misstep.

Clarion West

My
Post-Seattle Update, Sept. 2, 2013

I’ve been putting this off for a while. To sit down and try to sum up my experience at Clarion West in a single, immediate blog post is just a ludicrous idea—it can’t be done. I won’t try. But you might notice that my online presence has been scaled back quite a bit since June, and there’s a reason for that: Clarion West was exactly the kind of life-changing affair everybody had claimed it would be. Being a fairly young, impressionable dude, and not very confident in my art in the grand scheme of things, those six weeks in Seattle really did quite the number on me.

All the negative crap we tell ourselves as artists? Most of that has been swept aside, for the time being. Replaced with the sense that all that impostor-syndrome garbage, all that doubt, is both a universal and necessary evil. And it goes away when you sit down and
 
do work
, rather than just sitting around and bemoaning your station.

And all the positive stuff, too. Those milestones we cherish, and quantify, and constantly try to make sense of? They’re not terribly important. Past a certain point, I’ve seen that none of those things ever satisfy the artist. Especially in the context of an emotional low period.

Thankfully, I was happy and having the time of my life in Seattle. No regrets there. You hear the consensus that these kinds of situations—eighteen strangers sleeping in a house together, creative work happening, the occasional whiff of friendly competition in the air, alcohol being imbibed—might lead to drama of various kinds. To my surprise and delight, there was little of that for the Clarion West Writers Workshop’s 2013 class.

We became family. I think most of us would be comfortable saying that we share a pretty unconditional love for one another, far as I can tell, and that’s an amazing thing.

So many egos, so many national and cultural backgrounds melding together to form a household-sized society, might’ve been an ordeal for any other workshop, class, retreat, what have you. But what we had in common with each other won out over our differences, in a big, inspiring way. We became a sort of microcosm for the creative-intellectual types of the world; regardless of America’s political climate, or the idiosyncrasies of the Pacific Northwest specifically, we forged our own small utopia.

Saying goodbye to everyone, and leaving those friendships behind to return to the so-called real world, was maybe the hardest thing I’ll ever have to endure. Now, crying is not a thing that I do. Born and raised as a young man in the Midwest, where masculinity is so unaccountably prized, tears are not the norm. But I found myself locking the bathroom door and sobbing for a couple minutes, once most of my friends had departed for SeaTac, you betcha.

We’d talked for weeks about what it might be like to have to say goodbye, and see it all end. But nothing could’ve prepared me for the letdown.

I owe them all so much. Or
 
you all
, if you guys happen to be reading this. I’m so much wiser for having met each and every one of my Clarion West classmates.

And i
f you haven’t read their work, keep an eye out for them. David Edison’s 
The Waking Engine
 is forthcoming this February, from Tor, and Jenn Giesbrecht’s phenomenal “All My Princes Are Gone” is in this month’s issue of 
Nightmare
. You can find a handful of other CW ’13 alumni in recent issues of 
Clarkesworld
 and 
Daily Science Fiction
. The world certainly hasn’t heard the last of us.

Kim Stanley Robinson had some interesting things to teach us about online presence, blogging, social media, and balancing the work of fiction writing with life in general. Hence this blog being dormant from mid-June until tonight. But I’ll save the full elaboration of my thoughts on his provocative Mystery Muse lecture for another time.

Suffice it to say, I needed to hear Stan’s ideas about blogging right now, and most of my online thoughts will be found on Twitter (@alexjkane) from here on out, barring the occasional “necessary” update, such as this one, or news about my writing, etc.

Other voices floating around in my head at the moment, other than my classmates’, include Joe Hill’s, Neil Gaiman’s, Margo Lanagan’s, Ellen Datlow’s, Chip Delany’s, Liz Hand’s, Paul Park’s, Cat Rambo’s, and Ted Chiang’s, among a host of others. Lot of interesting ideas on storytelling and the artist’s journey that will take a lifetime to fully understand, I suspect. Those will provide fodder for future blog posts, if I decide to talk much about craft from here on out. I may take some time off from talking about process for a while.

Meantime, I’ve had another space opera story accepted by Deorc Enterprise, as a media tie-in for their 
Dark Expanse
 MMO real-time strategy game, and I’m working on an all-new story I can’t talk about just yet. Not to mention all the revision that needs done on my six or seven Clarion West pieces, two of which are out making the rounds at places like 
Daily Science Fiction
 and 
Nature
 while the rest sit broken and in need of mending.

There are things outside of writing, as well: I’m gonna put more
time and effort into gaming, for instance. Everything from my Xbox to my 3DS, and trying out tabletop and card games like 
Pathfinder
 and 
Magic: The Gathering
 for the very first time. I’m going to deemphasize writing to a degree in order to read more.

And, of course, I’m gonna make a more conscious effort to be healthy and spend time with the people I care about. Because writing’s only fulfilling if all the other stuff is in order, I imagine.

I’d like my work to be a celebration of this road we’re on, rather than an escape from it.

All my love and thanks to everyone who helped me get to Seattle, and where I am in my life today. You know who you are. It’s been a rich endeavor from the very first story I ever wrote, back in Kindergarten. And it feels surreal to have so many of my literary heroes and exemplars, having read my work, be out there rooting for me.

The Clarion West program is a worthwhile one, and it has empowered me in countless ways to keep at this thing that I’ve always loved doing, regardless of any doubts or setbacks that might come my way. For that, I owe the organization—and especially people like Les Howle and Neile Graham—my eternal gratitude. I am so honored to be a small, humble part of the incredible legacy you’ve built over the past three decades.

Man of Steel

Zack Snyder’s
First Foray into the Justice League Franchise is the Superman Film You’ve Been Waiting for, So Long as You Don’t Really Care About Women

In all fairness, Zack Snyder’s 
Man of Steel
 is a beautiful movie. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from a “New 52”-era DC Comics adaptation: loads of fun, generally on par with Nolan’s 
Dark Knight
 trilogy, light-years beyond lesser attempts like Martin Campbell’s
Green Lantern
 (2011), and far more mature than its ho-hum predecessor, Bryan Singer’s
Superman Returns
 (’06). I found myself engaged with the story, caring about the sense of literal alienation David S. Goyer builds around Clark Kent (Henry Cavill), and loving every tense, gorgeous minute of the CGI spectacle.

It is easily the best-looking, most visionary of all the DC films to date, and will in all likelihood serve as the company’s flagship blockbuster, in much the same way as Jon Favreau’s
 
Iron Man
 launched the 
Avengers
 franchise into existence.

But unfortunately, in light of
 a number of recent controversies within geek culture, I had my feelers out for gender bias last night, and what I noticed about the film’s portrayal of women left me enormously let down. How could a film released in 2013, in the wake of Snyder’s own widely-criticized 
Sucker Punch
, reduce the role of women as much as 
Man of Steel
 does?

For starters, the film effectively
 
bombs
 the Bechdel test. Two women, Diane Lane’s underutilized turn as Martha Kent and Amy Adams’s similarly underwritten Lois Lane, talk to one another on-screen for just 
a single scene
—in which the topic of discussion is, well . . . Superman.

That’s it.

The remainder of the film finds women in largely trivial, or at least traditional, roles, with the possible exception of Faora: a murderous Kryptonian sociopath. No, I’m not kidding.

While Kal-El’s (Superman’s) father, Jor-El (Russell Crowe), achieves a kind of ghostlike immortality through his world’s cerebral upload technology just before a heroic on-screen death, his wife Lara dies afterward during Krypton’s destruction—and is never seen or heard from again. Barely mentioned, in fact. While Clark tells his Earth mother, Martha Kent, near the movie’s end, “I found my real parents,” the truth is, he only communes with the phantom consciousness of his deceased father. He doesn’t even bother to
 
ask
 Jor-El about his mother!

As much as I loved the film, and no matter how perfect some aspects of its otherwise rich story are, I can’t help but lament the fact that all women in the film but one are reduced to the roles of damsels-in-distress and childbirthers. It’s more than disappointing; it’s downright sexist. And appallingly so, given the age we live in.

Even the gender-flipped Jenny Jurwich character (Goyer’s version of Superman’s longtime pal Jimmy Olsen, evidently) exists solely to get trapped underneath some rubble, and then be rescued by men. Lois Lane begins her journey in search of the alien who will become Superman as just a curious reporter, but quickly becomes enamored with him . . . without much explanation, really, except for meeting the demands of the formulaic Hollywood plot.

After boldly following Kal-El aboard General Zod’s Kryptonian warship, Lane carries out her single biggest contribution to the film by discovering how to defeat the superhuman invasion force; but it’s Jor-El’s consciousness, the mind of a man, who shows her—and then the rest of her efforts take place off-camera, while the audience is spoonfed some more flashy shots of Superman fighting Zod and making a catastrophic mess of Metropolis in the process.

Even from a less critical, more—(sigh)—
traditional
 view, Kent’s inevitable relationship with Lois Lane ultimately feels thoughtless and forced; they appear to care for one another simply because that’s what they’ve always done. Not because there’s any genuine character development taking place between the two, or because the story serves to build their love.

When you’ve got an actress of Amy Adams’s caliber at your disposal, that’s more than a little disappointing, frankly. But that’s no fault of the performers. Doubtless the unquestionable demands of the studio kept the script and final edit as lean and fast-paced as possible, leaving little room for more than a few minutes’ worth of genuine humanity and on-screen chemistry. So why have a love subplot at all? Save it for the sequel.

As it stands, Lois Lane in 
Man of Steel
 is left utterly objectified. Despite a few good lines—and some truly awful ones (“If we’re done measuring dicks . . .”)—and regardless of how convincing Adams is in the midst of what must have been an ocean of greenscreen. An object of affection, and a damsel to be rescued when the plot demands more overdramatized peril.

Last night, my inner child felt ready to proclaim to the world that cinema had found its new Greatest Superhero Film of All Time, superior to the works of Nolan, Snyder’s own
Watchmen
, and the now-classic Donner outings. But I can’t ignore the trivialization of women’s roles in popular entertainment any longer. What might have been a near-perfect, grand vision is marred by the absence of anything new, commendable, or progressive. 
Man of Steel
 plays it safe in its political message—and does a great disservice to twenty-first-century notions of gender.