The Return of Colbert - Same Comedian, New Platform

One of the better moments of Stephen Colbert's return to late-night television last night came right after Republican Presidential candidate Jeb Bush arrived on stage.  Bush, the first candidate to appear on this new iteration of "The Late Show," commented genially on the new stage, and remarked "you've got more pictures of yourself than I thought you'd have." Colbert then quipped "I used to play a narcissistic conservative pundit...now I'm just a narcissist."

It's a good joke that highlights the kind of comedian Stephen Colbert is - off-the-cuff, lithe and pouncing - but it also reflects the essential continuities in what may appear to be a total makeover of a beloved but enigmatic host.  For all the ballyhooed shift in persona, the sense of humor that accompanies a Colbert-hosted episode of television has not changed all that much.

Colbert's Oreo-themed skewering of Donald Trump exemplified this well.  Likening journalism's Trump obsession to the craving for Oreos, Colbert stuffed himself over and over again with equal parts cookies and Trump-lampooning sketches.  It was hilarious - one of the funniest parts of the broadcast - but what exactly was it?  On the one hand, this was Colbert engaging in a fully honest skewering of a political figure, something he didn't do quite as directly on the "Report."  On the other hand, the ludicrous caricature of journalism, the literal stuffing of his face with Oreos - this is the kind of subversive maximalism that "The Colbert Report" mastered.  It was one of many occasions that I felt exhibited more continuity than change in Colbert's persona shift.

What exactly did we expect?  This isn't, after all, the news - this is "The Late Show," where David Letterman broadened and emboldened comedy, which airs, you know, late.  Nobody would confuse CBS and Comedy Central, but this is basically the same premise and format as the "Report" - a funny, bold late-night comedy, talk and variety show.

What really excited viewers has been to see Stephen Colbert emerge reborn from the brilliantly glowing ashes of his old persona.  It's been funny, but who are you?  Colbert, as the "narcissist" joke shows, is completely aware of this, and he played it up many times during the premiere.  The first big takeaway, from his first episode at least, is this; Colbert the comedian is basically the same kind of comedian.  This being essentially, still, a comedy gig, we shouldn't expect to see naked-hearted admissions of personal truth on-air from the new "The Late Show" host anytime soon.  This is still performance art.

But there was nevertheless an exciting air that a mask has been shed, that Colbert still has a ton of tricks up his sleeve.  At the beginning of the show, Colbert skipped onto stage and danced like a kid auditioning for the school musical, before addressing the audience, beaming.  Colbert was genuinely thrilled to be there.  I think Colbert is a genius, that the Stephen Colbert pundit persona is one of the most ingenious strokes of comedic art I've ever seen.  If that man is excited about his new show, then I am too.

I suppose we can only hope that the grin isn't just about the paycheck.  There's lots of room to be encouraged based on yesterday's outing, though I think most viewers would agree that the show hasn't quite gotten out of bed yet.  The interviews were more focused on this being Colbert's first show than anything.  Jeb Bush, the blandest man alive, couldn't help but be overshadowed by Colbert, while Clooney and Colbert engaged in staged self-aggrandizement.

But talk shows are defined by their host, and while Stephen Colbert the efficient, slick host may take some getting used to, Stephen Colbert the comedian has come out swinging.

Birdman and 'Real Performance'

Washed-up actor Riggan Thompson can't tell where Riggan ends and his menacing alter-ego/former character Birdman begins.  This is just as well, because moviegoers may find themselves similarly confused in the layers of performance and fictionality at play in the latest Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film, Birdman.  Played by Michael Keaton, Riggan once starred in a popular superhero franchise as "Birdman," who can levitate, fly and direct objects with a sweep of his hand.  Though Riggan still gets recognized in public, his high-flying days as an actor are behind him.  Riggan is thus attempting to revitalize his career by directing, producing and starring in a stage adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story.

The adaptation looks like a disaster, dogged by personnel and production problems.  A falling ceiling winch injures Riggan's costar during rehearsal; forced to improvise, Riggan calls in Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), a manic method actor in a tempestuous relationship with fellow co-star Lesley (Naomi Watts) who threatens to unravel the whole production.  Meanwhile Riggan's sanity visibly frays.  He's haunted by the gravelly voice of Birdman, who encourages Riggan to shun his theatrical vanity project and return to his once-successful franchise.  "You tower over these theater douchebags...gravity doesn't even apply to you!" hisses his darker half.

Framing the film as a struggle between Riggan's ego (his civilized desire for actor-ly validation on Broadway) and id (the bloodthirsty Birdman) works up to a point, though Birdman's insights on the nature of authenticity, of performance and of subjectivity ultimately extend far beyond a psychoanalytic read.  But it is tempting to stick to that interpretation, largely because of the remarkable technical trick Inarritu and the wonderful cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki have pulled off.  Incredibly, the film appears to have been filmed in only one shot.

Hitchcock and others have attempted this illusion, but the deft, nimble motions of the camera in Birdman are more in the tradition of Alfonso Cuaron's astonishing single-shot wartime birth sequence in Children of Men than than the static stage scenes of Rope.  Birdman tops them as a cinematic spectacle, however, and moreover, it truly uses the single-shot illusion as a piece of the storytelling.  It is difficult to imagine Birdman without this most distinctive characteristic, and besides it has meaning for the story.  Lubezki's camera follows Riggan through labyrinthine back hallways of his theater, onto the stage, up onto the roof, through the crowded streets of Manhattan, and even into the sky, as the Birdman persona begins to take over.

This seemingly uninterrupted camera movement gives the film a truly subjective viewpoint.  By subjecting us almost exclusively to Riggan's point of view, Birdman taps into the deep psychic concept which Slavoj Zizek describes as "anxiety".  It's the underlying fear, in every person, that we are not significant, or that the position or station we perceive ourselves as holding in the world is not authentic or sincere.  Trapped, for the most part, in Riggan's consciousness, the viewer cannot help but share in his anxieties.  Is the play as bad as it seems?  Is it worse?  Is it even real?

The opening scene, where Riggan whirls from his dressing room through conversations with his lawyer (Zack Galifinakis) and his recently-rehabbed daughter Samantha (Emma Stone) and onto the stage, highlights the ambiguities of turning performance on and off, and of the bizarre layers of authenticity that envelop the film.  Is he performing in his dressing room, alone with Birdman?  Does he start performing when he emerges and has conversations with other people?  Or is it when he's on stage?

The troubled, weaselly Shiner is obsessed with performance but does not have a very nuanced view of it.  Fixated on authenticity, Shiner feels like he can only come alive when he's performing his life in front of an audience.  When Riggan replaces his gin with water at a preview screening, Shiner breaks character and berates Riggan in the middle of the show.  "Does anybody give a shit about truth other than me?" he screams.  In an on-stage sex scene with Lesley, he tries to rape her; apparently they haven't had sex in months but he sprouts a raging erection on stage.

For Shiner, the theatrical stage is the only stage, but by ruthlessly trying to inject authenticity into the proceeding, he's completely missed the point.  What he doesn't realize, and what this film does, is that truth and performance are basically the same thing - we are always performing, whether for ourselves or for others, whether on stage or in the dressing room, alone with our thoughts.  

Headhunters

The lead in the Norwegian export Headhunters has a serious Napoleon complex.  Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) may be one of Norway's most successful "headhunters", or high-end corporate recruiters, but the first thing he tells us about himself is that he's 5,6' - not tall enough, he thinks.  Roger suffers from a general sense of inferiority.  He worries that he doesn't make enough money to support a luxuriant lifestyle for his statuesque wife, so he steals expensive art from his clients to make ends meet.  Even still, he's gone into debt to keep their sleek, elegant house, but Roger sees this pampering as a requisite for his marriage.  After all, there are always plenty of men taller than 5,6'.

Headhunters is much more secure in its modest stature than Roger, and better for it.  A twisty and slickly executed thriller featuring a compromised, flawed man on the run, this Morten Tyldum film benefits from a desire not to reinvent the wheel, but to have some bloody-minded fun nevertheless.  The film benefits in particular from a black sense of humor, the occasional stroke of mad genius and a surprisingly comforting quality.

Roger interviews candidates in his capacity as a corporate recruiter; while doing so, he verbally scouts their art collections.  He asks them if they own any expensive art by way of an anecdote, and also asks if they have a family at home (in case anybody might disrupt the theft).  Roger has a partner, Ove (Elvind Sander) who dismantles the alarms before Roger goes in and steals the artwork personally.  One wonders whether these methods would work on repeat; I can picture corporate victims of art theft recounting the story of the headhunter who always uses the same weirdly specific artwork anecdote.

Indeed, Roger's transparency gets him into trouble.  At the opening of her art gallery, Roger's wife Diana (Synnove Macody Lund) introduces him to the dashing Clas Greve (Jaime Lannister), whom Roger immediately recognizes as an excellent candidate for one of his biggest clients, a GPS company called Pathfinder.  At their next meeting, he also realizes that Clas is in possession of a valuable piece of art, making him a prime candidate for Roger's night job.  Roger steals the art, but Clas smells a rat immediately.  Inconveniently, it turns out that Clas, besides being devastatingly handsome and charming, is also ex-special ops; for the diminutive Roger, cat and mouse becomes a fitting term.  When he realizes he's been outed, Roger hits the road, but not before discovering Diana's phone in Clas's bed.  Under the impression that he's been betrayed by everybody he knows (and frazzled by Clas's mysterious ability to track him down wherever he goes), Roger goes completely underground.

The film plays to these dramas with varying degrees of sincerity.  Confident and rugged, Nikolai Coster-Waldau is perfectly cast as a deviant threat to Roger's insecurities, but descends into something of a stock bogeyman after the first act of the film.  As a sly mystery thriller, however, Headhunters does well for itself, buoyed by a few genuinely inventive action pieces and kept limber by Tyldum's taste for blackly comic violence.  During one scene in particular, at a remote wooded farmhouse where Clas has cornered Roger, Headhunters hurtles into slasher tropes with a self-aware flair that '90s-era Wes Craven would admire.  Especially gruesome use is made of a tractor, and not in the way you expect.  It is sequences like these, of grisly violence with a streak of winking black humor, that get you to realize that this is a warmer film and in better fun than the austere, menacing set decoration and high-stakes set-up suggest.

This warmth comes through the most in Roger and Diana's relationship.  It appears as though the film is setting up Roger's liberation from his icy, conniving wife, but this plot thread takes an unexpectedly tender twist, one that teaches Roger the simple but important lesson of being comfortable with who you are.  A story about a marriage as much as anything else, Headhunters turns into a fast-paced exercise in violently ridding oneself of personal demons rather than succumbing to them.  It's a welcome alternative to interesting but increasingly predictable Breaking Bad-inspired sagas of mild-mannered men turning to the dark side.  That Headhunters nevertheless has some twisted fun on the way to real reconciliation makes it an odd mix of the kind-hearted and the breakneck.  You'll enjoy yourself and you might even get a feel out of it.  

Mamma Mia!

Mamma Mia! is like a musical class clown, trying over and over and over again to impress.  Last song didn't quite stick it with you?  Don't worry, there's another in two minutes!  The film is best characterized by its boundless desire to please, its relentless efforts to get the viewer to have as much fun as the cast is having - a nigh-impossible achievement, by the looks of it.  The star-studded cast - which includes, just for the headliners, Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Amanda Seyfried, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard - all got together to shoot on location on a Greek island, and they look like they had a whale of a time doing it.  Good for them.  I mean that, I really do.

This is a film adaptation of a Broadway musical that itself is based on the music of the Swedish pop band ABBA.  Sophie (Seyfried) is the sunflowery daughter of Donna (Streep), the ex-hippie who runs a shambling hotel on a Greek island.  Donna is all work and no play these days, but she used to be quite the opposite.  The summer that Sophie came along, Donna had three successive trysts and has no idea which of the three men is Sophie's father.  But on the eve of Sophie's wedding, she decides that she needs someone to walk her down the aisle, and invites the three unknowing candidates (played by Brosnan, Firth and Skarsgard) for the bash.  The mystery of Sophie's father is the basic agent for the "plot".

Let's just step back and think about what is going on here.  This musical is based on the songs of ABBA, which means that the original playwright Catherine Johnson put a wobbly narrative together that intends to make a story out of independently written songs.  I love ABBA.  This is preposterous.  This is awesome.

Mamma Mia! is a bit too stupid and shallow a movie to capture the true depth of ABBA's music, which doesn't mean that it isn't a blast.  Even its critics must admit this; it has no pretensions of being anything other than it is.  It is a shameless vehicle for the brilliance that is ABBA, with a deeply silly story that nevertheless manages to honor the basic emotions of the songs.  This is one of the few things that is genuinely clever about this movie, and one of the things that carried it for me; as botched as so many of the executional elements of this film unquestionably are, it never betrays the tone of ABBA either.  I wanted little more.

This is pure, exorbitant candy-fluff, and so purely candy-fluff that it is an extremity, an outlier.  It's like the camp movie of romantic musicals.  The actors seem to have been hired more for being game than anything else.  Pierce Brosnan, for example, plays a character who gets some big-ish singing bits, and it's not pretty.  But look at that smile!  It's Pierce Brosnan!  He's having fun, and if he sounds like a airplane engine, at least he's being likable doing it.

I don't what the draw was for these actors, but Phyllida Lloyd (who has very clearly never directed a film before) managed to draw some very appealing presences to fulfill these stupid, stupid roles.  The unstoppable Streep is the key to it all.  This amazing actress, in the face of pure bubblegum material, manages to wring every bit of pathos and subtext out of the role.  Despite everybody having a great time, personnel questions remain.  Why is Stellan Skarsgard passing off as a former hippie?  Why are Julie Walters and Christine Baranski degrading themselves as the two most insipid wannabe cougars on the face of the earth?  The film's idiocy is bursting at the seams.

Enough of it, though, is very good fun.  A lot of the songs stick really well; "Dancing Queen" features weathered Greek ladies abandoning their daily work and joining Meryl Streep in an exuberant number, and "The Winner Takes It All" is rendered in all its resigned anguish by Streep in a situation that merits the powerful song.  The most disco numbers like "Lay All Your Love on Me" and "Voulez-Vouz" benefit from the music-video/party quality of the film.  A few, like "Chiquitita" and the fascinating, ambivalent "Take a Chance on Me," flop completely.  But at the end of the day, it's basically watching a filmed version of ABBA's greatest hits, performed by charming movie stars at the height of their silliness.  For the most part, you ought to know whether or not this film is for you.

Dead Man - Dismantling the Western

Dead Man is a funny, nihilistic deconstruction of both the West and the Western.  This is the story of a man, William Blake (Johnny Depp) on a journey in several senses of the word.  The film opens with a innocuous but telling montage of Blake's train journey from Cleveland to the apocryphally-named town of Machine.  He's also on a journey to his emotional interior, reacting to a world seemingly without rules and simultaneously adapting himself to it.  He's also traveling inexorably to his own death.

Director Jim Jarmusch doesn't pull any punches on this point.  Early in the film Blake has a tryst with a girl who makes paper flowers and they are caught by her jealous lover.  The offended shoots the girl and Blake shoots him but catches the first bullet after it exits the girl.  Escaping deliriously into the wilderness, Blake wakes and is told by a Native American who calls himself Nobody that he will soon die.  The bullet is too close to his heart to remove.  Nobody takes it upon himself to bring Blake with him to "the place where sky meets sea," and where presumably, Blake will die.  Blake, therefore, is displaced and dying in the west.

So what this mean, to have this experience in Jarmusch's self-described "acid western"?  The name "Machine" is the first sign that this film means to represent a deliberately mythicized version of the West.  Blake is identified as from Cleveland, but Machine is not located in any particular place ("that's the end of the line!" is all we hear about the place).  It's not supposed to exist other than as a generalized representation of the deep, old West.

Dead Man is as much about journeys as it is about borders and transitions - between life and death, decency and indecency - so here it may not be a bad idea to bring in Frederick Jackson Turner's famous essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."  The Turner Thesis, as it has come to be known, is largely accountable for a number of basic understandings about the American West.  Taught in schools throughout the early twentieth century, it is largely the Turner worldview that characterizes the West and classic cinematic depictions of it.

Turner argues that for all of American history, the continually expanding frontier - "the meeting point between savagery and civilization" - has been the most significant constituent aspect of the development of the American character.  He says that the frontier fostered a distinctly American individualism, which in turn has promoted democracy.  This proudly individualistic character of the frontier, and particularly the American West came to be a significant influence on cultural representations of frontier society, which were beginning to become popular at the time that Turner's lectures became mainstream.*

Dead Man subverts that quasi-mythical account of the American frontier with its own generalized Western hell.  There is Machine itself, or the civilizing frontier, in Turner's conception of things.  It's a grim place, reeking of death and desolation.  Machine is dominated by Dickinson's metalworks, and Mr. Dickinson (Robert Mitchum, in his last film performance) holds a lot of local sway.  Blake's encounter at the factory is a critique both of the faceless, playing-against-the-house insurmountability of fighting for your place in industrial capitalism, and of frontier individualism.  Blake has a letter that says he has a job.  He gets there, he has no job, and he's spent all his money to get there.  Dickinson, meanwhile, points a shotgun at unsuspecting visitors and runs his metalworks with militant senility.  This vision of industrialization run amok in the unrestricted frontier neatly characterizes Dead Man's twisted sensibilities about life in the West.

Blake's wilderness retreat with Nobody, escaping the assassins of Dickinson, comprises the bulk of the film, but here we find no charming rugged individualism facing the encroaching advance of institution, except perhaps in the figure of Nobody.  But the frontier, whenever it permeates, is savage.  Take Iggy Pop's cross-dressing rapist, chatting lazily by the fireside, or the cannibalistic bounty hunter.  These are figures borne of the West, but while they are certainly individual, one wonders whether this is really what Turner meant when he stated that frontier independence fostered democracy.  Jarmusch consistently presents the civilizing side of the frontier as savage, even inhuman.  Rather than fostering the individual as democracy-boosting, Dead Man's frontier provides a world without rules, open season for people to become whatever they prefer, with no repercussions.

This is a surprisingly funny movie.  Even in the names like William Blake and Nobody, the film has all sorts of winking silliness about it.  But with their names as with most other points in the film, the absurdism of Dead Man generally has underlying significance.  Both names, in a sense, serve the film's critique of traditional representations of Native Americans (which I think is an important element of its deconstruction of the Western genre).  Blake has no idea that he shares his name with a major poet, but Nobody has heard all about him and believes Blake to be a reincarnation of the poet.  Not only does this fit into some plausible Native American beliefs (the film is considered one of the most well-researched with respect to its depictions of Native Americans), but Nobody is far better-read than his white counterpart.  Furthermore, the name "Nobody" is a dumbed-down translation of "he who speaks much, saying nothing," a much more complex idea, but Nobody both dumbs it down for ignorant white travelers and gives literal spoken word to the thought at the back of the minds of American frontiersman.  The way that Nobody represents himself to this white person he finds is a mirror of how he believes they view him.**

Those elements of the traditional western vernacular are consistently turned on their head, in particular the spirit quest sequence.  This is not a journey of enlightening introspection but rather a man's dark commune with himself under frontier and existential extremes.  What makes the film so dark is that this isn't some liberating catharsis of late-life violence or hedonism.  We could write that off more easily.  But Blake, even though he has no experience with violence or frontier brutality (see the opening train ride), casually slips it on like a second skin.  Jarmusch suggests, thus, that our savage frontier selves are at least a part of our true selves.  All we need is for the shackles to come off.

* See this for the original "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" for the Turner thesis, and this for a discussion of the historical response to the Turner Thesis.

**The film is regarded as being one of the most carefully-researched with regards to Native American depictions, but debates therein rage on.  See this for a critique of Dead Man's depiction of Native Americans (which could do with some fleshing out) and this for a Sartre-influenced discussion of the names in the film.

Mother's Mercy

This review is way too long.  It's taken a month to write because it's been hard for me to write.  So many events, so many feels.  I feel as though I can't short-change any of the major events because they were so momentous and so...complicated, in a lot of ways.

A madcap, eventful finale to what has been an interesting season of Game of Thrones, "Mother's Mercy" was...a decidedly mixed bag.  The failings of the episode are in part due to the jam-packed nature of the show.  I think that this season and the last season have been markedly more stuffed with content than the first three.  It was last year that the show came to take on its more globe-trotting character, where we drop in on each character for 5-10 minutes each week.  This year, they did a much better job by simply focusing on three or four major stories every week, fleshing those ones out and ignoring a couple threads that wouldn't have gotten meaningful attention anyways.  On the whole, the season has been expertly put-together, and giving characters 3-5 scenes in a week rather than just a few minutes before jumping somewhere else has made the content and the characters seem particularly rich.

The greatest challenge for the show in this respect has always been pacing.  How will D+D put their rogues' gallery together into something cohesive and meaningful?  The earlier sequences of the episode didn't really put together something all that meaningful, although with the complicated climax at Winterfell, you have to admire the guys for keeping all these plates spinning.

Stannis has had his meatiest season, sittin' pretty after his victory at the Wall and riding into battle against the Boltons.  We almost liked him.  And then he did...that thing, and reminded most viewers why they didn't really like him in the first place.  Stannis woke up the next morning to find the snows melting, but his men have deserted - most of his sellswords, and all of the cavalry.  Selyse has hanged herself after burning their daughter.  Even Melisandre abandons him.  At this point we'd all be hightailing it back to Castle Black, but what does Stannis do?  He leads his seriously outnumbered infantry into battle, and they get absolutely crushed.  And proving the point about Chekhov's monologues in Thrones, Brienne of Tarth is there to execute Stannis.

I'll cry about Stannis, still fighting in the books, later.  But this was all just very badly paced.  They skipped the battle - and I get it, money better spent at Hardhome and Daznak's Pit, but come one! - and managed to make the conclusion to Stannis's epic career seem even slight, the very last word with which we would describe Thrones.

There's not too much to shit on but the editor here, but it just goes to show - bad editing fucks everything up.  Lots of this was great.  Stephen Dillane killed it.  The early moments, when everything went from bad to worse and he stared disintegration in the face - those were brilliant.  But by simply not cutting - to anything, literally anything - Thrones blasted through his whole conclusion and made it seem as though the showrunners were simply trying to get it out of the way.  This is just bad construction for the whole season.  You don't build up this huge battle at Winterfell, involve many more major characters than ought to be there, and then make it slight.  GRRM is waiting a whole book to get to that point.  If only the show-runners could show similar restraint.

What kills me about this is that the content was fine.  Dillane was incredible.  Leading a band of ragged infantry into the galloping horsemen of the Boltons was one of the most Stannis-y things we've ever seen him do.  Also in resolute character was his resignation to death at Brienne's hands.  Just put something else in between all of these scenes and you have something pretty effective, with weight and gravitas.  Rush through it, and you have the ignominious conclusion to the seasonal arcs of tons of major characters, and worst of all, to the epic struggle one of the most resilient and unusual players in the game of thrones.  Brienne is one of the most appealing characters on the show and her cause, in this case, is supremely righteous, but that doesn't make up for the poor pacing.

Rest in peace Stannis.  You deserved death, but not like this.  Ya done fucked up, D+D.

Simultaneously, the writers took a bunch of strong, season-long work from Alfie Allen and Sophie Turner and again, rushed things.  Sansa escaped her room while the Boltons rode off to battle, but what was the impetus?  When things just happen like this, you can't help but feel that events are being generated for plot convenience rather than from organic, character-driven decisions.  So too was Ramsay's turn back to the light (paying homage to tossing the Emperor in the Death Star?)

Yet in the end - as in with most of the post-Stannis episode - their paths went the way of the conclusion of "A Dance with Dragons."  Theon and Sansa jumped off the high walls of Winterfell into the snows below.  It's a cliffhanger that hasn't been justified contextually, and since neither character felt terribly motivated by anything other than the long-established fear, it was also anti-climactic.

The ending of the Dorne subplot made me wonder why the fuck we'd been there in the first place.  Jamie, Bronn, Myrcella and Trystane leave with genial blessings from Doran.  Tyene says something so degrading that I don't even care to repeat it here, but it reduces the entire show by a considerable margin.

The point, perhaps, could have been that Jamie came into his own as a father, only to have it snatched away at the last moment in a classic Thronesian twist.  The father bit was actually pretty sweet, if a bit slight with respect to its actual story relevance.  But because nobody cares about Myrcella and because the Sand Snakes and this bloodthirsty twisting of Ellaria were both annoying and underdeveloped, the whole thing rang terribly false.  Dorne never got better and ranks as the Thrones team's all-time weakest thread.

This was an especially reckless off-book thread, but the rest of the episode swiveled back to book territory; for Cersei, Jon and Daenerys, things ended very explicitly as they did in "A Dance with Dragons."  And in this sense, the show was merciful.  Apart from the hard death of Stannis, they left us pretty much where we were at the end of "Dragons," though signs of reshuffling showed at the seams.  I'm trying to move from weak to strong so let's go "average" with Dany, wandering in the wilderness only to be found and surrounded (captured?) by a khalasar.

Thrones has been in pretty good touch with Dany's dragon queen side this year but the scene at Daznak's Pit and her brief scene this week display the limitations of the show.  It can't display internal dialogue as powerfully as GRRM can with his POV format.  I don't want to be a book complainer but in Daenerys's case the show has been aping the books pretty hard and failing to get the content across all that powerfully; I think her last two chapters of DWD tell us more about her than anything that had come before.  Without the internal monologue or the content flowing through Dany's delirious mind, they have no access to the depth of the books.  Through no fault of their own, I think, but the point stands.  Decidedly average Dany cliffhanger scene this week that leaves us right in DWD territory.

Except back in Meereen.  Hoooollly shit.  The brooding, post-Dany advisors try this one for size; while Jorah and Daario go off hunting for Dany, Meereen - on the brink of civil war, mind you - will be ruled by 1) a eunuch general whose soldiers have been getting massacred by the insurgents 2) a foreign scion who knows nothing of the local politics and 3) a hairdresser.  Ok, so there's more to Missandei, but you just have to shake your head at this.  The Thrones universe should eat these guys up given how badly this has been thought out, but I doubt it.  I guess we get another season of Meereen.  But the magically appearing Varys does give them some serious help, I'll admit.

I've got to be honest, pretty deep into the episode I was snickering at how silly all of it seemed, how rushed, how badly thought out.  But there were a few terrific, twisted sequences towards the end that really drove the knife in, so to speak.  As we suspected, Arya took the bait that is Meryn Trant and made an unsanctioned killing.  In the moment, the whole thing is very satisfying, the most brutal, justified revenge porn perhaps ever sanctioned by D+D.  Disguising herself as one of Trant's little girls (which is still just disgusting), Arya whips off her Faceless Mask and gouges Trant's eyes out, then talks to him while he lies bleeding from the face.  It's all incredibly graphic - director David Nutter leaves the camera lingering for what seemed like at least a minute and a half on an eyeless, bleeding Meryn Trant.  It's pretty horrible, but fuck Meryn Trant.  Arya reaffirms her identity by way of talking Trant to his death.

Her triumph is short-lived.  Personal killings are not the way of the Many-Faced God.  Arya is so not "no one" yet, and Jaqen seems to know this immediately.  He takes her through existential emotional punishment and then blinds her, in a move that, uniquely in this episode, retreats backwards into the books to make yet another cliffhanger climax.  It's a nasty scene and Maisie Williams killed it.  Arya's plot has been broadly inconsequential this year, but it's also a necessary trial-by-fire for the character, who has been turning into a killer but is learning what kind of killer she will become.  The whole thing has a complicated moral bent, in that the teacher-thing that Jaqen is doing makes a lot of sense and Arya seems selfish, but then, fuuuuck Meryn Trant.  This is some of the distraught moral ambiguity that Thrones does best.

Thrones really nailed that kind of ambiguity during Cersei's walk of shame this week.  Compelled, by desperation, by the need to see her son, Cersei makes a strategic confession to the High Sparrow.  She hits only the points that she knows the Sparrow can confirm, namely the Lancel affair, but she categorically denies the accusations of incest leveled by Stannis and others.  This could destroy the crown as it stands, and we will have to wait for Cersei's trial by the Faith next year to see how this plays out, but for know, the Sparrow is as sphinx-like as ever.

Cersei is allowed to proceed back to the Red Keep, having confessed, but there's a nasty twist - she will walk naked through King's Landing, with the evil septa shouting "shame" behind her.  Cersei is utterly stripped of her dignity, as the Sparrow foreshadowed in his arrest monologue, shorn like a beast before being unclothed.  During the walk she is pelted with insults, accusations, fruit and rocks from a hateful public.

This astonishing scene, one of the very best and most gut-wrenching in the show's history, is a confrontation, even though it looks like just a punishment.  Cersei's walk of shame is a battle between Cersei's ferocious desire for independence and respect being pit against the horrific sexual politics of the day in a pitched, seemingly one-sided showdown.  Lena Headey, giving a terrific (better be Emmy-garnering, honestly) performance alongside an equally brave body double, attempts to hover above the jeering crowd and her own physical shame.  The odds seem overwhelming.  The scene is paced brilliantly - at first the crowd is silent, and the only sound is the arhythmic clanging bell.  But the crowd eventually gets into it, mocking Cersei's body, her sexual sins - they attempt to destroy her humanity and identity.

Cersei is despicable, one of the most straightforwardly evil characters on the show, but this season has shown a tendency to want to get inside her head (observed most obviously during the quasi-mythical flashback scene).  Left to her own devices for once, Cersei absolutely fucked herself over and is now enduring punishment.  As with her awful son, we demanded comeuppance for years.  When we get it, we're not sure if we like it - moreover, we're not sure if this is what justice will look like in the broader political future of Westeros.  In a lot of ways, the scene completely strips Cersei down, in all senses of the word.  When you see her facing such awful punishment, perhaps the gravest, most horrible manifestation yet of the sexual politics of the Thrones world, you don't see the  horrible woman who betrayed Ned Stark, who fought for Tyrion's death.  You just see a woman struggling to retain her basic human dignity.  It's riveting.

Cersei eventually makes it up the hill and into the Red Keep and she sees...Pycelle, Kevan Lannister, too shocked, perhaps cruelly offended by her state to even engage with her.  But Qyburn, her personally-fostered "Grand Maester," shields her immediately and introduces her to Ser Robert Strong, the product of all that "work" he's been doing.  Confirming a popular book theory, it looks like Cersei is down but not out.

To me this season has largely been about leadership failure, and the final, gut-wrenching twist at the end of this season exemplified that more wrenchingly and hopelessly then even the great defeats of Daenerys and Cersei - Dany is down but has dragons, Cersei is down but has Robert Strong, and Jon is dead.  Inevitably assassinated in the Castle Black courtyard by a gang of Night's Watch, led by Ser Alliser, Jon completed his emergence this year as the great tragic hero of the show.  Questions will continue to circulate about whether Jon Snow is dead or not, but as an arc, this was certainly effective in driving the nail in.  This has been a particularly dark season of Thrones, and this felt an appropriate note to end it on.  It's worth noting that this greatest of the ongoing mysteries in the active book series has thus far been preserved.  In this and with a number of other threads in this finale, the show circled back to A Dance with Dragons cliffhangers, and thus gave GRRM some more time to get "The Winds of Winter" out there.  Good.

I have very mixed feelings about the execution of this finale, but the Arya, Cersei and Jon stuff was very good.  The season as a whole was also mixed but had some of the series' finest hours.  I'll write a crisper review of the whole season later.  This is so late because I've been busy and honestly, I've been not feeling like thinking about Thrones and doing other things so I've just been not wanting to write this.

Bits

- Given Thrones' proclivity for gruesome violence, one has to question the strategic cut from the death of Stannis.  It would be nice if he made it but I kind of doubt it.  They really went out of their way to emphasize his downfall during his sequence this episode.

- Not like anyone will miss Meryn Trant, but Ian Beattie sure was a fun performer to watch in a sleazy, misanthropic kind of way, and apparently he just fucking loves being on the show.  But you could hardly have asked for a more memorable death.  Perhaps they can bring back Ser Ilyn Payne now that Wilko Johnson is miraculously cancer-free?

Book Bits

- An impossibly cruel Benjen Stark troll, but also brilliant.

Tragedy in Bengal - The Blood Telegram

Much of the developing world continues to face obstacles related to one of the most common consequences inflicted by the age of imperialism - post-colonial borders.  In the post-World War II era, exiting colonial powers (particularly in Africa and most of South and Southeast Asia) left behind a slew of borders, most of which are unchanged, that often came to exist without consideration to the demographic or human components of the areas that would be affected.  The geopolitical sphere of South Asia continues to be dominated by the political arrangements drawn up as the British departed.  India and Pakistan were created as modern political entities in 1947.  The modern Indian nation is only the latest state to claim dominance over the subcontinent, but the trappings of being a modern political entity - a nation-state, a sovereign power, a series of designations arranged by West definitions of nationhood - required increased specificity.

So, on August 15, the predesignated date of independence, suddenly you have India, and you have Pakistan.  One is secular, the other is Muslim.  They are now entirely distinct, and the border will put them right next to each other.  The sectarian violence accompanied by the 1947 Partition of India, especially in the Punjab region, has become the notorious stuff of legend, though sadly not as much in the West as it ought to be.  But the source of this violence, while complex, is worryingly callous in one respect.  The border, a rush job done by inexperienced hacks who hadn't taken the time to survey the land, was haphazardly drawn by a British commission on a deadline.  It resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the largest mass migration in history.

The borders on the other side of Pakistan makes even less sense.  The different regions of the British Protectorate of India had the opportunity to vote as to which independent new nation they wanted to join.  The Muslim-majority country now known as Bangladesh, on the border of the Indian states of Bihar and West Bengal, voted to join Pakistan.  Thousands of miles away from the governing center of Islamabad, East Pakistan was more populous than West Pakistan and had an entirely different people and culture, despite the common Islamic heritage.  So what you had, from 1947 to 1971, is an unwieldy, incongruent Pakistan divided by thousands of miles of India.

This geographic situation in the Bengal region was very messy under these circumstances and continues to be.  The Indian state of West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh have much in common culturally but their national governments debate over water and refugee issues.  Springing from the Mughals, the British initially governed the whole region as one body, up until a violently-received attempt to partition them in 1905.  But in modern history, the region has been continually bisected until the "Bangla Desh" once envisioned by Rabindranath Tagore is hardly recognizable.

In 1971, the struggles with this ridiculous Pakistan-bisected-by-India came to a head in the complicated crisis detailed by Gary J. Bass in The Blood Telegram, which provides a strong overview of the events from a geopolitical perspective and accomplishes a fine piece of Nixon-bashing in the process.  Despite the advent of such institutions as the United Nations and a ruling generation scarred by the unspeakable genocide of the European Jews, the United States found itself not only standing by while an allied regime committed a genocide, but almost deliberately abetting it.  In power at the time was Richard Nixon.  His primary foreign policy advisor was Henry Kissinger.

The United States backed the standing president of Pakistan, Yahya Khan, whose power and support were concentrated in West Pakistan.  But East Pakistan, the region now known as Bangladesh, was more populous than the West, and united behind a single political party - which happened in the elections of 1970 - they could overwhelm the West's entrenched political stranglehold.  In the December 1970 elections, the Bengalis of East Pakistan united behind the Awami League candidate, Mujib-ur-Rahman, who called for greater autonomy from Pakistan for the Bengalis.  Yahya Khan banned the Awami and declared martial law, and began sending the Pakistani military - armed with American weapons - into Bangladesh.  In the ensuing crackdown the military wiped out hundreds of thousands of Bengalis and displaced millions, most of whom fled to India's western states.  Meanwhile, the American government willfully did nothing, deeming the matter an internal Pakistani affair.

It's remarkable how bad Nixon can still look after all these years.  After extensive archival research from recently-released White House documents (which seem to be a very authoritative source; rarely does Bass complain about a dearth of American information), Bass paints a scathing picture of the sitting president and his advisor.  Nixon seems like an embittered, racist bull in a china shop, but also like a defensive, sad little man (there's a very funny story about Nixon's chief of staff worrying about the boss's isolation and attempting to find him a friend).  The man disliked almost everybody he knew, but inexplicably held Yahya Khan in high esteem.  Nixon, not a subtle man, appreciated Khan's militant bluntness, a bluntness reflected also in the vicious crackdowns of 1971.

On the other hand, Nixon despised the Indians, and in particular the sitting prime minister Indira Gandhi (not a lovable woman herself).  He hated the poverty and squalor of India and found its leader pretentious and pandering.  To Nixon, this whole corner of the world was destitute and largely faceless, and he simply did not care much about them.  There is no other conclusion to reach from Bass's book - Nixon just didn't give a shit.

The whole of South Asia was to Nixon a pawn in what was, admittedly, he and Kissinger's diplomatic coup in opening relations with China.  In this respect his alliance with Yahya Khan was instrumental.  Pakistan and China had cordial relations and both opposed India, which in turn was friendly with the Soviet Union.  Nixon and Kissinger used Khan to ferry messages between themselves and Zhou Enlai (Khan, who for all his brutality was little more than a blustering drunk, apparently loved the cloak-and-dagger aspect).  It was largely for this reason, which Nixon could not reveal to the Indians, that they continued their alliance with the military dictator.  In the face of the genocide in Bengal, the whole thing is, of course, deplorable.

Bass doesn't claim to give a comprehensive account of the genocide, focusing instead on the role that world leaders played in allowing or downplaying it.  But we do get a window into the terror through the eponymous eyes of Archer Blood, the foreign consul in Dhaka.  His telegram, sent and signed by most members of his staff, excoriated American policy in Bangladesh and the Nixon administration in particular for doing nothing about what he saw clearly as a "genocide," - a difficult word that unfortunately is the only correct term for what in Bangladesh was little more than a concerted effort to wipe out an ethnic group.

This bit has to give you some faith in humanity, in that most people on the ground saw clearly what was happening and felt obligated to risk their careers (in Blood's case) to stand up for what was just.  The ambassador to India, Kenneth Keating, also saw the horror of the refugee crisis on India's eastern borders and unsuccessfully implored Nixon and Kissinger to do something; Senator Ted Kennedy, while he certainly had a political agenda, became an outspoken advocate of intervention after he visited the refugee camps in West Bengal and Bihar.

But it also raises troubling questions for everybody who doesn't see these things in person.  Hopefully Nixon is an appalling outlier, but one wonders about an age in which the influence of great powers has become so far-reaching that their leaders have literally no ability to conceive of the suffering they may be engendering.  Caught up in his Cold War diplomatic games, Nixon didn't notice or didn't care about what happened on the ground.  One hopes that it was the latter and that this principle extends just to grumbling crooks like him.

Bass deserves enormous credit for bringing to harsh light one of the most brutal human consequences of the Cold War and the complicity of the United States - and frankly, most of the world - in this tragedy.  It also is an interesting tale of pre-Emergency Gandhian politicking.  The Indian government has been even more guarded than the U.S. with its state secrets, and Indira Gandhi's personal papers and correspondences have not been released.  But through the papers of her chief foreign policy advisor, P.N. Haksar, a clear Indian perspective emerges.  Though India ultimately liberated Bangladesh and before that armed and trained its guerrilla force, they also aggressively provoked war with Pakistan for their own belligerent reasons rather than out of sympathy for the human crisis at their doorstep.  They make out better than the Americans in "The Blood Telegram," however.

This is not a definitive story of the "Cruel Birth" of Bangladesh, as Archer Blood later put it in his memoirs, but it is an incredibly important story of the consequences of geopolitical maneuvers and schemes in this still-recently globalized world, and a harsh reminder of the racist, ignorant lows to which this country only recently could still sink.  Bass infuses the whole work with a clear moral directive.  While there is no doubt that the nations of the world found themselves laying with bizarre bedfellows and mired in shades of grey in the early years of the Cold War, "The Blood Telegram" shows that even in these situations, right and wrong can and ought to be distinguished.

- For more information on the Partition of India and Pakistan, which is much more complex than what I've given here, I'd like to recommend Freedom at Midnight by Dominique LaPierre and Larry Collins and this more recent article from the Journal of Genocide Research on the specifics of the genocide.  There is also a new book called Midnight's Furies by Nisid Hajari, which I've just ordered.