One of the most interesting and difficult parts of the debate over The Help, the Oscar-winning adaptation of a novel about a young white woman who documents the lives of maids in her Mississippi community, was over the appropriate role of white characters in cultural depictions of the Civil Rights movement. There’s no question that white people participated in the Civil Rights movement with great bravery, and in some cases were targeted for additional violence for the sin of siding with black protesters rather than white bigots. But there’s also no question that the Civil Rights movement is not the product of benevolent white liberals, and that it’s proper to acknowledge white participation in the movement as the work of allies rather than as progenitors. But pop culture likes telling stories about people who are at the center of the frame, frequently elevating allies to central roles. So what’s a well-intentioned storyteller to do?

I’ll be curious to see if Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave, an adaptation of a true story of a free man who was kidnapped, sold into slavery, and redeemed out of it through the hard work of his wife and a white New York lawyer, has some answers. Chiwetel Ejiofor is set to play the main character, Solomon Northup, Michael Fassbender will play the plantation owner, and Brad Pitt will play the lawyer who represented Northup. As much as stories of black empowerment are critically important to tell, it’s also important to illustrate the depths of white brutality, and to acknowledge that in a deeply racist system, there were certain functions only white people could perform, and certain avenues that they had privileged access to.

But even so, I still want my Harriet Tubman biopic.

I think this piece from Salon is quite intriguing, particularly in its focus on the ideological purity of country or encampment living, and in arguing that while most of these protagonists spend at least some time allied with revolutionary movements, series often up rejecting them as overly violent or just the same thing as a repressive regime all over again:

But they’re not quite noble savages, because they’re self-aware. In the wild, they find misfits who safeguard learning, hoarding the books and lore that the dystopias have repressed. The Occupy movement often casts itself in a similar light, as its members “rough it” in parks in the middle of cities as if keeping alive a more earthy, simple, honest way of living; their library tents symbolize their devotion to learning from the past as they forge a better way for the future. Indeed, the library is a synecdoche for the movement itself: in Toronto, protesters chained themselves to theirs as it was about to be removed as part of the camp’s eviction; at Occupy Wall Street, the demolishing of the library has been viewed as a repressive dystopian act.

In the wilderness, the dystopian protagonists also encounter rebels – and not necessarily the same people who read books. Unlike in escapist fantasies such as “Star Wars,” where the rebels unambiguously deserve our support as they fight an evil empire with the light side of the force, the rebels in YA dystopias can be as dangerous as those in power. Often the two are mirror images of one another, led by charismatic but delusional figures who seek to wrest power for themselves by violent means and view the teenage heroes as vehicles for them to do so. In “The Hunger Games,” Katniss becomes an icon for the rebels in the legendary District 13 but ultimately distrusts their humorless and pathologically driven leader, Alma Coin; in “Chaos Walking,” Viola (Todd’s girlfriend and female counterpart) falls in with The Answer, a group of terrorists who are healers by profession but are just as adept at setting off bombs, and wouldn’t blink at blowing her up if it achieved their own ends.

Now obviously, conservatives have their radicals, too. But I tend to think most of these setups tend to have the regime in power be a conservative analogue, whether it’s preserving extreme economic inequality as in The Hunger Games or priests entangled with the ruling hierarchy in The Knife of Never Letting Go. And so for the people who are fighting against those regimes to prove to be terrorists or authoritarians suggests an unfortunate equivalence between liberals and conservatives, from reformers and preservers of the status quo. And I think there’s something inherently conservative (and worrying, given the age of the target audience) about narratives that encourage people not to participate in the system or to believe that there’s nothing they can do to improve their lives and the structures that govern them. If you drop out, you may be able to live your life on your own terms. But at some point, you’ll probably need to be in contact with the outside world. And if you come up for air because you need an abortion, or because you’re being affected by environmental degradation, or the economy’s left you destitute and you haven’t done your part to make sure the rest of the world is responsive to your needs, you might be in for a nasty surprise.

Fortunately, there are alternatives like Tamora Pierce’s books, which read collectively and in chronological order tell the story of the abolition of slavery and the liberalization of society in her fictional kingdom of Tortall. It’s a story about reform, and as a result, it takes a long time: the arc spans more than a hundred years and twenty books. Not a lot of authors are going to commit to something that ambitious, nor should they have to. But opting out isn’t the only way you can make a story fit in two to four books. Sometimes, it’s a matter of a compromised outcome, or one reform at a time.

I feel sort of guilty comparing Hell on Wheels, AMC’s new Western about the construction of the Trans-Continental Railroad, to Deadwood, but it’s sort of hard not to do when the show is trying as hard as it possibly can to ape as many Deadwood elements as it can transfer to a railroad camp. As I wrote in my review at the Atlantic:

The minister who’s set himself up in Hell on Wheels is a straightforward prairie minister (though one with a dark secret that ultimately reinforces the show’s sympathy for former slave-owners and advocates of slavery), rather than the tormented Union civil war veteran who ministered to Deadwood in its first season before succumbing to the brain tumor that was robbing him of his faith. And when the Hell on Wheels minister mildly asks “Haven’t we had our fill of war? Our fill of killing?” it’s no match for the anguished cries of Deadwood’s camp doctor raging at God: “What conceivable use was the screaming of those men? Did you need to hear them to know your omnipotence?”

Hell on Wheels doesn’t compete with Deadwood in the arts of cussing or whoring, either. Declaring of the Emancipation Proclamation, as Elam Ferguson does at one point, that “Ain’t nothing good coming from this either…Look what this got. I might as well wipe my ass with it,” or the sight of Doc Durant denouncing his own pitch to investors as “Twaddle and shite,” don’t remotely compare to Swearengen promising a crowd fired up by rumors of a massacre by Native Americans “I will offer a personal $50 bounty for every decapitated head of as many of these godless heathen cocksuckers as anyone can bring in. And God rest the souls of that poor family. And pussy’s half price, next 15 minutes.” Hell on Wheels’ prostitutes are hookers with hearts of gold—and in one case, tattoos from her time in Indian captivity—rather than full-fledged citizens in this rough new society, and their interactions with men are entirely predictable.

The one thing that Hell on Wheels has on Deadwood is the sight of Common in a jaunty hat, though of course that doesn’t make up for the show’s Confederate nostalgia. There’s a really interesting story to be told about the black experience in Westward expansion, or about the railroad and Manifest Destiny from the perspective of the Native Americans who are being displaced by it. But this isn’t it. Also, this is a reminder that I need to finish blogging Deadwood. That starts again tomorrow.

Regular readers know I’m a total nut for Tamora Pierce’s books, particularly her Provost’s Dog series about a cop with magical informants working in a nascent law enforcement system in Corus, the capital city of the kingdom of Tortall she introduced in her first fantasy series, the Lioness books. So I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the conclusion to the trilogy, Mastiff, which came out last week. Spoilers to follow.

I was initially disappointed that the story, which sends Beka, Tunstall, Lady Sabine, and a mage named Farmer Cape on a wild chase across Tortall in search of the Crown Prince, who’s been kidnapped and hidden in a slave caravan, takes them so far from the Lower City of Corus and from the class politics of the city. But Mastiff may be the most stinging book Pierce has written about the impact of a rigid class structure on the psyches of ordinary individuals. Prior books looked at the impact of big institutions on the poor people of the lower city: what it means when law enforcement isn’t reliable, when alternative social welfare networks break down, when the monetary system fails. People Beka knows pay with their lives, and poverty drives people she knows mad, and to dreadful crimes of their own. Mastiff, by contrast, looks upwards from the very poor to the nobility who, angry at the loss of their privileges, stage a devastating rebellion against the crown.

And the book looks up to Tunstall who, despite the reassurances of Lady Sabine, and the reinforcement of Beka, can’t get past the fact that he and his lover are of different classes. His insistence that the relative differences in their statuses are important and substantive eats away at Lady Sabine. And ultimately, it leads him into the most devastating betrayal in any of Pierce’s novels. Tunstall turns traitor, throwing in with the noble rebellion for the promise of a barony that would set his mind at ease about marrying Sabine. His confrontation with Beka is heart-rending because his betrayal is so unnecessary, such a deep reversal of the principals and values by which he’s lived his life: it’s a product only of his inability to stop hearing the artificial arguments of a class system that’s interested only in its own perpetuation. In defeating her teacher, Beka proves that she’s surpassed him as a Dog, and as a person.
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