Over in the world of computer animation and robotics, they have this awesome term for how the more human things seem, the more attractive they are, up until the point when something seems unsettlingly almost human but not quite, at which point, we become repulsed by the almost-human thing–the uncanny valley. The valley has a far side, where the thing looks exactly human and our revulsion is overcome and we like it just fine.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the notion of the uncanny valley helps clarify a lot about how our broader popular culture works. Remember good old-fashioned vampires, like Count Orlock or the New England vampires? They were gross and terrible, especially when they were beloved family members come back from the dead to feed on you. They were like humans but recognizably no longer human. In other words, vampires resided in the uncanny valley, close enough to human without being so that it creeped us out.

But, as we’ve lived with the vampire and its traits have become codified and known, it’s become less creepy. Not only in the sense that vampires now sparkle in the sunlight, but in the sense that, even when you’re watching a scary movie–let’s be honest–once you recognize that it’s a vampire, it’s not quite as scary anymore. I think this is a clue that recognition is a part of the mechanism for moving something out of the uncanny valley.

I just finished Karin Tidbeck’s amazing collection of short stories, Jagannath. And one of the reasons I think her stories are so damn good is her skill at navigating the uncanny valley, of using it to her advantage. Her stories are full of things that are unsettlingly almost human–a baby/locomotive that talks in a train-whistle-y voice, a tiny blooming plant man, distant relatives who are born from pupae, and a baby made in a tin can from salt water, a carrot and menstrual blood–that never quite resolve into something recognizably human.

Her story, “Pyret” has this great moment where one of the characters is describing her encounter with two of the titular characters.

I peeked into the grocery store and saw someone standing behind the counter, and a customer on the other side. Just what you might expect. But the customer would put some groceries on the counter, and after the cashier rang them up, the customer put the wares back on the shelves again! Then they started all over again. I looked while they did it four times. They were still doing it when I left.

See how it works? It’s not clear in the story what these things are exactly, but here we are, viewing them doing something that seems to be normal human behavior–a cashier checking someone out.  She’s leading us toward recognizing them as something human and then she slips that little weirdness in there of them repeating their actions. Even out of context, it’s strange. In the story, it’s a moment that gives shudders, precisely because it’s just not behavior that adult human beings would engage in for fun (though this does raise the question of how often children do stuff that creeps us out and whether we can understand it as being creepy because it strikes us as almost but not quite human).

I think there are social justice implications here, too, which I hope we can discuss when we talk about Lovecraft, tomorrow. Don’t worry if you’ve never read any Lovecraft. Every story is about how there’s something unspeakable thing that is worshiped by people unlike Lovecraft and that is, in some way, corrupting the narrator and touching him with its slimy tentacles.

I’m really happy and honored to be here–thanks for asking me, Alyssa–and so I hope it’s fun and interesting for you guys, too.

Marvel announced its slate of movies and their release dates at San Diego Comic Con. But it’s remarks by Marvel co-president Louis D’Esposito that are making waves in some circles. He told MTV of Guardians of the Galaxy and Black Panther that:

“That would be Marvel in space,” he said. “That’s a great concept and a great idea, and potentially one of our films in the future.” Another possible candidate is “Black Panther,” a superhero story that centers on T’Challa, the defender of a fictional African nation called Wakanda.

“He has a lot of the same characteristics of a Captain America: great character, good values,” said the Marvel exec. “But it’s a little more difficult, maybe, creating [a world like Wakanda]. It’s always easier basing it here. For instance, Iron Man 3 is rooted right here in Los Angeles and New York. When you bring in other worlds, you’re always faced with those difficulties.”

It’s silly to say that it’s easier to build a visual and conceptual Wakanda—especially given BET did it in the Black Panther animated series—than Asgard, or a Skrull warship. But D’Esposito, in a sort of clumsy way, seems to be talking around some beliefs embedded in Hollywood conventional wisdom: that it’s easier to sell white men as brawling gods than black men as hugely technologically advanced leaders of foreign nations.

One of the things that’s bracing about BET’s cartoon adaptation is that it’s so directly about the racism of that disbelief. You’ve got white American officials who say things like “Where do a bunch of savages get off telling us they have a no-fly zone? What are they going to do, throw spears at our jets?” and a World War II-era Black Panther who brushes off Captain America’s offer of help with invading Nazis by telling him “You can go home now. I’ve already taken out the garbage.” In this interpretation, T’Challa’s the rare kind of superhero who can call out systemic ills in Western society, rather than relying on their continued existence to give him purpose. “The fact that every conversation here is framed in terms of profit and power says everything,” he says in the cartoon. “Why cure a disease when people pay for medicine?”

As thrilling as it would be to see those contradictions and assumptions challenged in a big-screen movie with all the power of Marvel’s brand and marketing department behind it, I’m not really surprised that Marvel’s finding excuses to demur. American audiences like seeing American superheroes and American presidents beat back alien invasions, to see America as the sophisticated country that stands as a bulwark between humanity and everyone else. We can put up with Asgardians because they’re on our side, Thor’s promise to protect the earth mediated by his partnership with Captain America, and representations of American superiority in industry, military might, and science, Tony Stark, Captain Fury, and Bruce Banner and Jane Foster. Blade can protect humans from the decadence of vampire torturers, ravers, raisers of evil Gods and breeders of abominations, but he’s an affirmation of our goodness rather than a critique of our society. That’s not to say that there isn’t evil out there that needs taking care of, and I appreciate the Blade franchise’s attention to the vulnerability of homeless people. But it’s easier to sell superheroes of any color who emphasize our common humanity than those who point our failures, whether it’s T’Challa in Africa or Luke Cage in Harlem.

Noah Berlatsky and I have a running and I think generally friendly disagreement over the Twilight books, but I don’t really appreciate him strawmanning me and other female critics in what I think is condescending piece about the relative merits of Katniss Everdeen and Bella Cullen-nee-Swann and lecturing us on femininity. According to Noah:

Critics have expressed the Katniss-would-beat-the-tar-out-of-Bella dynamic in various ways…Alyssa Rosenberg laments, “Bella’s overriding passivity,” while Yvonne Zip at Christian Science Monitor enthuses that “Katniss is too much of a fighter to go serenely to her death.” Bella, on the other hand, is stereotypically girly, and as Melinda Beasi argues, even women and feminists (especially women and feminists?) are nervous about being “associated with anything ‘girly.’” Thus the appeal of Katniss, who is a badass. Because whether it’s in a fist fight or in the hearts of critics, butch beats girly every time.

The relative discomfort with Bella, then, can be seen as reflecting a larger discomfort with femininity. That discomfort is prevalent not just among men, but (as Melinda Beasi says) among women as well. In fact, feminists have long struggled with how to think about and value femininity. Second-wave feminists (to generalize wildly) tended to be down on the feminine; they saw frills and pink and bows and childishness (or even, in the case of radicals like Shulamith Firestone, pregnancy itself) as part of the patriarchy’s effort to infantilize and denigrate women. Third-wave feminists, on the other hand, have been (in general) more interested in reclaiming the feminine. For writers like Julia Serrano in Whipping Girl, the negative association with femininity is just another way through which the patriarchy devalues women…

And yet, for all the critical accolades…is masculinity really categorically better and more feminist than femininity? Would we really rather have our 17-year-old daughters kill dozens than have them carry a baby to term? Certainly, there are aspects of The Hunger Games that make the butch ideal seem problematic at the very least…At the end of Twilight, Bella actually does get power. She turns into a vampire who has the physical and magical wherewithal to save her entire family from death—not to mention flatten Katniss with a flick of her perfect pale sparkly wrist. Katniss, conversely, finds that what she desired all along was domestic bliss with her nice-guy suitor and a bunch of kids running around the cottage.

First, there’s something really profoundly weird and limited about this definition of femininity — and condescending in the piece’s sense that a totalizing devotion to motherhood, to relationships, to sex, to girliness is the only, or most worthy, definition of femininity. The second-wave feminists who produced Our Bodies, Ourselves may not have done the research into a groundbreaking medical text that changed the relationship between women and the medical establishment while wearing pretty dresses*, but that doesn’t mean that their work wasn’t deeply attuned to the feminine. Creating space for women’s voices in hip-hop, and suggesting that women have something specific to offer the form, may not be explicitly attuned to the state of romantic and sexual relationships, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an exploration and assertion of the feminine. Choosing to have a baby even if it means you have to be on bed rest or endanger your life might mean you’re devoted to motherhood, but it doesn’t actually make you more of a woman than casting off your cloak to duel the holy hell out of Bellatrix Lestrange or climbing into an exo-suit and doing battle for a little girl’s life — and by extension, the continued existence of the human race.:

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I just finished W. Scott Poole’s Monsters in America, and while I think the book has an unfortunate tendency to wander away from its central thesis (and as a result to not entirely prove it), the premise is interesting enough to merit further consideration. Essentially he argues that “the narrative of American history can be read as a tale of monsters slain and monsters beloved” — and more specifically that in the United States, monsters exist not just as engines of social control and reflections of our anxiety, but as things that we define ourselves by conquering. Poole describes one delightful example, the arrival of what a lot of people thought was a large sea serpent off the coast of Massachusetts:

Numerous New Englanders claimed to have seen it, and everyone tried to invest it with meaning. The Gloucester serpent quickly, in fact almost immediately, mae its way into political discussion. The anxious maritime entrepreneurs of Gloucester gave their sea monster the nickname “Embargo,” a reference to the controversial Embargo of 1807…The 1817 Boston broadside certainly makes it clear that destroying the monster in Gloucester harbor was the community’s first priority. On the first day of the sighting, ‘a number of our sharp-shooters’ were in pursuit, firing muskets at the serpent. There seems to have been no public discussion of this effort. It was assumed that killing the monster was the only possible course. The men of the New England coast killed giant sea creatures for a living, and this particular wonder would receive the same treatment. The monster in American history is not simply that which destroys. It is a being that must be destroyed.

Poole doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining how that American mindset is different from that of other countries, mostly asserting that it’s the case, even though I think he might have built a stronger one. The Puritans’ commitment to destroying monsters didn’t stop at self-control: Cotton Mather and others were all too eager to visit bodily destruction on the people who they believed had become monstrous in the country they’d come to subdue. The transformation of slaves who rebelled against their treatment into monsters in the canon of American mythology certainly had real-world consequences in the militarized mindset of the pre-Civil War mindset, and the treatment of fugitive slaves. But there’s no question that America is very good at mobilizing swiftly to absolutely destroy the kinds of things we’ve decided are monstrous, whether they’re New England sea serpents or al Qaeda.

It would be interesting to consider whether there’s a distinctly American approach to monsters that originate elsewhere. The edit and reframing that produced the American version of Godzilla turns the monster’s death from a tragedy and ominous warning into a triumph. In Europe, we desperately need Van Helsing to corner Dracula. Here, apparently, teenage girls can dispatch them either by slaying or seduction. The mark of real victory over a monster is when you don’t need to be afraid of it any more. America hasn’t defeated all of its monsters, and it never will. But to a certain extent, it can’t. It’s hard to remain exceptional if there’s nothing left to stand against, no way to distinguish yourself by the victories you can achieve that no one else can.

This post contains spoilers through the fourth episode of this season of True Blood.

True Blood is a horror show, but last night’s episode of the show didn’t need need anything supernatural to get truly horrifying. This season on the show, the biggest monster in the equation is sex itself.

I’m still not sure how I feel about the Jason storyline this season. I think it’s useful that the show makes clear that what’s happening to him isn’t just somebody’s twisted interpretation of a fantasy: he’s being sexually assaulted. But I wonder how much the show is going to deal with the implications of being gang-raped for him. Jason still has power over the people who are attacking him, who are brutalized himself. The minute he names himself as a rape victim, one of the women attacking him backs off, crying, “My brother husband just bites the back of my neck and holds me down until it’s over. You’re the best I ever had.” And when his next attacker shows up, a very young teenaged girl, Jason’s able to talk her into helping him escape by giving her a gentle vision of what sex can be. “This ain’t the way it should be. Your first time should be special, with a boy you like,” Jason tells her. “You make love with him ’cause it’s the right time, not ’cause some man shoves you in a shed and says you gotta.” People react to being assaulted all sorts of ways, but it’s going to be odd if the deepest consequence of being violently attacked, sexually assaulted, and transformed from being human into something else is that Jason becomes a proponent of serial monogamy.
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This post contains spoilers through the third episode of this season of True Blood.

Last night’s True Blood was an illustration of how unsettling tenderness can be when it’s unexpected, and all the unnerving places love can take us when we treat it as a higher power.

Sookie found herself on the receiving end on a lot of surprising—and not necessarily wanted—attraction last night. First, there’s Eric, who murmurs that she smells “Like wheat, and honey, and sunlight. What are you?” She assumes he plans to assert his old power over her, and to assert it forcefully, showing his true nature as what Lafayette describes him: “Eric Northman is a thousand years old. Ain’t no police can touch him…The best thing we can do is forget this ever happened.” Instead, he’s a large and unintentionally dangerous kitten, vulnerable enough to apologize for tracking mud on Sookie’s carpet, playful enough to notice that the water she washes his feet with tickles, mild enough to stammer “Sorry. Sorry, that was rude. Sorry,” to Sookie after pushing Pam away from her. That vulnerability and gratitude could be the basis of a different dynamic between Eric and Sookie, but it raises important questions. Is Eric the the majestic owner of Fangtasia, an ancient and powerful amoral being? Or is he a gentle and protective man who happens to be a vampire? And does Sookie like him better neutralized or majestic? Do humans really want the excitement of contact with vampires? Or do we want the Twilight-ized fantasy, a very limited amount of danger injected into sex and day-to-day life?

In a way, the second person who is taking a sudden interest in Sookie is even more disconcerting. In Sookie’s year-long absence, Debbie Pelt has returned, and she tells Sookie, “I got the program, and I got Jesus on the side.” Eric, at least, has been changed by magic. But Debbie’s claiming to have changed on her own, to want Sookie’s forgiveness and a more generalized chance to do right. Being a good person requires Sookie to give her the benefit of the doubt, but prudence and history suggests that she might be better off being a bad person, and staying suspicious.
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This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the fourth season of True Blood, which along with Breaking Bad, Burn Notice, and Louie are the shows I’ll be recapping this summer. If you want to spoil beyond the events of this episode with reference to references to Charlaine Harris’s novels, go ahead, but flag your comments as such.

I read Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire novels before I ever watched True Blood, so I should be clear I’ll inevitably see True Blood in relation to its source material. In general, I enjoy what Alan Ball’s done to diverge from the texts, though I have some objections to the ways in which Sookie’s become a simpler character, less a self-educated person trying to make up for the disadvantages life has bestowed on her, and more a slightly irritating ingenue, and I have real concerns about the transformation of the faerie storyline from something subtle that makes Sookie’s life up until this point make more sense into something cartoony and goofy-lookin’.

All of those disclaimers aside, it looks like this season of True Blood‘s going to be all about the cognitive dissonance of good and evil when they wear bodies we don’t expect. We learn that early, when apples in the land of Faerie fade from gold to rot. And that uncertainty is everywhere in this episode as Sookie returns home from what she thought was 15 minutes in Faerie that turned out to be 13 months in Bon Temps. And they were 13 consequential months, or so it seems.
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