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“Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.”
— Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire.
It’s always strange when a word changes meaning to its opposite.
Take the Italian word bravo, which changed its meaning from “bad” to “good” in about a millennium. Many steps of the way, weirdly enough, left traces in English.
Its ultimate source is probably latin pravus, which means “evil”, “wicked”. This sense survived in English as the central root of “depraved”. When, in Dante’s Inferno, Charon addresses the newly damned souls as anime prave, he’s not paying them a compliment at all.
When pravus turned into bravo, it later came to indicate a particular type of evil-doer – one who takes pleasure and pride in his own crimes. Swagger, if you will. Manzoni’s historical novel The Betrothed, set in the 16th century, uses the word bravi to designate the thugs cleaning up loose ends for feudal lords.
In modern Italian, a bravata is a reckless stunt that will probably get someone hurt.
But of course the feudal lords were those who decided what counted as virtue, so they were “noble”, “gentle”, and “chivalrous” while peasants were “villainous” and “churlish”. Bravo took a nobler sense of pride, daring, and courage – “bravery”, of course. This sense survives in English in “braveheart”, or “brave” as used for a Native American warrior.
In more refined centuries, the connotation of courage left place to one of competence. People, both in English and Italian, now call “bravo!” after particularly impressive performances. The word broadened over time, and people started saying to children when they behaved well.
Now, in current Italian, bravo simply means “good” – una brava persona is “a good person”. Every step of the way was a fairly minor change of meaning; but the final result was to invert it completely!
Reviews of Batuman's novel have tended to label Selin's curiosity and oddly incompetent approach to fun as innocence or naiveté. And while that isn't wrong — it is innocence of a kind — it stems from circumstances that Batuman renders more accurately than anyone I've read: namely, a bicultural upbringing that, by exposing you to multiple sets of social norms, immunizes you to their universality. It's a form of wordliness that makes you less certain. "I knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English — not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things," she writes. Selin reasons that people who think in Hungarian or mathematics — as Ivan does — might think differently still. When she tries to hold him accountable in English, it doesn't quite work.
People are not at their best, morally speaking, when they're desperate and scared. "I was desperate and scared" accounts for...not all the great crimes and tragedies of humanity, but an awful lot of them. We understand this perfectly well.
This applies to clerics and aristocrats -- which is to say, the people who have the power to make things really bad for everyone around them -- as much as anyone else.
So why do you dumbfucks keep trying to push them into a corner? How can you build an economy and a world-ideology around the practice of poking bears with sharp sticks, and then keep being surprised when there are a lot of bear-related injuries?
All aggression is self-defense. Proactive or reactive, born of justified or unjustified fear, the mechanism is the same. This is as true for interpersonal hostility as it is geopolitics. Want a detente with your roommate? Figure out what they’re defending against. And figure out what you’re defending against, while you’re at it.
“He (somewhat provocatively) argues that the calisthenics of intellect and emotion that are necessary for marriage are the same ones required of us in the operations of a democratic society. More broadly, though, I think I find marriage intellectually compelling because it can function as the central narrative of our lives, one whose success depends upon our continual re-enchantment. In this way, its habits of mind resemble those of religion—elsewhere, I’ve described marriage as “the theology of us”—where the survival of the relationship depends on a shared interpretation of experience, a hermeneutics of affection. And I guess if we apply Cavell’s logic to this end, it would seem to suggest that sometimes failures of relationships can be the result of bad storytelling—bad interpretation. And maybe certain moments in my book suggest that the social contract—like that of marriage—can fail because of similar narrative deficits.”
She does not fit the mold of an openly tyrannical boss or an irate, bullish tycoon. She is, more chillingly, able to control her surroundings through the artful subtlety of a cold stare, a warm hand, or the rebuffing of a too-needy request.
Thoughts on rewatching the original Star Wars trilogy:
(NB: I like Star Wars. I loved Star Wars as a kid; I love it now, as a jaded and bitter twentysomething. Star Wars was hugely informative in my taste in science fiction, and fiction generally. But…)
1. People who complain about how bad the new trilogy is don’t want to, or, because of nostalgia, can’t fairly compare it to the original movies. They’re *bad*, guys
2. I would, in fact, make the argument that all of Star Wars sucks *hard*, except for the second half of Return of the Jedi, and even here I’m thinking only of the scenes on the Death Star between Luke, Vader, and Palpatine (General Lando is fun, though)
3. Like, OK, Jar-Jar and the characterization of young Anakin, and Lucas getting free rein to do whatever he wanted as opposed to having the input of discerning and careful editors around him had some spectacular results w/r/t the new ones. But new Star Wars is not, like, an order of magnitude worse than old Star Wars.
4. For instance, world consistency is just not there. I don’t mean things which you don’t notice until a second or third rewatching, or the expanded universe (which, near as I can tell, is an insane mess that extrapolates far too heavily off the scant evidence of the films), or even just offscreen logistical stuff which is implied but not shown (like how you almost totally rebuild a moon-sized space station a few weeks after the first one was blown up, or how apparently your evil empire has no ontological inertia, and killing the Big Bad is sufficent to destroy it), but, like, how come the AT-ATs on Hoth are totally immune to snow speeder fire–until they’re lying facedown on the snow?
5. The dialogue is… not good. Sure, parsecs are a unit of distance, not time, words like “magnetic” and “energy” are thrown around without real meaning behind them, the opening crawl of the first movie is frankly ridiculous (though also, for three short sentences, actually a really good bit of exposition). But these are all par for pulpy narratives and/or science fiction which engages badly with the “science” side of things, both of which are de rigeur for space opera. But, like… all Kenobi and Yoda do is spout vague aphorisms at Luke, and this seems to magically turn him into a telepathic fencing master. The number of characters that speak incomprehensible alienese without subtitles is wayyy too high, which means an astonishing amount of the dialogue is just explaining what somebody else said (mostly R2D2 and Chewbacca, who, given their implied level of sass toward other characters, I would actually really like to be able to understand).
6. All the action shots are way too tightly framed, I assume for budget reasons–but this means that stormtroopers miss at laughably close range, the space battles in the first movie have like four X-wings in them (though there’s supposed to be 30), etc.
7. Pacing is kind of a mess. IV feels super rushed; V is frankly boring (asteroid field is a snoozefest compared to the rest; Bespin is a weird tone shift from Space Opera! to something verging a little on film noir; the dialogue isn’t good enough to make the Dagobah scenes interesting); VI, again, is better (but the scenes in Jabba’s palace take way too long and have little real impact on the rest of the movie). More importantly, it suffers from a chronic problem of trilogies, which is that the first movie is standalone with sequel hooks (because we don’t know if we’re gonna earn enough money for them to greenlight 2 and 3), and the second two are a continuous narrative–and all the real emotional payout comes only in the 3rd.
8. And oh my god, the droids. The droids are so boring. Much like Jar-Jar, the plucky comic relief is neither plucky nor comic, and C3PO is frankly annoying as shit. Like, people love to hate Jar-Jar and that’s fine, but honestly, he’s working within a grand tradition here.
9. On the bright side, the second half of Jedi is pretty good–the battle on Endor is fun, Han and Leia are a neat Action Couple, and the scenes on the Death Star are A+ melodrama, with a really cool visual style, and the space battle actually lives up to promise implied by the words “star wars” (even if the underlying strategy, by both the rebels and the empire, was… not very sound).
So yeah, I like Star Wars, and I think most of the things people knock the new trilogy for are pretty justified… just don’t get *too* indignant about Lucas ruining the franchise or anything. It’s never been *that* good (don’t get me *started* on the whole expanded universe thing), and I think nostalgia pretty heavily warps how people judge the movies.
This is a surprising take, and interesting for how contrarian it is—Return of the Jedi is what gets highlighted as the trilogy’s peak?!—but the main thing it misses is that the original Star Wars films are first and foremost atmospheric and mythological masterpieces. They’re all about the macro, all about scale and awe
By analogy, this review feels a bit like looking at an impressionist painting up close and complaining about the shoddy brushwork. If you hold the films up to a microscope you actually fail to see them—rather than seeing them more clearly—because they work by coarse-graining.
The problem with the new Disney stuff isn’t the bad dialogue or the lack of plausibility or the plot holes. Those are red herrings; they don’t actually matter much if the macro is in place. They get rolled out on Reddit at a prescheduled pace because they’re legible objections that geeks have endless practice leveling at popular media.
The problem with the new Disney stuff is that it fails to extend or reinvent the macro. The problem with pastiche is never that it lacks technical chops; often it has more technical chops than its model, and this actually exacerbates the problem. (No personality, no charm, just cold metal machine music.) The new Disney stuff offers a pastiche of the macro that is atmospherically flat, aesthetically tired, and mythologically incoherent. Andor has really good fundamentals plus an adult tone, which I suppose make it a Serious Work Of Prestige Television? But it fails to accomplish what the original trilogy provided, which was classic yet novel, undeniably compelling, intensely loveable macro. It’s a weird comparison, but I think works like Annihilation are closer to the spirit of New Hope than the third Star Wars trilogy. If we’re talking older films, Star Wars feels like… Wizard Of Oz?
(Everything here is equally true of Indiana Jones, which has pretty abysmal and childish plotting and dialogue, yet is highly loveable because of its handle on macro. This has always been what Lucas does best, see also Jurassic Park.)




