Top Tens of 2017: #10s

Here are the tenth best podcast, film, album, TV show, and videogame of 2017:

#10 Podcast: Don't Zap the Geek

There are some things about Don't Zap the Geek that are a bit rough: the audio quality can take Skype-induced dips, the hosts' familiarity with each other can sometimes obfuscate what's actually going on in an episode, that familiarity can lead to tangents that are often great but also can take away from discussions of other aspects of a particular episode, and the lack of a wrap-up episode is kind of a bummer. Despite all that, it's my favorite of the podcasts dedicated to recapping & discussing the third season of Twin Peaks (honorable mentions to Idle Thumbs' Twin Peaks Rewatch (which I appreciate for the discussion of cinematography especially) & Entertainment Weekly's A Twin Peaks Podcast, which has the opposite problems of this).

An example of why: at one point, the hosts talk about how David Lynch is a director who doesn't do antiheroes. He doesn't ask you to root for someone who is fundamentally doing bad. This is meant positively, and is contrasted with nearly all contemporary prestige television. As someone who is super not sold on Dale Cooper as the sweetheart of the century, it's something I don't know that I fully agree with. But it's also a strong theory of the work and the show that influenced my understanding of it in a way that more straightforward recap shows didn't manage.

Plus it has good jokes about John Justice Wheeler and serious reckonings with the show's violence and a totally baffling appreciation of Bobby Briggs that I absolutely can't get behind.

#10 Film: The Night is Short, Walk on Girl

I have what you might call a general rule. It is a bad one, but it is formed in reaction to many things, and it often serves me well (shouts out to Grant). Boiled down, it amounts to: the end of a movie (or narrative generally) is worthless. Endings suck. They pander or they tie together or they introduce useless obfuscation. They moralize or they idealize. There is no good or useful message to take from them, except that they turn the strange into the comprehensible, and render a product.

Given that criteria, The Night is Short, Walk on Girl might have been one of my favorite films of the year. It is, basically, a film pseudo-sequel to the 2010 anime series The Tatami Galaxy. They share a staff, and the same director - Masaaki Yuasa, who is almost certainly my favorite anime director - directed it. That series followed a high school boy as he attempted to choose a club that would suit him. Each episode, roughly speaking, saw him choose a club, live through it, fail, and revert back to the beginning. Yuasa is also the director of one of my favorite films of all time, also animated: Mind Game. In the past I've highly recommended it with the caveat that it opens with an upsetting scene of sexual assault.

The thing is that the bulk of The Night is Short does everything I love in his movies and shows. It combines the beautiful animation of Ping Pong with the delirious asides of Mind Game, the externalized politics of Kaiba, and the respect for spectacle of Kick-Heart. And, of course, the serious and ludicrous focus on character that defined The Tatami Galaxy. It tells the story of an endless night in which The Girl With Black Hair drinks, performs in a play, shops for a used book, visits ill friends, and diverts multiple kinds of divine judgment. There is also a dude who is convinced he's in love with her, despite the fact that all he has done is literally stalk her.

Which, I suppose, brings us to the issue. Our ostensible protagonist - literally Senpai - is some asshole who is real broken up about his inability to talk to this girl who he likes. And again, there is a lot there that, in the watching, seems fruitful; he is friends with a weirdly fascistic school events coordinator who is super queer coded; he is himself basically an MRA in waiting ready to be told off by this pretty great woman who should clearly be the lead of this film; there is a villain established early that is clearly paralleled to the dude in a way that seems like it is leading to a reckoning; and so on. You may have guessed that it isn't just the ending that disappoints, by now.

The movie takes a turn when The Girl With The Black Hair confronts Ri Haku, the capitalist, and lets him know that he is Connected with everyone, and is in some sense responsible for the brilliant night she has had. This is true in the most saccharine way possible. It is also a clear betrayal of any exciting possibility, a capitulation to capital, and a boring fucking story. From then it only gets worse.

Here's the thing: it's much harder to simply ignore the ending when it turns into what more or less (more) amounts to MRA propaganda. Because there are versions of this movie that last another minute, or a minute less, that are entirely different in meaning. It's fucking frustrating. These versions leave it unclear whether a relationship begins, or cut to a month into it when things fall apart. They, in other words, give context to the ways in which this movie tells the story of a dude who is shitty in ways that aren't necessarily his fault, but which he does nothing to effect.

Is it clear that my frustration with this movie has made me incapable of talking about it in a coherent way? Because that's more or less how I feel. It comes so close to being something unbelievable, and fails in ways that it sets itself up to avoid. And those failures resonate back through to color everything else, and fill this wonderful thing with poison.

#10 Album: I Believe In You by Dolly Parton

Last year, Dolly Parton released an album that was genuinely challenging, exciting, and playful all in the same measure. I can't overstate how good Pure & Simple is. This year, she released another album.

I Believe In You is her first children's album, and that's a weird thing to say. There are so many awkward moments throughout it, and so many exciting ones as well. The main problem, though, is that it is very slight. Which isn't to say in a way that kids might find appealing. Though that could be true. In the end, it's just not the kind of album that makes a huge impression, whether melodically or thematically.

#10 TV Show: American Gods (season 1)

American Gods is a show obsessed with its style that desperately wants to have something to say. It doesn't. Sometimes the style works, though.

#10 Videogame: Doki Doki Literature Club

I came into Doki Doki Literature Club expecting to hate it. The particular virality reminded me a lot of a muted version of Undertale, particularly in how it was made clear that there was a spoilable turn and a metafictional element. Consider those warnings for this free game you may want to play.

Those elements are, in my opinion at least, the weakest parts of this game. What's more, they actively undermine the strongest elements, which is the part that takes the dating sim genre very seriously in a way that interrogates its tropes. They're also, of course, what gained this game its virality, and are entirely at fault for things like my own awareness of its existence. I'm somewhat plugged in to the Smash community, but certainly not enough to hear about a new free game that a creator of the 20XX Tournament mod or "one of the best Melee Links in Jersey" had created.

The basic pitch is that you play a guy who joins a literature club in high school, only to find out it is entirely attended by a variety of attractive girls. They are each drawn in broad strokes, and your player character is internally fairly straightforward with the fact that he's mostly trying to get laid by becoming a member. The central mechanical interaction (aside from clicking to advance text) is fairly neat: every night you are tasked with writing a poem, which you can (and are advised to) game towards the tastes of a particular club member. You do this by picking a word from a list; the cute young girl, Natsuki, enjoys words like "marshmallow" and "fluffy;" the more mature, literary girl, Yuri, prefers lengthy, uncommon, or imagistic words like "aura," "anxiety," or "raindrops;" and your long-suffering friend and people-pleaser, Sayori, prefers more emotional descriptions like "tears" or "sad." It manages to break up the flow of the game while simultaneously developing these girls' characters and testing your own knowledge and assumptions about who they are supposed to be. Plus, it leaves you with the possibility of a poem, rather than awkwardly trying to force you into generatively writing one, which is super smart.

Saying that the horror/metafictional elements detract is not as clean as all that. Without them I wouldn't have just missed the game entirely; it is incredibly unlikely that some of the choices that work so well wouldn't have been made at all. For instance: part of the dawning horror is the drip feed of (which isn't to say particularly nuanced) information that you get which indicates that each of these datable girls has very specific trauma or mental illness. I'm not qualified to speak on the specifics of anything particular about that in terms of representation, but it is all written in a way that feels intentional and sensitive. Which isn't to say unproblematic. (Speaking of which: the thing that kept me playing as I was flagging early on was the fact that the game's discussion of literature is actually pretty solid. It largely consists of fairly basic craft discussions and questions around the purpose or embededness of style, but done in a way that feels not dismissive and useful for the presumed ages of the characters.)

The problems that these characters are dealing with are the basis for its horror, but they're also genuinely interesting critiques of the tropes of the dating sim genre. Your bubbly, people-pleasing best friend, for instance, confesses her depression to you. She is fairly straightforward in saying that her ability to bring people together is related to how much self-loathing drives her away from close relationships and how much it simultaneously brings her joy to help bring other people together because she can then fade into the background. Like I said, I can't say, but it doesn't feel wrong.

All of which is to say: while I came in expecting to feel negative, what I'm left with is mostly a sort of ambivalence that leans positive. Because the metafictional elements don't work in an especially literary way, despite the game's relative intelligence in those matters. Briefly(ish): the fourth girl in the club, Monika, is the president. She doesn't have a route. She ends up manipulating the game files. In the ordinary ending, she reveals that she has tried to subtly enhance the issues present in the other girls. After this goes bad, she ultimately deletes them and brings you to a room in a liminal space where she declares her love, happy that you - the player, not the player character - can exist together with her, alone and in love, forever. She does this because she has become self-aware as an entity within a game.

I say it doesn't work because it uses the metafiction as another kind of narrative abstraction, rather than a real break. The kindly friend being someone who suffers makes sense, and actively makes the player rethink the assumptions of the genre; the ignored character who undermines the game does the same thing, except with significantly less impact. In context, it kind of just doesn't work.

Some of my feelings about this game would be different if I didn't know games like We Know The Devil existed. Or Anatomy or Dust City, both by Kitty Horrorshow, which do the strategic restarts and 'local files' better, respectively. Or even Liz Ryerson's Problem Attic, which shares very little with this game except the way in which it integrates the horror of play into an interrogation of traumas much more holistically. But even without those, there's something deeply compelling about Doki Doki Literature Club, and there's also so many ways in which it doesn't quite get there.

Top Tens of 2017: Introduction

Over the next ten days, I'll be bringing you some top ten lists right here. Five of them, to be precise, all at once, from the bottom of the list to the top. It's an idea I had when I was putting them together and noticed some strange synchronicities lining up; it's an experiment that I'm expecting to fail, but that I want to try anyway.

The lists will cover Podcasts, Videogames, Albums, Films, and TV Shows. So tomorrow, on the first day, there will be a post that reveals what I consider the tenth best podcast, game, show, movie, and record from last year. The day after will be number 9, and so on. I think that makes sense? Some entries will be a couple sentences, others will be a full essay; it just depends on how I felt like talking about them. Themes will, hopefully, arise throughout the numbers alongside broader themes on the list (which is to say: beyond things that I liked or watched and had some shit to say about).

After it's over I'll try to collate it in a more readable form for those interested in one list in particular. Maybe. This has been an absurd amount of work for something that was basically a joke. On the other hand, though, I wrote less in 2017 than I have since I started this blog, probably, and felt bad about it. So if you forgot (like I did sometimes) that I'm a writer, here's too many words to the contrary.

Oh, and a bonus: I also did a list of Books (I Read) of 2017, but didn't feel like I could do justice writing them up, so here it is in full:

10. Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (Mark Frost)
9. World, Chase Me Down (Andrew Hilleman)
8. The Boy in the Earth (Fuminori Nakamura)
7. Pirate Utopia (Bruce Sterling)
6. Crash Override (Zoe Quinn)
5. Prodigal Summer (Barbara Kingsolver)
4. Last Orders (Graham Swift)
3. Ninefox Gambit (Yoon Ha Lee)
2. The Familiar Volume 4: Hades (Mark Z. Danielewski)
1. The Familiar Volume 5: Redwood (Mark Z. Danielewski)

Valentine's Day Compilation 3: Extra

The theme for 2018's Fuck the Polis! Valentine's Day Compilation is Extra. Just send the file to uninterpretative at gmail to be included (or hit me up on Twitter or Facebook or wherever). Wav files preferred but whatever you output can be made to work. Any questions or clarifications or ideas you want to float are super welcome at the same.

2017 was Solidarity; 2016 was Pop. The themes are as loose as you want them to be; if you just have a thing, hit me up with it. But if you want to, this is a great opportunity to go ham, to push out some bullshit, to go in on an idea you had but that totally couldn't fit anywhere else. You don't have to write a song about doing Too Much, but you totally could. This is going to be a fucked year and we might as well start it off right. And if you have something but can't finish it, I'm happy to chat with you and help out on whatever you need. No promises as to quality, though.

There aren't any genre or style requirements, and your level of professionalism doesn't matter. Just whatever you're comfortable with doing, especially if it will push you a little bit into trying something you might not otherwise.

As I've said previously, thanks a bunch for even considering? I do a bunch of weird bullshit and this is another one of those things and I very much appreciate y'all. I'm gearing up for this year to be a fucking trainwreck, personally and politically, and what better way to do that than by getting a little extra.

Charlie Chaplin and Anti-Comedy

Colin Spacetwinks has been sharing some of their old comedy writing/theory on Twitter recently, and one of the pieces that came up was this post about Too Many Cooks. They relate it specifically to the Space Ghost: Coast to Coast episode "Fire Ant" to talk about the technique of "dragging the joke out," and specifically to position it in the sort of "anti-comedy" popularized by Adult Swim. It's a good post, and its resurfacing is weirdly timely for me.

The Castro Theater just had a double feature of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and Fritz Lang's Metropolis. I'd seen the latter a handful of times, though no more recently than a decade ago. The former I hadn't seen. It was, in fact, my first Chaplin movie period, I think. That's despite spending literal full weekends in college scheduling my sleep around what TCM was playing. I had a lot of fun in college.

The programming of that double feature was smart as hell in ways I did not anticipate. Even not having seen Modern Times, I knew the broad strokes made sense together. The short version is: they're both films about labor, featuring broad, iconic images of industrial machinery. The particulars were what I wasn't ready for. I didn't realize that, for instance, the opening shots are nearly identical.

Both films open on the face of the clock. They also both move from this into scenes of undifferentiated laborers moving to work. The main difference is a generic one: in Modern Times, the shift to the laborers is prefaced by a shot of sheep being driven forward. It sets up a parallel with the workers we are about to see. In Metropolis, the laborers move into the space of an elevator rather than directly into a factory. A title card then describes them as going 'deep below.' It's as concise a visual argument for the definition of genres -- comedy and science fiction -- as I've maybe ever seen. There's a whole essay there, but I want to talk a little more about Modern Times' comedy.

I bring up Spacetwinks' essay because one of the most striking aspects of Modern Times, to me, was how close it came to that kind of anti-humor. Plenty of it was the sort of humor I expected of Chaplin through cultural osmosis -- vaudevillian slapstick and mugging, underdog character work, &c. -- but the execution was surprising.

An early joke involves the boss testing out a machine that can feed laborers while they work. It's sold to him as a way to reduce the wasteful lunch break, and so he decides to have Chaplin give it a go. The scene is structured about how you would expect: everything goes well until it doesn't. Once it doesn't, it starts going worse and worse, quickly.

The thing, though, is that it isn't all that quickly. The scene itself lasts for, I'd guess, nearly ten full minutes. It's a funny scene, and it isn't structured like a Tim & Eric bit or anything; instead of languishing, it continuously escalates toward the conclusion. Even still, the scene itself struck me in a way much closer to that sort of anti-comedy than to a lot of the other jokes even within the film itself.

Another tangent that I'll note without diving into: I don't know that I've ever seen comedy theorized in a way that was anything but ahistorical. Comedians themselves are the worst about this, of course. But the rhythms of comedy change over time, and according to knowledge.

There is one other major scene that I read as anti-comedy in Modern Times. It comes near the end. Chaplin has been in and out of prison and work throughout the film. He is finally trying to make good by his ward, who has secured him an audition as a member of the waitstaff at a restaurant of Singing Waiters. Before the obvious joke, though, he has to actually wait on tables; in particular, on a gentleman who is furious that he has had to wait an hour for his roast duck.

About two thirds of the way through the bit, Chaplin is nearly at his table with the meal. The band strikes up, and he is immediately surrounded by dancers. He gets caught in their twirling and seething. The only part of him left visible his upstretched hand holding the plate of food. He does a full rotation of the floor, begins to walk forward, and gets caught up again. This is funny in its flouting of expectations. The scene seems to have played itself out, but it continues. It's when he gets caught again for the third time that it borders on the kind of comedy where "dragging out the joke" is itself the joke.

Unlike the automatic feeder, this sequence doesn't really structure itself by escalation. The thing that ultimately happens could have easily have happened the first time around with no great loss; the escalations are secondary to the act of languishing on the act of watching. At the time of the film's release, both scenes were, presumably, uproarious. They are not played like they are meant in some way as ironic commentary on comedy. But it's nearly a century on, and they feel that way now. To me at least.

Fight From Inside the Fandom

Back in December, I wrote that a leftist trolling would involve "litter[ing] the user-generated-content hell with strategic propaganda." It's a phrase that's stuck with me.

In the months since I wrote it, I've been digging through the My Brother, My Brother and Me archives. It's a comedy advice podcast. It's been rapidly growing in the last couple years, in large part because of how "good" the three brothers are; how willing they are to admit to mistakes of ignorance, to talk openly about their own growth, and to do their best to build their comedy with a foundation of inclusivity and understanding. Take this response from a TV Insider interview with the brothers, in response to the question "How do you build a brand that revolves around positivity and compassion in comedy?":

Griffin: You f--k up a whole lot when you start doing a podcast, and you hear from people who really, really, really like you, who let you know very politely that you hurt their feelings and ostracized them, and then you stop doing it. And then after enough of those, you kind of stop doing it to everybody, or you try your f--king best to. Literally, that’s it. I think it’s easy to get defensive, but I just always felt so miserable when I heard, “I’m a big fan of yours and you hurt my feelings."
Travis: When someone tells you, “Hey, what you just did hurt me,” you have two options. One is to say like, “You’re wrong, and I didn’t do anything wrong.” Or your other option is to say, “Okay, well if you feel that way, let me take a step back and really look at what I did.” Do that second one every time.
Griffin: I think doing anything that has a big enough audience these days becomes a lesson in empathy. The show and me, Griffin, a person, have gotten so much better since those lessons have come pouring in. I like having that relationship with our audience, and I genuinely think it’s funnier to not say no to s--t, or not slam people instead of getting on board with them. I think that’s the funnier thing 100% of the time.
Justin: It’s harder, but it’s always funnier.

It's a good sentiment, especially in the retrograde world of comedy. Honestly, I think that a lot of what is appealing about their work is shaped by the fact that they aren't Comedians. But that's a subject for another day.

Part of what compelled me to keep listening to back episodes of their show was the promise of the origin story of this development in their work. Because there's definitely an origin story that they reference for, like, a hundred episodes after it happened. I think it's explained fairly well in this piece for Brooklyn Magazine:

Justin told me, “I think we’ve always tried to be [inclusive], it’s just early on we didn’t necessarily have the tools or the understanding of how to be that way. I think mainly that’s because we grew up around people like us. So that was our default. But that expanded. ‘People like us’ has gotten a lot broader since we’ve had a much broader audience.”
The turning point was furries. It was around episode 30, not even in response to a listener’s letter, but to a Yahoo Answers question from a thirteen-year-old furry wondering about coming out to his family. The brothers’ comedy comes from escalation, each taking the previous joke farther and to sillier lengths. In this case, the joke—the “joke”—was about how freaked out and disturbed they were by furries.
The next episode, in the middle of answering another question—from a listener afraid of being made fun of for being in their school play—Justin segued into an apology. “Like, if you look at us. Last week we talked a lot of yay about furries, but to cover up the fact that we are all right now, as we record the show, wearing furry costumes.” Griffin said, “I’m a lynx.” Travis: “I’m a sexy cow.” And Justin? “I’m an apologetic tiger, because I feel bad to our furry friends.” Griffin chimed in, “I feel wicked bad!” He continued, “Let’s put this question on pause, cause we need to address this. I think that hatred comes from fear, and fear comes from misunderstanding.” And the brothers owned up to misunderstanding furries, and thanked the listeners who’d written in to set them straight.
As Justin told me, “Afterwards, we got these tweets from people who were like, ‘Hey, I’m a furry, and I like your show, and that sucked.’ I don’t know who we thought was listening, but we certainly didn’t think furries were, ‘cause we didn’t know any growing up. Once we realized that we hurt these people, we felt like garbage about it. So we were like, let’s make the decision to learn, and talk to these people, and celebrate them and become wildly pro-furry. What we realized is, isn’t it also a lot funnier to be wildly pro-furry. I think it’s funnier to be really into everything, permissive of everything.”
It’s not that they’re pretending to be pro-furry because being pro-furry is silly. The McElroys decided—and the success of MBMBaM proves—that actually being enthusiastic about everything opens the door to better comedy.

To recap: something like half a year after they started the podcast, the brothers went in on furries in a typical "this is funny because we are having an outsized reaction to a thing we don't understand (or want to)" style bit. The difference between them and 99% of other comedy is that, when pressed on the shittiness of that bit, they apologized sincerely and did their best to stop doing that.

Or, at least, that's how it's turned out in the long run. Part of the reason I was so compelled to get back to that incident is because, frankly, there are at least another couple dozen episodes of the show where they clearly haven't actually learned from that error, despite constantly professing to. They're repeatedly shitty to people during that time, except now in a way where they preface it by saying how much they learned from being shitty about furries.

As an origin, it's a pretty fascinating one. Partially because telling the story lead to its enactment; but also, for me, because it seems very much like an example of that kind of strategic propaganda I advocated for.

Even more, it suggests a possible addendum to my essay, another tactical opportunity. I more or less completely ignored fandom in it, despite my hovering on the periphery of a million of them forever. What that origin suggests, to me at least, is the possibility of a sort of dedicated left entryism; a program for people who are fans of things to guide them into pressing advantages on new or developing creators.

This could take a number of possible forms. One option would be something like a generally-accessible resource sheet, pointing out certain methods of approaching sympathetic creators. It could be completely straightforward, like "if you want to see responsive, growing creators do better, try this," or even in the style of those viral Tumblr/Twitter posts that treat everyone who doesn't act exactly how you just learned to as an incomprehensible asshole.

Another would be a centralized group who actively searched out burgeoning successes and deployed members to their fandom. An IRC would work for this, but something like a facebook meme page might actually be even more ideal and difficult to detect/subvert. Admins could point to creators who seemed sympathetic through an understood language within the memes themselves, allowing followers to integrate within the fandom and deploy targeted criticism/propaganda.

The goal, to be clear, would be to create a sustainable method by which we could repeat something like what happened with the McElroys. One thing that gets left out in their origin is any question of what happened to those furries; this is the sort of thing that requires some investment (to understand the norms of the space) but not an indefinite amount. Listening to a pre-Pitchfork-level band's album and patiently explaining its exclusivity in normal channels might take a couple hours over a week, and they're certainly going to remember it.

The possibilities here are, admittedly, a little harder to imagine with an economic leftist argument (rather than a cultural one), so I'm not breaching them now. Maybe if I have some ideas later, or if you do. I'd certainly be interested.

5 Thoughts on "The Xena Scrolls"

I don't know that I'll be doing every recap episode, but man, season 2's clip show picks up and develops the thoughts from before in a neat way. It's nowhere near as good as "Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards," but most things aren't.

1. Up to this point in the series, it almost feels like the writers are more interested in characterizing by inversion. From Hudson Leick's two-episode stunt as Xena to Lucy Lawless' role as Xena, Dianna & Meg in "Warrior...Princess...Tramp" to Gabrielle's bloodlust in "Ten Little Warlords," there's a lot of it. Including "The Xena Scrolls," it's almost at the point where it feels as common as any of the characters acting like they're "supposed to" act, even though that obviously isn't strictly true. Even Joxer gets it here, to an extent.


2. Where "Athens City" was a recap episode that largely focused on structure but allowed for some very clear, good moments of character development, "The Xena Scrolls" is very structurally focused on character while allowing for a couple moments of what we'll call worldbuilding. Nearly all the clips in "The Xena Scrolls" give a moment of character rather than re-tell a story, which makes sense given that it would be pretty weird if the centuries-later descendants of Xena, Gabrielle and Joxer did a lot of character work for any of the ancestors. The thing about this, though, is that up until now it's clear that Xena: Warrior Princess is set in a sort of mythological time; Xena herself invents CPR in Ancient Greece -- which would have been anachronistic even in "The Xena Scrolls" -- and hops happily through histories of Grecian, Roman, and Biblical origin as though they were separated by a few miles and weeks. "The Xena Scrolls" not only positions itself during World War II with explicit references to Nazis and Hitler, it ends with a sting saying "Fifty Years Later" with a fantastical version of the show being pitched to Rob Tapert (executive producer on Xena: Warrior Princess) by a thoroughly 90s 'descendant' of Joxer. It's the first episode, in other words, that puts Xena: Warrior Princess definitively in, if not our own timeline, then one that is self-contained.


3. I'm glad they reused the trope of not just using clips from Xena: Warrior Princess, although the way they did it this time (Joxer tries to take credit for what look like some old Universal Horror pictures & gets called on it) is significantly reduced from "Athens City."


4. The anti-Nazi stuff, which when I watched a few years back I probably kind of balked at, feels embarrassingly more relevant. I wonder how it felt a year and a half ahead of Saving Private Ryan; probably trendy?
   
   Even more than that, though, it feels strange coming just two episodes after "Ten Little Warlords," which is Ares, God of War's big coming-out-as-a-character episode. In that he loses his godhood and has to go through the tribulations of being human, until Xena ultimately helps him win his sword, and so powers, back. A (really very bad) Christmas episode later and we're here, where Ares gets out of his tomb and immediately talks about how dope he thinks Hitler is and how much he wants to help him. And, as previously mentioned, one of the big points of "Ten Little Warlords" is that Ares' absence causes folks who aren't used to harnessing anger to completely lose control, which goes completely unaddressed here. I wonder what that looks like in the Xena universe.


5. For all the shitting on Hitler this episode does, there is a bit of a feel of equivocation on whether biology is destiny. There's an obvious alternative version where Lucy Lawless is a descendant of, say, Gabrielle, Renee O'Connor of Joxer and Ted Raimi of Xena. They didn't go that route, though, even as they largely change the characters of the descendants (Lawless' Mel is meek; O'Connor's Janice is swashbuckling; Raimi's 'Jacques' is ... pretty much Joxer). Around half of the way through the rest of this season is where I stop rewatching and start seeing a show for the first time, so part of me hopes that they went along with the idea here and dug through it: this episode takes place in the 1940s and 1990s; why not have The Xena Scrolls II in the 2040s? Make Lawless Joxer's great-great-great-etc. granddaughter.
   
   I'm sort of just doing fandom work here (decades late), but the point is that the show opens itself up to the possibility of not conforming in this way. Which isn't to say it's a radical show -- it closes itself off in a million others -- but the constant inversion of characters, the contextualizing work of non-Xena: Warrior Princess properties in the clip show, the myth-time of it, and much more makes Xena: Warrior Princess a peculiar thing that I hope gets explored as much as it could.

5 Thoughts on "Athens City Academy of Performing Bards"

Calling "Athens City of Performing Bards" (Xena: Warrior Princess Season 1, Episode 13) one of the best clip shows of all time would be talking out of my ass -- the only other clip show episode I can think of is "The Prince Who Runs Through the Night" from Revolutionary Girl Utena -- but it's still an impulse I have. And I think it's worth saying, at least, that it's a wildly successful recap episode that manages to successfully develop characters and themes and to produce great moments. The rest of this post will be a quick rundown of some of the cool shit in this episode.

1. The storytelling advice is kind of garbage, but makes sense for Gabrielle. The points are basically: Your story needs a moral, and it needs to be visual. These are things that I think are self-evidently the kind of craft garbage that can be useful for the inexperienced but is ultimately harmful; and I like that it's coming from Gabrielle here, who is the most autodidact of the bunch. She's a very empathetic character but she's also super gifted in a way that leads to cockiness (see "Hooves & Harlots") in the fiction, and this kind of misguided helpfulness genuinely feels like it develops the character.


2. The show to this point is surprisingly interested in systemic problems; two of the dozen prior episodes feature scenarios in which war is on the horizon, and the culprit is quickly rooted out as the financially interested party (an arms dealer and a ('neutral') warlord. So when this episode stages its central conflict -- Gabrielle's not being properly registered -- as a story of organized power of students/workers against an administrative/owner class, it works pretty well. It's also tied into the Spartacus usage, which brings us to the next point.


3. It's a recap episode that's actually pretty necessary, and done in a way that provides not just wrap-up but context. The others who are trying to get into the Academy tell stories that pull from old Hercules movies and the Kubrick film Spartacus, situating Xena in the context of a history of period pieces. It also pulls from the episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journey in which Xena the character was created, providing backstory that the show itself has largely only gestured toward to this point. On top of that, it has Gabrielle tell these stories from the position of being someone insistent on a moral and visual focus, so it reinforces that the conflicts to this point are not just the development of Xena's character but an attempt at an education of a sort.


4. The last time I watched this episode was around three years ago, and I think we had decided that we were going to make an EP about this first season (you can find that here). When we were making that, I was writing a short essay (as a sort of liner notes) putting Xena: Warrior Princess into the frame Malcolm Harris developed for his essay "Upping the Antihero" -- what he called a "consultant procedural." The argument wasn't that it fit perfectly, but that it was surprisingly apt for a show that significantly predated the shows he was discussing, especially given that he was arguing for a specific reading of it as a collusion of genre and material developments. The stories that Gabrielle tells in "Athens Academy of Performing Bards" reinforce just how much Xena's deeds (to this point in the series) rely on governmental stability -- whether that's a town council, a druidic cult, or a king -- that gives episodic stability to her adventures while simultaneously allowing her to act outside of the law. Each set of clips more or less boils down to: a thing happened; we consulted a pseudo-governmental body which reacted in X or Y fashion; Xena won the day through cunning and prowess. I still think there's something to that connection, anyway.


5. Two little pieces of character development also make this a pretty great episode. The first, at the very beginning, is for Xena: when Gabrielle wants to go to the Academy, she first makes sure that Gabrielle at least thinks she's doing it for the right reasons, and then unconditionally supports her. The second is in Gabrielle's relationship with Orion/Homer: he's maybe the half-dozenth love interest she's had, and the first that signals that she's aware of this happening. Rather than go full bore on the romantic elements, she takes a role more typical of Xena to this point, except with her skills. She reads the situation and supports him through his troubles with his dad, and ends with him as something between a potential lover and a friend. It's a nice way to acknowledge that the show has relied on certain structural pillars and that it feels confident enough to shake them a bit, while at the same time giving Gabrielle precedent for not having to rely on them to make sense as a character.