The Full Lid 15th November 2019
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Happy Friday everyone!
Welcome! To The Full lid! I'm Alasdair Stuart, professionally enthusiastic pop culture analyst, podcaster, 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo finalist, 2019 BFS award finalist and all around thing liker and stuff enthusiast. Here's the plan; every Friday, around 5, you get all the details of the interesting, weird, fun, clever or often all of the above pieces of pop culture I've encountered in the week. If you like what you read,the archive and sign up link are here. Please share it but if you do please tell folks how to subscribe and where you got it. Also if you like what I do and want to assist me in remaining conscious, why not buy me a coffee?.
I had a dog, and his name was CONTENTS
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Contents
The Order of the Day
Mike Banning Gets Weird
Green Lantern: Far Sector
Signal Boosting
Where You Can Find Me This Week
So How Was Work This Week?
Signing Off/Playing Out
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It is days before the start of World War II. The Austrian Chancellor is about to find out just how badly he's been manipulated, the blitzkrieg threatens to collapse under the twin pressures of logistics and ego and in London, a farewell luncheon for a tenant provides cover for an audacious land grab.
So whenever it's my birthday I like to pick up a couple of books I would never normally go near. This year it was this and My Sister, The Serial Killer by the magnificently named Oyinkan Braithwaite. Reports on that are forthcoming, but here, we're going to talk about Vuillard's grip on tragedy, humor and the absurdity of human behavior. Which, it turns out, very nearly saved millions of lives.
Vuillard dances around Europe with the grace his protagonists believe they have. We begin in Germany, where the mammoth titans of industry let themselves be herded into line behind Hitler. From there he skips across the border to Austria and breaks down the systematic and alternating harassment and support that Germany used to break the Chancellor's will. He also, in the first of a raft of clear-eyed, unblinking portraits of powerful and inadequate men, makes it clear just how little work it was.
Vuillard lives as an author and a historian in the empty spaces. The moments Hitler is not in the room. The collapse of the fragile male ego when faced with an intimidating physical force. Most damning, the English inability to see either corruption or the assertiveness needed to shut down a ranting guest. Especially a guest who is ranting in triumph, a bloviated waist-coat straddled smokescreen of a man, aggrandizing himself to a government, a nation, he knows are too cowardly to say what they think of him to his face. Comedy becomes horror becomes tragedy and the evolution is allowed in the name of civility and the shadow of near apocalypse. Here it's not good men doing nothing that causes evil to triumph, it's men who think they're better than they are doing half of what they should. Vuillard backs away from nothing, sparing not a single inadequacy of these men in the right place at absolutely the wrong time. He also takes great pains to move outside the tidy frame of history and the authority it imparts to the undeserving. Few, he clearly feels, more undeserving than Chancellor Schuschnigg, a man who is returned to again and again as being a vital cog in this elaborate machine of horror. The book's best passage concerns the fundamental absurdity of both Schuschnigg and the narrative, pointing out how a tiny piece of photo manipulation changes him from a confused, frightened little man to a colossus of European history.
But what really drew me up short was the German war machine itself, and Vuillard's view of it. The much vaunted invasion of Austria is stopped, twice, by obstacles that are uniquely hidden from the Nazi's pure, Aryan, empathy-free view of the world. The first is ambition, Vuillard going into detail as to how their puppet Chancellor decided he'd like rather more of a moment in the Sun than was planned. The second? Entropy. The tanks barely worked, the roads barely carried them. The mighty German war machine was, like a 1990s comic character, bent double under it's own machismo and almost broken by that long before the war even started.
A world changing event, one with horrifying echoes today, almost didn't happen because of human egotism and Murphy's Law. It's a concept as reassuring as it is blankly horrifying and it's one Vuillard puts front and centre but lets you find for yourself. The absurdity of war, the presence of hope on the other side of the coin, the pathetic bullies and cowed leaders who stood by and let it happen. All of it's here, described in prose as light on it's feet as Ginger Rogers and with rocks in both it's fists. Short, funny, horrific and unforgettable.
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Keith Garrett joins the Pantheon of Big Men Who Are Good. Also I'm stealing that Quesadilla technique.
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You know that thing that happens when I get really excited about something and maybe think too much about it? Me too!
Okay, so it was announced this week that Agent Mike Banning is set to join Detective John McClane in the NO MANNER OF LUCK AT ALL Club. Angel has Fallen, the third installment of Gerard Butler’s every day story of facepunching kind of racist PTSD riddled Secret Service folk was, despite all indications to the contrary, actually quite good. About 18,000% less racist than both its predecessors, it at least approached interesting issues of emotional damage, PTSD, ageing and what makes a man like Mike Banning. It’s not Logan, as I said at the time, but it was a really good sign off for Banning. Promoted into his outgoing boss’ position, exonerated, even reunited with his army ranger survivalist dad who you KNOW has every episode of Duck Dynasty downloaded and flat out refuses to delete them. It was a happy, bullet riddled ending of the exact sort Butler's characters never get.
Except now a second trilogy and local spin-offs are planned. This is pretty much the point where most people begin weeping and rending garments but we don’t do that here. This is a house of baked goods and positivity and the thing is, there’s actually a couple of really good things that could come of this deeply weird decision. Let’s have a look at them.
1. The Mike Banning Cinematic Universe
The piece talks a lot about local language spin-offs, which is far from a new idea. 24 had a successful Indian version, Primeval at one point was planning multiple local language spinoffs in the same continuity which would have been AMAZING. There’s a Korean Leverage now. There’s an American Good Doctor. Ideas cross borders all the time and by definition they become something different in the remaking. A TV show in a different key, if you like. That’s certainly true here too. An Italian take on Banning would be wildly different. A British one would swear more and, odds are, be played by well known cockney facekicker Scott Adkins(SUPER gory clip by the way). And a Mexican Mike? In this day and age? You want to kick stuff over, and have some interesting, grown up, tough conversations about modern biases in the action movie space? That's where you start to have them.
Make them local. Make them gay. Make them female. Make them trans. Make them ace. The Has Fallen series has the most forgiving ‘wardrobe’ of any franchise in years. It’s literally just ‘last honest agent left stranding’ and that agent doesn’t have to, and I'd argue can't, always look like Gerard Butler.
Now where things get really interesting is in the stated aim to potentially fold these characters back into the main franchise. That is a BRILLIANT idea, not just for our capitalist overlords but for the scriptwriters paid a tenth of their worth to put together the next blockbuster. For the overlords, it allows you to break into new markets, sort of like The Great Wall tried but with SO MUCH LESS white savior nonsense. For the scriptwriters, it means you can lean on established continuity at the same time as doing new things with it. Oh and of course it also means the creators of the Local Mike Analogues are compensated for their work each time these characters are used.
It also means this.
2. Mikevengers Mikesemble
There is so much fun to be had in putting different versions of this character together and seeing what happens. Banning has been very specifically written, in Angel especially, as an unusually self-aware T-Rex. He knows he’s a dinosaur, knows that there are agents with vastly different world views and skills who can do stuff he can’t. He also, at the end of Angel, knows not only that his watch is done but he gets to live.
So,Has F4llen (YOU KNOW THEY WILL DO THIS) will open one of three different ways. They’ll either kill Mike (unlikely if 5 and 6 are also on the cards), have him disappear or have him realize he can’t do what he does alone anymore. As the new head of the Secret Service he’s uniquely equipped to assemble a team of like-minded souls. More interestingly still, there’s at least one movie in the idea of Mike being the package that has to be protected. This would serve the franchise’s stated desire to get a little rucky again, give Butler the new found maturity he enjoys playing to push against and provide a perfect excuse to pull a multi-national team together. If the only agents left standing at a summit are an Indian, a Ukrainian and a Brit, you work with what you’ve got. Even when the Brit is revealed to be a traitor (YOU KNOW THEY WILL ALSO DO THIS).
Plus, once the dust has settled and Director Banning is safe/safely invalided out for a cameo in the next one, what better symbol of international cooperation than a team of elite maverick operators who find problems and punch them in every single face hole? Like Tom Clancy without the gear fetish and like earlier ...Has Fallen's without the racism. Everyone wins. Except whichever Brit is parachuted in to play the bad guy, obvs.
3. The Evolution and Redemption of the Action Hero
The action hero of the 21st century is infinitely more interesting than most of his more veiny predecessors and there's no greater example of that than Dwayne Johnson. Johnson brings something flawed and human to every performance (Including Baywatch, just probably not here) and audiences love it. This is fantastic news, not just for the genre but for the emotional health of cishet men all over the damn planet.
Movies are, for many of us, the third parent. For men, they are the emotional template that doesn't give you your hairline and the structures they help you build, and the damage they do, help to define you. For that definition to become more nuanced and inclusive is as welcome as it is decades overdue. The fact it's coming in through the franchise which inflicted London Has Fallen on us is nothing short of miraculous. This is your racist uncle reading Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is the male chauvinist pig in the office telling you how great The Power is. This by all weights and measures should not happen. Yet, potentially, brilliantly, maybe, here we are.
I’m not saying the Has Fallen movies are classics, believe me they aren’t. It’s a wildly variable series held together by the charm of its lead and that charm is strong enough to hold this expansion together too. The series, like Mike, has made the brave choice. The series, like Mike, is now faced with a very different world, one it’s uniquely equipped to explore. Bourbon and poor choices only take you so far and if Has Fallen has realized that? Then these next movies are going to be something very, very different and far more needed than anything that’s come before.
But seriously though, Nolte's toast by movie 5. Set your watches.
Olympus has Fallen and London Has Fallen are available to stream on Amazon Prime and to buy now. So's White House Down, which is basically the same movie as Olympus Has Fallen, just with added Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx and Roland Emmerich. Angel has Fallen will be on blu-ray and streaming by 16th December.
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It's been a hard week. Have the most avuncular former pro wrestler who ISN'T Matt Wallace walk you through the good, the bad and the WHAT?! of wrestling movies.
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Green Lantern: Far Sector
Jo Muillein was a New York cop. Now she has a very different beat. The furthest Green Lantern from home, Jo works the City Eternal, a settlement built from the ruins of three closely associated races' homeworlds. The Nah, the @At and the keh-Topli run the gamut of biological and cybernetic shapes and each one has their own agenda, all in turn connected to their shared history. The City Eternal is both their greatest achievement and their greatest penance. It is a utopia, a peaceful amalgamation of their cultures, a reminder of the worst part of their history and so much more.
Someone has just been murdered there.
NK Jemisin is one of the best writers working today and she takes to comics effortlessly. The book reads, and moves, like the cop at its heart. Every action has purpose, every word has meaning. Jemisin never gets too text heavy, is always happy to let Jamal Campbell's superlative artwork speak but also refuses to let Jo get buried in the waves of new experiences she and we are having. We get just enough to go on, with Jo apparently a new arrival in the Corps and leaning on her past training to get her through. More interesting still is the rich, complex alien world she finds herself working.There's a real hint of Mass Effect's The Citadel to the whole thing and it makes every page sparkle and crackle with invention. Plus it gives Campbell a chance to do things like this.
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As mission statements go, that image is kind of amazing. The symbol of the Corps, those wonderful glasses glasses and Jo's piercing determined eyes while behind her the council look on. Tension and character, world building and design all locked into one image. It's All this good.
A massive part of that is Campbell, who has talked at length about how the City's design is intended to be unsettling. You get that here too, as Jo struggles to get used to a world which is just human enough for her to understand but no more. That's all Jo has to work from and as the series continues, it seems likely that that will be the only thing she can rely on. Deron Bennett's lettering is exemplary too, especially in the scenes where Jo is talking to her erstwhile partner. You get the beat and shape of people's language here and that further reinforces just how far from home Jo is.
And then, just as you think you have a handle on what the book is, Jemisin pulls the rug out from under you. There's a moment of totally left field zen here which is the emotional anchor for the entire series and easily my favorite moment in comics this month. Jo, takes a second. She looks her weird new city in the eyes and finds, despite herself, she likes what she sees. it's a grounded, pragmatic moment of compassion and self care, I loved it and it's looking like a core element of her character.
Green Lantern: Far Sector 1 is a precision tooled piece of invention, character study and science fiction drama. It's effortless to read, which means everyone involved must have sweated blood to get it done. It has more than paid off. Find it at your local comic shop, I found it at mine and if all else fails, here's Comixology.
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We've talked here before, and will again, about the vastly ambitious and successful New Century series. This glorious poster for Princess Thieves hit my desk last week. Yes that is my name on row two, yes I have done quite a lot more voice acting than I thought and yes you can, and should buy this. Find it here.
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And of course, here's my Ko-Fi.
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Where You Can Find Me This Week
At PseudoPod!
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So How Was Work This Week?
You know that thing that Hans Zimmer does in a lot of his soundtracks? Where there's this constantly building but never quite resolved scream?
Some of this week has felt like that. So I did something about it. I decided I'm not doing NaNo this November. I lost all the prep time I needed to Glasgow and while I've got a fun idea, I've not got the sense of its shape I had last year.
See this? This is me not kicking my ass about it.
I'll do the second book. Maybe even start it next month. But this month is all about picking things back up and reassembling them. Glasgow took a lot of people, including me, to the brink of some really damaging behaviors and rowing back from them takes persistence and patience and kindness. It's tough, but not as tough as I feared.
And that's how work was this week.
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Signing Off/Playing Out
We GOT there, folks! Weekend ahoy! Great job getting here and enjoy the weekend. And what better way to enjoy the weekend than checking out the vast amount of amazing free fiction offered by the Escape Artists Podcast Network?
Also check out the Team KennerStuart instagram. This week! Selfies! Pizza! The cutest little avatar of Loneliness ever!
As always I work without a safety net. If you like what you read please consider dropping something in the tip jar. Thank you:)
Remember, hydrate and for the love of God go OUTSIDE. There's like 14 minutes sunshine a day right now. Get some of it.
Playing us out this week! The Sugar Hill Gang because very little makes me happier than aged, cheerfully disreputable rappers:) Seriously these guys are just joyous and SHARP too. So hotel, motel, holiday iiiiiiiinn? Say WHAT? Because this?
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Is a Full Lid.
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