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Recently speculative fiction author Charlie Jane Anders posted an essay on tor.com about character agency in fiction, interrogating the wisdom that characters, principally protagonists, are required to have agency. Anders presented Arthur Dent from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as an example case but confessed difficulty in presenting more examples but remained certain that they existed.

This got me thinking on such examples and what agency means for a fictional character. First off when we speak of a character’s agency, I think primarily we are pondering ‘plot authorship.’ The influence the character can exert to shape, direct, or stop the story’s plot. Certainly, Arthur Dent has very little plot authorship, he bounces, nearly always without his intention or proactive action, from crisis to crisis. Dent is far from the first or even most famous character trapped by their circumstance.

Alice from Alice in Wonderland is another such character. While she initiated the plot by following the rabbit from there on, she is on a ride that is mostly beyond her control. Lemuel Gulliver from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is also a character swept by circumstance with limited plot authority. For a more recent example you could consider Sarah Conner from the film The Terminator. Sara in that film is simultaneously the protagonist, the point of view character, and the plot’s Macguffin. Until the final sequences of the story, she is pulled along by other characters, her life in their hands with very little input as to what happens to her.

Clearly, a protagonist does not require a great deal of plot authorship for a story to be meaningful, memorable, or lasting. That said it would appear, at least to me, that the absence of plot authorship is an element in certain types of characters or stories.

Arthur Dent is the ‘straight man’ in Hitchhiker’s farcical, fantastic comedy. He has no agency because he is there to heighten the absurdity to deliver the comedy. Give him too much ability to shape the events and the farce would turn into mediocre adventure.

Alice and Gulliver as reader surrogates, for one as a person to give voice to the reader’s questions as the wonder of the setting spills out and the other to be the subject of the satire and to perhaps see their own reality and its insanity from a new perspective.

Sarah Conner lacks plot authorship because the story, not the plot mind you, is about her gaining it. By the film’s finale she has gained the ability to shape and direct not only her life but the future as well, but to gain it she, and we the audience, must first be made aware of it absence.

Charlie Jane Anders is correct you can obsess too much over if this character or that character have agency, but the lack of agency is also a specific trait that, like everything else in the tale, much serve a purpose delivering the author’s desired effect.

Not much to say this morning that I haven’t already said, so here are 3 pictures from our trip to the San Diego Zoo on April 2nd.

First a Jaguar presenting the most dangerous position know to many a cat lover, on his back with a belly exposed for rubs.

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The rains have returned to San Diego and with the fluctuations in barometric pressure so have my headaches. Not with the force that would require me to stay at home and endure the stink of painting as the contractors continue to reconstruct our condominium but enough pain that conjuring a subject for an essay seems to be an impossible task. So, once again, here a few bits and bops on my mind without any particular theme or connection.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returns for season 2 on June 15, 2023. Yay. I am an old fart and for me when someone mentions Star Trek my mind flies instantly to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. I watched most of TNG and very little of the other series offerings, but SNW seems to scratch that ich quite well and I am happy to have it back.

A new short story idea. For the first time in a few years a short story idea has popped into my head. It is mystical supernatural horror. Inspiration struck while I was giving a rewatch to The Last Wave an arthouse horror movie from down under.

I am annoyed that Disney+ has released no behind the scenes/making of documentaries for the Star Wars series Andor. Andor is the best thing to happen to the franchise in The Empire Strike Backand I desperately want that bonus material. I suspect, without evidence, that since the decision has already been made that there will be only two season they are going to hold off on that stuff until the series is finished.

This week I returned to my blog after a bit of an extended absence.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed a wet spot on the floor of the dining area of our condo. when I went to get some napkins from the counter separating the kitchen from the dining area to clean it up, I discovered that all the napkins were soaked.

The unit above ours had sprung a plumbing leak in their kitchen and the water had invaded our kitchen, walls, and dining area.

For 10 days my sweetie-wife and I lived in a hotel with only so-so Wi-Fi while ServPro tore out kitchen, walls, ceiling, and flooring. We returned home just last Friday but as the studs had not completely dried, we endured all weekend loud blowers and de-humidifiers, and it was only yesterday that we could hear ourselves think in a living room.

Sadly, the adventure is not over. Now, the contractors have to arrive and schedule their work to rebuild everything. At some point I expect we’ll be forced out into a hotel again, hopefully one with better Wi-Fi.

Still, no one is injured, sick, dying, or dead, so while annoying it is all tolerable.

Late to the party I watched Top Gun: Maverick the sequel to 1986’s Top Gun. I did not rush out to see this acclaimed piece of cinema last year because I had watched the original in 1986 and found it lacking. I can say that the sequel is better, with a more defined arc and plot but hardly the sort of the movie that leaves a lasting positive impression.

36 years following the events of Top Gun, hotshot pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, whose career has stalled at the rank of captain, is called to train and select a team for a daring nigh impossible mission to destroy an enemy Uranium enriching facility before it can come online and disrupt the delicate balance of nuclear power in the region. Complicating his task is that one of the pilots is Bradley Bradshaw the son of the man Maverick got killed in a training accident. Faced with a nearly unachievable mission and the deep personal resentment of his dead friend’s son, Maverick must find a way to seize success and get all the pilot home alive.

Unlike the first film, this movie presents us with a clear plot objective, destroy the enrichment facility, and a clear story objective, heal the rift between Maverick and Bradshaw. It’s easy to see why this move was such a hit in the theater. The aerial cinematography is fantastic and thrilling. On a massive screen it undoubtedly induced motion sickness for some of the audience. The writers, including long time Tom Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, avoid anything that might offend any member of the audience or close a foreign market. The enemy state is never named, the pilots are concealed under full-face black flight gear, and even the region is left unspecified. The enemy exists only conceptually.

Top Gun Maverick is a perfectly acceptable ‘popcorn’ flick with enough action to be thrilling and just enough character to have some emotional weight but hardly deserving of the industry’s top accolades for writing or Best Picture.

The rest of this review contains spoilers for the movie.

Many people have pointed the similarities between the mission in this movie with the climatic attack on the Death Star in Star Wars; a high-speed run down a narrow valley/trench to hit a small precise target. My mind went to a classic WWII film that inspired George Lucas, The Dam Busters, based on an actual mission that had those requirements. (Undoubtedly Top Gun: Maverick upset Peter Jackson because if he gets his remake of The Dam Buster produced, he will seem to be derivative rather than the other way around.)

I was bothered by some of the logical lapses in the story. There is a nearby enemy airfield that the US Navy kindly puts out of commission with a number of cruise missile strikes. That’s all well and good, but the SAM (Surface to Air) missile sites along the rim of the valley/trench, a very serious threat to the mission, are left utterly untouched. Once the cruise missiles hit the runway the Navy fails to fly any sorties to distract or confuse any enemy CAP (Combat Air Patrol) as cover for the real mission.

Thew entire third act, with Maverick and Bradshaw shot down and trying to escape the incognito enemy is far too fantastic to be believed. I had really hoped that they had killed Maverick when he used his own plane and its countermeasures to save Bradshaw. That would have a nice symmetry to it, Maverick got Bradshaw’s killed by being reckless but died saving Bradshaw. I wonder if Cruise’s ego refused such an ending.

Top Gun: Maverick while superior to the original remains essentially a brainless film well suited for popcorn and fun.

As I have mentioned before one of the things I like doing on YouTube is watching younger people reacting to films that they have never seen before. It’s always interesting to see which scene and moments are commonly and sometimes universally selected for their review videos.

A side-effect I has not anticipated when I discovered these videos is the bluntness with which I would come to understand just how much the world has changed in my lifetime.

My 50s are behind me and a lot of these films that are reacted to come from the 70s and 80s containing references that were understood my nearly everyone in the audience but are now strange cryptic moments to younger viewers.

For example, in the 1973’s The Exorcist Father Merrin, Max von Sydow under fantastic old-age make-up by Dick Smith, frequently with shaky hands opens a tiny tin and take a small white tablet. People of the time and well into the 80s and 90s understood with any expositions that this was medication for a heart condition. Merrin has server heart disease and is in poor health. Younger viewers have no comprehension of this and Merrin’s heart attack, which is not called out as one on-screen, comes as an inexplicable surprise.

The Legal Framework for South Africa’s Apartheid was passed into law in 1948 and remained enforced until the 1990’s creating as oppressive, racist, regime the disenfranchised, abused, and subjugated the majority population of that country by the white Europeans. The 1980s saw significant outrage and international protest about the South African government and its racist rule. This naturally bled into entertainment and 1989 the sequel to the hit Lethal Weapons utilized this wide-spread disgust at Apartheid to craft villainous South African diplomats as their antagonists.

And this intuitive understanding of the evils of Apartheid has sublimated away from morning dew. A millennial watching Lethal Weapon 2 was confounded by the inclusion of racism into these already despicable foreign diplomats. (Undoubtedly had they been from the American South wearing the ‘stars and bars’ it would have failed to be shocking. The Confederate Flag is an internationalsymbol of racism appearing in Icelandic Television as that signifier.) The widespread knowledge, disgust, and repulsion to South Africa’s apartheid is a subject for history textbooks and not popular media.

The world is forever changing and what is something that ‘everybody knows’ is tomorrow’s obscure trivia.

My earliest memories are of horror film playing at a drive-in theater. Fragments of the film, vivid color, brains in jars, stay with me to this day so many decades later. It is not surprising I grew up with a taste for horror movies. Over the long years those tastes focused and resolved into my best-loved types of horror cinema.

Ghost stories are without a doubt the horror I love best. I can’t explain why this genre appeals so strongly to me but from classic cinema and literature such as The Haunting/The Haunting of Hill House to more recent fare like The Night House, or Last Night in Soho, ghosts have fascinated and occasionally terrified me. Ghosts hold no terror for me in reality. I do not believe in ghosts and spirits. Life is a bio-chemical reaction and once the reaction stops, we are gone from this Earth. The emergent properties from out brain that we call ourselves vanishes with the cessation of life. But despite this firm, mechanistic view of reality and life, it is the ghost story that fascinates and compels me.

At the other end of my horror preferences lies the genre of Slashers.

What makes it strange that slashers so often are uninteresting or laughable to me is that they bear a close evolutionary relation to a genre I do very much care for the giallo. What differentiates the giallo from the slasher, at least to me, is that the Italian films are more centered on the mystery, the macabre, and flamboyant cinematic style while the latter is more focused on the kills, the more gruesome and outlandish the better. This is not to denigrate or belittle those who love, adore, and flock to the slasher movies. The beauty of the arts is in their diversity. We should always love what we love with shame or apology.

It is my apathy towards slashers that made films such as X difficult for me to suspend that vital disbelief that transforms a movie from something you watch to something you experience.

Each of us has the stories and genres to speak to something deep inside each of us and it the artists that bring us these fantastic fantasies I am continually in awe of.