“This reality is so fixed & it can’t always / be a matter of escaping to other realms, right.” – Alina Pleskova, “Blood Moon”
Hang on, let’s finish that snippet:
This reality is so fixed & it can’t always
be a matter of escaping to other realms, right.
Molly says that when she can’t sleep,
she imagines each of her friends’ hands.
That’s what this column is about. I think. Sort of a sibling to this column. If it makes sense the way I want it to.
Last week, we talked about sci-fi against empire. Week before, we were reading conversations with anarchists and a book of hard-won joy. Now, I want to try and synthesize these into, well, not a manifesto, per se, but just stuff I’m interested in.
Antifascist literature doesn’t always have to be Judas And The Black Messiah or How To Blow Up A Pipeline. Some quiet ways to be antifascist include: passing the Bechdel Test, having a queer romance, showing people of color enjoying their lives, and either not having cops in your stories or making the cops idiots. Maybe I’m a dad, trying to model good behavior for an impressionable child, but I think the types of stories we tell get stuck in our brains in unexpected ways. I’m not saying all art has to be good-for-you medicine—I like messy art about bad people that doesn’t tell you what to think. What I’m talking about is the subject matter we do and do not include in stories. Here are things I like to see:
Losers and Misfits and Weirdos Having The World Happen To Them
Do you feel powerless in contemporary society? Maybe you got laid off, despite a glowing performance review. Ever notice how layoffs are nobody’s fault? Maybe you got hit by a drunk driver and you’re physically not the same and the insurance bills have near-bankrupted you. Maybe you have long COVID, an affliction that maybe you wouldn’t have if competent leadership had been in charge when the plague hit. Maybe you’re one of the vast majority of people who didn’t vote for Donald Trump and now have to live under his reign for a second four years.
Lately, I’ve been wondering how much agency characters really need to have. It doesn’t seem like regular people in the real world have much agency. Oh, sure. Everyone could make different decisions. Everyone could eat less meat or opt of using Tax Prep companies or quit smoking or exclusively take public transit. But life is messy. Sometimes, you understand questionable people more than a questionable society, you know?
examples: Trouble Finds You, Bone In The Throat, Jesus’ Son, Didn’t Nobody Give A Shit What Happened To Carlotta1, The Big Lebowski, The Trial
this, except that pitch: this is basically the opposite of the whole entire trend of “you’re a nobody from nowhere, but secretly you’re the chosen one” stories. Maybe Luke Skywalker started it, but Harry Potter and Hunger Games and Divergent and all those other cashgrab YA series made it unbearably omnipresent. Basically, give me a Spider-Man who only accidentally rises to the occasion. Or doesn’t at all.
Working People Trying To Figure It Out On The Margins
A long time ago, when he was at Cracked had a thing about how Hollywood never depicts poor people. Here’s the article, and it’s worth reading. TL;DR is that you and I have lived with worse kitchens than the residents of Zion in The Matrix movies. Poverty never looks all that bad in movies and TV unless they’re trying to win an Oscar. There’s never that feeling that José Olivarez is so good at capturing: swiping your debit card and not knowing if it’s going to go through.
Poverty isn’t the center of Mac Crane’s I Keep My Exoskeletons To Myself, but that novel was maybe the first time I read something that rang true in the way I experienced new parenthood. Sure, I didn’t have cops with sci-fi-powered shadow branding technology installing cameras in my house. But this feeling that everything could fall apart at a moment’s notice—and not the Hollywood falling apart, the complete unknown, cosmic horror, too-scared-to-look-over-that-ledge falling apart—that’s the feeling I carried with me for a long time as a new parent. I want to make it clear that I’m not calling for characters to be anxious wrecks all the time, with every other line of dialogue referencing making rent or not. But I haven’t read very much that captures the very specific dread I felt from age 23-25 (and have felt since, plenty of times, to a lesser but still taxing degree).
examples: I Keep My Exoskeletons To Myself, Chef, The Bear, José Olivarez’s poetry, Little Giants, The Metamorphosis
this, except that pitch: is there a way to make a non-Oscar baity Pursuit of Happyness? Maybe one where the main character doesn’t become an investment banker. Chef is almost like Pursuit of Happyness in reverse, and I’d watch that. Someone loses a high-paying job and things suck for a while, but then they find true happiness after an unexpected career change.
Ok, Sure, Some “Rich People Are Awful” Stories
It’s really hard to do satire when the targets are too dense to get it. Elon doesn’t understand Hitchhiker’s Guide, Thiel doesn’t get Lord Of The Rings, Fight Club fans don’t get Fight Club, the list goes on. It’s hard to know the utility of something like, say, The Colbert Report or Tim Heidecker’s An Evening With Tim Heidecker when the people being skewered are reading the art as a playbook.
That said, they are making new 13-year-olds, just, all the goddamn time. Sometimes people need to be told the obvious. There are fine lines between exposé, exploitation, and endorsement-by-gaze2, though.
examples: Parasite, White People On Vacation, White Lotus, Ready Or Not, RRR
this, except that pitch: I’d watch a White Lotus that focused even less on rich people. Like what I thought Below Deck was before I learned it was a reality show. I suppose Lower Decks is what I’m asking for, but I don’t know Star Trek well enough to feel like I’d get that show. Here’s a pitch: Downton Abbey, except all the workers are raving, violent communists, and the seasons all end with something akin what the Bolsheviks got up to in that basement.
It’s Always A Good Idea To Read More Indigenous Writers
This isn’t me saying that all Indigenous writers have some magical insight into the USian condition. This isn’t me saying that reading an Indigenous author is the same as supporting Indigenous communities, nor does it absolve of your ongoing role in colonialism. What I am saying is that reading Indigenous writers, even if you’re reading, like, a horror novel or a mystery, you’re looking at the United States from the other side of a mountain already. That’s valuable. Or, at the very least, I just watched Rez Dogs for the first time last week and loved it.
If Baldwin tells us that the things that torment us most are the very things that connect us to anyone who has ever been alive, reading the words of Indigenous people—including those elsewhere in the world besides just the U.S.—is a great way to steel your brain against the ruthlessness of fascism. Fascism is predicated on a flawed vision of human perfectability, this idiotic idea that everyone can be the same in the most (nationalistically) virtuous ways, all the time. Indigenism is, uh, very much not that. If you thought things look bleak in the U.S. heading into 2025, imagine how bleak they looked if you lived here in 1493. Or 1830. Or 1890. Christ, imagine how completely hopeless and bleak 1992 must’ve felt.
examples: Night Of The Living Rez, any SGJ but especially Mongrels if we’re thinking about people on the margins, Sisters of A Lost Nation, Natalie Diaz’s poetry, Hard Skin
this, except that pitch: literally take every dollar and cent given to Taylor Sheridan and instead give it to an Indigenous director/producer/writer.
Let’s Have An Adventure
A cousin of the first example. You could say Carlotta belongs in this category instead of the first one. I’m going to say Under The Silver Lake belongs in this category, but not The Big Lebowski, because I think Sam deliberately goes looking for answers. All The Dude ever wanted was his rug back. The Dude and Sam bring me to something that’s been nuzzling its way into my ear lately: everyone in sci-fi has such a pedigree. And sorry for being PUNK ROCK, but pedigrees make me roll my eyes. “‘Sergent First blah blah blah lol shut up, nerd,” I say to, like, Teddy Roosevelt or someone. Like, I get why Lena in Annihilation is both one of the most brilliant scientists in her field and a former soldier—I also totally get that it’s possible to be both of those things in real life—I just get so weary of characters listing their qualifications. Yet, for both financial and practical reasons, you often need lots of qualifications to go on an adventure. Sure.
For an adventure to work in the application I’m talking about, it almost has to function like a Straight Man/Goofball comedy, with the main character in the former role and the entire world in the latter. Hitchhiker’s Guide is close to this, but I don’t think Hitchhiker’s Guide is consciously antifascist. A very sad version of this would be something like Chain Gang All-Stars, which is like if The Hunger Games read Mariame Kaba or Michelle Alexander. An off-the-wall example I thought of was The Trees—maybe my favorite novel I read in 2024?—even though some of the main characters are cops. Percival Everett kinda gets the same pass Columbo does. I wrote previously about how Movie Cops (distinct from real cops) make such frustratingly good protagonists, and how to get around that. The loser P.I. sort of gets to this—I think Chandler’s Marlowe would be considered a loser in his time, and Pynchon’s Doc certainly is. But P.I.s are too close to cops for this to be as satisfying. This would be like if Neo in The Matrix wasn’t The One, they just needed a guy to code new computer software on the ship.
examples: Chain Gang All-Stars, The Trees, Alina Pleskova’s poetry, Inherent Vice, The Night Of, Zodiac
this, except that pitch: any movie with a cop who decides to solve a crime, the main character changes occupations. Shit, for sake of exercise and solidarity, let’s change a bunch of cops to other civil servants. Se7en but Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt are librarians. Any legal drama, but from the perspective of a public defender. Casablanca but instead of a bar owner it’s like a reverse Kim Davis, some civil clerk who thinks they’re apolitical but then gets dragged into a culture war. Zodiac kind of does this? Maybe? The I’ll Be Gone In The Dark documentary. Yeesh. Talk about not needing cops.
Again, I’m not saying I need all art to be prescriptive. In fact, I really despise preachy art that feels like eating steamed cauliflower coated in bitter cough medicine. Instead, I’m asking us—as writers and readers and viewers—to consider what exactly our art is talking about a little more.
Aw hell, I just realized I should’ve spent 10,000 words on why fantasy writers need to excise monarchs from their texts. Too late now.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
Didn’t Nobody Give A Shit What Happened To Carlotta may be the biggest test case for what agency means. Read that whole book and tell me if you think Carlotta has control over her own actions. Tell me if you think someone who spent decades in prison and years in solitary has free will the moment they step outside. I’m not saying there’s a right or wrong answer.
this is a term I made up for the idea that it’s impossible to make an anti-war movie because war always looks cool in movies, or whatever that old adage that that old critic said was. Endorsement by gaze. There’s probably a scholarly term for this already. Idk y’all, I’m tired, I’m still getting used to my new job, and it’s late on Tuesday.