The Ellis-Fallacy

 TL;DR

Lindsay Ellis was a popular youtuber, a cornerstone of "Breadtube" an informal collection of progressive video-essayists. Lindsay Ellis by the way, isn't dead. I use the past tense because my understanding is she posts exclusively to Nebula now, that creator owned platform that you'll hear plugged by Youtubers and presumably has some lifetime subscribers though I am yet to meet one.

So that's the context. Ellis was particularly popular for critically analysing through video essay form, Disney Animated features, providing much context and commenting on lazyish problematizing tropes that cropped up around Disney princess movies - like Beauty and the Beast is just Stockholm syndrome, the moral of Aladdin is lying gets the girl, the moral of the little mermaid is change yourself for a guy etc.

As such, I would say that Lindsay's video essays are good, if you haven't seen them already. I do not possess the skills and aptitude to improve upon them.

The Ellis-Fallacy though, I put thus:

If A was important to you, then A is therefore important.

And this may not be a fallacy Lindsay Ellis herself ever committed. She just made video essays about Disney movies. But the fallacy was almost certainly committed by some people, most likely the Disney Corporation itself, as evidenced by the changes made in their cash-grab live action adaptations - Ellis herself commented on the new injected feminism in Beauty and the Beast.

Roadhouse

Steve: What if somebody calls my Mama a whore?

Dalton: Is she? 

Patrick Swayze plays Dalton, a "cooler" in the pre-civilised 1980s, and the quote comes from a scene where he trains the bouncers of the Roadhouse. He is specifically telling them to 'be nice' to de-escalate situations, to not rise to bait. 

And he is making a very basic point about empirical observation - not everyone loses their shit to defend their mother's honour.  

We get a scattered spectrum of humanity where despite most people being raised by a mother, forming some kind of attachment to them, as of something like the 1950s onwards, everyone goes through childhood celebrating mothers day and yet some people will commit acts of violence because someone suggests "yo mama so fat" or "your mama's a whore" or even simply "ya mum" and others are all like "whatever..."

And then, as it turns out, well I shouldn't say as it turns out. But if you were to interview some sample of (men) who do or don't defend their mothers honour and everything in between. I'm betting they all will be able to demonstrate a serviceable understanding of the important role and function of motherhood, and be able to talk about whether their mother struggled and sacrificed heroically to do their best, or they appreciate that their mother still mothered despite having every privilege available to them.

So I'm also betting it will transpire, that something close to an objective truth emerges, that boys who grow into men that do not fly into a righteous fury if someone says "ya mum" tend to do better in a number of outcomes like education, incarceration, marriage, finances, mental health and physical health.

Harvey Milk

If it were true that children emulate their teachers, we'd have a lot more nuns running around. ~ Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, Milk, 2008

It's been a while since I watched Milk, like the other side of the MCU and films not being made for grownups and a theatrical release. I believe the argument was, back in the 70s or whatever, and no doubt for some still to this day (certainly it echoes in the Anti-Trans and Anti-Drag activism of the US Far right) that homosexuals need to be kept out of education because 'grooming' which was an idea that people possess the power to make us gay.

The Milk movie is a neat little left-wing counter-argument to what I'd broadly call "media effects" theory, Harvey refers to teachers being gay and a common anxiety that they would teach children (somehow) to be gay.

It's also understandable that many parents of modern history, would have committed a post-hoc-ergo-proctor-hoc or "post hoc" fallacy. Much like the vaccines, their children experience their sexual awakening in high school. Mother discovers them wearing their lipstick or father discovers their male underwear brochure in their sock drawer, then they go to school and identify the most effeminate teacher and blame them.

Basically, pretty much all the research on media-effects indicates that contrary to our intuitions, but in line with pretty much all of our actual experience - media effects are weak. Students decades later, can't remember most of their highschool teachers at all, if they were to resit their final year exams they would likely fail. 90% of advertisements are forgotten, people don't particularly care about brands, almost no boy who grows up reading superman comics turns out to be heroic, and despite having unprecedented access to pornography and a sex obsessed youth culture, teenagers are boinking at record low rates all around the developed world.

Furthermore, when you control for history you can see that media has little impact. While there was no 'manosphere' in the mid-90s adolescent males dropped CDs into their portable stereos and discmen and bopped along to songs about murdering prostitutes. Their fathers listened to ballads by Johnny Cash and Jimmy Hendrix about murdering wives. 

Then there is religion, enormous amounts of energy are expended by organised religion primarily to replicate itself into the future, but also to somehow mould the flock into some ideal. Transparently to anyone with eyes however, someone's religious beliefs are actually very weak predictors of behaviours. In modern secular nations, religiosity might predict violence, but it is a very weak predictor of violence, the same is also true of charitability.

The fact being, that even in large congregations, for a variety of reasons, very very very few religious people take being a disciple seriously.

I have direct experience of this, because I lived through the years where atheists attained the prefix "militant" and not everyone was Dick Dawkins just being incredibly short with people and spitting Oxbridge acid at believers. The most common experience of atheist cruelty was doing incredibly shallow digging and hitting cognitive dissonance in believers of Abrahamic Faiths. 

I feel it worth the diversion here to use Jonathan Rauch's which I'm paraphrasing from his promotional junket of podcast interviews for 'Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy' where much of the time, Rauch advocates for less militancy and more understanding from atheists because - most believers in at least modern USA actually believe in a very secular God that tends to believe in what they believe in.

And I raise it here, because it seems likely, that never in the history of humanity, has anything had more collective energy poured into it to shape the minds of our fellow human beings, from a young age so that they would go on to shape the minds of their children, and grandchildren when the become elders of their community, than the Abrahamic religions. 

All evidence suggests, that this, and other endeavours like it, are simply not possible. 

Why? I would guess because our minds are made of meat, meat pumped full of hormones. That our thoughts react to.

I'm Lovin' It

I don't know when McDonalds adopted this campaign, but as a concrete example of the weakness of media effects, McDonalds might seem like an unlikely example.

Afterall, this company has gone for total market saturation. The "Big Mac Index" is an actual thing economists use to evaluate if a currency is overvalued or not, because a Big Mac is such a standard finished consumer good that it's price can be compared between nations fairly.

The golden arches are recognizeable, now the brand has an audio signature the 'da da da da daa' they sponsor major pro sporting codes and people know about upselling and happy meals and all of that.

So...

Why can't everything McDonald's does, be used to sell salad?

Just take upselling, McDonald's famous, and now in many jurisdictions, illegal 'Would you like fries with that?'

Offer someone salty fat saturated carbohydrates to go with their burger and milkshake, and we know people most often said 'yes.'

Ask someone 'Would you like kale with that?' and the vast vaaaaaaast majority of people would say 'no.'

Fuck no. 

The secret behind ostensible health-food movements like Boost Juice in Australia, was not the wheat-grass shots, but ice cream. Sugar was the fucking secret to Boost Juices success, much as it was with Starbucks and coffee. 

Sugar, Salt and Fat I believe is the simplest foodmarketing strategy in the world - add more of these three things and sales go up. Beside these, superior branding strategy might give McDonald's an edge over Burger King and Wendy's, economies of scale and market saturation may give McDonald's the edge over Shake Shack, In-N-Out and 5-Guys all generally considered superior by consumers, but salad franchises have to put a lot of fat and sugar and salt in their dressings to stay viable at all against hamburger and pizza joints.

So Did Disney "Steal" Aladdin?

Wouldn't you know it, within days of me beginning to write this up, Lindsay Ellis posted a new video-essay to Youtube. 

Handily however, it is titled "Did Disney Really Steal Aladdin?" In accordance with Betteridge's law of headlines - The answer is 'no' but in contravension of the law, Ellis' headline is paired with a thumbnail that reads "x - yes, x - no, [tick] - it's complicated."

Now, on some level we could define this question into 'importance' by referring to the actual 'new world order' that is for many, so boring their imagination resists it by positing illuminati, Jewish cabals and interdimensional lizard people and AI to displace the possibility that the legal structure known as a corporation is the new world order. Something that has the legal property rights of a living breathing person, but in fact only exists on paper.

So yes, it's important as to whether Disney employees on behalf of Disney shareholders, engage in forms of espionage to take shortcuts on what is essentially R&D to keep consumers from having choices, and workers from having choices and monopolising a market such that for periods of time the world has only one viable animation studio.

But how important it is relatively to other behaviours by Disney - like purchasing Marvel Studios, purchasing Lucasfilm, purchasing 21st century Fox, purchasing Miramax etc. Or Disney's lobbying to extend intellectual property rights out to 75 years, whatever Disney 'stole' to make its 'Aladdin' I would say is not broadly consequential, ie. qualifies as unimportant.

Non-source of information and generally disreputable word-salad cannon Russel Brand had a bit I believe on his old BBC show 'Ponderland' about a newspaper story that revealed a convicted child-murderer was practicing voodoo in jail. Russel's punchline was something like 'Oh no he practices voodoo? I kind of decided he was a bad individual when he murdered children.' 

And exploring critically the possible shady practices of Disney in the development of one of their renaissance features, in this sense feels like face-value trivia. We are talking about a movie watched by millions of children around the world, whose opening musical number 'Arabian Knights' performed by Robin Williams playing a merchant featured the line 'it's barbaric but hey it's home' and where Robin Williams as condition of accepting the role of the Genie of the Lamp, demanded Disney downplay his role in promotion so as not to draw attention away from his passion project 'Toys' scheduled to release at a similar time to Aladdin, which Disney just flat-out betrayed him on.

Aladdin came out in 1992, the 90s was a decade were globalisation was just really taking over. This was a decade where Blanka, the Street Fighter II character whose backstory involved being orphaned by a plane crash in the Amazon Rain forest and learning electric powers from electric eels was one of only three Brazilian personalities a tv-segment shot in Spain found, could be recognised by all participants along with Pele and Gisele Bundchen. That was in 2008, so Spaniards apparently recognised Blanka over Ronaldo and Ronaldino both of whom played in Spain for Barcelona FC and Real Madrid, though I haven't researched the timelines.

Prior to September 11, 2001, Aladdin was probably the major source of information and impressions most of the Anglosphere and perhaps continental Europe too, had about...well what? Arabs, certainly. Is there any real overt messaging about Islam and Muslims in Aladdin?

Aladdin made half a billion dollars in early 90's money. That's $1,164,593.73 in today's money, but even that doesn't really paint a picture of how many people saw it, because I'm reasonably confident that ticket prices, including childrens consessions have increased much faster than the CPI. I think it is safe to assume that tens of millions of children went to see Aladdin at the movies, and hundreds of millions watched it on home video, including its cheap shitty sequel(s?) and Saturday morning cartoons. 

It's major impact: nostalgia. Forget Blanka, I'd bet if you asked people on the street who 'Iago' is, Gilbert Gottfried's parrot would beat Shakespeare's most heinous villain every time. 

Of the hundreds of millions of people that saw Aladdin at an impressionable age, the lasting impression is likely to produce a word cloud like "Prince Ali Abubuu" "Jasmin hot" "Never had a friend like me" "Robin Williams" "A Whole New World" "Do You Trust Me?" "Street Rat" in other words, trivia.

If you draw a pie chart, we will find a relatively small percentage of total people who have seen Aladdin ten or more times, actually had their imaginations captured by it.

Disney fanatics are kind of like Royal fanatics, they are a sizeable, monetizable minority. If Disney made a billion on sales of home video copies of Aladdin, they made hundreds of thousands on Aladdin merchandise, cups, posters, toys, licensed limited edition Mattel Barbies, SNES video games, direct-to-video sequels. 

And the impact? The cultural impact? Minute. Tiny. Negligible. That's my whole thesis. I'm going to assume it is safe to say, that Ellis' Nebula views are likely a fraction of what her Youtube views are. That fraction might be as large as a half, or 3/4, I can't really get the info, but generally Youtube is the kingmaker. Ellis' most viewed Youtube videos as at writing are her video on how Disney screwed over Robin Williams (which is probably where I learned Disney screwed over Robin Williams re:Toys) with 8M+ views, after that some legal drama involving properties I can't recognise at almost 5M views a piece (two videos).

Now, Youtube views are very different from a half-billion box-office in the 90s. For one thing, box offices undersell the cultural impression of a G-rated animated feature because we forget the VHS views at home, particularly the repeated views. Aladdin is clearly a much bigger phenomena than say Evil Dead 2, a super-influential cult movie by director Sam Raimi beloved by film buffs and nerds and horror nerds for which the most viewed video essay I could find has a respectable 800k+ views, The Blues Brothers, an iconic non-cult movie though it did produce a cult following, similar maxing out at 800k+ views (and this is less a video-essay than a mythbusters type edutainment video where someone is tallying the property damages the Blues Brothers inflict).

So Aladdin is huge, it is popular. But that does not make it, broadly important.

I can appreciate and respect, that there's people out there that likely, just statistically, can testify that Aladdin '92 got them through their parent's divorce/cancer/suicide. That it was a piece of entertainment that functioned almost as a dependable companion they could escape into. That Jasmine's "I am not some prize to be won!" speech left an indelible impression on them, served as their retrospective feminist awakening.

The effect sizes though, will prove to be small. Most women will never be in a position to experience Greer's "Eternal feminine" construct of being the trophy men vying for status and power compete over. Roughly half will struggle mostly with getting romantic attention from any people they desire at all, while enduring harassment from complete strangers of no discernible status.

Children who escaped into Aladdin to get through rough times in 1995 will discover their analogues in people older than them who escaped into The Goonies and Back To The Future in 1989, and people yet older who escaped into Narnia, and the Georgian intrigues of Jane Austen, Blyton's Secret Seven and Fantastic Five, the Hardy Boys.

A close critical reading of the text and subtext of Aladdin will predict almost nothing but common attitudes of the times, just as the remakes when held up and critically evaluated against the originals will reveal the subtle point that both releases tended to reflect the prevalent attitudes of the times far moreso than shape them. But likely also poorly reflect the prevalent attitudes of the times, almost like children's movies are not written by thought leaders, but beholden and compromised employees of cynical, publicly listed companies seeking large box-office returns, merchandising opportunities and award consideration.

That when the impact of "culture" is measured against a control like a person's immediate social environment, it is minute. That is to say, you are more likely to grow up to resemble your parents and friends, than Wayne from Wayne's World.

Oxygen

Why is the Ellis-Fallacy important?

Yale Professor Timothy Snyder served up a delicious paradoxical argument when he said (paraphrasing): "Say you think that ideas don't have consequences. Well that sentiment is itself an idea and it has consequences." Right, the idea that ideas are inconsequential is just fundamentally false.

Importance is a different idea though to consequences. The Ellis-fallacy is important because of priorities. It is the fallacy by which we arrive at screwed up priorities. 

Disney animated movies might be important to you because they are full of ideas, consequential ideas. Those abundant ideas may serve as landmarks you use to navigate the schema you have constructed of your own identity. 

I will happily concede to anyone, that Disney animated movies, or fucking Eminem albums, or International Cricket, or holy books are important to you. 

That importance though, may screw up your priorities. Take something that is unambiguously important to people - their own children, their importance to you, may screw up your priorities if say, you have the authority to launch a nuclear strike, and someone takes your kids hostage so you fucking nuke Ukraine and fuck the lives of billions of people who have important children of their own.

This is the important/not-important distinction. When I was a teenager, I was a huge fan of Batman, by early adulthood and two Christopher Nolan movies, somewhere in there I came to the realisation that Batman was a poor role-model. People talk about Batman being a fascist, or just an arsehole vigilante. For me it was as simple as recognizing that Bruce Wayne has incredibly poor mental health. That is the whole premise of the Batman character, someone who cannot deal with grief. He is miserable.

But for some reason, it is plainly obvious to me, that Batman is just not important. He doesn't need an overhaul, a re-imagining, a mental health check because Batman's actual ability to shape the character of impressionable children into adult Bruce Wayne's is pretty much nothing at all. 

Yes, Stephan Colbert pointed out that more US born women had grown up to become actual princesses than Supreme Court Justices and still notably, Presidents. But again, I'm sure a rigorous analysis of history will find no correlation between Disney making fairy-tales salient, and women achieving social upward mobility through marriage. 

I've digressed again, my point being, and tying back to Snyder's paradoxical argument; that if you disagree with my thesis that media effects are small-to-the-point-of-negligible, congratulations, you have a data point to support my thesis, because you've read this post, been exposed to my idea of consequence and simply rejected it. Just as people do with most of the ideas they are exposed to via media every day of their lives.

I'm asserting, you believe that media is important for emotional reasons, not reasonable reasons. The idea brings you comfort that society might just need a new boot-disk to solve all its wicked problems. That's a problem for me though, because it is important more people get uncomfortable, to use up less oxygen trying to reform Bratz dolls and the Wynx fairies, and more addressing tax-codes to create behaviourist conditions that can tackle existential threats like climate change.

The left used to be all over this, they knew immediately that guns kill people, not Marilyn Manson CDs. The left also recognised that scripture didn't kill people, tiny minorities of people who took scripture seriously killed people.

Then for fucking reasons, in the mid-2010s the left embarked on a disastrous undertaking of fucking up priorities, and those reasons were likely great reasons - being that neoliberal economics embraced identity politics as its most cost effective way to kick the can up the road - and its main effect was in transferring wealth from Disney shareholders to MRA youtube grifters with shit takes and shit ideas masked by the low hanging fruit of pointing out that the new Star Wars was shit, the new Star Trek was shit, MCU phase 4 was shit, Dinsey+ TV series were shit etc. etc. puke, puke, puke.

That and creating whole new swathes of single-issue voters to polarise and destabilise democracy around the world.

Bam Adebayo's 83 and Goodhart's Law.

Goodhart's Law is the best description of Mediocrity

For years now, which is a relatively recent thing for me; I've been struggling to articulate something I see all around me. 

First I told a story archetype, that's quite old (to me) now: History can be summed up as, someone does something of value to their community and the community gives that someone some form of recognition. Then someone else, seeing this, desires to recreate that recognition for themselves; but not the value.

People are already impatient with my ability to get to a point, so telling a whole story, even one that is uncomfortably (for me) low in detail, is not great. I thought I could express this concept through the fallacy "affirming the consequent" this is like, someone who makes a great product that everybody wants to buy, gets rich; Bill Gates is rich, therefore he must have made a great product that everybody wants to bur. But like, people get rich from forcing people to buy their shitty products, from stealing, from frivolous lawsuits, from lottery, from real estate.

It took me a while, to figure out that what I'm getting at, is the problem of mediocrity, and I think "what to do about mediocrity" is a tremendous problem. Goodhart's law describes this problem succinctly, beautifully and tacitly, describes the mindset of the mediocre:

"That every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure" ~ as articulated by Keith Hoskin in 1996.

 And last week, the basketball world produced a perfect example: a long standing "record" fell after two decades. You may have heard of Kobe Bryant, dare I say, you are even likely to have heard about Kobe Bryant, because Kobe Bryant is one of the all-time great athletes, and won an Oscar for an animated short and was in the news for an alleged sexual assault, and for a fiery death in a helicopter crash.

Kobe Bryant was not famous for being famous though, he was famous for basketball. Winning 5 NBA championships and dominating the decade 2001-2010. In 2006 he scored the second most points by a player in an NBA game - 81 points, and the most points scored in a modern-era (3 point line, 82 game regular season, two-month long post-season consisting of 15 best-of-seven series) that was up until last week, where Bam Adebayo scored 83 points in the game.

You probably haven't heard of Bam Adebayo. Even though he scored 83 points in an NBA game last week. Bam is not a household name, he is, to be brief, an NBA mediocrity. 

Kobe's 81 point game was significant and celebrated because it demonstrated Kobe's eliteness. The 81 points, in other words, describe Kobe's elite-scorer status. Particularly, if you try to learn who Kobe was and why people paid so much attention to him, you will probably come across the esoteric term "shot creation" what this refers to, was that Kobe was like a weed that thrives in poor soil, through a combination of pump-fakes, foot-work, dribbling, fade-away jump shots etc. Kobe "created" scoring opportunities for himself.

The 81 points in a game, was not a target, it was a measure, when Bam and the Miami Heat (and arguably, their opponents in the game, the Washington Wizards) began chasing the target, 81 points becomes a bad measure.

Here is a description from ESPN writer Tim McMahon:

ESPN writer Tim MacMahon heavily criticized Adebayo, stating, "He's jacking up threes while being triple-teamed. I mean, it honestly was just awful, hideous, disgusting basketball down the stretch that I admit I was cracking up laughing while watching."

But more importantly, a few days after the "feat" Bam's reaction to the criticism his performance garnered:

"...And that's the thing that's crazy when they talk about 'unethical' part of basketball, if I have 70 with 9 minutes to go who would just be like 'you know coach just take me out'? yeah right..." ~ Bam Adebayo, emphasis and punctuation added, actual video here.

And this might be where, I feel most sympathetic to Bam. In his own words, he doesn't understand the detractors of his big night. I don't know much about Bam who kind of got on the radar in the same way that the whole world now knows about the Straight of Hormuz, but formally speaking this rebuttal to the detractors - those talking about "unethical" basketball - is an example of the informal fallacy 'appeal to personal incredulity' and its for this reason I have an impression, to put it politely, that Bam is not one of basketball's great intellects, like Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Dennis Rodman, Kobe Bryant, Jeff Teague, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Phil Jackson.

Bam shares a mindset with many people that it is as simple as 83 > 81. For him, his 83 point game is the same as a Guinness World Record (example "most coconuts smashed with one hand") and this is what likely, the media environment in which Bam lives, has struggled to articulate - why it is such a good example of Goodhart's law.

Kobe's 81 point game was perhaps the single greatest offensive performance in the professional sport of basketball ever, Bam smashed 83 coconuts with one hand.

9.58 seconds

As at writing, 9.58 seconds is the world record time for the 100m sprint, set by Usain Bolt of Jamaica in 2009. But 100m world record is not reducable to getting a person from point A to point B (100m away) as fast as possible. You cannot for example, fire them from a cannon, it cannot be downhill, they cannot be on roller-blades or a motorcycle or inside a drag racer.

Ridiculous stipulations aside, a record will not be recognised if there is a tail-wind of greater than 2.0 meters per second. There is no restrictions on altitude at which a record may be set, however times recorded at an event that takes place over 1000m will be marked with an 'A' because of the lower atmospheric pressure.

Sport does not get much simpler than the 100m, but there are rules regarding what constitutes a false start, there will be rules about what kind of shoes can be worn, there are a lot of rules about what athletes can put in their bodies.

As such, if we hear tomorrow that someone has broken Bolt's record tomorrow, aside from finding out at a later date that they failed their drug test as happened with Tim Montgomery and Ben Johnson.

In the case of drug cheats, we have to presume a mindset. Functionally it is going to be something like 'to be the best I have to be the fastest, it doesn't matter how.' 

Hopefully, this is a very clear demonstration of Goodhart's law, the whole point of a 100m race is to find out who is fastest, to make a broad generalisation, people are less interested in who is fastest on performance enhancing drugs, just as they are less interested in who is fastest on a motorcycle. (I am aware that motorcycle racing is its own sport, and people are interested in it, whether it is drag racing or moto-gp, motocross etc. the point being, who is fastest on a motorcycle is a different question to who can run the fastest).

"Most points scored in an NBA game" doesn't have anywhere near the stipulations that the 100m race does. As such, it makes it a deeper study in how Goodhart's law functions, than the 1988 Seoul Olympics men's 100m sprint and the rampant juicing going on.

In the NBA probably the most relevant terminology is "stat padding" Goodhart's law has long applied to, for example, player contracts. For example, a traditional basketball position is the 'point guard' their role traditionally is to bring the ball down the court and initiate the offensive play. 

Statisticians trying to figure out what made a good point guard, in order to inform decisions by team franchises about trades and contracts, noticed that good point guards passed the ball to a player well positioned to make a shot, bad point guards pass the ball to a player in a bad position to make a shot. This was described as an 'assist' which is a pass by a player that then results in points being scored without a player having to dribble or make another pass. 

This descriptive statistic that could be used to describe why Magic Johnson, John Stockton, Jason Kidd, Oscar Robertson etc. were good pointguards, then gets written into player contracts as a target eg. 'if you average 8 assists per game we will extend your contract and pay you an extra $2m per year.' at which point, a player may be on a fast break where they could easily score 2 points by performing a layup themselves, but instead they pass it behind their back to a teammate who performs the layup because the assist is worth more to the player than the 2 points is to the team. 

If basketball is too much not your thing, the pop-science book "Freakonomics" gave a famous example of this shallow understanding of stats, by citing a study that found the kids that performed best in school had a lot of books at home, they didn't even have to read the books, just have lots of books in their home. A local politician heard this, and set up a program to provide all kids with free book collections before they reached school age. Freakonomics breaks down that correlation does not equal causation and that the magical presence of books was likely a symptom of a child having smarter parents and passed this on via genetics, which was why the kids didn't have to read the books, they were just the kids of adults who had met at college in the 70s.

Again, I would stress that Bam is a mediocrity, there will not be anyone in the NBA who sees a player that has averaged almost 20 points per game for most of his career as an NBA starter has suddenly blossomed into an elite scorer, it is likely that Bam would 'not want to belong to any club that would have me as a member' should he come across an optimistic owner who does believe Bam has the potential to explode for 50 points at any given time.

What he doesn't seem to understand though, is his historical role in changing an 80+ point performance from a meaningful description of greatness, into a meaningless target.

Point made, Here's the detail

Writing about the NBA is apparently, death for my blog. I don't have access to the audience that is interested in the NBA, and I do not possess the skills to make my audience care about the NBA. 

Anyway, last week, Bam's 83 point game was something both confusing and clarifying that happened. 

The 2nd most points scored in NBA history. Who is Bam Adebayo and why has nobody ever heard of him? Exactly, Bam is a mid-tier NBA all-star and US Olympic team member. My rule of thumb would be that your general formula for an all-star is some combination of 25 points per game, 5 rebounds per game and 5 assists per game, and by combination you can chop 5 points off and add 5 rebounds or 5 assists.

Bam almost does this, having almost 20 ppg and almost 10 rebounds. He was basically on track to have a long but largely unaccomplished professional basketball career, before retiring and being (largely) forgotten.

He now occupies an odd space as a record holder, the NBA has a strange record for second most points ever scored in an NBA game. A viable 'second is right after first' spotlight because Wilt Chamberlain holds the record for most points ever scored in an NBA game at 100. Wilt Chamberlain is this statistical outlier that the NBA basically says 'Wilt doesn't count' in the same breath as his voice is invoked.

Scoring 100 points is very hard because generally in the NBA teams score on average between 98 and 116 points a game. So one person has to basically do the productivity of a whole team, which is easily countered by double or triple teaming the ball hog.

This is likely too much context. Bam did not eclipse Wilt's actual scoring record, he eclipsed Kobe's 81 point performance. People around the world have heard of Kobe Bryant. Kobe's 81 point game, is but an anecdote in Kobe's illustrious career. and so this is a good time to bring in some theory, about why Bam's 83 point game is important.

Making Cents

So here's the thing, saying that Kobe Bryant once scored 81 points in a game is like saying "the sky is blue" and saying that Bam Adebayo once scored 83 points in a game is like saying "the sky is Burberry tartan."

And sure enough, when you hear this extraordinary claim that an extremely average NBA player eclipsed a player in the pantheon, you want to know how, because it makes no sense.

I'll walk you through my investigation process. The first sense making factor you learn, is that the Miami Heat were playing the Washington Wizards, the second worst team in the weaker Eastern Conference, a team that is tanking, a team that is actively trying to lose games to improve its draft position, a team that acquired two all-star calibre players in Trae Young and Anthony Davis this season and has no intention of playing them until next season.

The second sense making factor was the end game score - the Heat won 150 to the Wizards' 129. This is basically a game where nobody is playing defense. These scores historically have been reserved for NBA All-star games. (The average game score is referred to as 'pace' with different eras seeing higher or lower scores, rule changes make it harder to compare one era to another for example scoring was historically low during Jordan and Kobe's career, referred to as the 'dead ball' era. The current NBA has one of the highest historical paces, only the 60s compares) The team with the best record in the NBA - the Oklahoma City Thunder, and defending champions have only exceeded the Wizards' losing score of 129, a dozen times. 

The third sense making factor was Bam's stat line, he made 36 of 43 attempted free throws. As a youtube commenter pointed out, Bam attempted more free throws than he played minutes in the game. He now holds the record for most free throws ever attempted in a game, and most free throws made in a game, eclipsing Dwight Howard's previous record, a big man who was victim of the "Hack-a-Wilt" or "Hack-a-Shaq" strategy where you intentionally foul a poor free-throw shooter to force them to make free throws instead of dunking the ball.

And then the whole picture becomes clear. Bam's 83 point game is a perfect example of Goodhart's law, and also how confusing the question of 'if losers win, are they still losers?'

Kobe's 81 point game, in short was a game where a player put his team on his back and went to work for the win. Bam's 83 point game, in short was a game where a coach, the team, the officiators and the opposition team all worked together to help a mediocrity get a record.

An 81 point game in accordance with Goodhart's law, described Kobe's greatness. An 83 point game is useless at describing Bam Adabeyo. It was not Bam's awakening and emergence as a great player, Bam would go onto score 20 points in a loss to the Orlando Magic in his next game, including 6 free throws from 10 attempts.

We can predict, that without significant trade moves to beef up the Miami Heat's roster, or trading Bam to a team where he is the third or fourth scoring option, Bam will likely not win any NBA championships, and certainly not be named the finals MVP. He is not going on to win any season scoring titles, or MVP awards, he is going to regress to his mean performance of around 20 points per game.

It does not even predict that a Miami Heat game will be a particularly good game to watch, because Bam might do something amazing or incredible. It is likely the case, that Bam's 83 point game was not a good game to watch (I didn't watch it, because the Heat are not an interesting team this season) given that the Heat were up 20 points, the game more or less in the bag, when it ground to a halt of endless fouling and free throws to get Bam across the line.

What I do predict, is that in the next 5 years, there will be an influx of 81+ point game performances, because Bam is a nobody. Last season there were a flurry of 70+ point games, in the space of a week, somebody eclipsing Kobe's 81 mark was I felt, a matter of time. I just expected it from one of the loser-All star players like Joel Embiid, SGA, Kevin Durant etc. The thin skinned accomplished players who suffer most from unfavourable comparisons to the players of yesteryear.

Now that Bam has gone and done it, in the naughty sense, he's given permission to the better all-stars to take it from him to win the NBA some respectability back. I can now see Victor Wembenyana, Jalen Brown, Anthony Edwards, Luka Doncic, Jason Taytum, Donovan Mitchell etc. etc. not to mention all the entitled diva players who are still better than Bam Adebayo.

Because previously, if you were a player who scored 60 points in 3 quarters and your team was up by 20, you would be sat on the bench. Now, this could become the new NBA pastime for whenever you are playing a team that is deliberately tanking.

There's also a sense in which, if players made a coordinated effort to eclipse Bam's performance for the right reasons, I would be right behind it. As an act of protest against both the current debilitating rule-set that has basically made defensive play impossible and the game less interesting, and the practice of tanking, to force the commissioner to act.

I also am factoring in the commissioner of this era of the NBA, Adam Silver, who is really the architect of this problem. He will not act to clamp down on the lack of defence in this era until it becomes an unignorable problem, and even then reluctantly.

Because of course this is all the fault of...

Lebronze James

I think at some point I will write a non-fiction book about Lebron James. I feel he is a great focal point for understanding the early 21st century. I may have to write myself a post I can just link to so I don't succumb to the temptation of writing a Lebron explainer every time I need to explain something through the example of Lebron James.

Lebron's career is fundamentally a product of anxiety. There is a financial incentive for professional sports to have the greatest player ever to be actively playing at any given time. 

The trouble is, the greatest player to ever play any given game sort of just happens. In MLB it was Babe Ruth in the 1910's-20's over a century ago now, in NFL it happened recently in Tom Brady, in a movie like script where he only got his chance when the Patriot's Quarterback was injured, and in the NBA a younger professional league, it happened in the 90s.

MJ wasn't planned, it just happened. A few may have seen it coming, but most tuned in when it started happening. 

Now, given a premise that you can't make the greatest player of all time happen, what you can do is tell people the greatest player of all time is happening.

That is the anxiety response of trying to seize control. Lebron was a promise that someone of good conscious would not make. He was kind of a contract with basketball fandom "don't worry, we'll give you a player even better than MJ so keep watching." Having entered such an ill-advised contract, there was a lot of post-facto efforts to make good on the promise.

Largely speaking, Lebron was just given things, and that has never stopped. 

Among a divided NBA fandom, some refer to the Lebron era as containing "the era of player entitlement"

I had written out the details in length, but for brevities sake, this era is characterised by players demanding trades to specific destinations, "load management" that evolved into players not playing games they do not feel like playing, the degeneration of All-Star weekend into a farce with no NBA stars participating in the Slam Dunk contest, and no competitive play in the All-Star game, a relaxing of the NBA dress code, allowing players to choose between focusing on basketball and being a fashion model for social media.

Almost all of the derided player behaviours that characterise the era of player entitlement can find their precedent in Lebron James, the demanding trades to specific teams begins with Lebron's "The Decision" and forming a super team after leading his own team to a championship proved too hard and Kobe Bryant had 5 championships to his 0. He also had New Orleans star Anthony Davis sign to his agency and then demand a trade to the Los Angeles Lakers to play with Lebron James, refusing to consider any other franchise and greatly hamstringing New Orleans ability to get the best exchange for Davis. 

Lebron also never entered the slam dunk contest, we can't know, but the most likely reason being that he was afraid he wouldn't win against the likes of Dwight Howard, Nate Robinson, Blake Griffin etc. and just couldn't risk it, even though most likely the NBA institution would simply have handed him a win should he choose to compete, even now.

Coming back to Bam's 83 mediocrity, there are too many precedents in Lebron's career to really name. Youtuber Angry Old Hoops or AOH has obsessively documented Lebron's stat-padding. 

Lebron is a direct beneficiary of a death spiral, the less people that watch his games, the more impressive his stats look. People tuned in to see Michael Jordan fly over Hakeem Olajuwan and Dikembe Mutumbo to viciously dunk, this was exciting basketball that captured the imagination of the world. People do not tune in to see an old man who doesn't have the energy to run back and help on defense receive a lobbed pass from his shooting guard and cherry pick a slam dunk with no defenders in sight. It is not exciting to watch a missed 3-point shot clatter off the backboard and watch all four of Lebron's teammates scatter like pigeons so he can collect the uncontested defensive rebound.

All the people who do not watch Lebron's games anymore just see that Lebron scored 28 points, 11 rebounds and 4 assists tonight, at 41 years of age in his 22nd season. But Lebron doesn't get those numbers it is a concerted effort by literally hundreds of people to get Lebron those numbers. The Lakers organisation has been sacrificing wins to get Lebron those numbers. Players who are younger and better are forced to pass the ball to Lebron so he can get his numbers.

What AOH has been documenting on his channel, is that Lebron causes his teams to lose in order to look good and his coach, his team, his organisation and the media go along with it to maintain the narrative that people are watching the miraculous longevity of the greatest player to ever play.

So the playbook was all there for Bam to stat-pad his way to 83 points. Bam's coach Erick Spoelstra used to coach Lebron when he played for Miami. 

US Black Culture has lost its cool

There's another baller to blame and that is Barrack Obama. Not in the way white-supremacist Christian Nationalist republicans blame Obama for everything while being too chickenshit to stand up to the buffoon their party enables and inflicts upon the world. 

But in the sense that Obama made forever a fact, that a black man can be the most powerful in the world, respected and revered, be President of the United States, win a Noble Peace Prize. Black Culture has entered it's Rocky III period, and Eastern European players in the NBA are its Clubber Lang.

Will Smith stood up and slapped Chris Rock, but not only Chris Rock, an entire generation who suddenly had flashbacks of Will rapping the theme song to "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air" when they were 12, and "Wicky-wicky-wild-wild-west" where he was inexplicably dressed as a cowboy rapping about the wild west for some reason (nobody saw the film) when they were 16, and him cracking wise next to Tommy Lee Jones in MiB when they were 18 and suddenly asking themselves "was that cool, or incredibly lame..." and not liking what they found there.

I think Bam and almost everyone in the NBA, particularly US players are conscious that they have declined in public esteem compared to previous generations. They sense that they are seen as immature, entitled brats. Under Lebron's leadership, it is hard to understand why. The person they've been told is the greatest ever, has lost more NBA Finals than he has won, he has accomplished less in one of the longest careers than players who aren't even in the discussion of who he is greater than, like Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O'Neal, Steph Curry...

They are employed by and in an organisation that cannot tell them the truth of their circumstances. They do interviews with people who have to lie to their faces or face losing their jobs. The people whose careers do not depend on continued employment in basketball media keep cropping up on podcasts and saying very different things than the ESPN anchors.

They suffer constant comparison to players of the past, players who played their entire careers for one team, players who routinely played all 82 games of the season, who played sick and injured, players people seemed to like and respect more but were paid significantly less money.

I'm sure even Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra suffers constant unfavourable comparisons to Phil Jackson, coach of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. 

I think all of these factors conspired to produce a huddle in which Spoelstra and the Miami Heat conspired to try and relieve the current era of the looming shadow of Kobe Bryant, all the "Kobe wouldn't have tolerated this..." "Kobe would never abide this..." "People are only brave enough to say this because Kobe is dead..." 

They are suffocating under the failure of their own anxiously constructed narrative that "nothing bad can happen. It can only good happen." People living in a concerted effort to diminish Kobe Bryant in order to prop up Lebron, that likely, through no fault of their own, Bam and the Miami Heat didn't know they were out of touch with reality.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect and the Response

I don't want to spend too long on the Dunning-Kruger effect. In brief, the effect basically says you can't know you are incompetent. Goodhart's law is far more relevant. The incompetence though is in not understanding the significance of Kobe's 81 point game.

Clearly, to Bam, to the Miami Heat, and to many it is just a number. 83 is higher than 81, why would people try and take that away from Bam? His mother was there, his girlfriend was there, the crowd gave him a standing ovation.

The most controversial thing I will say, is that most sports fans don't understand sports. Most sports fans think that sports is about winning. Sports is about competition. This creates a Dunning-Kruger dividing line between the fans themselves. Incompetent sports fans think what they want is for their team to win every game, every year. Competent sports fans recognise they want their team to win hard-fought contests.

A meme has cropped up that goes "game recognise game" its pretty much the opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It is often applied to how Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant talk about each other.

Let me though, talk about Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan for a bit. My appreciation of Tim Duncan has grown over the years, but overall, I think he remains somewhat boring to watch. In a sense he is as accomplished as Kobe Bryant, winning 5 championships, and they were basically contemporaries, though Duncan was drafted a year after Kobe and won his last championship after Kobe won his 5th. 

Now it was and is within the NBA's power to change the rules so as to make the game easier for Tim Duncan and harder for Kobe, or easier for Kobe and harder for Tim Duncan. For example, Kobe predominantly a mid-range shooter, the NBA could have moved the three-point line in so Kobe could regularly score 3-4points (and-1s) and Duncan's Spurs would have had 1-2 less championships and Kobe's Lakers 1-2 more. 

Conversely, they could have changed the rules to get rid of the 3-point line altogether. Bringing Kobe's scoring potential down far more than Duncan's, a low-post player.

The point of these hypotheticals, is to draw attention to the calibration issues a sport has. For most of NBA history, it was a game of the centre, Bill Russell, Wilt, Kareem, Walton, Moses Malone, Hakeem, Shaq, Robinson, Jokic. 

I would argue, that for numerous complicated reasons, that show up in the ratings of NBA finals, that if you have to calibrate the rules one way and not the other, you want the game to reward Kobe's style of play and not Tim Duncan "The Big Fundamental"'s style of play. Please note, I'm not saying I wish they did, these two competing dynasties were arguably perfectly calibrated.

The thing is, basketball isn't good when it is reduced to a matter of being tall. This isn't to say the dominant big-men of NBA history aren't skilled. But the game would suck if it was a simple matter of 'lob it to the tall guy who puts it in the basket.' the rules are calibrated to not make it this easy.  

Jordan didn't come out of nowhere, "Pistol" Pete Marovich was likely the first real showman of the NBA, combining skill and flash, he was the first white person to be offered a contract with the Harlem Globetrotters. The prototype for Jordan's game was David "Skywalker" Thompson, whose career was cut short by substance abuse problems. 

I think the 90s became the NBAs golden era because what we witnessed in Michael Jordan, but also Pippen, Drexler, Penny Hardaway, Wilkins, Johnson as guards, and Kemp, Barkley, Malone in the power forward position and in the context of Shaq and Hakeem and Mutumbo was the game we wanted to see, to see a man fly over a defender and slam the ball into a basket. These half-court set pieces against serious, physical defenses. 

It was a transition era where the common sense was to load up the paint with twin-towers, and then people watched MJ and his generation jump over them.

In the 2010s and continuing somewhat to the present day, the common sense now consists of "small ball" - loading up the roster with 3-point shooters, a point guard might drive into the paint before tossing the ball out to an open man along the 3 point arc who passes the ball typically two more times along the arc to get someone an open look at a 3 point shot.

It's winning basketball (sort of, provided you have Steph Curry, the greatest pure shooter to ever play on your team, nobody else has really made it work) this play style would have been fully available in the 90s and 80s, it kind of just wasn't discovered. 

It's problem being that it is off-peak. If we entertain the possibility that forthcoming generations of players may surpass Steph Curry's accuracy from the 3, we might imagine a future where having any defenders in the paint becomes obsolete, basketball becomes a very different game that consists of passing a ball around an arc, hoping to catch a defender off for an open look and shooting 3s. 

The NBA is a business, if ratings and attendance and ad revenue and broadcast rights crashed, the players themselves would likely be calling for the removal of the 3-point line. On the flipside, had centers remained so dominant that the game became a formality of whose tall guy could run down to the other end for longer so he can deposit the ball in the basket, the NBA probably would consider lowering or raising the hoop.

The NBA is best in a transitional period, where there's genuine confusion about what type of player to build a team around and you get the fundamental uncertainty of rock-paper-scissors, and epic match-ups in the post season.

I feel peak sports balance strength, speed and coordination. Soccer does this, AFL does this, NBA does this. The 90s and 00s did this, and in the mid 2010s it began to fall apart, not only because Kerr's GSW perfected D'Antoni's 7-second or less offense, and let his players shoot 3s in volume, but also because the NBA had to accommodate an ageing Lebron and keep his lack of speed and athleticism viable in order to chase Jordan's 6 championships and 6 finals MVPs.

Bam, and seemingly numerous people don't seem to understand that just because 83 is bigger than 81 the performance isn't greater. 

28 of Wilt Chamberlain's 100 points came from free throws, making a convenient 28%, furthermore the theory is that Wilt shot his free-throws granny style in that game because it was not televised, hence he made an unusual (for him) 28 of 30 attempts. Bam made 39 free throws of 43 or 46% of his 83 points, Kobe made 18 of 20 or 22% of his 81 points, lower than Wilt's ratio, a 5th versus a half vs a third with some rounding. Bam made less than half of his field goals, (he missed most of his shots) and made less than a third of his 3-pointers. In other words, it was a putrid performance outside of sheer volume. 

Bryant's 81 is great because a) his team was down by 18 in the third quarter, he was in the game because they needed to overcome a massive deficit, not because they were beating up a bottom-tier team with no self-respect. b) Kobe made 60% from the field and 55% from 3 the kind of accuracy that defines an elite shooting performance, the greatest shooters in NBA history like Bird, Miller, Allen and Curry occasionally manage to average these kinds of percentages over a season. c) Kobe scored 55 points in the second half, he wasn't chasing a record, but a win.

In the end, Bam's probably done Kobe the bigger favour, his placement as a mediocrity in the short list of 80 point games will, contrary to predictions that in 30 years time nobody will scrutinise them, likely cement Kobe's 81 point game as the single greatest offensive performance in NBA history, it is likely people will, through the incongruity of basically a nobody chasing a meaningless stat-line, force many incensed by it to make arguments as to why 83 is not better than 81 simply because 83 is higher than 81, and in an ironic twist, argue themselves into the position that 81 turns out to be better than 100. 

This piece of sporting trivia will demand explanation, it will force people to attain competency in understanding why a description is valuable and how that value collapses when it becomes a target.

Kobe's legacy is, and already was, his turning scoring into an artform. I've seen people invent criteria because something they value isn't being captured, and as applied to Kobe, it is rating him on "shot creation" and this is not unprecedented, Bill Russell was known for his shot blocking when it was not a statistic collected, Pistol Pete shot from beyond the 3-point line and made his shots when there was no 3-point line, people have retrospectively calculated what his points record would have been in college (a record he still holds at 44 ppg without a 3 point line) as 57 ppg. 

Just as assists are kind of dubious, because the player that receives the crucial pass might miss, might take a dribble or might pass the ball again, I can see a future where a stat is collected on "shot creation" when a player effectively "assists themselves" through dribbling or footwork or pump-fakes.

With 1:25 remaining in the game, the Heat's Keshad Johnson was fouled and intentionally missed his second free throw off the front of the rim in an attempt to gain another possession for Adebayo

This is actually Lebron's legacy, just there aren't enough scholars alive to write up in prose, every time in the past 6 years the Lakers team took action to get Lebron points, an assist or a rebound, but it describes Goodhart's law, a player deliberately missing a free-throw in order to try and get the ball to the player chasing an arbitrary number. 

As does the ESPN writer's description of Bam 'chucking' up three point shots when he is being triple-teamed (3 out of 5 defenders assigned to one player, Detroit famously had the "Jordan Rules" which was to triple team Jordan whenever he touched the ball) going for a record when you are up by twenty points under these conditions is a Guinness bullshit-record-the-longest-banjo-solo-played-with-a-salami farce.

Conclusion

This is how mediocrity works, this is what mediocrity looks like. 

Economist Dan Davies wrote a book called 'lying for money' (please note I am not calling this incident any kind of grift or fraud, I am calling it more the 'no it isn't' response to an accusation of having a small-penis)  the trouble with White-Collar crime, like financial fraud, is the usual police formula of "means-motive-opportunity" isn't as helpful, as basically any man who can afford a suit has the means and the motive and the opportunity to commit financial fraud. 

So where fraud is under investigation, it needs to be means-rationalization-opportunity. The way you pick the fraudster, is the guy in the suit that says things like 'everybody is doing it' the people who are justifying themselves dipping their hand into the cookie jar.

I think this rationalization is also true of when Mediocrity pursues greatness. Bam had 60 points and his team were up by 20 against a team that was deliberately trying to lose games. He publicly shared his rationalization in his "I'm at 70 with 9 minutes to go" and implicitly agreed with his critics by saying "You should be blaming the head coach [of the Washington Wizards]. Get that first. I was not the one letting me go one-on-one the whole game until I had 70, and then you started to send a double."

I feel badly for Bam, because he is no Mayor Quimby presenting his pre-whacked snakes on whacking day. He is someone who didn't understand heading in that Kobe's 81 said something about Kobe, and that his 83 would say something very different about him.

But sometimes, like a shipwreck, our greatest contribution is as a warning to others.

Give "The Bride!" A Chance

Beyond Cringe

I've seen a few critically panned films where I can appreciate everything the critics pan about them. 'Dumb and Dumber Too' comes to mind, as does 'Wonder Woman 1984' and I feel "The Bride!" deserves its criticism. But I'd recommend seeing it, regardless, as I would those other films.

So I'm going to begin to make this case by talking not about 'The Bride!' and yeah, Maggie could have written a movie title with less stylization so it wasn't tedious to write about her movie, but by talking about one of the greatest books of the 20th century, possibly ever. Catch-22.

Catch-22 is critically acclaimed and commercially successful. It's title and central joke has made it into common vernacular "a catch-22" for any lose-lose situation, a polite and literate way to tell someone they are fucked. 

But Catch-22 is dense and not only dense but enjoyable*. There is easily a whole semester that can be done on Catch-22 and the various characters presented to us, Yossarian and Orr of course, Nately, Clevenger, Doc Daneeka, Major Major Major, Milo Minderbender, Chaplain R.O. Shipman (in my edition) are all fascinating windows into institutional psychopathy. If there were only two texts to assign students to make sure they don't fuck everything up, it would be 1984 and Catch-22. If I could only assign one, it would be Catch-22. Why? Because in Catch-22 the enemy is calling from inside the house. 

There is something extra about Yossarian vs the US Air Force fighting an abstract fascist threat, that doesn't come across in Winston Smith vs Big Brother, perhaps because Soviet UK is counterfactual.

Anyway, here's the catch with Catch-22, not the eponymous catch, but the catch is that Yossarian and the central cast of fly boys are misogynist cads, (this point is the '*' on 'enjoyable' above)  to extract the value of Catch-22 a reader needs one of two things: the least practical thing is to bowdlerize the text, rewrite an edition with all the casual misogyny removed, this may be what George Clooney's TV adaptation is like, I have zero need for, nor interest in an adaptation of Catch-22. 

The most practical thing, is to simply get beyond the misogyny in order to extract the incredible, satirical, institutional analysis that few works of literature can compare to.

"The Bride!" is not great, it is dense, it is a dense hot mess. It is also very "cringe" an expression that itself is becoming self-descriptive. I think we need to accept, that not many people are good at expressing themselves, a good many people are low in self-awareness. Low self-awareness goes hand in hand with stepping into the arena, and expressing something and "The Bride!" is certainly a something, and I think if you see it, you will be cringing in sympathetic embarassment at the opening monologue, the very try-hardness of it that is antithetical to the Grunge aesthetic and early 90s feel this movie mostly employs. 

My recommendation is to just cringe it out and get the fuck over it, like the "vvvvvtttt vvvvvtttt vvvvtttt" noise that Robocop never stops making when he walks, the worst character and characterization in "The Bride!" being Mary Shelley, will sadly, just keep coming back, and I too wish it didn't, but somebody, perhaps many somebodies, thought it was a good idea, and it remains.

Consider though, that at some point, someone will download this movie and simply edit Mary Shelley out, and then maybe people freed of cringe reactions (not entirely, but mostly) will critically pick over all the stuff that remains in there, it will be revisited, inevitably, by video essayists and given that video essays are as prone to herd mentality as initial reviews, "The Bride!" feels like a candidate for reevaluation, and I think you can skip the normal 12 year half-life, forget the 90 million budget and wide theatrical release, forget the cringe and look at what is there.

Good Disconnect

2013's "Man of Steel" could be instantly improved by cutting out the entire prologue, the "fall of Krypton" action sequence where Russell Crowe struggles across an alien planet to put his infant son in a spaceship with his wife and see him off. 

In the same way, I would instantly improve "The Bride!" by cutting out everything prior to Christian Bale's first scene as The Monster. A good decision, a promising decision Maggie made, was to advance the Frankenstein Timeline, albeit not into the present day, but 1930s United States.

This solves a lot of story problems, we have the monster as the catalytic agent to get the plot going, you can even follow directly on from Guillermo Del Toro's recent adaptation of Frankenstein. The monster's fear of eternal life in crushing solitude has come to pass, it is excruciatingly painful for the monster, and he is here, now, because there is a mad scientist with a lab that could possibly do what Frankenstein would not for the monster.

This is good, this is great, just the take-off was fucked with the Mary Shelley framing device that introduced convoluted metaphysics that split the sauce that was to be the thesis of the film. That decision didn't come out of nowhere, in the 1930s movie "Bride of Frankenstein" the framing device is that Mary Shelley in 1818 told her storm-sheltering companions "but wait there's more" and the same actress that plays Mary Shelley, plays "The Bride." But I digress.

The point being that the monster is a deep and mostly coherent character that I would guess, Christian Bale whole-assed in preparation for the role. He is a monster we are already familiar with from all the adaptations that came before. We know his plight, his monstrous appearance has plebs assume the worst of him, to treat him like a monster until he lives down to their expectations. He has to run and hide to survive and he does so all alone, and has been doing so since the death of Victor Frankenstein in the events of the book.

I am hard pressed to think of a movie, that better captures the disconnect between sexes of a romantic courtship/puppy love phase. The general problem with onscreen romances, be they Pride and Prejudice, Emma, When Harry Met Sally, 10 Things I Hate About You, Along Came Polly, Love Actually etc. etc. is the coherence. So even when Ben Stiller is an uptight insurance executive and Jennifer Anniston is a manic pixie dream girl, they are manufactured to go together.

What I found most interesting in "The Bride!" and it was likely on-accident, is that it depicts a man commissioning a woman for himself from an artist through a process that is essentially random. He gets what he gets, and I suspect what happened, was that Christian Bale the actor was given a lot of creative control when it came to realizing his monster, and Maggie Gyllenhall likely through incompetence struggled and never overcame the problem of fleshing out the bride as a character.

What we get, is an onscreen courtship where a man and a woman don't understand each other, talk past each other, project onto each other, aren't listening to each other, are both slaves to their own egocentricity. 

This is interesting. It's interesting to watch, even if it is hard to like, and even if Maggie cannot stick the landing.

Obviously, I am making an appeal to ignorance, I have not conducted a census of romantic movies, I haven't seen Gone With the Wind and I haven't seen Maid in Manhatten. I am generalizing out that most rom-coms in particular, are formulaic with a particular trope being that the lovers know they have found the right person because they are "seen" by the other. I once walked into a room where some people were watching a Rom-com I couldn't identify for you today. I can't even recall who was in it. All I saw was female hands opening an envelope(?) and pulling out a watch. I said "so that's the watch she always wanted as a child..." or something, and one of the viewers remarked "how did you know?" I knew because the formula was well established by the time I was 15. 

The onscreen relationship you see in "The Bride!" isn't even close to Sandler-Barrymoore romcom 50 first dates. The basis of that movie is that the lovers 'see' each other even though Barrymoore loses her memory of Sandler every day.

Even Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I understand to involve minimal direction for the cast coming from Larry, and has at its center for the first 6 seasons, a dysfunctional but loving marriage, doesn't give us the same disconnect because at some level, I suspect Cherryl takes Larry's direction.

The deconstructive solution, seems simple to create an authentic disconnect between lovers - isolate two writers such that they are projecting and reacting, not choreographing. 

I am not ready to conclude that Maggie Gyllenhall is an incompetent director and writer, even if "The Bride!" is largely incompetent as a film. The main source of doubt, are my doubts that the writing challenge is theoretically surmountable. That in "The Bride of Frankenstein" is a character to be fleshed out is the next most interesting thing about "The Bride!" this may have been the vortex under which we have the directorial energies circling to give Bale the room to be this experimental male lead, trying to maintain his characters integrity, while being open to whoever the bride reveals herself to be, while succumbing to the temptation that she might be a tabla-rasa and that she might wish to be, whatever he wants her to be.

That's interesting.

Feminism Problems

Kant being recently on my mind, the 'original' "Bride of Frankenstein" as a character is a means, not an end. She is not a fully formed character but a plot device, she is there to scream in horror at the monster, even though she herself is a monster, compounding the monster's own horror of his existence. The "Bride of Frankenstein" is iconic, what it isn't is very good. As a sequel it is more akin to the modern phenomena of "Dune: Part 2" or "The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug" and "The Hobbit: Enough Already" where a book is adapted into multiple films. 

The 1931 Frankenstein movie, took a bunch of liberties with the source material, maybe because of run-time constraints, maybe because the studios didn't give a damn. For example it isn't Victor Frankenstein but Henry Frankenstein, there's no framing device of Victor recounting his misadventure to a ship's captain in the Arctic circle etc. etc.

"The Bride of Frankenstein" resurrects the monster, carelessly, like the somehow by which Palpatine returned, and then unused source material pads out the runtime, most notably the monster coming across a blind man's cabin in the woods and learning to talk. 

In this sense, Henry Frankenstein completing a female monster and bringing it to life is a smaller departure from the source material than Victor being Henry, than him surviving the events of the first film and expecting a child of his own with his wife Elizabeth. In the source material the bride is abandoned because Victor fears the possibility of the monsters reproducing. 

So the eponymous "Bride of Frankenstein" being a means, to the end of illustrating the monster's plight, doesn't give anyone needing to adapt the character a whole lot to work with.

For me though, this very conundrum produces an interesting mirror to hold up to feminism in the 21st century. 

Imagine you were to close your eyes and imagine, which you can't do and keep reading. That I decided to reclaim Frankenstein to my own ends. I open my movie with Mary Shelley talking to us from beyond the grave, embodied but displaced, my Mary Shelley informs you that I never intended for Frankenstein to be any cautionary tale against hubris, that I died before I got a chance to write what the story was really about - the Great Man theory of history, and transhumanism, objectivism!

I think people would writely criticise my hubris of sticking my hand up the arse of Mary Shelley and having her posthumously endorse some Ayn Rand shit as transparently self-serving and disrespectful.

The obvious illegitimacy of this move, is because my claims to know the mind of Mary Shelley go against the solidarities of Identity Politics. From a group identity resolution, Mary Shelley is a woman so somehow therefore, all women are Mary Shelley, Maggie Gyllenhall is a woman, therefore Maggie Gyllenhall is basically Mary Shelley.

I suggest, that the cringe inducing opening of the movie, can be explained because under the auspices of identity politics, the fallacious appropriation of an individual's voice is not obvious. However, for it seems, so many who experience the appropriation of Mary Shelley's voice, it is obviously illegitimate because they experience it as cringe. Mary Shelley has to announce the false bravado of "the motherfucking bride" and it isn't cool, it isn't even ironically uncool, it is simply a misstep.

Bringing us to the second misstep, and where 21st century feminism starts coming into starker resolution, with the introduction of 'Ida'. The bride is given multiple names throughout this movie, but like the monster, really doesn't have one, or shouldn't have one. I have invoked Ida, which is the first chronologically, a much more interesting one is given by the monster later 'Penelope' aka 'Penny' which is the first name the bride accepts, the most famous literary Penelope being the wife of Odysseus and I'd bet some money, that Maggie or someone else in the development of "The Bride!" knows their Natalie Haynes. 

The monster as Odysseus, has been struggling for a long time to reunite with his beloved Penelope, likely the idea from where this name is suggested after "Ginger Rogers" is recognised by the bride as a film reference. Haynes says in her non-fiction art history book 'Pandora's Jar' that I happened to read a few weeks before seeing "The Bride!" that historically Penelope has been held up as the ideal wife, for her quality of loyalty and devotion, awaiting the return of her husband faithfully for 20 years. Hayne's points out that Penelope is not given enough credit for being the ideal partner of Odysseus, in terms of her own cunning, her own sacrifices, the ordeal she endures for 20 years.

I won't be able to do the chapter on Penelope justice in a few sentences and via my lack of expertise. But as the name offered by the monster, this is something a feminist must radically reject, resist, reclaim. Alas, another similarity with the poetry of Homer, is where to lay the blame for the whole debacle.

Who caused the Trojan war? Ostensibly, it is Paris who abducted Helen of Sparta to make her Helen of Troy. But Paris abducts Helen because she was promised to him as the most beautiful of mortals by Aphrodite in order to win the judgement of Paris. But Paris judged Aphrodite the fairest after turning down the bribes offered by Athena (wisdom) and Hera (offered him Eurasia). Having to wikipedia the story because I'd forgotten the third contestant was Hera, I noticed that the event goes down on "Mount Ida" so the Greek myth references in "The Bride!" are looking less coincidental.

Zeus delegated judging to Paris, so maybe the Trojan war is Zeus' fault, but the golden apple inscribed with 'to the fairest' was tossed out by Eris, personification of Strife.

This is the complicated mess of who started the Trojan war, tohm, I hear you say, what the fuck does this have to do with "The Bride!" and 21st century feminism. 

Mary Shelley is Maggie's muse, in the first scene Ida is possessed by Maggie Gyllenhall who brings about Ida's death, that she may become the bride of Frankenstein's monster. The movie is taking place in a reality of Mary Shelley's creation, the events of Frankenstein are canonical, the monster only exists because of Mary Shelley, and Mary Shelley had him demand of Victor a female companion. Maggie steals Mary and makes her kill Ida to provide the necessary materials for the bride.

Again, it would all be much tidier, if you just cut Ida and Mary Shelley out. Then it is just the monster demanding a bride who is a resurrected corpse. That corpse can have a backstory, revealed later when her memories return or she is recognised from her former life. But instead Ida is killed by Maggie reclaiming the plot catalyst from the monster.

If it sounds incoherent, that's because it is. But we aren't past the film's opening yet, Ida's death is precipitated by her causing a scene in the proximity of a mafia boss. I was left guessing as to why the movie was set in the 1930's. I think it was specifically 1936, and I thought it might have something to do with WW2 and the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust or something. That hypothesis went nowhere, I suspect it was in the 1930s because that's when the Boris Karloff movies came out, and that's really where the bride came into existence, not 1818 when Mary Shelley began telling the story.

That leant the Bonnie & Clyde idea of Monster & Bride, but it also provided the mafia as I suspect, a symbolic patriarchy. 

But which "patriarchy" because there are (at least) two, and I am confident I have previously documented in my blog, the incoherency of this Feminism 101 concept. There is intelligent design patriarchy, or the conspiracy patriarchy. This is an active, organised concept that suppresses women. Then there is a descriptive, emergent, status quo patriarchy - this is a passive patriarchy that merely collects observations of all the ways in which women are oppressed in society relative to men.

The mafia is a criminal conspiracy, and it is a conspiracy in the film. The symbolic patriarch of the mafia, who has women's tongues cut out and murders with impunity.

Organised crime is much less scary than disorganised crime. It seems scarier when you live in modest comfort, because you are already spared disorganised crime. It seems scary when you are literally minding your own business and some fat guys in suits come in, don't introduce themselves and suggest you need to pay them a "protection" fee every month because it would be a shame if your business were to burn down.

That seems scary, compared to when unemployment is so high, that pretty much anyone might cut your throat for spare change in your pocket. It's much scarier when you go to the town hall and instead of saying "we are going to address this by building an effective witness protection program where we can guaruntee the safety of those we need to come forth and testify against the Gambino crime family, we are going to get them on taxes, we are going to flip their low level members and get them turning states evidence against the big players..." they say "well we need to stop the civil war between religious sectarian groups in order to secure property rights so people can safely farm again and create the surplus calories needed to keep children in school for longer so we can start building a modern economy that provides good opportunities to our youth so they won't turn to crime and instead pay taxes that we can transparently spend on social programs without foreign interference."

I may not like the term "patriarchy" but I will grant it for argument's sake to move on to the question that interests me - "how efficient is patriarchy?" I think patriarchy is unfortunately, quite efficient, which is to say, its the disorganised kind of crime. Fighting it is not a simple matter of disobedience, standing up and saying "I'm not going to take it anymore" is the starting line, not the finishing line.

This I think, is the unintentionally interesting disconnect between the bride and the monster as a love story. The bride is fighting nebulous patriarchy, a loose end that is handled clumsily in an impatient mid-credits scene. This is, and it is probably a taboo, a Quixotic quest of modern feminism, which is a generalisation on my part, not a stereotype. It is where you fight a coordinated conspiracy to oppress women, but in the movie the monster has literally nothing to do with the mafia.

If you think instead of patriarchy as spontaneous, disorganised, decentralized local cells, where there is no campaign to take the head of the snake, just local battles, then probably the best weapon a 21st century woman has in her possession, is her agency over mate selection, and that is right in front of the bride throughout the film, it is treated as the spine of the film, with the film's ending and final act being that she has come to love the monster who loves her. That's why justice for the mafia don that motivated the circumstances of Ida's death is an afterthought.

I think it is a product of incompetence (and incoherence) because there is a convoluted backstory based on the criminal conspiracy that saw Ida die. She was a spy, basically a prostitute employed by a detective in a case that was killed due to police corruption taking bribes from the Mafia but Ida wanted justice for the silenced and dead women.

With Maggie's visual interpretation of the bride, her production has successfully created an iconic character, it doesn't matter that the movie is bad or bombs, like "The Suicide Squad" and Harley Quinn, the bride's look was destined to become a 2026 Halloween costume staple. Except the next cringe and incompetent thing the film does that an audience needs to move beyond, is that it depicts women everywhere dressing up as the bride, replicating her cheek smear or tattoo birthmark, and fighting their battles of disobedience under patriarchy. 

This is doing Aldous Snow's "I'm like an African white space Jesus. That's not for me to say though." from Get Him To The Greek, but Maggie calls herself African white space Jesus. 

Alas, this is projection, and I think it is projection that sustains appeals to the nebulous "patriarchy" notion, that the battle is about disobedience to a system that oppresses women, by stepping into your power and subjugating your oppressors. That's literally what is happening when a group of women, made up as the bride, pin down the mafia don and tattoo his face in the mid-credits scene. 

But what is wrong with patriarchy, such that it is, is that it treats women as a class of inferior people. It manifests in the basic way, that your boyfriend won't go see Pride & Prejudice which you want to see, so you end up watching XXX: The Return of Xander Kaine with him.

Bale's monster is flawed but good guy, he is just desperate. The script shows us this, shows us the bride seeing this in him. Before she is brought to life, (and after Maggie has already possessed her and deprived her of personhood) Bale gets cold feet, rejecting her on account of her being 'too pretty' and the mad scientist pushes it through, she even pulls the lever to bring her to life because the monster has a panic attack, so frightened by the prospect of what the source material got so right in the original bride's lineless cameo - she screams upon seeing the monster. (and also the Helena Bonham Carter incarnation from 1998ish, commits suicide by self immolation upon realizing her own fate.)

Narratively, there is supposedly this issue of consent, but again, consent is a limitation of the modern collectivist form of feminism that allows Maggie to appropriate Mary Shelley to her own ends, it just continues - Ida is dead, Ida is dead because Mary Shelley precipitated the strife that killed her own creation. Maggie, as Mary Shelley hand picks Ida to be the bride of Frankenstein, so already we have Maggie as Mary Shelley consenting to the match. Then there's Annette Benning's character, she is the one who actively argues the case against resurrecting a woman for the monster, just as Shelley's Victor did in the source material. 

Except Benning's objection isn't on the grounds of them reproducing, a la "Seed of Chucky" but on the grounds that she could create a monster. The monster puts forward his counterargument to "what if she's a monster?" as "then I will love her." and to this Benning tacitly consents, like a father blessing a groom.

It's shallow, dare I say, a close reading of the text, to say Ida doesn't consent to being resurrected to serve as a companion for a lonely monster. If you back off a bit, all the characters are Maggie Gyllenhaal, and the marriage has been arranged variously by her, Mary Shelley and Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Benning), the bride is perfectly safe with the monster, he has already been vetted. The bride just has to trust that her fellow women are looking out for her.

The women in this movie, universally approve of the match.

Earlier in publication than Shelley's Frankenstein, but near enough to be contemporary was Pride and Prejudice, which could also be considered a guidebook on fighting Patriarchy through mate selection:

As the story progresses, so does her tumultuous relationship with Mr Darcy. The course of Elizabeth and Darcy's relationship is ultimately decided when Darcy overcomes his pride, and Elizabeth overcomes her prejudice, leading them both to surrender to their love for each other. ~ from the wikipedia article.

As a man, a much more difficult version of feminism to grapple with, is the more literal interpretations of women's liberation. This is the considerably harder battle of not employing mate-selection, something within women's control, to tackle men's violence against women. This takes the form of needing to educate Pete, that the problem has nothing to do with Sarah's insistence on dating Dave (including isolating herself in domestic environments with him) despite his history of jealousy, insecurity, possessiveness, emotional dysregulation and verbal and physical abuse, because Sarah is free to be attracted to whomever she likes, and to date whomever will have her that she chooses. The problem is that Dave refuses to be domesticated by Sarah. 

I understand this, the freedom for Sarah to date Dave and not Pete. It to my understanding, has a lot in common with women's freedom to wear miniskirts and thong underwear to the club and not expect sexual violence. Furthermore, it is relatable. No matter how many studies replicate that arranged marriages provide higher levels of satisfaction, I don't think anyone who has gained the liberty to choose their own partners feels compelled by such data to wish for a return to arranged marriages.

It is the right for women to pursue their own Beauty & The Beast fairy tale. "The Bride!" is an interesting twist on the Beauty & The Beast fairy tale, for the beast in this case is thoroughly domesticated, the bride is not. Benning reveals in the final scene, that somehow the bride was a means and not an end to her. Some long unrealised dream to create a disobedient geometry.

All the evidence suggests, that Maggie is incredibly well read, her movie is a hot intertextual mess. The deep cuts are peppered through the movie itself. That's where the reflection of 21st century feminism comes into sharp relief, and it's unfoundedness and incoherence is the making of this movie, encapsulated in this appeal to disobedience.

"Well behaved women seldom make history." ~ Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

Obviously this mantra hinges on your definition of "well behaved" you can easily "beg the question" by asserting that a well-behaved woman, cannot make history, so if she does, then she can't be well behaved. But I suspect this assertion, could prove, like the rule "i before e except after c" I suspect nobody has ever really examined the claim, I can think of a number of exceptions to Ulrich's statement, but that wouldn't substantiate a frequency claim like 'seldom':

• Queen's Victoria, Elizabeth II, Isabella of Spain, Eleanor of Aquitaine etc.
• Penelope of Ithaca, Iphigenia, Sita etc. from mythology.
• Margaret Thatcher, Teresa May, Angela Merkel, Julia Gillard, Jacinta Ardern etc. in politics.
• Ada Lovelace, Mary Curie, Mary Summerville etc. in the sciences.
• In literature there are almost too many to name but probably should include Murasaki Shikibu, the Bronte sisters, Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie etc. etc. etc.

Again, everything hinges on the definition of "well-behaved" and in large part I have to plead ignorance, for all I know Enid Blyton financed her writing by selling crystal meth to local teenagers, Margerat Thatcher declared war on the falklands, is that well-behaved or badly behaved? She was leader of the Conservative party, but her radical economics ended Britain's post war period of upward social mobility, but it was also pretty much identical policy wise to the Reagan administration across the pond. 

Iconoclasts need to be free to be iconoclastic. I'm not anti-any form of liberalism (with the usual caveat that your rights to swing your fists through the air end at the tip of my nose) 

I think "The Bride!" finds in the mafia, an unintentionally interesting metaphor for how to approach 'the patriarchy' - I'm sure the mafia, and organised crime, kills women. I'm also reasonably confident, that at its deadliest, the mafia has killed far less women than the institutions of marriage and family, nor the alcohol, tobacco, automotive, pharmacuetical or cosmetics industries.

Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised, if organised crime is unpopular with both men and women. There is an overwhelming common ground on which to form an alliance, and that history will show, most people are against organised crime, and its condemnation is codified in laws.

Just so, given what little we know about Ida, it seems that the monster is a better romantic partner for her than any of her known male associates at the time of her death. The major thing making the relationship bad, is that the bride is possessed by Mary Shelley, who created the monster. So this is kind of like a woman being possessed by her own mother-in-law. 

The bride depicts for me, the naive isolationist war against patriarchy that inadvertantly prophesied the US-Isreal attacks on Iran. As at writing today, Trump has criticized/begged for NATO allies to help him out of the mess he made without consulting them.

If "The Bride!" is confusing, then there's hope that women can sit in the audience wondering what the fuck the bride is doing and where the movie is going, and men can sit in the audience and find the monster's situation weird and disconnected. 

Again, that's interesting.

Appropriation of the Commons

So let's address this, for me, worst aspect of the film. Worst creative decision. I have very limited influence, so my neologism of "samening" an offense equal and opposite to "othering" is something I'll have to rearticulate. I think it's bad when people "other" I agree, it is aggressive to be all like "you can't sit with us." but there is also an aggressive form of inclusion, I've seen it. The pressure exerting "hey, come sit with us." not as friendly invitation, but as laying claim to someone's time and attention. 

My sense is, a lot of people naively assume that "inclusion" can only be good thing, not bad thing, forgetting arranged marriages, gangs, teenage betrayals. Forgetting egocentricity, that one can be included as a means, as an object, as an accessory. 

Then there is the question of owning people, to which I feel the answer is an emphatic 'no' but people will take possession of people they identify with. Usually this is banal as people declaring "we won" regarding the victory of a professional sports team that the person objectively contributed nothing to. But sometimes you will get a quite intense sense of proprietary ownership over a person, like people who feel it is their place to defend the honour and reputation of Jesus. Someone to the best of our knowledge, was a person, and I don't think Christians "own" Jesus anymore than anyone can own a person.

I think a problem with identity politics, is when you start thinking in group resolution, you can lose sight of something like Mary Shelly was a person who had her own voice and could very much speak for herself. Some 'forgetting' like this is my most charitable explanation as to why Maggie hubristicly felt that she could write Mary Shelly in the first person as though she knew her mind, the mind of the author of multiple manuscripts of Frankenstein & His Monster: A Modern Promethean Tale, that included her explicitly tackling a request by Frankenstein's creation to Victor, to make him a bride, and Victor (and by proxy, Mary Shelly) doesn't think it a good idea and declines it.

In 2019, Greta Gerwig released her improved ending to Little Women, O magazine quotes her as saying "I wanted to give Louisa May Alcott an ending she might have liked" and in Greta's case it seems there's a paper trail, along with the biography of Louisa May Alcott that suggest that Josephine as a self-insert probably should have wound up a righteous spinster babe.

I recently read Pandora's Jar by Natalie Haynes, a non-fiction book by the author of "A Thousand Ships" which was a retelling of the Trojan war from the perspective of its women and goddesses. In the conclusion, which I have to paraphrase because I returned the book to the library already, Natalie argues that it is valid to retell stories from other perspectives because they've always been retold from other perspectives. 

This is hard to argue when you have Greek playwrights like Euripides riffing off episodes of the Iliad and Odyssey and Jason and the Argonauts. I tentatively accept her conclusion, her arguments compelled me to accept it, including through the preceding book leading to her conclusions.

But only to a degree. One thing that diminishes "A Thousand Ships" as a project (I haven't read it, so it could be great, but I'm just commenting on the project) is that while the Iliad may not pass the Bechtel test, it isn't like it is devoid of great female characters who have great scenes like Helen, Cassandra, Hecuba and Penthasilia who fights Achilles. The question is more of emphasis, I guess, and probably a matter of which roles got relegated to the cutting room floor in the moving picture era.

Then there's something like 'Julia', which is Orwell's '1984' told from Winston Smith's romantic liason Julia's perspective. The difference being, our ability to preserve the fidelity of the manuscript an author turns in has improved remarkably since Euripides was putting on plays, and that was already a massive improvement over oral traditions of Epic Poems.

Right there's this thing, that Orwell was doing, which was sitting down to a Typewriter and being like "how can I get my thoughts on Communism and Socialism and man's inhumanity to man out to the general public?" and he writes "Animal Farm: A Fairy Tale" and he writes "1984" about a dystopian future and they both hit. 

Somewhere in this very feelie terrain, there's a right of reply. Like anyone can pick up a typewriter and write their own response to Animal Farm, and 1984. Responses include the very famous "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, and while not a direct inspiration, Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" was described upon release as "A Feminist 1984" and I think in modernity and post-modernity, writing a reply that involves creating your own world and characters is the path that leaves one far less exposed to hacks. 

Over on the flipside, there's something like Baz Lurman taking "Romeo & Juliet" and setting it in Las Angeles in the mid-90s. At that time, my feeling is this was a huge swing, where Baz scored a home run on all the doubters. It's success no doubt lead to greenlighting the forgotten "O" and enjoyable beloved fluff featuring a teacher putting Shakespeare to rap in "10 Things I Hate About You" when people realised that teenagers love Shakespeare when you don't make it so fucking boring.

But if some guy was like "I'm going to improve on Shakespeare" by inhabiting the ghost of Shakespeare to endorse my new better version of 1998's Shakespeare in Love, I feel in my waters that it would be far more likely to be caught somewhere in pre-production as "maybe this is a bad idea."

I don't know if it's some embedded sense of Marxist-collectivism, but it does feel to me, that feminism has this distinct hubris wedded to it, that I doubt is essential or necessary, where anything and anyone can be annexed for the cause but is the yin to the cringeness yang woman must feel when watching Vin Diesel remind us that flying a rocket car up to a space station as part of a counter-terrorist heist is "about family" when he and his crew have a cook up to celebrate using a Shelby GT-500 to take out a nuclear submarine in the Arctic Circle.

Of recent I've begun to wonder if anything is actually cool. I don't have an answer, but something that is definitely uncool is trying to be cool. That's the risk though, and again, through that on screen disconnect between Bale's coherent consistent monster and trying to make something of The Bride that isn't relative to the monster, illustrates two viewpoints both trying to be cool in front of each other, that is a unique viewing experience.

Christian Bale > Jacob Elordi

I've now had time to watch some of the reviews I avoided of "The Bride!" Another reason to see this film is because Christian Bale's take on the monster, is probably the best ever. I'd say he's also the best looking monster since Boris Karloff.

I disagree with nothing said in this review that pans the film and this review that praises the film. Don't miss that I think neither of these reviews contradict the other. It is clearly, demonstrably, about what you see and I'm probably closer to being in furious agreement with Mark Kermode, whose review I sought out because of his review of Del Toro's "Frankenstein" from 2025.

Del Toro's movie is commendable because it is closest to the plot beats of the source material. He set out to make a faithful adaptation of Shelley's book, to honour her rather than co-opt her. It was commercially successful, critically acclaimed (it just won 3 Oscars, relating to production design) and was nominated for 9. It was also, surprisingly boring.

Furthermore, Mia Goth as Elizabeth gets these great costumes. Victor as a child has visions of a grotesque angel of death or something, the stuff people go see Del Toro movies for since at least Pan's Labyrinth maybe even Cronos. There's some expectation then, for an interesting visual take on the monster, but the creature is visually boring.

I've seen multiple reviews comment on Del Toro's Frankenstein being boring, even to the point of people putting it on and falling asleep in the middle of it, and I'm inclined to agree. It's a conundrum, because Del Toro has made it to the standard of a proper period drama, he has faithfully adapted the text and yet it is less interesting to watch than Pride & Prejudice, Emma, Vanity Fair period dramas that involve no explosions, no monsters, no reanimated corpses, no rotating barrel blunderbusses nor arctic expeditions. 

The cast too is talented, with the possible exception of Jacob Elordi. I think that's the central problem, the monster isn't interesting, unlike the shark in Jaws, once revealed, I wanted to see less of him.

And yet, the curious thing being that Bale's monster benefits immensely from Elordi's performance. Within Bale's introductory scenes we know his story, his motivations, his character. 

But Maggie has also gone intertextual, giving Bale heaps to work with. She's watched Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder's "Young Frankenstein" and has a scene where the bride questions whether it's "Frankensteen" or "Frankenstyne" in pronounciation, then it references maybe one of the earliest shit-losing comedy scenes in cinematic history, Young Frankenstein's 'Puttin' on the Ritz' from which I'm sure the plot mechanic of having Jake Gyllenhaal playing a Fred Astaire star that the monster literally projects his fantasies onto.

No aspect of hilarity is preserved from the original gag, but its just an example of the freedom Bale had to work with to create a coherent character that also has a century of existence to use to give us insight into the predicament of this experimental byproduct.

Again, I hesitate to give Maggie too much credit, beyond her ambition. What she has is a mess, and I cannot understate how annoying the Mary Shelley personality is and how unwelcome it is whenever it shows up.

In the above linked reviews, there's two different comparisons made - there's an unfavorable one to Poor Things, that I thought of too. That's the movie at its most hackey, and I thought it during the dance scene to putting on the ritz. Especially if you are unfamiliar with Young Frankenstein, you will likely be turned off by that scene, as a try hard attempt to be quirky by out of touch nepo-babies.

With Young Frankenstein it is coherent though, because I guess the joke is, that dignified idiot, Gene Wilder as Dr Frankenstein, feels the best demonstration of his god-like power to create life, is a song and dance number that stars himself. I'm laughing comprehending it, and don't get me wrong, that gag is a greater achievement than "The Bride!" and it's complex, worth getting obsessed over. But Maggie takes that sentiment, and this is the monster's fantasy, to be a tap-dancing hollywood star. 

Things like when Bale's monster reveals he gets his money by fishing it out of public fountains, wishing wells. the film has the scope, and the talent in Bale (who read Maggie's script and took Maggie's direction) to outshine what Elordi did in a faithful adaptation of the enduring source material.

Bale also eclipses, it goes without saying, Robert De Niro as the monster. I remember learning that De Niro was the monster after seeing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and being like 'that was De Niro?'

But then to flip it around, Jessie Buckley is a great actress, and in most of her personalities, she shines. Just not Mary Shelley, the worst and most prominent. I also think, that while she seemingly has a lot to work with, like being part Bonny, maybe part Zelda Fitzgerald, part Mae West. What I would guess happened was to Yin the monster's Yang, where the monster is a composite of body parts with a single original mind, the bride is a single body and somehow all women, so the intertextuality may include Frank Herbert's Dune sequels. 

Jessie Buckley is fundamentally charismatic, but I think its that case of if you are every woman you wind up being no woman. However, I think this comes from there just being nothing to work with, with "The Bride of Frankenstein." beyond the very, very interesting disconnect.

Consider, that in "The Bride of Frankenstein" the primary antagonist, once the Bride is declared alive announces "Behold the bride of Frankenstein!" in a movie where Henry Frankenstein is already married to Elizabeth, who is already pregnant, and they live happily ever after, so she isn't his bride. Is the character making the same mistake as everyone has since forever, in referring to the monster as Frankenstein? Probably. The movie poster plays this trope.

Maggie was fucked like Charlie Kauffman's attempt to adapt 'The Orchid Thief' in Adaptations, where his own hubris from writing 'Being John Malkovich' leads him to want to write a story where nobody grows and nobody learns anything. 

The Bride only exists because the monster does, he is literally her reason for being. 'The Bride' is also Uma Thurman's cognomen in Kill Bill until she is revealed to be called Beatrice, and that was one text this movie missed despite it being right there. 

When you subtract the 'of Frankenstein' to make the bride somehow her own woman, what you are left with is nonsense, like Season 5 of Stranger Things nonsense, and this movie even has an unproposal scene.

Collage

I'm tired, so I think we can say, that there is a lot, probably too much going on in this film. I suspect you cannot work on a Frankenstein screenplay, with so little to work with to begin with, without consciously or unconsciously Frankensteining a bunch of stuff together. This movie has a collage feel.

What it reminds me of, is David W. Mack's collage based art-style, and in that sense the movie has a very 90s feel.

The production design, hair and makeup, costumes, what is the french - mis en scene, shot composition, cinematography is all of artistic merit. 

It's worth seeing as a spectacle, and it's really really busy, like a teenage girl of the mid-90s vision board.