The movie Labyrinth (1986) is a tale of an adolescent girl’s quest/hero’s journey/sexual awakening. It’s a fantasy that features muppets good and slightly evil and everything in between. It also features David Bowie in very tight tights with his cod on obvious display. You can’t miss it—and that’s the point.
But why is it the point?
THE SETUP:
Jareth the Goblin King and his co-star. No, not the muppet.
Our intrepid heroine, Sarah, is a girl whose mother ran out on the family to become an actress and from what tidbits one can glean, a relatively successful stage actress. Sarah is not resentful. In fact, she finds this wistfully romantic. Sarah has a baby brother by her not-very-new stepmother, whose treatment of Sarah is (per Sarah’s point of view) borderline abusive because she asks Sarah to babysit while Dad and she go out on a date. The viewer doesn’t get much but that the stepmother would not ask Sarah to babysit if she had a date or parties to go to and that she is frustrated that Sarah doesn’t want friends nor does she want to date or go out. Sarah just wants to live in her own fantasy world alone, cosplaying and dreaming about her mother’s glamorous life, which distresses the stepmother to no end.
Stepmom: She treats me like the wicked stepmother in a fairy story no matter what I do.
We get the point: Sarah’s living in her head in the starring role of Cinderella and loving every second of her victimhood. But she’s a teenager whose mother ran out on her, so that is to be expected.
So Dad and Wicked Stepmother leave and there’s poor Sarah wandering around the house in a romantic and fanciful poet’s shirt and vest, in the dark while it’s storming outside, bemoaning her fate and talking to the baby rather hatefully, yet handling him gently.
Sarah: I wish the Goblin King would come take you away.
And … cue baby vanishing. An owl thumps at the window and (because she is very smart), she opens it.
Owl: a symbol of femininity, fertility, darkness, spiritual wisdom, strategy, and represents the goddess Athena/Diana. “According to myth, an owl sat on Athena’s blind side, so that she could see the whole truth.”
Then there stands a man, a tall man with freakish hair in RenFest garb. He’s the personification of desire, and Sarah is breathless with fear and attraction. He is Jareth the Goblin King, and she knows this instantly. She begs for her brother back. He plays with his balls to demonstrate his magic while giving her a challenge/quest/dare. If she can complete the labyrinth that surrounds the Goblin City in 13 hours, he’ll give her her baby brother back, but if she doesn’t, he will turn the baby into a goblin forever.
And off she goes on her quest like a good little hero/ine on his/her journey, encountering all sorts of obstacles along the way, the main one being her hubris that she can defeat the Goblin King
“Don’t go that way … If she’d’a gone that way, she’d’a gone straight to the castle.”
She is constantly exhorted not to take things for granted and that things aren’t always what they seem. She cuts other characters off once she thinks she has all the information she needs. She doesn’t ask the right questions. She thinks her wisdom is sufficient to solve the labyrinth.
On the surface, the movie is a morality tale and is very explicit about it: Don’t take anything for granted and stop it with the hubris. A teenage girl watching this movie will get that. She will be breathless at the idea of Jareth the Goblin King taking an interest in a lowly teenage girl, but she won’t parse that. Why do that when she has a powerful, magical man’s attention and his lust (which is in plain sight), tempting her to the pleasures of hedonism? And he blatantly uses his cod to tempt her with his presence, his devotion to her, his love and desire for her as a woman.
Jareth: I ask for so little. Just let me rule you and you can have everything you want. … Fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave.
THE DECONSTRUCTION:
The story is a constant struggle between Sarah’s sense of adult responsibility, her burgeoning womanhood/sexuality, and her girlish dreams, desires, and fantasies.
The struggle comes down to two pivotal moments in the movie:
Dancin’ in the streets… Oh, wait.
Sarah has been poisoned. In her delirious state, she is at a ball, in a grown woman’s fantasy ball gown, in the middle of decadent adults, being romantically pursued by Jareth. She is confused, disoriented, even while it is the culmination of all her romantic and magical fantasies. Yet the memory of an important quest is on the edges of her mind. She chooses to rebuff Jareth’s advances and escape, turning away from her new and scary sexual feelings.
She falls in the darkness, eventually winding up on her own bed, which is frilly. Was it a dream? Was it real? Her bedroom is full of stuffed animals (that look remarkably like her muppet friends), RenFest clothing, a shelf full of elaborately bound fairy tales, a vanity on which there’s makeup and knickknacks. Every single thing in her room is a three-dimensional representation of everything going on in the fantasy. Most importantly (which you will miss in a blink), there is a newspaper clipping of a review of her mother’s play. It’s a picture of her mother standing with her costar, who happens to look exactly like Jareth the Goblin King.
The Goblin King is in the details.
She sits confused at her vanity while a character shoves all her old comforts at her and reminds her of how nice it is to be in her comfy warm and welcoming and fantastical bedroom, tempting her to stay a little girl. She’s painfully disoriented, but it’s her own room, her childhood in 108 square feet, her shelter from the world of adulthood, adult decisions, adult problems.
On the edge of her mind, though, is a purpose, a purpose she doesn’t remember until she sees one of her fairy tales and remembers. On she forges. You know she successfully retrieves her baby brother because that’s how the quest works. Humans like that.
In the last scene, she’s back in her house, the baby’s in the crib asleep, she goes to her room and starts putting away her childish things, Dad and Stepmom come home. The stuffed animals come to life and regretfully must leave, but they reassure her that should she ever need them …
They don’t finish the thought, but she dances with them while an owl (femininity, fertility, darkness) sits on a tree limb outside her window and watches them before flying away.
For now, she is firmly on the edge of girlhood and womanhood, having rejected both—for the time being—but knowing that it’s inevitable and she will leave her friends behind.
THE CIRCUMSTANCE:
I was not aware of this movie when it was released in June of 1986. My parents had bought a house on the opposite corner of the metro area from where I grew up and I was busy moving us. I and our trusty 1.5-ton passenger van moved that house almost all by ourselves. I was also getting ready to go to BYU. I would stay in the new house for a grand 2.5 weeks before I left for another adventure.
I was leaving my frilly childhood bedroom and stuffed animals behind and in a month, I would be dropped off at a dorm 1200 miles away from home watching my parents drive away and going back to my dorm room alone. But what was home? A new bedroom in a new house in a suburban neighborhood like the one I’d always fantasized about? Naw. “Home” was no more home than the dorm room was. My home was gone forever and we all know you can’t go home again.
The movie didn’t come to the BYU on-campus theater until late spring or early fall semester 1987. I don’t remember. I went with this gorgeous, funny, hyperactive Korean dude I was majorly crushing on. He couldn’t keep his leg still, bouncing it all the way through.
But the movie worked its spell no matter how irritated and distracted I was.
THE BREAKDOWN:
Fast forward 20 years. I found the online romance novel scene. Self-proclaimed feminists and budding SWJs were out pounding the internet pavement preaching the gospel of the Feminist Agenda of Romance Novels. Why? Because they liked them, they felt guilty about liking them with some of their problematic themes, and wanted mainstream feminism to stop sneering at what they liked. It was simultaneous defiance and begging for approval.
They didn’t get it. I was a romance-novel veteran and they hated the early ones where the heroine was brave and gutsy and involved herself in all sorts of feats of derring-do. They were bad. “This isn’t your mother’s rapetastic romance novel,” they would screech, not actually knowing what they were talking about. The romance novels of yesteryear had kick-ass heroines and more explicit sex than the namby-pamby stuff of the aughts.
A major participant in Romancelandia was a women’s studies professor. Her husband was Jewish. She was Catholic, but converted to marry him. He got a job at some rinky-dink college and she was a spousal hire (“You don’t get me if you don’t hire my wife”). Instant tenure. Hot stuff in her field (ORLY).
She had heard much wistful sighing over Labyrinth in Romancelandia so she sat down with her two tween sons and watched it. Like a good feminist and women’s studies professor, she broke it down to three things: David Bowie’s cod, phallic imagery everywhere, men (Henson and Lucas) telling such a stupid tale to fulfill their own perverse desires for a young girl. She thought it was hilarious and ridiculous, a sausagefest (with one sausage).
She, whose respected romance novel blog* with thrice-weekly posts would routinely get close to a hundred comments (impressive even in those days, for a one-chick blog), garnered a few vague “Oh, that’s an interesting take” type comments.
It sat there. For a week. Getting nothing more. She let it sit for a few more days. Nothing.
Finally, I said, “I really don’t understand how you missed the entire point of the movie.” And went on to summarize the above but far more briefly and only so I wouldn’t come off as totally unhinged with rage at her stupidity.
Because I was.
How in the world does a feminist women’s study professor—who “loves” romance novels (but only the politically virtuous ones) (zzzzzzz) and screams to her disdainful colleagues how empowering and feminist they are—miss this?
I stopped just shy of telling her she was a stupid traditional housewife who converted to a man’s religion to marry him, followed him to his profession, got a job on his coattails, and promptly had two children. Betty Friedan would be ashamed. There was nothing “feminist” about her, and then she missed this.
She gave me a polite, “That’s an interesting take,” but the floodgates opened. And the comments section exploded with other gently made points about Labyrinth’s importance to both feminism and the hero’s journey and the fact that a girl was on the hero’s journey (quite groundbreaking for 1986) and a girl’s sexual awakening—and that Jim Henson and George Lucas knew more about it than any other filmmakers at the time (and maybe still) and portrayed it accurately. Details and symbolism got pulled out left and right.
Dr. Hot Stuff: “Well, maybe I should watch it again.”
Ya think?
She lost a lot of credibility in Romancelandia that day, credibility that was, inexplicably, very important to her.
My work there was done.
Yay! I can’t wait to read this in full. Thanks Mo!
I hope you’ll enjoy it!
I sure did, buddy. Thanks!
Great read about one our house’s favorite films. Thanks. As an aside, back in the early 1990s, the fellow who does the actual contact juggling (Bowie’s hands) had an awesome juggling/yo-yo/kite store in Tallahassee, FL.
Thanks!
They have clips on YouTube of the dude doing the juggling behind Bowie. It know it’s a skill but it borders on magic.
Aha!
Thanks.
Sleight of hand is as real as magic gets.
I never saw the movie, but Bowie was a hero of mine
Bowie was one of the best live acts I’ve seen. I only regret I didn’t see more shows.
“I never saw the movie, but Bowie was a hero of mine”
I think that you might appreciate this. It is from an interview twenty years ago: “In a 1999 BBC interview, Bowie tells a skeptical Jeremy Paxman, ‘I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable.’ When Paxman retorts that the internet is merely a tool, Bowie calls it ‘an alien life form’ and expresses his belief that ‘it is going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.'” Here is a clip.
Although I am not a fan of David Bowie like yourself, I found his insight rather prescient.
This was an excellent read.
So, I saw this on VHS when it was released to video, making me probably nine or so, maybe ten. I remember being annoyed at the puppets, thinking that there was too much sparkling and glittering (and to this day when I think of the movie I think of it as sort of blurry and glittery), and, true to form, being really, really annoyed at the fact that the protagonist started the whole damn thing by screwing up from the get-go. At an early age, I had absolutely no sympathy for people who did something wrong (in the sense of incorrect, not immoral) and suffered for it. I also was really pissed off at David Bowie’s character requesting that she fear him, too; as far back as I can remember the idea of obeying someone out of fear was something I considered a terrible state of affairs to be tolerated only as long as it took to successfully defeat the person in question, preferably in violent and permanent fashion. At the end of the movie there was pretty much nobody I felt good about other than a couple of the companion puppets, who I thought deserved better than to prop up some dumb girl and then fade into the background until she screwed up again.
Thanks!
The endless string of bad choices she makes–
She fell down a hole and was caught by hands that grew out of the walls.
Hands: Up or down?
Sarah: Well, I was already going down…
–who chooses to continue falling? That always hung me up.
Also, I still don’t understand the riddle.
https://riddlesbrainteasers.com/honest-dishonest-guards/
Riddle explained
I misstated. I understand the riddle. I have a couple of problems.
1) I am not nearly that fast on my feet, certainly not as fast as Sarah was in the movie.
2) I would not be able to formulate the right question to ask.
My brain isn’t wired that way.
When your ass in on the line it’s hard to think rationally. Damn lizard brain.
The stupid mistakes bit has always bothered me, which makes watching horror movies sort of a different experience, since so many tend to require characters to do blatantly stupid things in order to set up the punchline. Same with horror fiction. The one exception that stands out is the stuff written by Laird Barron, who tends to write stories where the protagonists actually make good decisions or do reasonable, common-sense things.
Two thoughts:
Have you seen that Geico ad with the horror movie?
Many, many stories depend on the characters not talking to each other like reasonable people, assuming what someone else would say, cutting them off in the middle of an argument and walking away. The Big Misunderstanding. I hate that. My characters either explain fully or they don’t explain at all because they’re being assholes. Assholes I can deal with. Stupid people I can’t.
Related: I hate the white hat always refusing to kill the black hat when he has the chance and only whips around to kill the black hat when the black hat takes that one.last.chance. to kill the white hat. Just kill the motherfucker while you have the chance.
So you’re a fan if “scream” then?
https://youtu.be/OMHF7Z0ASyk
No. I don’t like horror movies unless it involves Bruce Campbell.
I saw The Hitcher only because I wanted to watch 2 hours of Rutger Hauer.
Try Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. Comedy with some Bruce Campbell slapstick in it.
“No. I don’t like horror movies unless it involves Bruce Campbell.”
So, Hail to the King, Baby.
“I saw The Hitcher only because I wanted to watch 2 hours of Rutger Hauer.”
Here is a segment form an interview with Rutger Hauer that I think you might enjoy.
I happened to find an interview with him wearing a shirt with Owl imagery, which may tie in nicely with your original post.
I worked a bike for Rutger Hauer once. It was funny, because he came in before the bike got there and said that his Softail would only go 50 in second gear and it used to go almost 70. I told him there’s no way he’s even going 50. That bike’s only good for 35 in aecond. It was hard to communicate, because of his accent and the crazy shit he was saying. The bike finely gets there and it turned out he bought it in Austria. It had a kph speedo.
I glommed Stephen King when I was a teenager. Read everything he’d done to that point but when I got to the end of his oeuvre at that point, I never read him again. Sadly, that is what I do.
I also read Lois Duncan. Her YA horror was teh shit.
Lois Duncan is great.
I’d love to see a 3rd wave feminist reading of Daughters of Eve. Jezebel.com would have a meltdown.
By the way… Amazon Prime has the TV movie adaptation of Summer of Fear available.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078330/
That commercial is hilarious.
Yeah, that’s a great commercial! Cabin in the Woods is for much of its length a longer version of that same gag.
I read a lot of horror, and for my money the best stories are the ones where the characters do the smart thing and are still overwhelmed. Bad things happening to people who do obviously stupid things aren’t especially horrific or surprising, unless the horror comes from the idea of people making very obviously bad choices.
That brings to mind a common situation in horror movies I am torn over: Going Into The Basement.
Normally, you hear a noise in your house. You think it’s in the basement. A reasonable person is going to believe that it’s the furnace or a critter or something broke or the washing machine is off balance. So you go down there and set things aright without one thought.
A reasonable person would not suspect that there is a villain in the house waiting to pounce, especially if you have not heard the news that there is an escaped serial killer running around your neighborhood.
Now. In a movie, the viewer is primed to think DON’T GO DOWN THERE! and believe it is a stupid thing to do when in fact, it is NOT a stupid thing to do. The lighting, the music, and the lead-up all remove our sympathy for the character when we know they should NOT GO DOWN THERE!
These are situations I can’t really stand.
I like being manipulated by movies as well as the next person who cares about the quality of her buttered popcorn, but that’s too much.
Ok, so I come from the Bowie, Maryland school of horror film viewing, which means that, despite myself, I feel compelled to give advice to people in the film, and this is the classic situation. In movies where there aren’t clues to the characters that something’s amiss, then yeah, I totally agree with you. That’s the whole Hitchcock bit about having two characters sitting at a table with a time bomb under one of the chairs that only the audience can see. Where I go nuts and start yelling at the television is when the character knows there’s something up and they decide to walk barefoot and unarmed without telling anyone else into the basement to see what made that strange growling sound.
In fact, I SOOOOO can’t stand it that it was one huge reason I re-edited my first book.
The duality of one of the male characters is obvious to the reader. I meant it to be. It’s not a secret, not a gotcha, not an ah-ha moment. It’s a wink at the reader that we are all in on the joke.
The man wants the woman to figure this out, so he drops clues like crazy because he doesn’t know how to tell her and still have a relationship with her. He expects her to Figure It Out.
She doesn’t. I got reader emails like crazy that the woman was too stupid to figure it out.
W.T.F. Are you fucking KIDDING ME? A REASONABLE person is never going to make that leap. It is a wildly unreasonable leap.
So in the re-edit I had the woman ream the man up one side and down the other for expecting her to figure it out. “People take drugs to keep them from making those kinds of leaps. It’s called MAGICAL THINKING.”
That was for those readers.
If, as I do, one sees Jareth as a mere manifestation of her burgeoning sexuality, then it makes more sense.
Very interesting. I find movies that have lots of deeper imagery interesting, and get that “I’m smart” dopamine kick when i (think i) see them.
Be careful with that. A good sign that someone is about to get in trouble is going around telling themselves how smart they are.
Seriously…Mojoeaux’s take is insightful…stuff dummies like me never miss an opportunity to miss.
Audrey Rouget: What Jane Austen novels have you read?
Tom Townsend: None. I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists’ ideas as well as the critics’ thinking.
With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it’s all just made up by the author.
From the wonderfully underrated Metropolitan (1990)
Oh i know, I would be the dummy who misses the point.
Ill fully admit that having not seen even a single frame of this movie before today, I find the article interesting. Maybe my wife has seen it. Perhaps I’ll ask her.
Oh, and Mo…. You’ll be proud of me, I worked a cod into the next Lizzy Warren chronicle.
Yay! I made a Glibmeme!
‘I worked a cod into the next Lizzy Warren chronicle.’
These euphemisms are making me nauseous.
Don’t worry, it’s not her cod. It’s Ted Kennedy’s.
Not.Helping.
He fished it out of the river.
Now Jarflax will be irritated because “cod” apparently actually means testicles/scrotum instead of the dangly thing, but let me say preemptively–considering the ball-playing-with in the movie, it still fits.
That was some good sleight of hand. I suspect that Bowie didn’t do that himself, particularly the over-the-shoulder shot. Something odd about the arm in the initial ball shot where you can see his face — angle and distance from his body look like a juggler is kneeling just in front of him.
Oh, no, he didn’t do it himself. The juggler’s name is Michael Moschen . l0b0t above mentions that the juggler had a store in Tallahassee.
Thanks!
Contact juggling is just amazing to me. I have Michael’s intro book and can manage a couple drops and passes but it’s significantly more difficult (for me) than regular juggling and I never had the time to devote to it.
There’s plenty of cod in that bulge….
🙂 No, I was actually resisting giving you grief over:
Many, many stories depend on the characters not talking to each other like reasonable people, assuming what someone else would say, cutting them off in the middle of an argument and walking away. The Big Misunderstanding. I hate that. My characters either explain fully or they don’t explain at all because they’re being assholes.
So here’s the grief: That is exactly what most real conversations are like. It is also the only way a Romance Novel can exist, since otherwise all you get is one scene of the lovers meeting, one scene of a date. then a letter to Penthouse, followed by a marriage.
And blaming your miscommunication on deliberate obnoxiousness is not really different than blaming it on obtuseness or inattention 🙂
end grief. Good Article, although that riddle is such a cultural chestnut, even in 86 it was old, that I think most people would be able to solve it.
I’m not sure what sort of people you talk to, but, I don’t see conversations of those types outside of film/TV.
I must agree.
At some point the un-listened-to will demand the interrupter shut up and listen if it’s important enough.
Really? watch two people have an argument sometime and then separately ask each what the OTHER was saying, compare it to your neutral understanding. Maybe people don’t overtly cut people off, but they also don’t listen most of the time, and instead make up a narrative about what the other person is saying. People do this all the time especially when emotions get involved.
How many times have you posted something which specifically includes a caveat that you are not talking about X, or that your claim that Y is true is not intended to imply that Z is the response, and then been buried in replies that all harp on how you are saying X or advocating Z? It happens all the time, even here, and people here tend to be more careful about that than in other places.
I haven’t seen the movie in forever. Next time it’s on I’ll be sure to re-watch it.
Great article! ?
Thank you!
Awesome!
I watched this exactly once – in 1986 after it came to video after theatrical release. I think it puts both of us at almost the exact same age. As a young man it did nothing for me. I didn’t hate it, I didn’t love it. I expected more from Bowie and the muppets (sorry Rufus) didn’t work for me.
Reading this I think you neatly explain why I didn’t appeal to me. Now Bowie’s other film thank you Ms. Deneuve!
It was for fantasy fans, but I agree that it’s so not a boy’s movie.
I liked fantasy, but more of the Conan style or classic sword and sorcery.
I think I’d appreciate it more now. For example Time Bandits didn’t work well for me either.
Yes, my female friends positively gushed about it; for me it was a solid “meh.”
For you that is unsurprising, for me Jennifer Connolly was all the fantasy I needed.
You at least liked The Dark Crystal though, right?
Couldn’t get through it. Tried several times.
My step brother loved it. The last time I watched it I was probably 8. It was fun at the time though. Puppetry > CGI.
I saw it as an adult and hated it.
Time bandits and Dark Crystal were always rough for me too. I really enjoyed Willow, Princess Bride and the Conans.
Now Bowie’s other film
I thought you were going to link to this.
Relevant.
Nice article, Mojeaux. It’s also a coming of age moment when you realize “experts” are often full of shit.
That’s the best version of Frozen.
More relevant poetry.
Experts are often full of shit. Feminist criticism experts are always full of shit, because being an expert in made up shit only qualifies you to be full of shit.
Sometimes a cod piece and juggling balls are just…. ahh forget it.
How in the world does a feminist women’s study professor…miss this?
I stopped just shy of telling her she was a stupid traditional housewife who converted to a man’s religion to marry him, followed him to his profession, got a job on his coattails, and promptly had two children.
It isn’t that hard to figure out. Your second point explains it all. The sort of person you describe is a pretty par-for-the-course feminist. For the most part, their major claim to fame is marrying well. A certain recent presidential candidate comes to mind.
Like most other forms of collectivism, feminism’s major appeal is to the mediocrity. They can’t particularly aspire to greatness. So they demand its trappings by virtue of their membership in the collective (in this case, women). And they latch onto guys who will feed their pretense. A remarkable woman doesn’t need feminism. Respect is something that she is accorded on her own virtues. Feminism is a way for the utterly unremarkable woman to pretend she’s remarkable.
Your last paragraph should be required reading before any political discussion.
A certain recent presidential candidate comes to mind.
Who did Gary Johnson marry?
A-wife-oh.
Too soon?
*Bites tongue*
I have a small issue. My view of feminism is freedom of choice. There is nothing wrong with CHOOSING to be a homemaker and mother. The issue is when that is the only acceptable role for a woman. Unfortunately there are multiple waves of feminism, like multiple waves of civil rights activists. The early ones I strongly agree with. The latter are mostly griefers and grifters.
I get where you’re coming from. But, it seems to me what you’re talking about is more individualism than feminism. And the early feminists certainly shared goals with individualists. The question is what is the basis for thinking women should have options. The individualist would say that it’s the consequence of personal agency and volition. The feminist, from what I can tell, would say it’s on behalf of Team Women.
I don’t mind using the term feminist women talking about equal rights/responsibilities for women anymore than using men’s rights when talking about how modern men are disproportionately disfavored in the court system. It’s a quick way of framing the conversation. In my idea world everyone would be treated equally under the law.
Feminists don’t talk about equal responsibilities. They don’t believe in equal rights, either, and they don’t believe in choice.
In the beginning, feminists talked about equal rights, but “responsibilities” was assumed to go with it, as at that time, they were responsible by default–responsible for their duties to keep a marriage, household, and children together while the husband went off to make the money.
I need to do a deep dive into the different flavors of feminism and when it changed gears from we should have equal rights to “shut up, they explained”.
First wave feminism is what you are thinking of. Yeah, it had some temperance movement stuff in it, but it was mostly about extending recognition of human and civil rights to women.
With that accomplished, it moved into second wave feminism, which is most easily recognizable as being sex-negative and thinking that the punchline to every joke is “that’s not funny!”
I’ll add something that will probably get me some pretty solid pushback. One reason I cringe at the term feminism is because i personally see handing ones kids off to hired agents to raise them as an act of neglect.*
Feminism, at least in its modern incarnations, appears to use hired help raising children as a foundational aspect of the worldview. To me, it makes most aspects of feminism feel like an outgrowth of the abortion argument. “I want to have my cake and eat it too, no matter if I have to steamroll innocents along the way.”
*there’s obviously a lot of nuance, gray area, and situational considerations being paved over here
Exchanging the obligation to stay at home and raise children for the freedom to work 50 hours a week in order to obtain a sufficient wage to hire someone else to stay at home and rise your children on your behalf was a lateral move at best.
Yep. It’s good that the social and legal barriers to work are gone, but look who filled the void. Big Brother is/was the primary caretaker for a vast majority of minors in this country over the past 40 years.
Uncle Sugar can’t help but slip his dick anywhere it could possibly fit.
In the past, people who had kids and handed them off to nursemaids and nannies were the wealthy.
Poor people doing it is a fairly recent thing (I’d say since WWII).
Keep in mind that the latest wave of feminism is just Marxism with tits. It has nothing whatsoever to do with choice, freedom or women’s welfare or happiness. In fact, quite the opposite.
CosmoThe NYT assures me that women have way better sex in communist russia.I remember that.
If I remember correctly the quest for the new communist man was sparked by the rampant alcoholism and drug abuse in the general population. The people weren’t good enough for the glories of communism. Deplorables, all of them.
“No, you idiot. You crushed all of their hopes and give them no way out. Of course they are all trying to escape any way they can.”
Better sex, huh? More like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpDmklLFXVc
“A remarkable woman doesn’t need feminism.”
Bullseye, Pat. If you have to tell people that you are remarkable….
But that’s universal. Without fail the worst physicians I have worked with come from big famous schools boasting of their credentials.
“Feminism is a way for the utterly unremarkable woman to pretend she’s remarkable.”
That’s a very good summary.
Long time ago I think Limbaugh said feminism was a way for ugly women to get dates.
Interesting article. I may give the movie a go when it is on.
I never saw that movie, but I enjoyed the breakdown. And the poignant smack down at the end.
There were no cod pieces in coming of age stories from my boyhood. Just dead bodies (Stand By Me) and baseball (Sandlot). And they didn’t even have busty girls in either movie (except Wendy Peffercorn).
Squints = legend
For the boys in my milieu, the closest they got was Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
As for “boy movies”, it was Red Dawn and possibly The Outsiders.
Both excellent films. Outsiders had literally everybody in it.
For Outsiders I read the book, but never saw the film. I didn’t especially love the book. Other S.E. Hinton I liked however.
The movie is worth watching for the all-star cast.
There were piles of “pointless doomed adolescent rebellion” movies such as Pump up the Volume and Dead Poets Society
Both of which I liked for different reasons, but then I enthusiastically throw myself into angsty emo sappy movies and underdog movies (which are sometimes the same thing). If I am entertained or it makes me think, I don’t really care how “good” it is.
It’s somewhat easier to be a libertarian when you’ve been taught from an earlier age that the right thing to do is get crushed for nonconformance.
Why the inferior Christian Slater movies? Heathers and Gleaming the Cube!
There were plenty of cod pieces in my coming of age stories that I gravitated to. Lots of neat vocab words like “manly thrust” and “thews”.
Look, I did the world a favor by not using the word “manroot.”
I have only seen one author use ‘thews’.
It appears not to make the top 60,000 according to this place
IRT the hero’s journey
What makes this movie great is that they didn’t shoehorn a female into a male role. Sarah didn’t punch her way to victory, she used her intelligence, team work and intuition to succeed. Modern story tellers could take some lessons and stop having 90lb girls throwing 200lb dudes through plate glass windows. I can only suspend so much disbelief.
To be fair, they are striving to increase the realism by making all the 90lb girls in modern entertainment biological males.
My problem is that it’s lazy. They look at every dude action movie and copy it. It would be more entertaining to have a female role that fights to her strengths instead of a simple swap. Maybe a fight style that relies more on the element of surprise and focuses on pressure point strikes. It would at least be plausible and something interesting.
You want a diverse selection of good stories, they want stories to have diversity. It isn’t lazy, they’ve put the cart before the horse.
I liked Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
I flove Kill Bill, but that was a blatant homage to pulp martial arts movies, so the viewer should not expect that to be realistic.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer struck a good balance between a woman playing to her strengths and gaining physical strength.
I would love to see a movie where a woman uses one of these (yes, I know that’s from Kill Bill, but I don’t remember it being used so I don’t know if that’s an outtake or not) and/or a movie where the woman is a poisoner. Poison is a woman’s weapon.
When I was young, I thought a woman using poison was cowardly and awful. Why couldn’t she man up? (Girls kinda like it when heroines man up.) Then I researched for my pirate novel and found out that pirates did whatever they had to do to get what they wanted, including subterfuge. Well then! I reasoned. If you’re going to go so far as to murder someone, must you be dignified and make it a work of admirable art? Pride goeth before the fall.
I want to say I’ve seen Those fan knives used by a lady in a Bruce Lee movie. I can’t remember which one though.
You might like this heroine, https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Darth_Zannah. She’s the student and heir to the Sith dynasty in the Darth Bane trilogy of the Star Wars EU. It’s very much about her being trained to use her innate strengths – Sith sorcery – rather than to “fight like a man.”
At first I thought you were trolling me bro. Thanks.
“They look at every dude action movie and copy it.”
Very good point. Brainwashing useful idiots does not produce a bumber crop of creative geniuses. Contrast the number of incredible works of art produced by the west with the number produced by the USSR during the same period.
You want to watch Jett on skinimax.
Great point!
Good breakdown. Thanks Mojeaux. I vaguely remember watching the movie and missed all of that. In those days I am sure the only thought in my head was ‘Wow, that Connolly chic is pretty hot.”
Extra points for your conclusion. *brushes palms together* “Well, I can see my work here is done” *steps gingerly over and around wreckage* is one of my favorite lines.
I haven’t been able to keep up much lately but I took a few minutes this morning and caught Ozymandius’ most recent article. Thanks Ozzy…terrific. I recommended it as a quick read to half a dozen other people and all agreed with me on it. I am still waiting to hear back from one and regrettably he is the smartest of the lot and has lots to say, I am sure. I will let y’all know. Prelude: When I described the subject matter of the article he replied ” The United States is unique in the world because unlike nearly every other culture we raise our children to solve their own problems instead of looking to someone else to solve problems for them. That has created an avalanche of wealth and freedom unlike anything in history.”
Thank you so very much, Suthen. I’d love to hear what they have to say.
/Wipes eyes, looks at clock, and realized body has not yet adjusted to China time. (Just woke up after 3 hours of sleep… and it’s 4 am).
WRT the movie, I barely remember it, even though I think we are vey close in age, Moj. Your write-up (and my later-acquired hots for Fraulein Connolly) will compel me to watch this on the flight back in a few days. On that note, she’s brilliant in Requiem, but man, even my minor-obsession with her won’t let me watch that movie for the ‘stroke factor.’ It’s just that disturbing.
Thanks again, Moj. Also mildly related, I think I’ve mentioned Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” on here before, but I understand from my youngest daughter (in her junior year of college) that there is a version of the “Female Hero’s Journey” written by a female Campbell disciple. I believe her name is Maureen Murdock. I think it might help me to delve into it… especially since I raised 4 girls and 0 boys. (This was divine providence: I would have killed a son if he were a reasonable facsimile of me before he made 13 or 14, I think).
I loved the movie, and we must have had it on VHS, since I can recall so much of it.
The scene in the MC Escher labyrinth was mind-blowing when I saw it in the theater. Ditto the forced-perspective/monocular vision illusions
It holds up pretty well except for some special effects on high def TVs.
If you look carefully, you will see that Sarah has that Escher staircase print on her bedroom wall. She has a labyrinth game on her vanity that looks like the hedge labyrinth before she gets to the riddle doors. She has a doll who is dressed in a white ballgown in a crystal music box.
Yeah, I noticed those (another reason I’m sure we must have had a recording of it). I did NOT notice the picture of Mom & Costar Bowie. I must see if I have a copy of the movie at home to look for it.
My bad. It’s not on the mirror. It’s a scrapbook. Very left edge toward the bottom.
Mojeaux,
I’d be curious as to your thoughts on Legend? Tom Cruise, Tim Curry, Mia Sara all together with Ridley Scott.
I had some thoughts on Mia Sara.
Oddly, so did I!
I was still a little too young to understand why I liked that movie so much as a kid, but yeah, makes sense now. The skinny dark haired girl from Stranger Things kinda reminds me of her. Pretty, but needs to put on at least ten to fifteen pounds.
I have not seen it.
I have generally avoided movies with Tom Cruise in them unless the synopsis tempts me. I find him amazingly blah.
And you nail it again. So it isn’t just me. The guy plays exactly the same character in everything he is in.
Eh, to be fair, so did Robin Williams, except for a couple of movies there at the end of his career.
That said, I have seen a good number of Tom Cruise movies, but because the synopsis tempted me. So he’s good at picking some movies with some tempting (for me) premises.
Eyes Wide Shut I deliberately saw in spite of him. Nicole Kidman acted rings around him and it was glaringly obvious he’s a stick figure. It was painful.
Mission Impossible and Minority Report are his only good flicks.
When Kubrick died right after Eyes Wide Shut it was a minor relief in the sense that he couldn’t continue pissing away his legacy… then Spielberg revived AI.
Eyes Wide Shut was vastly different watching it as a single person and then re-watching it as a married person.
I watched it several years after release in my late teens and at the time I just thought it was pretentious and failing to be as insightful or edgy as it thought it was. Of course 4chan and internet porn had sort of undermined the idea of offending moral sensibilities by then, and I thought I was a lot more clever than I was.
Sorry, but “All the Right Moves” is a good flick. Maybe because it came out at exactly the time I was playing defensive back as a sophomore for a football coach who was every bit as abusive as Craig T. Nelson was in that movie. As an added bonus, I also was dating a cheerleader, but she was no 23 yo Leah Thompson. Whew!
“Top Gun” was also a good movie for him, but that’s because it’s a story that writes itself around that character. I would agree with you otherwise. But I do think he gets more heat for essentially being what a ton of actors in Hollywood are: good at a variation of who they are that works on screen with writing and directing that plays to those strengths. See, also Pitt, Brad and a long slew of others.
Yeah, I remember thinking how much better Minority Report could have been with someone else.
Or if it had ended at the right moment.
I’ve still yet to read the actual PKD short story the movie’s based on. Screen adaptations of his stories always suck. Including Blade Runner. Not that it’s a bad flick, it’s just a bad adaptation.
The short story has basically nothing to do with the film.
(Spoilers)
I just felt that it should have ended with him shooting the guy the pre-cogs said he would shoot and that the guy was the guy that really killed his son. It’s a dark ending, but you get into a more interesting area of predestination and paradox, rather than just “this one guy is bad, he’s gone now, yay!” resolution.
I also felt that A.I. should have ended with the boy staring at The Blue Fairy forever. (Although the ended use does make him out to be a sucking monster of need, thoughtless in the service of his own appetites.)
It would have been a better ending for sure. Of course it was a Spielberg flick, so the chances that it would end on anything but a hackneyed saccharine note were approximately zero. I’m surprised he didn’t end Schindler’s List with the messiah appearing and delivering the Jewish people from their oppressors.
Zhukov Messiah or I.D. White Messiah? It makes a difference!
I really enjoyed Edge of Tomorrow and Oblivion. Both were far better than most big budget sci-fi flicks these days.
I was pleasantly surprised by “Edge of Tomorrow”.
No doubt, the guy gets excellent gigs. He’s just not all that. The movies are good in spite of him.
Yeah, he picks good stories.
Sounds like a soap opera.
Groundhog Day with aliens.
Plus, Tom gets killed over and over and over again.
Happy death day was fun.
The title of the Japanese source novel was All You Need Is Kill.
Yup.
オール・ユー・ニード・イズ・キル
Hepburn: Ōru Yū Nīdo Izu Kiru
Literally. Anytime you want to be “cool” in Japanese you write in English. Except no English speaker recognizes that it English. It has to be one of my top 5 amazing things about the Japanese language.
And Japanese people won’t understand you unless you speak it with what we would consider a wildly unpolitically correct accent. You sound 100% like you are making fun of somebody here.
High fantasy film, with the lord of darkness (Tim Curry) trying to send the world into eternal night by killing the last pair of unicorns. Jack (Tom Cruise) is basically an empty suit in the story acting as a love interest to the girl, and being a bridge between the fantastic (unicorns, fae, lord of darkness) and Lily (the “real world” girl). Well known for a soundtrack done by Tangerine Dream. Based on your avatar changes, this scene may interest you.
Oh, you know me well. So many feelz.
I try… I try.
IDK what it is but I LOVE some of his work: Losin’ It, Risky Business, the Jack Reacher stuff, and that weird alien invasion/Groundhog Day movie with Bill Paxton. But I can’t stand the other deck. I will stick up for him in that he is a great fellow to work with. He is always on time, knows his lines, hits his marks, treats the crew well, and usually makes everyone a decent amount of money.
Oh, that’s nice to know. That always makes me like someone more.
As I said, I have seen lots of movies with him, but always in spite of him.
He’s a hard working actor. He’s beat the shit out of his body for a good shot more than once.
After he did his own stunts on the outside of the Burj Khalifa, I cannot mock the guy. Those outtakes made my testicles crawl back up into my body.
His ankle-breaking jump gave me a wince.
He’s still no Jackie Chan.
Is this first hand?
I’ve read other accounts that say the same thing. Tom Cruise is thoroughly professional and treats the cast and crew well.
I have to say that that does garner respect. I will quit badmouthing him.
My sister in law worked with Margot Robbie and said she was really nice and personable with the crew.
I’ll offer one personal counter-example I’m aware of, but with context. Three years after “Top Gun” came out (’86, I’m pretty sure) I was on midshipman training for my second summer and I managed to get assigned to the Tomcat squadron that Cruise had been with for the filming. He was NOT well-liked, and that is a vast understatement. I believe I saw one of the ‘promo’ photos that Tom had signed for all of the members of the squadron – him in all of his gear, standing next to a plane, those big teeth, trying to look “cool.” Scrawled across it with a sharpie was “TOP FAG” and it was posted in the squadron spaces somewhere.
Two pieces of background: (1) I was told that during the filming of the infamous Goose dying scene that when they put them in the drink, Cruise got caught up in the chute in the ocean and had to be pulled out by the diver in the water with him. I was told that he wasn’t quite as grateful as he should have been to the guys who pulled him out by some pilots, wwhile at least one said he seemed embarrassed about it, but not rude.
(2) In Cruise’s defense, if you think actors have big egos, imagine wha a F-14 pilot’s ego was like a few years after Top Gun came out. He became mega-cool pretending to be one of them – and to a bunch of fighter pilots, if you don’t fly, you’re still just a fucking “leg” to them. Hell, when I was a flight student, we used to abuse Naval Flight Officers (NFOs – i.e. backseaters) by calling them “Non-Flying Objects.” I once heard a senior officer say that his helmet bag had as many landings as his backseater. So…. this may not be a dig at Cruise at all.
I can buy that. I can also buy the caveats you noted.
That’s also earlier Cruise too. It’s quite possible he mellowed with age as well.
Might well have learned from that one.
I used to hate him and call him smirky boy, but he has grown on me over time. He is no worse than any other big budget actor and seems like less of an ass than many. I don’t care if he is a member of a religion whose premises I find silly and made up. I find the premises of Mormonism just as silly, but I try to judge Mormons based on their actions and they do quite well on that basis overall, and while the Church of Scientology has done awful things, I have no reason to believe that Cruise has.
Legend is so mind-bogglingly bad, it is worth watching. Mia Sara is cute and does what she can with what they gave her, and Tim Curry makes a fine Devil, but the rest is just a fucking trainwreck.
Or take a newbie, do a double feature with Alien and Legend and then explain how they were directed by the same person. [brainsplosion]
Blade Runner… GI Jane
When Ridley Scott hits, he really hits. And when he misses, he really misses.
I liked GI Jane. The mock rape scene where the commander made his point was pretty brutal.
A wildly underrated movie and Viggo Mortensen is the shit.
I was trying to think of which fantasy movies I liked from that era and couldn’t come up with one. So I googled it, and IMDB had a long list of movies from the 80s and 90s. As I reviewed the list, it was “that sucked and that sucked and that sucked and so on”. The only great movie from that time frame was Time Bandits.
You missed Conan the Barbarian.
It was a weird time, the special effects weren’t there to do anything really interesting, there aren’t that many fantasy properties that really translate well to film, and no one really took the genre seriously. Much the same way that it was so difficult to create a decent superhero film until recently.
Conan is a great B-movie.
There were a bunch of those made in the time frame. They don’t have to be “good” movies; they just have to be entertaining for 90 minutes.
The fantasy movies with big name stars; however, all sucked. And Arnold wasn’t a big name star then. He was a body builder that could manage to spit out is lines and hit his marks.
Beastmaster or GTFO
I’d rather watch Red Sonja
Speaking of movies with musicians. Anyone remember Freejack? Emilio Estevez and a Mick Jagger. Also Rene Russo, Anthony Hopkins, and Jonathan Banks
Thanks for the article, Mo. Like most have already said, you pointed out many, many things about the film I never bothered to notice and gave it context. Well done.
Back to work, see ya!
Movie Hot Take: The John Wick movies are XXIc The Warriors
Huh? You mean the warriors that was about street gangs?
Yeah. The “underworld” is this organized parallel society existing within our own with it’s own rules, communication systems, implausible gangs, etc.
John Wick is Clearchus?
Cleon. And the High Table are the Rifts.
But Warriors is based on the Anabasis, Cleon is Clearchus
I watched Labyrinth when it came out on VHS. I was not particularly impressed with the show. Of course I was an adult male, married, with two grade-school kids at the time.
I suspect it would have no charm whatsoever for adults seeing it for the first time, and I would probably be no exception to that.
Worst possible movie remake: Amadeus costarring Chris Tucker and Gilbert Gottfried. With Bobcat Goldthwait as Emperor Joseph.
Another fantasy movie I love that has not yet been mentioned is The Last Unicorn.
Fun fact: Around that time, Mr. GT wrote several songs for a planned animated film to be called “The Last Leprechaun.” Then “The Last Unicorn” came out, and that pretty much sent his project down the ol’ poop chute. Also, the director was a sociopath. Mr. GT got one really good song out of it that he still sings to this day.
(On-topic comment to come below.)
Mo, a long time ago I read The Last Unicorn. Peter Beagle is one helluva writer and I have to lay hands on some moe of his work.
Very nice article, Mo’. I’m not much of a fantasy, or Bowie, fan so I’ve never had the urge to watch this flick. Now…maybe.
Thanks!
Anyone want to know what the whistleblower looks like?
Are you sure? Some news sites are reporting it was a maid named Hillarita Clintonez.
Don’t know anything, but anyone who takes so many selfies with politicians just ends up looking like a douche.
They like to be called “hipsters”
The permanent five o’clock shadow coupled with the thick brimmed glasses really screams “I enjoyed ‘The Shape of Water'”
Which is why we call them douches.
Well, that and the fact they are.
Spot the difference
I would like to know what an honest, no-holds barred newscaster looks like. Everybody knows what is going on here and what the shitweasels are up to, but outside of this site very few people are willing to say it.
Andrew Breitbart?
Thanks for reminding me of Bertrice Small, Mojeaux. I haven’t read her books since I was fourteen; I think it’s time to revisit.
Who let the Tulpa in?
Seriously welcome.
Thanks! I’ve been lurking for a while, even managed to solve one or two of the crosswords!
Don’t tell hyperbole, it’ll go to his head.
Woohoooo! I’m so glad you came out of lurkdom!
You are very welcome!
Are you also a unicorn?
Also, fuck off Tulpa.
I *am* a libertarian woman. I also like reading, cooking, watching pro wrestling and learning esperanto.
That is AWESOME. I think we need a sidebar list of the non-existent women on this site.
Welcome, LG! I’d love to hear the story behind your name & avatar (the latter of which I can’t see very clearly on my smallish phone, but it intrigues me.)
And I’d be remiss if I did not convey a hearty “Fuck off, Tulpa!”
The handle is from when I used to spend a lot of time gaming, and was in love with Portal 2. Cave Johnson’s lemon rant = words to live by.
The picture is actually work related: A friend that worked at my company drew it for me, to celebrate the millionth piece of spam I’d removed from our site. That’s me in my trophy room, enjoying a smoke and a glass of wine (although I’m more of a beer girl), surrounded by the carcasses of products and topics I’ve conquered.
Thanks for the welcome!
This place has nothing but women. Tulpa/ae is first declension and feminine.
What language are you misattributing it to?
Latin. Screw your Tibetan nonsense. Everything is Latin
Terrible Movie Idea:
A screen adaptation of Starship Troopers Starring Casper Van Diem, Denise Richards, and Dougie Howser.
If you view the movie as an adaptation of ST, it’s terrible. If you view it as a parody, it’s brilliant.
This.
This is hilarious.
Ha. Is that from the movie or something?
Also it is annoyingly catchy.
That’s what I thought! I like it!
It’s from ST 3, which as satire goes, is even better than ST 1. Because it was straight-to-video, they didn’t have to pull any punches and it gleefully stuck the knife in and twisted it to the mid-2000s “Nuke Mecca and kill all them Islams cuz KJV-Only Jesus said so” zeitgeist.
You know which other ST3 was better viewed as a parody?
3 is the one you’re going to shit on when 4 had fucking whales and 5 was, well, 5?
All good points, but 3 has klingon doc brown being choked out by Hillary Clinton’s genitals.
Sounds like somebody needs to share their pain.
Good lord. That reminds me of those bands the AF put together to play in MWR in deployed locations.
They suck.
SHUT THE FUCK UP, LIBTARD!
Thank you for your service.
*flips table*
GHAAAAAAAH
*throws chair*
GHAAAAAAAH
*beats coworker with coffee mug*
Didn’t Verhoeven admit to never having even read the book?
Yes.
Heinlein (like PKD) doesn’t get many good adaptations (I admit to really loving the Scanner Darkly adaptation). The animation style and actors work really well with the story.
“Why would you say it’s an 18-speed when there’s only 9 gears?”
Btw if you want to catch Casper van Dien at his level best, check out The Omega Code
Needs more topless Dina Meyer.
https://dailycaller.com/2019/11/08/kanye-west-run-for-president-2024-dont-vote-democrat-algae/
“Kanye West Makes Announcement About Running For President In 2024, Urges Black Americans Not To Just ‘Vote Democrat’”
That sound that you hear while reading this headline is the sound of a thousand white liberals uttering a racial slur. But, it’s OK, because they have “right thought”.
I’m still bummed that Senator Kid Rock wasn’t really a thing.
So am I. “Shat their pantaloons” is a great line to have in an official response to media inquiry. So classy.
Dammmmmnnnnn……if looks could kill.
It’s sad to see such a talented singer fall into the throws of white supremacy.
“Talented singer”… I’ll assume you’re joking. And it reminds me of this,
https://vimeo.com/132078549
Remember when “eccentric” was a perjorative for crazy, rich people? I think we need to bring it back.
Both takes are 100 percent bullshit.
The real message of the movie is that babies are a pain in the ass.
Do we need feature length movie to tell us that?
Or is it like sex-ed think about “Don’t get preggers, cause babies suck”.
It’s better than having to carry an egg around for a week.
Babies do, in fact, suck.
If they don’t, they starve.
Eggsactly!
We already had the morality plays of the 70’s/80’s slasher films.
You’re not wrong.
That’s why they pay me the big bucks.
I strongly endorse this message.
The whole point is to get *her* to do tricks with your balls.
This is one of my wife’s favorite movies. I knew it existed, but I’d never seen it before she insisted on me watching it with her recently. I was 10 when it came out, and a fantasy movie definitely wouldn’t have been my cup of tea. In 1986, I watched baseball, football, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and the Dukes of Hazzard. Red Dawn, Ghostbusters, and Back to the Future were my movies.
Anyway, so we watched it and….it was OK. Not as bad as I was expecting, but still not my cup of tea.
I was never really into any kind of fantasy thing – no comic books, D&D, nothing that involved wizards and elves and that sort of thing. History was always my bag from a very early age. My wife said once that it’s because I lack imagination, and she’s probably true about that.
Wow really interesting article. I’ve seen that movie about 15 times in middle school because my sister loved it when I was a kid. Never thought much about it.
See, I thought the entire time Labyrinth was the result of dropping acid and writing in Jennifer Connelly to make sense of it.
Jennifer Connolly did manage to make dreck like The Rocketeer and Career Opportunities watchable.
Don’t forget shitshows like Requiem for a Dream, and A Beautiful Mind.
Hey! I liked both of those.
Say, did you know that Christopher Steele is pulling the same “Rooskies are everywhere!” routine in Britain? He’s pretty much repackaged the Trump stuff as the Russians blackmailing Boris Johnson to force Brexit to happen.
No, really.
Look, being an international Spy for Hire is busy. Freelancers have brought down his wages, and he’s had to take more contracts. Really what could he do but start recycling material?
Also. That is the first picture of Christopher Steele I’ve ever seen.
He really has that in-bread British look. Way more than i ever imagined.
He looks a tad too disheveled. His collar is askew. His tie is wonky. He has hair sticking out at the nape of his neck.
Have you ever been to England?
Yes.
I don’t remember much, so I’m going off what I think an Englishman should look like.
The first thing you hear upon disembarking your plane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJxCdh1Ps48
And when you return home:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b538ndRV9Do
for some reason I figured a shaved head black guy… maybe I mentally made a Steele=Seal connection at some point
I was thinking Evan McMuffin-esque
Tiresome doesn’t really cover it, does it? Who didn’t know right out of the gate that these people are completely full of shit?
I vaguely remember seeing “Labyrinth,” but that release date would have during the first year of my first marriage, possibly around the time of the first of many moves. (I feel so old! ***WHIMPER!!!*** Where’s Fourscore to tell me what a sweet young thing I am??? ***SNIFF!!!***)
Much respect for calling out the online chick who completely missed the point! That took ovaries!
I’d try to add some more thoughts, but damn day job. I’ll try later.
Damned Day Job! *angry emoji*
??
Governor Coonman says “Hell yeah I’m taking your AR-15s”
Grrrrrrr…
*starts looking up next date for nearby gun show*
*continues shopping for houses in TX*
So when do all the people who said “Come and Take them” start shooting cops?
I am afraid that is going to happen. The biggest problem with that is that the cops didnt write, vote for. or sign any of that into law. Responsible parties need to be held responsible.
My point being that Conservatives will talk a big game, but in the end they will eat that boot.
I wouldn’t be 100% sure of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Colorado_recall_election
It might be best to use civil means before we start resorting to shooting people.
I wouldn’t be sure. Many will not disarm. Many cops will not obey to disarm their fellow citizens. There are already counties in VA declaring to be 2nd Amendment sanctuaries who not follow any gun control laws from Richmond.
Can’t speak for the city conservatives. They are probably fucked living in enemy territory. Disarmament will not fly out here in the boondocks.
And in 40 years when all the holdouts are dead and gone, will that continue, or will the rural areas succumb and bend the knee?
Well, that’s a different story than the immediate door to door confiscations you were talking about. I don’t think 40 years will change anything in terms of turning ARs in, but no one will be purchasing new ARs or taking currents ones to the range. They’ll remained in closets or under beds and passed down likely heirlooms.
The long-term battle you speak of was lost once “shall not be infringed” was interpreted to mean “infringe the shit out of it”. As soon as the Overton window was pushed to not accept guns being as visible in public as watches, that battle was lost. Same with the Overton window being pushed to it being accepted that the military should be able to have more powerful firearms than civilians. The Brady Bill was another death cut.
I think it can be pushed back, but gun rights groups are not willing to play that game. There needs to be wall to wall ads equating gun control with racism and nazi-style confiscations. Every single gun control activist and politician needs the question repeatedly raised about why they hate minorities, women, and freedom. That should be the only talking point from the NRA, and it should be as loud and graphic in visual ads as possible.
They won’t do it though.
See GCA 1986 and current availability of automatic weapons for a road map to disarmament. Damn millennials voting in gun control when they were 5 or under years old.
Well, that’s a different story than the immediate door to door confiscations you were talking about.
You’re probably right that i shifted the post a bit. My main point is that the law gets in the books an no one challenges it at any level, then being quietly disobedient about it doesn’t make you a hero for liberty. At some point people have to be willing to put their lives and livelihood on the line, because liberty for their children and their family is worth it. But simply putting your weapons into hiding is giving up your liberty and tacitly saying that the Government can win, just in 40 years when you are dead.
They won’t do it though.
Why not? And if not them, why not us?
or will the rural areas succumb and bend the knee?
The question I’d ask is if they really could, practically. I’m sure Virginia’s different, but there are a decent number of areas in upstate Pennsylvania or upstate New York where deer season accounts for a non-trivial portion of the winter’s diet of protein. And, of course, self-defense is a real consideration in rural areas that it’s not in urban centers.
Government can win, just in 40 years when you are dead.-
Correct. Another reason I don’t have kids. The world can burn for all I care after I’m dead.
I would agree with everything you wrote, but I don’t know what the answer is. At a minimum, I want to provide the means to my descendants to make it as painful as possible for anyone who tries to round them for camps (per the below quote often cited here on Glibs). I’d like to help advance liberty on a societal level, but I don’t know how to do that.
I think the major gun rights group won’t play the racial aspect because they think it’s “icky”. Just like the Repub nominees besides Trump would rather write concession speeches and be invited to cocktail parties than take on the Dems and the Media at their own game and actually win. Some do, like the Jewish Never Again one, but they are very small scale.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking, What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
I’d like to help advance liberty on a societal level, but I don’t know how to do that.
I haven’t found a good way either, except for paying the premium to stay off the NICS system.
I think about what it would look like in my community if they tried to confiscate. Most of my neighbors are armed, some are avid shooters. Will they be able to pick us off one by one, or would we band together and tell them to fuck off?
Unfortunately, there are enough foxes in the henhouse around here that I don’t think it’d happen. Come and find them would be the best hope.
I think you’ll get a variety of responses. Some will do like you say, some will turn it into “Come and Find Them”, some few will go Rambo and get into a standoff with the police. The problem is that in order to really resist this kind of thing directly you need something like what happened out west with the Bundy family, where you have a bunch of like-minded individuals who are willing to join up and hold an area. When you’ve got ten armed police showing up at someone’s house in a surprise raid, then yeah, they’re taking whatever they want and there’s not much of jack shit that person can do about it besides get killed. When you’ve got ten armed people expecting a raid willing to go en masse and confront the police, even if through passive noncompliance, that’s a different story.
Responsible parties need to be held responsible.-
“Just following orders” doesn’t relieve you of responsibility.
gun violence activists
So Northam has openly discussed gun confiscation and infanticide.
Way to go Virginia.
My home state is fubar. Sucks.
Friedersdorf has a thing up over at the Atlantic. Bad Orange Man, solicitation of bribery, blah blah blah. Investigating the Bidens benefits him personally because election, ergo ill gotten gains.
Aside from the obvious (to me) question of who is above the law, and why, I started asking myself, “How does investigating Public Enemy Number One not constitute a direct personal benefit to the Democrats?” Why is there a distinction between the various fishing expeditions targetting Trump’s taxes, and the Rooshunz, and whatever else they are flinging at the wall? Why isn’t Trump immune to investigation? Also, as R C pointed out the other day, if the time comes to put Trump on trial in the Senate, how can Bernie, Warren and Harris possibly not be required to sit it out?
I crack myself up.
The Democrats have left little to the imagination about how they would govern if they controlled all three branches. After the Kavanaugh shenanigans and Trumpalalooza, I expect that they would not hesitate to bring the entirety of the federal apparatus down on anyone who opposed their rule in the future.
Exactly. This isn’t about Trump at all. It is about giving power to people who openly express contempt for this country and large portions, maybe even a majority, of its citizens and the ideas the country was founded on. Those people are weaponizing the state’s legal apparatuses and demanding that the population be disarmed.
This is not a good situation. It is a recipe for the greatest tragedy in history.
Aside from the obvious (to me) question of who is above the law, and why, I started asking myself, “How does investigating Public Enemy Number One not constitute a direct personal benefit to the Democrats?” Why is there a distinction between the various fishing expeditions targetting Trump’s taxes, and the Rooshunz, and whatever else they are flinging at the wall? Why isn’t Trump immune to investigation? Also, as R C pointed out the other day, if the time comes to put Trump on trial in the Senate, how can Bernie, Warren and Harris possibly not be required to sit it out?
It makes sense if you think the allegations against Biden are completely baseless. The Corporate Media has been non-stop saying that there is no “there” there. So while Trump was trying to manufacture dirt on a rival, they are investigating real crimes.
The long and short of it is that we are in this situation because the American Public exists in (at least) Two distinct realities. Depending on which reality you subscribe to influences how you see the whole shindig.
Isn’t ‘principled leftist’ an oxymoron?
You are absolutely correct about differing realities. Essentially the divide is between individualists and collectivists. Those two diametrically opposed outlooks are the root cause. It is impossible to overstate how much those outlooks influence a person’s world view. The problem of course is that one results in ‘fuck off, mind. your own business and leave me alone’ people while the other results in ‘ I can’t, we are all in this together. Everything you do affects me so I get a say in your business’ people. Of course the second one is just a pretense for taking your property and liberty and they are nothing if not persistent.
I don’t really see this coming to a good end. We got ol’ Duke Nuk’em on TV threatening American citizens. Think about what that means. We have an elected official openly saying he is willing to murder Americans en mass if they don’t do as he says. He is willing to kill us. That means he sees his own countrymen as enemies and that he is justified in murdreing us. I don’t think complying with his demands is going to result in a good outcomes for the people he despises.
How’s it go? If not for double standards they’d have none at all.
I think the Trump era has really exposed a lot of libertarians as having no principles beyond fashion trends, while a lot of Leftists have shown themselves to be principled. The divide in the US really is just a divide between “blue pill” and “red pill”.
Good Taibi column today:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/christopher-steele-britain-insanity-909539/
“Why Is Christopher Steele Still a Thing?”
Why hasn’t he been brought before Congress for open testimony?
I believe he has remained quite steadfastly out of this country since all of this started to blow up.
He’s not that dumb.
Couldn’t we just have the Brits arrest him for rape or something?
Ha! The Brits have no intention of handing his sorry ass over. Their intelligence services are probably tied up in all of this as well.
SOME leftists have shown themselves to be principled. I don’t think I’d say “a lot”
gun violence activists
Those crazy bastards at the NRA are out of control!
What next?
The BB does it again:
https://babylonbee.com/news/bill-clinton-epsteins-cause-of-death-depends-on-what-your-definition-of-suicide-is
ENOSI
(Latin: Epstein non occidit se ipsum)
landing a solid blow with the first line…
Adding to the things I never thought I would hear myself say file:
“We’ll need at least a couple of nanograms to make it work.”
There are day when I think I’m pretending to be in a sci-fi TV series.
I’m assuming you were referring to antimatter?
Either that or Fusion Fuel.
Unobtainium
Defective lamella. The technique that would screen out X-ray interferences requires “bulk.”
Bulk in the context of microelectric engineering?
Yup. We’d need to cut a lot of them to make 2ng.
Antimatter, gotta be antimatter.
Don’tcha know, we are in a postapocalyptic dystopia.
“We’ll need at least a couple of nanograms to make it work.”
Russian bot confirmed.
I keep reading this as “mammograms”.
Isn’t that a kind of puzzle?
I check as many as a I can for a solution, but I still haven’t found it.
The solution is below the puzzle
It’s underboob? After all this time, I had no idea.
Tits, OK. You’ll finger it out eventually.
https://babylonbee.com/news/bill-clinton-epsteins-cause-of-death-depends-on-what-your-definition-of-suicide-is
Fucking with the wrong crime family?
All of babylonbee staff die in tragic natural gas explosion… at each of their homes.
Svetlana Bolkinskiya, the Belorussian Swan?
She did not age well at all.
No, Svetlana Zharin, widowed daughter of an influential noble.
“Well, if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you!”
It’s difficult to write relationship scenes when it’s just normal people without evil motives.
It IS. You know who else is hard to write? Shy people. Seriously. I know that shy people can be as interesting as anybody else, but getting them talking is like pulling teeth.
The Brits have no intention of handing his sorry ass over. Their intelligence services are probably tied up in all of this as well.
Oh, come now. The Brits are strictly impartial. Remember when they got all het up at Obama and warned him to keep his beezer out of British internal politics when he started offering his buttinsky opinions about Brexit?
All right. That’s it. My daughter is never going to watch this movie again. I might have to hide her Bowie paraphernalia too.
I never saw the movie but I found this interesting. A good hero’s journey is always interesting to me. Thanks Mojeaux!