The Robin Hood we deserve, and desire, most
Do we really need another “Robin Hood”?
That's the question begged by Ridley Scott’s new version.
Starring action-lunk-with-acting-gravitas Russell Crowe in the title role, and an A-list supporting cast of Cate Blanchett, William Hurt, and Max von Sydow, the new “Robin Hood” also features a budget and production values on an epic scale. “Men in Tights,” Mel Brooks' 1993 send-up, this is not.
Scott’s “Robin Hood” is the latest of some 50 movie and television adaptations chronicling the life and exploits of our favorite do-gooder thief -- an impressive run that begins with the silent “Robin Hood and His Merry Men” in 1908.
You’d think viewers would be weary of another retelling of this gallant, often green-clothed folk hero who selflessly stands up for the common man. But few other stories have enjoyed such a continuous reworking as good old “RH,” who began appearing orally in legends, ballads, and outlaw stories around the reign of King John (1199-1216) and, in print, in “Piers Plowman” (circa 1377).
Despite its age, Robin Hood remains fresh and relevant. Each iteration reflects its particular times and tribulations. And, sorry, many fans want him NOT to be Kevin Costner's 1991 “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” anymore. And, sorry, many fans want him NOT to be the lightweight, listless Kevin Costner of “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” (1991) anymore.
In most versions, Robin is portrayed as a loyal follower of King Richard the Lionheart, driven to outlawry while Richard is away at the Third Crusade and his incompetent and evil brother, John, assumes the throne and drives England into social ruin. But like King Arthur, a single historical Robin Hood probably never lived. Rather, Robyn Hood, Robert Hood, and Robehod were 13th century nicknames for those who had run afoul of the law.
So what if no real Robin Hood existed? It’s the idea that endures: this hope for a savior to restore the balance of power. Even today, he remains a powerful symbol against tyranny, injustice, and over-taxation. This is especially appealing to Tea Party types: Robin Hood is anti-big government, and stealing from the rich to give to the poor is egalitarian.
Egalitarian ... or socialist? If you believe in redistributing the wealth a little, Obama-robin is a force for good; for those who see this nation’s economic policies as troubling, not so much. But this goody two-shoes / bad-boy schizophrenia found in Robin Hood actually fits with the historical legend.
He used to be mean, killed lots of people, even robbed from the clergy. The dashing Robin Hood character doesn’t begin until the Renaissance, when he sheds his cutthroat image and becomes an outlaw with a heart of gold, dispossessed of his property and exiled to Sherwood Forest. Around this time, he also picks up his “girlfriend,” Maid Marian.
In the 1922 silent, stylized version with Douglas Fairbanks, the Robin character is swashbuckling for sure. But he also plays against the backdrop of two wars: the Crusades, and the Great War -- both supposedly "the war to end all wars. Likewise, in 1938, the famous Technicolor version with Errol Flynn was released on the brink of World War II. Again Robin Hood becomes a safe way to engage with the experience of war. Robin Hood films have a habit of surfacing during major conflicts, right up to “Prince of Thieves” during the Gulf War, and the BBC's three-season series debuting shortly after the start of the Iraq War.
As the 20th century progresses past men in tights, Robin Hood becomes less of a fairytale. Robin’s story is grungier, more violent, and more realistic.
One harbinger of the change is the 1976 revisionist tale, “Robin and Marian,” starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn as the couple in their sunset years. Robin is back after 20 years abroad in the Crusades, where he’s seen atrocities and seems lost in a haze of PTSD. Our Hood is a troubled hero. He questions military objectives and his king. Parallels to Vietnam abound. That this version ends in tragedy fits with the pessimistic Seventies.
Then there’s this odd take: Terry Gilliam's comic “Time Bandits” (1981) which includes an imbecilic and condescending Robin Hood played by John Cleese. “The poor? Oh you have to meet them,” he says, and hands out booty to the downtrodden just as an assistant punches them in the face.
Disenfranchisement -- namely, of the Saxons, who are being replaced by the Normans as England’s ruling class -- is the theme of a few Robin Hoods. In director John Irvin’s 1991 movie starring Patrick Bergin and Uma Thurman, the Normans are the invading elites and the Saxons are the lower-class peasants. Guess which side Robin fights for? That film also shows realistic bandit life in the forest; the Merry Men live like guerilla fighters in the jungle. We also see Maid Marion’s transformation from wimpy damsel in distress to plucky, independent feminist who likens a marriage against her wishes to torture. "What's the difference?" Uma-as-Marian quips.
More than anything, the appeal of Robin Hood proves we have fairly predictable needs. In these disillusioned days of robber barons and Bernie Madoffs, authority figures take a beating. Where we are powerless, Robin Hood fights in our stead. So it makes sense that, in Ridley Scott’s newest of Hoods, Crowe doesn’t simply steal from the rich and give to the poor. He becomes a Gladiator-like national emancipator, protecting England from civil war and restoring the nation to glory once more. Taking the law into his own hands, he becomes a freedom fighter.
Naturally, the ruling class finds a ragtag hero challenging the status quo an enormous pain the saddle. Especially when the downtrodden mobs cheer for Robin and his Merry Men, and lob rocks and garbage at the Sheriff of Nottingham and his henchmen.
"Have you tried to fight a legend?" complains an underling to an impatient King John in the Connery/Hepburn "Robin and Marian." No easy feat.
For these reasons, the spirit of Robin Hood endures. Perhaps more than ever, we need someone to come to the aid of the common man and woman. That’s the Robin Hood we deserve, and desire, most.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms . He contributes regularly to The Boston Globe, New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, and The Christian Science Monitor.
Dreams Die Hard
As I wrote in a recent review of the book, The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale Of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks , dreams die hard.
The DreamWorks studio --- which went on to make not only live-action movies, but music, video games, websites and cartoons --- was a pipe dream for three of Hollywood's biggest industry giants: director Steven Spielberg; record company mogul and billionaire David Geffen; and Disney animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg. (It was Katzenberg who was the driving force behind the idea to make a new studio from scratch.)
DreamWorks began building on a lofty foundation. At the Oct. 12, 1994, press conference announcing the partnership, Spielberg said, “Together with Jeffrey and David, I want to create a place driven by ideas and the people who have them.’’ The studio was to champion works based on merit, not commercialism. Like the founding of United Artists in 1919 by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith, it was to be an artistic haven amid Tinseltown’s money-grubbing rabble. It was to be different.
The way in which the financial realities eventually poisoned the idealistic dream are instructive. In Nicole LaPorte's book, we watch as the studio’s inroads into video games and music hit dead ends and we wince as the money pit of building a physical studio — what was to be a “giant dose of Ritalin’’ to focus a distracted Spielberg — gets deeper. More than $1 billion in investor capital evaporates. The studio sheds its money losers, shape-shifts from artsy-fartsy to cash cow, gets bought by a studio, and starts making schlock. The initial reverie — “to become that buzz’’ as one DreamWorks executive wanted — takes a back seat to reality. Eventually, DreamWorks has to begin making the very commercial fodder that its founding had hoped to defeat --- or, if not defeat, then at least offer something in opposition, an alternative.
I think the lesson of DreamWorks is not to give up, or revel in failure, or become pessimistic. I think the lesson is that the pursuit of the dream is worthwhile. Yes, dreams get derailed. Reality impinges. Compromises must be made. But, I think as humans, we are a hopeful species. We want to see dreams succeed. So, we root for DreamWorks. We love our dreamers and hate to see hubris bring them down.
Movies have always been a metaphor for ambition. For the idea that we can better ourselves --- be a better person, better lover, make the right decision, be brave enough to fight for your beliefs, to rush into the wedding ceremony at the last possible moment and say, "No, this marriage can't happen, because I love the bride!" Movies are that vehicle for escape to a place where, because the real world has failed us, another possibility awaits. This might be Middle-earth or Gotham City; a galaxy far, far away or a place as familiar as small town Mississippi.
The location doesn't matter. It's the desire to do better next time, to transform ourselves, that Hollywood has always represented. And that applies whether you are a movie mogul, or just an average Joe or Jane, dreaming your dreams and hoping to someday not be a spectator, like in a movie theater, but to live them, inhabit them, be them.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.’’ More info at www.fantasyfreaksbook.com
Are you a compulsive hoarder?
So you save stuff. You like reuse. Be frugal. No problem, right?
Well ... maybe it is.
Collecting Beanie Babies or swizzle sticks is one thing. Amassing piles of, say, old newspapers, yogurt containers, and rusty buckets is another. If you’re unable to discard mountains of what most people would consider random clutter, your collecting bug has crossed into the realm of obsession. You can literally drown in stuff.
Take the case of the Collyer brothers, which kicks off the new book “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things’’ (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304 pp., $27.00). Langley and Homer Collyer, two well-heeled brothers living in New York City, packed their mansion over decades with more than 170 tons of debris, including an X-ray machine, a Model T Ford, 14 grand pianos, and thousands more mundane items. In 1947, police received a tip that something was amiss at the home, but they found the door blocked by clutter when they came to investigate. They finally entered the home via a second-floor window and found Homer’s body. It took them three weeks to find the other brother, who had died from suffocation after a tower of baled newspapers crushed him.
A highly readable account of this perplexing impulse that affects as many as 6 million Americans, “Stuff’’ offers a peek into the lives of compulsive shoppers, cat ladies, junk scavengers, even children who hoard things. The authors, Randy O. Frost, a Smith College psychology professor, and Gail Steketee, dean of Boston University’s School of Social Work, have been investigating hoarding for a decade. They’ve developed long-term relationships with hundreds of hoarders whom they’ve treated.
“Stuff’’ isn’t exactly a narrative; it’s a series of case studies. We experience the “awe, the excitement of discovery, and empathy for those caught in the web of hoarding.’’ We accompany the authors as they navigate the “goat paths’’ through the home of one woman, Irene, who is trapped by “a sea of boxes, bags, ski poles, tools, everything imaginable all in a jumble, chest-high.’’ We see Colin, collector of hundreds of articles of free designer clothing. For him, dressing each day is a nearly paralyzing act. We meet Madeline, whose penchant for hoarding drove her husband away, and we watch her grown daughter, Ashley, struggle with her own relationship to material possessions.
The most gripping chapter, “You Haven’t Got a Clue,’’ offers the pleasures of “you are there’’ immersion journalism. The authors arrive with a social worker and cleaning crew to empty a Manhattan condo whose rooms are, effectively, “a solid wall of trash 20 feet deep’’ and infested with cockroaches. Amazingly, a family lives amid the squalor. The account of trying to clean up the health hazard while the hoarder, a man named Daniel, refuses to see any problem, makes for stupefying reading.
The profiles of people save “Stuff’’ from reading like a dry academic conference paper. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, the hoarders explain their rationales. For some, piles of clutter contain endless possibility. Others make nests or private worlds of potential knowledge. Some may be fearful of waste. Some see stories and find meanings in every item. “This outdated coupon seems as important as my grandmother’s picture,’’ Irene says at one point. Later: “If I throw too much away, there’ll be nothing left of me.’’
The irresistible fascination with a book like “Stuff’’ has already been proven by reality TV shows featuring makeovers and weight-loss quests: It’s the lure of oddballs trying to clean up their lives. But the book succeeds beyond mere voyeurism, because “Stuff’’ invites readers to reevaluate their desire for things. Which, as far as things go, is not a bad thing at all.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.’’
Harry Potter to the rescue
Geeks have hearts of gold.
I wrote some time ago about an effort to aid Haiti relief, spearheaded by an organization called the Harry Potter Alliance, which has long inspired Harry Potter fans to take action on real-world social issues like global warming and Darfur. Recently, it launched its largest fandom action, called Help Haiti Heal, to raise money for the victims of the Haiti earthquake.
Of course, the point was to raise a bunch of money in a time of need. But, on the sly, I think the effort helped show that so-called escapist pursuits like reading fantasy novels like Harry Potter, watching fantasy movies like Lord of the Rings, or participating in role-playing games can actually connect to the real world, too.
Heroic acts and derring-do involving wielding wands and swords and smiting evil-doers are all well and good in a book or movie. What makes this success so sweet is that the forces of gaming and fantasy and fandom can be wielded, too. And fans and gamers can be a powerful body indeed.
The effort is also a reminder that one reason we need fantasy is to remind us how to act in the real world. Perhaps society’s lack of a coming-of-age ritual explains the appeal. We have a driver’s license, and a drinking age, and we get married. But not much else. Fantasy genre fills this void, framing the hero’s journey in right and wrong, good and evil.
Moreover, books give hope in hopeless times --- like when calamity strikes. Fantasy is a genre people can read and retreat to and gather strength to face the real world. Refuge from oppression, personal or political, or wars or natural disasters like earthquakes all lay in the fairy world and the possibility of imagination. Fantasy keeps the spirit alive and kicking, and provides a blueprint for good behavior.
So thank you! Fans of all kinds have come together and raised over $110,000 for Partners In Health in Haiti... We’re chartering three cargo planes packed with 75,000 pounds of critical, life-saving supplies to thousands of people in Haiti.
The planes are going to be named Harry, Ron, and Hermione.
You can still donate here: http://www.thehpalliance.org/haiti/
Thank you!
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the travel memoir-pop culture investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.
The Game Loft fosters risk-taking, leadership, and camaraderie.
I think it's easy to forget about "healthy" aspects of gaming and fantasy because (as I have written before) the media loves sensational stories about people taking games and other fantasy experiences "too far." Much of this has been exaggerated, and its roots delve back to the 1980s and Pat Pulling's Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD) campaign to ban D&D (because, in her estimation, D&D was responsible for her son's suicide). In another so-called gaming tragedy, the famous "steam tunnel incident" supposedly led to James Dallas Egbert III's disappearance from Michigan State University in 1979, after getting lost in the campus's tunnels while playing a live-action role-playing game. Rumor was, this led to his death. (In fact, Egbert had simply fled campus, and sadly killed himself a year later.) The death was unconnected to D&D: the kid was depressed, suffered from pressure about school performance from his parents, and had a drug habit. Nonetheless, a movie was made starring Tom Hanks, called Mazes and Monsters (based on these events, itself adapted from a quickie novel of the same name). Forever after, D&D and its ilk was linked to abnormal behavior.
In the past couple of years, more sensationalized stories have appeared about addicted gamers in Korea and China, about cold-turkey boot camps to cure Internet addicts, and about a gamer who died from exhaustion at his keyboard. Stories of flirting and affairs (often in character, in role-playing game worlds) have also bopped around the blogosphere. A recent movement sees the Harry Potter phenomenon as dangerous and satanic; in the words of Chick Publications and its comic book tract "The Nervous Witch," "the Potter books open a doorway that will put untold millions of kids into hell." It's exactly what D&D faced as a pop culture fad when I was a teen in the 1980s. D&D was going to corrupt the minds of teenagers or turn them into Satan worshippers. Remember Jack Chick's "Dark Dungeons"? Hilarious, if it wasn't so sad and misinformed.
All these fears --- D&D as dangerous --- all seem quaint today. No one takes that threat seriously anymore, except perhaps the fundamentalist wingnuts.
Still, stereotypes and prejudices against gaming and fantasy persist. Most people don't realize that for 99% of players and fans, these activities are integrated in healthy ways into the lives or normal people, and they provide an essential community, rites of passage, ethics and values, just like other clubs and hobbies.
But funny thing: gaming does even more. It lets us try out new roles. There's personality development that arises in a role-playing situation. And if you're a geeky shy kid like I was back in the day, role-playing games can be a necessary tool for socialization.
I recently discovered a teen center --- the only one like it in the nation --- that uses table-top (not video) games to teach these exact life skills. Based in the small town of Belfast, Maine, The Game Loft fosters risk-taking, leadership, and camaraderie. Especially for kids who find the football gridiron to be a foreign world, The Game Loft immerses them in a different sort of team sport, where they can find achievement and connectedness.
As I wrote in a recent article for the Christian Science Monitor ("Role-playing games pull reluctant school kids into a supportive crowd"), Game Loft members play characters armed not with football padding and hockey sticks but chain mail, broadswords, light sabers, and magic spells. Working together, they charge onto battlefields and explore underground dungeons, seeking valor in these imaginary realms. Re-enactment games that let kids inhabit other selves from local history give them a stake in their own community. For those at risk of dropping out of high school, The Game Loft can provide empowerment, accountability, and a way back in.
As founders Patricia and Ray Estabrook put it, "At the Loft we know that good things happen to kids through games and The Loft kids can identify these good outcomes with ease. Our games program is designed to encourage these good outcomes."
Too bad the Game Loft hadn't existed back in the days of Mazes and Monsters, and James Dallas Egbert III.
Top 10 Science Fiction Movie Quotes
Top 10 Science Fiction Movie Quotes
By Ethan Gilsdorf
Science fiction movies voice our fear of what may come to pass if we don't clean up our act (death, destruction, apocalypse), and express our hope for a good life here on planet earth (or other planets) should we choose the right path. In other words, SF can inspire strong opinions about the future of the human race. It can even and create belief systems as powerful as religion. Just look at L. Ron Hubbard.
When I was a kid, instead of quoting Bible passages for spiritual guidance, sometimes my family quoted Star Wars. Imagine the scene in my chaotic house: sink overflowing with dishes, something burning on the stove, dogs tearing apart a trash bag, cats pooping in the basement. The only logical response was to shout, "3PO! 3PO! Shut down all the garbage mashers on the detention level!" (Hence my paranoia about technology, too.) Reciting lines from Episode IV didn't necessary solve my family problems, but it did provide comic counterpoint.
Plus, the Force seemed as plausible an explanation for how the universe hung together as other ideologies and philosophies that had reached the backwoods of rural New Hampshire. In fact, fictional characters like Yoda, Darth Vader, Hal 9000, E.T. felt as real to me as anything else. Raised on monster movies and cineplex fare, I happily let their words infect my brain. I know they've corrupted yours.
But which lines of SF movie dialogue have reached mythic status? Which ones that truly made a permanent stain on our cultural fabric? In my search for the best, most indelible SF movie quotes ever, here was my criteria. 1) They had to be memorable. 2) They had to show staying power over the years. 3) And they had to lines you and I use in everyday life to punctuate our humdrum lives with irony, drama, and humor. (Oh, and number 4: they had to appear in a SF movie, not TV show or book.)
In my humble opinion, here are the ten best. I expect you might quibble with my picks, but heck, that's what these lists are all about. To paraphrase one famous movie line, the more I tighten my grip on this top ten list, the more quotes will slip through my fingers.
(Tune in for my next post, my choices for the Top 10 Fantasy Movie Quotes)
10) "Klaatu barada nikto" --- The Day the Earth Stood Still
In the 1951 SF classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, "Klaatu barada nikto" are the secret words Klaatu (Michael Rennie) passes on to Helen Benson (Patricia Neal). One of the most famous commands in all of SF, the three words are a kind of failsafe code that keeps the robot Gort from destroying the Earth. Good to know. Memorization of this should be required along with the Pledge of Allegiance, your mommy's and daddy's address, and the Lord's Prayer --- just in case.
9) "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." --- 2001: A Space Odyssey
In the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film (based on the novel by Arthur C. Clarke), there's a mission to Jupiter, and the super-smart HAL 9000 computer, seeing that the humans might blow it, begins to off the crew members one by one. Dave Bowman heads out for a spacewalk to rescue his buddy, but HAL locks him out. Bowman: "Open the pod bay doors, HAL." HAL: "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." HAL's passive monotone makes me wonder if there was ever a creepier line said by a computer.
8) "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die." --- Blade Runner
Replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) waxes poetic to Decker (Harrison "Am I a replicant, too?" Ford), to the dreamy score by Vagelis in one of most bittersweet lines from SF. Then a pigeon or dove flies off into the rare blue sky of rainy cyber-punk Los Angeles, circa 2019 and, I swear, nary a geek in the house can escape with dry eyes.
7) "Doo-Do-DOO-Do-DUMMM" --- Close Encounters of the Third Kind
This isn't technically a line of dialogue, it's a few bars of music (I'm stretching the category here), but heck, when I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the theater back in 1977 and that big mother ship landed on Devil's Tower and began to play "Name that Tune" with the scientists, the musical orgasm blew my mind. I was 11 at the time and I never looked at the night sky the same.
6) "Get away from her, you bitch!” – Aliens
Yes, James Cameron has a mother complex. In the ultimate fem-smack-down, Ellen Ripley makes her grand re-entrance to protect the little feral girl Newt, clomping in the hydraulic crab forklift walker thing to take on the baddest momma alien of all. Aliens (1986) was either a giant leap forward (or backward?) for feminism and science fiction.
5) "Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" --- Planet of the Apes
As George Taylor, Heston gets to utter this, the first words ever spoken by a human to the apes. It may be 1968 in the real world (sexual revolution, student protests, that sort of thing), but in Charlton Heston's world, the poor guy's trapped on an f-ed up planet run by apes. Now, wait a minute --- either this is way, way in the future ... or way, way in the past. Are the apes hippies? Do they belong to the NRA? Either way, don't mess with Heston.
4) "The needs of the many outweigh ... the needs of the few... Or the one." --- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(sorry, can't find a video clip; can anyone find it?)
I know you wanted me to pick Kirk's line, "KHAAANNNN!" But when Spock sacrifices himself (by entering the irradiated zone that's part of the Enterprise's warp drive system and fixing the main reactor just in time), another great SF line was born. The quote is actually tag-teamed by Shattner and Nimoy, each on one side of a transparent barrier. Spock says, "Do not grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh ..." to Kirk adds, "the needs of the few," and Spock ends with: "Or the one ... " Sniff! (Don't worry, Spock won't be dead for long.)
3) "E.T. phone home" --- E.T.
You've said it. I've said it. Say no more. Enough said.
2) "I'll be back" --- The Terminator
Before the Governator was in charge of California, he had another deadly mission: to travel back in time to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor (maybe he could have killed Huey Lewis and the News instead?). Of course, in later Terminator movies, Schwarzenegger got all warm and fuzzy and was on the side of good. This is SF movie quote that is probably repeated (to the annoyance of girlfriends and wives everywhere) more than any other.
1) " Do... or do not. There is no try." – The Empire Strikes Back
Many of us who originally saw the 1980 film fondly remember this scene in the swamps of Dagobah featuring the grumpy and whiny student, Luke Skywalker, and his impatient, diminutive, Kermit the Frog-like teacher, Yoda. Whiny Luke can't get it up (no, not that – the "it" is an X-wing sunken in the). Yoda, the Zen master, Luke: "All right, I'll give it a try." Yoda: "No. Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try." And with such few words, a green rubber puppet inspired an entire generation, and made us believe in forces we can't see or understand.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the travel memoir / pop culture investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. More information at http://www.ethangilsdorf.com
Avatar-bashing
Avatar-bashing
It's up to us how fantastic our lives can be.
(originally published on Psychologytoday.com, on January 14, 2010
A couple of stories have been bouncing around the Internet this past week about the dangers of the movie Avatar. And a fellow psychologytoday.com blogger Elana Premack Sandler, has also weighed in on the topic in a post called "Avatar Blues."
The buzz is for good reason: The place where pop culture, the media and psychology intersect is fascinating, and ripe for investigation.
The hubbub began with this story on CNN.com, "Audiences experience 'Avatar' blues," about how some avid Avatar fans are so enthralled by the movie's lush landscapes of Pandora, the imaginary world where the movie takes place, and the nature-loving ethos of the Na'vi race, that their own lives pale in comparison. Go off the deep end --- i.e. suicidal thoughts --- and this is a disturbing phenomenon, to be sure.
The other story is how various groups --- right-wing Christian, Catholics, Republicans, Liberals, the military --- have all found something in Avatar to complain about. It's racist, it's sexist, it bad-mouths the military, it's anti-American and anti-capitalist, it promotes turning ecology into a religion (the latter being a pretty old complaint: hasn't the church been worried about nature worship since the days of Druids?). Some of these arguments are summarized in this article "Avatar under attack from Vatican, U.S. military, liberals."
The whole reality-fantasy divide is one we all must be careful not to fall into. Anything can be taken too far. Sex, drugs, gambling, pornography, eating, shopping --- all of these activities, when taken to the extreme, can be dangerous and blot out the self. No one, in their right mind, should use any one experience, like a movie, to find meaning and attribute so much meaning to it that it looms large to the exclusion of other influences. We all need balanced lives.
The fear about Avatar is, in the end, I think unfounded, but it's understandable. It stems from this perennial worry that any pop culture phenomenon could overhwlem our senses, our good judgement, and cause some careful balance in the universe to veer wildly one way or the other.
In this case, Avatar --- on its way to becoming the most popular movie of all time, in terms of box office, eclipsing Titanic --- has become the latest fear magnet. Some think it's so powerful a vision, so able to shape public opinion or show the public some potentially radical and mind-altering way of life, that it threatens to usurp the power of traditional institutions which usually have the job of making meaning and creating structure in our society --- for example, political parties, the military, religion, to name a few. Or in the case of our so-called Avatar addicts, the fear is how a single experience like a movie can warp a mind into thinking "real life" is hardly worth our effort.
In other words, no way are we going to let an immoral, money-mongering individual like James Cameron, the movie's director, wield all this power to mold the public consciousness.
But remember: we've seen these alarmist concerns before. The minute something new hits these shores --- the telephone, comic books, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, the Internet, video games, drugs, heavy metal music --- we get all worried about brains being rotted and souls being seduced by Satan and the end of civilization as we know it.
But of course we carry on. We always have. Only to be sucked in, become fearful of, the next faddish flavor of the month.
That said, whenever a single event like Avatar commands so much air space, it's not a bad time to reflect, take stock, and wonder if perhaps we are talking our entertainments too seriously. I like very much what movie critic Ty Burr said in an Avatar commentary in the Boston Globe. He wrote in response to a comment from a reader who felt his life was "normal" and "unsatisfying" compared to the fantasies of Avatar. In Burr's words, "Who said our lives had to be normal or unsatisfying ...? Why not transform it into something that satisfies you, not the bottom line of an entertainment corporation?... Why not take off the glasses and have a look around? It’s real 3-D out there and it’s amazing."
In other words, it's up to us how fantastic our lives can be.
Avatar is about transformation
“Geek” Is No Longer a Four-Letter Word
“Geek” Is No Longer a Four-Letter Word
(originally posted on Tor.com, FRIDAY JANUARY 15, 2010 01:22PM EST)
ETHAN GILSDORF
Here’s the truth: No matter how hard you try to suppress some jagged part of your past, it invariably comes screaming back. Especially when you label that subterranean aspect of your previous life “unfinished business” and sweep it under the rug.
Such was the case with my Dungeons and Dragons obsession. The last time I played was senior year in high school, 25 years ago. I thought I had put my gamer days behind me. But what I had simply done was quit playing. My desire to inhabit some fantasy world remained, haunted me throughout my adulthood, and kept beckoning me with its crooked, wiggling finger.
I had played D&D, that oft-maligned fantasy role-playing game, for six hours every Friday night (not to mention the hours I spent scheming and dreaming my next D&D adventure), from the summer before my eighth-grade year until my last year of high school. Week after week, for five years straight, I sat at a table of pimply-faced boys, surrounded by bags of cheese doodles, bottles of Mountain Dew, and mounds of polyhedral dice. In and around those mundane trappings of 20th-century rural New Hampshire life, my D&D gang and I conjured a more fantastic reality, one filled with magic swords, blistering fireballs, and heroic leaps from castle parapets onto the backs of giant rats, goblins, and umber hulks.
Yes, I was introverted and anxious. Many players were. Yes, I had a troubled childhood (briefly: my mother suffered a brain aneurysm when she 38 and I was 12; she survived, but was a massively changed woman). Not so with all of us players did. But D&D was always a great time, and sometimes I think it saved me.
I gave up D&D when I saw college as a chance to remake myself as social and beer-swilling. Fantasy was kids’ play, I said to myself, and my relationship to fantasy felt like a hindrance to becoming the “me” I fantasized about becoming. I forgot the game, and I thought it forgot me.
But then, just shy of my 40th birthday, that old friend returned. By “friend,” I mean “unexpected guest.” I mean, erstwhile “addiction.” By which I mean—and this is what I felt that day I discovered the musty box of D&D rulebooks in my parents’ basement—“Oh, old nemesis. You have come back into my life.”
I got sucked into “the hobby” in the late 1970s, back when D&D was merely a fad—misunderstood, marginalized, and (amusingly) a scourge to Satan-fearing evangelists. Nowadays, our relationship to fantasy has changed. The latest Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, ruled the box office all last summer (along with other science fiction, fantasy, and comic-book hero tales like District 9 and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra). Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies have made writers like Tolkien safe for the entire family. Adult men and women buy Xbox and PlayStation consoles, and not just for their children. Average office workers arrange Star Wars and Halo action figures on their computer monitors. Online worlds like Second Life have made role-playing second nature, and massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) like World of Warcraft (WoW) are now more or less OK worlds to fall into.
Wearing our +3 Eyeglasses of Exceptional Hindsight, we can see that D&D and other fantasy pop-culture phenoms begat a whole sub-industry of Tolkien-esque fantasy entertainments: book series, swords-and-sorcery movies, quarter-devouring video games, home computer online games, and fandom-driven fantasy conventions. Being a fantasy freak is acceptable. “Geek” is no longer a four-letter word.
And it seems to me, the past year of 2009 was particularly a big year for geekdom, both for me personally and for the culture. I graduated high school 25 years ago. D&D celebrated its 35th anniversary. The Warcraft universe and franchise was launched 15 years ago, and the game WoW appeared five years ago. And the second of the two D&D co-founders, Dave Arneson, died (E. Gary Gygax, the other, passed away in 2008).
Discovering that old box of D&D maps, dice, and notebooks sparked the quest that became my book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. I had complex reasons why imaginary worlds had lured me, and why I still heard their siren song. I suspected the same of others. Hence, my world-girdling journey and the dozens of fantasy and gaming fans we meet in Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. I wanted to hear, in their own words, how they had integrated fantasy experiences into their adult lives. I wanted to find out how the worlds of fantasy in all their incarnations had morphed and expanded. And I wanted to find out how much I had morphed and expanded. I hoped I had.
On my quest, I learned the mind works in circuitous ways. Yes, I had put D&D aside, but it was not yet done with me. And, above all, this: the past may be stored in a box, but it does not forget us.
"Avatar" takes the gamer dream a step further
Avatar has been compared to a video game for good reason: it wouldn't exist without role-playing games (RPGs) having blazed the jungle trail first.
The film's visual design alone echoes what game developers have achieved in creating believable digital worlds. Devoted gamers already accept that pixels are as palpable as a Hollywood set. Increasingly, as more directors marry actual and digital performances and landscapes, the look and feel of the pixel will also feel real to the average moviegoer.
Both games and movies must be believed to work their magic. Seen in 3-D, "Avatar'' feels immersive --- more so than most films --- and provides the same high excitement, danger, and adventure of a game. It might be the most "game-like'' movie yet.
But no movie, no matter how richly textured, offers the same immersion as a video game. An RPG or first-person shooter (FPS) isn't passive escapism. Players are participants, choosing their own adventures, telling their own stories, and tapping into that pick-up-your-battle-ax-and-kill mentality that still courses in 21st-century veins. The rush that paraplegic Jake Sully feels in his Na'vi skin is the same World of Warcraft players sense, controlling the actions of level-60 night elf hunters.
Role-playing lets players safely try out aspects of their personalities --- heroic and dark, extroverted and flirtatious --- that they can't explore in "real life.'' Gamers get to trash-talk, boast, and celebrate their victories. RPGs also provide accomplishment and belonging, and in some cases rites of passage and codes of honor. Movie audiences can talk back to the screen, but that's about as far as the interactivity goes at your local cineplex.
Avatar --- like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars --- also exists as a tie-in Xbox 360, PlayStation, and Wii video game experience. Why? The savvy franchise holders want to make money. But they also want to sate movie viewers' thirsts to explore Pandora themselves.
Avatar takes this gamer dream a step further. It doesn't stop at the vicarious heroics or gloss-over this desire to be the hero. The wish to transcend the limitations of the self, the idea that hovers at the edge of gaming culture, is utterly explicit in the plot. The movie's very title speaks to the desire to be uber-powerful; an avatar, literally, is the manifestation of a deity or released soul in bodily form on earth.
Indeed, who doesn't want to be superhero-shaped (if not blue-skinned); better, faster, and more instinctual; lithe and running low to the ground one moment, jumping from vine to fantastic vine the next; riding six-legged horses and flying pterodactyl-like beasts.
Of course, we can't do these things. And the "real life" of living in the jungles of Pandora would be a slog. The reality of that fantasy life would be brutal. We'd be dead in a second, eaten by some jaguar-Trex hybrid or poisoned by a cute looking lemur dart frog. We'd never actually survive on Pandora --- or if we did, we'd have to be willing live with half of our children never making it to adulthood. As 21st century humans, we would never make it without modern technology that, of course, is an irony of the film: Cameron had to use a arsenal of whiz-bang gadgets and digital effects to craft his tree-hugging, environmental message.
The point is not we all should become Luddites. But there's a reason why that tribal, Stone Age way of life seems superficially attractive. The alluring fantasy life presented by Avatar would not be feasible in "real life." Yet it remains attractive because it IS fantasy --- unobtainable as Unobtanium. We can pretend, make believe, project ourselves in our imaginations. We can escape there for a couple hours, knowing that our warm beds and fast food await back home.
Still, sitting in the multiplex, 3D glasses draped on our faces, we're asked to role-play a little, to fantasize like Sully about how we were meant to live, hunting the forest, enacting meaningful rituals, taking charge of our destinies. Forget our selves as post-industrial, post-blue collar office workers stuck in our civilized ways. For, like Sully, we are effectively paralyzed as well, chained to our desks and DSL lines, far from Eden, far from nature, far from the magical thinking of yore. We yearn to break free. If only in our minds.
It's a similar dream offered by Tolkien's Middle-earth --- to be peaceful, nature-bonded hobbits, quietly growing crops, smoking pipes, drinking ale and laughing. An alluring fantasy life to be sure. And one perhaps worth fighting for, and to defend from the marauding hordes of orcs or bulldozers.
But here's another irony. Sully says he feels more alive as his avatar, while his real self lies supine on a bed, stuck in a trance state. "Everything is backwards now,'' he says, "like out there is the true world and in here is the dream.'' The self is split, and it haunts him.
As role-playing games cross new frontiers and become more integrated into our leisure lives, and as movies become more like games (and vice-versa), the question becomes: When is it time to hit the pause button?
World of Warcrack players, not to mention mere Facebookers, beware your various selves aren't spread too thinly across cyberspace.
Avatar lets us return to Eden
In its short life, the movie Avatar has already become many things to many viewers: science fiction dream, action-adventure epic, visual spectacle, technological triumph, cautionary tale, and morality play.
Box office conquered, Avatar also proves the culture has shifted. Part role-playing game come true and part special effects masterpiece, its hybrid gamer-geek pedigree is as glaring as the blue skin of Na'vi race director James Cameron has brought to life. Cameron's movie --- alongside the rise of Harry Potter, the return of Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, and the obsession with online games like World of Warcraft --- shows that fantasy is no longer a shunned or exotic side dish. The genre has become the main dish.
And what is that transformation all about? I think that classic geek dream --- "if I were only not me" --- has leaked now into the general culture. Even the jocks want to be someone else. Fantasies about transcending the self ain't just for 98-pound weaklings anymore.
And there's this twist: we spend so much time in front of our computers, chained there in effect, that we are like much like the paralyzed protagonist of Avatar, Jake Sully, who finds joy and transcendence through his athletic, virtual Na'vi feline body let lose on the jungle planet Pandora, where the movie's action takes place. Sully feels so unleashed, so uninhibited, that his real life pales in comparison. In Sully's words: "Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world and in here is the dream."
More than one critic --- and James Cameron himself --- has already compared Avatar to movies like Dances With Wolves and its ilk (Lawrence of Arabia; Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now). It's a classic clash of civilizations or of cultures premise: jaded Western military man crosses to the other side, discovers something untainted and wholesome in a tribal culture, falls for the hot local gal, and thereby completes his "going native" conversion by switching sides and eventually leading the natives to fight their oppressors – his old self.
Sully's journey may be the well-worn hero's journey, but with a new chapter. His journey is not just about saving the day. It's about becoming one with nature, returning to state of Eden, tapping into a wholeness with the world as Mother Nature, God or the deity of your choice meant it to be. To be re-aquainted with our primal selves.
For who doesn't want to be better, faster, stronger (like the Six Million Dollar Man), leaping through the forest and bounding across the jungle canopy, hunting some beasts and conquering others? To be one with mystical forces of healing, the "one-ness" of the living, breathing, interconnected mass of greenness that is the earth? And to be able to do cool stuff like fly dragons and kill the nasties?
The irony here is that it took Cameron a gazillion dollars, 12 years and some very amazing, so-called "cutting-edge" gadgets--- computers, 3D cameras, digital draftsmanship --- to bring us this fantasy tale of how technology threatens the new world, Pandora; how it has wrecked humanity; and how it keeps us from being that lean, mean, agile, fighting machine-nature boy/girl.
Our true selves.
Yep, I'm giving them away for free...
A heartbreaking tale of staggering geekiness
A heartbreaking tale of staggering geekiness
I wrote earlier about my personal relationship to fantasy and gaming, and the reasons for writing my book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. I wanted to expand on those ideas here.
To recap: I was a high school gaming geek. I played Dungeons & Dragons religiously. I was not on the football team. My varsity letters might as well have been "D&D."
Years passed, and I forgot about my gaming days. But I noticed the culture had changed. Suddenly, in the 21st century, all the geeky pursuits of my youth --- video games, science fiction and collecting action figures --- had gone mainstream. So I asked myself one primal question: did our culture's obsession with Harry Potter, Xbox, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Magic: the Gathering and World of Warcraft mean we had become a nation of escapists? Were we all unable to deal with the real world?
As it turns out, no. But to find out, I embarked on a nonlinear, noncontiguous odyssey of self-reflection, cultural analysis, and free mead. The journey became my book.
I crisscrossed the country, the world, and other worlds, from my home in Somerville, Massachusetts, to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin; from France to New Zealand; from Planet Earth to the realm of Aggramar. I asked gaming and fantasy geeks how they found balance between their escapist urges and the kingdom of adulthood. I questioned Tolkien scholars and medievalists. I spoke to grown men who built hobbit holes and learned to speak Elvish, and to grown women who played Warcraft and EverQuest. Old, young, male, female, able-bodied and disabled—I wanted to hear, in their own words, what lured them in, and for what reasons, whether healthy, unhealthy, or in between.
I needed to put myself face-to-face with these escapist pursuits. Before, as a kid, my Dungeons & Dragons obsession was a haphazard consequence, a symptom of being lost and a solution to my familytrauma. But I had adopted D&D and fantasy accidentally. This time, I would get lost on purpose. I wouldn’t be escaping again; I would be excavating. Examining the unexamined in an effort to find out what fantasy meant to me, to all of us.
I hung out with Harry Potter tribute bands, attended fan conventions and gaming tournaments, camped with 12,000 medieval reenactors for a week, learned to sword fight, and battled online goblins and trolls. I went on pilgrimages to Tolkien's hometown of Oxford, England, and I trekked across New Zealand in search of the filming locations for the Lord of the Rings movies. At a live action role-playing game, I dressed as a pacifist monk for a weekend. I became Ethor, Ethorian, and Ethor-An3. I sewed my own tunic. I even played Dungeons & Dragons again for the first time in 25 years.
I met hundreds of gamers and geeks on my quest and listened to their stories. Their reasons for embracing fantasy and gaming were diverse, surprising and in many cases, touching. It wasn't mindless escapism that lured them to swords-and-scorcery realms. Games taught social skills,leadership, and strategy; they inspired creativity and storytelling. They provided rites of passage, accomplishment and belonging, even belief systems. They let people safely try out aspects of their personalities --- often dark, evil sides, or extroverted or flirtatious --- they could not or would not flex in "real life." The games connected folks to magical thinking, to nature, to a primal, pick-up-your-battle-ax and kill mentalities long suppressed by so-called society. For the disabled who ventured online into realms liek World of Warcraft, games and fantasy provided transcendence from pain and prejudice, and a venue where they'd be judged not based on their appearance, but how they played the game. As one woman told me, bound to her walker and crutches, “I can’t run through the grass barefoot anymore. It’s something I cannot do. But my avatar can.”
In short, all the stories helped debunk the stereotypes that gamers and geeks were simply anti-social escapists who lived in their parents' basements and had no "real" lives. And, by meeting all these articulate, tolerant and confident folks who still gamed after all these years, I was finally able to face my inner geek.
That's the happy ending of my story. Because, after all, we're a storytelling people. And if nothing else, fantasy and gaming lets us be the hero of a story -- not to simply absorb and consume but to participate, to tell and be part of our own heroic narrative.
That thread to our heroic lives has been largely lost. The minutiae of our modern, mundane troubles --- politics, race, jobs, communication, relationships, family --- are a bore and a chore and wear us down. Dissatisfied with ATMs and speed limits, mediated experiences and the suburban blah-scape, who wouldn’t prefer trying his or her luck with a broad- sword against a horde of orcs rather than paying the Visa bill or looking for parking?
Which explains why people read Tolkien and J.K. Rowling and play role-playing games. Why? The books and games give us hope in hopeless times. Fantasy is a genre people can read and retreat to and gather strength to face the real world. Fantasy keeps the spirit alive and kicking --- and inspires us to confront our real-world problems.
Indeed, when you read heroic stories like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, or watch the movies (and even play the games), you sense that if a mere hobbit can withstand evil, why not you? If the little guy can enter Mordor and destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, then perhaps we can take on our own problems, no matter how real or imaginary they may seem.
As for me, my problem was that I was 40 and still in love with fantasy. But I've changed. I finally embraced my inner geek.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the new travel memoir Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms
Magic Moments and Imaginary Friends
Given the themes of my book, namely fantasy and gaming, the subject of imaginary worlds is often on my mind. Indeed, for much of my childhood and even adulthood, when I wasn't playing a game, drawing a picture or reading a book, I was and am often seeking those fleeting "magic moments" when I could feel like I had shaken off the weight of the present day to travel to another era in history. Or to another world entirely. Just last week, on walk in the woods, I pretended to see hobbits, dwarves and elves.
In my book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, I talk about how the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) helped an adolescent me escape the trauma of my mother's debilitating brain injury. To cope, my siblings and I called her "the Momster." Turning her into a creature, in my mind, saved me from having to deal with emotional pain.
In her new memoir, Jessica Handler covers similar territory. Handler is an Atlanta-based writer and author of Invisible Sisters: A Memoir , her chronicle of growing up as the oldest of three sisters and being the "well sibling," learning to redefine herself after her sisters' deaths. I asked her to contribute to Geek Pride her take on "escaping," role-playing and the power of the imagination. Here are her thoughts:
+++
I've been thinking a lot lately about imaginary friends, maybe because I've recently started Twittering. I've never met most of the people who are my social media "friends" and "followers." They're real people, but the intensity of our interactions and the presumed the 24/7 nature of their interest in me (and mine in them) makes them a little like imaginary friends.
I had a constant relationship with imaginary friends when I was a kid. My sister Susie, eight years old to my ten, had just died of leukemia. Our little sister Sarah, four, was terminally ill with a rare blood disorder. Our parents kept our lives as normal as possible, but we were rigid with terror, captive to hospitals and medical bills, and frantic with love. No one spoke about the death that came and the death that was coming. Our parents' marriagedissolved, as they often do with the loss of a child. Sarah died in her twenties.
When I was a child, my imaginary friends were imaginary selves --- my alternate lives. Like D&D for Ethan coping with his "Momster," they were ways to escape my actual life.
Kids are generally pretty powerless. A serious illness renders everyone involved powerless. Parents, whom kids presume all-powerful, become tragically fallible. A kid seeing her parents' frailty for the first time turns away. Unable to help, kids are ashamed of their lack of power.
And so we turn to a safe place inside ourselves.
Imaginary friends allow a kid to take control of her life. With imaginary friends and imaginary selves, a child recreates herself as visible and vital in a world of her making.
Every good-weather afternoon, all I wanted to do was get home from school and get outside. There, I walked in a circle for hours, silently telling myself stories in which I was the heroine; someone who wasn't me. Thinking back now, I'm amazed at how unselfconsciously I tamped down a ring of grass in our front yard, in clear view of the neighbors, and disappeared wholly into a story - and an imaginary self.
My grandmother once remarked that she saw me in the yard, "pretending to be a horse." I wouldn't dream of correcting my beloved grandmother, but no way was I pretending to be a horse. I was pretending to be Elaine, a girl who looked like Katherine Ross in The Graduate, the new movie with ads everywhere. Or I was a popular, athletic, blonde pre-teen who climbed trees and slugged boys and was surrounded by friends. Sometimes I was a girl who survived the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. All of these characters were survivors.
Escapism and fantasy helped me survive a traumatic childhood. I had real friends and real responsibilities in my household. My sisters and I loved each other, and our parents loved us. My imaginary selves killed our lawn, but they also took me to a world I owned. In its way, this is similar to gaming, so I guess I can claim bona fide Geek Pride.
Does it explain my fascination with social media? Maybe a little.
Jessica Handler is the author of Invisible Sisters: A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2009). You can learn more about her book here:http://www.jessicahandler.com.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the new travel memoir Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.
The Holiday Role You Play
The Holiday Role You Play
Perhaps no other time of year is as highly anticipated, and secretly dreaded, as that festive family time known collectively as "the holidays." The clash of fake gaiety and togetherness around Thanksgiving time plus Christmas's unrealistic expectations of "perfection" can lead to a train wreck of emotions.
We cope the best we can. Both poles of our Jekyll-Hyde personalities can be released. Sometimes we slip behind familiar masks. We might play comforting, non-confrontational roles, or perhaps hide out in the kitchen behind a tower of dirty dishes. For example, I noticed how in recent years around family gatherings I had become "the entertainer." My job: make 'em laugh.
To see if this holiday ailment afflicted more than just myself, recently I polled my friends and select family members. I had them write descriptions of their annual performances, each titled "The Holiday Role I Play." (I'd also like to hear from you: what role do you play?).
Reported anonymously, here are some of the responses (edited for length) that I received:
• I am considered the queen of Christmas.
• When I go home for the holidays I am "The Good Sport." No matter what game I am asked to play, song I am asked to sing, I never complain. There is time to get even later.
• I am "The Pretender" and enter into all they're doing and willingly going along. At some level, I know they know this.
• Characterize me as "The Bartender." Everyone's glass is full -- which permits me to fill my own glass in the doing.
• At mom's house I am "The Organizer." Everything must run on schedule, all the dishes at the proper temperature, the gifts opened in descending order of seniority. My husband is "The Clean-up Guy." When all the gals are sipping their Bailey's, he is quietly at the sink washing and drying.
• I think I am "The Son Who Needs To Be Spoiled." Whenever I come home for the holidays, my mom wants to spoil her "lost son" as much as possible.
• I play three roles. With the immediate family, I am "The Reminder of The Love Before." Mom sees my father in my face and usually loses her mind. The second role I play is "The Project" -- everyone is eager to see me 50 and relatively finished. Finally, I am "The Outsider." My family is a bunch of heartening, Midwestern hicks, barely anyone finishing college, lots of alcoholics, teenage drug addicts and runaways who try to commit suicide. To have become the quiet one who got out of Fort Wayne, Ind., without babies or a husband, is always unsettling.
• I can tell you right off my role would be "The Moderator." Such choice therapeutic phrases such as "what I hear you saying is ..." and "what I think she is trying to express is ..." are commonly uttered by me. I try to avoid using language like "shame spiral" and "co-dependent." (Note: variations on this theme were the most common roles cited -- "The Referee," "The Sounding Board," "The Therapist," "The Link Repairer," "The Peacemaker.")
• I play "The Honored Guest," graciously bestowing my presence and allowing myself to be treated as such.
• I know the pitfalls of family gatherings (a dirge-like, morose collection of individuals, shoveling down holiday food to the strains of Johnny Mathis and searching for an appropriate escape) and do my best to avoid/dilute them.
• My role: "I Am My Sister's Keeper." We share thousands of tiny glances throughout one holiday evening that speak volumes in the moment, and signify volumes to be spoken much later. Separately, we can hardly win any battles, but together, on Christmas, we are an unstoppable army of two.
• I am the one trying to shed a little factual light on my family's highly distorted, historically rewritten views. I used to be the family clown. I don't think the two are that different -- just components of the same role.
• In my house I take the role of "The Conversationalist." Frequently this involves many different conversations, held in a constant blur of moving from living room to kitchen and back again, trying to not alight on the couch and be sucked into the brain numbing drone of TV. The talk goes a little like this: Cooking, a little politics and sports with Dad; sports with younger brother; current events and education with step-mom. Don't alienate anyone, make sure you include all the guests, remember to include significant others. Above all else avoid the deadly seven-minute dead air. Silence isn't golden. Perhaps we will find out how far we have traveled from each other over the year.
• As a child I was "The Anointed Christmas Infant," responsible for displays of wonder. As a young adult my role shifted to being the one responsible for the continuation of our handed-down traditions of perfection -- "Mid-Winter Monarch" and "Kitchen Queen" -- she who secures the boundaries, mediates the squabbles and is provider of plenty. Now, in exile and older, I have become "The Contented Ghost of Christmas Past."
• My son is unable to type so I will attempt to respond for him. His role is to experience and share pure unadulterated joy during the holidays. He jumps with excitement when putting out a plate of cookies, eight carrots and a glass of milk for Santa. He brings meaning to the holidays. Ask him this question in another five years and I am sure you'll get an answer more like what you were expecting.
• I have no idea what my role is. I think maybe I'm the guy who makes screaming faces in the bathroom mirror and then comes out all smiley.
And you probably could add to these your own cast of characters you find yourself playing. Feel free to comment below and let us know what roles you slip into around the holidays.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the new travel memoir Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.
Ethan Gilsdorf on TheOneRing.net Radio Show: Sunday Dec 6th
The next radio show for TheOneRing.net is set for this Sunday, December 6th at 2PM Eastern. Our guests include author Ethan Gilsdorf (‘Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks’) and professional blogger Jenna Busch (JoBlo, Huffington Post, SCI FI Wire, AOL’s Popeater, Newsarama, IGN, UGO, Forces of Geek). We will also be talking about all the latest Hobbit news and other items featured on TheOneRing.net.
We’ll be taking questions from listeners via chat, email, text and the old fashioned phone! Visit our BlogTalk Radio page to listen in!
TheOneRing.net brings fans the latest news on the beloved figures involved in the making of the wildly popular Lord of the Rings movies as well as the newest information available on upcoming productions, Tolkien-centered events, new publications, and fan gatherings.
Could fantasy have prevented the Fort Hood slayings?
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan should have been a gamer.
Is it possible that fantasy or gaming could have prevented the brutal slayings at Fort Hood? Perhaps.
The motive for the shooting wasn't clear. But Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the accused shooter, was said to have expressed some anger about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Too bad he did not find the proper venue to express that anger.
The power of simulations and make-believe have been proven. By play-acting scenarios --- be it Civil War re-enactment, a model UN, the classic role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) or an online game like World of Warcraft (WoW) --- we can imagine different outcomes. We can pretend to be good and chivalrous, or evil or villainous, all within the safe realm of a play. And by role-playing, which is a kind of inhabiting other sides of ourselves, and other possible personalities, we imagine how others live.
Gaming and fantasy play give us the chance to take risks in controlled ways. They let us sort out complex feelings of fear and anger. They let us blow off steam. Contrary to the fears of a post-Columbine High School world, gamers don't mix up reality with fantasy. But some people, and perhaps Nidal Malik Hasan was one of them, let reality become too burdensome. Obsessed with their own emotions, they lose their sense of what is right and wrong. And then they make a huge mistake.
In a book like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, we are reminded again by what is good and what is evil. These narratives ground us. They recalibrate our internal moral barometers. A swords-and-sorcery or futuristic realm has conflict, and when there's a conflict being acted out, just like in all great literature, we learn useful stuff about the human condition. In a way, D&D is a huge exercise in empathy.
I'm not saying that had Hasan played D&D or WoW, these shootings would not have happened. But they might not have happened. Perhaps by finding some venue to express these dark thoughts, he would have found catharsis. And not, as it turned out, gut-wrenching tragedy and pain for countless others.
Perhaps, had Nidal Malik Hasan played a first-person shooter game in an imaginary realm, he would not have felt compelled to create his own first-person shooter game in the real world.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the new travel memoir Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.
It's OK for kids to dress up evil for Halloween
Prohibiting scary costumes at Halloween? Ridiculous.
A recent article in the New York Times ("Drop the Halloween Mask! It Might Scare Someone") reported how, "in some classrooms across the country, the interpretation of what is too scary - or offensive, gross or saddening - is now also leading to an abundance of caution and some prohibitions" on what kids can "be" at Halloween.
The story reproduced a memo from a principal at a Los Angeles school that outlined what was OK for kids to dress up as:
>They should not depict gangs or horror characters, or be scary.
>Masks are allowed only during the parade.
>Costumes may not demean any race, religion, nationality, handicapped condition or gender.
>No fake fingernails.
>No weapons, even fake ones.
>Shoes must be worn.
Weapons, gang depictions, and costumes making fun of race or ethnicity, et al, I get. Even shoes, I understand. But prohibiting fingernails, horror characters or anything scary? This is ridiculous.
The truth is that we need to tap into our scary sides. To be both scared and to frighten others. We need to know what it is to be freaked out, even to risk death (in a safe way), so we can understand what it is to be alive. We need to be confronted with evil and nastiness --- even if it is "play" --- so we can recalibrate what is means to be good. We need to play the villain --- be it Sauron, the Wicked Witch of the West or Snidley Whiplash. Halloween is one of the few opportunities we have to encounter and inhabit these archetypal characters. We get to be "the baddie," if only for one night.
Sociologist Norbert Elias, author of The Civilizing Process, suggested that in our increasingly structured society, we must exert proper control over our emotions. In the "civilizing process" described by Elias, people don't get to flex our primal emotional muscles. So we have created acceptable arenas to blow off primal steam and experience adrenaline and danger --- even if real death has been removed. Elias called it "controlled decontrolling" of emotions. It's acceptable to bellow battle cries at football games, or hoot during rock concerts, or get drunk and crazy at Mardi Gras. Otherwise, we don't get to act out and act up.
Hence, the importance of Halloween, a holiday that not only lets us role-play, but connect us to the spirit world and the supernatural. The celebration has its roots in a festival of the dead: a time when a family honored its ancestors and invited them home but also were careful not the welcome the harmful spirits. Supposedly, by wearing of costumes and masks, and disguising oneself as a "bad" spirit, the evil forces were warded off.
But some adults (i.e. the ones protecting kids from scary masks at Halloween parties) think Freddy Krueger costumes and rotting zombie make-up will somehow harm kids. It's a fallacy. Gerard Jones, author of Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes and Make-Believe Violence, reminds us that fantasy violence and playground role-playing of scary stuff helps kids process anger and violent emotions in a controlled and safe fashion. Violent and scary entertainment can be good for kids --- and to demonize it can damage their emotional development. He also argues that children clearly get the difference between make-believe and reality.
So, educators and parents, let's not unduly limit what or who kids can be at Halloween. Yes, leave the AK-47s at home. But scary costumes are as old as Grimms Fairy Tales and haunted forests and evil step-mothers. Scary is good. And to be undead is to be alive.
Let me know what you think.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the new travel memoir Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.
Online gaming creates another self
It's human nature to demonize what we don't understand.
It is easy to assume that fantasy gaming is "bad" or "harmful." Rumors of Dungeons & Dragons luring susceptible kids to the dark side added to its geek creep factor back in the 1980s, forever linking the game to deviant and antisocial behavior. Indeed, it's human nature to demonize what we don't understand.
Such has been the case with MMOs (massively multiplayer online games) like World of Warcraft. Society still considers gamers to be as introverted, inarticulate, and emotionless as their armored avatars. News stories tell of how virtual relationships wreck real-life ones. Spouses are ignored or cheated on. Or even more heinous behavior occurs: virtual muggings, harassment, racial incidents.
A hierarchy emerges. It seems to many that even so-called "healthy" fantasy like reading Harry Potter books or sketching dungeons with pencils has to be better than fantasy like WoW, which numbs minds, sucks the imagination, and has no redeeming value.
But negative stereotyping of online gaming isn't fair. And if you delve into these games, you soon realize that MMOs and other computer games can offer something more powerful than escapism. They even change lives.
In my book, a woman named Phyllis Priestly talks about her relationship to online fantasy role-playing games like WoW. "You're in this world where it's life and death," she says. "Adrenaline rush. You kill. I'm really happy. It's changed the way I interact with people in the real world. I am less patient. I am more forthright. I blurt out what I think. It’s about [expletive] time. It’s like breathing for the first time."
She find in gaming a way to express a part of her personality that once lay hidden. Her gaming personality -- huntress, fighter, doer, killer -- leaks into her real world. All that rapid-fire picking off of wolves, quilboars, and troggs (the various monsters in the game) sharpens her reflexes, quickens her reaction time, and heightens her senses. She claims that gaming made her a better driver: The windshield became a rectangular viewfinder into a world of obstacles and foes. "I keep expecting something to jump out and kill me," she told me. "It's freed me up to say what I want to say." In her mind, she had become more confident, more daring, more connected.
Assertiveness training came through her experience with MMOs, not some corporate team building exercise. And through a "game," people can try out new attitudes, new personalities, new selves. And maybe, just maybe, find a way to export their fantasy experiences into their real lives, and become more like the ideal selves they want to be.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the new travel memoir Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.
Do. Or do not! There is no try: Part 2
LUKE: I don't...I don't believe it. YODA: That is why you fail.
In part 1 of this post, I proposed the idea that we seek moral guidance and spiritual example in unexpected places these days, even from movies like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Here's another twist on this intersection (or collision) between pop culture and behavior.
Fantasy games like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) link and role-playing groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) link aren't just fun ways to socialize and feel the rush of battle (whether we swing foam and PVC swords in our mind or on a real-world play battlefield). These experiences actually teach us useful things, and for some players, provide guidance. In my book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, I talk about how D&D not only gave me, a nerdy and shy kid, something to do each Friday with friends who didn't judge his lack of prowess on the athletic field. It also helped give shape and order to a chaotic world of adolescence and my own troubled home life. I had learned that in the adult world, fate was chaotic and uncertain. Guidelines for success were arbitrary. But in the world of D&D, at least there was a rule book. My character gradually becoming more powerful, I could gradually risk more daring feats. D&D was a safe place to act out, be bold, be a chamption. The game's subterranean realms and heroic quests welcomed me; high school dances and locker rooms did not.
In my book we also meet a schoolteacher named David Randrup, who was raised as an atheist. Visiting churches as an adult left him disappointed. He got no sense of wonderment or higher purpose-until he found the SCA. In this group devoted to recreating the best parts of the Middle Ages, Randrup became Sir Gareth, a knight who found in the Society's chivalric ideals what he called his "moral compass" and transferred those ideals to the real world. When faced with a thorny problem, like a conflict at his school, Randrup asked himself, How would a medieval noble face this situation? While wreaking havoc with a broadsword was tempting, he said, the better choice was to "face a situation with courage, mete out justice while expecting it from others, show mercy as you'd expect others to, be generous without regret, have faith in humanity, show nobility in adversity, have hope for the future, and have the strength to do it all over again the next time."
A dress-up medieval reenactment group or "escapist" book or movie offering life lessons? And yet they can and do. Such is the premise of Star Wars Jesus: A Spiritual Commentary on the Reality of the Force, a book by Caleb Grimes, that aims to both playfully and seriously analyze the six Star Wars movies like holy texts or philosophical tracts. Unlike me, Grimes is a Christian, and sees in the Star Wars universe another way to look at his universe. The movies are another text that provide a metaphor or signpost for how to tackle life's thorny troubles. As his website says, his project is "all about the celebration of the ‘more' that exists in the Star Wars films. You can enjoy the movies without seeing these things, but that does not mean they don't exist."
Which bring us back to that scene between Yoda and Luke in the swamps of Dagobah. Here, poor whiny Luke is struggling to harness the Force and lift the sunken X-wing fighter from the murky depths of the lake:
Luke closes his eyes and concentrates on thinking the ship out. Slowly, the X-wing's nose begins to rise above the water. It hovers for a moment and then slides back, disappearing once again.
LUKE: (panting heavily) I can't. It's too big.
YODA: Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hm? Mmmm.
Luke shakes his head and complains that Yoda wants "the impossible."
Quietly Yoda turns toward the X-wing fighter. With his eyes closed and his head bowed, he raises his arm and points at the ship. Soon, the fighter rises out of the water and moves majestically toward the shore. Yoda guides the fighter carefully down toward the beach. Luke stares in astonishment.
LUKE: I don't...I don't believe it.
YODA: That is why you fail.
Perhaps even a Saturday matinee western, disguised in the garb of a science fiction space opera, can make us believe in things and forces we can't see or understand. Or a game of make-believe knights in shining armor can instruct us how to be better people, not in a time or galaxy far, far away, but right here on planet earth.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the book, part travel-memoir, part investigative cultural journalism, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.