Blurring of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Genres
October 23, 2023 § 8 Comments
Growing up, my favorite books were always Scholastic’s Rainbow Magic Fairy books by Daisy Meadows. I was–to say the least–obsessed. For instance, at one point my fairy fascination led me to beg the tooth fairy to bring me the latest Rainbow Magic book, rather than hard cash. Therefore, it’s no surprise that my love for fantastical fiction has transferred into my adult years. In fact, I even decided to major in Creative Writing, solely based on a dream of writing my own fantastical novel one day. Thus, as I take this course about classical science fiction, I am most curious about where the speculative fiction genres overlap.
Upon origin, the term speculative fiction was meant to cover a subset of science fiction that dealt with stories concerned with an uncertain future. However, the phrase speculative fiction is now used “as an all-encompassing category for many types of writing that deliberately choose not to imitate the ‘consensus reality’ of everyday experience. When used thus, it covers many other genres, like fantasy, horror, gothic, science fiction, superhero fiction, science fantasy, utopian and dystopian fiction, supernatural fiction, cyberpunk, steampunk, post-apocalyptic fiction, alternate histories, slipstream, and a number of hybrids between all these” (Joe Pellegrino). As a result, science fiction and fantastical fiction could, in a sense, be seen as two sides to the same coin. Both genres often work to reveal a certain, real problem in society, from the perspective of the impossible.
Thus, you might ask—like I tend to—what makes the two genres distinct? Anna Day, a published author from the UK, states that “The main difference between fantasy and science fiction is that fantasy deals with the impossible, whereas science fiction deals with the possible. Fantasy features magic and monsters, the realm of the imagination, and science fiction is grounded in scientific principles. Both genres need internal consistency and logic, but in fantasy, the writer creates the rules, whereas, in science fiction, nature and physics dictate the rules” (Anna Day). I buy this definition, to an extent. My doubt concerns the last sentence, surrounding which rules govern each of these two genres. In an effort to explain this doubt, I am going to put two vastly different books in context with each other for the rest of the post: Leah Bardugo’s Young Adult Fantasy novel Shadow and Bone and Pauline Hopkins’ Classic Sci-Fi, Afrofutruist novel Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self.
Leah Bardugo published Shadow and Bone in 2012, as the first book which takes place in the Grishaverse. The Grishaverse is her Russian inspired fantastical world, where certain people, The Grisha, are born with the ability to manipulate the elements and use them as weapons. The reason why this fantasy world holds particular importance to this discussion surrounds the fact that, throughout the novel, Bardugo remains steadfast that the Grisha do not possess magical powers and are not witches, rather they are masters of the “Small Science.”
The Small Science is Bardugo’s way to explain how the governing rules of her world differ from our own, without referring to it as magic. She spends a good portion of the novel explaining the science that has led to the Grisha being able to manipulate the elements. For instance, there are Grisha who can manipulate fire as a weapon, yet Bardugo states that those Grisha don’t make fire but rather, “summon combustible elements in the air around us, and…still need a flint to make a spark that would burn that fuel.” Additionally, there are certain Grisha whose power focuses on composite materials, such as metal, glass, textiles, and chemicals. These Grisha focus on inventing new technology (Sci-fi Alert!!), such as extremely durable steel. Yet, Bardugo still maintains that, “Grisha steel wasn’t endowed with magic, but by the skill of Fabrikators, who did not need heat or tools to manipulate metal.” The idea of people being able to use an invisible force to throw fire at their enemies or melt metal from the touch of their hand remains a fantastical concept, yet Bardugo still claims that it is science that dictates the rules of this world (Bardugo 147).
Additionally, Bardugo writes that the “the grounding principle of the Small Science is ‘like calls to like’” (Bardugo 147). The idea is that certain Grisha are born with an affinity for certain elements, and since they are like them, they can manipulate them. When I first read the phrase “like calls to like,” I was immediately brought back to my sophomore year of highschool, where my AP Chemistry teacher, Mrs. Tarvin, would chant to us, “like dissolves like.” This utterance is used to explain the Law of Attraction relating to polarity (polar molecules are more attracted to polar solvents, and thus can be dissolved by them). Thus, there are moments in real life science, where like is calling to like. Furthermore, Bardugo basing her fantastical world off of this scientific principle is not even unique to her, as another wildly popular fantasy author, Sarah J Maas, uses “like calls to like” as a similar explanation for her magical system in her novel A Court of Thorns and Roses. Fantasy authors might be written off as dealing with the impossible, magic, and monsters, but that does not mean that their books are necessarily any less scientific based.
Now that we’ve covered a fantasy novel that bases its governing principles on real life science, let’s talk about a Sci-Fi novel that bases its rules on African mysticism and pseudoscience. Hopkins’ novel Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self was published between 1902 and 1903, and it surrounds the story of a young man Reuel, who travels to a long lost (fantastical) city in Africa called Telassar. By the end of this fateful journey, Reuel has survived murder plots and taken up his duty as rightful king to Telassar.
From the very get go, this novel makes it clear that it is not grounded in reality. By page thirty-one, the idea of mesmerism is introduced and one of the main characters—Dianthe—is resurrected from the dead by Reuel (I want to make a note here that even Shadow and Bone doesn’t go as far as resurrecting people). The idea of mesmerism comes from the pseudoscience of animal magnetism, which was created in the 18th century by Franz Anton Mesmer. The concept of mesmerism/animal magnetism is that “a presumed intangible or mysterious force that is said to influence human beings,” which can be harnessed as a means to heal people (Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica). To me, this idea seems pretty dang close to Grisha healers being able to use invisible forces to manipulate the human body and heal them, which is common practice in Bardugo’s Grishaverse. Just because Hopkins’ novel starts out in Boston and seems pretty realistic for the first third of the novel, it does not mean that its rules are grounded in any more nature or physics than any of Bardugo’s books.
In the end, the debate over whether a book should be labeled as science fiction or fantasy might seem like semantics. Yet, books—like all things these days—are subject to capitalism, and different genres are marketed towards different audiences. Thus, these classifications have real world implications. If you get anything out of this post, I want it to be the acknowledgement that the boundaries to these labels can be mighty blurry, as science fiction and fantasy have considerable overlap. Furthermore, whether you were once a little girl who grew up reading Rainbow Magic or a small boy obsessed with clones and robots, both fantasy and science fiction novels can teach about the problems of society from the lens of a world quite different from our own. To me, and I hope to you, speculative fiction is worth the read, regardless of which genre category the story falls into.
-Molly Buffenbarger
References:
Bardugo, Leigh. Shadow and Bone. Henry Holt, 2012.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “animal magnetism”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 May. 2005, https://www.britannica.com/science/animal-magnetism. Accessed 23 October 2023.
Day, Anna. “Science Fiction vs Fantasy: A Speculative Fiction Comparison.” Jericho Writers, 5 Sept. 2023, jerichowriters.com/science-fiction-vs-fantasy/.
Hopkins, Pauline E. Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self. Broadview Editions, 2023.
Pellegrino, Joe. “SF vs. SF: ‘Speculative Fiction’ and ‘Science Fiction.’” Joe Pellegrino: Department of English at Georgia Southern University, jpellegrino.com/teaching/specvscience.html. Accessed 23 Oct. 2023.
“The Grishaverse.” The Grishaverse Fandom, thegrishaverse.fandom.com/wiki/Grishaverse_Wiki. Accessed 23 Oct. 2023.
Why We Love Monstober & Harry Potter: The Intersection of Fear, Fantasy, and Juvenile Fiction is Possibly Perfection (And the Ultimate Form of Escapism)
October 11, 2023 § 5 Comments
Disney Channel’s Monstober, formerly known as Hauntober and Wiz-tober prior to 2012, is a nightly marathon of Halloween-themed Disney Channel Original Movies (DCOMs) and other animated Halloween classics that premiered on the channel from 2005 to 2016. Every night for the month of October, these eccentric children’s television shows and movies would animate the television screens of thousands of homes as viewers everywhere indulged in spooky specials.
One of the first DCOMs ever, Halloweentown premiered in 1998 with a modest budget but was so successful that it decorated the program list of every Monstober marathon and was eventually made into a sequel. Halloweentown follows the journey of protagonist Marnie as she learns on her thirteenth birthday that she is a witch, and therefore must help her family combat the evil that is encompassing her world. Similarly, Twitches tells the story of two twins who, upon meeting on their twenty-first birthday, learn that they possess magical powers that they must use to conquer darkness and restore their coven. Like Halloweentown, Twitches was made into a sequel after reigning as the most popular cable program the week of its release.
As impressive and iconic Monstober DCOMs have been for Disney Channel, J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World, or the “Harry Potter franchise,” is even more impressive as one of the highest grossing of all time with over $34.5 billion in gross revenue to date. Beginning as a series of novels that eventually became a series of movies, Harry Potter has found its way into the hands and hearts of countless readers and viewers over the past 25 years. The first novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the protagonist, Harry, is an orphan who learns on his eleventh birthday that he is a wizard. Extricated from his abusive home life, Harry receives help from half-giant Hagrid as he begins his new chapter at a school of magic, discovering the truth about the world around him, meeting his best friends, and conquering the evil he was destined to defeat.
At the intersection of the Harry Potter franchise and the Monstober DCOMs are three shared elements: they are catered to children, they are fantastical with supernatural features, and they are made to be terrifying at times – how else are we supposed to feel when the weight and fate of the world rests on our shoulders, let alone those of an elementary student? Given this niche subgenre, it would seem that this media should be simply seasonal, solely to be enjoyed in youth and the season of fall. But why, then, out of all of the ultra-popular children’s movies and entertainment franchises, are these some of the most iconic, celebrated, and re-watched among age groups that should’ve outgrown them?
The first component of the answer to this question lies in the precedent of prior literature. In She: A History of Adventure, narrator Horace Holly is tasked with raising and caring for his friend’s son, Leo Vincey, after an ominous visit directly preceding his friend’s death. During this visit, Holly is given a locked iron box that must not be opened until Leo’s twenty-fifth birthday. Once opened, Leo and Horace find the Sherd of Amenartas, which gives them instructions to travel to Africa where they eventually encounter the fearful female queen, Ayesha. A Victorian, lost world adventure novel, She and its ability to allow the reader to escape into a new world made it one of the best-selling novels of all time.
While She is just one example of a Victorian escapist novel, Victorian literature has had a substantial impact on contemporary conceptions of children’s fantasy and adventure stories. Emphasizing idealism and a moral purpose, Victorian literature makes a targeted moral statement while depicting events in a way that are unlikely to come to fruition in the real world. Whether it is a giant showing up on your doorstep to tell you that you are a wizard, or running into your identical twin witch sister while shopping, contemporary children’s media deploys idealism while granting characters magical powers to engage in the fight of good vs. evil.
Additionally, and arguably the most visible plot device in these works, the central characters all receiving life-changing and world-altering information on their birthday is spiritually significant. This idea stems from pagan spiritual thought that has existed for centuries. I will use the term “pagan” to refer generally to the polytheistic faith that worships the forces of nature. In pagan religions, birthdays began as a form of protection, meaning a spirit was present on the day of one’s birth and would guide and protect the individual throughout their life. It isn’t a coincidence that the characters all concurrently receive a mentor that facilitates their journey and navigates their understanding of a new world: Hagrid for Harry, Holly for Leo, Marnie’s grandmother, and the twins’ birthmother. Evidently, the prevalence of paganism is hard to ignore: Marnie, Harry, Alex and Camryn are all either wizards or witches, Alex and Camryn were named Apolla and Artemis after the Greek gods of the sun and the moon, and the Yule Ball in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is named after the pagan winter feast that later became affiliated with the celebration of Christmas.
The coalescence of Victorian literature, paganism, and the coming of age plot are what make these modern classics synchronously familiar and futuristic. The identities and adventures of the characters that were just like us less than 30 minutes ago allow our mind to wander amidst an adrenaline rush, and the protagonist facing their fears affords us the cathartic experience of facing our own without the actual action. It is this feeling of the past, and of spiritual or superior guidance and protection, that provides comfort, and it is the fantastical future that allows us to escape into a world of magic and exploration.
-Ava Zins
Works Cited
Film References:
Columbus, Chris, director. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Warner Bros. Pictures. 2001.
Dunham, Duwayne, director. Halloweentown. Disney Channel. 1998.
Gillard, Stuart, director. Twitches. Disney Channel. 2005
Text References:
Haggard, H. Rider. She: A History of Adventure. Oxford University Press. 2008.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Scholastic Paperbacks. 1998.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Scholastic Paperbacks. 2000.
Web Sources:
“Good Question: How Did Birthday Traditions Start?” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 25 Jan. 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/good-question-how-did-birthday-traditions-start/.
Guerra, Julia, and Fiona Clair. “21 Interesting Things You Probably Didn’t Know about ‘Halloweentown.’” Insider, Insider, 17 Oct. 2022, http://www.insider.com/halloweentown-fun-facts-2018-10#marnie-was-recast-in-return-to-halloweentown-and-many-fans-werent-happy-about-it-20.
Ladd, Henry. “How Much of a Profit the Harry Potter Movies Made at the Box Office.” ScreenRant, 28 June 2023, screenrant.com/harry-potter-movies-box-office-profit-explained/.
Sorren, Martha. “14 Things You Probably Didn’t Know about ‘Twitches.’” Insider, Insider, 14 Oct. 2022, http://www.insider.com/unique-things-you-probably-never-knew-about-twitches-fun-facts#the-twins-witch-names-are-meaningful-3.
Wiki, Contributors to Halloween Specials. “Monstober.” Halloween Specials Wiki, Fandom, Inc., halloweenspecials.fandom.com/wiki/Monstober#:~:text=Monstober%20(formerly%20Disney%20Channel’s%20Hauntober,Channel%20in%20October%20since%202005. Accessed 11 Oct. 2023.
Image Sources:
Monstober Image – https://halloweenspecials.fandom.com/wiki/Monstober?file=Monstober.png
Video Citations:
Halloweentown – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMGhlaDxV3o
Twitches – https://www.tiktok.com/@freeform/video/7285469760781946143
Harry Potter – https://youtu.be/z9GwIeh5FIY
(HONS) The Mist and Monsters Within
October 24, 2022 § 7 Comments
By Rishik Bethi
What if I told you the most important monsters in a fog covered world weren’t the mutant spiders or the 30-foot-tall octopus, but rather a prolonged feeling of hopelessness and an extremist mentality brought about your not-so-friendly neighborhood Christian woman. The Mist, published by Stephen King in 1980 and later adapted into a movie in 2007 by Frank Darabont, tells the story of a quiet town in Maine that, after a heavy storm, is flooded with monsters and a mist from another dimension.
Extremism
After the storm hits, our main character David Drayton is forced to go into town to buy supplies to fix his home. There, everyday grocery shoppers get trapped in by seemingly-supernatural monsters that start taking lives. As conditions worsen and no definite plan is made, fear pervades the grocery store, and the couple dozen members start turning to anyone for answers. The Christian religious radical, Mrs. Carmody, uses the fear built up to start give people the answers they’re looking for. The deaths, the monsters, and herself become part of her circular but passion justification for “God’s Will”. Even though she is labelled as a fanatic in the beginning and is met with a lot of resentment, as people start getting more desperate, she is able to build a larger following. She then is able to convince those in her now cult-like following sacrifice each other to please God. It starts with her leading a group to sacrifice a soldier to a mutant praying mantis and shifts to her targeting Drayton’s son Billy.
Her militant actions eventually end up getting her shot and killed, but her character serves to demonstrate a common and much larger issue in society. Fearmongering and manipulation aren’t just prevalent in certain religious groups, but also in politics as well. People’s initial reaction to any jarring event lends the opportunity for those with influence to use fear and, oftentimes, even bigotry to gain support. Mrs. Carmody is an obvious comparison to George W. Bush in his response to 9/11, where dictating foreign policy bled into society in the form of racism and xenophobia. Extremist viewpoints in America much like in The Mist led to the loss of life and continues to contribute to ongoing structural violence.
Even though the movie and book give references to the source of the monsters (lighting strikes a military experiment, opening an interdimensional gate), the details behind the monsters are left largely unexplained, and I think that’s intentional. Even though these monsters act as stressors in these characters lives, the real villains The Mist wants us to pay attention to are characters like Mrs. Carmody, who become just a problematic as and, at some points, worse than these mutant creatures. I mean, even the monsters themselves can be thought of as a unifying force – something to fight against. But ideologies intended to tear each other apart, to me, is far more frightening.
Hopelessness
After David had made an escape from the cult following in the store with his friends and his son, he quickly finds his wife dead at their home. Then after running out of gas, the party (aside from Billy) decided that dying from a bullet would be a far better alternative than the horrors the other monsters could enact on them. With almost no words, it was a collective moment of defeat. In this scene a quick death becomes a privilege. Because there aren’t enough bullets for everyone in the car, David bears the burden of surviving after killing his companions and only son. After surviving not just the mutant attacks, but the others in the grocery store as well, to end it all like this was devastating for David. But even worse, just moment after David had to kill his friends and his son, the military rides in, clearing the mist and driving in saved citizens.
The Mist more than anything else, is a movie and book about what can happen without hope. Without hope, people can easily miss out on opportunities and successes in the future. I don’t mean to sound like a cheesy cat poster but it seems as if The Mist makes commentary to tell us that even if life feels like a constant struggle with no end in sight, keeping hanging in there because the mist could rise at any moment.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Works Cited
Darabont, Frank, et al. The Mist, November 2007.
Evangelista, Chris. “One of the Scariest Scenes in the Mist Goes out with a Bang.” /Film, SlashFilm, 28 July 2022, https://www.slashfilm.com/927821/one-of-the-scariest-scenes-in-the-mist-goes-out-with-a-bang/.
King, Stephen. Skeleton Crew. Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2016.
Robots: Pickle Rick and Why Robots Aren’t *that* Scary
September 18, 2022 § 7 Comments
*disclaimer: I’m not trying to undersell the shock factor of being able to literally talk to a machine here. I am, however, trying to get everyone to save a little breath on the global robot takeover mass human extinction Titanomachy talk*
For those that don’t know, Rick and Morty is an adult sci-if animated show from [adult swim] that centers around the galactic adventures of grandfather and self-proclaimed smartest man in the universe, Rick, and his less impressive sidekick grandson, Morty. Since its release in 2013, Rick and Morty has completed 5 seasons (with its 6th currently underway), and it’s received enough critical and public acclaim for me to feel comfortable giving it the Peter stamp of approval.
In other words, great show.
And one of the most referenced, loved, hated, memed, and awarded (2018 Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program Winner) episodes of the show can be found early on the third season.
The infamous. The singular. The legendary.
“Pickle Rick.”
The premise of Pickle Rick is pretty simple: Rick turns himself into a pickle to get out of family therapy and then ends up in a sewer fighting for his life.
So, no, there are no robots in the episode.
Not directly, at least.
But I would argue that Pickle Rick (the character) is really not all that different from the massive supercomputers stuck in warehouses in the middle of Tennessee. Neither of them can move. Neither of them can hold anything. But they both contain effectively and comprehensively limitless intelligence when compared to the standards of the average human. Really the only functional differences are the supposed presence of a soul, the flavor profile, the size, and Rick’s eyes and teeth (which albeit he ends up using to control a bunch of cockroaches and rats to build a supersuit out of sinews and garbage). But the similarities are nonetheless reasonably striking when you subtract out a little bit of the absurdity.
Suppose for a second that we take away Pickle Rick’s sensory organs, acidic sense of humor, rat-biting mechanisms, and “humanity,” or whatever proxy we want to toss in there. Now, let’s add on some external microphones and a speaker.
Pickle Rick then very functionally becomes that random super duper A.I. computer in the middle of nowhere that can write essays in milliseconds. A vast, if complicated and difficult to understand, knowledge bank that would absolutely wipe the floor with me in standardized tests and trivia games, but quite honestly not much else.
I’m deus ex machina-ing the hell out of this argument, and I understand that.
I promise.
But what does this admittedly nerfed version of Pickle Rick tell us about robots not being scary? Well, great question.
The bottom line here is that this new Pickle Rick is not particularly scary, right? It’s literally a pickle. Morty even asks Rick about his new persona, searching for some sort of cool ability or some semblance of a reason for Rick to turn himself into a pickle. “Can you move? Can you fly?” he asks.
“Wouldn’t be much of a pickle if I could,” Rick replies with his stereotypical sarcasm.
(You can see the full scene here if you’re interested)
So, yes, our new Pickle Rick can (and maybe will) make you feel like a Morty, either through direct insults or just through sheer, dominating intellect.
But, most importantly, it can’t hurt you.
It can’t stab you (@Ava and Kyoko from Ex Machina). It can’t siege and seize your island (@all the robots from R.U.R.). And it certainly can’t use Sokovia as a functional meteor bomb to blow up the planet (@Ultron from The Avengers). Regardless of how smart is.
Now, using this new Pickle Rick as a direct substitute for the world’s most advanced supercomputers and A.I. devices, we can see these robots really shouldn’t be as scary as a lot of Hollywood wants them to be. All of this of course assuming we don’t make them to be.
Put bluntly, if we don’t create a robot that has the capabilities to hurt us/kill us/take over the planet, then it literally can not do any of those things.
My solution to the potential problem of a robot takeover is therefore pretty simple and seemingly pretty obvious:
Let’s just not make anything that could feasibly do it.
Let’s not force humanity on something that is naturally and inherently incapable of fully experiencing it. Let’s instead use our robots and A.I. to complement and enhance the human experience, not mimic or obliterate it.
I’m hoping to not get too lost in optimism, though. As we’ve heard from the words of Andrew Grove, “In Technology, whatever can be done will be done.” So the logical conclusion there is that if (better said when) we can make A.I.s capable of destroying the world, we will.
But doesn’t that just seem like a cheap and convenient excuse for some mad scientists to make some regrettable choices?
I think it does.
So let’s not do that. Let’s not ruin everything. Let’s just chill, broh.
Let’s make some Pickle Ricks.
-peter
Robots: The World How It Could B(MO)
September 5, 2022 § 7 Comments
As early as the theme song before each episode of “Adventure Time,” our teenage protagonist Finn isn’t just Finn, or even Finn Mertens. No, he’s “Finn the Human,” an awkward epithet that comes from one of his primary motives throughout the show: finding other humans and proving he’s not alone.
Though Finn eventually succeeds, the emphasis on this quest ignores another character who’s all too human: BMO, Finn and Jake’s robot companion. Two key episodes show us how the heroic little bot defines himself—and continually modifies that definition—as he “grows up,” suggesting that perhaps he’s more familiar with the concept of humanity than we might imagine. Let’s examine season five’s “Be More” and season seven’s “The More You Moe, the Moe You Know” to understand how BMO achieves his unique brand of humanity.
Being More
For those unfamiliar, BMO (an acronym we’ll learn later) is a small Gameboy-shaped robot and main cast member of the Cartoon Network series “Adventure Time,” which ran from 2010-2018, placing it at the tail end of the network’s so-called golden age. More than just Finn and Jake’s roommate and friend, BMO (voiced by Niki Yang) functions as a video game console, music and video player, camera, alarm clock, flashlight, and much more. As an independent “person” with his own consciousness, he also frequently accompanies the brothers on their adventures through the post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo, even dragging them along on a few of his own design. Jake describes him as “like a baby almost,” which is an accurate and concise label for the bot’s quirky innocence.
“Be More,” our first look at BMO’s origin story, sets the stage for some complex emotional growth. Through BMO’s eyes, we learn how Moe, an old man being kept alive artificially by his eponymous robot creations, built BMO a little different than the rest of the bots in the MO series (DMO, QMO, SMO, and so on). “I built BMO to understand fun and how to play,” Moe says. “I made BMO to be more.” Though the other MOs engage in “fun” activities like flying kites and jumping rope together, we already know BMO has more going on in that silly little heart of his. Not only does he have a secret alter ego of his own invention—who challenges him to know more about the world and himself—but he also has his own ambitions and lives his own life when Finn and Jake aren’t around.
Once we know Moe’s reason for creating BMO, “The More You Moe” sends BMO on a hero’s quest, daring him to prove that he is indeed more than just a companion bot. On said quest, it’s his internal monologues that reveal the most about his humanity, especially one set to an imaginative montage. A taller BMO, wearing adult clothes and going about adult tasks, asks, of no one in particular, “If I change, will Finn and Jake still love me? Will I still love them? Moe changed into a new body, and he’s still the same, I guess, sorta. But does growing up just change your body, or also your soul?”
“Imaginative” is the key word here, reminding us of BMO’s many solo adventures, especially those involving his alter ego or the friends he’s made independent of Finn and Jake. AllMO—a conglomerate of all other living MOs—helps BMO realize and come into that imaginative power. “I can only see the world as it is,” AllMO tells BMO. “But your imagination, BMO, lets you see the world how it could be.” Immediately following this exchange, BMO improvises to devise a way past one of the quest’s previously insurmountable roadblocks, proving AllMO’s words correct.
A Sense of Fulfillment
Plot specifics aside, the quest later forces BMO to kill his “brother” AMO to save his friends. In another imagination sequence, he splits into six hallucinatory versions of himself, each of which offers different bits of advice on how to define himself now that he’s “grown up.” One suggests that Moe’s death earlier in the episode means BMO can never learn anything new, and another advises against listening to his own heart, because AMO did so and “turned out bad.” In finality, however, BMO remembers what AllMO told him about his imagination, and concludes confidently that he’s achieved a sort of self-actualization, defining himself as himself for the first time in the series. “It’s not just Moe up here,” he says to his six spirit selves, “it’s me too. If I cannot trust in Moe, I can trust in me.” The episode ends.
It is this powerful acquisition of self-knowledge that sets BMO’s humanity apart. His ability to take himself on such an intellectual journey, ask the sorts of questions he does, and walk away feeling fulfilled, grown up, and a little bit traumatized—these are all signs that BMO, in Moe’s words, is actively being more every day of his life. It takes Jake nine seasons to do the same (see season nine’s “Abstract”), and Finn isn’t even fully there at the end of the show. But BMO has learned who he is, what he’s about, and what makes him human, completely outside of any of his programming directives. Whether it’s his own passion projects (“BMO Noire”), his feisty alter ego (“Football”), or his humorous attempts to seem more human by “eating” (aka pouring food on his face), nothing can stand in the way of his imagination.
Andrew (AJ) Kolondra Jr.
Too! Many! Bodies! Or, What the Nineteenth Century Has to Say About Marvel Movies
March 14, 2021 § 6 Comments
I was a late convert to the Marvel movie fandom.
Like most people growing up in the 2000s, I was a passive consumer of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) since its advent in 2008 with Iron Man. But other than its concurrence with my new-found freedom to attend the movies without parental supervision (I was thirteen when Iron Man came out), the rise of the MCU wasn’t really on my radar.
That all changed when I moved to Ireland after college. As long trans-Atlantic flights became a regular occurrence, I came to the MCU with renewed interest: big budget action movies are perfect for flights because they are loud enough to hear over the plane’s engine and through the free (mediocre) headphone set. Also, exciting and flashy visuals kept me from imagining the horrors of a plane crash.
I’m a sucker for vast, sprawling universes, so it didn’t take long for me to become fully invested in the intricacies of the MCU. And what intricacies there are!
The MCU is known for packing its movies full of big names, but the phrase “ensemble cast” seems unfit for the scale of the franchise’s 2018 release, Avengers: Infinity War. Behold, the poster:
This film brings together almost all of the surviving characters from the preceding films, and while the scope of the population of the MCU makes for larger-than-life battle sequences, some fans have suggested that this comes at the expense of certain characters’ development.
Though it only occurred to me recently, what seems more troublesome is that these overpopulated storylines require a nameless mass, a crushing crowd of people that becomes the human background upon which these elaborate stories are played out. Think, for example, of the way The Avengers (2012) centralizes New York City, whose teeming masses only serve as human fodder for destructive action sequences and a realization of the “stakes” of a given conflict.
The specter of faceless masses haunts Thomas Malthus’s 1798 warning that “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce the subsistence of man” (454). Worried that populations would soon outgrow the Earth’s capacity to support human life, Malthus came to the conclusion that the Poor Laws in England (which helped provide welfare to impoverished families) should end, and, consequently, that poor people should be left to fend for themselves…or starve. The Big Bad of the MCU, Thanos, echoes Malthusian population theory, but with a violent efficiency: his singular goal is to ease the strain on the universe’s resources by erasing one half of all life with the snap of his fingers.
There’s something contradictory about Thanos’s neo-Malthusian desire to eliminate half of all life. In the lead up to the climactic battle of Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther warns one of Thanos’s minions, Proxima Midnight, that if they try to breach his home country of Wakanda, they will “have nothing but dust and blood.” The antagonist chillingly replies, “We have blood to spare.” At this declaration, the huge spaceships behind her pour forth a seemingly endless supply of alien soldiers whose bodies are coded as beastly, as less-than-human. These bodies throw themselves at the force-field surrounding Wakanda, tearing themselves into pieces, only to be replaced by yet more bodies. As one protagonist whispers in horror: “They’re killing themselves.”
Proxima’s statement that she has “blood to spare” signals the fungibility of her non-human army – their lives are emptied of significance, their only purpose to repeatedly destroy themselves to prove their inexhaustible numbers. Here is one of the great contradictions in the MCU’s logic: Thanos operates as a neo-Malthusian bad guy, aiming to depopulate the universe, but he works towards this goal with the help of numberless alien bodies – bodies that presumably eat away at the universe’s resources.
So what happens when populations are perceived as both the cause of resource-depletion and consumable resources themselves? Messed up stuff, if you read it in the context of nineteenth-century colonial narratives.
In She, H. Rider Haggard’s wildly popular 1886 novel, three English men come across a “lost” African tribe led by a (nearly) immortal white sorceress. Population control is clearly an underlying concern for this community: as one indigenous man tells the narrator, “about every second generation” the men “rise and kill the old [women]” of the tribe (188). While he argues that this is an act of social control – to keep the women from getting too comfortable bossing the men around – there is an undercurrent of resource anxiety in this practice. The Amahaggers, the indigenous people, rely upon the resources left behind by the civilization that occupied the land before them. The vases, pots, and even clothes that they use are relics taken from the vast tombs of the ancient people of Kôr. The killing of older women can therefore be read not only as a method of misogynistic psychological control, but as sort of self-culling, a cutting down of excess bodies that drain the population’s limited resources.
Even as the bodies in She are seen as overconsuming, they themselves operate as resources available for consumption. The ancient civilization of Kôr left behind not only vases and cloth, but perfectly preserved corpses that are literally used as torches throughout the novel. As the narrator notes in a particularly grisly scene of body burning: “There were plenty of [human torches]. As soon as ever a mummy had burnt down to the ankles […] the feet were kicked away, and another one put in its place” (219). Just as the dead population of Kôr operates as an ever-available mass of consumable flesh, the living citizens of the land are seen by their white leader as dehumanized bodies available for use. As she claims, “These slaves are no people of mine, they are but dogs to do my bidding till the day of my deliverance comes” (156). Just as Thanos utilizes his overpopulated army of aliens without a thought for their individual identities, the white sorceress of Kôr burns through her people without mercy or sympathy.
When the MCU’s overpopulation is put into the context of the nineteenth century, the issues become clear. In a time of colonization, slavery, white supremacy, and the rampant exploitation of an impoverished workforce, the nineteenth century’s relationship with “teeming masses” was deeply and systemically unjust, mapping consumability onto those bodies that are nonwhite, non-English, and lower class.
The MCU’s extension of Victorian population theory doesn’t just apply to the treatment of antagonistic aliens. What does it mean that the battle scene in Infinity War is populated almost entirely by Black Wakandan warriors, whose nameless bodies are thrown into bloody conflict in the background while the audience’s attention is reserved for a handful of (mostly white) protagonists?
I love a big battle scene as much as the next person—they’re thrilling, expansive, distracting. And the MCU’s endless list of characters provides me with SO MUCH FUN STUFF to explain to my friends when they ask a simple question like: “Oh, how was that movie?” (They love my Marvel rants, right? Right.) But maybe, by tuning into the Victorian roots of the MCU’s treatment of overpopulation, we can begin to picture a more ethical way of depicting crowded narratives, a way out of seeing certain bodies as both exhausting resources and inexhaustible resources.
References:
Haggard, H. Rider. She: A History of Adventure. Edited by Patrick Brantlinger, Penguin, 2001.
Malthus, Thomas. “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology, edited by Laura Otis, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 453–56.
She Made Herself
February 3, 2020 § 1 Comment
In 8 AD, Pygmalion prays a statue to life to be his wife. In 1886, Ewald enlists a fictional Thomas Edison to create Hadaly, a romantic companion who would have the beauty of a human woman without the pesky spirit. In 2009’s (distressingly orientalist) The Windup Girl, main character Anderson finds a lover in the continually exploited Emiko, a genetically engineered woman programmed with a compulsion to obey and without control over her own sexual responses. Peppered between these are countless others – E.T.A. Hoffman’s automaton Olympia is pursued by Nathanael in 1816, Helen O’Loy becomes robot companion in 1937, and this is without branching out into film, though The Stepford Wives (1975) and Ex Machina (2014) would fit comfortably in this cannon.
Given this legacy, one would be forgiven for envisioning the literature of the artificial human as being primarily* a collection of tales – either cautionary or laudatory – of heterosexual male desire finding its ideal expression in vessels with consciousnesses either too new or too programmed to be anything but subservient. However, one genre of animated being fiction has, historically and contemporarily, bucked this trend: tales of the golem.
A being from Jewish folklore, a golem is a humanoid creature made of clay and given commands by the written word – akin to a robot programmed by binary code, except instead of “0”s and “1”s golem creators use the Hebrew alphabet as the base of their commands. Inarguably the most famous golem tale is that of the Golem of Prague, a creature created by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel in the 16th Century to protect its/his people from anti-Semitic violence. A dedicated protector for a while, the golem deviates from its purpose by either breaking the Sabbath or falling in love, depending on the tradition, and is eventually deactivated. What is interesting about the figure of the golem is that it is neither solely a vessel for the romantic as female automata, robots, and puppets have been, nor a duty-bound sexless creature as has been the fate of less humanoid constructions**.
Golem depictions are as complicated as the original in Prague, who managed to be both utterly programmed and ultimately disobedient. In Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), the golem serves as both an important the main character’s tie to heritage and the physical embodiment of the need to allow ties to the past to disintegrate. Zod, the golem in Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It is the object of female sexual desire, but exists in a society that devalues traditional, heterosexual family constructions.
Perhaps the most interesting construction of a golem comes from Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers (1997). If male creatures of other animated beings are giving life to a vessel for their romantic desires, the title character of Ozick’s novel creates a golem to give birth to herself. This purpose is initially mystified even the Puttermesser herself, who initially does not remember how or why she created the creature. She tries to name the golem after the daughter she imagined she’d have. The golem rejects that name in favor of Xanthippe, the only person who had the courage to gainsay Socrates and a figure with whom Puttermesser herself identifies. When asked why she was created, the golem replies that she came so that Puttermesser “could become what she was intended to become” (65). Xianthippe is both a dedicated servant, and a sexual being, her hunger for partners with greater and greater political power her eventual undoing.
A being both mechanical in that it is manmade, but natural in that its materials are of the earth, it makes sense that the golem presents an opportunity for figures that trouble the binary between creations that are either only sexual objects or totally nonsexualized appliances. The novels above each mention the Golem of Prague directly in text, but their golems also exist in a way that marks them as successors to a branch of animated being stories that provide much needed texture to the animated being cannon.
*Though not entirely, as we do have Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) among a few others.
** From this I exempt Paladin, a creation in Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017) a tankish military bot who is both a sexual being, and far from humanoid.
Technology, Culture, and the Perception of Horror
September 8, 2019 § 5 Comments
Horror is an incredibly subjective genre. Your perception of horror is greatly influenced by your own life and experiences. While watching a horror film, one viewer may have their hands over their eyes and scream while the girl runs up the stairs with a murderer in the house, while another may just laugh at her stupidity. Cultural standards and technology also influence our perception of horror, especially when looking at media from other eras. When released in 1818, Frankenstein shocked audiences with the grotesque description of the monster, and placed in many a fear of the possible overreachings of science. Today, although we may experience some trepidation, modern media has largely desensitized us from regarding Frankenstein’s monster as exceptionally scary.
This weekend, I went to see IT Chapter 2 (2019), and it made me think about how we perceive horror, and how our technology and culture influences it. One of the reasons I think that Stephen King’s It is such a great horror novel is that it covers such a wide range of horror subgenres. It contains monsters, gore, deranged killers, fear-targeted psychological horror, and so much more; anyone that reads it should be able to find at least one scene that sends shivers up their spine. Because it is written as a novel, the only limit on how terrifying it could be was King’s imagination. The film adaptations, the 1990 miniseries and the two part 2017 and 2019 movies, however, as films are limited by what can be practically shown on screen, as well as by the technology of the time the film was created.
Because we have become accustomed to a certain quality of special effects, many of the scenes in the 1990 miniseries that were supposed to be incredibly terrifying just seem comical. Instead, much of the horror in the film relies on Tim Curry’s portrayal of Pennywise the clown as he preys on the children. His combination of dark humor and wild antics as he targets the kids’ deepest fears creates a dark image that has left many with a lifelong fear of clowns. In the boat scene, Pennywise’s ability to lure in Georgie despite his better instincts, and the iconic delivery of the line “You’ll float too!”, plays on every parent’s fear: the elusive stranger, coming to snatch their child away.
The 2017 adaptation takes a drastically different approach to Pennywise, and relies on CGI to characterize the clown. Although Bill Skarsgard gives an incredible performance, some of the scariest moments of Pennywise are, in my opinion, when he behaves most unnaturally with the help of special effects. The scene where his body untwists as he comes out of the fridge,
or the image of rows of razor sharp teeth protruding from his mouth are both particularly terrifying.
It is unfair to directly compare the two performances of Pennywise due to the vast technological differences between the 90s and today, as well as the different cultural hurdles each had to make. Because the killer clown trope has become so iconic in horror, the 2017 film needed to step up the terror in order to stand out. We have become mostly desentized to performances like Curry’s because we expect clowns in horror films to be evil. However, in 1990, the genre was not so saturated with killer clowns, so Curry’s Pennywise was plenty terrifying.
While CGI greatly increases the quality and intensity of the effects, leaning too heavily on effects can cost the film a more widespread appeal. For me personally, CGI monsters are not super scary. The type of horror that keeps me up at night is realistic: the kinds of things that I believe could actually happen. In the 1990 and 2017 films, the scenes with the group of bullies terrorizing the kids and Beverly’s abusive father brought in a realistic element that intensified the terror for me.
The newly released 2019 film leans most heavily on the use of CGI and jump scares to provide the horror, instead of developing tension through more mundane means. While watching the film in theaters this weekend, I found myself growing bored as monster after monster appeared on the screen with few other elements. There was little diversity in the types of terror, and the sequence of suspense building before a monster jumped out and chased someone became very predictable. However, my friend said that she enjoyed the movie and was thoroughly terrified, so my discontent could be around the film not suiting my own preferences, giving more evidence to the subjectivity of the genre.
~Kayla Lee
Image citations:
https://www.altoastral.com.br/11-filmes-series-baseados-livros-stephen-king/
https://horygory.tumblr.com/post/170234367847/hg-107-it-2017
More than just a tree: Avatar and Heidegger’s “Standing Reserve”
April 8, 2019 § Leave a comment
Derisively labeled by the Huffington Post as “’Pocahontas’ in Space.”[1] James Cameron’s Avatar is by no means an original work. It can’t even be counted as a well-known eco-warrior film (An Inconvenient Truth ). Moreover, it is not the only example of media that tries to espouse the viewer to think critically about our own relationship with nature and the world around us.
What Avatar does manage do, however, is to introduce to a mass audience a romantic form of thinking about nature. In a more nuanced manner than, say, Dr. Seuss’s Lorax, the viewer is presented with the framework that has a justification for it (at least on Pandora).
What exactly is this romantic form of thinking about nature? First, it is not just ecological conservation. One can be an ardent environmental conservationist yet still reject this philosophy (more on why later). Instead, this thinking is probably best understood by what it isn’t: modernity. As Jonah Goldberg sums up in his book Suicide of the West, for tribes “a tree was many things – a source of fuel … shelter and tools, plaything for children… and a manifestation of some divine purpose or entity. Separating the practical ways of seeing a tree from the transcendent ones is a modern invention.”[2]
In premodern days, human societies “layered meaning atop meaning, horizontally, like one sheet of tinted film on top another.” Now, however, the immediate frame of mind is to compartmentalize these meanings, rather than managing the abstract and incomprehensible.
One particularly testy exchange in Avatar illustrates this perfectly. Dr. Grace Augustine tries to explain to Colony Administrator Parker Selfridge the damage he had caused by bulldozing a sacred Na’vi site. Parker begins by dismissing her concerns, arguing that “you throw a stick in the air here, and it’s gonna land on some sacred fern.” Dr. Augustine’s response is the following:
“I’m not talking about some pagan voodoo here. I’m talking about something real… something measurable, in the biology of the forest … electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. …it’s a network, it’s a global network and the Na’Vi can access it… upload and download data, memories.”
Dr. Augustine is trying to say that man should not view trees as single objects, but rather emblematic of larger entities. In the lingo of modern science and technology (“upload and download data”), Augustine attempts to translate to Parker (and indirectly the moviegoer) how the forest could have been truly sacred and transcendental.
Of course, Parker simply fails to understand, much less acknowledge, this viewpoint. “What the hell have you people been smoking out there? They’re just goddamn trees!” He responds. Their final dialogue is an argument about which one of them “need[s] to wake up.” As this exchange makes clear, the modern and romantic are two, completely incompatible ways of viewing reality. If you choose one reality, the other must be a hallucinated dream. Scully’s dual life as a Na’Vi and a human is a parable of this fact.
As an utilitarian, I completely disagree with the fundamentals of romantic philosophy. Nonetheless, I do believe engagement with this frame is important. Therefore, I want to present the history of Avatar’s Na’vi philosophy, which in our world has been echoed by poets and philosophers for centuries.
One of the most famous examples of such thinking emerges in late 17th century with Jean de la Fontaine’s work La Foret et Le Bucheron. Fontaine points out the irony of a woodman using the wood of the tree as an axe handle, while proceeding to chop down the very tree with the same axe:
“Twas thus the Woodman spoke.
The innocent Forest gave the bough.
The Woodman hacked both oak and fir!“[3]
The trees are presented as helpless, giving the woodman the weapon for it’s own demise. Man’s exploitative nature ravages the earth with no concern for the tree.
In the “modern” era, this frame of mind found its best advocate in German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Heidegger believed there was a “difference between older forms of technology (the windmill, for example, which draws its energy from the wind but does not extract and store that energy) and modern technology which exploits and exhausts–in Heidegger’s terms, “challenges”–our planet’s resources.”
In Heidegger’s view, modern industrial societies had begun to view nature as a “standing reserve.” In short, this terminology is the idea that nothing in the world, even nature, is “good” in and of itself, but only “good for” something. Even for the environmentally conscious to call themselves “conservationists” suggests such groups are not there to challenge the system, but rather to help it more effectively exploit and try to satisfy an ultimately insatiable appetite. The impact is that there will come a day when “humanity itself [turns] into [a] standing-reserve.”[4]
(Landesarchiv Baden-Württenberg )
This impact is shown in the post-apocalyptical Earth of Avatar. At the beginning of the movie, Jake Sully, a disabled former marine, is treated with disdain. Having completed his military service, he no longer has any value to society. However, because of his genetic material being the same as his twin brother, Tom, he is approached to be part of the Avatar project. Because Tom represented “a major investment” by the company, Jake by extension now has value.
But it is more than just Jake who is commoditized. In an almost slapstick manner, Colony Administrator Parker Selfridge complains he is at the mercy of the company’s investors for turning out excellent quarterly results. Colonel Miles Quaritch is loyal to his military code, but is nonetheless fatally flawed as he does not see himself as just a commodity providing “private security.”
Heidegger does leave a way out. While the vehicle of modern technological machinery puts humanity in danger, humanity nonetheless can get out of the driver’s seat by a new orientation towards technology. This does not mean, according to Heidegger, of disposing Science. Reality of course exists: trees exist, the earth exists. But he believes we can approach it with frame of mind that harkens to a deeper truth, much like what Dr. Augustine does in Avatar.
Unfortunately, as well as I understand this philosophy, I still cannot accept it as truth. Heidegger’s recommendation is merely that we “rethink.” He does not conclude with any recommendations of action. But rethinking isn’t going to do anything for anyone’s next meal.
Indeed, while Avatar may seem to conclude with the hero’s success, it is clear such a victory is pyrrhic and one-sided. What about the millions of people on Earth who are starving due to the Unobtanium energy crisis? These are women and children who must reckon with a bleak economic future thanks to the events on Pandora. The loose end by corollary suggests Sully’s victory was temporary: as Unobtanium prices continue to rise on Earth, a crushing “second-wave” military expedition to Pandora is unavoidable. Ultimately, the ground truth is that the only thing the hungry masses care about is their next meal. To say anything more, as Parker hints at in his bewildered response to Dr. Augustine’s explanations, one will have to light up some really dank stuff.
— Wenhao Du
[1] “‘Avatar’ = ‘Pocahontas’ In Space,” Huffington Post, March 18, 2010.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/avatar-pocahontas-in-spac_n_410538
[2] Jonah Goldberg, Suicide of the West.
[3] Fontaine, Jean. “Forêt et Le Bucheron.” 2015.
From Jean Fontaine, The Fables of La Fontaine, 776. London; New York: Project Gutenberg.
[4] http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/heidegger/guide5.html
Science Fiction: Disrupting the Art World?
March 20, 2019 § 4 Comments
Some previous posts on the blog have discussed how culture – art and fashion – are represented in science fiction.
But is science fiction ever represented in art?
I have two words for you: Meow Wolf.
Meow Wolf is an immersive, interactive art experience based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The inaugural exhibition, The House of Eternal Return, opened in 2016. Involving more than 100 local artists, The House of Eternal Returnis at once a mystery, a scavenger hunt, a playground, and most of all, visually magnificent. Walk into the normal-looking, life size Victorian house, and you will soon realize that things really are not normal at all. The secret passageway in the refrigerator proves that.
(There are many more secret passageways waiting to be discovered – I won’t spoil any more, in case you want to visit)
Beyond being a psychedelic, fantastical, out-of-this-world arena to be explored, there is a story behind the madness. Based on clues left behind throughout the house and exhibit, the home belonged to the Selig family of Mendocino, California, who mysteriously disappeared. Portals ripping through the space-time continuum appeared in the house, and a mysterious, intergalactic agency called the Charter is somehow involved. (Are they good guys? Bad guys? Somewhere in between? I’m not sure.) Just to explore The House of Eternal Returnis wondrous enough, but if you want to get invested in solving the mystery, clues are everywhere – from notes left strewn on desks of the house, to mysterious family pictures, to the youngest son’s bionic hamster that appears elsewhere in the exhibition.
Though the overarching “story” of The House of Eternal Returnis clearly influenced by science fiction, the immersive art experiences housed within are influenced by a range of themes, from fantasy, to pop art, to things too weird to categorize. But, just as literary science fiction was once thought of as a “junk” genre, Meow Wolf represents a watershed moment in the art world. To expand on this, I’ll tell a little about the story of Meow Wolf.
It all starts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Santa Fe, a town of 70,000 and the state capitol, is steeped in more than 400 years of history and a major tourist destination. It is also the third largest art market in the country. Meow Wolf, as an art collective, was founded in 2008 by a group of young artists who felt that the Santa Fe gallery art world was closed-off and snobby. Initially anarchical and radically inclusive, and headquartered in a run-down warehouse they rented for $1,000 a month, Meow Wolf eventually got more attention in the Santa Fe art scene and around New Mexico. As the collective grew more structured, their ideas became bigger, and with some venture funding from Game of Thronesauthor and Santa Fe resident George R. R. Martin, they purchased a vacant bowling alley, renovated it, and created the inaugural 20,000 square foot exhibit.
Meow Wolf was an instant critical and commercial success. The collective, which at its beginning had united over feeling orphaned by the tony Santa Fe art world, turned a profit of nearly $7 million in the first year of the exhibition. In just over two years, one million people visited The House of Eternal Return. Currently, plans are underway for a 400-room hotel in Phoenix, an art and entertainment complex in Las Vegas, an amusement park ride and massive complex in Denver, and a multi-story installation in Washington, DC – all created working with local artists. Co-founder and CEO Vince Kadlubeck has no qualms about his vision for Meow Wolf. He wants to see it become a billion dollar company. (I want to note: Meow Wolf is a certified B-corporation, a designation that denoted a corporation’s commitment to social and environmental well-being, as well as its shareholders.)
Meow Wolf has certainly departed from its anarchic roots, and their growth (and success) has not come without controversy. They have certainly shaken up the art world, not just in Santa Fe but across the country. Perhaps this could have only happened in New Mexico, where cultural traditions thousands of years old mingle with scientists working on top-secret government projects, where art aficionados encounter UFO truthers. So if you find yourself in Santa Fe (or Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, or DC) in the next few years, go and check Meow Wolf out. You won’t be disappointed.
(If you’re flying on Southwest Airlines this month, you may notice that there is an article on Meow Wolf in the in flight magazine. I wrote this BEFORE I saw that – I promise!)
I also would have loved to include photographs I took of the exhibition, but I think that may be violating their policies of allowing photography only for personal use. But it’s not hard to find snapshots. I’ll help you out and search Google Images for you.
-Max B.
Science/Fiction 
