This and that

[selenak]

There are still some free slots in my January meme, so if you want me to ramble on about the topic of your choice, ask me there.

I watched Glass Onion on Netflix which is indeed that rarity, a sequel of equal quality. All the actors are clearly having a blast, and yet it doesn't feel self indulgent, not least because in addition to Rian Johnson's (gleeful) anger at the super rich, there is, as in Knives Out, also a character to root for. (In addition to Blanc, that is, and in a way emotionally affecting that Blanc, in the detective role, can't be.) Here is an interesting interview with Johnson about this - spoilerly for Knives Out, but not Glass Onion -, though my favourite passage is this (which refers to a bit of dialogue that comes after Birdie, the Kate Hudson character, has prided herself on being a telling-it-like-it-is type:

Sims: The best line in the movie is Benoit saying to Kate Hudson’s character [a fashion designer named Birdie], “It’s a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth,” and her replying, “Are you calling me dangerous?” You’re illustrating the voice that certain people present to society.

Johnson: The whole movie, for me, is a bit of a primal scream against the carnival-like idiocy of the past six years.

I hear you, Rian.

I also read The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope which was one of cahn's Christmas presents, and found it charming and engaging. The fairies manage to be genuinely other, which is always a plus in my book, and Kate was an excellent heroine. The relationship between her and her main antagonist eventually develops in the best kind of worthy opponent respect against the odds. If anything feels dated, it's the framing of late in Mary Tudor's reign, where (off page) Mary is just a meanie; one has the impression less for her religious policies and more because she supposedly makes sister Elizabeth live at Hatfield because it's the most unpleasant and coldest of Royal palaces. (Never mind the fact Elizabeth as a baby and toddler was put there already by her parents when her mother was still alive and Queen and that Mary was part of her household then.) After more recent takes on Mary I. which were far more interesting and more dimensional - for example, The Tudors had its myriad of faults, but its take on young Mary was one of its undisputed highlights, and Becoming Elizabeth has a very compelling, smart and heroic Mary while also showing the seeds of what's to come - it feels weird to go back to Cinderella!Elizabeth and Evil Stepsister!Mary. But this really is just early in the book to get the plot going, as our heroine Kate is banished by (mean) Mary to the titular location, and so it doesn't impact on the overall quality of the novel. (One last Tudor nitpick: when Kate finds out about pagan human sacrifice by burning, she reacts as one would, but I kept waiting for someone to bring up that if this is late in Mary I's reign, and Kate was a member of Elizabeth's household (thus presumably Protestant), Kate actually should firstly be aware of some present day Christian-on-Christian burnings, and secondly, if she remembers her childhood, be aware that there were also burnings ordered by Protestant Edward and Doing-His-Own-Thing Henry VIIII. (Meaning: executing another human being by fire should not be news to anyone living in the reign of a Tudor. Doesn't mean Kate can't be shocked. But not in the 20th century kind of way.)

Lastly, I'm continuing wiht the History of Byzantium podcast and am now around ca. 925 AD. Talk about violent regime changes. (Not just on the Byzantine side. The Abbasid Kaliphate is falling apart simultanously.) Iconoclasm is over and done with, and now I'm curious what the next big theological dispute will be - the great schism, I suppose?

Comments

[nostalgia]

I got to the word "burning" and thought "oh like Bloody Mary?" and then oh they don't mention that?

[selenak]

Not that I recall. (Though maybe I overlooked a reference.) Like I said, when the heroine hears about wicker man like human sacrifices and is understandably shocked, my mind still went…. „yeah, but Archbishop Cramner and all those other people recently?“

Maybe I‘m just too influenced by a novel in which the Aztec narrator after a Spaniard goes „human sacrifices WTF?“ at him says, what‘s this I heard about burning heretics?

(I mean, obviously both are wrong, and I don‘t bedgrudge Kate being shocked at the thought of burning people. But if you do set your novel in that era…)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, without having read the book in question, for me it would come down to: is she horrified by the thought of a person being burned alive, or at the thought of pagan sacrifices? Because the ability of the human mind to compartmentalize is really quite extraordinary; see also 19th/early 20th century British ministers writing indignantly about Fritz's invasions. :P

The bit where Macaulay, who used to be stationed in India, blames Fritz for the fact that "black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America," because British colonialism is just that totally natural to him, never ceases to amaze.

[cahn]

So -- I went back to find the passage in question.

"Did they say how they were going to [pay the teind/sacrifice you] -- on All Hallows' Eve?"

[...]

"When I was a boy at home in Norfolk," said Christopher, "we young folk always lit a great fire in the fields on All Hallows' Eve, and then threw in a figure of a man made of the last harvest's straw... We called it 'burning the payer.' None of us thought that in the old days the man might not have been made out of straw."

There was another long pause, and then Kate said, with her voice sticking in her throat: "Not -- not -- made out of --"

"As for the burning: well, it seems to have been the customary manner of offering a sacrifice to the gods among the heathen British that the Romans found here when they first came to England. I remember reading about it in school. It's in Caesar somewhere."

"But that --" said Kate numbly, "that was almost sixteen hundred years ago."

So, well, both. The focus is on the pagan sacrifice of it all. And what Kate herself is principally shocked by is that this will be the method for disposing of Christopher, this person that she knows (and may be in the process of falling in love with), and she might well have reacted that way to any death method Christopher had told her about. But then of course you could reasonably think that Christopher's response might be along the lines of "well, the burning part of it does happen quite a bit now as well as sixteen hundred years ago..." (although at this point he too is probably a bit fixated on "welp, this is the thing that's going to happen to me!") And certainly there is an undercurrent here of burning alive being a terrible thing that doesn't happen every day!

On the other hand I'm going to give this a big out because I believe this was published as a kid's book, and I know it was published in 1974. (It won the Newbery Honor, which, selenak, is part of the big children's award in the US for the best children's book of the year -- it's the second place to the Newbery Award, which you may have heard of?) I can see why, given that, even if it occurred to Pope that there were a lot of other people getting burned, she might well have figured that she didn't really want to get into that.

(Same for the pregnancy aspect of Tam Lin -- to be fair, the whole book is about how the origins of stories and ballads can be very different from what the stories and ballads say, but I'm used to the pregnancy being kind of a big deal in most versions and retellings! But that would not have worked so well for a kid's book published in 1974...)

[selenak]

On the other hand I'm going to give this a big out because I believe this was published as a kid's book

Point taken; there's only so much exposition you can put in a book for children, especially since the explanation for the current burnings would have demanded some more backstory about the Reformation in general and Henry VIII's divorce shenanigans etc.; given the focus of the novel was completely elsewhere, I suspect any editor would have said, yeah, no, skip it.

[nostalgia]

Cranmer should have been allowed a wicker man too :(

[rose_griffes]

Johnson's skewering of the rich felt a bit... hm, limited in scope* in Knives Out. Interesting that he went back to that theme for Glass Onion. (I won't be back to Netflix until March, so we'll see if I remain unspoiled for key elements until then.)

*I'm not sure if that's the best description of my impression of that element in KO. The movie worked very well for me on a first viewing, but I found it tedious while trying to watch it a second time, so my opinion is based on one and a half viewings, one positive and the half negative.

[elisi]

Johnson: The whole movie, for me, is a bit of a primal scream against the carnival-like idiocy of the past six years.
I presume you saw Ben Shapiro's response to Glass Onion? *g*

[selenak]

I did now! But only after reading your comment and googling.

[likeadeuce]

I enjoyed it a lot, and ended up rewatching Knives Out, too, while I was at home with my parents.

I also watched The Last of Sheila the 1973 Stephen Sondheim/Anthony Perkins/Herbert Ross collaboration that Johnson cited as an inspiration for Glass Onion, in particular. If you haven't seen it, it's worth tracking down -- it doesn't have nearly the humor or the heart of the Johnson films but it's very clever + with a great cast.

[selenak]

Thank you for the tip, I'll look out for the film now - maybe one of our broadcasters like ARTE and/or Amazon Prime Germany has it.

[cahn]

:D

I know very little about Mary Tudor (and what I do know has probably been influenced by this book, honestly). But I've always loved its portrayal of young Elizabeth (my mental picture of which has also probably been influenced by this book). But anyway, I suppose one can't assign to this book all my love of over-the-top all-but-adversarial banter to signify a close/other-self relationship, nor my love of bowing/kneeling/curtseying to signify things that can't be said in words, but it certainly was, shall we say, formative :D And the fairies here are other enough that I cannot read any current fairy YA these days, all of which seem to have fairies who act mostly like immature adolescents.

[selenak]

And the fairies here are other enough that I cannot read any current fairy YA these days, all of which seem to have fairies who act mostly like immature adolescents.

That's very true, and a reason why I was awed by these fairies! Also, the book's take on young Elizabeth is absolutely plausible and good. Re: Mary, though, while certainly near the end of her life her relationship with Elizabeth was terrible, for most of their lives it was more complicated than that (and even then, note that dying Mary still made Elizabeth, not one of the remaining Grey sisters or for that matter Catholic (!) Cousin Mary Queen of Scots her successor). And Mary always struck me as a truly tragic character. Right up to her coronation, she fulfills all the fairy tale tropes: after an early childhood with loving parents, her life goes to hell as her mother gets bullied and abused non stop by her father and she herself gets bullied and abused to side with her father against her mother and proclaim her own illegitimacy. From Mary's pov, Anne Boleyn even is the ideal cast for the evil stepmother, as Anne does behave badly towards Mary - as Anne herself acknowledged; one of the things she did before her death was to ask one of the ladies attending her to go to Mary and tell her Anne was sorry -, insisting Mary was to serve her own daughter in her daughter's household. Mary doesn't even get to be with her beloved mother when Catherine dies. And then Anne is executed and there's worse to come, because until this point, Mary could reconcile the beloved father of her early childhood with the one being cruel to her by blaming it all on Anne. But now Anne is dead, Henry is on to his next wife, and STILL wants her to acknowledge him as head of the church and declare herself illegitimate. (In)famously, one of the nobleman Henry sends to his oldest daughter to make that clear tells Mary that if she was his daughter, he'd smash her head to the wall "like a boiled apple" for her disobedience. (In fiction, this man is invariably the Duke of Norfolk, since he was one of the men and was just the kind of jerk to say something like this, but in truth we don't know which one said it. Just that it was said, courtesy of Thomas Cromwell receiving a report of it.) This is when Mary caves, which she'll never forgive herself for, and acknowledges her father's supremacy.
Once Henry is dead, both of the Protectors reigning for young Edward VI are very Protestant, and Edward as he becomes an opinionated Tudor teenager turns into an ultra Protestant, so it's more harrasment from a royal relative for Mary. And then Edward dies, and after the nine days Jane Grey interlude, Mary becomes Queen to a universal wave of popular acclaim. She's the daughter of the beloved Katherine, the true Queen, she's the true heir, persecuted for years but still there, she's the people's princess finally becoming Queen! And then, alas... it turns out that of course the faith Mary has clung to through all these years as one of the few things to cling to as everything else was taken away is no longer the majority faith of the country, and her attempt to turn it all back to how it was when she was a child so that she saves her subject's souls and redeems her own moment of weakness (as she sees it) can't be done without using more and more violence. The marriage she makes to one of her Habsburg relatives, those relatives she saw as her defenders all through those miserable years, is spectacularly unpopular among the English, contributes to alienating her from them, and while cousin Philip is perfectly polite to her, he doesn't love her while she falls in love with him. Does he develop a thing for her younger sister? We'll never know for sure. If so, it's an additional wound, but I think worse is that she can't give birth to a child. (Since Philip already has Carlos, it's clear it can't be his fault.) When she dies, she knows that her attempt to make England Catholic again has failed, as Elizabeth sure as hell won't continue in this vein, her marriage has failed, and the people have gone from loving and supporting her to hating her.

As I said, it's an incredibly sad and tragic life, and the tragedy wasn't lost on Elizabeth who told the Venetian ambassador once she'll never name her successor since people always favor the rising sun over the setting sun and she won't forget how they deserted her sister in droves. (Not to mention that the Mary/Philip marriage illustrated the drawbacks of marrying a foreign prince just as Mary Queen of Scots' second and third marriages illustrated why marrying a local noble isn't much better.) Now Mary wasn't literally alone when she died - she had some very loyal ladies-in-waitings with her, one of whom, Jane Dormer, married a Spaniard, left England and thus contributed with her own writings to a positive image of Mary that's very different from Bloody Mary as written about in the English tradition. Now, none of this makes the people burned during Mary's reign less burned. But it's very easy to imagine Mary, if just a few things in her life had turned out differently, or she had lived in a previous century, becoming a beloved Queen instead of a reviled one. In any event, her father's treatment of her easily rivals FW's of Fritz. And there's no evidence she was hostile towards Elizabeth up to and including the start of her own reign, though undoubtedly there were all kind of repressed things lurking in her subconscious, but the fact Elizabeth was illegitimized and ostracized by Henry as well and that Mary by all accounts loved children (the age gap between her and Elizabeth was big enough that Elizabeth could have been her daughter if Mary had given birth at 16 or so) makes it plausible that for as long as Elizabeth was a child and young teen, they got along. Mary even invited Elizabeth to live with her after Henry's death, and if Elizabeth had done that, the Thomas Seymour desaster could have been avoided, but of course from young Elizabeth's pov, living with Catherine Parr instead was a no brainer.

In conclusion: have a vid that sums it up as well.

ETA: And here is another vid about the Mary & Elizabeth relationship in its complexity, this one based on a different series, Becoming Elizabeth.

[cahn]

Ahhhhh this is great, thank you!

or for that matter Catholic (!) Cousin Mary Queen of Scots her successor

Ohh, right! I do remember from Game of Queens that Mary Queen of Scots was sort of a walking disaster, but to have even that trump the Catholicism...

(In)famously, one of the nobleman Henry sends to his oldest daughter to make that clear tells Mary that if she was his daughter, he'd smash her head to the wall "like a boiled apple" for her disobedience. (In fiction, this man is invariably the Duke of Norfolk, since he was one of the men and was just the kind of jerk to say something like this, but in truth we don't know which one said it. Just that it was said, courtesy of Thomas Cromwell receiving a report of it.) This is when Mary caves, which she'll never forgive herself for, and acknowledges her father's supremacy.

Oh nooooo :( (And, he's her dad :( )

and her attempt to turn it all back to how it was when she was a child so that she saves her subject's souls and redeems her own moment of weakness (as she sees it) can't be done without using more and more violence.

Ah, right -- I knew some of this but not about that "moment of weakness," which just makes everything worse :(

When she dies, she knows that her attempt to make England Catholic again has failed, as Elizabeth sure as hell won't continue in this vein, her marriage has failed, and the people have gone from loving and supporting her to hating her.

Oh no! :(

But it's very easy to imagine Mary, if just a few things in her life had turned out differently, or she had lived in a previous century, becoming a beloved Queen instead of a reviled one.

What are the few things you have in mind?

And thanks for the vids - the one about the Mary & Elizabeth relationship was especially moving.

[selenak]

I do remember from Game of Queens that Mary Queen of Scots was sort of a walking disaster, but to have even that trump the Catholicism...

That, and young Mary Stuart was about to become Queen of France at this point. Against which Mary Tudor, loyally supporting Philip in the last of the Habsburg vs Valois wars, had just sent troops, and had lost Calais to.

Oh nooooo :( (And, he's her dad :( )

Yes, that's the most awful thing. I can understand why this was Mary's breaking point - through all the years of separation from her mother, losing her mother and the non stop bullying, she told herself that her father still loved her, it was just the evil influence of his mistress which caused this, or maybe he didn't even know. But now that excuse was gone and she had to see it had been her father all this time.

BTW, I left something out: Mary's governess while she was still regarded as a princess, before she was declared illegtimate, was Margaret Pole, the last of the Plantagenets (daughter of George of Clarence, niece to Richard III and Edward IV). Margaret and Mary loved each other; when Mary's household was dissolved, Margaret offered to serve her at her own expense, but Henry VIII. wouldn't let her. Because we're talking Tudor, Margaret ended up on the block some years later. She had one of the most gruesome executions of the era (supposedly up to 11 blows with the axe were necessary). To quote the Imperial ambassador, Chapuys, who was one of Mary's and Katherine of Aragon's few friends throughout his time in England, described it thus: At first, when the sentence of death was made known to her, she found the thing very strange, not knowing of what crime she was accused, nor how she had been sentenced" and that, because the main executioner had been sent north to deal with rebels, the execution was performed by "a wretched and blundering youth who literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner".

See, this is why I feel entitled to compare Mary's childhood and youth and the long term impact all of this had on her to that of Fritz, and FW with Henry.

What are the few things you have in mind?

Well, for starters, if Catherine of Aragorn's son who lived only for a few days or weeks (I forgot which) would have survived. This doesn't mean no reformation in England by necessity, but not one sponsored by the state (as Henry VIII's instincts were pretty conservative), and it means Mary doesn't become Queen of England. She does get married to a suitor of equal or superior rank when young. I think she would have been a very good Queen Consort the same way her mother was, able to be regent and lead a campaign if she had to (as Catherine did against the Scots), yet otherwise happy organizing court life, promoting charities, humanist writers, that kind of thing. We can't know whether or not she would have had children, of course, as she was in her late thirties when marrying Philip in rl, and not in the best of health.

Or: Henry VIII dies before the "Great Matter" is settled. Mary becomes Queen. There are already not-yet-called-that-Protestants in the country, of course, but she's far younger, her mother is still alive, and since no one has been declaring themselves head of the church, compromises between reformers and traditionalists are far less incendiary and possible.

Or: Mary gets married to one of the men she was engaged to for a while, or who were discussed as possible suitors. These included Charles V., who became engaged to her when he weas a teen and she was a child, and later married his other cousin Isabella of Portugal instead. Now, just because Charles was happy with and was a good husband to Isabella (except for the part where he was absent a lot, because gigantic Empire, leaving her as regent in Spain) doesn't mean he'd also been a good husband to Mary, of course. But it's worth considering he did not have a mistress while married, - he had some before and some after his marriage, but not during -, and if Mary had married him, she would have almost certainly ended up ruling over a part of the HRE and/or Spain because Charles used all his female relations and his wife as regents. As long as said part would not have been the Netherlands, I think she'd have been good at it - without the pressure of being the first Queen Regnant and the pressure to marry (she's already married, and she's regent, not Queen Regnant), she would have been respected, and while undoubtedly there would have been political problems as they were everywhere in the Renaissance, they would not have felt as personal to her as the Reformation in England did, and therefore she would have been able to judge with a cooler head.

[cahn]

Yeah :( and plus which there's all that filial piety stuff that we see with e.g. Wilhelmine that has got to be rearing its head here too -- I mean, she owes it to her mom, too, of course, but also to her dad :( It seems awful and like FW not just in the FW-alone sense but also in the mother-father battles and absolute inability to do what both of them would want (although as far as I know Katherine of Aragorn was a rather nicer mother than SD). Poor Fritz and poor Mary!

Margaret Pole, George's daughter! I have heard of her from the notes to The Dragon Waiting! (It's really true, all my history knowledge comes from historical fic and salon.) But since I only knew of the George connection I didn't know about the Mary connection at all. Also, I am Not Pleased about her execution :( (I suppose if I had my way, if people had to be executed it would all be instantaneous. Then again, you go too far in that direction and I suppose you get the Terror.)

Oh, all those AUs for Mary sound lovely and like they have distinct potential to have been rather better than what she actually got <3

As long as said part would not have been the Netherlands

Okay, I did snort at that :P :D Point taken.

Glass Onion spoilers

[kernezelda]

Re: Glass Onion
I enjoyed it for the most part. I felt that the ending was more feel-good via personal, violent, short-term retribution than effective, long-term decapitation of an empire's head, and the regaining of Andi's honor, as it were (poor Cassandra, never to be believed). While destroying the sculptures and structure and Mona Lisa felt like a satisfying PR slam (Bron known in same breath as Mona Lisa via its loss), and the other characters participated and voiced the truth they'd previously denied, no material change has occurred in their relative positions. There is no proof, and Bron still has his fortune, probably has insurance to recoup his losses and pay compensation for the incalculable loss of Mona Lisa.
Will the others, once awakening from aftermath of orgy of destruction, still turn on their benefactor? They were all in positions to lose political/financial/influential power that only co-operating with Bron could avert. Unless he turns on them and refuses his aid, won't they return to status quo? Will there be sufficient media coverage of a private party to label it as the-wealthy-playing-while-the-rest-die-during-covid, enough to damage their various careers regardless of Bron's intervention, so they no longer have reason to hide the truth? Or will Bron's wealth cover the dirty disaster with a veneer of tragedy to garner public sympathy, and retain hateful alliance?
In Knives Out, there was a direct benefit for poor and honest Marta while the rich crashed-and-burned around her due to their own character flaws and greed, but Glass Onion didn't provide a similar satisfying conclusion.
I really expected that the last shot would be of the photograph (of them all in the bar Glass Onion) having blown out somewhere to survive the blast, with a zoom in to Andi holding up the significant napkin, and then Helen's hand coming into frame toward it.

ETA: Upon second thought, I realized I had forgotten about Bron's new energy invention crystal (Klear?) beyond its immediate impact on the island--iirc, hadn't the lady governor started a program for installing the infrastructure in her state already, or was about to? In which case, that would be probably enough to ruin Bron's reputation and hers, and he'd be in no state to aid the others, either, which might indeed lead to all their downfalls. I guess that might be enough for Helen, although Andi's name/rep would remain a footnote amid the chaos, while I'm sure Bron would remain wealthy enough to insulate himself from much of the fallout.

[monanotlisa]

That was the most killer dialogue in Glass Onion -- incisive, sort of like splashing into the cold pool of reality on a hot day, before surfacing and climbing back into a comedy of thinly veiled metaphors.

[lightofdaye]

I just saw Glass Onion, I enjoyed it but didn't quite click with it the same way as Knives Out.