Correction: a *paid* newsletter that you expect me to write on any kind of a cadence
When I was a teenager I’d tell people who asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up that I wanted to be a hermit. I got that from Obi-Wan Kenobi. It wasn’t particularly thought-out, because children don’t actually have much in the way of original creative ideas, and are merely reporting back the world as they have ingested it. But it also, wasn’t, not thought out. That era was also — coincidentally, I am sure — when the dreams of the desert also started. Growing up and annihilation fantasies go hand in hand; and in mine, I always found the edge of the desert, and walked straight into it. That continued to be a weird mental polygon into which I’d slip whenever things became overwhelming, till I was nearly thirty.
Hermits and deserts are not a required pairing, though Star Wars (till The Last Jedi) made them seem so. My granddad was kind of a hermit, in my mind anyway; my grandmother predeceased him by fifteen years and he spent his remaining years a reasonably amiable widower, puttering around his small Toronto home and his elaborate Muskoka outdoor workshop, which — of all the parts of our family cottage that I sorely wish I still had access to — is in the top two.
Now, I don’t live in the middle of nowhere and I certainly don’t have a workshop or a standing agreement with a local Jawa to bring me parts, but the hermit thing came for me all the same. (Wait: is Amazon the Jawa?) The pandemic migrated me smoothly into my “eccentric middle-aged man living alone” phase, and among the full-throttle approach to collecting action figures and the time spent reading or baking bread, there’s still a lot of time left over for thinking. I spend a lot of my time mulling the off-ramps that got me to this place (global catastrophe notwithstanding). I no longer dream of walking into the desert, but I had the thought a few weeks ago that maybe I oughta start dreaming that dream again.
Perhaps this is why I enjoyed the first episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi as much as I did; in its own particular way, it was exactly what I wanted from that series, even presuming a starting condition where I wanted anything from it at all. (I didn’t, really; but perhaps that’s a longer discussion for a different non-newsletter.)
For a franchise ostensibly built on zipping from one place and plot point to another, “Part I” of Obi-Wan was appreciably interested in portraying the monklike repetition of staying put. It felt, no shit, immensely familiar after the past two years. Three whole scenes of Ben carving sushi. Many opportunities for him to “get involved,” become the Jedi we want him to be, that he sadly lets slip past, even to the detriment of those begging for his help. (Boy, did Benny Safdie show up exactly one day too early, huh?) A lot of moments catching Ben thinking — staring out at the dunes, or at Luke, or at nothing. McGregor said he wanted, in some way, to find the story of a broken man. Well, here it is: Obi-Wan is broken. And therefore, there is a tale to tell between now and the man who wanders out of the desert in full Jedi robes ten years later, like he knew all along that that day was the day.
Colour correction
Sidebar: wouldn’t it be way better for the show, which looks like this:
…to look like this?:
That’s a little experiment I did selecting a header image for this post, and I think I accidentally made a Disney+ series look awesome. Am I wrong here or does that not look a lot more like the original Star Wars, shot on Technicolor film in the desert in 1976?
(Which — if you’re asking, “why does that matter?” — isn’t because film is so nifty [though it is], but because Lucas intentionally designed Star Wars to be filmed in a documentary style of an otherwise fantastical environment, which is part of how it worked. It looked like a real place, where movie cameras just happened to get to. So, artifacts like harsh shadows, bright blue skies, natural skin tones, weren’t accidental visual errors; they were part of the design.)
It’s a common bandwagon upon which to jump, re: Disney+ shows, but now that I’m fooling around in the 4K realm I gotta say, digital grading for those series is… pretty fucking awful. I don’t think the Volume is doing these series any favours — as good as Favreau’s little toy clearly is at letting you, say, shoot a scene of the Mandalorian sitting on a butte on Tatooine just after the suns have set, without having to worry about losing the light — the perennial washed-out-ness of pretty much any scene taking place in daylight suggests to me that direct light is not the Volume’s forte.
But I also worry that the apparent “house style” on Disney+ series (by which I’m largely referring to Marvel and Star Wars, because I don’t really watch any other ones) is becoming a mandated “reduce saturation and contrast by 50% and then ship it,” which is ghastly to look at and … doesn’t … make … sense? The 4K grade of Eternals is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen professionally produced, so much so that I assumed it was just an error; but with no replacement disc (or digital copy) coming, I am now wondering if this is all intentional. And that intent is… I dunno. To dull our wits? To continue with the same example, I don’t know how you take a movie with such striking use of colour, even in humdrum street scenes, and say “there should be way less of this,” unless you’re on some secret mission to deprogram our neural pathways to accept the visual equivalent of unsalted food.
Out of warranty
I was talking to a friend the other day and reflecting upon the fact that when my hermitage was relatively new in 2020, I was taking pretty good care of myself: getting plenty of exercise and movement; eating meals I cooked myself; staying social (albeit virtually). Naturally, this was back when the pandemic, though frightening, was novel — and came with an expiration date.
We were hilariously wrong about the latter, mostly because “we” were hilariously wrong about the fundamental stupidity of the human race; and you know the rest. Novelty gave way both to boredom and, probably more importantly in the “broken hermit living alone” sense, real nihilism and anger. (See one sentence ago, where I referred to the fundamental stupidity of an entire species.) Hence: 2021 sucked. 2021 sucked so much it apparently has managed to make me nostalgic for the year previous, which was a pretty fucking awful year of all of our lives.
But 2021, aside from being personally and professionally hard, also probably brought me as close as I’ve ever been to permanently fucking up my expiring body. I think this is because of the novelty-wearing-off thing. It wasn’t new or exciting or even particularly satisfying to quietly take good care of myself. Suddenly: less exercise and movement; less eating food I cooked myself (more Uber Eatsing myself a cheeseburger, though); less forced virtual chitchat because good lord was I sick of it. And also, less in-person chitchat too, because there are only so many ways you can say “nothing” in response to a friendly “so, what’s been going on on your end?” before you’re frankly exhausted with having to report to anyone on the sameness of every single day of your life.
I’ve said that I had a really good winter, mentally; and I did. But I’ve come out of it with a left leg that scarcely works and an overall physical stamina that gets uppity after a single flight of stairs. I’m not really grousing about it. 2021 did suck and I got through it, and this busted-ass contraption in which I keep my brain got me through it. I’m immensely grateful for that and refuse to berate myself for those choices.
But it’s time to turn the corner that, I guess, men in our forties (based on several of my friends) inevitably do and put this thing back in working order; or at least, be a stronger, leaner hermit. I want to be able to walk freely again. There are milestones ahead for my mental life that need a better sense of discipline than the earned trash-fire that was my survival in the last year. And I kind of figure I still want to get on Survivor, before I die? Canadians keep winning; why not me? The thing about KPIs is, they can be anything, even stupid things.
I suppose all this to say: I didn’t really begin reconciling the quantity of damage that was 2021 (not as a clean line of months and dates; but as, like, a concept) did. It took a good winter and a bit of emotional space from all of that to even start realizing there was a thing there to reconcile. Alone in my hut with little to do but read, this is what I’m thinking about now.
Useful
- Speaking of the stupidity of the human race, humans are too stupid to own guns.
- I gave my entire Friday over to Obi-Wan Kenobi and Stranger Things and man, what a god damned delight. And, I am aware, a rare privilege and pleasure.
- Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons, two issues in, is just one hell of a thing to read. The Goddamned with shades of Sandman, and always Kelly-Sue DeConnick’s masterful weaving, spinning, pulling of threads across the loom.