Wikiedit: Vandalust

This is what I hope to be the first of many posts about particularly amazing Wikipedia articles I have come across at 3 in the morning. For our inaugural edition (back myself), we're going to take a look at this absolutely mad page called, simply, Vandals.

You've probably heard of the Vandals. They were a Germanic tribe that kicked up a load of trouble for the late Roman Empire, winning a reputation for mayhem for which they were gloriously immortalised in the English word vandalism. In it's habitually cryptic fashion, Wikipedia nods to more recent analysis that somewhat undermines this legacy:

modern historians tend to regard the Vandals during the transitional period from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages as perpetuators, not destroyers, of Roman culture.

The page says no more than this, and never mentions the issue again. And nothing in what follows remotely hints at Vandalic "perpetuation", so take it as you will.

Here are some choice facts that you might not have known about the Vandals:

• In the course of about 30 years, they sacked basically all of Western Europe, migrating from their temporary home in modern-day Hungary to establish a powerful kingdom in North Africa, via the very, very scenic route.
• They accidentally killed Saint Augustine.
• Despite originating in Sweden, their closest allies were Iranian.
• Having rarely come anywhere near a coastline for most of their history, by far their greatest power was achieved practically overnight as a naval/pirate empire.
• Although Christianised, they were fanatically opposed to the orthodox Catholic church.
• Defeated as a result of a stupid blunder, their entire race vanished suddenly only a few decades after reaching its zenith.

OK, so lets start at the beginning. The Vandals came from Scandinavia. Probably. In a perfect reflection of Western historical priorities, the Wikipedia page mentions the first 500 years of known Vandal existence in a couple of sentences, and the rest of the huge mass of text deals with the roughly 200 years where they interacted with the Romans, from the 4th to 6th centuries AD. I mean, you've got to remember when you read this stuff that the Vandals were obviously far too violent and uncouth to record their own history, so the Wikipedia page is little more than a highly filtered distillation of Roman historians writing out of their arses about their invaders. With that in mind, let us continue:

By about 100AD the Vandals were living in modern day Poland, for reasons unknown. Equally inexplicably, they joined a ragtag bunch of other Germanic (seemingly a catch-all term for "non-Roman") tribes in a migration into Ukraine and then Romania about 150-180AD, taking advantage of, and maybe even taking part in, the various wars between the unrelated Macromannic confederation and the Romans. We know the Vandals also fought against the Visigoths, not for the last time, and that the first recorded Vandal king, Wisimar, a one-time lord of Transylvania, was killed by them.

OK so before the historical haze settles over all of that, let's skip forward to "around 330AD" (sorry, sorry), when Constantine the Great gave the Vandals land in Pannonia, a region in middle Europe to the northeast of Italy. Presumably letting them live there was easier than dealing with possible invasions - a Roman policy of appeasement that they were to adopt towards the Vandals for the foreseeable future despite it not working at all.

But it's around 400AD that things really kick off for the age of Vandalism, and it's all the fault of Attila. The Huns weren't just the scourge of the Romans, but also of the poor barbarian hordes wishing to pillage them. In reaction to unstoppable Hun invaders, the Vandals up and left Pannonia to flee west. But it wasn't so much a fearful escape as a crazed rampage across Germany and France. Here's were it gets weird: the Vandals were accompanied in their warpath/flight by some new allies, a tribe called the Alans.

The Alans (friends of the Dereks and the Craigs) were originally from Iran. Yes, Iran, in the middle of Asia. Having lived north of the Black Sea for a while, they had tipped up in Europe with the Huns, as part of the same migration. But now they joined the Vandals in fleeing from them; once again, God knows why.

Anyway, with the Huns in the rearview mirror, the Vandals and the Alans cheerfully plundered, burnt, raised, decimated, terrorised and butchered their way across Europe, and when they got to the Rhine, they found themselves facing an enormous army of Franks who were damned if they were going to let the same thing happen to la Belle Gaul. Wikipedia states monastically of the incredible bloodshed that followed:

Twenty thousand Vandals, including [King] Godigisel himself, died in the resulting battle, but then with the help of the Alans they managed to defeat the Franks, and on December 31, 406 the Vandals crossed the Rhine, probably while it was frozen, to invade Gaul, which they devastated terribly.

The hyperlinks provide barely any more info. Apparently the battle was an ambush, with the Vandals caught unprepared and slaughtered in droves, rescued at the last moment by the brave Alans (every single member of which was called Alan, including the women). But even through the extraordinary Wikipedia understatement filter, it's a striking scene: the huge expanse of the Rhine on an Arctic New Year's Eve, frozen solid but melting slowly as it runs red with the warm blood of innumerable bodies, the gruff Vandal King bleeding out in the arms of his saviour, Alan, screaming to the skies for a medic. Take that, Hobbit Part 3.

With Gaul devastated terribly, the Vandals and Alans decided, thanks to bizarre machinations that defy illumination, not to settle down again, but to continue their lovely walking tour over the Pyrenees and into Spain. Maybe their sojourn on the Rhine had understandably given them a hankering for some sun. Just bear in mind that they spent three whole years devastating Gaul before deciding to move on - not a long period historically, but it probably didn't feel terribly short either to the Gauls.

They arrived in Spain about 7 or 8 years after leaving Pannonia, and stayed for about 20 more years. On their arrival in 409AD, Rome again gave them land for free. But ten years later, Rome allied with the Suebi and Visigoths (two other German tribes who happened to be on their own migrations through Europe, in much the same way as a bull migrates through a china shop), to attack the Vandals and get them the heck out.

I like to think there was a meeting among high-level imperial officers around this time that went something like:

"Right, moving on, next on the agenda is Spain. How are they getting on over there?"
"Oh, Spain's being terrorised by Vandals."
"Beg pardon?"
"Vandals."
"What, the Vandals who were giving us a damn headache in Romania and who we let live in Hungary?"
"Those're the ones."
"What the blazes are they doing in Spain?"
"They've been there for 10 years."
"10 years?!"
"Yes, we rather thought the Huns were more of a priority. We don't have any spare armies to deal with them."
"Well are there any other barbarian tribes from the other side of the continent who we can conveniently ally with to get rid of them?"
"Yeah, there's a couple actually."
"What?!!!!"

The Vandals beat the coalition, but not before a massive army of Alans was completely wiped out, causing the survivors to finally join the Vandals more officially. Vandal kings subsequently called themselves "King of the Vandals and the First Men". Whoops, sorry, I meant, "King of the Vandals and Alans". So close. But still - how insane is it that the ancient Iranian Alans finally met their demise fighting Germans in Spain?!?!

Despite basically winning the war against Rome/Suebi/Visigoths, the Vandals left Spain anyway ("I mean, it's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there"), whereupon it was promptly colonised by the Visigoths, who were the ones who lost it to the Moors much later. There was another casualty of the war, however: the Vandal king Gunderic, who was succeeded by the greatest of the half-a-dozen Vandal Kings we know of: Genseric. (By the way, Genseric was succeeded by Huneric, one of several examples of the awesome real-life Vandal tradition of naming people like they do in Lord of the Rings).

Fortunately we do actually know why the Vandals left Spain, at least probably: they were invited by the Count of Africa. That's right, North Africa was (kind of) ruled by a Count, named Bonifacius, a rebel Roman general. Although they came ostensibly to help Bonifacius conquer more of Africa, what actually happened was that the Vandals immediately attacked and besieged him in a town in modern-day Algeria that rejoiced in the name of Hippo Regius ("King's Hippo"). Also trapped inside Hippo, as it were, while the Vandals lurked outside, was a certain Augustine, not yet canonised, who found the siege all to much and promptly died "perhaps from starvation or stress", as Wikipedia puts it. One of the two. Turns out Augustine was actually from Hippo, hence being there when the Vandals attacked. Who the heck knew?!

So it was that the Vandals, the Germanic tribe from Sweden, came to establish an empire in North freaking Africa. Genseric captured both Hippo Regius and Carthage, his new capital, from which he swiftly built a vast fleet and suddenly found himself naval ruler of the Mediterranean. I guess he did look and have a name like a Viking, so maybe maritime raiding was in the blood all along. Vandal ships became some of the worst privateers that Rome ever faced, pillaging and conquering the islands and coasts to such an extent that the Mediterranean is actually called Wendelsæ in old English. Bear in mind that Genseric, the new African-Scandinavian pirate warlord, scourge of the Romans, was born in 389AD, and could certainly remember sedentary times in Pannonia before anyone had ever heard of the Huns.

Speaking of which, Atilla still hadn't gone away, and the Romans were so preoccupied by him in more conventional parts of their empire that they basically let the Vandals get on with it, even signing a peace treaty by which the Emperor Valentinian III's daughter would marry Huneric, the Vandal heir. ("What's all this about pirates from North Africa?"/"Oh, it's the Vandals again"/"What?!!!") In 455, Valentinian was usurped by the conniving Petronius Maximus, who was never bothered by dementors; he seized the dead Emperor's daughter to marry to his own son. Miffed at this insult, Genseric went to have a little world with his daughter-in-law's dad's deposer, accompanied by a "personal bodyguard", as it were, and casually wandered into the city, the centre of world power, and stripped it of all its riches. Petronius fled and was lynched by a mob outside the gates, his last words "I immediately regret this decision".

After Atilla finally died, Rome did try a little harder to get its own back on Genseric, but he "soundly defeated" their assaults (Wikipedia loves the phrase "soundly defeated"). For example:

In 468 the Western and Eastern Roman empires launched an enormous expedition against the Vandals under the command of Basiliscus, which reportedly was composed of a 100,000 soldiers and 1,000 ships. The Vandals soundly defeated the invaders at the Battle of Cap Bon, capturing the Western fleet, and destroying the Eastern through the use of fire ships.

The link reveals the sheer extent of this episode. The armada against the Vandals was one of the most huge and expensive in Roman history, and it was dramatically burnt to ash by a surprise attack made in the middle of peace negotiations. Even Wikipedia uses the word "enormous", a frantic outpouring of emotive prose by its standards. Genseric was left alone again, having completely outmanoeuvred the greatest military force in history, adding insult to injury after having literally sacked Rome. He consolidated his kingdom and died peacefully in 477, after almost 90 years of wanton destruction across the entire continent.

About 50 years later the Vandals were caught unprepared by a Byzantine attack when they'd foolishly sent most of their army to quash a small rebellion in Sardinia. With North Africa once again a Roman province, the Vandals basically slapped each other on the back, told each other that it had been fun, and went their separate ways. One of the most remarkable political powers of the late Roman era just suddenly dissolved into nothing on the edge of the mighty Sahara. Imagine if their Scandinavian ancestors could have seen it. Then imagine if they could have seen me, 1,500 years later, spraying my drink across my laptop screen as I read the words "which they devastated terribly".

John Wallis is the author of Human Not Human Enough, including this bit in italics at the end. If you have any suggestions for future Wikipedia pages to review, please send them to the comments under the facebook link where you almost certainly found this post. Thanks!

Breadbasket timetravels

I'm in Kansas, experiencing the miracle of 17-year cicadas. This is a cicada:

Living in the ground their entire lives, they emerge in huge numbers only at precise intervals exactly 17 years apart, disappearing again a few weeks later. The insects make the most incredible racket, like a sea shore made of grasshoppers.

That I'm here for the cicadas is a remarkable coincidence. The Kansas brood, as it's called, is the only cicada population in the world blooming in 2015. But I didn't come for them. I didn't even come for the other inexhaustible delights of Kansas. I'm here, like a hero on a metaphorical journey of self discovery, to find where I came from.

This is George Joseph Staubus, born 1926. He died last year, and was my mother's father. For my whole life, and indeed for my mother's whole life, he lived in El Cerrito, California, in a modest but glorious house overlooking the San Francisco Bay. He moved there with his wife Sarah in 1954. But he was born and raised here:

This is Brunswick, Missouri, population ~800 and falling. The first suggested search term when you type "Brunswick Missouri" into Google is "Brunswick Missouri funeral home". It's about as far away as you can get from an ocean anywhere outside of central Asia. It likes to call itself - ambitiously - the Pecan Capital of Missouri. Most of the stores on its one commercial street are boarded up or sell antiques. Many of the houses are similarly abandoned.

The first white people to see Brunswick are thought to be Lewis and Clark, but it wasn't until the 1830s or so that the town was properly established, largely populated by German fortune seekers. Not originally among them was a certain Christian Staubus, my earliest known ancestor, who came to the New World at about the same time, after having served as a Prussian officer at the battle of Waterloo. His grandson, George Washington Staubus, and his great grandson, George Washington Jr, came to Brunswick to farm the rich Missouri soil. I find it strange to think that I am separated from the Napoleonic Herr Staubus by a mere five lifespans - George Washington Jr was George Joseph's father, and my great-grandfather. This is not necessarily impressive, however: my mother remembers a famous relative who lived to 102 and had been born during the Civil War. The oldest person in town at that time probably remembered the War of Independence.

As a boy, some of my grandfather's classmates rode to school on a horse. Yes, the grandfather of me, reared in the age of cat videos, knew a time when the main transport fuel was hay. The school consisted of one room and one teacher, who taught all ages simultaneously. George had no electricity or running water at home and had to survive prolonged sub-zero winters with nothing but wood fires.

After being sent to study accounting by the US Navy during World War Two, George eventually ended up becoming an academic. The young, folksy country lad, with his traditional Protestant upbringing, got his first teaching job at the University of Buffalo, where he met a Jewish girl from the mean streets of Brooklyn. They were married after 6 months and remained happily together until death did them part, over 60 years later.

Sarah Mayer was the daughter of proper hardcore immigrants. Her mother, Anna Lipshitz, hailed from a rustic homestead somewhere around the border of Poland and Ukraine; she and her many brothers and sisters were sent one by one to America as soon as their parents had gathered enough money for the next. Having come through the horrors of Ellis Island by herself at the age of 16, Anna had nothing but her siblings' names to go by - miraculously she located them in the seething cesspit that was New York in the 1910s. Working whatever jobs she could get, Anna scraped by, marrying another Jewish immigrant and producing, in contrast to her own parents, a single solitary child, Sarah. (Incidentally, as my mother's mother's mother, Anna's religion is what makes me technically Jewish).

Sarah had electricity, modern transport and all the glories of city life, such as the ability to spend a nickel on the movies every Saturday. What she did not have was money or personal space, living in a special kind of poverty equal in degree but opposite in kind to George's. Her position at Buffalo was only secured after her city university was asked to send male professors. They wrote back saying that the men had all been killed at war (those that hadn't were the ones now in needing of teaching), but they had some superbly qualified women to offer.

The coming together of these two souls, and the incredible longevity of their union, has never ceased to fill me with awe and inspiration. The two extremes of the quintessential American experience personified in the homely figures of my grandparents - an experience that could not be further from my own.

Why does family hold us in such a powerful spell? I know, rationally, that family is the result of relationships formed during one's upbringing, that the idea of blood ties is a purely social construct, and that people who died before I was born can't actually influence who I am in the slightest. Yet I can't help feeling fascinated by my ancestry. It's a gateway into a history that feels otherwise so alien.

Coming all the way to Missouri in pursuit of this dilemma, I've encountered another aspect of it. We've been staying a few hours from Brunswick with George's Kansas-based 90-year-old brother, great-uncle Charles Staubus. Last time I met him was in 1990, before my first birthday. Today he enjoys terrifically good health, living alone in a beautiful, well kept-suburban house. In 1945, his parachute regiment raided Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" HQ near the legendary Berghof residence in the Bavarian Alps, and he still keeps the Fuhrer's personal writing stationary in a box under the kitchen table. Also in attendance were Charles' sons Keith and Kent, and their children - my second cousins, not too far from my own age - all of whom I had not previously encountered; even my mother hadn't seen most of them since the 70s.

Kent lives in South Dakota and is an exceptional photographer and train enthusiast; his son Matthew is a computer science prodigy. Keith is a lawyer in Dallas, Texas; his daughter Addison is a talented graphic artist and a student at Texas Christian University. They say grace before meals. They consume red meat with incredible frequency. They use the term "good old boy" unironically. And they're all ridiculously lovely. My blood kin who I didn't even know existed. Their last name is all Staubus. We all knew the same story about great-grandfather George Washington - how he used to say that he only liked two kinds of pie: hot and cold. Now we're facebook friends. The cicadas will be gone soon, but we'll still be family when they return. Weird.

The dead don't write op-eds

Charlie Hebdo happened. I'm not interested in the issues of freedom of speech, religious tolerance, global politics or all that stuff that's been reposted from every conceivable angle so many times that I want to tear my own face off; rather, I'm interested in death.

12 people died in the attack, another half a dozen in the ensuing chase. A massacre, by any definition. Think of those innocent people, promising young lives cut short by acts of senseless violence. Think of their families and their destroyed lives. What should we do about it?

We should ignore it.

Here's a challenge for everyone: next time there's a bloody tragedy, don't post about it. Unless you personally knew the victims, don't read news articles about it. Definitely don't read opinion pieces about it. Avoid conversations about it to the extent you can. Pretend the story contains spoilers from upcoming Game of Thrones episodes.

“How unbelievably crass and awful!” I hear you cry. “We should honour and remember innocent victims so that their loss wasn't in vain.”

And yet, I'm virtually certain, anyone making this objection doesn't do that. Almost no one in our society honours and remembers innocent victims of terrible massacres. OK, you honoured and remembered Charlie Hebdo, maybe you remembered the victims of flight MH370, heck, you definitely still remember 9/11. If you're politically attentive, you might have noticed and felt sorry for the victims of Boko Haram in recent weeks.

But you probably forgot about the many hundreds who died in the insurgency in Iraq in 2015 alone. The 144 people who died in Northwest Pakistan may have slipped your mind. More than a hundred in the Libyan Civil War. 52 in Somalia. 30 in the Mexican drug wars. All in the last few weeks. Not to mention Syria, Darfur, Palestine and dozens of other locations.

I definitely don't want to guilt trip anyone. I didn't know about any of these until I looked them up just now. The point is, we don't keep track of horrible massacres because we couldn't possibly. There are too many. We also don't mourn the thousands who die from horrible diseases every day, despite them being just as tragic and impactful for the victims.

To my mind, caring about the death of certain people when you so blatantly don't care about the death of most is somewhat thoughtless. When the ones you care about are the same race and religion as you, it becomes even more suspect.

If you choose to give your attention, opinions and solidarity rallies to a certain Death Event, you've got ask yourself what it will achieve. In the case of Iraq and Pakistan and the rest, it won't achieve much because we have very little power to do anything about those conflicts.

If you think it's different for Charlie Hebdo, ask yourself this: how would the world be different now if no one had ever heard of the attacks other than personal acquaintances of the deceased? If anything, the world would be better, right? There'd be tiny bit less threat to freedom of speech, and a tiny bit better relations between the Christian and Muslim worlds.

Did the massive parade convince anyone not to bow to the terrorists' whims? Of course not. No one was contemplating bowing. Did it help to improve the West's policies towards radical Islam? Nope. Was it even trying to? Not really.

The dead don't need our honour or remembrance. Frankly, if I died and could magically have an opinion on the matter, I would find the mourning of people who didn't ever know me to be highly patronising. I'd hope to be remembered by my friends and loved ones, but it would be insane, not to mention arrogant, to expect any more. Doesn't matter if I have a random heart attack or if I was blown up in a children's hospital.

If you have to mourn something, and clearly there's a lot in the world to mourn, then mourn the statistics. Focus your emotions and actions towards graphs and spreadsheets. Do whatever it takes to get those numbers ticking in the right direction. The survivors need more help than the victims.

Don't mourn the dead you never knew. In almost every case of random violence, it does more good to forget than remember.  

The romance of life without tech

You've probably seen the video going around of someone reciting 5 minutes of soulful couplets about the problems of modern technology, over footage that cuts between him looking sincerely at a camera and some images of pretty people using and not using phones and computers. Did I mention the cheesy emotive music? There's cheesy emotive music.

If you've read much of this blog before, you won't be surprised that it made me quite wrathful. Let me start with one particularly irksome rhyme:

All this technology we have, it's just an illusion:

Community, companionship, a sense of inclusion

He asserts that the sense of community and social connection we experience using virtual technologies is just an illusion; this is factually incorrect. And not just a little bit incorrect, it's the exact opposite of a really fundamental truth. It's a lie on the scale of climate change denial.

Virtual socialisation has been the subject of a vast amount of academic research. And I mean vast. I spent years studying it at uni and only scratched the surface. There are dozens of peer-reviewed journals and international conferences every year dedicated solely to online society. While the work done in this area has covered a huge scope and there are many different theories and models that have been advanced, there is one issue on which there is complete consensus: virtual socialising is real. It is meaningful and important for those who engage in it.

It's interesting, therefore, that no one questions our youtube poet when he flat out contradicts the mountain of evidence. In fact, I think the analogy of climate denial is quite apt - saying that socialising online is not real makes intuitive sense in our culture in the same way that saying climate change is a conspiracy makes intuitive sense among certain conservative cultures.

Yet when we think about it for a moment, the idea that social interaction that occurs using virtual technologies might not be real is clearly nonsense. For one thing, why would so many people do it if they didn't find it meaningful?

There are several factors at work. One is a culture that has deep roots in a tradition which sees technological change as automatically bad. Socrates thought writing was a terrifying, unnatural technology that would send the world to hell in a handcart. Multitudes of writers and filmmakers have reinforced similar notions through the ages, to the point where suspicion of change - and its association with evil forces - just comes naturally.

Secondly,  there's the Golden Age Fallacy, one of my favourites. The poet assumes that ever since we started using computers and such, we've started isolating ourselves and started having less real-world social time. In the old days we would have spent the time we now spend texting hanging out in the park instead. This is again a factual error. Phones, computers and such are almost entirely used when we would have been alone anyway. For example, there's a bit in the film where a girl sits down at a bus stop and the two other girls at the stop ignore her because they're on their phones. The implication is that without phones, the three women would have burst in to spontaneous and joyous conversation.

No. Obviously, in the old days, they would have still sat ignoring each other, but they just wouldn't have had phones to use in the meantime. Do we really think British people used to talk to strangers on public transport?! LOL! In fact, this is a classic situation in which the phones allow us to be more sociable, because we can use our downtime to socialise when we would otherwise be bored.

Similarly with going on facebook while alone in your room. In the old days, you would still have been alone in your room, you just would have been staring at the ceiling rather than at a screen. We still go out to see friends in the real world whenever there's a social reason to do so. In fact we probably do it more than in the old days because of our shorter working hours and better transport connections. But we can use our alone time to stay in touch, which we couldn't do before.

The dude says he has 422 friends yet he is alone. The figure caught my attention because I happen to currently have 420. Maybe there's some magical barrier around the 421 mark, because I am not alone at all. That's because I contact my friends fairly regularly, using facebook and yes my phone, and I reinforce my friendship with them via the age-old method of talking to them and sharing stuff. Sometimes I do this while they are physically close to me, sometimes I do it while they're far away. In both cases I feel equally less alone.

If you want to build a case that a technology is bad, you have to ground it in real, research-based evidence and not instinct. As a culture we simply have to get over this idea that there is some qualitative difference between virtual and actual socialising. There is zero evidence that one is better than the other. If you think about it, what factor could there possibly be that could make one better than the other? They're both about connecting with other people. That's what humans do.

In his groundbreaking study of the virtual world Second Life, anthropologist Tom Boellstorff points out that his findings (which show that Second Life society is very similar in every fundamental way to offline society) might be explained by a simple truth: socialising has always been virtual. The psyche that constitutes you or me as an individual is formed by billions of neurons. These receive signals from the outside world and interprets them. Other individuals that we encounter are nothing but concepts put together in our brain - we have no experience really being them. We have a concept in our mind for "friend", "soulmate" or "that guy I know" - all our interactions with these concepts take place via some kind of intermediary communication system, whether it be touch, language or social media. In this sense it is absolutely fair to say that there's no real difference between talking to someone using the sound waves your larynx creates over short distances and talking to someone using fibre-optic cables. The media are not important - or at least not compared to the content that they are communicating.

When is a pixie not a pixie?

This post is about the Disney film Frozen. YOU MUST SEE THIS FILM. You must see it. This post will assume you have seen it, so DO NOT READ until you’ve seen it. Go! See! Now!

Ah, what can I say about Frozen? Its virtues are as uncountable as the stars. It’s got all the good points you’d expect from a modern animated feature - breathtaking visual splendour, supreme attention to detail, perfect timing - as well as the best of this genre’s screenwriting talents: good pacing, a compelling narrative, spot-on dialogue (including great comedy), rounded characters with personal journeys that play off each other. Also, and this is no small matter, it has an awesome and actually quite novel use of superpowers. Oh yeah, and the music is joyous beyond all reason.

And there's a frost giant! What more could you want?

But most of all, the reason why I wholeheartedly embrace the Frozen cult, why the whole thing makes my heart thrum with delight, is its treatment of women.

But how can you say this, I hear you cry, when the film is set in a fairytale medieval kingdom with useless princesses, where men have most of the positions of power, and the characters are all more or less gender normative?!

Hear me out while I explain why I think Frozen is the most gender-revolutionary film to have ever come out of Hollywood, or the most revolutionary film with a talking snowman at least. Yes, Frozen doesn’t do much to challenge gender stereotypes. Rather, what makes it special, I will argue, is that it completely overturns how such stereotypes are capable of being used as actors in a mainstream motion picture.

The Sexy Villainess

I have heard it said that one of the potentially troubling ways in which Frozen conforms to conventional gender narratives is that when Elsa first unleashes her ice powers, she simultaneously transforms her appearance, suddenly taking down her hair, developing new curves and acquiring a suggestive new cut for her dress.

This plays to an old and ugly trope of women only ever being openly sexy, or embracing their sexuality in any way, when they are also evil. This trope in turn plays to the even older and uglier archetypal dichotomy of the Madonna and the whore. So much of Western fiction, including Hollywood, has deployed this horrible vision of all women as either chaste and virtuous, or depraved and sexual.

But Elsa utterly and exuberantly overturns all this in the course of her magnificent solo “Let It Go”. The song is clear beyond the slightest doubt: she is not turning evil. Rather, she is embracing her own power, and staking a claim for her own freedom. It’s a song about about doing as one choses, free from the demands of a judgemental society. Elsa’s unleashing of her powers is a metaphor for becoming a fully-fledged actor, in the true sense of the word. This is a theme throughout the film and it’s at the crux of why I find it all so exciting and revolutionary.

Yes, the new dress reveals a shapely leg, but this is the same leg that with a single stomp is capable of raising up an entire castle. Her ice powers are linked to her sexiness not because they are both bad things, but because they are both glorious and awesome to behold. And because they are both things that she is now free to enjoy fully as a responsible adult, an actor in control of her own body and her own actions - all on the very day that she has come of age.

I first saw Frozen with my ten-year-old sister. She absolutely loved it, and the bit she liked most was “Let It Go”. All through Christmas, she’s been strutting around the house doing the sexy-empowered walk and miming Elsa’s ice powers. I couldn’t be more thrilled. My older sisters never got such awesome role models. 

My sister should aspire to nothing less than magical superpowers.

The Love Thing

For all her sexuality, Elsa doesn’t get a love story. This is another clear statement that embracing sexiness doesn’t mean you have to find a guy if you don’t want.

Instead, it is the other sister-protagonist, down-to-earth Anna, who gets the romantic subplot. This is another complaint I’ve heard made against the gender roles in Frozen. At the start of the film, Princess Anna, alone in the big empty castle, dreams of finding a man to love. How predictable.

But again, Frozen’s treatment of romance is a lot more nuanced than you might expect. First of all, the song in which Anna mentions she wouldn’t mind finding a boyfriend is the “First Time in Forever”. The first part of the song has Anna singing about how she can’t wait to meet other people for a change:

Don't know if I'm elated or gassy

But I'm somewhere in that zone

Cause for the first time in forever

I won't be alone

Then she has a brief bit about how as well as meeting new people, she might meet “the one”. Then the song switches to Elsa, who sings about how she has to stay strong and “don’t let them in”:

Conceal, don't feel, put on a show

Make one wrong move and everyone will know

Then they duet, with the same lines:

It's only for today

It's agony to wait

Where Anna is looking forward to it, and Elsa is dreading it. In short, the song is fairly straightforward character development, highlighting the very different kinds of people the two sisters have become. Anna’s thoughts about “the one” should be taken in this context - she’s open to meeting people and sharing her life with them, while her sister is not.

When the guests arrive, of course, she does meet Prince Hans and enjoys a whirlwind romance. But this is again a set-up - transparently so, as the rest of the film’s events unfold. The love scene, where Anna and Hans have so much in common and are supposedly made for each other, is clearly a parody. With its “Can I say something crazy”s and its “Jinx”s, it’s openly making fun of how silly this popular notion of easy, unrealistic love is, just as much as XKCD #807.

Later, when Hans is revealed as the villain and the extent of how facile their love really was becomes clear to Anna, there’s an incredibly poignant moment where she sits miserably quivering with cold by the fire and says “I don’t even know what love is”. But the film does in fact have a whole song about what love is - the very intelligent yet comic “Fixer Upper”. Among the lyrics of this fun number is the elegant insight:

We’re not sayin' you can change him,

‘Cause people don’t really change.

We’re only saying that love's a force

That's powerful and strange.

...True love brings out their best!

...We need each other to raise

Us up and round us out.

Everyone’s a bit of a fixer-upper...

These thoughts underly the all the changing relationships between the various characters in Frozen. The result is that the film presents a thoughtful, uplifting and kind vision of what genuine love is. Again, it entirely overturns the tropes we’re so used to seeing in these kinds of stories. And the message we’re left with is delightfully progressive: there’s nothing wrong with being a little bit romantic, but you should try to come to a fuller understanding of the complexities of love and of human interaction in general.

Manics Are People Too

Another complaint I’ve heard, and something which originally bothered me but which I have learned to embrace, is that Anna exhibits a lot of the features of a certain kind of romantic heroine - at least at the start of the film. She thinks of herself as dorky. She’s carefree and clumsy. She doesn’t know how beautiful she really is. She talks a lot about how she likes chocolate. She’s girly but has a tomboyish side. She’s whimsical, excitable, has big dreams, is in love with life and moves around everywhere really fast.

There’s no two ways of saying it: Anna is a manic pixie.

In the standard post-Whedon model of thinking about gender in mainstream movies, manic pixies are the Enemy. The are the antithesis of the Strong Female Character. We hates them, we does, my precious.

Who are you calling manic?

But a lot of pixie anger is misplaced. People often - understandably - get annoyed by their sheer annoyingness. No one likes a good looking person who pretends not to be good looking. And we instinctively distrust those who seem to be too perfect. And with good reason - manics have often been used by boring screenwriters as the dream girl for their male protagonist, basically just an object to be admired, with no real agency. They aren’t afforded basic character rights such as development over time (other than to reveal a tragic side which they already had). And they certainly don’t make any decisions or take any actions which meaningfully impact the course of the story.

But what if a manic pixie wasn’t written in such a lazy fashion? Despite all the aggravating outward appearances, Anna is not abandoned in the traditional manic pixie fashion. Indeed, she becomes the central protagonist of the film. Never does she rely on men to move the story forward for her. At every stage, she makes her own choices. It’s her story, she owns it, and at the end of the day it’s not at all difficult for even the most hardened pixie-hater to get behind her. Plus, she talks to Joan of Arc, so...kudos.

There are only two female characters in the film, but they get all the action. Everything hinges on them, their choices, and importantly, on their relationship. In this respect, Frozen brings to full fruition a trend that’s been slowly growing in Disney films over the last seven decades. Disney started with princesses with no agency whatsoever. Snow White has things done to her, never doing anything herself. The true love has to come and kiss her prostrate body to allow her to even live.

Later, in the 90s revival, princesses got a slightly greater share of the action. At the end of Beauty and the Beast, my personal favourite, it’s Belle’s love that saves the prostrate Beast. But Belle spends most of the final act locked up or weeping uselessly, and many of the film’s key decisions are not made by her. Later still, the likes of Pocahontas and Mulan brought the strong female character to Disney. But these films still depend on plots largely dictated by men, with the romantic element remaining central. 2010’s Tangled takes another step on the path, with the strong, pixie-esque Rapunzel taking the initiative to embark on her own journey of self-realisation. But after the realisation is achieved (the lantern scene), there’s a whole other weird section of the film where she gets kidnapped twice, is locked up at the first sign of defiance, tries to help but is stopped by a man who cuts her hair - her defining feature and a symbol of her sense of self - without asking her. The ending undermines her agency. And the only other female character in the film is a sexy villainess. So...yeah I was disappointed by Tangled because in many respects it has all the makings of a stellar film.

Frozen transcends all this and completes the journey properly this time, with female characters who are true actors. This is nowhere more apparent than the spectacular climax itself. Anna, on the point of death, is waiting for true love’s kiss to save her (although even at this stage she’s still trying her best to get to him on her own steam). Elsa is on her knees weeping into her hands, with another man approaching her to put her to death. The tropes are set up on their pedestals - the powerful sexy sorceress always has to die, the manic pixie needs a man’s love to happen to her.

At this point the sledgehammer comes down and smashes both tropes to smithereens in the most satisfying fashion. Anna leaves Kristoff in the dust and goes to Elsa’s rescue herself. She blasts Hans away, and is left frozen in a moment of pure action. Her own act of love and self-sacrifice saves them both.

The most obvious inversion here for audiences, I expect, is that a man’s love for a woman (true love’s kiss) has been turned around to become the sisterly love of two woman - a powerful epiphany in the character arcs of both women. But the greater inversion for me is that of action - instead of the lover saving the cursed victim, the cursed victim saves herself on her own.

Just What the Doctor Ordered

A few months ago, I wrote about a great article in the New Statesmen that powerfully demonstrates how ostensibly strong female characters are not good enough. One of its best points is that when men want to be strong, they can do so in many varied, interesting, complex different ways. When women are strong it typically just means they know kung-fu and are angry a lot of the time.

Frozen has shown Hollywood how female protagonists can be done right. Anna and Elsa are not Mulan with her sword, or Merida from Brave with her bow. They don’t know any martial arts. They don’t talk mean. They don’t take on traditionally male roles. Yet they are perhaps the strongest female characters Disney has ever created. And everyone loves them for it - remember, Frozen is Disney’s best performing feature since The Lion King. If we needed any confirmation that women can be gender normative and still marvellously strong, this is it. In fact their normativeness arguably makes their strength all the more thrilling.

It's not exactly ice powers though, is it?

But most of all, they’re complex. They’re more deeply and interestingly developed than many many male protagonists in Hollywood, and certainly much more so than the other male characters in the film. I particularly like Elsa’s story in this regard. She starts the film already troubled and multi-faceted. A sense of daughterly duty and respect for her parents clearly motivates her to stay disciplined and keep to the conceal-don’t-feel regime, despite how much she desperately misses Anna’s company. The coronation sequence is a masterclass in portraying the build up of these competing motivations, until they explode in a wall of ice-shards. Her self-banishment leads to the first major development in her story - the “Let It Go” song - where she finally lets all her pent up anxiety out, frees herself from her lifelong prison and embraces her empowered inner self.

This alone is more than most female characters can hope to achieve, but for Elsa it’s just the beginning. The “Let It Go” epiphany is only the first stage in her journey. The song, for all its glory, is also an acceptance of isolation. The ice castle makes it very clear that despite her empowerment, Elsa has merely imprisoned herself in a different form. And, rejecting those who try to help her, she soon winds up in a literal prison. It is here, and on the ice-sheet blizzard, that she realises the futility of such a shallow form of empowerment, and it is Anna’s love that teaches her a much more genuine form of self-realisation, one that embraces others. When Elsa says “of course! Love!” and then turns winter back into summer, it is ostensibly the height of Disnified cliche silliness, but audiences don’t react to it that way. Rather, for the audience, it feels natural, cathartic and uplifting - and this is entirely because it represents the final stage of Elsa’s difficult and complex character journey, where she finally heals the fractures inside her, completely masters her powers, and becomes a better person. She has thawed her frozen heart - and then you realise this was the theme from the very beginning, starting with the tone-setting opening song, “Frozen Heart”.

For a Disney princess to receive such treatment is nothing short of a revolution.

I am no man

Scattered minor spoilers.

At the end of the summer, I posted a piece arguing how terrible the movie industry was at doing good female characters. I listed all the films I'd seen over the summer which exhibited this terribleness; they were legion.

But summer's end is inevitable, and the movie industry ebbs and flows in the opposite direction to the seasons - after summer comes a rebirth and vitality that renews one's hope for the future. Looking back at the films I've seen recently, I am struck by how awesome they are at female characters. And not just female characters but female-centric story lines, with real women acting as actual people who make choices and stuff! Revolutionary! For me, the story is always paramount, and often the least well dealt with in terms of gender. This autumn has made great headway in reversing that trend.

Just recently we've had two French films about young women exploring who they are via their sexuality: Jeune et Jolie, and Blue is the Warmest Colour. Both of them are slow, boring and pretentious; the first failed to bring it's main character to life at all, and the second, while extremely powerful in parts, ended on a bleak note where the main character failed to resolve any of the issues or problems she was dealing with.

A friend who I saw it with said that he liked this - real life doesn't always resolve nicely and it's more effective to show us the brutal truth than some neatly wrapped-up plot line. Personally, I find this poor story-telling - catharsis is a key element for me, although maybe the director, Kechiche, intended the film more as a parable than a story. Not my cup of tea, at any rate.

Another film noteable for its directorial finesse and masterful techniquery but ultimate ineffectiveness of story was The Counselor. I never really felt I knew who any of the characters were. Just like Prometheus, each scene seemed to be an island of breathtaking self-contained drama, without ever joining up any of the dots. While Cameron Diaz was probably the worst actor of the five, her character was probably the most exciting - a dazzling femme fatale who revelled in her exquisite ability to manipulate and control everything around her. 

Then there were my favourite films of the post-summer season. Short Term 12, a story of young people with issues who care for even younger people with issues, was rightly called a masterpiece: the story is dizzyingly multi-levelled yet achingly simple and direct. I love the way it transcends gender to get right to the core of exactly who each of the characters are as people and why they make the choices they do.

Katniss Everdeen continued her coming of age in part two of the Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Where the story in the first film was predictable and unimaginative, and frankly very slow, the second film was completely engaging. The key lies in making other characters just as interesting as the heroine if not more so: when Peeta has a personality that we care about, it means he can have relationships with Katniss and others that we can also care about. I particularly liked that they took time to develop the character of the strange PR girl who manages the district 12 team. That kind of thing adds a new dimension that really brings the story to life, and allows us to relate to the main issues faced by all the characters a lot more potently.

In a less mainstreamy kind of way, How I Live Now did a similar thing. The protagonist, Daisy, has to deal with the apocalypse and in doing so, face down her own demons - a tried and tested forumla that is just wonderful when done right. By the end of the film, Daisy has survived the apocalypse and has become a well-adjusted and less insecure woman. The film was only let down by a tepid and empty love interest, but this was made up for by the other supporting characters.

I adored Gravity - not because of the epic visuals, but because of how they feed into the epic story. It's hard to tell a story with just one real character for most of the film, but they completely achieved it, simply by going back to basics. It's a very paired-down three-act deal, in which a woman struggles - yes, again - to survive against the odds and in doing so comes to terms with personal issues. The magic of this formula becomes apparent at the key moment at the end of act 2 when she halucinates the guiding hand of George Clooney's character, pep talks herself into turning the oxygen back on, decides to stand and fight for her own life, and blasts off to meet her future, as the music swells. Now THAT was masterful.

But perhaps my favourite story of all could be found in Carrie. Goodness knows why they chose to remake this work of staggering genius, especially as the new film sticks to the original to the extent that almost every scene is identical. The new version did cut some bits, however, in a worthy effort to deal with the slow pacing of the original; while this did lead to a better structured and more streamlined film, it also sacrificed, if only slightly, some of the longer character-building sections in the middle, which is a shame because I felt you didn't get as full a sense of who Carrie is pre-prom. The prom scene itself was, needless to say, nowhere near as masterful as the original, but it's always going to be a great scene however its done.

I have few words to express how much I love the Carrie story. Again, its success completely rests on the supporting characters - the repressive mother, the hateful Chris, the guilt-wracked Sue and the other caring kids and teachers at the school. It is these latter who nurture Carrie along her journey, who take her from the timid and adoreable creature, so full of kindness, and help her make the transistion to womanhood. The mother is the chief obstacle, and in overpowering her, Carrie makes the all-important choice to be a full person with all the agency this entails. Yet it is only really the first step on this journey out of repression, and before she can take another, she has all her worst fears about the world confirmed at her exact moment of triumph. At every stage is the aweful presence of blood - the showers, the cupboard, the prom dress (which the mother calls "red"), the bucket and the cruxifiction. The new film intorduced one more bloody episode right at the beginning: the birth.

What's great about this story is that, despite being really quite a simple coming of age tale, it still reaches staggering highs and lows - Carrie starts completely humiliated and alone, works her way up to the ecstasy of love that is prom queen, and is immediately returned to the humiliated loneliness, the lowest of the low, reducing her from serene joy to abject frenzy. Just as the blood on the mother's nightdress at her death mirrors that at Carrie's birth, so the blood on Carrie's hands at the ball mirrors that in the showers at the start.

But in another sense, Carrie's greatest triumph is still to come - after the conventional coming of age transformation is destroyed by the pig's blood, the true realisation of Carrie's darker self, and mastery of her real powers can take place. After all, when she puts her mother away the first time, she escapes. When she deals with her the second time, it's a finality. Carrie has completed her second journey - the one neither she nor the audience was looking for - at the exact moment when she fails to complete her first. She can now burn happily in hell, her story utterly resolved, her character fulfilled at a more fundamental level than she even knew to look for.

So those were the films I've seen recently with fully-fledged female characters. I've seen some other good films too - Captain Phillips was brilliant despite not featuring a single female face after the first couple of minutes. I also very much enjoyed Thor 2, which did much better with its supporting cast this time around, although it still didn't properly invest any of the female characters with their own stories or agency. Sigh, Marvel.

The point as ever is not that you need strong women to have a good film, but merely that its equally possible to do so. This is something the movie industry is slowly waking up to, if this autumn is any indication. Hurrah!

***
Update: Just before I published this, I happened to see Disney's Christmas film, Frozen. It is superb, and has a fantastic handling of strong female characters. I feel it should be the subject of its own post, but suffice it to say: see this film!