EPISODE 718: A TALE OF TWO FANDOMS
St. Augustine is mad at the gays.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi! Happy Pride! And welcome back.
I wonder if the tweet above will make sense to everybody. You have to click on it to see the full joke, but the punchline is that everything has been heading toward the new Sony movie Morbius, which debuted in April.
I don't know if you've followed any of the craziness around the movie. I can't say that I had, but I am definitely loving reading about it now.
Here’s the deal: Sony still owns the rights to Spider-Man. And they've decided to build a Spider-Man universe, even though so far Spidey himself is not present within it. They've had two successful Venom films. And their next venture was Morbius, starring Jared Leto as a good-ish? vampire.
Yeah. Not exactly standard Spidey. It had disaster vibes all over it.
But in the months before it came out, instead of scorning it, the internet decided to laugh. What followed were memes describing just how well Morbius was going to do.
Like this:
Or this:
(Note the length of the film.)
Or this:
To me the whole thing has a sort of good-natured quality, probably because people’s responses kept getting more and more creative.
Since it was released April 1st (this poor movie), it did not do as badly as I would have thought. It has ended up grossing 163 million around the world, and 73 million in the US. That might not be break even, I don't know, but in Pandemia, it's not bad.
And STILL the ironic love for the movie continued. People started calling for a sequel with the hilarious name, Morbius 2: It's Morbin' Time. Basically the party around this movie continued.
And so, although the movie had only just come out two months prior, Sony decided to re-release the film this weekend, thinking maybe it was on the track to becoming a kind of cult hit.
The film opened on over 1000 screens across the country. And on Friday—*drum roll*— it made, in total across the country, $85,000. Basically that means something like 5 people saw it in each one of its theaters across that whole day.
I love every part of this story. I love that people decided not to kick this film but instead to weirdly celebrate it. And it’s the strange moment where the internet is actually better than real life; if you were at a party and someone kept saying of your movie, “That movie is going to beat Endgame, it’s going to make 3 trillion dollars,” it would just sound nasty. But online people instead dreamt up a whole fantasy around this film, and somehow the movie and its creators were included in that rather than mocked.
Compare this to what happened when Cats came out.
I love that Morbius’ fans also continued to celebrate the film even after it was terrible, and that even they came up with hilarious ideas, such as that Morbius would walk around saying "It's Morbin' Time."
I also love that Sony completely misunderstood what those fans were saying and re-released the film, not because that looks to have been a disastrous move, but because that's the kind of adorable misunderstanding you would expect from the older generation.
And I love that there's about 5000 people in this crazy country who said on Friday, Hell yes, It IS Morbin' Time. I gotta be honest, I kind of wish I were one of them. And I wonder if their numbers won’t grow over time.
Sony, you might have had the right idea. You just need to give it some time.
OBIWAN KENOTGETABREAK
So, the third episode of Obi-Wan dropped this week. And I think I've come to conclusion that this series is basically good fan fiction.
Between the Ben/Vader confrontation and the Third Sister capturing Leia, it's veering pretty far away from everything we've always been led to believe. Ben and Vader's interaction on the Death Star very clearly signals that they have not had any contact with each other. Vader even comments about just how weak Ben has become; why say that if he's already seen him at that point 8 years later?
(Also, while I can Feel the Force-logic of Ben being now bad at everything Jedi—it's the only way to truly hide from the Sith Lites—man does it make for disappointment onscreen. The fact that for some reason the show also refuses to truly set loose the Inquisitors—upon each other, if nothing else—only makes this frustration worse. Right now this show looks to have the least interesting Jedi stuff of the entire saga.)
The idea that Leia would have been sussed out by Third Sister, too, just feels completely out of keeping with everything we've understood about her. I was willing to go with Kid-Leia-Knows-What-You're-Thinking for a bit, but even that has given her a power set adult Leia did not demonstrate.
But it's also undeniable that Obi-Wan and Vader meeting was interesting, and that what Vader immediately wanted to do to him was burn him alive felt fitting, in a tidy WWDVD fan fiction kind of way.
I think the whole thing should maybe be A LOT crazier. And for me that starts and ends with Third Sis. Forget Vader; she is the driving force of this series. So why not let her off the chain.
There was also news this week that Moses Ingram, the actress playing Third Sister, has been getting death threats for daring to be Black in a Star Wars show. It's horrifying, and at the same time I sort of kick myself for being surprised. Kelly Marie Tran had the same thing happened to her after The Last Jedi came out.
Friend of the newsletter and hero of the people Chris Kent wrote me a couple weeks ago after I had written about how there are some ways in which Star Trek is superior to Star Wars. And I keep thinking of this thing that he said: "Star Wars is make-believe, whereas Star Trek is 'this could be us….’” His point being, Star Trek HAS to be thinking about things like diversity and represenation because it means to reflect the future we hope for. Meanwhile Star Wars is about a “galaxy far far from away.”
(He smart, that Chris Kent. Chris Kent, go write a newsletter!)
Now, I think I'd quibble with the idea that Star Wars is not also responding in some ways to our real world. But I agree, it is very much a fantasy series—that is to say, it’s meant to be understood as an entire universe unto itself. There can never come a point, as happened on Battlestar Galactica, where we hear a Bob Dylan song, or someone has a Sony Walkman. The saga may be riffing on our reality at times, but it must seem like a totally different place.
And I wonder if Chris isn’t write, that that fantasy aspect doesn't complicate questions about representation and diversity. As I wrote in EPISODE 715, "Star Wars has no notions of inclusion or diversity baked into its DNA." It established rules about what its universe looks like in the first three films, and honestly, it looked REAL white, and very cis-male.To now start pushing lots of women and people of color (and who knows, maybe somewhere in the Star Wars universe there really is a queer person?) can feel like Our-Universe concerns pushing in on that world. I mean, it doesn't to me, because the characters all seem very true to the universe. But still it's undeniable these kinds of moves feel inorganic in part because they are. They come from real world concerns, not the story.
It's the same problem Marvel has; it spent so many years building a world of white male heroes that when it steps too far outside those lines—it's fine to have a black or female supporting character, but not leads--it seems like a political choice rather than something coming naturally from the story. And again, that’s because it is.
I don't remember Black Panther facing the same level of craziness. I wonder if that's because it imagined really a whole new world, Wakanda. And because it was some place really new and self-contained it didn't push the same buttons.
None of this is to justify what's gone on with Tran, Ingram or anyone else. It's disgusting. It's so hard to understand people who love Star Wars wanting to shame or frighten anyone.
But I do wonder if some of what we're seeing is about Star Wars, too. John Boyega, Finn in the sequels, has complained about how he and his character were treated. "What I would say to Disney," he said in GQ in 2020, "is do not bring out a black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are and then have them pushed to the side. It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up."
"You knew what to do with these other people, but when it came to Kelly Marie Tran, when it came to John Boyega, you know fuck all. So what do you want me to say? What they want you to say is, ‘I enjoyed being a part of it. It was a great experience...’ Nah, nah, nah. I’ll take that deal when it’s a great experience. They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley. Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.”
Bottom line there’s a lot of messed up stuff going on in fandom right now…
A thread well worth clicking on for laughs.
For Pride this week I wrote a piece for America that the church needs queer saints. And I got well and truly ratioed. (Ratioed, v.: to have the number of comments to a post greatly outweigh the number of times it was liked.) There were hundreds of comments about how homosexuality is disgusting, many quotations from St. Augustine—which is pretty wild—and lots of lectures. Pretty much any time I've gone to Twitter in the last three days, I've got more than 20 new comments, almost all of them negative.
That hasn't bothered me. I'm good with what I had to say. And I actually think there may be a lot to learn from the kinds of reactions I got, about the kind of assumptions that people bring to any conversation about LGBTQ issues and the church. (For instance, I can't tell you how many people threw quotes from other saints at me about sodomy, which a) shows zero percent awareness that there's lots of queer life and sexuality that has nothing to do with anal penetration; and b) gives those saints a very “Sorry, this is a members only (aka men-only/white men-only) club) feel.
But what was probably most interesting to me was that a year ago I wrote about being gay as a priest, and got almost no negative reactions online at all. But I write about the need for LGBT saints and people go banana. I had no idea that would be more controversial. It'll be interesting to dig into why it is.
Also had a great interview with the Catholic composer Sarah Hart in the magazine this weekend. I really really loved talking to her. Just a wonderful human being.
THREE TWEETS
This is absolutely fictitious. Daniel Kibblesmith is so funny.
Like I said, fan fiction.
But really, take all the time you need.
Substack is telling me I’m just about over the size limit, so I best be gone. I leave you with a video of 76-year-old actor André de Shields, who has been killing it in Hadestown for years now, finally retiring from the role last week.
And he took the opportunity to sing a beautiful song (which you’ll have to click on the link below to see). Consider it my hope for you this week.
Look after yourselves. See you next week!