In a historic decision of the US Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade was overruled on Friday 24th June 2022 by the new precedent of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation. Dobbs was the Mississippi state health officer who was sued by the state’s only abortion clinic to challenge the constitutionality of a law which banned abortion after 15 weeks. Prior to Friday, the enforcement of this law had been halted by lower court injunctions which prevented states from banning abortion before foetal viability at around 24 weeks, based on the 14th Amendment granting the right to privacy. Roe v Wade never legalised abortion across the board, it only prevented states from enforcing laws which banned abortion prior to 24 weeks, and was thus interpreted as a constitutional right to abortion until that period.
As was to be expected, delegating law-making around abortion back to the states was interpreted with the greatest hysteria and hyperbole imaginable. Despite the explicit constitutionality of delegating the greatest possible powers to the state level, it should be of no surprise that the same people who ascribe more power to feeling than to the first amendment had no consideration at all for the rights of states to form their own laws on sensitive issues.
Instead of rejoicing at the approximately 300,000 female lives saved as a result of a so-called ban on abortion (which this is not), feminists were quick to scream that this violates their bodily autonomy and is the result of male overrepresentations in positions of power. This is despite the fact that the judge who made this possible was Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic mother of seven and one of three women who are currently serving on the Supreme Court of the United States.
They simultaneously claim that the decision to have an abortion is that of the woman concerned, and that no man (including the father) should have any say, while maintaining that parental responsibilities should be split evenly between both parents (and in many cases other parties such as nannies, nurseries, and the state through the education system). Furthermore, not only should parental responsibilities be split evenly, but the woman concerned has a permanent claim on the financial resources of the man.
This claim begs the obvious question of how it is in any way feminist to allow men to abscond from their parental responsibilities by allowing abortion, in which both mother and child are gravely affected, but the father can walk away scot-free? Given that a study which interviewed women who considered abortion and decided against it found that in five out of six cases, they did not regret their choice, it seems likely that in many cases the women concerned face significant pressure to end the pregnancy.
Looking in the abstract, this raises questions about who the culture of no-consequences sex really benefits. Despite increasingly reliable contraception, rates of abortion are increasing, which demonstrates that there will always be greater ‘risk’ of sex for women. Additionally, a culture which praises hedonistic sexual lifestyles inherently delegitimises the mature, committed lifestyle which most women want, leading to women adopting more and more masculine ways of being. Given how early feminists stressed the equal value of women, this delegitimisation of femininity seems a far cry from their initial intentions.
However, despite the inevitable reaction of hysteria, there may yet be a positive outcome for those on the opposite side of the fence. The calls for a sex strike will not just reduce the hedonistic sexual behaviour of much of the population and all its negative consequences (including unwanted pregnancy), but in doing so may encourage them to develop a more nuanced outlook on sexual behaviour and morality than ‘put whatever you want into whatever you want as long as there is consent’.
Spending less time on Tinder may also have economic benefits, as well as tanking the share price and punishing the individuals who have endorsed and profited from a company which aims to take all moral value out of sexual behaviour. In the longer term, the sex strike among liberal women may force on-the-fence men into the arms of more conservative women, thus leading to the creation of a far more conservative next generation. And yet it makes sense that those so committed to the principle that killing babies is acceptable would allow their entire ideology to die out just for the sake of proving said point.
To sum up, there is no feminist case for abortion. In this way as with so many others, ‘equality’ has been a trojan horse with which to tarnish traditional, feminine, childbearing women in order to create more wage workers. This ultimately benefits those at the top of the capitalist system (men), while making the women concerned insecure and miserable. In encouraging women to deny their reproductive capacity, abortion not only kills children but also kills part of the women concerned. The way to be a good woman is not to bend to the will of a modern man.
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Right Place, Right Time, Wrong Movement
During an interview for the H. L. Mencken Club, writer Derek Turner described political correctness as a ‘clown with a knife’, combining more petty nanny state tendencies with a more totalitarian aim, thereby allowing it to gain considerable headway as no-one takes it seriously enough. In a previous article, the present author linked such a notion to the coverup of grooming gangs across Britain, with it being one of the most obvious epitomes of such an idea, especially for all the lives ruined because of the fears of violating that ‘principle’ being too strong to want to take action.
The other notion that was linked was that of Islamic terrorism, whereby any serious attempts to talk about it (much less respond to it in an orderly way) is hindered by violating political correctness – with both it and Islamic extremism being allowed to gain much headway in turn. Instead, the establishment falls back onto two familiar responses. At best, they treat any such event with copious amounts of sentimentality, promising that such acts won’t divide the country and we are all united in whatever communitarian spirit is convenient to the storyline.
At worst, they aren’t discussed at all, becoming memory-holed in order to not upset the current state of play. Neither attitude does much good, especially in the former’s case as it can lead, as Theodore Dalrymple noted, to being the ‘forerunner and accomplice of brutality whenever the policies suggested by it have been put into place’. The various ineffective crackdowns on civil liberties following these attacks can attest to that.
However, while there is no serious current political challenge to radical Islam, there was for a time a serious enough alternative movement that was, and despite it not being completely mainstream, certainly left its mark.
That was Britain’s Counter-Jihad movement, a political force that definitely lived up to the name for those who could remember it. Being a loud and noisy affair, it protested (up and down the country) everything contingent with Islamism, from terrorism to grooming gangs. It combined working-class energy with militant secularism, with its supposed influences ranging as far as Winston Churchill to Christopher Hitchens. It was often reactionary in many of its viewpoints but with appeals to left-wing cultural hegemony. It was as likely to attack Islam for its undermining of women’s and LGBT rights as for its demographic ramifications through mass immigration.
While hard to imagine now, it was the real deal, with many of its faces and names becoming countercultural icons among the British right. Tommy Robinson, Anne Marie Waters, Paul Weston, Pat Condell, Jonaya English, as well as many others fitted this moniker to varying degrees of success. It had its more respectable intellectual faces like Douglas Murray and Maajid Nawaz, while even entertaining mainstream politics on occasion, most notably with Nigel Farage and UKIP (especially under the leadership of Gerard Batten) flirting with it from time to time.
While being a constant minor mainstay in British politics for the early part of the 21st century, it was in 2017 when it reached its zenith. The numerous and culminating Islamic terrorist attacks that year, from Westminster Bridge to Manchester Arena to the London Borough Market as well as the failed Parsons Green Tube bombing had (cynically or otherwise) left the movement feeling horribly vindicated in many of its concerns. Angst among the public was high and palpable, to the point that even the BBC pondered as to whether 2017 had been ‘the worst year for UK terrorism’. Douglas Murray released his magnum opus in The Strange Death of Europe, of which became an instant best-seller and critical darling, all the while being a blunt and honest examination of many issues including that of radical Islam within Britain and much of the continent itself – something that would have previously been dismissed as mere reactionary commentary. And at the end of the year, the anti-Islam populist party For Britain begun in earnest, with its founder and leader in Anne Marie Waters promising to use it as a voice for those in Britain who ‘consider Islam to be of existential significance’.
In short, the energy was there, the timing was (unfortunately) right and the platforms were finally available to take such a concern to the mainstream. To paraphrase the Radiohead song, everything (seemed to be) in its right place.
Despite this, it would ironically never actually get better for the movement, with its steep decline and fall coming slowly but surely afterwards. This was most symbolically displayed in mid-2022 when For Britain folded, with Waters citing both far-left harassment and a lack of financial support due to the ongoing cost-of-living crisis in her decision to discontinue. This came shortly after its candidate Frankie Rufolo quite literally jumped for joy after coming last in the Tiverton and Honiton by-election, the last the party would contest. All the movement is now is a textbook case of how quickly fortunes can change.
What was once a sizeable movement within British politics is now just as much a relic of 2017 as the last hurrah of BGMedia, the several jokes about Tom Cruise’s abysmal iteration of The Mummy (half-finished trailer and film alike) and the several viral Arsenal Fan TV videos that have aged poorly for… obvious reasons. Those in its grassroots are now alienated and isolated once more, and are presumably resorting to sucking a lemon. Why its complete demise happened is debatable, but some factors are more obvious than others.
The most common explanation is one the right in general has blamed for all their woes in recent years – what Richard Spencer dubbed ‘The Great Shuttening’. This conceit contended that reactionary forces would eventually become so powerful in the political arena that the establishment would do all it could to restrict its potential reach for the future. This was an idea that played out following the populist victories of Brexit and Trump, largely (and ironically) because of the convenient seppuku that the alt-right gave to the establishment following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, leading to much in the way of censorship (on social media especially) with that event and the death left in its wake being the pretext.
Needless to say, it wasn’t simply Spencer and his ilk that were affected, confined to either Bitchute or obscure websites in sharp contrast from their early 2010s heyday. Counter-jihad was another casualty in the matter, with many of its orgs and figureheads being banned on social media and online payment services, limiting the potential growth that they would have had in 2017 and beyond. In turn, the only access they now had to the mainstream was the various hit pieces conducted on them, which unsurprisingly didn’t endear many to these types of characters and groups.
But if they couldn’t gain grassroots support (on social media or off it), it might be for another obvious reason for the collapse: the movement itself was not an organically developed one, of which made its downfall somewhat inevitable. This is because much of the movement’s main cheerleaders and backers were that of the conservative elite (or Conservatism Inc., for pejorative purposes), on both sides of the Atlantic, rather than the public at large. For Tommy Robinson in particular, the movement’s unofficial figurehead for the longest time, this was most apparent.
On the British end, it was a matter of promoting Robinson in differing ways. At best, they tactfully agreed with him even if disagreeing with his behaviour and antics more broadly, and at worst, they promoted him as someone who wasn’t as bad as much of the press claimed he was. That he had friendly interviews in the Spectator, puff pieces written for him in the Times, all the while having shows from This Morning and The Pledge allowing right-wing commentators to claim that he was highlighting supposed legitimate contentions of the masses demonstrated much of this promotion.
American conservative support came through similar promotion. This mostly came during his various court cases in 2018 and 2019, whereby many major networks framed him as a victim of a kangaroo court and a political prisoner (all the while failing to understand basic British contempt of court laws as they did so under ‘muh freedom’ rhetoric). However, most of the important American support was financial. This often came directly from neoconservative think tanks, mainly the Middle East Forum which gave Robinson much financial support, as did similar organisations. To what end is unknown, but given the war-hawk views of some involved (including MEF head Daniel Pipes), it is reasonable to assume something sinister was going on with that kind of help.
This in turn compounded another central reason as to the movement’s collapse: the genuine lack of authenticity in it as a whole. This is because the movement’s pandering to secularism and left-wing thought as expressed earlier are acceptable within mainstream political discourse. This sharp contrast between the inherently left-wing Robinson and Waters and their ideologically reactionary base made the movement unstable from the get-go. Much of it was a liberal movement designed to attack Islam as undermining the West as defined by the cultural revolution of the 1960s, not a reactionary one attacking that revolution as a whole as well much to the chagrin of its supporters.
Counter-jihad was therefore just simply a more radical version of the acceptable establishment attack on Islamism. As Paul Gottfried wrote in a recent Chronicles column, ‘Those who loudly protest that Muslims oppose feminism and discriminate against homosexuals are by no means conservative. They are simply more consistent in their progressive views than those on the woke left who treat Islamic patriarchy indulgently’. It is for this reason that the mainstream right were far kinder to counter-jihad and Robinson in the early 2010s than the likes of actual right-wingers like Nigel Farage and the Bow Group under its current leadership.
It is no surprise then that a movement with such inauthentic leadership and contradictory ideology would collapse once such issues became too big to ignore, with Robinson himself being the main fall guy for the movement’s fate. With questions being asked about his background becoming too numerous, the consistent begging for donations becoming increasingly suspect and people eventually getting fed up of the pantomime he had set up of self-inflicted arrests and scandals, his time in the spotlight came to a swift end. His former supporters abandoned him in droves, all the while his performance in the 2019 European Elections was equally dismal, where he came in below the often-mocked Change UK in the North West region, to audible laughter. Following his surprise return to X, formerly Twitter, and his antics during Remembrance Day, scepticism regarding his motives, especially amongst people who would otherwise support him, has only increased.
Now this article isn’t designed to attack British Counter-Jihad as a movement entirely. What it is meant for is to highlight the successes and failings of the movement for better attempts in the future. For one example, as other have discussed elsewhere, when noting the failings of the 2010s right, having good leadership with a strong mass movement and sound financial backing is key.
Those that can get this right have been successful in recent years. The Brexit campaign was able to do this through having moderate and popular characters like Nigel Farage, eccentric Tories and prominent left-wingers like George Galloway be its face, all the while having funding from millionaires like Arron Banks and Tim Martin, who could keep their noses mostly clean. The MAGA movement stateside is a similar venture, with faces like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Tucker Carlson being its faces, with Peter Thiel as its (mostly) clean billionaire financier.
The British Counter-Jihad movement had none of that. Its leadership were often questionable rabble rousers, which while having some sympathy among the working class, often terrified much of the middle England vote and support needed to get anywhere. Its grassroots were often of a similar ilk, all the while being very ideologically out of step with its leadership and lacking necessary restraint, allowing for easy demonisation amongst a sneering, classist establishment. The funny money from neocon donors clearly made it a movement whose ulterior motives were troublesome to say the least.
Hence why counter-jihad collapsed, and its main figurehead’s only use now is living rent free in the minds of the progressive left and cynical politicians (and even cringeworthy pop stars), acting as a necessary bogeyman for the regime to keep their base ever so weary of such politics reappearing in the future.
However, this overall isn’t a good thing for Britain, as it needs some kind of movement to act as a necessary buffer against such forces in the future. As Robinson admitted in his book Enemy of the State, the problems he ‘highlighted… haven’t gone away. They aren’t going away.’ That was written all the way back in 2015 – needless to say, the situation has become much worse since then. From violent attacks, like the killing of Sir David Amess, to the failed bombing of Liverpool Women’s Hospital to the attempted assassination on Sir Salman Rushdie, to intimidation campaigns against Batley school teachers, autistic school children accidentally scuffing the Quran and the film The Lady of Heaven, such problems instead of going away have come back roaring with a vengeance.
In turn, in the same way that the grooming gangs issue cannot simply be tackled by occasional government rhetoric, tweets of support by the likes of actress Samantha Morton and GB News specials alone, radical Islam isn’t going to be dealt with by rabble rouser organisations and suspicious overseas money single-handedly. Moves like Michael Gove firing government workers involved with the Lady of Heaven protests are welcome, but don’t go anywhere near far enough.
Without a grassroots org or a more ‘respectable’ group acting as a necessary buffer against such forces, the only alternative is to have the liberal elite control the narrative. At best, they’ll continue downplaying it at every turn, joking about ‘Muslamic Ray Guns’ and making far-left activists who disrupt peaceful protests against Islamist terror attacks into icons.
As for the political establishment, they remain committed to what Douglas Murray describes as ‘Rowleyism’, playing out a false equivalence between Islamism and the far-right in terms of the threat they pose. As such, regime propagandists continue to portray the far-right as the villains in every popular show, from No Offence to Trigger Point. Erstwhile, the Prevent program will be given license to overly focus on the far-right as opposed to Islamism, despite the findings of the Shawcross Review.
In conclusion, British Counter-Jihad was simply a case of right place, right time but wrong movement. What it doesn’t mean is that its pretences should be relegated or confined to certain corners, given what an existential threat radical Islam poses, and as Arnold Toynbee noted, any society that doesn’t solve the crises of the age is one that quickly becomes in peril. British Counter-Jihad was the wrong movement for that. It’s time to build something new, and hopefully something better will take its place.
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Modern Feminists and the Anti-Bildungsroman
Over the recent decade, we have seen a certain type of storyline rise to popularity among critics. The plot usually follows a female character with some type of special power or circumstance who, by virtue of said power, is beset by some type of related conflict; sounds normal enough—this is the beginning of virtually every story.
However, in this case, the conflicts that develop around said heroines’ uniqueness do not always follow their growing or learning how to ethically or effectively use their power. Instead, it’s the opposite: their stories or the cultural interpretation thereof often involve the discovery, decision, or insistence that they do not have to grow or learn, but that it is society or the surrounding world that must adapt to and accept them. From Elsa, to Carol Danvers, to Rey (it cannot be stressed enough) Palpatine, some of the most lauded heroines in current media have followed this type of storyline—which, due to the the ways the characters interact with their settings and conflicts, involves several tropes of a common story type, the bildungsroman.
However, the plot structure and underlying tone of the aspects emphasized as worthwhile by critics classify them as an attempt to form a new genre: a kind of anti-bildungsroman that, in line with the beliefs of the modern feminism that usually advocates said storyline type, actively seeks to subvert the assumptions of the individual’s (here, the individual woman’s) relationship with the broader social structure. The execution of this storyline ironically does the female characters—and stories with female leads generally—several disservices that run counter to the stated goals of those behind the stories.
The Bildungsroman: what it is and what it isn’t.
Just for a refresher, a bildungsroman—German for “education novel”—is a story that intertwines the character’s ethical, psychological, and spiritual growth with the resolution of the conflict. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is as much about Alice’s learning not to behave like all the examples of toxic femininity she encounters through the story as it is actually getting out of the rabbit hole. Harry Potter learns as much about how to be a responsible young adult as how to actually cast spells (with the when and why invariably outweighing the what). The bulk of Aang’s story in Avatar: The Last Airbender involves not his learning how to use his powers as the Avatar, but his learning not to be a childish idiot who sticks his foot in his mouth at every turn. And who can forget Uncle Ben’s injunction to Peter Parker (established by Spider-Man: No Way Home as a theme that transcends the multiverse) about power and responsibility? It’s become nearly as iconic a scene as a still novice Luke Skywalker running through Dagobah with Yoda on his back, with nary a trickle of Force to be discerned by the anticipating audience.
In each of these, the external conflict is resolved and made more complex and dramatic by the character’s resolving some type of inner conflict—usually involving the growth from maturity to immaturity, selfishness to sacrifice, idleness to responsibility, &c.
Now, not every story is or needs to be a bildungsroman. We don’t always need heroes that change or grow—sometimes we need the opposite! It’s no coincidence that Conan the Barbarian and Superman, both unique because of their unchangeability, came out of the flux of the 1930s, when the average Joe, Jane, Jimmy, or Jill might rather enjoy a character who stands in opposition to the instabilities and shiftings around them.
There are many other examples of changeless characters coming out of changing times. The Lord of the Rings—specifically, Aragorn—came out of Tolkien’s effort to preserve English virtues and history through the trauma of values that were the Great War and Modernism (though, granted, Aragorn did a lot of growing up before Frodo receives the Ring). Later in the twentieth century, James Bond stood like a modern Conan (the parallels between their stories and characters are many, despite the obvious differences) amidst the unease of the Cold War. Nor does it always need to be so dire as these: in the ‘90s, Forrest Gump’s charm often inhered in how his simplemindedness showed how the problems around him might really have simple answers (at least within the bounds of his film), and the Dude of mistakened Lebowski fame would not be His Dudeness if he grew through his misadventures.
I list these to head off any claims of my placing standards on the female characters discussed below that I won’t apply to male characters. This is also why, other than this sentence, I won’t use the oft-bandied phrase “Mary Sue;” besides simplifying the argument into mere stereotypes, the phrase, or its male counterpart Gary Stu, implies that strong or unchanging characters are always bad or always lack depth. They may very well be, but my interest is not to simply descry it but to find out why. I come at the topic and characters below with one goal: to encourage complex characters and stories that do what we need art to do—to concretize the values we need to experience at a given time in ways that are timeless. Sometimes that can best be achieved by characters that grow, sometimes not; usually we need iterations of both simultaneously—often in the same story.
But the stories I’m focusing on do assume the complexity of a bildungsroman framework; in each case, the female character is placed in a situation where she is expected by society (and, often, the audience) to grow and she either flatly refuses to do so, or she grows in ways counter to her respective canon. In fact, the characters often self-consciously push against and subvert the canonical expectations for growth in various ways.
Elsa: Letting Go of Past Story Structures
The phenomenon that was Frozen was hailed by many as a deconstruction of the archetypal Disney princess story. Its setup follows many tropes of said genre: a girl of unique birth locked away by parents to prevent a misuse of her powers. However, from there the movie breaks the tradition of stories as late as Rapunzel (2010), which, itself, broke several tropes while adhering to familiar formats. Parents? The uredeemed source of her abuse. Prince charming? Actually the villain. The protagonist’s powers? To be used without compunction after letting go (of expectations? Of the need for self-control? The unnamed antecedent of her song’s Dionysian “it” is as multifarious as the audience might wish).
It would be wrong to say Elsa experiences no growth or argue her character lacks compelling internal conflicts. After going to live alone on her mountaintop (notably embodying several characteristics of the traditional ice queen villain), she does come down and remit her isolation upon learning that by embracing her powers she has caused an eternal winter in Arendelle. Furthermore, not all of the movie’s deconstructions are negative. While the ending of stories in a marriage signifies the restored balance and completion of comedy—and is much more than merely reducing the female to an ornament of the male and his restored power structure, as the format’s feminist critics allege—Frozen’s replacing the familiar eros-driven love story with one of phileo between sisters should be welcomed as an expansion of the virtues and values we enjoy being explored. However, from there we are faced by the irony that the same voices who push the “sisters > prince charming” dynamic often insist on seeing eros in any story featuring two male friends—an unfortunate sexist double standard…
My focus here on Frozen and the others is as much on the cultural response to the stories as the stories, themselves. The danger to Anna posed by her love-at-first-sight relationship with Prince Hans was not rectified by placing it against the authentic relationship with Kristoff; rather, the reversal of the form was turned retroactively onto all other Disney stories about love at first sight, which had the tone less of adding complexity that had never been established than of burning down the now malicious parts of what had. Finally, it was not a song about Elsa’s learning how to judiciously use her powers that every parent of kids of a certain age (or, let’s face it, young adults, too) had to listen to on repeat for the rest of 2013 and most of 2014. It was a song advocating the audience (especially girls) vicariously “Let it go!” along with Elsa. It was a kicking song, and I don’t begrudge any young girl for making her parents want to break a speaker because of it, but it did, thematically, set the ideological perspective and tone for latter heroines that would come after.
Rey Palpatine: A Victim of her Advocates
The next female character who declines to grow in ways prescribed by her lore is Rey Palpatine. Establishing Rey’s arc or lack thereof is difficult due to her appearing in three films with different directors with conflicting goals for her movies. The lack of unified vision, added to the retconning the trilogy exacted on the established Lucas canon and universe, makes it difficult to treat Rey’s plot either as a uniform whole or as a consistent intentional decision to buck expectations.
Nonetheless, against the backdrop of Luke’s growth under Yoda Rey’s development falls short. While Luke’s progression is drawn over two, if not all three, of the original movies, Rey is able to, for example, beat Kylo Ren the first time she touches a lightsaber. This could be possibly excused if, like Anakin, she were shown to have a high concentration of midichlorians and, thus, a more preternatural adeptness with the Force; however, such a reveal, set up by Abrams in The Force Awakens, was rejected by Rian Johnson in favor of making her a nobody in The Last Jedi (a more vicious crime against Star Wars lore than simply creating a new heroine backstory—or, really, refusing to—might necessarily entail). Abrams, then, had to pick up the pieces in The Rise of Skywalker to make what he could of Johnson’s arson. Central as it is, Rey’s disjointed arc is by no means the only problem with the new Star Wars trilogy.
Enough has been written and recorded about the canonical breaks between the original and the prequel trilogies and Rey’s that I don’t need to belabor the differences. Furthermore, many of Rey’s lacks can be explained, and possibly excused, by acknowledging the directorial conflicts of the trilogy. However, this does not excuse how Rey’s character was marketed: she was, we were often reminded, a female heroine, and that to reject her and all the incongruous elements of her story, even for the sake of preserving the larger Star Wars universe in good faith, was nothing less than sexist bigotry resulting from an irrational fear of strong women (which, strangely enough, had not reared its head in response to any of the other strong, complex females in the Star Wars universe).
The insistence among Rey’s defenders that she is a prime example of both a strong female character and a victim of unfair bigotry unfortunately sets the bar quite low for what is considered a good character—besides disregarding a devoted fanbase who were already invested in finding in the star of the revival trilogy as much depth as they could. Again, my focus is less on whether Rey consistently grows (if she does, it is disjointed due to director disagreements and rushed in a “tell rather than show” kind of way—a sin for character development of any genre). At issue here is the implied insistence that she should not have to grow—that standards of growth from a previous canon are at best an unfair standard and at worst a reactionary response from a threatened tradition of supposedly (but, as fans know, not really) male lore and predominantly male audience against a new heroine. That Rey’s greatness, thus, relied on the spectre of sexist pushback for its vitality and clout did not strike anyone as an issue to be worried about.
Carol Danvers: The Unrestrained Will
My final example of a heroine who rejects the complexity of growth prescribed by her own canon—and the one that does so most openly—is the adult version of Elsa, Marvel’s Carol Danvers. Begun in production as Elsa was gracing theaters, Captain Marvel (2019) added the element of the character’s rethinking her entire culture—of decolonizing her mind, as it were—to the formula, providing her further justification to eschew the self-control and prescribed growth of the traditional superhero story.
Danvers’s story begins with her training opposite Jude Law’s Yon-Rogg, who is preparing her to be a Kree warrior. It is against his mentoring admonitions to control her impulses and to use her head over her heart—and to become “the best version of yourself”—that the rest of her story takes place. Through the movie, she pieces together her disjointed memories to discover the Kree she is fighting for against the Skrull are actually the baddies, and that she is a human whose powers come from Kree technology she destroyed but which Yon-Rogg and the civilization’s Supreme Intelligence AI are trying to still utilize in her.
For the present I’ll ignore the fact that the movie reduces the 1970s “Kree-Skrull War” match between two bloodthirsty races in into a one-sided genocide of the Skrull by the Kree that resembles less the source material and more the modern revisionist simplifications of history into binaries between rapacious, patriarchal colonists and innocent, victimized indigenous. At issue here is that the heroine discovers, in a reverse-brainwashing sequence, that she has actually been misled (gaslit, brainwashed, Stockholm syndromed, all the common terms) by the Kree, and that her assumptions and even her own mind are complicit with the evils of the Kree. She must, thus, decolonize her worldview as she works out whence she got her powers—which, upon learning she gained them through an attempt to save the Skrull, could be used without any moral qualms about their being created by the antagonists.
Within the bounds of the movie, it’s a compelling conflict, and one which does necessitate Danvers’s rethinking and rejecting Yon-Rogg’s inducements to use her powers in what the Kree would say were the right ways (but which are, in reality, against her practical and ethical interests). However, it is not, technically a character arc: rather, it is an anti-arc. Released from the usual inducement to meet power with self-control, or to clearly delineate between her power and her self (with the former always needing to predominate), Danvers simply uses her powers.
This results in some great cinematics that, I’ll admit, meet the desire for a decent action movie with a satisfyingly insolent protagonist. However, Danvers nonetheless loses a major potential character arc.
Even in the final moment with Yon-Rogg, where, in rejecting his last-ditch effort to manipulate her into fighting as herself without her powers (i.e. on terms in which he knows he can beat her), she simply blows him away, thus showing that he’s right: that she cannot control her impulses.
She claims she has nothing to prove to him, but what about to herself? This is, after all, one of the classic canonical superhero conflicts—where the line between self and power falls, which can provoke further questions of what can ultimately be relied upon, or how to maintain one’s self despite the changes brought by power. What about conflicts regarding the dependability of her newfound way of seeing the world, a major question in a movie where the inability to trust reality (brainwashing Kree, shapeshifting Skrull, etc) is a common motif? No, once she gets woke to the Kree, Danvers never questions her new episteme. Why allow internal conflicts to burden her character with unnecessary complexity—especially when we can resolve all the movie’s external conflicts with unlimited girlboss power, smashing the patriarchy—err, the Kree—with their own tools, instead?
This lack of reflection on her powers is a major part of what makes Danvers’s character flatter than either Elsa’s or Rey’s. Both of them at least experience doubt regarding their powers and their relationship to them and their relative place in the world. However, as if stuck in Elsa’s famous song, Danvers’ climactic embracing of her powers keeps her in a third-act moment of what could have been a five-act growth arc.
There is also the unadmitted Superman paradox.
The Superman paradox arose when writers realized an all-powerful being could have no serious conflicts—and, therefore, no compelling story. His creators had to steadily introduce kryptonite to keep him interesting. Presumably her creators knew of this but didn’t think it would apply.
It can certainly be argued that incorporating both an awakening embrace of power and an overcoming of weakness to that power would be expecting too much—and trying to include two major conflicts in one movie. However, completely eschewing any real weakness (Danvers’ conflict involves her adopting and subsequently rejecting weaknesses she does not intrinsically have, which are accidental and, thus, ultimately unserious as conflicts) still sets a low bar of complexity when most superhero movies include some sort of chink in the hero’s armor for future exploration. Danvers’s embracing of her powers is so wholly untainted that, as cathartic for some as the final sequence may be (complete with her acquiring the ultimate symbol of freedom, flight), the seeds for future growth or reflection—the marks of a hero’s staying power—are, sadly, lacking.
[1] Feminist Heroines: A Rejection of Complex Females
None of this is to deny that Elsa’s, Rey’s, or Danvers’s movies are entertaining and have devoted, good-faith fanbases. As with the unchanging heroes I mention above, people can and should enjoy what they like and feel they need. However, this leads to my qualms with the idea of a character type that shouldn’t have to grow in expected or sympathetic ways. Among other things, I fear the contention that traditional complexity and character growth are arbitrary impositions meant to reject characters because of their femaleness will result in less complexity in female characters, as well as create, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, an antipathy or apathy among audiences towards new female characters—not because they are female, but because they are simple.
However, so long as a certain brand of feminist critics assume that all efforts to mold a female character according to a broader ethical framework are, really, a patriarchal attempt to keep women down, we will continue to get simplistic stories and morals thereof like these. This should not surprise us. The same critics who hold to this implicitly Marxist reading of traditional story structures interpret Pride and Prejudice as an anti-woman novel because it suggests some of Elizabeth Bennet’s problems can only be fixed by personal reflection and reformation—i.e. because the novel is in part a bildungsroman—despite her embodying most of the same traits of their stated favorite heroines (even those discussed above!). If that is how such critics interpret a thoroughly complex character arc, we should not hold out hope for better from them or from studios working to satisfy them as an audience.
So, what should we do? For one, we should flatly deny the accusations that disliking an individual character equates antagonism or bigotry against an entire category; besides employing an irrefutable denial of moral legitimacy, it tries to shoehorn a Marxist reading that sees individuals as merely instances of their group or class. In trying to save characters from simplicity, we should also fight the simplification of critique.
When stories or characters come out that do, indeed, participate in complexity in some way, we should promote them. This may mean being open to new reworkings of stories (on that note, I had originally included The Legend of Korra above, but on further reflection and research of perspectives, I decided the Avatar Korra does grow in ways consistent with the precedents of the Avatar universe that I had not considered before). While above I critiqued the characters for breaking from their canons, it can be equally damaging for story to never stretch what has already been. The best stories will, in my view, resurrect familiar elements of their canons while showing that new arcs are still possible therein. So, we should vote with our pounds, dollars, and online engagements to show at least the less ideology-driven studios that complexity of story matters to audiences more than character identity politics.
A converse of this is to reject stories built around transgressive or socially deconstructive elements, and to educate ourselves on why such things do not and should not be privileged as equally valid views or stories (being anti-stories) in the marketplace of ideas—especially when those who promote them would not and are not extending the same toleration to the rest of us.
Finally, as we at The Mallard have advocated and tried to put into practice, we should create the things we want to see. If nothing else, this will help us understand how to interpret the other art we consume. Complexity is difficult, and accomplishing it subtly and succinctly is even moreso. It might discredit me as a writer to put it in print, but I had to cut 250+ pages of my novel Sacred Shadows and Latent Light, most of which was backstory and characterization. Necessary for fleshing out my characters for myself, but not inherently necessary for developing the book’s conflict. The experience paradoxically made me more sympathetic but also less yielding when it comes to character depth. I hope I’ve shown both above in my treatment of characters who have, in theory (certainly in budget), better writers than I behind them.
[One aspect of Captain Marvel that is only peripherally related to Danvers’s relationship with her powers, but which nonetheless aligns with the eschewing of usual self-control progression, is her treatment of the minor male characters in the film. Danvers has the perfect excuse to treat new people with suspicion, and, perhaps excepting Stan Lee on the bus, she enjoys it—from ____ to committing theft grand auto. Of course, the trope of an apparent alien not conforming to local property laws goes as far back as Thor (and, of course, farther), but the undertone here is that the theft is justified in response to the man admittedly creepily asking Danvers for a smile. She later shows that her default to rudeness is not a casualty of her untrusting circumstances: she responds to someone as unthreatening as Tom Holland’s Peter Parker in Avengers: Endgame in as insolent a manner as she does to the characters in her movie—an indecency for which I have not been able to forgive her.]
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What we must take from Marx
Britain is a nation that enjoys making light of its peculiarities and eccentricities. We enjoy having a laugh over a slightly self deprecating and scathing analysis of the fine-points of our society. We are keenly aware of the little things that set us apart – most famously the class system.
Unblemished by the tumults of the continent, we never saw fit to put whole socio-economic stratas to death, and such, on this isle has evolved a range of economic classes; that at times can seem whole cultures within themselves. The topic of a good Harry Enfield sketch, the plethora of verbal inflections in dialect, or what one tends to do on a Sunday, to general mannerism and pattern of speech – there is much that can set one into working, middle, or upper class. We view class not through a reasoned analysis, nor through a simple review of how much money is in one’s wallet – in fact, these tend to be quite secondary thoughts when judging someone’s place in the hierarchy.
Class is understood through a range of social signifiers, all of which have their root in one’s upbringing, which have their root in the upbringing of one’s father, and his father, and his father, and so on.
No matter how much money you win for your coffers, no matter how noble and high your method of work is, no matter how much you may put on a rendition of received pronunciation – you cannot really change your class. You may own a country estate, go shooting pheasants with the lads on Sunday, you may call your son Tarquin, but if your Dad came from a pit village, and passed down the speech, mannerism, and sentiments of said pit village to you – you’ll never leave the place. You may be able to win your son a jaunt up the social ladder, Joseph Chamberlain’s little known son called Neville transcended his father’s position in the middle class by growing up far away from his Dad at Eton, managing something of a different upbringing thereby.
The ultimate result of this strange institution is an utterly cartoonish understanding of class. It is entirely possible in this view of things, that a well-born feckless son from a manor in the home counties could spend his days shepherding pit-ponies around mineshafts in South Wales, and still outrank Gwyn Jones who was born in the pit village just adjacent, and made enough money to buy that very country estate mentioned.
Do not suppose that I write against such cartoons, they are quite wonderful, and I wish not for some Jacobin iconoclasm to mandate state-approved classes based upon occupation. These things make brilliant Harry Enfield sketches, however, when we seek to understand British society, and thereby create a successful right-wing movement, we have no time for the twee cartoons of such a sketch. We can not begin to engage in a successful right-wing, or nationalist political program without a firm understanding of how social classes interact in this country, every political movement must find itself between a class antagonism, lest it fail. Hence, we must begin to integrate Marx’s view of class into our thinking. Marx, despite standing in near complete contradiction to us, is the only thinker from which we can concretely define and analyse the real and tangible class divisions within the British people, beyond the thesis of a sketch.
Marxist class analysis centres around how one relates to the means of production. Totally ignoring someone’s salary or mannerisms – Marx defines class purely through the manner in which one works. We all know of the two main classes of industrial capitalism he expounds upon – the proletarian, and the bourgeois. The bourgeois class owns means of production (in Marx’s time this could be a cotton mill or a steelworks) he holds this capital, and purchases wage labour in order to produce goods with it. The Proletarian class are the folk from whom wage labour is purchased, not owning any means of production themselves, the working class sell their labour-power in order to make a living.
Furthermore, Marx introduces the petit-bourgeois class. Marxists (who cannot for the life of them agree on anything) disagree on what exactly this class is, and whom makes up its ranks. Simply, it could be said, the petit-bourgeois class may own alternative forms of capital (such as a small shop) but are unlikely to purchase labour power in the working of this capital, and wherein he does, he likely works side by side with the proletarians he pays.
Now, Marx does not ramble on like this all day, and he eventually gets to the point: antagonism. The ultimate purpose of delving into these social relations is getting to grips with the separate desires and interests each class works toward. To put it simply, the proletarian seeks to labour as little as possible for the greatest wage. The bourgeois, inversely, wishes for the proletarian to labour as much for the smallest possible wage.
In this, we find Marx’s most valuable lesson. In taking up his understanding of class, we need not blanketly throw his particular analysis of the Victorian urban sprawl onto our day, we need not even use the word bourgeois and such – in fact, the economic relations of our day can be said to have deviated so much from Marx’s day that such terms are useless. We must centre in on the antagonism between the classes, while also putting key caveats on our understanding of it.
If one is to ignore this doctrine of antagonism, then one is to ignore nearly all of British political history. Is not the rift that has dominated our nation since even before the Civil War that of Whig and Tory? One cannot separate these two groups from their diametric class antagonism. The Tory of the country, who profits from agriculture, who finds himself well off in the ancient landed hierarchies. The Whig who profits from the city, who thrives in more modern and capitalistic relations of the mill and steelwork. There are few debates of British political history that can be fully understood without getting to grips with this specific sociological battle. We cannot look to Peel’s full thrust support for the abolition of the corn laws, and championing of free trade thereby, without understanding that the Whig sought out this reform in order to ensure the flow of cheap grain into urban centres, and the mouths of their proletarians, at the expense of the Tory landowner and his tenant. Without this economic antagonism, there is no movement to abolish the corn laws.
Now, this is not to say that all hitherto history is that of class struggle, we should not assume that Peel was consciously plotting to pull the rug under the Tory landowner – no one thinks this way, in fact, class antagonism while informing these political disputes can sometimes enter the sub-conscious. We can understand this doctrine without becoming totally affixed to it.
Principally, we must maintain that class is not the prime fraternity of man. There is no international working class or the like, and such is a fanciful idea. Ultimately, one’s nation and ethnicity trump their class identity. Leftists like to imagine that they have more in common with a working class Chinaman than a billionaire of their ethnic kin, but while Richard Branson may have vastly different economic interests; you can share a conversation in your mutually native language, you celebrate the same festivities every year, you probably share the same cultural references and tidbits. Man is much more than his economic interests, and his identity goes much beyond what he’d like to be paid at work – such a totalising view of class ignores the depth that makes up men’s lives.
Nonetheless, we can simultaneously hold that ethnos is the prime fraternity of man, while recognising the inherent divisions within such a thing. Without a comprehension of these differences, we will remain ignorant as to how to effectively mobilise our people in a political movement. Blindly assuming that if we put forward a political program that broadly seeks to better the condition of the native Briton, that such will rally all sections of our people will lead us to ruin.
While it is true that in ‘diverse’ societies, democracy simply becomes an ethnic headcount (see South Africa) such diversity is concentrated in certain areas of our country. Areas such as Bradford fit this model much more, wherein the diametric antagonism between the native and immigrant groups naturally trumps the bounds of class, however in other areas of the nation this is not such. (Ironically, it is class antagonism that brought this into being. Former industrial areas are highly saturated with immigrant groups due to the importation of cheap labour into mills and cotton works, for example.) Thereby, we must understand the class antagonisms we can ride, and the classes with whom we have appeal.
To illustrate this, let us think to the average voter in the 1983 general election, the man who voted for Thatcher, and the man who voted for Foot. The man who voted for Thatcher, 38 years on, has likely benefited from the deindustrialisation of the country, much more attuned to a neoliberal regime of international finance and services. He is likely insulated from the demographic issues of the nation, perhaps he will scoff at some anti-social behaviour on the tube, but he is not bound by public transport. Let us think now to the man who voted for Foot, he has seen the industries his family worked in for generations crumble before his eyes, and the economic impetus of his town dry up. Equally, he has seen an unprecedented swamping of its demographic character in mere decades. He has lost his home, and his work at the behest of short sighted, shock doctrinaire neoliberalism.
Who is more likely, do you think, to support a nationalist cause? We all know that the working class tend to be more right-wing in our day, but if we do not understand the antagonism (being in this case, deindustrialisation) that this tendency has its roots in, then we shall fail to harness this support. Once we comprehend this, we will understand that nationalism has no future among the jungles of the free market, it must entail economic nationalism, and an active role of the state in economic affairs in order to steer the economy toward the national interest.
Without being at the parapet of class antagonism, that fuels all successful political movements, we march aimlessly into bogs and marshes. We must understand that nationalism has to be a movement in the interests of the disenfranchised native working class, that acts in the interests of that class. Without this, we are but ideologues barking into the wind.
