“Still, even though David wrestles with mental illness that feels cloudy in description and specificity, there are moments when Legion touched a nerve of emotional truth with his experience — such as whenever David struggled with the idea of whether he is worthy of love and can change as a person despite his troubled nature. The series finale ends on an image of baby David cooing in his crib against yellow satin, his whole life laid out before him. We don’t get any answers to what that future will look like. Will the love of a solid family make him into a better man? When the time comes, will he accept help for his mental-health struggles? Will he use his power to aid instead of harm?
The image of young David in his crib is not what will stay with me from this final season. Legion’s most beguiling visuals are elsewhere in the psychedelic enchantment of David’s cult, the jittering visage of the Time Eaters, the ecstatic villainy of Lenny as she crawled on top of a table in a forest that hearkens to Alice in Wonderland. But the message Legion lands on in its closing moments — a hopeful one that suggests that we can remake ourselves and even the world into something better — is perhaps its boldest gambit. Ultimately, Legion is a series of bristling enchantment and wonder, even when it failed to live up to the fascinating threads of family and mental illness that it wove into its story of superhero power.” [Via]
Song for the soundtrack as the Amazon burns
My first suggestion for ritual catharsis:
My second is we stop eating beef.
GABBLER RECOMMENDS: ‘Donna Haraway: Story Telling For Earthly Survival’
Armen Avanessian, Peter Frase, Daniel Rourke, Ytasha Womack, Laurie Penny and, Fabrizio Terranova’s documentary on Donna Haraway frame and reframe our thinking about our possible future by telling different stories. In the present light of fake news and alternative facts, Haraway urges: “Thinking is what we are about, and is a materialistic practice with other thinkers and some of the best thinking is done as story telling.”
Writers and critics of science fiction and fantasy have used the term ‘speculative fiction’, referring to stories that about imaginary futures, since the late 19th century. Its emphasis is less on the ‘science’ in fiction and more on the social changes that result from the advances in science and technology, extrapolated into the future. Speculative fiction is a reflection of the now. It breaks open ideas we have about our current world and how we want it to be.
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Fabrizio Terranova portraits the scholar Donna Haraway in the documentary: Donna Haraway, Story Telling For Earthly Survival. In it, Haraway says that the story of the planet is at stake, there is work to be done to bring attention to positive proposals of how things could be different. We need to “make the weak stories stronger and the strong stories weaker,” she says. She is infectiously positive, both in her interview as well as her nuanced writings about possible futures.
[Via]