D&D and Racial Essentialism

[Celebrim]

If I've seen Alien I don't remember it, but one observation concerning Aliens that I found insightful is that it's a type of wish-fulfillment fantasy of the war in IndoChina.

???

???

Ok, help me out here, but... is that a joke?

I think the movie you are thinking of is Rambo II, not Alien II. I could see that argument about Rambo II, but if you can see 'wish fulfillment fantasy of the war in IndoChina' in Aliens then I guess you can find it in anything. Aliens is a typical James Cameron movie featuring his typical pallette of emotional hang ups and politics, combined with HR Giger rape fetishist/Lovecraft inspired art. It's, like its director and its art designer, is expressedly anti-military.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

Buh? Ok, that one needs some 'splainin'. Aliens feature fairly mindless killer aliens wiping out a colony and the marines come in and wipe out the aliens. It's pretty much stock milfic. I'm all for seeing allegory, but, really?

Apocalypse Now <--> Heart of Darkness. (Joseph Conrad: "Nostromo," "Sulaco.")
Coppola/Ridley Scott/James Cameron conspiracy?

I'm not that paranoid.

More generally, this is a fascinating thread.

 

[pacdidj]

To your last comment, yes and no. As I said upthread, I think aesthetics and political morality can come apart.

For example, in the film Das Boot, I feel sympathy for the German submariners even though, from the political point of view, I should be hoping that their boat is sunk by the British.

Or a slightly different example: in the film Hero I am highly moved by the conclusion, even though the values it expresses, both political (nationalistic) and personal (particular notions of loyalty and service) are very different from my own.

Point taken. I had a very similar experience with Hero: found it moving, but was left with a sour taste in my mouth by the strongly nationalistic overtone.

Or, as I said earlier, LoTR.

I have deeply mixed feelings about LoTR. It was a childhood favorite, my dad read me a chapter every night for a good long while when I was nine years old. It really grabbed my imagination, and probably is responsible for my continuing interest in the fantasy genre.

When I re-read it as an adult though, while I still enjoyed large parts of it, I was put-off by the conflations of 'race' with culture/religion and some 'races' with absolute evil, among other things. The books left a great legacy to FRPGs, there's no doubt about that, but this particular part of that legacy is something I'd rather leave out of my D&D.

 

[pemerton]

Buh? Ok, that one needs some 'splainin'. Aliens feature fairly mindless killer aliens wiping out a colony and the marines come in and wipe out the aliens. It's pretty much stock milfic. I'm all for seeing allegory, but, really?

Board rules make some of this a bit tricky. And not everyone sees the war in IndoChina the same way. And both the person who made the observation, and me, are Australian, which means our relationship to that war, and our relationship to American understandings of and responses to that war, are likely different from those of many other people posting in and reading this thread.

And of course Aliens is not an allegory for that war. But there are all sorts of ways of being wish-fulfillment without being allegorical.

All the above said, here is the basic idea: Aliens involves a duplicitous military-industrial complex sending soldiers into an impossible situation, where an insidious and faceless enemy is all around them (and at least from time to time in an area that is hot and steamy), and the real solution to stopping the spread of this contaminating enemy - which is also the only way to stop the needless deaths of the soldiers, but which the conspiracy won't permit to be used - is to pull out and just nuke the whole place from orbit.

Undoubtedly that story can be read in various ways. It was only after seeing the movie a few times that someone suggested to me this particular way of reading it. It resonated with me, and has always stuck with me.

It's, like its director and its art designer, is expressedly anti-military.

A story can be anti-military and also wish-fulfillment in relation to a war. To give an example: Breaker Morant is a movie that is anti-military, but which also has (in my opinion) strong elements of Australian nationalist wish-fulfillment (of a more literal variety than Aliens).

Anyway, I'm guessing that my reading of Avatar is also a minority one!

 

[S'mon]

A story can be anti-military and also wish-fulfillment in relation to a war. To give an example: Breaker Morant is a movie that is anti-military, but which also has (in my opinion) strong elements of Australian nationalist wish-fulfillment (of a more lit

I guess the Boers are the Aliens (gotta nuke 'em all), the treacherous British are Weyland-Yutani, and the Australians are the poor Marines?

 

[Hussar]

Pem - I gotta say, that's a bit of a stretch. I would also point out that I'm Canadian, so, my views of Vietnam are likely different as well.

Yeah, you might find some paralisms there, but, that's really tenuous. The whole "company" thing is a staple of genre fiction and certainly had been for years by the time Aliens came out. I kinda sorta see where you're coming from, but, that's reaching really, really far.

 

[billd91]

Board rules make some of this a bit tricky. And not everyone sees the war in IndoChina the same way. And both the person who made the observation, and me, are Australian, which means our relationship to that war, and our relationship to American understandings of and responses to that war, are likely different from those of many other people posting in and reading this thread.

Thanks for letting us know your perspective. A lot of people forget how many different groups were involved and interested in that war and who have a different take on it than we do. As advanced as our own navel-gazing about Vietnam is (far more advanced than any other war in US history save perhaps the Civil War, I'd say), it does tend to be a bit parochial.

I can see the allegorial similarities, they're certainly fuel for more thought on the subject.

A story can be anti-military and also wish-fulfillment in relation to a war. To give an example: Breaker Morant is a movie that is anti-military, but which also has (in my opinion) strong elements of Australian nationalist wish-fulfillment (of a more literal variety than Aliens).

I'm not sure I'm seeing the wish fulfillment too much for Breaker Morant (awesome film though it is) beyond possibly receiving world-wide acknowledgement of the shafting the Australians had to put up with for Empire. By the way, I really enjoy the film Gallipoli too.

 

[billd91]

When I re-read it as an adult though, while I still enjoyed large parts of it, I was put-off by the conflations of 'race' with culture/religion and some 'races' with absolute evil, among other things. The books left a great legacy to FRPGs, there's no doubt about that, but this particular part of that legacy is something I'd rather leave out of my D&D.

You probably want to leave a lot of the pulp writers like Robert E. Howard out of your D&D too, frankly.

While LotR does, I think, draw on some orientalist racial stereotyping (like Bill Ferny's friend, the squint-eyed, sallow-faced spy from Isengard), I think it's also important to note that there are multiple levels of the story going on here. You've got the destiny of Aragorn's lineage writ at one level of the story, that ties in with his natural racial/cultural nobility and the contrasting you see between the Men of the West bearing the cultural legacy of the early alliance with the elves and Valar and everyone else, particularly the forces of Mordor (some of whom ally, others of whom are intimidated/dominated into Sauron's armies). That's all strongly influenced by great epic myth and legend which typically pit one group against another, like Arthur fighting the barbarous Saxons, or the Saxons fighting the Normans, etc.

But at another level of the story, you've see the world through plain Hobbit sense. Sam sees a dead man of Harad and wonders, at a sympathetic level, what brought him to that battlefield. And it's at the Hobbit sense level that I think we can see Tolkien's main sympathies.

 

[S'mon]

I'm not sure I'm seeing the wish fulfillment too much for Breaker Morant (awesome film though it is) beyond possibly receiving world-wide acknowledgement of the shafting the Australians had to put up with for Empire. By the way, I really enjoy the film Gallipoli too.

In Breaker Morant the Ausrtalian soldiers routinely committed what are normally regarded as war crimes, particularly the executing of Boer prisoners, but they get to be the innocent victims of the British authorities who ultimately execute them for those crimes? "Only obeying orders" didn't work for the Nazis, and Morant was never actually ordered to kill prisoners, at most it was nod-and-a-wink. It seems to me that it was the Boers who got the shafting, since we were killing them and taking their stuff.

 

[billd91]

In Breaker Morant the Ausrtalian soldiers routinely committed what are normally regarded as war crimes, particularly the executing of Boer prisoners, but they get to be the innocent victims of the British authorities who ultimately execute them for those crimes? "Only obeying orders" didn't work for the Nazis, and Morant was never actually ordered to kill prisoners, at most it was nod-and-a-wink. It seems to me that it was the Boers who got the shafting, since we were killing them and taking their stuff.

The shafting is that the Brits were willing to accept the effectiveness of their prosecution of the Boer War but, rather than protect the people who were doing their dirty work despite a vigorous legal defense, execute them for their crimes. It's a tactic straight out of Machiavelli's The Prince, and in this case, I do mean it literally.

This was all before the Nazis, and before any precedents set at the Nuremberg Trials. Whether or not the actions taken by the British armed forces in South Africa were crimes against humanity, the sacrificing of two Australians serving in the British Army to hide the complicity of the organization all the way up to Kitchener is a shaft. And a big one at that.