Review Roundtable: Avengers: Endgame

At the end of April a little movie came out called Avengers: Endgame, which has been getting something of a buzz in genre circles, seeing as how it brings together ten years of big budget Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) storylines in one big action-packed conclusion. Here at NoaF HQ we’ve been following the ups and downs of the MCU for some time (some longer than others), and have many capital-F Feelings ranging from excitement to confusion to mild bafflement about this culmination of an era.

Today I’ve gathered Brian, Mike, Phoebe and Vance to chat about our Endgame reactions: what made us punch the air in glee and what had us sliding down in our seats in frustration. Needless to say, all the spoilers are ahead and you really shouldn’t be here unless you’ve had a chance to see the movie first.

Adri: So, Endgame! That was fun. Even more fun than I expected after, you know, all the dead people and the feelings about them.

Brian: First impressions are that I thought this was a great conclusion to all of the movies that came before it. The MCU could stop here (it won’t, but it could) and I would be completely satisfied.

Vance: The woman seated next to me -- and I’ve never experienced this in a movie theater -- started taking deep, centering breaths the moment the lights went down. And I love her for it. Infinity War was a gauntlet for fans, yet she was there opening day for whatever came next, no matter how gutting. Turned out the movie was a lot of fanservice, so she made it through. As did I!

Phoebe: I’m going to date myself by saying I was fifteen when Iron Man came out and I thought it was the coolest movie I’d ever seen (beside Lord of the Rings of course). I’ve seen every MCU movie in theaters except Ant Man and the Wasp, which I regret because I loved that movie. I grew up with these movies, and this just totally satisfied me eleven years later. I cheered, clapped, laughed, bawled, and said thank you.

Mike: I definitely enjoyed the movie and look forward to watching it again, but it felt very slow as they tracked down the stones in the previous movies. I felt there was too much humor and not enough action. Although I greatly appreciated Captain America joining the Hydra agents in the elevator in what I expected to be a brawl, only to lose it when Cap whispers “Hail Hydra” and proceeds to simply walk out with Loki’s staff.

Brian: I’m with you on the plodding pace. I can string together the important moments in my mind, and they don’t really add up to three hours of movie. But I watch at least three hours of terrible TV weekly, so I’ll take “great but a bit slow” without much complaint. Agree that the elevator scene is a great subversion of expectations, and also just the tiniest hint at the Secret Empire story. Not that I want them to put that story on screen.

Adri: I thought the combination of humour, emotions and action built into something incredibly cheesy, but I don’t mean that in a bad way at all: it really works. There’s quite a long first act of feelings which is mostly engaging and builds off dynamics that are a decade in the making. With the exception of expecting us to care about Hawkeye’s family which is… hmmm...

Vance: Hawkeye’s dumb farm family is the thing I have always hated the most about the MCU. Asking us to care about it all of a sudden is akin to asking us, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, to suddenly care about one of James Bond’s bedfellows. The ship has sailed, I don’t buy in. That said, I at least believed it as a motivation for Hawkeye going batshit before we get into the real meat of the movie.

Adri: Farm family out of the way, we get into TIME TRAVEL, which lets us go on a mostly-greatest-hits tour of some of the other films, underlining how far some of the Avengers have come along the way. Once things start to coalesce into a climax, there’s a really satisfying pay-off to each of the beats. Yes, it means you can see some of them coming from a mile off (time travel plus Captain casually stopping by Peggy’s office in a midpoint scene adds up to a pretty obvious decision for his “retirement”) but that just makes it even more gratifying when those moments hit. Obviously I have lots of time for subversion in fiction too, but it’s so enjoyable to watch a story that’s already had its twists and turns and is now going to milk every moment out of the one path to its conclusion. It also makes it feel like an actual movie structure - despite the fact it starts in the immediate aftermath of Inifinity War - with well-managed tensions, rather than the big messy action-fest that was its predecessor.

Brian: The choice to immediately deal with Thanos and then flip to undoing what he had done was more interesting than I expected out of the film. It’s also a little funny that, in a world where magic exists, the solution was scientific, even if the science is pretty magical. But wow, how many cans of worms did they open with the introduction of time travel to these movies? I appreciate that the basic premise is things changed in the past can’t affect the future, and they spin off their own timelines. But if the Sorcerer Supreme (thank you for returning, Tilda Swinton) controls the Eye of Agamotto and knows Strange isn’t around until five years after the New York invasion, wouldn’t she also know that Thanos is going to dust half of the galaxy’s population? Time travel always opens a lot more doors than it closes.

Vance: Hat tip to my friend Caroline for sharing this article that offers a really game explanation of the time travel dynamics. TL;DR: the time travel actually does kinda makes sense, but just go with it. It’s fun. It’s fine. Leave it alone.

Mike: While I was expecting this to be emotional, I was not surprised for how powerful it was for the characters to travel back in time and connect with individuals they had previously lost. My favorite of these meetings was Thor and his mom. I love the way she talked about his current condition and wanted him to make things right for himself and not to worry about her. I also love that other Asgardians call Rocket Raccoon ‘rabbit’.

Adri: Remember how I told you all I’d seen all of the canon movies except the second Thor and I hoped that one didn't turn out to be in any way important to the plot here? All I can say is OH COME ON. His Mum died? Natalie Portman went to Asgard? I still appreciated this moment - Full use of Chris Hemsworth's comic abilities was appreciated, and despite the fat jokes I actually thought Thor’s arc was probably the most satisfying of the core group, given he didn’t have quite as obvious a place to go as Iron Man and Cap did. But I did spend ten minutes squirming and hoping not to be spoiled.

Brian: I am a Thor: The Dark World hater and I guess, yeah, it’s a little important to the complete narrative. Still wouldn’t recommend anyone pressed for time to watch it though. Ragnarok is a lot better and literally sets up Infinity War.

Vance: I like Thor 2, and don’t apologize for it (because like what you like, folks! It doesn’t matter if your co-contributors think you’re dumb!). Kat Dennings is a joy in it. But that aside, from Ragnarok through Infinity War through Endgame, Thor’s story is truly, deeply moving. My heart breaks for the character. Again, it would be better if his weight weren’t played for laughs, but his descent into oblivion is a) a strong choice by the filmmakers b) totally understandable, and c) fertile ground for setting up his final confrontation with Thanos.

Phoebe: I love all the Thor movies due to the Norse mythology (one of the reasons I started researching Norse myth was because I saw the first Thor and thought, hmm, that’s not right.) I’m also a HUGE Loki fan--which was one way that Endgame disappointed me honestly. They did so little with Loki, didn’t resurrect him, and didn’t let time travel Thor interact with his dead brother who he’d reconciled with at the end of Thor: Ragnarok. To follow up on the fat phobia, while I was disappointed the few times it was obvious we were supposed to laugh at his fatness, I actually wonder how much of the fat phobia comes from the audience. It was immediately obvious to me that it was a symptom of PTSD and, surprisingly, he never returned to washboard abs Thor, the usual end to such a trope. He remained “fat Thor” even when he fought Thanos, and he looked way more badass and viking-y. If anything, the audience response showed how much farther we need to go as humankind to accepting different types of people and recognizing suffering.

Vance: I’m with you. I wondered how much of the fat-shaming was more on the audience than the filmmakers. I thought it was a strong choice and I appreciated it.

Adri: I mean, to me having one fatphobic joke is one too many and I completely understand why many people don’t want to “look past that” to whatever the filmmakers intended, even if it sort of came good in the end with the Viking aesthetic and his arc, and eventual alignment with the Guardians of the Galaxy, which has been a few movies coming.

Adri: While I’m on the complaints train: the “scene of women” does not make the lack of representation over ten years right, Marvel. Especially because the vast majority of those women just show up with no emotional arcs at the very last minute. I also had no time for the sacrifice of Black Widow, and while I know Scarlett Johansen is a bit frustrating as an actor it’s such a shame Natasha Romanoff never truly got the development she deserved up to this point, even though she turned into a brilliant character without that focus. It’s really telling that what we’ve lost by the end is mostly women and a robot, and the funeral we end up going to isn’t Romanoff’s.

Phoebe: I’m going to jump in here to comment on the “women assemble” scene as I’ve been calling it. I totally agree that it doesn’t end the bad representation throughout the series, but to be honest, I cried during that scene. Was it patronizing? Probably.

Brian: Thank you for articulating better my complaints about that 5 second scene, Adri. I’ve seen a lot of people (idiots) bandying about that Marvel ruined the movie by going full SJW, and this is literally not it. Those characters and the women playing them deserve better.

Mike: My biggest gripe was Black Widow’s death. My wife disagrees with me, but I felt it was cheapened by her and Hawkeye fighting over who would sacrifice themselves (obviously it was going to be her because of his family). Her death hit me a bit harder when Hulk talked about trying to bring her back when he wielded the stones.

Adri: What I hated most about this - and there are many aspects I hate - is that this movie really drives home the fact that Natasha’s family are the Avengers, and that of all the characters she is the one that has poured the most into relationships with the rest of the group over and above any outside attachments. I think we’re supposed to accept that Hawkeye has more reason to live because he has a flesh-and-blood family but, in a narrative that’s about the Avengers where those characters are completely on the side, it feels cheap and unearned and utterly disrespectful to her character and the things that are important to her, undermining the actual sense of sacrifice which this scene was supposed to set up.

Vance: I’ll push back a tiny, tiny bit here. I don’t take issue with anything you’ve said at all, but just offer a slightly different read. I think Hawkeye is willing to sacrifice himself for his flesh-and-blood family, but Nat is willing to sacrifice herself for her adoptive family. I’m not certain the audience is asked to accept that one has more right to go on living than the other. It’s certainly a valid read of the scene, but what the filmmakers *intended* is murky. I think whatever an individual audience member takes away from it is 100% valid. I just don’t want to step on the landmine of saying “the filmmakers intended zyx,” when that really can’t be known without talking to them. For me, I hated to see Nat go, and I very much questioned why we were being asked to accept that, but the movie itself didn’t give me a clear-enough answer to really speak to it. I felt like both Nat and Gamora going off the Soul Stone cliff made me uneasy...but it’s hard to unpack, personally, what I thought the movie was asking of me. I mean, I think the farm family is dumb, so for sure I’d rather Nat have stayed topside.

Adri: I guess the thing is, in the genre which literally coined the concept of “women in refrigerators”, setting up a subplot like the unavoidable Soul Stone sacrifice and then having two women go off that cliff with similar lingering death shots shows, at the very least, a disappointing lack of self-awareness of this trope and its impact on female representation.

Mike: My favorite arc over this epic event is Nebula’s. She grew a great deal in a limited number of films from a villain with a troubled past who would stop at nothing to please her father to someone who confronted her demons from her childhood, made amends with her sister, and finally got closure from her father only to have Thor ruin the moment by chopping his head off.

Adri: I agree that Nebula’s a great character here. She also gets an interesting arc with Gamora and her past self, which really underlines how far Nebula has come (although underscoring that by killing her past is… hmm) while also suggesting that Gamora’s development over the past movies, and especially her role in Infinity War, never mattered to her as a character? I guess I see where that’s coming from, but it drives home the fact that Nebula is really the only Guardians of the Galaxy character with any interesting emotional depth. More Nebula!

Vance: I love how they’ve taken Nebula from a 100% baddie to a 100% empathetic central character. I’m curious to see where they take Gamora going forward. I loved the TV show Chuck, which ended with one of the two love interests having their memory wiped, and the open question of “What happens next between them?” There are no more Chuck episodes, but I like the narrative space created by the question of “Will these two misfits fall in love again under different circumstances?” Again, I had problems with the Gamora/Soul Stone element in Infinity War, but I’m intrigued by the narrative possibilities this suggests for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

Adri: Any other favourite moments people want to share? Captain America making full use of Thor’s hammer got a loud “WHAAAAAAT” from one particular lad at the back of our cinema, joined by the rest of us cheering in appreciation. I’m still not quite sure how it happened, but in the moment it’s so epic I don’t really care. (Insert Doctor Horrible Captain Hammer joke here). Also, Wakanda turning up first in the ending battle was a big hit!

Mike: My favorite moment in the entire film may have been old man Cap passing his shield to Falcon. I went into this film expecting Captain America to die and prepared myself for that reality, but loved the fact that after returning the Infinity Stones he went home, had his dance with Agent Carter, and lived a normal life.

Another moment that really hit me emotionally was Iron Man hugging Spider-Man after they reunite. I often don’t like humor during certain emotional scenes, but Peter telling Iron Man “this is nice” during the long hug was very sweet and hit close to home as a father.

Brian: Yeah, I’m pretty heartless and this moment really hit me. It was a nice wrap around from Tony watching him turn to dust in his arms to returning to finish the fight.

Vance: I told my daughter, “You know how Infinity War starts on Earth with Tony telling Pepper he wants a kid...and you know how through the whole movie he calls Peter ‘Kid’?” And her eyes bugged way out. I thought this moment was a really nice moment for both of them. It’s the kind of fanservice that I feel like we’ve all earned...and I guess the characters have, too.

Brian: Iron Man was the beginning and the end of this cycle of movies, and my favorite Iron Man moment, possibly my favorite MCU moment, is the bits in Iron Man 3 where Tony has to come to terms with the fact that he threw himself into a gaping void with a nuclear weapon to defeat an alien invasion of Earth and survived. Selfless acts weren’t Tony’s thing but he did it, and again, in the conclusion of Endgame, he did something he knew could end badly for him personally without hesitation. He came out of a very comfortable, happy retirement to save the world one more time. The whole Tony Stark arc is well done.

Vance: Seconded. Tony Stark’s last words are, “I am Iron Man,” which is such a perfect punctuation mark on these 10 years of filmmaking for all of the reasons Brian just pointed out.

Brian: Also, I was very excited when Captain Marvel came out of the sky to punch holes in Thanos’ giant spaceship. She’s very good at that. I expected and did not get more Ronan the Accuser, which is weird because Captain Marvel seemed to go out of its way to make that character cooler than when he was just some bland antagonist in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Adri: So, now that it’s over (except that it’s not): any last thoughts? Mine is that I now have to round off my MCU "first ten years" experience by catching up on, er, Thor: The Dark World...

Vance: Do it. Kat Dennings is hilarious, and it’s the buffest Hemsworth ever got, which is really saying something!

Mike: Overall the movie and all of the movies in the MCU were a monumental success. I loved the simple twists this finale provided, learning early on that the Infinity Stones were all turned to dust by Thanos, Loki making off with the cosmic cube, Thor’s current state, and was truly not sure what to expect next. I even enjoyed how they managed the time travel and had some funny jabs at Back to the Future. I’m not sure where I would rank it among the MCU films, but it is likely in the top 5. It provided a fitting end that my entire family enjoyed.

Brian: Looking forward, I guess we know some of the direction of future MCU movies with Spiderman: Far From Home and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 on the horizon, but nothing about the overall future of the series. I’m guessing some of that is up in the air as Disney now owns the X-Men too and could integrate them and their rich history into these stories. I’m excited for that future.

Vance: If I can be permitted to wander a bit into the weeds, I would like to address how we have never in the history of cinema seen anything like this. I distinctly remember sitting in the theater during Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, when the armies are massing at the Black Gate, and thinking, “I have never, ever seen anything like this.” Like all works of artistry that move a medium forward, those innovations, once realized, become relatively easy to copy. We see scenes like that Lord of the Rings moment routinely now. But I had the thought before Endgame, “I wonder if I’ll have another moment like that?” I did, kind of, but it wasn’t visual -- it was narrative. This is essentially the season finale of the most expensive TV show in history. Endgame is the coherent final product of 16 directors and at least 35 writers. The script alone for Infinity War and Endgame (which were reportedly shot simultaneously) would’ve had to be around 400 pages long. The scale of the production is mind-boggling. So while there was certainly visual spectacle on display in Endgame, I do want to take my hat off to the complexity of the undertaking that Marvel just delivered. Universal Monsters died on the vine after only one film, and DC’s best movie (by far) has been Teen Titans Go! To the Movies. Marvel has moved the goal line for cinematic storytelling, and I’m just glad as a fan I got to see Iron Man opening day, and now Endgame all these years later.

Adri: Thanks for joining me today, all, and I look forward to our next chat!

Nerds Assemble:

Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke.

brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Mike N. aka Victor Domashev -- comic guy, proudly raising nerdy kids, and Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2012.

Phoebe Wagner currently studies at University of Nevada: Reno. When not writing or reading, she can be found kayaking at the nearest lake.

Vance K — co-editor and cult film reviewer for nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012.

Review Roundtable: Vigilance by Robert Jackson Bennett

The escalating havoc and ultraviolence of Vigilance holds an effective, if culturally specific, mirror to violence and fear in the US.

CONTENT WARNING: This review discusses gun violence throughout, and includes references to child death. Also, we're discussing the whole novella, so BEWARE SPOILERS.

Vigilance, the new novella from Robert Jackson Bennett, is out today and it's a searing look at gun violence in the US. In this near future dystopia, John McDean is tasked with running "Vigilance", the nation's favourite reality programme, which releases real shooters are released on unsuspecting locations with military-grade armaments, and the resulting carnage is broadcast as a "lesson" in how to protect oneself. McDean and his crew at ONT station think they have the variables of Vigilance down to a fine art, but in the novella's ensuing escalation find themselves taken down by one of McDean's own blindspots, to dramatic effect.

We've got a lot of Bennett fans on our team here at Nerds of a Feather and when this novella came to our attention, lots of us were interested in reading it to review. That's why, instead of taking it on alone, today I, Adri, am joined by Paul Weimer, Brian, and Joe Sherry to unpack Bennett's highly topical novella and our reactions to it.

Adri: Vigilance is a novella about a near-future America that “from the beginning, … had always been a nation of fear”. In it, the perception of internal and external threats has given rise to a reality TV show (also called Vigilance), where state-sanctioned shooters are let loose in public spaces with the subsequent carnage broadcast for entertainment and “education”. Was Vigilance what you expected going in?

Paul: I want to begin with something I saw on twitter from the author, Robert Jackson Bennett. In talking about the novella, he said:

my novella, VIGILANCE, out in january, is about a cynical entertainment news channel creating its own news to manipulate americans' fears, only to be itself manipulated by a hostile foreign power

it was super hard to make this a satire and im not sure i did

— robert "robert" bennett (@robertjbennett) December 20, 2018

a lot of folks are interpreting this book as a take on gun culture. which is fine. but for me, guns are a symptom to larger culture of fear and insecurity which manifests in all kinds of unpleasant ways - hence the neverending, hysterical need to be *VIGILANT!!* at all times

— robert "robert" bennett (@robertjbennett) December 18, 2018

When I picked up the novella, which was before these tweets, I went in with the expectation that it was aimed at gun violence and gun culture. That's how it had gotten sold to me. That's how the novella overtly sells itself, as judging the book by its cover: full of guns, and with an icon of a gun between the title and tagline and the author name.

As I read it, my mind went to The Running Man (both the novel and the movie) more than anything else. Sure, there are plenty of guns and the insanity of a heavily armed society, but the theme of the entirety of America as a high-ammo Truman Show where at any moment, people might get caught up in gun violence made this a very surreal and uncomfortable experience to read.

Joe: Not at all. Like Paul, my initial assumption was that this was going to skewer (in some capacity) America’s obsession and glorification of guns, gun culture, and violence. I missed Bennett’s comments, so I went into Vigilance with those initial assumptions firmly in place.

Those assumptions were challenged fairly quickly when Bennett pushes the idea that this, all of this, is really about fear. The extended quote from Vigilance is awfully telling.

"The heart of the matter was that, from the beginning, America had always been a nation of fear. Fear of the monarchy. Fear of the elites. Fear of losing your property, to the government or invasion. A fear that, though you had worked damn hard to own your own property, some dumb thug or smug city prick would either find a way to steal it or use the law to steal it. This was what made the beating heart of America: not a sense of civics, not a love of country or people, not respect of the Constitution - but fear.”

Bennett pushes that farther and baldly states that America’s love of guns, America’s mythologizing of guns is directly tied to that fear which is then tied to the monopolizing and capitalizing of that fear. It’s also tied to the idea that a good man with a gun can save the day and that if the bad guys are armed, and you know they will be because by golly, they don’t respect laws, then we’ve all got to be armed, too. It’s irresponsible not to be.

Of course, Vigilance is a novella about fear and complacency, which is also strangely tied together.

brian: No, though, to be honest, all I needed to see were “Robert Jackson Bennett” and “dark science fiction” for me to jump into Vigilance. I went into it almost blind, just a fan of Bennett. I was not expecting Vigilance to be quite so near future, nor so close to a possible reality that I could smell it. It was hard for me to read Vigilance when I sit in an office all day that has a TV set on a cable news station that increasingly resembles ONT. It was hard for me to read when Vigilance’s “Ideal Person” is not only people I’ve met, but people I work with, and people I am related to. I was expecting something grim, but I was not expecting something real.

Adri: And it’s interesting that, from a reader perspective, that fear is so transparently co-opted: something that is ostensibly directed at the elite, is then used by the elite, to put at risk everything but the elite, with just enough confusion over ownership to allow plausible deniability from both the media and the government. On the whole, it’s quite a concept to pack into novella length, although I suspect most of the target audience will be coming pre-invested to the line being taken here.

Even The Hunger Games were hosted by a real human...

Another thing I noticed about Vigilance was how well the characterisation fit with the wider themes of the novella. As you’d expect from the subject matter, there are no heroes here, and almost nobody who is genuinely sympathetic. Beyond that, though, there’s a constant sense of watching “personas” rather than real people. Indeed, the first character we are really introduced to is John McDean’s “Ideal Person”, supposedly the target audience for the Vigilance programme (which is hosted by fabricated CGI personas). From the power fantasies of the “actives” selected to carry out the shootings, to the highly scrutinised survivor role Delyna resists but is ultimately forced to play, to the more overt deceptions that come into play at the end, there’s a pervasive sense of unreality even outside the game world. What did you think of Bennett’s characters - did any leap out for any reason?

Paul: McDean is ostensibly our main character, the one that we use for the majority of the novella in setting up the scenario. He’s hardly sympathetic, I think he is deliberately drawn to be that way. We can look at him as the Richard Dawson's Killian analogue. I am not sure that I hated McDean but I definitely wanted to see him taken down a peg by the end. Comeuppance on a personal level was one the expectations that I had for the story, and we do get that on an emotional level with him, when he sees what he has helped midwife come into fruition.

I am not entirely happy with the blurb on the back, because the promise made there for him is only really paid off at the end, In a sense it gives away the ending.

Adri: I felt that about the blurb too! It sets you up to be looking out for something to happen to McDean and his team from what feels like a too-early point, although the “how” of it did come as a surprise to me. But then, how the does the arc of the “secondary” PoV character, Delyna - a young black woman working in a bar where the Vigilance show is being screened - affected the sense of payoff for McDean’s comeuppance?

Paul: That last scene with Delyna does underscore just how futile the addition of more and more weapons into a charged environment does anything except escalate matters. I do think it’s a “take that!” directed squarely at the “good guy with a gun” and the other narratives here in the US, which promote the idea that the only way to solve gun violence in schools and other places is to arm everyone. As Delyna sees and witnesses, all it does is up the body count. A society where everyone has weapons isn’t a safer and more stable society, it’s a more vulnerable and fragile one.

Joe: I’d argue that Delyna is a sympathetic character and probably the closest to the reader’s “ideal” stand in character. She speaks up and speaks out when the easy and safe answer is to leave the television on. Of course, that’s followed by a Tarantino-esque standoff and then escalation after escalation.

I think you’re on to something with your larger point that we’re watching personas act out their roles rather than following fully realized characters. I don’t know if you’ve read Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy, but his skill at characterization is absolutely top notch. I think it’s a deliberate choice here. The game show nature of Vigilance lends itself to that unreality, as if we’re never sure if we’re ever out of the game world.

Paul: Joe, I have read and loved the Divine Cities trilogy, and I think you are right here, Bennett is crafting these characters as roles to deliberate affect. It’s a bold stylistic choice, that goes with the whole unreality of the world.

Adri: Agreed on Divine Cities too.

brian: I’m definitely feeling the roles over characters, particularly since I can more clearly remember the function of each team member in the Vigilance production team over their names.

With that said, the character that stood out the most to me was Ives, the social media wrangler. We know our social media vessels such as Facebook and Twitter are primed and almost designed for spreading misinformation, and here we have ONT using bots and other social media shills to steer the flow of communication and interaction to Vigilance. A lot of words have been typed about how dangerous it is for social media disinformation campaigns to disrupt political power, so it’s almost quaint that ONT is using these tools in the manner they were designed to benefit: advertising. #brands #engagement #howdoiescapethishellihavecreated

Adri: As the token non-American in this group, I also have to ask about the elephant in the room: how US-specific is Vigilance? The idea of citizens living in fear of their own government clearly isn’t tied to a single nation or identity, and neither is the manipulation of crime or fear of the “other”. Yet, perhaps because artificiality is such a running theme through the novella, I found it hard to personally connect to the satirical elements of the text. Many of the points felt either very on-the-nose or too far-fetched, with little in that sweet spot where reality is distorted but all the more recognisable through the satirist’s lens. What were your experiences? Am I just too far away from Bennett’s “Ideal Person” in this case?

brian: Terribly US-specific? Let’s go with terribly. Fear of government is so ingrained into American culture that we wrote the right to give ourselves the means to violently overthrow the government into our constitution. Every year, maybe every month, we suffer a violent outburst that involves someone using a firearm to shoot innocent people. Time after time, we decry the tragedy and refuse to do anything to address the cause, which is the wild proliferation of weapons in the US. Instead, we put bulletproof plates in childrens’ backpacks, drill on what to do during an “active shooter” incident, and wait for our turn at our own Vigilance. I can’t recognize Vigilance as satire. I see the conditions that lead to Vigilance happening too often for it to be anything but a glimpse into our future.

Adri: Wikipedia suggests in 2018, mass shootings happened in the US on an almost daily basis...

Joe: I’d like to be able to say that the main aspect of Vigilance I found too far fetched was the mass shooting competition itself, but even though we joke about how The Running Man and The Hunger Games could never actually happen and would never be broadcast, I’m feeling a little cynical this morning. I’m not so sure. Besides, that mass shooting competition, the “vigilance” of the title, is the hook of the novel. There’s more than enough of a literary and film tradition to hang a story on.

I’d really like to be able to say that Bennett’s commentary on America’s indifference to school shootings and murdered children is far fetched, but that’s just cooked into the fabric of American society right now.

I don’t know if he originated the idea, but British journalist Dan Hodges wrote in 2015:

In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.

— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) June 19, 2015

Sandy Hook, if you don’t remember, was an elementary school in Newton, Connecticut where twenty students between the ages of 6 and 7 were killed in a 2012 shooting, as were six staff members who died trying to protect the kids. (Also, as the father of a now four year old who is shockingly close to being old enough to go to school, that was honestly one of the most difficult sentences I’ve had to type.)

Hodges was not wrong. America’s legislative response was silence. Thoughts and prayers. Inaction. Indifference.

Also, if you want to really depress yourself about America, spend some time reading through a list of school shootings in the United States. 

But, Adri, you said that you found the satire either too on the nose or too far fetched. Can you expand on that a bit more? For me, the stuff that was on the nose was generally just accurate and perhaps a bit sad / painful in the “it’s painful because it’s true” paraphrase of The Simpsons.

Adri: I might be setting the bar too high, but I think that fully communicating satire across cultures is a challenge for both reader and writer, because it’s inevitably going to be the more subtle elements that are lost. And when a high action story like Vigilance stops communicating its subtlety, it just becomes a relentless gore-fest; incidentally, this is also how I feel about Tarantino films, and there’s definitely similarities here, and also I know lots of mostly-male English friends who who love Tarantino for what are almost certainly very similar reasons to their American counterparts, so this is not some impenetrable cultural barrier in general - perhaps just an aesthetic one.

Paul: Is Vigilance satire or prediction? I think it’s just implausible enough to be firmly satire, but I am very uncomfortable, and was very uncomfortable as I read it, as to just how plausible a US that was sinking lower and lower by the day would turn to fear cannibalizing on itself, and America being okay with it. Fear may be the mindkiller, as Dune taught us, but Fear sells. Fear motivates people to do very terrible things in an effort to placate and ameliorate that fear. I think of Security Theater at airports--restrictions on liquids, and shoes just as simple examples of “being seen to address the fears” is meant for public relation, and oh at the same time reminding people of the danger.. Or the fears stoked up this fall and winter over the migrant caravan. But can we get from here, now to the world of Vigilance two decades hence? I don’t think we can logically and rationally get there from here, but I think we could get disturbingly closer. So Vigilance is still Satire, and not Cautionary Tale. But it’s a close run thing.

Adri, you brought up before the idea of this being a US-specific book. Is there anywhere else in the world that you think a story like this could have been written? Brian, Joe and I swim in this water, and unless one widely travels, it’s hard to escape seeing that water as being anything except “the way things are”.

Adri: My experiences are far from universal, but I don’t think you could write about this particular response to fear -- the state sanctioned libertarian arms race --  in any of the places I’ve lived. It’s interesting that Joe mentions Sandy Hook as a potential turning point above; because I grew up partly in Australia with British parents, I have the massacres in both Dunblane and Port Arthur (which happened within 2 months of each other in Scotland and Tasmania respectively; Dunblane in particular had heartbreaking similarities with Sandy Hook, over a decade later) in my childhood consciousness. Each prompted fundamental changes in gun control and the perception of guns in those countries, which were treated as completely self-evident. Over twenty years later, it means I now live in a city where outrage and grief is directed towards the level of knife crime, which is also awful, but doesn’t create the same level of destruction and collateral damage as guns do. It’s hard to get past my own ingrained bias that safety means fewer machines designed to kill you in close proximity, and that being “vigilant” and “safe” always means de-escalation except where absolutely necessary. And while I’ve also worked in conflict resolution, meaning I’ve met plenty of people for whom that bias isn’t true, that was a very different context to the relationship most Americans - particularly the ones most likely to be vocal about gun ownership - have with their national government.

To me, this loops back to the point about what Vigilance is about: it’s not just a story poking fun at gun-obsession through a lens of ultraviolent absurdity, but one about the fear that brought this society about, and that it feeds back into in turn. While some elements of US national fear and the rhetoric around it do get replicated elsewhere - like the language around the war on terror, or immigration - the context around the Second Amendment, the NRA, the inaction and victim blaming and everything around it is so specific that you could only tell this story in the US. And, while many of us outside that context have news consumption and Twitter feeds that constantly bring us into contact with this debate, I do feel there’s a fundamental gap in what can be understood from an outsider perspective. To me, the ultraviolence and the fear of oppression feel equally speculative, even though I intellectually know they aren’t supposed to be. It means on an emotional level, Vigilance functions much more along the lines of The Hunger Games, a series which also marries both violence and fear to great effect but whose worldbuilding “how did we get there from here” gaps are tricky to intuit, than as the satirical "close to home" text it’s intended as.

Speaking of international influences, I wanted to discuss the very left-field ending to the plot. In a nutshell, the thrust of the story is that McDean's crack team (who have enough power to be targets) spends so long thinking about internal threats that they forgot about external security, and in particular how threatening China is. This is a mistake that proves fatal not just to ONT and company but, apparently, to the entire audience of Vigilance. Again, this is a combination of "frighteningly plausible" - America is taken down by a combination of cyber security leaks and sexual exploitation of interns - and "not going to happen" - China would benefit from the US declining in power relative to itself, but probably not from instigating mass death.

Paul : Was the out-of-left-field meant to be a deliberate writing technique on Bennett’s part to show that people were focusing on the wrong things, so that when “Tabitha” makes her reveal, it is a “Wait, what?” moment for reader and audience alike. The whole bit about Americans not paying attention to the fact that there was an international crisis going on for days--sadly, that’s not really very much satire any more, not here in the US, and the obsessions and blinders of the news media, now.

brian: What I found interesting about the twist was the difference between McDean/ONT and the Chinese. ONT is using high technology to craft their fakes, and the Chinese used actual people. Infiltrating an organization using people isn’t high tech; it’s the oldest, most basic technique available. It still works, and it’s why we’re talking about what impact Marina Butina may have had on the US government by infiltrating a powerful gun advocacy lobby.

But what McDean and ONT do to the American population, the Chinese did to McDean/ONT. They know their “Ideal Person” (McDean) and use his personal taste to manipulate him into doing what they want. He becomes so hyperfocused on sexual release with Tabitha that he installs some unknown phone app that ends up giving the Chinese a backdoor. He’s also so enamored with Bonnan (the Vigilance contestant who is also a literal Nazi) that he has to put him in the next episode. ONT is so focused on the shootings and violence that they don’t even consider that you don’t need a weapon or a threat to manipulate people. You can use something alluring and they will do what you want anyway.

Adri: Any final thoughts before we wrap up this review?

Joe: The comparison is to classic novels like The Running Man, Battle Royale, and The Hunger Games and I think the thing I am most curious about is whether Vigilance will have that sort of staying power or cultural impact. That level of impact is doubtful, but Vigilance does hit those buttons in very accessible terms. It may well surprise us. At the very least, it’s led to a great conversation here and hopefully similar conversations in other spaces.

One thing that I wanted to note, that didn't come up earlier in the conversation is that as much as a primary focus of Vigilance is on the intersection of American gun and fear culture and how that it is monetized and weaponized, Bennett does make a point to very briefly bring race into the conversation. Race comes up in McDean's Ideal Person and it comes up sideways in aspects of how that fear culture is consumed, but it is dealt with firmly with the character of Delyna and in her family background. Delyna is black. I'm not sure how this plays outside the United States, but Black Lives Matter is a major movement inside America and police shootings are woven into the racial fabric of America. In the novella Delyna's father was a police officer killed in the line of duty, but he was killed by a fellow police officer, a white police officer who, instead of seeing another cop, saw a black man with a gun and opened fire. I don't have a larger point in bringing this up, except that I didn't want it to go unmentioned, and it could easily be the spark of another larger conversation. Hell, it could easily have been the spark for an alternate universe version of Vigilance.

Thank you for putting this together, Adri.

Paul: Thank you for putting this together, Adri. I agree with Joe, will this have the long term cultural impact of previous efforts in the genre? Will it be seen as an artifact of our times, or a dark prophecy of what could happen “if this goes on...”. Hard to tell. Bennett’s writing is certainly strong and sharpened toward a goal and social goal. In that, it has a hell of a lot of ambition--more so than The Running Man. It may not completely succeed at entertainment, but I don’t think Bennett wrote the book with that aim. I will be interested in how others view this, both within the SFF genresphere and as a more general conversation.

Adri: You're welcome - thanks for participating, all, and thanks to everyone reading!


The Math

Adri’s Verdict: 6.5, rounded up to 7. I understand what it's trying to accomplish but the particular blend of ultraviolence and satire didn't quite strike me right.

brian’s Verdict: 7. It works for me because it’s a future I can grasp that I do not want. Observations about roles/stereotypes over characters are completely valid though. They’re not quite cardboard cutouts, but not far from it either.

Joe’s Verdict: I’m between a 7 and an 8. Vigilance almost completely worked for me. I get that most of the characters are more outline than breathing, but that’s part of why the story works so well. It’s about the ideas Bennett is playing with. Occasionally didactic, but done so well that it is remarkably effective.

Paul’s Verdict: I’m somewhere on a 7.5. It’s nearly succeeded for me at what it was trying to do, but there were some pulling tensions between having characters as archetypes and a story that don’t quite mesh with the dialectic that Bennett was aiming for all the time. For all that, when it was “on”, it was terrifyingly effective, dark and chilling. If that was Bennett’s intention, then at points he succeeded to very strong effect.