Tacoma’s confident understanding of how the smallest details can quickly and effectively reveal character is evident almost immediately. As Amitjyoti “Amy” Ferrier, you have just flown your tiny spacefaring vessel to Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma. As you prepare to board Tacoma, you jokingly instruct your shipboard AI, the delightfully chipper Minny, to not let anybody scan your ship while you’re gone. “O-kayyy!” Minny replies. “O-kayyy,” Amy repeats, half to herself, in a way that’s understated, not at all mocking, and that suggests Amy is taking a bit of comfort in Minny’s particular, familiar quirks of personality, before venturing into the unknown that awaits on the other side of the airlock.

Amy has arrived at Tacoma to recover its shipboard AI, Odin. Odin is the extremely valuable property of the Venturis Corporation, which runs Tacoma as a waypoint for the transfer of cargo between Earth and the moon. When you arrive, the six-person crew has apparently just evacuated, though the circumstances behind their sudden departure aren’t immediately clear. Luckily, a malfunctioning augmented-reality surveillance system has stored enough of the recent occurrences aboard the station that, as you make your way through Tacoma to recover Odin, a picture of what’s occurred in the last few days comes into focus. It’s the process of piecing together this narrative, and especially of developing an understanding of who these people are, that makes Tacoma such a pleasure to play.

Sometimes the skill with which a game achieves something is most fully revealed in contrast to games with similar aims that failed, and I couldn’t help but think of The Chinese Room’s disappointing Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture while playing Tacoma. Both games try to engage us in the lives of people who appear before us as ghosts, whether those ghosts are technological or metaphysical in nature. But Rapture’s efforts ring false; its characters are never pushed beyond shallow collections of character traits mechanically going through the motions of a story, and their onscreen representations as nearly identical, indistinct, glowing echoes of the past make it all the more difficult to become attached to them as individual entities. By contrast, Tacoma’s characters are wonderfully specific, real-seeming and visually distinct from each other. They feel like people caught up in a crisis, and although the characters are full of depth and nuance, one never senses the game straining to convey it. It all seems to emerge organically from the environment and the circumstances in which the characters find themselves.

That’s not to say there’s nothing dazzling about the storytelling skill on display here; there definitely is. As you watch the augmented reality recordings of Tacoma’s crew interacting, you can rewind and fast-forward at will, and some of these scenes involve all six members, converging together, splitting off, having private conversations or personal moments of anxiety or grief, then reconvening into the greater whole. The first such scene involves the crew gathering for a party; you might at first listen in on Clive’s conversation with Andrew in the kitchen, then rewind and head down to a nearby pool table where Sareh is discussing her search for human connection with Odin. That’s not to mention the simultaneous actions of crew members E.V., Roberta, and Natali, and the narrative choreography we witness as the threads of these characters’ lives split and reunite is truly masterful. It’s all the more masterful for feeling subtle and natural, for being concerned first and foremost with illuminating our understanding of these people, rather than with impressing us with its technical brilliance.

It’s at this party that you discover the nature of the crisis that has resulted in the crew’s absence: space debris strikes the station, damaging Tacoma’s oxygen systems and leaving the crew with a supply of breathable air that won’t last more than a few days. What’s more, the station’s communication systems are also knocked out, leaving them stranded, forced to devise their own desperate means of escaping to safety. It’s a classic pressure cooker situation, and Tacoma ratchets up the suspense as you gradually uncover what happened in the hours and days following the impact. But through it all, the game maintains a focus on character first and foremost; it’s never about the crisis, so much as it’s about the individual, specific people trapped in the crisis, and how they respond to it.

The game envisions a future in which discussions like the one I’m having right now no longer need to happen, because everyone’s humanity is fully recognized.

Tacoma arrives almost exactly four years after Gone Home, and the differences between the games reflect, perhaps inadvertently, shifts in gaming culture that have taken place in that time. For me and many others, Gone Home felt like a revelation, a window into a world that could exist, but didn’t, where I as a queer woman might regularly see myself reflected and represented in the medium that I’d loved for so long. Set in the mid-90s and incorporating the passage of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Gone Home was a game focused on queer people that was specifically about conflicts rooted in their existence as queer people, and it was released into a 2013 gaming landscape in which some people vehemently condemned the “political agenda” of a game that dared to recognize the basic humanity of queer women and tell a story about them for a change. Sam and Lonnie had to hit the road in the hopes of finding a place that could truly be home to them, and two decades later, we still know too well what it is to not be seen as fully human; our stories not seen to be as worthy of being told as those about cis white men, the very telling of our stories still sometimes met with some degree of fear and rage.

Tacoma feels bold not just in its speculation about technological advancements, but also in its assumption of a present in which stories with a cast of six people and nary a straight white man in sight can elevate everyone’s humanity. So often when I express the need for broader, better representations in games, I’m met with a response that’s some sarcastic variation on “Sure, why don’t we make a game about a queer black Muslim bisexual trans woman?” As if such a character is inherently less human, less deserving of being the center of a story than a straight white cis man.

Tacoma features a black woman, a Muslim woman, and a queer Asian man, among others, and the humanity of every character is incidental, fully assumed and fully granted by each of the others; the game is full of conflict but none of that conflict is rooted in the specifics of anyone’s gender, race, or sexuality. The game envisions a future in which discussions like the one I’m having right now no longer need to happen, because everyone’s humanity is fully recognized. I look forward to the day when we no longer need to praise a game, film, or TV show simply for who it dares to be about, but although Tacoma imagines such a day, and although we need visions of what that day might look like, we’re not there yet.

Tacoma may imagine a future in which people are no longer oppressed or marginalized along axes like race, gender, and sexuality, but that doesn’t mean its vision of the future is utopian. The Venturis Corporation is a cold, capitalist enterprise, and Tacoma knows that a world in which we are all equally liable to be exploited under capitalism is not a truly free world. Gone Home was a simpler narrative, with a simpler thrust: everything you discovered about its two central characters tied in directly to the game’s central conflict. The threads of the story were neat and clearly focused. Tacoma is a little messier, its threads less unified, more frayed, less narratively impactful but more legitimately lifelike.

Of course, the game has a plot, one that generates suspense, contains a moral dilemma, builds up to a gut-wrenching revelation, and features a character making a bold decision that puts them in tremendous danger. However, not every insight into who these people are, what they want, or what they’re struggling with in their personal lives feeds elegantly, powerfully and cathartically back into the central narrative, as it did in Gone Home. But it doesn’t have to, because Tacoma knows that elevating the essential humanity of individuals is, in and of itself, a rebuke to the inherently inhumane and dehumanizing aspects of capitalism. These people exist in a system which does not see them as people, but the entire experience of Tacoma is one of revealing their humanity.

And what a pleasure that process of revelation and discovery is; how it trusts us, how it engages us in the process. Any game can tell you things about its characters, but Tacoma trusts you to do the work yourself. This is a game that risks the possibility that you might miss so much of what it works to accomplish, because if it didn’t take that risk, the feeling that you’re actively discovering these things yourself would be lost. It lets little details suggest the full picture rather than painting the full picture for you, and that means that at times you may come to false conclusions, misreading the motivations of characters. Gradually, though, you really get to know these people, and reassessing and correcting your perception of events only makes piecing together the story more rewarding. One of my favorite examples of a meaningful detail that suggests a larger picture comes when one character, trying to set up another with a friend of hers back on Earth, tells her crewmate that her planetside friend has a zero-G bonsai garden. Ya gotta admit, that sounds pretty hot.

In coming to know these characters, I came to like some more than others, but to care deeply for all of them, most of all Sareh, the crew medic, perhaps the loneliest member of Tacoma’s crew, but also one who, in Odin, has found someone she can talk to about her loneliness and her search for connection — a relationship that is, of course, its own kind of meaningful connection. With Gone Home and now Tacoma, something of a Fullbright ethos is emerging, and it’s rooted in relationships, efforts to humanize characters, and a championing of compassion and love as forces that, when taken beyond feeling and into the realm of action, can and do make the world a better place. I won’t go into specifics about Tacoma’s ending, but I will say that it feels, like so many of the best endings do, like a beginning, like we’re right at the point where maybe, just maybe, the creation of a better world is truly possible.

Pyre takes place in the Downside, the harsh realm to which those who violate the laws or, simply through their existence, the very principles of the Commonwealth, are exiled. You are exiled here for the crime of reading, in a society where knowledge passed through the written word is deemed so great a threat as to be outlawed. Quickly you are found by an unlikely trio of exiles, including the imposing figure Jodariel, one of the most striking female presences I’ve ever encountered in a game. She is the kind of stereotype-defying, utterly original character who, just by existing, helps illuminate the fact that most prominent women in games come from a very narrow range of representations, and that there remains a whole world of possibility out there for compelling leading ladies. In a very welcome touch, you may specify during this encounter whether you, the Reader, are female, male, or non-binary, and characters will then refer to you appropriately throughout the game.

The trio are known as the Nightwings, one of the triumvirates or teams competing in the Downside’s hottest high-stakes sporting event, the Rites. The Rites are the only way out for exiles: succeed in occasional championship matches called Liberation Rites, and earn your freedom, along with a full pardon for all your crimes. Fail, and remain in exile forever.

The Rites are terrifically fun to play; simple enough that you grasp the basics immediately, but complex enough that you find your appreciation for them growing over the course of the campaign, as things become more challenging and you may find yourself pressured to change up your tactics. In short, each team of three seeks to snatch the celestial orb that spawns in the center of the field and carry it or toss it into the opposing team’s pyre, a flame that grows a bit weaker each time it is doused by the orb’s magic. When one team’s flame is extinguished, the contest is over.

It’s not a violent clash but it is a fierce one, and it should be: these people are fighting for their freedom, after all. (Some care more about that than others, but they all have their reasons for wanting to win.) It moves quickly, full of thrilling close calls and rapid shifts between offensive and defensive play as teams wrestle for control of the stone or try to protect their pyres. Each member of the Nightwings has different attributes: Jodariel, for instance, moves slowly, making it more difficult for her to reach the opposing pyre without being intercepted, but the defensive aura she casts out around herself when not carrying the orb is massive. Come into contact with the aura of an opposing player and you’re banished from the field for several seconds, which of course gives your rival team a temporary advantage and perhaps a good opportunity to score.

If Pyre were nothing but the Rites themselves, it would still be an entertaining diversion, a fun, arcade-style video game sport, a kind of fantasy world equivalent to NBA Jam. And indeed, the game’s local versus mode should get a lot of play; it’s great for gathering friends and holding makeshift tournaments to see who among you has the greatest mastery of the Rites. But what elevates Pyre is the story it tells, the characters who populate it, and the fact that, whether you win or lose any given match, the story continues, shaped by your victories and your failures.

Pyre’s first few hours lay the groundwork for what’s to come, as you and the Nightwings make your way across the Downside, competing against the other triumvirates for the first time. Along the way, the ranks of the Nightwings expand as you pick up new members, each of whom bring different skills to bear in the Rites, as well as bringing new energy to the story. Perhaps the most memorable of the bunch is Sir Gilman, the incredibly swift slug-knight who is very small in stature but whose sense of honor is tremendous. He’s as endearing as he is hilarious, and like all of his fellow characters, he’s more complex than he initially appears. Get to know him well enough and he’ll make you consider how the idea of honor itself may be limited, diminished or twisted by being so closely associated with conflict. And it’s not just the Nightwings who have histories, relationships, and motivations: your rivals in the Rites do as well. Many of them are also good people, in their own way, just as deserving of freedom as the Nightwings, which meant I often felt deeply conflicted about beating them, though I never stopped playing to win, for the sake of my friends.

Pyre has a lot on its mind, including what value freedom for some can have in a corrupt system where so many are still oppressed, if that freedom is not used to work for the liberation of others. It’s a story of resistance and rebellion, of struggling for justice and a better world for everyone. For its characters, the personal is often political, but the game’s concerns never feel dry, abstract or heavy-handed; they are rooted in the lived experiences of the characters, and those characters are brought to such vivid, distinctive life by the game’s writing that you naturally grow increasingly attached to them, and invested in their friendships and struggles, as you all make your way around the Downside in the Nightwings’ increasingly cramped and cluttered wagon together.

The fact that you care about these characters so much makes the Rites feel that much more important, and the decisions that you face as the story progresses toward its conclusion increasingly difficult. You eventually have to start making decisions about exactly whose freedom you’re playing for. In my first Liberation Rite, I bid farewell to Jodariel, a painful choice to make because she was my favorite character, and an incredibly valuable member of the Nightwings, but I also felt that she was the most deserving, and perhaps could do the most good upon returning to the Commonwealth. Still, I and my fellow Nightwings missed her when she was gone.

Pyre left me with a feeling of the most real kind of joy; the kind that is tinged with sadness.

It’s not just deliberate choices you make that shape the story, though. You might play your heart out in a Rite only to lose, and still the story moves forward, the consequences of your failure woven into the narrative, and this makes the final few hours of Pyre extremely involving. For a long while, playing on the normal difficulty setting, I dominated the Rites, running circles around my opponents, and I started to consider bumping up the challenge. Then, a new adversary appeared, one whose appearance is a profound surprise to one member of the Nightwings. I felt a bit shaken myself, and went into my contest against him a little anxious, not sure what to expect. I was right to be concerned; he was a formidable opponent, and against him, my Nightwings suffered their first defeat. Suddenly my confidence faltered, and I went into subsequent matches more fearful about their outcome. I later lost a Liberation Rite, failing my fellow Nightwings, seeing one of our rivals earn her return to the Commonwealth while all of us remained behind. The weight of that failure was on my shoulders.

Whatever befalls you, the story adapts. There are other games that do this, of course–perhaps most notably David Cage’s games such as Heavy Rain–but those stories are such a mess of absurd character motivations and ludicrous situations that they completely fall apart in their efforts to advance whether you succeed or fail in any given situation. Pyre, on the other hand, glides forward elegantly regardless of the outcome; you never sense it straining at the seams to accommodate your successes or failures. I had failed in this contest, and that was that. Looking back on it, the arc of my story in Pyre seems so natural — the victories in the first act, the failures in the second, creating a feeling of uncertainty and desperation heading into the third and final — but I know that there are so many other ways it could have gone.

Toward the end, I approached Rites with a real feeling of nervousness, because I felt that so much was at stake, and that I only had one shot at each contest. (In actuality, the game does let you restart a Rite immediately afterwards if you want to, but why the heck would you do that?) I found myself shouting at the screen and shouting at myself, desperate to emerge victorious, terrified of failure.

I won’t tell you about how I fared in the end, or about the particularly difficult final choice I had to make, but I will say that Pyre left me with a feeling of the most real kind of joy; the kind that is tinged with sadness. It does this by being designed in such a way that all of its elements — the characters, the Rites, the art and music — work together, united in vision and purpose. Some of my Nightwings got what they wanted. Some of them didn’t. Some had to carry on living without reconciliations they had long desired. So it goes. But all of them found value in the time they spent together. Some were separated from close friends by the outcomes of the Rites. Some forged friendships that endured into the years beyond. So good is the writing in Pyre that you feel these connections, and you feel like a part of this unforgettable group that once traversed the Downside. In their world, as in this one, not everything works out, and we take what friendship and companionship we can, when and where we can. We ride together. We help each other. The struggle continues.

Anita: There’s a moment about midway through Wonder Woman where Diana of Themyscira witnesses firsthand the suffering and strife happening in an area where German forces have held Allied soldiers in a stalemate for months on end. Unable to walk on and do nothing, she fearlessly rises up from the trenches onto a bleak French battlefield and strides toward the German encampment, a blaze of life in a place utterly drained of it. Witnessing the conviction and ferocity in Diana’s eyes, I felt something stir in me that has always been there but rarely comes to life; the yearning, so rarely fulfilled, for images of women being the larger-than-life heroes men so often get to be, rather than just the ones who need the aid of a hero.

Carolyn: I loved that moment, too. (I may be dating myself by saying this, but it’s the same thing that drew me to She-Ra in the era of He-Man.) And because I so rarely see such images, and so strongly feel the need for them, perhaps I’m inclined to go a little easy on Wonder Woman. Certainly the discourse in general has been much too hard on the film, even before its release, with articles on film sites inadvertently replicating the very sexism in Hollywood one hopes a film like Wonder Woman, if successful, might help to dissipate in some small way, by citing what a risk the studio was taking by trusting director Patty Jenkins, whose previous film, 2003’s Monster, was very successful for an indie and earned its star, Charlize Theron, an Oscar.

Anita: The weight that’s been placed on this film is definitely unfair on multiple levels; not only is it directed by a woman, but we’re talking about one of the most iconic characters in comic book history, created over 75 years ago, who only now got her own movie. Ant-Man got a movie before she did!

Carolyn: It’s true! This movie is fighting an uphill battle on multiple fronts, and because it’s so rare for a big-budget film to either be about a woman or to be directed by a woman, and this film is doing both, it feels like there’s so much riding on its success. And there shouldn’t be. For the record, I do think it’s a genuinely well-directed film, at times audacious and almost operatic, simmering just under the line of going over-the-top, all the while maintaining its sincerity and heart. But it’s also true that it shouldn’t matter so much.

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Male directors including Colin Trevorrow and Gareth Edwards are constantly given massive franchise films to direct on the strength of an indie hit and rarely, if ever, are they subject to the kind of scrutiny or talk of “risk-taking” that loomed over Wonder Woman’s release with Patty Jenkins at the helm. As some have pointed out, we’ll know things are a little more equal in Hollywood when a bad movie about a female superhero, or a bad big-budget franchise film with a female director, comes out and nobody associates the failure of those involved with the gender of the character or director any more than they do when a male-centered, male-directed movie crashes and burns at the box office. But we’re not there yet, not by a longshot, and so, as someone who liked Wonder Woman, I’m not only glad that the word of mouth about it in my circles has been so positive; I’m also relieved.

Anita: I am, too, but I admit that my feelings about the film overall are less enthusiastic than yours and just about everyone’s, it seems. And while I understand the power and value of images like these, for me, on close interrogation, the film falls short. I was bothered by the way the film presented Diana as an icon of virtue and kindness who abhors suffering and cherishes human life above all while simultaneously depicting her mowing down tons of German soldiers. They’re just fodder, just “bad guys,” not really human and, as a result, not deserving of her compassion, or the film’s. It made the moment at the end in which she didn’t kill Dr. Poison feel really manipulative and hollow for me. The film wants to have its cake and eat it too, letting Diana revel in “badass” physical violence while still being this beacon of compassion.

Carolyn: I definitely share some of your feelings about the film’s handling of violence. That stirring scene you mentioned earlier, in which she strides across the battlefield without fear — she ends up drawing enemy fire, deflecting a thousand bullets, while Steve and his friends move in and do what they must: kill the enemy combatants. I would rather Diana had managed to get in close herself and use her strength, her prowess and that incredible lasso of hers to disarm them.

I did quite like much of the film’s politics, though. The bad guys are Germans (well, mostly Germans, and one Greek god), but I often felt that the true enemy in Diana’s eyes was war itself, and the suffering caused by it on all sides. I appreciated that the film didn’t let the United States off the hook; at one point dashing American hero Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) admits his own culpability in humankind’s history of war, and when Diana asks Steve’s Native American friend (played by Eugene Brave Rock) who took his people’s land, he looks over at Steve sleeping nearby and says, “His people.”

Anita: Yeah, I appreciated that moment, and hey, at least the film got people at Fox News to complain that it “isn’t patriotic enough!” But I also couldn’t forget about the politics of the film’s star, Gal Gadot. Of course, we shouldn’t hold the character of Wonder Woman accountable for the actor’s actions, but we also shouldn’t entirely separate our feelings about an actor as a person from our feelings about their work. Casey Affleck’s history of sexual harassment should impact how we think about him, and the legacy of a filmmaker like Woody Allen must ultimately be viewed through a lens which takes his horrifying transgressions into consideration. In Gal Gadot’s case, it was the awareness of racist comments she’s made about Palestinians that made me bristle when, as Diana, she declared that she was acting “in the name of all that is good in this world.” When she chastised a British military leader for acting as if some lives matter less than his own, I was pulled right out of the film’s fiction as my mind boggled, hearing this woman try to embody the principled ethos of Wonder Woman herself.

Carolyn: Absolutely, that troubled me, too. And it’s frustrating because I do think Gadot is well-cast in many ways; in her face resides all the righteous intensity the character calls for, and Jenkins makes the most of this asset, even as the film itself makes rather too much of Gadot’s body, turning her into a hero and an object simultaneously and giving us a world in which men everywhere are thunderstruck by Diana’s beauty. And sure, okay, I get that she’s literally a god, or something akin to one, anyway — she refers to Ares, the god of war, as “brother” at one point — but even Thor, which had no illusions about Chris Hemsworth’s attractiveness, doesn’t make it an intrinsic part of his character in the way that Wonder Woman makes Gadot’s attractiveness part of hers.

We live in a world in which women are constantly scrutinized and judged based on their appearance and being measured against unrealistic beauty standards, and I get that Wonder Woman is supposed to be beautiful but the film handled this in a way that reinforced ideas linking women’s beauty directly to their worth rather than challenging those ideas. And while some of the fish-out-of-water comedy was genuinely funny, I also felt that at times it was too much; sure, it “makes sense” in the context of the origin story this film is telling, but the film focused on it to a degree that undermined the character: she needs to learn about everything from a man: politics, war, the complexity of human nature, and, of course, sex.

Which brings me to the film’s ending. The climax was so generically Hollywood that I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. I don’t take issue with the film’s central love story; it felt sincere, and both Diana and Steve were well-developed characters. The film earned that. But the way everything hinges on the moment that Steve dies, the way that Diana is spent, on the brink of defeat, and then suddenly gets all of her power back as her heart overflows with love and grief, was so formulaic and predictable.

Carolyn: I totally agree that it was formulaic and predictable but what can I say? I’m a sucker for moments like that. Moments where love triumphs over all, because it’s not the way the world really is, but it’s the way I wish the world really was.

Anita: I know you are. And I do like that, in an era when so many of our superheroes are actually antiheroes, when so many of them are so “complicated” or “gritty,” Wonder Woman gives us a hero with a more sincere moral heroism, harkening back to the Christopher Reeve Superman films. I think we need that. And I love that the film begins with Diana as a young girl. That image is so powerful, so important; it gives young girls who see this film a way to see themselves in this character, too.

Carolyn: I agree. I take issue with almost any assertion that Wonder Woman is a “feminist” film, not because of what I think it says about our feelings about the film but because of what it says about our ideas about feminism. But for all its flaws, I think it’s still important; I think girls and women need and deserve images and stories like this. I think that in this day and age, we need more mythmaking about heroes who are brave, who have a strong moral compass, and who use their powers far more often for protection than violence. Maybe the way that people haven’t really responded positively to the gritty, grimdark DC Universe films up to this point, but are responding positively to Wonder Woman, says that there’s an appetite now for real heroes. Given the state of the world right now, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Wonder Woman’s Diana may be every bit as earnest and virtuous as Christopher Reeve’s Superman, and I appreciated a quote by Patty Jenkins that’s made the rounds on Twitter quite a bit these past few days: “Cheesy is one of the words banned in my world. I’m tired of sincerity being something we have to be afraid of doing.” By the end of the film, I think Diana’s learned that she can let go of the moral idealism she brought with her from Themyscira without sacrificing her conviction or losing her sincerity. And whatever the future DC Universe films do with this character, god, I really hope they let her keep that.

Viceland’s Jungletown, one of the latest installments of this burgeoning genre, begins to reveal how reality is itself shaped through national perspective and global position. This ten-part docu-series serves as a starting point from which to consider how reality TV shows set in the Global South are often centered around contrasting white Westernness with a foreign “other,” normalizing a certain brand of Western culture and exotifying other cultures in the process. And, to put it plainly: if the past few months have proven anything, the last thing we need is to ignore the incipient ways that white American exceptionalism is reinforced.

As a “docu-series,” one could argue that Jungletown isn’t, at its core, reality television; it lacks the formulaic casting of contestants, weekly competitive challenges, and that familiar “day in the life” family drama, perfected by the likes of the Kardashians (whose lives we know, after 13 seasons, are anything but quotidian). With staged scenes, specified filming times, and armies of editors, it’s safe to say that when it comes to the interactions captured by these unscripted series, we’ve given up the ghost of an unsullied “realness.” Just like other reality shows, however, Jungletown carries with it the same allure of watching and witnessing uncomplicated interpersonal arguments and meltdowns, heartfelt confessions, and passing triumphs.

And, as far as escaping reality goes, this is Jungletown’s explicit premise: it’s about finding ways to exist outside of the environmentally detrimental impact of “modern” society – and that impact is something we should all be concerned about these days. Jungletown is about seeking out untarnished spaces and creating something ethically and ecologically sustainable. It’s about exploration, building both social community and physical communes, and learning how to live in a way that doesn’t deplete both the earth and its resources in the process. And holy smokes, for the love of goodness sakes, is it ever about whiteness and privilege.

Jungletown follows the story of a real estate entrepreneur in his early thirties who is trying to build “the world’s most sustainable modern town,” with little more than the land that he’s already purchased in Panama (and hopes to eventually profit from) and an incredible ability to sell his idea (and, to a large extent, himself). Aware that towns take people, this area is packaged and sold as an educational institute called Kalu Yala, which is basically a unique study abroad opportunity promising a minimal carbon footprint and the freedom to be shoeless most of the time. As such, the institute has attracted a few dozen or so staff, and up to 80 young folks between the ages of 18-24, “interns” willing to pay $5,000 for the opportunity to spend ten weeks living in lean-tos in Latin America. The camera captures these staff and students negotiating survival without electricity and running water, while trying to build up on-site infrastructure and residing in extremely close quarters (or, to be more specific, hammocks).

Some might view Jungletown and the personalities it depicts as an accurate glimpse of a generation that’s been treated with kid gloves and demands instant gratification. To say that the privilege evidenced in this show is merely a symptom of (accusatory finger wagging) “millennial snowflakes” and their over-educated self-entitlement, however, is to risk missing the mark entirely. The driving force behind this venture is way bigger than birthdates – and, way, way older. In one of Kalu Yala’s founder Jimmy Stice’s many monologues, he says of the group’s vision: “We’re building a town to look for the best ways we can live, in terms of compassionately treating each other in a global community – access to food, access to healthcare, access to socioeconomic mobility that’s actually beneficial to the environment” (emphasis mine). Sounds sort of idyllic, right? Maybe. But what Jungletown aptly starts to highlight is that the “we” who get to be intentionally included in said “global community” is much less obvious – and inclusive – than it often appears on TV.

With episodes entitled “Pioneers or Colonists?” and shots cutting between the crew of recently arrived interns and a crew of reticent, aging Panamanian men doing manual labor while making (subtitled) comments about liking the institute’s presence since Kalu Yala pays more than locals, it’s hard to ignore the meaning in this juxtaposition. Thanks to insightful editing decisions that self-consciously depict the incongruity of this coupling, Jungletown begins to pull back the curtain of reality TV casting – and not just of individuals. Rather than mere backdrop, Panama – and with it, Panamanian peoples and cultures – becomes the co-star against which to contrast a nearly nauseating display of youthful naivety and, most importantly, largely Western, largely white, idealism.

While subscribing to the sustainability piece of Stice’s pitch, pretty much all institute attendees have ulterior motives. Some state that they’re there to make a career change, others point out that it’s a great way to build up wilderness skills and have an adventure, and others just want to see the world. Select vignettes show the interns’ range of experiences and backgrounds, but nearly all the individuals have one thing in common: international mobility.

Jungletown is by no means the biggest offender in this field; there’s a whole bevy of reality shows that rest solely on the exploitation of geographic otherness as both stage and starting plot point for suspense, courage and conquest. There are competition-based series like Survivor, one of the most widely known and whose US version now boasts 34 seasons, but there are also those shows that focus solely on surviving, such as Man vs. Wild, one of many television shows featuring survivalist Bear Grylls, and the greener Naked and Afraid. Depending upon their format, each one of these shows has situated a season or an episode (or three) in Panama – and the country serves a very specific purpose. Naked and Afraid is perhaps the most extreme (and thus crystal clear) example.

Each week, viewers can tune in to watch as one (naked) American man and one (naked) American woman go up against a chosen geographic region: “the daunting jungle of Amazonia,” “high elevation in the peaks of Udhampur, India,” or, of course, “the remote Panamanian rainforest.” Armed with no more than a bowie knife or a machete, a pot or a fire starter, the topography, flora and fauna, become our Americans’ adversaries. Watching folks from places like Colorado, Florida and Missouri amble barefoot over thorns and through swamps, struggle to purify muddy, fecal- and bacteria-infested water, and deal with hundreds of mosquito bites in a matter of hours does make for entertaining, escapist television. But, when nearly all of the episodes take place in non-Western nations, shows like Naked and Afraid also reinforce a stark divide between “here,” the home states of our daring participants and even the safety of our couches, and “there,” the undeveloped wilderness of the unknown.

By repeatedly casting certain countries in the role of remote wilderness locale, reality shows like Naked and Afraid exotify and cement the distant danger of places like Panama: places where people have been living for years. Thousands of years. And when over 90% of participants featured in shows like Naked and Afraid are white, and shown traipsing across Tanzania and wading through parts of Brazil talking about wanting to conquer, combat and survive an environment that is presented as utterly inhospitable, the episodes work to altogether erase the experiences of the people always already existing there. We turn on these reality TV shows to watch white people trying to survive in far-flung regions, and yet, what’s always already lost in these recurring representations is real survival. And, not just surviving: living.

When reality TV shows (or notions of new, all-inclusive sustainable communities, such as Kalu Yala) originating in the US repeatedly choose as their stage the Global South, it’s because we are in the privileged position to do so. As Jungletown demonstrates, to escape the perils wrought by “modern” society – or, capitalist consumerism – where do folks head? Why, South, of course. The repetition of this choice time and time again works to eclipse the lives, cultures and histories of these regions whose only role to play is one of an unpopulated, even primitive place just waiting to be colonized and developed, conquered and survived – and this effective whitewashing works both ways. Viewers are not only presented with the image of the threatening, exotic and undeveloped wild of “there”; they are implicitly asked over and over again to understand “here” as just the opposite: modern, safe, and easily livable (albeit environmentally harmful and unfulfilling).

To reiterate its self-professed statement of purpose, Jungletown is about creating a place where “we” have “access to food, access to healthcare, access to socioeconomic mobility that’s actually beneficial to the environment.” We who are Western, white, and willing and able to travel beyond national borders, and then back again. When the staff and students at Kalu Yala complete their ten weeks abroad or tire of their time in the jungle – and after Naked and Afraid participants succeed in starving themselves for the full 21 days or tap out after just two – they will all effortlessly return to their previous places. It’s not a stretch to say that most of these people will also be returning to a stable place to sleep and affordable treatment for whatever afflictions they incurred abroad. But of course, this is not the case for everyone living in the US; survival isn’t always a breeze here, nor is getting medical care and sustainable nourishment.

The easy binary of “us” and “them” reinforced through particular reality programs not only erases people beyond the borders of the US; it also flattens the experiences of millions of people living in the States that can’t drop everything and head off for an adventure. In the astute words of one of Kalu Yala’s most redemptive (and rare, himself the son of immigrants to the US) staff members: “there’s… ‘us and them’ attitudes sometimes that Americans tend to carry around with them – which is a little disappointing.” Reality shows whose prefaces reaffirm the consistent erasure of – and perceived divide between – peoples both “here” and “there” are disappointing, indeed.

Speaking of wardrobes: Belle’s style, from her time in a tiny town to her celebrated dance in a majestic castle, is an iconic component of both the 1991 animated classic and the live action remake, released this past weekend. Closely analyzing the fashion she sports in the tale’s newest incarnation can reveal how, despite its heroine’s surface level spirit and bravery, the film still traffics in restrictive notions of femininity, in ideas of virtue and wholesomeness that all too regularly come to reinforce the way women are treated beyond the big screen and in everyday life.

The early parts of the film establish Belle’s family history: the loss of her mother, her father’s gentle spirit and enduring care for his daughter, and Belle’s own ongoing anxieties about caring for him. When we’re first introduced to Belle’s father, Maurice, he’s tinkering with the gears of an elaborate gizmo as she knowingly preempts his every procedure, handing him just what he needs, right when he needs it. Though only for a split second, we’re also given a glance at the interior of this machine; within resides a tiny statuette of a woman clad in blue, holding a baby in a manner that is simultaneously adoring and protective. We eventually learn that the statuette is an expression of Maurice’s love for and devotion to Belle’s mother, and that Belle herself is that child.

Channeling the Pietà, this statuette subtly suggests the Christian narrative of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. And conveniently, for the next two hours we watch the now grown Belle demonstrate how she is, in fact, a savior: she rescues her father repeatedly; she protects the Beast from himself; and she swoops in just in time to liberate both the Beast and his trusted companions from their respective fates as a large, hairy-scary mammal, and as wise-cracking household objects for all of eternity. This early reference to Christian religion – and more specifically the allusion to virginity and purity – sets the scene for the remainder of Beauty and the Beast.

Throughout hundreds – even thousands – of beautiful artworks depicting biblical scenes and dating back to as early as the 1300s, the figure of the Virgin Mary is recognizable by the blue robe adorning her shoulders. In these images, her head is often concealed by something – the robe, a white cloth, or some other ornamental headdress – and in many works, one breast is exposed to nurse the infant in her lap. Folks familiar with the animated classic of Beauty and the Beast from 1991 are accustomed to seeing Belle gallivant about her “small provincial town” in blue garb, and others have written on the prevalence of blue in the wardrobes of many Disney leading women. Blue on Belle, however, is particularly significant; not unlike prolific images of the Virgin Mary, Belle is clothed in blue for nearly the whole first half of the film. And, not coincidentally, this is the portion of the film during which we are invited to understand Belle as (in her own words, in later reflection) “innocent and certain.”

So, what is Belle certain of? First and foremost, she’s certainly not interested in the troublingly aggressive advances (read: stalking and harassment) of the hyper-masculine Gaston. For all intents and purposes, and for the entirety of the time that she’s wearing her all-blue attire, Belle is presented as virginal: she is purely interested in books, in caring for her father, and in one day seeing the “great wide somewhere,” whatever and wherever that may be. To ensure that no viewer risks overlooking Belle’s moral innocence, it’s emphasized by the fact that she is the only woman in the film to wear all blue, both skirt and corseted bustier top. Well, except for one, that is: a young girl, the child that she attempts to teach to read. This parallel is unmistakable. Belle in blue is a naïve Belle, a resolutely single Belle, a Belle uninterested in sex and largely void of sexuality (albeit curious about romance), a Belle before the Beast.

It’s not until well into Belle’s time of isolation that we first see her in a dress of an entirely different hue. After rescuing her father by sacrificing herself to the Beast’s imprisonment, Belle is sequestered in his far-off castle and held hostage while inorganic items tirelessly try to facilitate her seduction. In no time at all, however, Belle begins to warm to said objects (while, significantly, declining the Wardrobe’s attempts to re-clothe her) and, subsequently, she warms to the Beast as well. Belle and the Beast spend time learning more about one another – of their mutual interest in literature (Shakespeare, specifically) and their similar, motherless upbringings – until finally, their eyes meet. They exchange a meaningful look and – cue dramatic costume change.

This sartorial shift aligns with Belle’s reflection upon a change taking place inside her, away from innocence and certainty, toward a more “wise and unsure” state. (The more we know, the more we know we don’t know, right?) Presumably maturing, while also beginning to acknowledge the fluttery butterflies in her belly which will eventually lead to “love,” Belle reappears donning a deep red robe. It is only now, in this ruby-colored cloak, that she and the Beast touch for the first time. Hands. They touch hands. And, with palms placed over one another, we start to get the picture: the girl skipping around the village just days ago is now galloping towards womanhood (which, in this case, apparently involves a crush on her captor). Even though Belle puts her standard blue frock back on in some of the following scenes, it’s accompanied by a red scarf tucked alongside her décolletage, thus denoting her permanent shift away from inexperience. (It’s worth a quick mention that, in contrast to the Virgin Mary, artistic representations of Mary Magdalene – notably, not a virgin – traditionally clothe her in red.)

Anyone who is familiar with Beauty and the Beast can call to mind the yellow ball gown Belle wears during what is arguably the story’s most famous scene: Belle and the Beast twirling together in the great hall to the film’s eponymous tune. It’s the moment that she discards the yellow dress for another, however, that marks the final transition of Belle’s burgeoning love. Finally out of captivity, Belle has officially caught feelings for the Beast. Deciding she must go back to save him, she quickly hops on a horse, casting off her heavy yellow gown to reveal a white dress beneath, leaving the viewer to puzzle whether this gauzy number was layered under her ball gown the entire time. Now wearing white, the color Belle dons in varying iterations for the remainder of the story, this clothing change marks Belle’s confirmed commitment to the Beast. Which is only fitting, as she can seamlessly move from saving the Beast with her tenderness (and unshackling the castle staff), to participating in what is most likely a joyous celebration of their matrimony. And, end.

Clothing unquestionably plays an important visual role in defining the kind of girl that Belle is, and in indicating her internal sense of herself. One could dismiss this as a mere narrative tool of a children’s story, but that would require willfully ignoring a lengthy history of how clothing has functioned and continues to function in everyday life – especially for women moving through public spaces. When interpretations of clothing – of style, errant behavior and even bodies – can be manipulated to legitimize harassment, assault or violence against cis women, non-binary individuals and trans folks, the significance of attire cannot be ignored. And as it turns out, the hyper-masculine character of Gaston – former general and current town bachelor and brute – is there to forcefully remind us that what people wear remains a problematically significant part of both the perception and justification of actions.

Belle’s tiny little town hosts a thriving rape culture in which women are literally defined as “prey” and followed home despite repeatedly rebuffing a man. Spurned by Belle’s hard and fast no, Gaston states, “It’s the ones that play hardest to get that make the sweetest prey.” He is utterly undeterred by her adamant refusal of his efforts to entice her. Belle’s blue chasteness is contrasted by other women in the town, who very clearly want Gaston’s attention and affections. A trio of women are clad in low-cut pink with well-pruned coifs and make-up caked on their faces; not shockingly, these women, in attire meant to suggest promiscuity, are unoriginally depicted as literally “asking for it.” Later, Gaston’s sidekick LeFou, in an effort to soothe the arrogant brute, reminds him in calming, hushed tones of his days of yore as a war general: “Go back to the war… blood… explosions… widows.” With this, Gaston lasciviously smiles, as though lost in some related, fond memory of war, and with it, a different type of carnal conquest.

Gaston’s masculinity is a muddled amalgam of alarmingly violent heterosexuality. Normalizing gendered aggression is particularly problematic in a children’s story that clearly contrasts the clothing of the women chasing him with the one spurning his come-ons. This simplistic polarization reinforces the notion that one can anticipate what a woman “wants” based on her aesthetic – and at the same time stalk another, couched in jokes, smiles and attempted charm. As outsiders, passive viewers of the story, it’s easy for us to rationalize that the film positions Gaston as a villain, and to conclude therefore that the film condemns his behavior as a result.

Watching his relationships to other characters within the film, however, one could hardly guess that his behavior is perceived as a problem. On the contrary, Gaston remains a well-respected, adored, even lionized figure till the time of his demise. The townsfolk kowtow to his demands and consistently follow his lead, from dancing around their community dining hall to blindly storming off into the night in search of the Beast. And this is precisely what defines and reifies rape culture: normalizing, trivializing, and largely ignoring sexual assault and harassment (let alone horrifically using sexual assault as a weapon of war as referenced in the quote above).

Of course, the world of Beauty and the Beast is one of fantasy, but the false notion that you can tell what a woman wants based on what she’s wearing is very real, and has only too much power in our lived realities. When films like Beauty and the Beast rely on simplistic ideas of female identity as existing either in the realm of the “pure and innocent” or elsewhere, and suggest that what women wear accurately communicates their desires, their value, and how they should be treated, they reinforce attitudes about women and attire in our culture that are not just ridiculous, but dangerous as well. All in all, the new live action Beauty and the Beast is an easily enjoyable delight – but that doesn’t mean we can’t also be diligent in our awareness and analysis of it, even as we leave the theater fondly humming along to its familiar and incredibly catchy melodies.

This desire comes through in so many facets of Logan. This film does away with the glossy, sanitized brand of violence we’ve come to expect from so many superhero films, including many of the X-Men films, in which characters in tights have time for banter and wisecracks and the violence they engage in rarely leaves a lasting mark. Logan feels more like a Western itself, and Logan, as the violent, grizzled hero of this particular Western, is a figure genre audiences are all too familiar with: the brutal, emotionally closed off man who has disconnected himself from the world, but who forges a new connection with a younger person that peels away the layers to reveal that somewhere deep inside, he still has a beating heart. He shares some cinematic DNA with figures ranging from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 in Terminator 2 to Casey Affleck’s Lee Chandler in Manchester by the Sea, but because of the beard, the gruff attitude, the parental relationship he forges with a young girl and the long journey the two of them take, it was Joel from the game The Last of Us who Logan reminded me of most.

Logan is a film at odds with itself

The film’s setup works well. It’s been years since the events of the last X-Men film. Logan, old, tired, grizzled, and utterly broken in every way, is trying to stay under the radar. A montage shows Logan driving a limo for an Uber-like service, drinking on the job and sizing up his customers with disdain: business executives, a bachelor party, a group of drunken frat boys chanting “USA! USA!” outside the limo roof while a border patrol officer looks on without a care. But this time it’s not about Logan just trying to stay away from everyone he cares or could care about. On the contrary, he is working to raise money to protect his old friend Charles Xavier, who has a degenerative disease that causes him to be one of the deadliest weapons in the world.

This movie is not light. It’s heavy all the way through, weighed down with time, loss, and grief, and any levity we encounter is in the sharp banter that exists between Logan and Xavier, two men who love each other in that frustrating way only family can, a relationship in which Logan has shifted from student to caregiver. Neither Xavier nor Logan are entirely comfortable with their new roles, and at one point Xavier tells Logan, “I wish I could say you were a good pupil but the words would choke me!” It’s biting, funny and sad all at once.

Chaos ensues when Logan extremely reluctantly takes on the responsibility of protecting a new mutant named Laura, once he discovers that she is just like him: bred with his genes, she heals just like he does, and just like he was, she was surgically “enhanced” with adamantium claws, born and bred to be a little killing machine. Unlike Wolverine, however, she also has blades that emerge from her feet, which the film justifies with some nonsense about how female lions are the hunters and protectors of their species. As Logan and Laura journey together, we see him actively keeping his distance from her, being short with her, not letting himself get attached to her. I bet you can guess how that ends up.

The violence in the film is atrociously gruesome, from the very beginning all the way to the end. There were so many claws through skulls that I lost track. Heads go flying, limbs get severed, blood spurts everywhere. Wolverine may explain to his young protege that violence is damaging to one’s psyche whether the victims are “bad guys” or not, and the film repeatedly reminds us of Shane’s words to young Joey, but this is also a film in which the action sequences are beautifully choreographed and meant to thrill and tantalize. Some of them would have looked right at home in George Miller’s symphony of glorified violence, Mad Max: Fury Road. So Logan is a film at odds with itself, telling us one thing about violence while showing us another.

Watching a young girl single-handedly destroy an army of men twists my brain up in knots. It is incredible to watch and satisfying because it challenges the feelings of weakness and frailty that girls learn to internalize. At the same time, it’s horrifying that this child or any child would be capable of such emotionless violence. Laura embodies a trope we’ve seen a few times in recent years, most notably in Hit Girl from Kick-Ass. But while I found the gleeful, comedic, psychological abuse of Hit Girl’s formation into a violent child assassin revolting, Laura’s story arc is presented more seriously and with a bit more respect. She was bred to be a military monster, and if the movie went on any longer we’d probably see her actively grappling with what that violence has done to her and how, or if, she can ever overcome that trauma.

I really wanted to see the movie this was supposed to be

Significantly, Laura was born in Mexico, and like her, all the children bred as mutant killing machines by the evil Transigen corporation are children of color, born to Mexican mothers who have since been disappeared. There was an opportunity here for the film to say so much about race, about corporations unscrupulously exploiting people in other countries, but Logan doesn’t seize that opportunity. On the contrary, its racial politics are typical and troubling.

Logan is introduced to us in an altercation with a group of stereotypical “cholos” whom he slaughters. The disappeared mothers of the mutant children receive only a passing mention in the film, concerns about their fates out of sight and out of mind. The Mexican nurse who risks her life to bring Laura to Logan in the hope that he might protect the child is murdered, her death serving to fuel his angst and uncertainty. Later, an entire black family is killed after offering Logan, Laura and Charles a place to stay for the night. People of color are introduced just to die, sacrificed to represent the inescapability of the violence that Logan has cultivated as a way of life. The film’s one and only saving grace here is the children themselves, who do survive; we can speculate that perhaps they are able to carve out a new, more peaceful kind of life for themselves, but whatever their fate, it happens offscreen. It’s not what this film is actually about.

It’s about Logan being tough and brooding as audiences expect of him, even as he is rotting from the inside out, swinging his claws even when he can barely stand up, resisting any ounce of human companionship. This is not anything new. It’s just packaged differently. During one scene in the film, three different groups of men vie for dominance, each trying to out-masculine the other, and it’s clear that one group is out of their league in the contest to be the most violent and manly of them all, and their “inferior” masculinity is played for laughs. But perhaps the greatest symbol of just how internally conflicted this film is about its own attitudes around violence is the fact that Logan must face a clone of himself, the soulless X-24, and the battles between them are the most relentlessly savage in the entire movie.

I didn’t hate Logan. It was entertaining, peculiar, and even kind of touching at moments when I wasn’t jerking my eyes away from the screen after a particularly gruesome butchering sequence. But I really wanted to see the movie this was supposed to be. The one buried deep inside, the one that explores how toxic masculinity and violence destroyed this man, and maybe even how men can change. Even old, curmudgeonly, cold-hearted men.

I saw Get Out among a predominantly white audience this weekend. The decision was spontaneous and swift — there was a showing near me (in the white-ass suburb in which I live) at the perfect time, so I went. If I had had more than 10 seconds to think about it and plan, I would have taken the time to drive a little further and watch the film in a part of LA with a more diverse crowd. 90% of the time, this is not something I consider. Every so often, though, you have to sidestep the Django Trap.* It’s become apparent after reading a lot of “hot takes” this weekend that In-Their-Feelings White Supremacist Punditry has a lot to unpack right now, from trying to act like they understood “ShEther” to whether or not it was safe to applaud Casey Affleck winning at the Spirit Awards. (It turns out Affleck had a safe Saturday, but the tide had largely turned by the time he received the Oscar on Sunday.) They still found time to decry Get Out‘s “anti-whiteness,” though, while trying to wrestle with how to use the term “woke.”

Meanwhile, POC were out in force to catch Get Out this weekend, helping to propel Jordan Peele’s debut feature to a number one opening. Reviews got passed along like gossip on an old-school party line:

“Yo, you gotta go see Get Out! “

“Word?”

“So damn good.”

[three hours later]

“Yooooo!”

“Right?!”

One of the fascinating things about reactions to Get Out is what they reveal about where an audience locates the source of the horror.  The plot of the movie concerns a young interracial couple, Chris and Rose, who take a weekend trip out of the city to visit her wealthy, educated family — and the escalating terror Chris undergoes as he recognizes that something is definitely not right with all these white folks. From the very beginning of the film, an explicit parallel is made between the uncanny things Chris witnesses at the home of his girlfriend’s parents, to the abject fear and isolation POC are subject to when an everyday situation turns on a dime and becomes threatening.  What Get Out posits, correctly, is that to be a minority in these United States is always already to exist in a state of wariness and justifiable fear for your life — no Freddy, Jason, or Michael Myers needed.

The movie opens with a young black man, André (the always stellar Lakeith Stanfield) walking down a quiet, leafy suburban street at night. The twinkly streetlights, the well-maintained single family homes, the hush of a residential street at rest — all of this is meant to convey an atmosphere of security and safety. But for whom? And against what? As the camera follows a confused André down one street and then another, we hear him on the phone, bemoaning the confusing way these planned suburban enclaves will have an Edgewood Lane two blocks from an Edgewood Parkway. It’s a funny line, but there’s something important going on in that moment that will become important to our understanding of the rest of the movie. Because of course, there’s something more than a startling lack of originality at play when suburban developers and property buyers insist upon homogeneity and a sense of a pseudo-pastoral escape from “the city.” Consider: this also has the effect of easily separating out those who don’t belong. It’s like a code that one must learn.

As I write this review, it has been five years since the horrific and cold-blooded murder of Trayvon Martin. When a car ominously pulls up alongside André and stops, we — people of color and horror fans — collectively hold our breath because we recognize the signal for danger. But for white audiences, that frisson is the delicious fear of the unknown. For POC, it’s precisely the opposite — the threat we see is all too well-known. It’s for that reason that Andre’s abrupt turnaround with a “No. Not today. You know how they be doing motherfuckers out here!” is so satisfying.

There are dissertations to be written about the ways that horror cinema functions differently in communities of color: after all, what does it mean to chase the visceral thrill of terror projected onto an external victim when the very real threat of bodily harm is a specter of your own day-to-day existence? Put another way: the critical consensus is that, among other things, the horror genre is consumed with an irruption in the social order and then a restoration of that order. At the end of Get Out, the true threat — white supremacy — has not been vanquished, and the only salvation possible for our hero is that mercifully provided by another person of color.

I’d be willing to bet that the title of Get Out is at least partially a shoutout to a famous bit by Eddie Murphy, who expertly delineated the differences between a hypothetical horror film starring a black and a white family:

Director Peele has talked in interviews about how he deliberately set out to make a horror movie that would be satisfying to black viewers, precisely because of this disconnect between how predominantly black audiences and predominantly white audiences react and “talk back” to danger. The audience’s mouthpiece — and the film’s comic relief par excellence — is TSA Rod, Chris’ friend and literal lifeline. It is Rod who articulates the fears of a black community going into all-white spaces. It is Rod’s conspiracy theories that turn out to not be so ludicrous (“some Eyes Wide Shut shit”); and it is Rod whose pragmatism ultimately saves the day. Remember that earlier in the film, after Chris and Rose hit a deer in their car and are talking to a police officer who demands to see Chris’ ID, Rose’s well-intentioned but clueless attempts to “stand up for her man” escalate an already tense situation. As a visibly middle-class young white woman, the fallout from this conflict is unlikely to rebound upon her — why should it? This is the same person who never bothered to tell her family that her boyfriend is black; because her father “would have voted for Obama three times if he could have.”

Get Out masterfully skewers this kind of oblivious, feel-good liberalism (Bradley Whitford, as Rose’s father, is an absolute joy to watch as he points out all the “souvenirs” from other cultures that he has amassed on his travels) while also allowing black audiences the opportunity to laugh through the paranoia that many of us have had to adopt as a necessary precondition of living in this country. It would be impossible to list all of the ways Peele subverts common horror tropes in this film to suggest that the film’s Big Bad is something so much bigger and more virulent than just the Stepford community Chris falls prey to. It is this suggestion, this recognition, that is behind the critiques of Get Out as an “anti-white” film. The brutal equation of anti-white supremacy with anti-whiteness is a rhetorical sleight of hand that would deny the truth that the lives of the Chrises, Andrés, and Trayvons of this country are in danger. It would deny the culpability of white supremacy in maintaining a culture of fear in communities of color that has nothing to do with axe murderers but everything to do with vigilantes with guns or criminals with badges.

*ask any POC about watching a movie next to some white folks who are laughing way too loud and long at scenes where brown bodies get brutalized

** Tell me Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris doesn’t look just like “Buuuuuuuud” from The Cosby Show. Come on.

There’s a line of dialogue about halfway through Split,  M. Night Shyamalan’s latest blockbuster, that masterfully illustrates precisely how this film careens smugly off the rails. Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), sympathetic psychiatrist to the movie’s hero (more on this later), sits across from her patient and asks him which of the personae inhabiting his body currently “has the light.” Who is actually in the session with her? Facial tics, body language, speech patterns  — these can all be faked. Is she speaking with “Barry” — the primary identity — or one of “the horde”?

Dr. Fletcher eyes Barry carefully, then asks,

“To whom am I speaking with?”

It’s a small thing; and it shouldn’t matter, but that small grammatical error made my fists clench.  Everything about this movie testifies to writer/director Shyamalan’s insistence that he be seen as “smart,” even when he overcorrects. I wanted to yell at the screen. Note to Shyamalan: that final “with” is unnecessary.

[Assorted spoilers below the jump. Proceed with caution or whimsical disregard, as is your wont]

The plot of Split is fairly straightforward, despite its insistence that its assorted “curveballs” represent something really new and interesting. Casey, Marcia, and Claire, three young women, are abducted by a stranger; they are kept in a dungeon for an undefined period of time while the terror and suspense about their ultimate fate ratchets up incrementally; the group is separated; the violence becomes more personal and more directed; the end. Horror aficionados will note that there’s a crucial step missing here, and it’s therein that the narrative promise of Split is left unfulfilled.

Part of what makes all horror cinema (slasher films, creature features, contagion/invasion allegories, etc.) such a persistent and universal genre of entertainment is the way it taps into a fundamental human need to be scared; but more importantly, it grants the audience and the protagonists a vital measure of catharis.

Order is upset. Bad things happen. The evil are punished. Order is restored.

Characters who have had their autonomy and power forcefully denied reclaim it. The audience can release the breath they’ve been holding.

That catharsis is rarely pretty (it’s not supposed to be); it may very well be temporary;  and one could argue that it’s a convenient excuse for an audience to rationalize its voyeurism, but it’s nevertheless a necessary component of what makes horror cinema work.  This is not to suggest that there’s no way to upend or play around with the narrative and generic conventions of horror — the best directors do. But M. Night Shyamalan is not that director.

It’s clear from the structure and format of Split that Shyamalan is aware of the cultural conversation surrounding horror cinema. There’s a lot we could unpack in the film, but the most striking element is probably what Shyamalan does – or rather, doesn’t do — with one of horror’s most enduring tropes: the final girl. The term, coined by Carol J. Clover in her seminal work, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), refers to horror cinema’s archetypal lone survivor: usually a female who may be bloodied and bowed, but is never broken. These films usually position her at some remove from the other characters in the film — particularly the other women/girls. In juxtaposition to their stereotypical femininity, she is often more athletic, less concerned with appearance, more able to physically meet the demands required to survive the maelstrom of violence the horror film throws at her. It’s not a coincidence that The Final Girl often has an androgynous name:  Jess, Jamie, Sidney. Likewise, although her heterosexuality is assumed, she is often still a virgin (or in some cases, safely married — no illicit and non-procreative sex for our heroine).

In Split, it’s clear from the outset that Casey will be our Final Girl: she is continually framed as separate and distinct from the other girls — starting with the way they are clothed. Marcia and Claire wear comparatively little: short skirts, sweaters, and heels. Casey, on the other hand, wears trousers, boots, and an almost comic level of shirt layers (something that two of the captor’s personalities comment on).  At the beginning of the film, Casey stands alone at a window waiting for a ride home from a classmate’s party — a party that she was invited to only out of politeness. Once in the underground bunker, she takes up residence on one bed, and across the room, Claire and Marsha share the other. Friendless and weird, Casey’s demeanor is nearly as frightening to the other girls as that of their kidnapper. As it happens, it’s only by chance that Casey is in the bunker with them all: Marcia and Claire were the intended targets.

And yet, once the action truly kicks off, Marcia and Claire virtually disappear. They are important only insofar as the movie needs nubile young female bodies upon which to wreak havoc. Narratively, they remain completely undeveloped. They have no inner lives to speak of. They are painted in broad strokes (Claire is the brain; Marcia is the body; Casey is the heart) that are supposed to Mean Something, but it’s hard to care what.  We barely get a chance to meet Marcia and Claire before they are hustled out of the main action of the film, so the emotive punch of their eventual deaths is considerably lessened. The movie doesn’t care about them, and it’s hard for an audience to care, either.

Something different is going on with Casey, however. It’s useful to remember here that the actor playing Casey, Anya Taylor-Joy, played the luminous, afflicted Thomasin in 2015’s horror standout, The Witch.

Taylor-Joy’s open, expressive face is ideal for registering pain and confusion (although it must be said that where her wide-eyed torpor worked to great effect in The Witch, here it’s just frustrating). As Split unspools, we learn that Casey is no stranger to monsters — she’s been sexually abused since early childhood by an uncle. Via flashbacks, we see Casey sharing affectionate moments with her father on a hunting trip, and we watch her learn to hold and shoot a shotgun.

In this case, Chekov’s Gun is a literal gun.

We know that it’s going to reappear later, and will be instrumental to Casey’s salvation. The movie suggests that, of the three abducted girls, Casey’s history makes her the most likely, and most worthy, to survive.

This question, the issue of who is “worthy” to be allowed to live, undergirds the twisted philosophy of Casey’s abductor.  Much of the discussion around Split centers on James McAvoy’s technically brilliant and emotionally-wrenching performance as the film’s villain, Kevin. As a young man with DID, or Dissociative Identity Disorder, McAvoy’s character slips between 6 or 7 primary personae (out of a total of 23, we are told) with clarity and tangible affect. Most of Kevin’s identities are “good” people, for what it’s worth: Barry, Owen, Jade, Hedwig. Not that it’s worth much, since they’re easily subsumed by the two others who are responsible for the girls’ abduction and continued imprisonment. And as it happens, there’s a 24th personality, “The Beast.”

It’s actually not a stretch to posit that The Beast is the movie’s true Final Girl, not Casey. Throughout the film, Shyamalan juxtaposes Kevin and Casey’s attempts to maintain control in the face of the monstrous actions of others — even though the monster that Kevin fights is no longer his abusive mother, but his own fractured sense of self. All of his personalities — Barry, the erudite fashion designer; Patricia, the finicky matriarch; Dennis, the detail-obsessed “protector”; and yes, even The Beast — arose out of young Kevin’s desperate will to survive in the face of his mother’s abuse and his father’s abandonment. Like Casey, he’s been victimized. And if anyone is offered horror film’s vaunted catharsis, it’s Kevin/The Beast. He eliminates all obstacles in his way and it is through his inner reserves of strength that he, like Casey, survives to the end.

Because as it happens, Casey’s  Chekov Gun doesn’t go off when she — or the audience — needs it to. Casey is denied the catharsis that The Beast is granted. As a tiny child, Casey is unable to shoot her rapist uncle; he lives to continue tormenting her (and in an additional, galling development, becomes Casey’s legal guardian when her dad dies). And when she takes up convenient arms against Kevin at Split’s end, her shots prove completely ineffective. Becoming The Beast has rendered him invulnerable. Casey survives, but it’s largely through The Beast’s largesse, not through overt action of her own.

It’s a grimly unsatisfying end for Casey, and for the audience. Although Casey is ultimately discovered and liberated from where she’s been kept prisoner, she never gets a true opportunity to enact vengeance upon her captor, which remains one of the fundamental axioms and pleasures of horror film. Instead, the shell-shocked and bleeding Casey stares bleakly ahead as she’s told that, after all she’s experienced, she’s going to be returned to the waiting, loving arms of her uncle.

By now, everyone is aware of the Shyamalan Schtick: you go into one of his films expecting a twist, or some clever bit of hand-wavery and voila! The guy was dead the whole time! Behind the hedges of a social experiment in colonial living where water kills the aliens! There’s no twist in Split, although it’s got a reveal: this film apparently takes place in the same universe as Unbreakable. It’s not unreasonable to expect that Bruce Willis’ reluctant superhero, David, will face off against The Beast in the future. As for Casey? She’s left to endure more horror and degradation. The twist, perhaps, is that despite our expectations, it was never really her movie to begin with.

*This piece has been edited to reflect the fact not all of the girls are white, as they were incorrectly labeled before. H/T to @thearetical for reminding the author of that important fact! 

Man, I wanted to like ReCore.

In its first few hours, both the game and its protagonist, Joule, exude such a scrappy, can-do attitude that I found myself really rooting for it. At a time when so many games are burdened with a grim, superficial self-importance that their actual narratives can’t support, dashing and double-jumping across the mysterious desert landscapes of Far Eden with Joule felt like taking a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, ReCore can’t get by on sheer gumption alone, and it ultimately fails to capitalize on the potential of its setting or its likable protagonist.

At its…ahem…core, ReCore is an action platformer that feels like a throwback to the days of the original Ratchet & Clank, so I hoped it might soar where this year’s R&C reboot fell flat. As Joule, you’ve just woken up out of a cryogenic slumber on the planet Far Eden. You were to be part of the planet’s terraforming crew, turning it from a desert into a bountiful, life-sustaining world so that what’s left of humanity could flee a devastating plague on Earth and make a new home here. It’s immediately clear that something has gone wrong, and Far Eden is strewn with the sand-scorched husks of terraforming technology that clearly never had the chance to fulfill its purpose. It’s a setup for an intriguing mystery–What went wrong here? Where’s the rest of humanity?–but ReCore squanders it.

The game relies on audio logs that you may or may not find in your travels for most of its narrative development, and while it makes a halfhearted attempt to depict a meaningful bond between Joule and her father, it’s not nearly enough to create a real sense of a relationship. Worse, it’s not nearly enough to give us any real sense of who Joule is as a person. The tiny glimpses of her personality we see in her warm interactions with her robot companions and her undaunted approach to the challenges before her had me wanting more, a reason to latch onto this character, but it never comes, so Joule ends up feeling as underdeveloped as the game she’s in.

Like the setting and narrative premise, the gameplay communicates promise early on. Joule wanders the wasteland with a few robot partners called corebots, crafting better parts for them out of the scrap you scavenge from defeated enemies. In my game, Mack, the eager, playful, canine-style corebot who is your first companion, wound up early on with a head of one color, a body of another and legs of another, a great detail that contributed significantly to a feeling that Joule was resourcefully scrounging together whatever she could find and cobbling together makeshift components from the bits and pieces.

Joule ends up feeling as underdeveloped as the game she’s in.

Mack can dig for useful items in the sand, while Duncan, an ape-like buddy you meet much later, can smash otherwise impassable obstructions. By far the most enjoyable companion ability comes courtesy of Seth the spider-bot, who can speed along specific tracks, carrying Joule with him and then flinging her through the air toward her destination. It feels rough, reckless, and liberating, and contributed to my initial hope that ReCore might be the game to reinvigorate the lighthearted, optimistic action platformer.

Unfortunately, like other promising elements of ReCore, your corebot companions never get to realize their potential. While you can switch between corebots with the push of a button, for some reason you can only have two of them with you at any particular time, which is a huge problem when you’re looking everywhere for the so-called prismatic cores you need to collect to access dungeons and advance the story. I repeatedly got to the location of a prismatic core as marked on the world map, only to find that I didn’t have the companion with me whose ability I needed to acquire the core, which forced me to spend considerable time hoofing it back and forth from the nearest fast travel point to swap out one corebot for another.

There’s a difference between a game that takes up your time because it’s presenting you with a worthy and engaging challenge, and a game that simply wastes and disrespects your time, and ReCore is the latter. There’s no option to set waypoints in the world, which means that if you’re heading for a specific spot, you need to keep pulling up the map screen to see where you are relative to your destination. There are numerous spots where you might fall right through the world geometry to your death. And when the combat gets frantic, the camera sometimes can’t keep up, putting you in situations where rogue corebots attack and kill you from one direction before you even see them because you’re dealing with enemies in another.

Like a mirage in the desert, the early promise of ReCore evaporates.

These moments make the game feel like a throwback to early 2000s gaming in the worst sense; all of the frustration and none of the fun. To be fair, there are also moments that recall the joys that a great action platformer can offer. The game’s combat is intermittently engaging as you manage multiple threats, dashing and circle-strafing around enemies, leaping over attacks, swapping the elemental alignment of your weapon on the fly and playing a little game of tug-of-war to yank the cores from weakened foes. But it’s not quite enough. If there were thrilling dungeons to explore, satisfying puzzles to solve or a memorable story to experience, ReCore’s frustrations might be minor blemishes. But there’s nothing special waiting for you on Far Eden, and so, like a mirage in the desert, the early promise of ReCore evaporates.

At first, I wanted to admire ReCore for being rough around the edges and feeling hastily cobbled together like one of Joule’s robots. We could definitely do with more games that have an optimistic, adventurous spirit. But instead of reminding us how enjoyable such games can be, ReCore ultimately makes the genre feel like one that’s better left in the past. It’s all the more frustrating because we also could do with more games that have female protagonists, and when such games don’t succeed, some see it as evidence that games with female heroes are less viable than those that center men. But make no mistake: if ReCore isn’t a success, it’s certainly not because it stars a woman. It’s because it’s just not a very good game.

“Yeah, her. Temperamental, high maintenance, only responds to the right touch.”

“Well, I’ve been touching this thing for six months,” Donna responds, “and he still hasn’t turned on.”

This exchange, as it turns out, isn’t just a bit of pointed repartee between spouses. It’s an indication that in its third season, more than ever before, Halt and Catch Fire is concerned with the perceptions and the realities of gender dynamics in tech. What makes Halt’s foregrounding of these dynamics so effective is the way in which it arises organically out of the characters and the dramatic situations in which they find themselves. There’s nothing heavy-handed or conspicuous about the show’s concerns with sexism. Unfortunately, the same can’t always be said of the show’s desire to appear knowing and witty about tech culture. At one point, for instance, two characters have an exchange about the correct pronunciation of GIF, and nobody, but nobody, was having that conversation in 1986.

Of course, Halt is a fictional show, and it’s never been overly concerned about faithful adherence to technological reality. It’s primarily interested in exploring its characters and their relationships; the broad trends of 1980s technological development are just a means by which it does that. So while season three may show us online avatars and graphical environments that are far more sophisticated than anything CompuServe or any other actual online service could have managed in 1986, it doesn’t really matter. Anyone old enough to have dialed up a BBS in the mid-80s will recognize that the show gets the most important thing right: the excitement of developing new ways for people to connect through their computers.

Halt’s third season finds Mutiny relocated to the Bay Area, a San Francisco tech startup a few decades before the city would find itself overrun with them. Donna and Cameron (Mackenzie Davis), the brilliant programmer who founded Mutiny, are eager to keep the company on the frontier of online innovation. Noticing that many people are using their online community to set up informal exchanges with each other, the two seek the necessary venture capital to incorporate trading into Mutiny’s official offerings, complete with software designed to support an online marketplace.

But for Donna and Cameron, pitching their plan to potential Silicon Valley investors is especially difficult. Not only are they asking people to take a big financial risk on an unproven idea; they’re doing so in a culture dominated by male visionaries–Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the show’s own fictional Joe McMillan–where people are more likely to see a man’s idea as worth rolling the dice on, and where women generally aren’t expected to have such ideas at all. Time and again, Donna and Cameron’s pitch gets no response from venture capitalists, and there’s only one reasonable conclusion as to why. When their colleague and friend John Bosworth (Toby Huss), trying to cheer them up, says “It only takes one of them to ask you to the dance,” Cameron is quick to shoot back, “God, I love how even the metaphors in this business are sexist.”

As is always the case with systemic sexism, it’s so ubiquitous as to be largely invisible to many people, and even the sympathetic and supportive men of Mutiny, like Boz, don’t really see the extent of how it functions. His efforts to be supportive are genuine, but when he says to Donna and Cameron, “The fact that you two are women I’m sure doesn’t help matters,” it’s obvious that he doesn’t grasp just how significant of a force sexism is. It becomes more apparent, though, when one venture capitalist has an easier time seeing Donna and Cameron as potential sexual conquests than as serious business partners. Sadly, this aspect of Halt’s narrative is just as relevant today, as female entrepreneurs still have a much harder time securing venture capital than their male counterparts.

Unsurprisingly, Joe MacMillan, the figure who has alternately propelled the show’s other central characters to greatness and left their lives in shambles, has a much easier time making it big in Silicon Valley’s business climate. As played by Lee Pace, MacMillan exudes the kind of enigmatic charisma that makes it clear why some people are so drawn to him, even when he continues to be an egomaniacal prick.

Now the head of a cybersecurity company, MacMillan’s ambition is no less ruthless, even if, in coming to dominate the Bay Area’s tech scene, he now masks it more effectively under a quasi-spiritual veneer and seems to be equal parts businessman and prophet. “Something’s coming,” a young coder says to Joe. “I don’t want to get left behind.” As if Joe is the religious figure who can lead him to the promised land. That young coder, the latest person to fall under MacMillan’s spell, is Ryan Ray, a brilliant programmer who feels that his ideas go unappreciated at Mutiny. Manish Dayal as Ryan brings a bit of much-needed diversity to Halt’s excellent but overwhelmingly white cast, and his social awkwardness makes his presence a great counterpoint to MacMillan’s graceful manipulations.

Also joining the cast in season three is Annabeth Gish as Diane Gould, a seasoned venture capitalist who acknowledges that being a woman in these spaces means that the rules are different for you. At one point, she explains to Donna that she still wears her wedding ring despite being divorced, because men take her more seriously as a businesswoman if she appears sexually unavailable to them. At another point, in a particularly sad bit of commentary, she refers to a male associate as “a sexist jerk, but better than most.” Pushing back against sexism doesn’t seem like an option to Diane; rather, she feels she has to accept it and adapt to it.

The show is clear about how male-dominated boardrooms in which sexism goes unchallenged can become places in which men perform and bond around sexism, as in a scene in which two powerful men discuss their preference for women in wetsuits or bikinis. When comments like these go not just unchallenged but reinforced by gestures of approval, it’s no wonder that women find themselves positioned as outsiders whose primary value lies in their sexual desirability rather than their ideas and business sense.

Given that the show has been transplanted from Texas to San Francisco, there are perhaps greater opportunities in season three for Halt to explore Joe’s bisexuality, which has arisen in earlier seasons but never been given much narrative weight. Sadly, the show continues to keep issues around queerness at arm’s length, and though concerns about AIDS arise in one character’s life, the show doesn’t acknowledge the tragic scale of the AIDS crisis, or the sense of shame and political silence around it.

It’s great, however, that the dynamic between Donna and Cameron is given narrative prominence. The unlikely connection between these two very different women has become the heart of the show. As Boz says at one point, they’re “the brain trust” of Mutiny. “They run the place. I just work here.” And as they try to navigate the challenges of running a pioneering, risk-taking company in a culture that’s predisposed to thinking less of them because they are women, it’s a pleasure to watch them also navigate the joys and challenges of their connection with each other; Donna, the more cool-headed of the two, more willing to play the game of business if it means Mutiny can be successful, and Cameron, the brilliant programmer whose passion created Mutiny but could also destroy it if she doesn’t learn to compromise once in awhile. Like Joe MacMillan, Halt and Catch Fire largely reinvents itself from one season to the next, and in season three, it has primarily become the story of two women trying to build something extraordinary together. And that, in and of itself, is pretty extraordinary.

The two-hour Season 3 premiere aires Tuesday, Aug. 23 at 9/8c on AMC.

Photos credit: Tina Rowden/AMC

In the 1989 film Ghostbusters II, Peter, Ray, Winston and Egon discover that “mood slime” is being powered by all the hatred and aggression in New York to bring the city to the brink of yet another ghostly apocalypse. If mood slime were a real thing, the male-entitlement-fueled rage directed at the new Ghostbusters reboot surely would have been enough to open a massive portal to the spirit realm and bring the world as we know it to an end. As it stands, that rage manifested in hate-filled tweets aimed at the film’s director, Paul Feig, and the main cast, especially targeting Leslie Jones, while also earning the film the highest number of dislikes on a movie trailer in YouTube history, all because the beloved franchise had been reimagined with an all-female crew.

The onslaught of aggression toward the remake is not at all surprising to anyone participating in online culture these days, where attacks against women remain a daily occurrence. In fact, online misogyny is so tiresomely predictable that the film anticipated it. In one of its most grimly funny moments, Abby (Melissa McCarthy) and Erin (Kristen Wiig) see a comment left on a YouTube video they have posted: “Ain’t no bitches gonna bust no ghosts.”

I very quickly found myself pulled into the new Ghostbusters.

But while plenty of people were decrying the film’s very existence for somehow retroactively ruining their childhoods simply by suggesting that women could also be professional paranormal investigators and eliminators, there were also many of us who were thrilled to see even the suggestion of this kind of reimagining. Before its release, I had many conversations with friends and colleagues that usually went something like this: “Oh god, I hope it’s good. It might not be. But it’s so important. Please be good!” And in truth, it’s unfortunate that any film should have to shoulder such expectations. There’s no sense that if a high-concept sci-fi comedy with male leads bombs, it means that men aren’t funny, or that men simply shouldn’t play characters in a particular profession.

But even as female-led comedies continue to make and break box office records, there is still an overarching sense that they just aren’t good or won’t be successful, and that if they aren’t successful, it’s somehow a commentary on women as a group, and what kinds of roles they should or shouldn’t play. While these illogical sentiments continue, there is a tremendous amount of undue pressure put on comedies that star women to be masterpieces. In a better world, there would be plenty of comedies starring women, some great, some forgettable, and it wouldn’t be a big deal. But this is the world we live in, and the outrage directed at the very existence of the new Ghostbusters indicated that it is, indeed, a very big deal.

Even with all the pressure and expectations the film had to carry, I very quickly found myself pulled into the new Ghostbusters. Very often, ensemble movies and TV shows have one female member of a core group otherwise made up by men, severely limiting the range of female representations we get and making “female” a defining character trait. (Katha Pollitt coined the term “the Smurfette Principle” to describe this phenomenon.) When there are a variety of female roles in a single piece of media, we get a wider spectrum of personalities and character traits, which helps avoid boxing women into obnoxious and played-out stereotypes. With the new Ghostbusters crew, we are presented with a range of women: geeky scientists, quirky engineers, and tough historians.

The story follows a similar arc to the original: ousted from their academic positions, scientists with an interest in the paranormal start catching ghosts who are wreaking havoc around New York, face bureaucratic hurdles that threaten to put a stop to their work, and end up fighting an epic battle to save the city. But like Kylo Ren of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the terrifying Kilgrave of Netflix’s Jessica Jones, this film’s villain is a personification of male entitlement. Rowan North (Neil Casey) works at a hotel but sees himself as a scientific genius whose gifts were never properly recognized, and so he aims to take the power that he bitterly feels entitled to by harnessing the energy of the spirit realm. When he’s confronted by the Ghostbusters, he gives them a spiel about how hard it has been to be so brilliant and never get the respect he deserves. Abby, of course, knows exactly what it feels like to not be treated with respect, just as any woman who has had to struggle against the boys’ club mentality of scientific circles would, and she says as much. The camera cuts to Patty (Leslie Jones), who no doubt could teach Roland a thing or two about what it’s like to not be respected by society, and she doesn’t need to say a word; her look says it all.

While the film successfully avoided the Smurfette Principle, I couldn’t help but feel like Patty fulfilled the role of the token black character. This became especially pronounced during a ghostbusting session at a metal show. There’s an amusing gag in which Abby successfully crowdsurfs to get at an evasive ghost but when Patty attempts to do the same, she is dropped by the crowd and exclaims, “I don’t know if it’s a race thing or a woman thing but I’m mad as hell!” A few moments later Jillian (Kate McKinnon) praises her teammates Abby and Erin for their hard work but jokingly tells Patty to “try harder.” Both of these are amusing gags and while they were used as an opportunity to acknowledge racism and sexism, it felt like the film was singling out the one woman of colour on the crew. And like Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zeddemore in the original films, she’s presented as the “working-class” member of the team, leaving her job at the MTA to join up, while the other three come from highly educated, scientific backgrounds.

Chris Hemsworth’s Kevin, on the other hand, is a male subversion of the old stereotype of the female secretary who is kept around more for her looks than for her skills. Kevin is as inept as he is attractive, and his sheer obliviousness about how to even do the most basic things like answer the phone properly leads to a number of funny moments throughout the film. Erin fawns over Kevin constantly in a way that’s both amusing and kind of pathetic. On its own, this would be frustrating, but again, because Ghostbusters gives us a range of women with notably different personality types, no one character is holding all the weight for womankind, so the film has more freedom to explore comedic territory without reinforcing negative stereotypes.

Ghostbusters gives us a range of women with notably different personality types

Kevin here fills the same function that Annie Potts’ Janine filled in the original film, though Janine, if anything, was far too competent to be working for the Ghostbusters. Alas, her skills as an administrative assistant only earned her mockery from Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman. Annie Potts is one of many cast members from the original film who make cameos in the new one; Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and Sigourney Weaver all show up as well. And not all the cameos are by human actors. There’s a gag involving the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, and also an appearance by Slimer. That’s fine in and of itself, but unfortunately this time around Slimer is joined by a female Slimer who is the very definition of a Ms. Male Character. While Slimer remains just a green ectoplasmic blob with a face and is perceived as male, his companion has practically every female signifier in the book–lipstick, long blonde hair, and a bow–to differentiate her as female.

Despite frustrations like this, the Ghostbusters reboot takes the beloved franchise from the 80s and manages to give us more of the rollicking comedic sci-fi adventure we loved in the 1984 classic while simultaneously wiping out much of the sexism that plagued the original. We also saw this with The Force Awakens, and it’s a trend I can certainly get behind.

Some internet misogynist may have commented that “ain’t no bitches gonna bust no ghosts” on that video the new Ghostbusters upload to YouTube, but in the end, just like the heroes of the original, they bust the ghosts and save the day. The final moments of the film clearly nod toward a possible sequel, and if the early box office results are any indication, we may well get one. In any case, it’s great to see a funny, entertaining film in which women triumph in spite of the sexist attitudes they encounter, and it’s made all the more sweet by the fact that this film also represents something of a triumph against legions of entitled men in the real world who felt so threatened by the simple idea of women busting ghosts.

That’s Hajime Tabata, director of Final Fantasy XV, discussing why that game’s core party is made up entirely of men. I thought of Tabata’s words when I was playing Uncharted 4, much of which is a globe-hopping adventure featuring the trio of Nathan Drake, Nate’s brother Sam and his old pal Sully. Nate has lied to his wife, excluding her from the group without even giving her a chance to decide whether she might want to participate. So she must finally force her way in, but when she does, she brings with her all sorts of gendered complications, representing things Nathan has to face but doesn’t really want to, and that, as players, we aren’t inclined to want him to, either. Her presence, as Tabata suggests, does indeed “change” Nate’s “behaviour.” It’s all so much simpler when you’re just adventuring with your bros, amirite?

Of course, Uncharted 4 is supposed to be a story of Nate finally growing up. An early sequence has him playing with a toy gun in his attic, still longing for the days of adventure that he thinks are behind him. And when, in the end, he seems to finally find peace in pursuing a less reckless, more responsible way of life, we are meant to admire this change and appreciate that he has grown, that he is no longer the Nathan who lied to his wife to go off and have so much fun with the fellas.

But if we examine how the game functions, I doubt that most players in their heart of hearts were led to a point of actually being critical of Nate’s dishonesty and recklessness. Late in Uncharted 4, there comes a point when Nathan decides to walk away, to abandon his quest despite having come so far and gotten so close to the legendary pirate treasure he has put so much energy into finding. And perhaps at this moment, we are “meant” to admire the growth and responsibility he’s demonstrating. But in truth, we don’t want him to be responsible. That’s not how the game is structured. We’re rooting for him to be reckless, to keep going, to leave Elena behind again if need be, because that’s where the gameplay is, that’s where the fun is. And of course when the game contrives a reason for Nate to keep going (as we know it must), we rejoice in the fact that Nathan gets to keep being reckless for just a little bit longer.

In response to our review, someone tweeted the argument at me that Elena is:

And I agree that this is the conclusion that the narrative wants us to come to. But if we take the game as a whole, gameplay included, we are encouraged to side with Nate. Those very characteristics of Elena that the narrative wants us to admire in some way–her relative responsibility, the way that she “grounds” Nate–are the very things that make it impossible for her to be part of the carefree, fun-lovin’ core group, and when she shows up, she brings with her heavy conversations about the state of their marriage.

Still, it’s tremendously appealing that Uncharted 4 gives relationships so much weight. It certainly doesn’t give violence very much. Nathan Drake’s relationship to violence is somewhat different than that of many other violent white male game heroes. Where some, like Bioshock Infinite’s Booker DeWitt and The Last of Us’ Joel, are grizzled men who seem steeped in violence, haunted by it and yet inextricably bound to it, Nathan Drake seems utterly unburdened by it. He floats above the violence that he commits. He is a character in the Indiana Jones mold. The famous scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy shoots a man and nonchalantly walks off perfectly sums up Drake’s own connection to violence. It just rolls right off of him. He can snap a few necks and then make a snappy witticism. (Uncharted 4’s biggest action setpiece, a destructive vehicular romp across a town in Madagascar, takes obvious inspiration from a legendary action scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark

The designers have done a masterful job of giving the combat a sense of flow; enemy guns sometimes seem to land in Drake’s hands of their own accord, and his allies have a way of appearing and helping him clobber an enemy with attacks so perfectly synchronized that it seems as if our heroes share a psychic link. All of this contributes to a feeling that Nathan is just breezing through all of this, almost by accident, as if the gods are looking out for him and vanquishing his enemies while he just leaps and swings and fumbles his way through his adventures. There’s no need for him to feel weighed down by any guilt about the deaths that happen along the way. It’s practically fate.

And so this breezy, near-effortless violence of Drake’s becomes just another part of his charm. At one point, the villain Rafe says that Nate and Sam don’t kill anyone in “cold blood” and the game expertly works to construct scenarios that encourage us to actually believe this, as if Drake and his allies kill hundreds of people almost without killing them. It is just something that happens, not something they do. He is incredibly lucky. He is indeed “a man of fortune.” Fortune smiles upon him as the bodies pile up. We aren’t supposed to think about it. We are barely even supposed to notice. Violence is normalized in a way that makes it seem almost weightless, inconsequential. Charismatic. Charming. In this regard, Uncharted 4 is par for the course.

And yet, there are so many ways in which this game is not content to be just par for the course. Ways in which it tries to do more than we expect a typical action adventure game to do. In the early goings, I was shocked by how willing it was to take its time using gameplay to establish the contours of Nathan’s “normal” life–his job working for a salvage company, his chats at home with his wife over dinner about their respective days at work. There’s an audacity to a massive mainstream action game that spends a level having you just swim around, calmly retrieving crates and securing a shipping container to a crane. And I loved that “The Brothers Drake” is an entire chapter about exploring a house as young Nathan, a house cluttered with details that tell the story of a marriage that comments on Nathan’s relationship with Elena in the present day, only in this marriage, it’s the woman who puts adventure ahead of family. This chapter also deepens our sense of the bond between the brothers, and gives us a crystallized moment to hold onto in the form of a faded Polaroid.

So throughout, Uncharted 4 seems pulled between the need to fulfill the expectations of the action adventure genre and the desire to challenge them, and in its epilogue, it finds a surprising way to both look back and look forward. As Elena and Nate’s daughter Cassie, you play a level from Naughty Dog’s 1996 game Crash Bandicoot in which Crash runs toward the camera, which is also something Nate has done from time to time. It’s an homage to the studio’s legacy that acknowledges how far they’ve come while also simultaneously recognizing that in some ways, things haven’t changed much at all.

As the spotlight shifts from Nathan to Cassie, and we see that now she may be the one with the treasure-hunting career ahead of her as dad has settled into a less reckless existence, it seems appropriate to me that she is a gangly teen awkwardly caught between childhood and adulthood, not unlike Nathan was (despite actually being an adult) for most of Uncharted 4. It’s not nearly enough, but it’s some small gesture toward challenging the gender dynamics of this game and of so many games. It wants us to imagine a future in which Cassie is the one at the center of her own adventures. And the home you explore in the epilogue is so beautifully designed and rich with detail that you actually do want to be there, in this calmer, more stable place. It doesn’t feel like an afterthought in comparison to all the places Nate explored on his adventures. It feels warm and inviting, like you’ve finally arrived in the place you were looking for all along.

I want games that go further to challenge our expectations and actively disrupt our ideas of what a game like this could or should be. And yet I appreciate that Uncharted 4 is a game that seems to recognize its own point on the trajectory. It may be the culmination of a storied franchise but in terms of where this leaves us for the development of the genre, we’re still all just teenagers, looking ahead and speculating about what the future might hold. And I think there is something beautiful about that, awkwardness and all.

Watch our video review of Uncharted 4