Reading Les Miserables Out Loud: L'Affaire Champmathieu's Double Trouble

At long last, we have worked out way through L'Affaire Champmathieu. Devotees of the musical will remember L'Affaire Champathieu as an episode covered by a fairly short song titled "Who Am I." Inspector Javert, who is running the police in M sur M, has for quite some time had a suspicion that Mayor Madeleine might really be a convict named Jean Valjean. Then Javert learns that a different man who goes by the name of Champmathieu and was picked up for among other things stealing apples from an orchard has been positively identified as Jean Valjean. Javert is 100% certain that this Champmathieu really is Jean Valjean, which means of course that he was quite wrong to suspect Mayor Madeleine, which according to Javert's Ethical Code means he has to go to Mayor Madeleine, explain his suspicions, explain why he was wrong, and tell Mayor Madeleine that he needs to be fired for this ghastly mistake. But of course Mayor Madeleine actually is Jean Valjean, and now knows that some other poor sap is about to be sent back to prison for life on his behalf. What to do? Let the name Jean Valjean stick to Champathieu and go die in the galleys with him, thus leaving him in the clear forever? Or go down to the court where Champmathieu is being tried, establish that he's Jean Valjean, save Champmathieu, and accept the (extremely severe) consequences?

So, behind the cut tag, I have some thoughts about what it means that this part of the story is told in such detail and from so many different angles and therefore takes...so, so, so much longer.

I've Just Discovered the Concept of "Mortality Salience"

Hi everyone,

Through a very circuitous route, I have come across an article published by Florette Cohen and Sheldon Solomon in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 20, No. 5 (OCTOBER 2011) entitled "The Politics of Mortal Terror," which has introduced me to a new-to-me concept which is possibly not relevant to what I'm actually researching but which I think can explain much about our current moment, which is: mortality salience.

Briefly, "mortality salience" is an increased awareness of one's own mortality, which can be generated by a lot of things. Here are the first two paragraphs of Cohen and Solomon's article, which define the concept and hypothesize its political consequences:

"Terror-management theory, derived from work by Ernest Becker (1973, 1975), starts with the Darwinian assumption that humans share with all forms of life a biological predispo sition toward self-preservation in the service of survival and reproduction. However, because of their capacity for symbolization and self-consciousness, humans are uniquely aware of the inevitability of death and their ever-present vulnerability, which creates the potential for paralyzing terror that is managed through adherence to cultural worldviews: humanly constructed conceptions of reality shared by individuals in a group. Cultural worldviews minimize death anxiety by imbuing the world with order, meaning, and permanence and by providing a set of standards of behavior that, if satisfied, confer self-esteem and the promise of symbolic and/or literal immortality.

Cultural worldviews are ultimately "shared fictions," in that they are unlikely to be literally true and are therefore generally sustained simply by social consensus. However, encountering people of different cultures may diminish confidence in one's own belief by presenting alternative conceptions of reality, undermining their terror-assuaging function. People are consequently generally uncomfortable around, and hostile toward, those who are different. Additionally, because no symbolic cultural construction can overcome the physical reality of death, residual anxiety is unconsciously projected onto other group(s) of individuals who are designated as evil incarnate. People typically respond to others who hold different beliefs by berating them, trying to convert them to one's own beliefs, or annihilating them to demonstrate the superiority of their own worldviews." (316-317)

So this presumes that humans always have *some* knowledge of their own mortality, but that certain events, ranging from state terror to, let's say, plague, can increase it sharply--and that this heightened "death anxiety" can significantly increase intolerance for other world views (apart from one's own).

Haven't read the article, but I'm interested in the concept. Because, of course, the recent pandemic increased EVERYONE's mortality salience, everywhere. But before that...there are so many other things, like the opioid epidemic, the general massive failures of the American health care system, increasingly pervasive and omnipresent gun violence, climate change, etc. We have SO MUCH mortality salience now. Could that explain some of the current...you know...insanity? I don't know. I haven't read the rest of the article yet.

Good Omens Summer Reruns

So, I have not had time to produce any new Good Omens content during the countdown to Good Omens 2. However, in the spirit of summer reruns--a thing I am just realizing now most people under 30 have no reference for--here are some links to my existing Good Omens content for your anticipatory enjoyment.

FICTION

A Nightingale Sang

This series includes all two and a half of my Good Omens fics:

There Is Only One Nightingale (Aziraphale & Crowley, or Aziraphale/Crowley, whichever you prefer, 2147 words)

Due to an Incident aboard Noah's Ark, a nightingale is left without its mate. Aziraphale does a little unauthorized miracle, and changes the course of literary history.

Laissez-Faire: A Debacle in Three Conversations. (Aziraphale & Crowley, or Aziraphale/Crowley, whichever you prefer; also Gabriel; 9.447 words)

It's November, 1847. There's famine in Ireland, and Crowley's been ordered there to buy some souls for Satan. Per the Arrangement, and due to Crowley's little misunderstanding with St. Patrick, Aziraphale winds up going instead.

Things do not go according to plan.

This debacle is almost the end of the Arrangement. But it's also almost the beginning of...something else.

The Good Omens Nativity: A Very Short Christmas Pageant (Aziraphale and Gabriel with a cameo appearance by Crowley)

What if Aziraphale was involved in the Nativity, the way Crowley got dragged into the Antichrist’s birth, because he was Heaven’s agent in the field? And what if, like the birth of the Adversary, it was…kind of a shitshow?

META

Good Omens Meta

The Good Omens Meta nobody asked for. 4 essays now; maybe more to come! Who knows?

Oh man. Nobody has time for ALL my X-Files thoughts. Many are collected here:

The X-Files Meta (a series of episode reviews written during a rewatch of all nine luscious seasons of it back in 2014; also includes reviews of Seasons 10 & 11)

But, you can also find a lot of stuff that's *not* collected there by going through a very special tag I wound up having to create:

#chris carter has lost his mind

I was in my 20s when The X-Files started airing. I watched up through Season 7 as it aired. Then I quit. I didn't watch seasons 8 or 9 until 2014.

So I watched this show pre-streaming, pre-most-forms-of-social-media, almost but not quite pre-internet. And I was really into it. I named two cats after Mulder and Scully. Mrs. P and I spent entire summers speculating about how certain cliffhangers would be resolved. We were really hooked.

But a lot of that interest was based on an assumption that turned out not to be true, which was that Chris Carter actually had an overall plan in mind and was building an actual plot which would eventually be revealed. I think it's clear now that he never really did. The show mythology was always, if we're being charitable, mysterious and obscure; and, if we're not being charitable, vague and incoherent.

But even before it got to that point--I think around Season 5--I started to have the suspicion that the show was a lot better and smarter than its showrunner. I think it was around this time that I first formulated the Accidental Theory of Good Television. The TL:DR on that one is: Good television does not happen on purpose. It is always an accident, which market forces will sooner or later correct. At any rate, The X-Files to me was a prime example of how a showrunner could create a hit without actually understanding why or how he did it. There was a lot I think he never understood about what drew people to the show.

The revival series were sad, for me, in that they proved to me that the show in fact had never really been what I thought it was. Chris Carter was not deep; he was a bad writer whose limitations had been concealed for a long time by the show's premise and by the strong group of writers he gathered around him. Between season 9 and Seasons 10 & 11 Carter had learned absolutely nothing, and in fact his reactionary paranoia had deepend to the point where it started to intersect with QAnon.

So bottom line: I think Carter never really knew what he had with The X-Files. He never really understood why most of us were watching the show. His ideas about Scully and about women and reproduction are retrograde to the point of absurdity. He got lucky with casting and he got lucky with the writers' room and that's what enabled me to be enthralled by this show for years. Apart from that, what keeps me interested in it really is the fandom. I've met some fine people here in the X-Files fandom and I really enjoy talking about the show.

What do I think of the movies.

To be honest, I haven't seen all of them, and I'm not sure at this point that I ever will. I've seen II, III, IV, VI, and I made it through the first TNG-based movie and two of the reboot movies but...I think I just got exhausted after a while. I don't have the same setup I had before where I could watch the shows while exercising, and with the amount of time I have in my life I feel less inclined to spend it watching movies I don't think I'm going to like.

I mean, I'm glad they made Wrath of Khan. I enjoyed Search for Spock and the one with the whales. By Undiscovered Country I think I was just tired, and Kirk's death in the TNG one was...underwhelming. But the movies did not have the same hold on me that the show did. Maybe I am too old.

I put out the ask, then I do some task. When I can do no more task, I check the ask box to find out what people have sent me; and then I take a little break to answer the ask. Having done so, I go back to task. And so on.

Basically I use answering the ask as a little reward for myself for getting me through the task. It's easier for me to work on the task knowing I can take a little break at some point to check my mailbox for goodies.

Of course sometimes i get too into answering the ask and it wastes more time than is optimal. But no system is perfect.

Well, the answer to your first question is clearly "no." This novel is unadaptable. Many have tried. But even I am not crazy enough to attempt it. I mean there is a 1956 film adaptation of it written by Ray Bradbury of all people with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab and Orson Welles as Father Mapple and even with all that talent I have never watched it because you just KNOW it was a terrible movie.

In 2019 someone adapted it as a musical. It was actually performed. It then, apparently, sank without trace. There is in fact a song titled "A Squeeze of the Hand."

I don't think you could successfully transform Moby Dick into performance without turning it into something entirely different. There's an outfit in Chicago called Manual Cinema that does sort of live filmmaking with puppets and whatnot; I would go see their adaptation of it if it existed.

So, the Eleanor/Tahani thing: I can take it or leave it. It was funny, but I saw zero evidence of any actual chemistry between them, and Kristen Bell's delivery of those lines always seemed forced to me. Then again, for a long time I saw no evidence of chemistry between Eleanor and Chidi either. Like, love, but not a lot of chemistry. Maybe this has to do with Kristen Bell as an actress and chemistry not being her wheelhouse. At any rate, I don't think that was an attempt at Representation or whatever. I think it was something the writers thought was funny, but which for whatever reason Bell and Al-Jamil never really pulled off. As for my headcanons about the gender/orientation of either character, I think Tahani will accept the adoration of anyone of any gender, but is powerfully oriented toward men. I think Eleanor has never had a close enough relationship with another woman to find out whether she has any bi potential, but she also seems pretty strongly oriented (from a physical standpoint) toward men.

Janet's being Not A Girl having gender implications: Since Janet is in theory just a very sophisticated machine--an artificial intelligence that actually is intelligent--Janet wouldn't have a gender any more than Alexa does. Like Alexa's, Janet's gender presentation is quite literally a construct; it's not an expression of Janet's essence, it's an interface designed and built specifically for facilitating Janet's interaction with humans.

But with film, theater, and TV, there's never just one gender story being told, and that's especially true for The Good Place, where we're often told that what we're seeing (and what the in-world human characters are perceiving) is not what is actually real (this is most vividly demonstrated by the IHOP sequence) and that everything they're interacting with is a concept (like the puppy that gets kicked into the sun). In theory, once you die, you are essentially transferred to a massive virtual reality, where the angels/demons in charge create a simulation which feels much like the world you knew before death, but which is instantly customizable and includes possibilities that actual corporeal embodiment would rule out. I mean basically the Neighborhood is what Mark Zuckerberg wanted Meta to be. So, we're told by the dialogue that Janet is neither girl nor woman nor human nor indeed an organic lifeform; but Janet is played by a human actor and she always presents as a woman. So each of us gets to figure out what we do with all that information.

Anyway, my point is: What is gender in the absence of embodiment? This question is raised explicitly with Janet because it's clear that her humanoid form, which not only always presents as female but always presents identically within realms (all Good Place Janets look and dress identically; so do all Bad Place and Neutral Janets), is basically a skin. But in theory, this is true for all the Good Place characters, except when they are actually alive and on earth.

So anyway. Short answer, if you want to read Janet as nonbinary, there's plenty of room for that; but once you open that can, a lot of other worms come out.

It's a long boring task day.

Ask me things and I will answer. I sorely need the motivational assistance today.

For those who recently decided to follow me: this is a multifandom and kind of multieverything blog, but here's a short list of topics about which I always have Opinions to Share.

FANDOMS (listed roughly in the order in which I got into them)

Sherlock Holmes (ACD canon, Granada, Sherlock but you better be prepared for Moffat negativity)

Star Trek (first and foremost ST:TOS; also TNG and DS9. Ran out of steam midway through Voyager. Have not seen any Trek series since)

X-Files (again, be prepared for Chris Carter negativity)

Doctor Who (doctors Nine through Thirteen but haven't done Thirteen's last season yet don't tell me anything about it)

Cabin Pressure, The Good Place, Brooklyn 99, Broadchurch, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Great British Baking Show, Top Chef, Blown Away, Repair Shop, other shows I'm probably foregetting

Big Fat Nineteenth Century Novels (Les Miserables, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Moonstone, Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, Lady Audley's Secret, and others)

Drama & Theater (mostly English-language with some French and the occasional German)

And then there's:

Ask away!