Have you ever been alone in a crowded room when I'm here with you?

Have you ever been alone in a crowded room; well I'm here with you...

On The Merchant of Venice, Wonder Woman, Intersectionality, and the Complexities of Human Nature.

A few days ago, I attended a "Shakespeare in the Park" production of The Merchant of Venice at a friend's behest (she drove me to the airport right after the play so... you know...). My only real encounter with TMOV had been when I took Prof Shea's Shakespeare class back in second year. I remembered liking Portia as a character, that Shylock was a moneylending Jewish person, and there was something in there about him wanting a pound of flesh and Portia somehow tricking him into not being able to get it.

One thing I had forgotten was how often the word "Jew" is used in the play. But another thing I had forgotten (along those same lines) was how incredibly anti-semetic the play is. I mean, at the end of the play, after Portia tricks Shylock out of claiming his pound of flesh, she literally robs him of everything he owns and then forces him to convert to Christianity. That's his punishment for trying to claim something that was legally his--he is stripped of all his property and coerced into a different religion. Granted, he was a bit of dick, but still!

I'm hardly the first person to point out the anti-semitism. We all know this (or at least, those of us who have read TMOV do...). What was more interesting to me, though, was how this anti-semetic sentiment affected the way we are meant to see Portia.

Portia is intelligent, resourceful, funny, and charming. For most of the play, you can easily see Portia as one of Shakespeare's great characters, who manages to be all these things while still operating within the confines of societal norms. The way she subverts said norms is, of course, one of those great examples of Shakespearean dramatic irony, and she makes for an excellent feminist case study when examining how ridiculous many of those gendered norms are.

Portia is all of those wonderful things. Portia is also an anti-semite. And realizing this also made me think about Gal Gadot and her role as Wonder Woman. There's a similar sort of critique to be made of Gal Gadot--that she with her zionist beliefs and public support of Israeli militancy feels, to some, like a poor choice of actress to represent Wonder Woman, whose character stands against war (on principle). I wasn't really planning on writing about Gal Gadot re: her role as Wonder Woman, but watching TMOV and considering Portia's character made me think that maybe I had more to say about this topic than I originally thought.

First, there are obviously some differences between Portia and Gal Gadot. For one thing, Portia is a fictional character. Gal Gadot is a real person. And that strikes me as being noteworthy. Because nobody seems to take issue with Diana/Wonder Woman as a character. The film itself, along with its characters and the messages it presents, does not appear to be particularly problematic. What people seem to struggle with is the fact that the actress who portrays Diana holds personal views that contrast with the supposed views of her fictional character.

Already, this strikes me as being odd. I mean, I understand disliking Gal Gadot and/or her views/principles. That's all well and fine. But since when do we require actors/actresses to be cast based on the extent to which their personal values align with the fictional character for which they are auditioning? I don't mean to sound glib here, but isn't "pretending to be character who isn't you" literally in the job description? We don't expect actors/actresses who portray drug dealers in films to be actual drug dealers in real life. Are we disappointed that Christian Bale isn't more like Bruce Wayne? If we really are going to start critiquing films based on the personal views/actions of the actors/actresses who play the characters, we may as well boycott the medium in its entirety. Hollywood is kind of a scummy and abusive industry.

Of course, there are plenty of people who won't see a film because they don't like the actor/actress who stars in it. That, of course, is their prerogative (and can I just say, I only ever learned about this word because Britney Spears wrote a song about it). I'm just not sure I buy that Gal Gadot's personal views are somehow a critique of the film itself.

But let us, for a moment, assume that it is. Let's assume that there is validity to the claim that Wonder Woman is somehow a problematic film because the actress who portrays Diana holds problematic worldviews. Portia, to return to TMOV, is subject to the same critique. What do we make of a great Shakespearean character who also happens to be an anti-semite?

Intersectionality is a term that has existed for a long time, but as far as public relevance, it seems to be a term that many people have only recently begun to grapple with. And like a lot of ideas/concepts/worldviews that are still in their infancy, I don't get the sense that a lot of people know what to do with it once they're aware of it. After all, what does one do when a film/play/book champions the cause of one underpresented group while simultaneously trampling on another?

Hypocrisy is a term that seems to get bandied about a lot. I can sorta see why. The more we strive to see things from a multitude of lenses, the more contradictions are bound to come to light. All of a sudden everyone's a hypocrite because how can you possibly say you're in favour of xyz rights while at the same time failing to recognize abc rights? How dare you support the gay pride parade when they have willingly excluded other disenfranchised groups from participating? How dare you celebrate Canada Day when it's really a celebration of the slaughter and displacement of First Nations groups? And so on and so forth. We're all hypocrites.

Except we're not. That's not how it works. Intersectionality doesn't reveal that we're all hypocrites; intersectionality is there to help us understand that human beings are complex. And that we're never just one thing. And if we weren't so concerned with planting our flags on some sort of metaphorical hill (i.e. this is my stance and it's mine and I will defend it because this is the thing I've decided will define me and it is my final, immovable position on this issue), we would realize that it's not such a bad thing to allow people and things to just... be what they are. We can say we don't support something, but I don't think any of us should reach a point of arrogance where we are also willing to say that that thing we don't support is unworthy of existence, which is sometimes the kind of rhetoric people come dangerously close to suggesting, if not downright asserting.

In all things--in all the people we meet and things we see and experience--there will be things we can take away that we admire and strive to replicate in our own lives. There will also be things that we see as faults that we can censure and strive to avoid in our own lives as well. People are complex. There's no getting around this. Do we require people to be perfect in order to support and recognize the good they bring to the table? Doesn't that seem like we're asking just a little bit too much? It is true that Portia is an anti-semite. The fact that she is an anti-semite is not the thing about her that we admire and it's not the thing that we should strive to emulate. We can, however, admire her resourcefulness, her strength, her determination. We can recognize those qualities to be worth aspiring towards, and we can aspire to those qualities without being an anti-semite.

Wonder Woman is a work of fiction. And insofar as its representation of women in superhero films goes (even if it is, as some critiques won't fail to point out, only a certain subsection of women), it has done some good. Perhaps we don't need to demand more from it than that.

Things I have learned about myself from playing video games.

So a bit of a preface. I was discussing the Steam sale with a friend recently when, in the course of said discussion, I mentioned that I hardly ever buy things during the event despite the fact that it is, as far as video game sales go, an extremely generous one (with most sales ranging from 40-75% off). I believe the main reason for this lies in the fact that I really don't have a very good grasp of what "kind" of games I like. The only thing I would say with more or less certainty is that I generally don't like racing games (and even then, I did enjoy playing Mario Kart as a child). For every game that I like, there probably exists several very similar games that I would maybe spend an afternoon fiddling around with before never playing ever again.

Part of me suspects that this trend indicates that context matters when it comes to my video game preferences, i.e. I love certain games because I was introduced to them when I was in a good place in my life. It does sound like a very Jon Wong thing. Nonetheless, I have realized that video game preferences, much like music and film preferences, often reveal things about ourselves that we might never otherwise have understood. So let's take a look.

1. Creative and artistic environments matter.

I like it when games look cool. And when I say "cool," I don't mean "realistic." In fact, I don't like games that have that gritty, realistic feel to them. I like colours and textures and games that make me feel like I'm on a heightened plane of reality. And I think this preference reflects something I've always said about books and films: realism is overrated. I don't watch a film because I want to get an accurate portrayal of what real life is like; I watch films because I want to imagine a world where crazy things can happen and people go on great adventures and love triumps in the face of adversity. I like to be reminded that beauty and compassion and hope can exist even during dark times and grim situations, and that they are worth beliving in, even when we feel like we have no reason to.

In a video game, we interact with the environment. I don't want to interact with an environment that looks exactly like something I might see in real life. I want to play in a world that looks like this:

More of this plz.

2. I don't like inaccurate guns. Or unreliable skills/gear.

I don't like guns that don't shoot where I aim them. I also don't like skills that have some random x-percent chance to proc. If I can't rely on it to work close to 100% of the time, I would probably prefer to just not roll the dice entirely if there was something else I could use.

I mean, it's not that I insist on things being predictable per se, it's just... I insist on my tools being reliable. I like the randomness and chaos of the world and the gameplay (after all, that's what makes it fun), but having RNG built into my guns or skills is like playing tennis with a racquet where there's a 20% chance the string could break but a 40% chance you add 10 mph to your serve. I like the randomness of teaching, but I also like that my projector works 100% of the time and that every time I use my whiteboard markers, there isn't a 50% chance they're out of ink.

Which is to say, tool/skill-specific RNG is rubbish.

Which is also to say... the things in your life that are closest to you--the people or skills or values that allow you to cope and interact and deal with the randomness and chaos of an otherwise unpredictable world--we need these things to be there for us. Always.

How am I suppose to reliabily hit anything with a gun whose pellets only have an 11.2% chance of going where I point it?

3. If we start a mission as a team, it's kind of a big deal that our success is conditional upon the survival of everyone involved.

There are many missions where in co-op/splitscreen play, only one person has to make it to the end in order for the mission to be considered a success. I don't really like completing missions without everyone making it to the end. Call me a team player I guess.

But I think there's a broader point here, which is that I don't feel like wanting something gives you the right to sacrifice people in order to get there. In a video game, sure, no harm no foul I guess. But in recent years, I've really begun to zero in on this idea in the classes I teach. We teach kids in school to "reach for the stars" or "achieve your goals" or  "strive to be the best" or whatever aspirational banality they have up on the posters/banners around the halls, but I find myself saying to students more and more, "Yes, it's great to have goals. Yes, I want you to achieve them and to feel accomplished. But don't hurt people to get there." And more and more, I've come to realize just how rarely people are given/abide by this specific mandate.

Once, when I dreamed about being an author, I was writing out a scene where one character was trying to explain to another why she admired him so much. As she struggled to find the right words, I realized I was struggling too. Finally, after much deliberation, she simply states, "You don't hurt people." And as soon as I wrote that, I was struck by how much it felt like I had written something extremely significant, even though on the surface of it, that line seemed almost as banal as "achieve your goals." Upon reflection, though, I realized how infrequently we would use that line to describe someone we liked or admired or respected. It's not even necessarily that it's not often true, as much as it is how infrequently we consciously recognize it as a virtue.

Whatever. Call me a bleeding heart hippie.

Legit selfie

4. I'm rather disinclined to play the game if there isn't an option to play as a female character. 

This was something I didn't fully appreciate until I started playing video games again, but it does somewhat explain why I stopped playing video games for so many years. So I mentioned in the preface that I generally don't like racing games. But one other type of game I unequivocally cannot get into is any game that involves men with guns shooting other men with guns in what basically amounts to a profanity-laced metaphorical dick measuring contest. It's just the most banal, boring, uninspiring basis upon which to build a video game and for years, that's what I imagined when I thought about the idea of playing video games (which, to be fair, when kids kept asking me if I played games like Gears of War and Call of Duty... that's basically what it is).

But even outside the context of most boring, banal first-person-shooters, it simply doesn't make sense to me for games to not give you the option to play as a girl. And I would hazard a guess that most of the times, it's because it didn't occur to the developers that it even makes a difference, and that level of ignorance feels like it would only originate from a think-tank that may or may not subscribe to archaic views of their target demographic.

I may not always play as the girl, but it's kind of a big deal to know it's an option.

2015 Game of the Year! Unless you want to play as a girl. That's why we made Tomb Raider amirite?

5. I'm not a huge fan of sandbox gameplay. 

I like games that steer me in a direction. I'm fine with failing a thousand times in order to get there, but I think in the end, it's good to know that I'm heading in the right direction. I know the whole point of a sandbox game is that there isn't a "right" direction per se and you can choose to wander around and explore the world as you see fit, but I don't know... once again, it seems to remind me a little bit too much of the real world and I'm already having a hell of a time navigating my way through that.

It does, however, make me realize how important it is to me to act with purpose. It quite often seems the natural reaction to being anywhere you don't want to be.

Navigation Error

6. I'm rather disinclined to play the game if there isn't a designated "jump" button. 

If there's one thing my character should be able to do, it's jump on command. My controller has 10 discrete buttons along with two joysticks and a d-pad. Surely it is not too much to ask.

But you can't play as a girl...