Red Band trailer, so NSFW.

 

Shōgun Improves on a Notorious Orientalist Blockbuster

Clavell’s Shōgun is a primo dad book. It’s a historical novel led by a burly white dude upon whom men can project themselves, over whom women fawn, and who ultimately lands a total babe. Granted, this white dude is based on a real figure—William Adams, also known as Miura Anjin, who became a Western samurai and advisor to Tokugawa Ieyasu—but beyond the bare bones of the historical events, Clavell made the tale his own. That’s a nice way of saying he wrapped the story in enough overt racism to make a certain kind of man feel both superior (because they’d never say that kind of thing, honest!) and yet seen (because they absolutely would—and do). Japanese characters stutter through European names—something Clavell seemed to get a kick out of, given how often he styled Blackthorne as some uncomfortable variation of “B’rack’forn” in a phonetic mockery of Japanese people’s accented English. That’s not to mention the book’s fascination with Blackthorne’s enormous white penis (really), just one of many strange ways that the novel reduces Japanese women to exotic, wanton dolls who apparently have no word for “love.”

It’s the Millennial gooner sweet spot:

1. Everything from the past is racist and bad and racist.
2. If an old straight White man created it see (1)
3. If old straight White men enjoy it see (1)

Language also plays a pivotal role in this recentering of the Japanese perspective. The Japanese language in Clavell’s novel is, like his grasp of history, clumsy at best. FX’s Shōgun, by contrast, takes place almost exclusively in Japanese, spoken by an overwhelmingly Japanese cast. For all its Western pomp and big-budget production value—the series was filmed in Vancouver—it is, at its heart, a Japanese series. It’s a dramatic shift, one that feels almost like a reclamation of a story that was only ever Eurocentric in the author’s narrow-minded thinking. All of this coalesces into a story that is both historically and artistically more authentic in time and place than its source material—and even, I would hazard to say, any previous depiction of Japan in Western cinema and television

The Goonlennial doesn’t seem aware that there was a previous adaptation at all. Them must be kicking theyself for the missed thempurtunnity to make clownself over a miniseries filmed 43-years-ago. In Japan. Where the cast of Japanese people from Japan spoke Japanese without subtitles for the most part.

I hate the future. Instead of flying cars and laser guns, we got lazy idiots with the IQ of an ass polyp doing moronic media criticism.

Also, you know that dipshit didn’t actually read. __Shōgun.__

 

McConnell will step down as the Senate Republican leader in November after a record run in the job

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitch McConnell, the longest-serving Senate leader in history who maintained his power in the face of dramatic convulsions in the Republican Party for almost two decades, will step down from that position in November.

McConnell, who turned 82 last week, announced his decision Wednesday in the well of the Senate, the chamber where he looked in awe from its back benches in 1985 when he arrived and where he grew increasingly comfortable in the front row seat afforded the party leaders.

“One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter,” he said. “So I stand before you today … to say that this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.”

MASSIE FOR SENATE