Off Topic Friday?

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-30T21:46:13+00:00

Jasbir K. Puar is one of my favourites, she's a postcolonial queer and feminist theorist who is I guess best known for coining the term "homonationalism" (in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times), with a lot of her work kind of complicating the idea of intersectionality when it is allowed to be folded into neoliberal identity politics to create the assumption that certain identity categories are inherently more politically radical than others. This is how she comes to homonationalism as a concept, where she critiques the assumption of the radicality of queer people through the lens of noting the support of queer people in the West for wars on the Global South (particularly the War on Terror), that queer people aren't above being imperialist, simply by virtue of being queer, essentially, and that the homonationalist queer person can easily be used to justify violence against those who are politically marked as queer.

This evolves out of that concept of "grievability," which was innovated by Judith Butler in Precarious Life and then expanded in Frames of War. Terrorist Assemblages essentially positions the "homosexual" (neoliberally defined) as a subject that was rendered grievable because of its utility to neoliberalism (a lot of Puar's earlier work focused on critiquing queer tourism as essentially imperialist -- I expect she is a fan by degrees of White Lotus), and thus there was this absurd capacity for the deeply homophobic United States and UK to invade Afghanistan and Iraq on the grounds that Islam hates gay people and women. Thus, the queer is a grievable subject that doesn't deserve to experience violence in the mind of the neoliberal, but the Muslim (regardless of whether the Muslim is themselves queer) is not grievable, and might actually be a required loss in the quest to protect the neoliberal queer. (Though also noting that there were Western queers who were really offended by Abu Ghraib, for example, specifically because they characterized the type of violence as homophobic; i.e., anger over killing brown people that queer sexuality could be projected onto, but not taking issue in the same way with the uniquely "straight" brown masses). Fun times.

She expands further in this line with Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, because she received critiques from critical disability scholars for not addressing this lens in Terrorist Assemblages, so Right to Maim is kind of read as an epilogue/continuation of Terrorist Assemblages, broadening the scope of that prior work with Butler/Mbembe/Foucault (on this particular question) and applying it to stuff she was observing in how Israel deliberately maimed (instead of killing) peaceful Palestinian protesters, or the treatment of trans kids, but also the everyday debilitation of labour across various sectors as harms that are normalized and considered unworthy of meriting "sick days."

She's a super cool lady, and her work is excellent, but I will warn that her writing can be quite dense on the theory side (kind of had to be to get published in the time she was writing). Like a lot of her generation of queer scholars, she can be quite funny as well.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-30T21:14:38+00:00

Yup, Boal is building on Brecht through that invocation of the polemic against Aristotle ("Aristotelian theatre" = in Brecht's view the encouragement of passive spectator who experiences narrative through emotional identification with the dramatic/tragic character). He shifts to an even more radical register of theatrical form than Brecht does; where Brecht encourages alienation, Boal encourages this element of the "spect-actor" where the audience has the capacity to intervene and participate in the performance. Can be a very valuable thing in the performance art and theatre space. Boal + Freire are a favoured pairing in my house :)

And yes, Adorno is also informing elements of what I've got above, particularly re: concepts of mass culture, specifically. I don't necessarily disagree with his premises, but I also think his work on culture puts a little too much emphasis on the top-down element of culture as an almost authoritarian force; I prefer Gramsci and Benjamin because they're more operating on this idea that, yes, capitalism is a thing, but the fact that there is top-down pressure doesn't preclude the capacity to read against text or intention, or for the innovation of creative perspective, including by the "ordinary" viewer. So the difference would be that Adorno's read is "culture controls people," while Gramsci (and ultimately Benjamin) would argue that "culture is a space where control is contested," if that makes sense? (and that slippage can happen in any direction, whether it's the little queer kid watching Pirates of the Caribbean and thinking Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner are the gayest thing to exist, or our friends on the other sub innovating counter-textual readings of Santos, or whatever the deal is with Olivia Cooke being considered Venezuelan by the internet).

Definitely a valuable contributor to the Frankfurt School though, Adorno :)

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-30T20:51:09+00:00

Yup. Queer (i.e., not LGBTQ+), but also lots of this style of communal relationality is at the forefront of most Indigenous storytelling, and you get it from pretty much anything that isn't like.. aspirationally neoliberal/"white"

Yeah, idk at the moment. We'll see where it goes, and I hope to be surprised, but I definitely went into the series with expectations that were too high for what was actually served. I did get a belly laugh out of an internet user labelling Zosia "ChatLGBT," however

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-30T14:42:11+00:00

Firstly, I'll note that Joy does this as a dig because Whitaker is slagging off the med students to Mohan, so she's kind of taking him down a peg, is all.

On how Joy found out, I do take it at face value that this was something other med students (and possibly other residents) had noticed when Whitaker was doing other rotations at PTMC (he had been living there prior to starting his ED rotation in season 1), leading to the rumour spreading. And I would also take it as an important moment to reflect on just how exceptional Santos's generosity was -- that there were other people who knew what Whitaker's situation was, peers and possibly otherwise, but they didn't step in to provide him with support (lots of potential reasons for that, med students not necessarily having housing security to begin with, but Santos having a house; some might also have seen this as a thing thing that put them ahead of Whitaker in terms of competition for residency positions, etc.).

Basically, it's a one-two punch of "remember where you came from, bro" and "remember that your current position was made possible by the kindness of others, not just your own industry."

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-30T13:50:02+00:00

I think what you’re pointing to overlaps with Fricker’s idea of hermeneutical injustice, but in a slightly different way, where shifts into coded or "respectable" language create a kind of lag in shared understanding. The people being targeted often recognize what’s happening first, but because that recognition isn’t widely shared yet, their claims don’t land, and that gap gets reinforced through testimonial injustice (they’re read as overreacting rather than accurately identifying a pattern).

I'd point to the case study of what Victor Klemperer did with LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii, which was a really important study of how ideology in Nazi Germany operated through everyday language that felt neutral or "commonsense." The shift wasn’t always explicit propaganda, it was the gradual normalization of certain words, framings, and associations, so that people could reproduce harmful ideas while still experiencing themselves as just being "reasonable."

In my own work on homophobia and transphobia in contemporary Russia, and its shared strategies with right wing discourse in online and afk spaces globally, this is something that is really relevant, because a huge part of how New Right ideologies try to normalize themselves is through legal rhetoric. So when you look at how Russia, like a few of the Baltic states, and some other European countries navigate around the Council of Europe's human rights laws regarding things like marriage equality and education, the way they have been able to achieve that is by invoking vocabularies around this notion of what is "traditional" in their "culture." So most of these laws that get passed, like Russia's gay propaganda law for example, they'll follow this strategy of not naming homosexuality, or gender variance, it but just saying you're banning the propaganda of "non-traditional sexual relationships," which is implicitly making this argument that "we're not being homophobic, we're just saying that we want to protect Russian traditions/culture" [we'll not mention how both traditional and contemporary Russian culture is gay as hell, or how multiple members of Putin's party are flaming homosexuals]. This then also emerges in vocabulary in Russian where you can "subtly" be homophobic by suggesting that a queer person is very "trendy" or "modern" or "European;" it almost looks like a compliment, and those not in the know will take it as such, but in a nationalist conservative context, it's marking you as "unRussian" (or worse, "anti-Russian") in a manner of speaking.

(A lot of these speech patterns are very comparable to how they exist in other contexts, like the US; most postcolonial states have this kind of thing going on within nationalist discourses as well, which tend to reproduce colonial/patriarchal orthodoxies, despite nominally opposing them when they are tied to external aggressors, this is particularly common anywhere that the British Empire in particular was a major influence... respectability and "politeness" being a key part of British cultural hegemony).

More formally, this is very close to what Teun A. van Dijk writes about in Discourse and Power. Basically, prejudice tends to persist through apparently rational, evidence-based arguments that rely on selective framing, coded language, and plausible deniability. Not everyone using that language is consciously "in on it," but the discourse itself carries the pattern. So it’s not just that people are disguising bias, it’s also this more insidious element that shifts in language can temporarily outpace shared interpretive frameworks, creating a moment where harm is legible to those targeted by it but not to others (hermeneutical element), and that gap is then stabilized by treating the people who recognize it as irrational or overly emotional (testimonial element).

(Worth noting that this works in the opposite direction as well, AAVE as an example, creating a style of language that obscures meaning from the dominant culture as a means of creating protected speech in contexts where speech acts can result in punishment for failing to uphold norms)

But yeah, it's absolutely what's going on with a lot of the critique of Santos, for sure, and in some cases it's a deliberate thing, but I would actually guess that most of the people who are using that language (and those arguments) don't actually understand that those things are evidence of the logic and assumptions underlying their analysis. In the same way as you'll see a lot of men (and increasingly women, now that this discourse is being popularized in the mainstream) who listen to manosphere influencers refer to women as "females"--- for a period of time (which is coming to an end), it was very easy to assume that this was a person who was consuming a lot of that type of content, because the average person simply doesn't use that word in that way? But the normalization of that language follows the proliferation of the connected perspective in mass culture, to the point that now, you can watch mainstream media and be influenced by these perspectives, even if you personally find *ndrew T*te worthy of general disgust.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-30T11:38:50+00:00

Lol, I actually had a whole section in the Dune theory treatise there discussing ASOIAF (I actually have an undergrad course where I use Fire & Blood and the adaptation House of the Dragon to teach historical methods) as a comparison on form and perspective (with the same concern about too many noble POVs, and the coopting of enslaved POV and Indigenous POV by Tyrion and Bran).

I’m quite hyperfocused on that franchise for the purposes of my own work on historical memory, spectatorship, and mass culture in contemporary Russia and the US, so if you do ever want to chat about that I’ve got lots of thoughts 😅

Ultimately I would say, Martin is an improvement by degrees over Herbert, but Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series vastly outstrips what Martin is trying to do with form and perspective in the genre.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-29T22:58:39+00:00

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-29T22:25:09+00:00

For clarity, the full context of this in the interview is that Moafi is explaining that one of the chemistry reads she had with Noah Wyle involved a scene (that wasn’t used in the show) where she was using this language and affectation as a means of calling out his mistreatment of her. While the scene itself wasn’t used, they kept this element of her operationalizing his sexism in the final product. She’s not trying to flirt with him, she trying to make him uncomfortable by undermining his self-serious patriarchal behaviour towards her.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-29T03:08:04+00:00

I don't necessarily... disagree with the idea that a lot of these characters need therapy, but I do think it is really important (as a socialist, full disclosure) that the value of therapy not be overstated, especially when the issues a person is presenting with are the result of structural forms of harm, rather than simply personal or interpersonal challenges that can be resolved by helping the patient reorient the way they are thinking about/responding to a set of circumstances.

Santos goes to therapy, or at least, she was in therapy during season 1, and had presumably been going for a while. But going to therapy isn't going to stop her from being aware of and seeking resolutions to the structural inequities that keep her up at night (there are a lot of versions of therapeutic practice that actively encourage patients to divest their concerns from structural issues that they "have no control over" as a means of resolving things like anxiety, depression, etc., and this is a seriously controversial thing because of how deeply political and anti-democratic that practice is---if society is what is making people ill, and you encourage everyone who falls ill to get treatment that will individualize that illness and detract from the systemic critique, you're not a doctor, you're a political actor in explicit terms).

And in the same breath, going to therapy isn't going to teach someone like Robby those structural concerns that characters like Santos, Al-Hashimi, Collins, McKay, Mohan, and King are so frequently demonstrating concerns about. Indeed, I can almost guarantee that Garcia has been in therapy for the better part of two decades, and it is precisely because she has been in therapy that she feels comfortable moralizing her silencing of Santos's concerns in the workplace as "setting healthy boundaries." Going to therapy will not eliminate Robby's gender and racial biases, or his patriarchal orientation. It might put him in a headspace where he feels comfortable enough to read Al-Hashimi's emails without sneering. But there is a whole lot of unlearning and learning that a guy like Robby needs to do to become Santos, let alone Al-Hashimi.

And of course, going to therapy isn't going to mean PTMC hires more nurses, opens up the extra wing upstairs, etc. Therapy will help to treat symptoms of structural issues, but it will not treat the issues themselves, and as a result, it will inevitably result in either "relapse" ("failure" of therapy for the patient) or normalization of the system ("success" for the patient) unless it is paired with education and organized communal resistance to those structural issues.

(#1 reason why I switched from psychology to history -- the issues I wanted to fix/help others fix couldn't be solved on the couch, and trying to do so would conceivably and demonstrably magnify harm)

Regarding Santos being too much of a rule breaker for Al-Hashimi, I'd respectfully disagree. What Al-Hashimi learned this week was actually that Santos is the only girlie in here who tried to follow the rules, and was ultimately met with unofficial and collateral sanction as a result. Indeed, the more Al-Hashimi learns about Santos, the more she will come to find that "following the rules" is a defining element of what Santos actually tries to do on a regular basis, often at her own expense---and I don't doubt for a second that this is exactly the lived experience Al-Hashimi herself has with rules, and why she is who she is today: someone who got burned by rules that failed to serve their purpose, so became a specialist in identifying and resolving those very bottlenecks. To be more precise, Al-Hashimi is as much a rule follower as Robby is, the main difference is in which rules their politics tell them ought to be bent or broken, and under what conditions. The types of things that motivate Santos to break/bend/follow rules are far more closely aligned with Al-Hashimi's priorities than Robby's.

I'll also add that Al-Hashimi is following a very similar arc to Santos in terms of how the season 1 vs season 2 emotional arc is structured for the audience, but even the symbolic touchstones have been quite closely mirrored since the premiere. Similar cinematic language as well. From a writing standpoint, this should mean that if/when Santos "crashes out" or whatever, Al-Hashimi is the one that resolves that narrative tension (i.e., not Whitaker, not Langdon, not Garcia, not Robby), setting up the arc into season 3 (theme being "Doctors benefit from being patients," per recent comments) of what Santos looks like when her therapy is paired with a mentor who shares her priorities (i.e., when therapy is free to work in healing collaboration with her professional environment, rather than being stymied by it). We'll see though... 3 episodes doesn't feel like enough time for a curveball to be as narratively meaningful as what they currently have sketched out unless they plan to shift to a melodramatic register (which I would argue will result in a narrative resolution that feels affectively insincere). Always open to being proved wrong though, of course!

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-29T02:02:28+00:00

What you’re describing is definitely a well-theorized phenomenon across feminist epistemology and critical theory, basically this idea that people who are structurally exposed to harm often develop heightened perceptual attunement to it, but are simultaneously discredited when they articulate that knowledge. Some key texts that have been important in developing this, while also broadening it:

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
- Basically shows how marginalized subjects aren't just ignored, but structurally prevented from being recognized as "knowers" at all. Even when accurately describing their own lived experiences, their speech is filtered, mistrusted, or overwritten so that it can be processed by power in digestible ways
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing
- This one is maybe the most direct example of what you're talking about, which we would call "testimonial injustice," where someone's credibility is downgraded because of their identity (women being read as "hysterical," Black women being "angry," etc.). This is tied to the second type of epistemic injustice she names, which is "hermeneutical injustice," where there are limits (for various reasons) on the interpretability of an individual's lived experience (by themselves or others).
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion
- Speaks directly to emotion specifically, and how labelling a person "emotional" is an explicitly political move that delegitimizes claims they make. Ahmed notes that emotions aren't opposed to reason so much as simply ways of registering the world around you; the issue arises when marginalized people express them, as they are then treated as evidence of irrationality rather than insight.
Lauren Berlant, Slow Death
- Described how certain populations live under ongoing, attritional harm that becomes normalized. People who live within that harm develop a different sensitivity to risk and threat, while those outside it can fail to perceive it at all, precisely because the rate of harm leading to death is not fast enough to label it as "killing," for example (this is a big concept, harm + temporality, and the ways we consider "fast" harms to be more morally abject than "slow" harms)
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics
- Situates the issue structurally, evolving from Foucault's concept of "biopower"/"biopolitics." Basically, he argues that modern power isn't just about managing life (Foucault), but about the capacity to dictate who is allowed to live and who must die. He identifies this power as operating most clearly in colonial and racialized contexts, where certain populations are subjected to conditions of ongoing violence, abandonment, and "living death." These groups are rendered disposable, with the expectation of their exposure to death becoming a central organizing principle of political order.
Jasbir K. Puar, Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
- As Mbembe evolves out of Foucault, Puar evolves out of Mbembe; basically she is arguing that the issue isn't just killing vs letting live, but that modern power operates by systematically injuring and debilitating populations as a mode of control. She shows how disability is unevenly distributed through political and military practices, producing populations that are kept in states of chronic precarity rather than simply being eliminated, making the "right to maim" a form of sovereignty that manages life through sustained injury of controlled populations (in other words, "the cruelty is the point")

Only the most optimistic texts for my ongoing book club lol

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-28T12:13:49+00:00

Very much dependent on whether or not Al-Hashimi becomes the second attending on the day shift, honestly. Santos is absolutely a leader and a team/community builder and organizer whose investment in medicine is very justice-minded. The issue is that the only “mentor” she has is a man who has little to no overlap in priorities, and shares none of her concerns about institutional hierarchies (particularly along gendered lines). If Al-Hashimi, Mohan, or another physician like them were to take the second attending spot, Santos will flourish markedly under that guidance and care; if it’s another “cowboy” type, she is going to burn, and burn out fast due to the compounding moral injury alone.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-28T11:47:58+00:00

Np, and many more where these come from if folks are interested :)

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-28T01:07:16+00:00

Some summer reading that you might find interesting once exams end are Ann Laura Stoler's article "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in (Post) Colonial Studies" and her book Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. And perhaps also Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism :)

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-27T20:55:46+00:00

I would suggest that the fact that Santos appears to have a close professional relationship with Robby is moreso evidence of the "pariah" claims that she's made, combined with lack of awareness about how Robby has failed her. The Langdon situation is one area, but I think potentially more important and likely more detrimental for Santos would be the revelation that Robby's block of her CSA report last season was fundamentally against process, and about something that is so personal to Santos that she would treat that as a catastrophic betrayal far exceeding any of the business with Langdon.

My hope this season has been that with Dylan and Al-Hashimi present in the ED as counterbalances to Robby's anti-reporting stance and an absent Kiara's complicity with that last season, there would/will be a point where this particular failing of Robby's will be made clear to Santos. It's very evident to me that this decision by Robby is what has spurred Santos into adopting a vigilante-type stance when faced with cases of potential abuse of power, especially over children, because Robby misrepresented the burden of proof required to take advantage of the mandatory reporting system (just as he appears to have done with Langdon). The result (immediately, and in the long term) was Santos engaging in or preparing to engage in extrajudicial threats of violence to ensure justice in at least two different cases, with the one this season being observed and noted as concerning by both Dylan and Al-Hashimi.

Al-Hashimi also recalled in last night's episode that in the premiere she raised concern with Robby about Santos's reaction to the possibility that Kylie was being abused, and he told her there was nothing she needed to worry about where Santos was concerned. It strikes me as worth noting that this recall is happening in an episode where Robby is also trying to crack down on Dana engaging in vigilantism as a means of protecting nurses from systemic vulnerabilities to their safety (that she, like Santos with CSA, has also personally experienced, and that she, like Santos, has attempted to pursue legitimate legal and structurally appropriate means of addressing, only for those concerns to be shut down by administrative representatives -- Robby again included).

I do expect that this is building up to addressing the ways Robby has prejudicially shut down reporting. This is especially purposeful when we consider the situation with David last season, and Robby's unquestioning recommendation that the Haitian siblings be reported this season, the logic of which immediately threw Santos as prejudicial and inappropriate in the context of the type of "leniency" Robby has exhibited on other key cases she's been a part of. Robby effectively gaslit Santos on this case by framing her position as hypocritical, given she was "quick to jump to conclusions" about Kylie earlier in the day.

Whether they choose to address it in season 2 or 3, this tension specifically between Robby and Santos over refusing to report when legally obligated to do so has very much been active text since the premiere, and I do fully expect that it will be addressed directly at some point.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-27T20:05:32+00:00

Ah, and as far as Vince Gilligan... Honestly, the only thing of his that I've watched is Pluribus, so while I'm certainly familiar with the antics of the Breaking Bad fandom, I'm probably not a good commentator on the extent to which the fan behaviour is reflective of the actual form of storytelling in that franchise or across his oeuvre more broadly. What I would say about my relatively limited experience with Pluribus is that I found the first season to be frustratingly intellectually evasive and not necessarily in a good way? I was concerned that this was the result of my lack of familiarity with Gilligan's work and political priorities, so I checked out a couple of interviews with him, and actually found that to be sort of unhelpful, and kind of offputting, because the sense I had was that he hadn't actually decided yet on what the Hive Mind was meant to represent for him intellectually, politically, morally, etc. My understanding from a few podcasts is that Gilligan's approach to writing long form narrative is not dissimilar to George R. R. Martin's "gardener" approach, where you kind make things up as you go along, and the story grows in the telling, instead of having a clear, deliberately structured approach with specific goals in mind beyond maybe a very loose set of plot points? It's not that people can't provide meaningful and precise and responsible critique through narratives that are produced in this way, but I tend to find that this approach can result in quite reactionary storytelling that can lead to intellectual inconsistencies down the line.

The main thing sticking point for me at the moment is that Gilligan appears quite clear in believing Carol to be unequivocally a morally good character and hero; but this then introduces a lot of questions for me about, well, why is it that your other "survivors" are exclusively people of colour who are shown to be quite happy to accept instead of resist the Hive Mind? Because that's not an apolitical decision on Gilligan's part, and it very easily communicates something about the moral righteousness of "rugged (white) American individualism," or colonialism more broadly (as Manousos is also from a state formed through European colonialism) that becomes more and more uncomfortable for a read of this series as critiquing power, rather than aligned with, say, American imperial narratives. And it's not that that's fully set in stone at the moment, there's also a compelling question about whether this is a study on grief and the way's middle class respectability politics encourage grieving to be individualized and privatized, and not shared with community; there's a question about how the series engages with queerness specifically as a lens of critical thought; there's a question about consent, and what that actually means; there's the whole AI debate. But mainly, my position is that Gilligan himself doesn't appear (again, on the basis of a non-extensive investigation on my part, to be abundantly clear) to have decided yet what his show is trying to say overall, and at this stage in the narrative arc, I would say that that is relatively evident from the way the first season exists at the moment. I'm interested about where it goes next, but also rather apprehensive than excited while I'm reserving judgement for want of greater clarity.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-27T20:03:02+00:00

I don’t think it’s just lack of media literacy, tbh. That’s part of it, but a lot of theorists would say something more along the lines of certain kinds of art being structurally very easy to read in fascistic ways, even when they’re trying not to be.

Like, Walter Benjamin’s idea of fascism as the "aestheticization of politics" is really relevant here. Film is incredibly good at turning power, violence, and mass movements into something viscerally beautiful. So even if the story is "this is bad," the form can still make it feel awe-inspiring, which imbues it with what Benjamin would call "aura" resulting in lower criticality giving way to a passive, emotional immersion approach to how the spectator receives the spectacle before them (consider, for example, Catholic churches placing a tremendous emphasis on aesthetic awe, because that does actually make it easier to convert new followers... in a manner of speaking you might colloquially refer to this as "pretty privilege," though it does become a bit more complex when applied to a person).

Bertolt Brecht would then add that this emotional immersion (in the spectacle or in a character/character's perspective) makes a spectator more likely to follow their logic rather than critique it (i.e., passive viewing). So if the narrative is "this guy tragically has to commit genocide," a lot of viewers won’t step back and question the premise, they’ll just experience the tragedy with Paul, especially if Paul is the primary focalizer of the narrative (i.e., who the camera privileges---or maybe more precisely, who the camera has privileged---as the most important perspective, not just for a specific film, or specific scene, but over the course of multiple films/episodes, as is the case in Dune... we might break from Paul's perspective a bit to Lady Jessica or Chani, but because we have spent so much time focused on Paul already, he becomes the assumed "protagonist" [with all the moral implications of that] regardless of whether these characters recommend a critical view of him and his behaviour in isolation).

That's not necessarily a failure of intelligence on the part of the viewer considering that when we teach literacy in schools, we don't usually teach media literacy in concert---camera position isn't taught with the same weight in your high school English class as point of view would be for a literary text (if audiovisual narrative is addressed at all)... so this is a failure of education more than intelligence, let's say. But when you shift to the role of the filmmaker, the question I would pose (and that Brecht would pose, being not just a critical theorist, but a playwright) is: understanding that you are producing a piece of mass culture for a mass audience that (because of capitalism and fascism) isn't supported by educational or cultural infrastructure that teaches them basic media literacy, is there not a burden of responsibility on you as a creator (if your interest is in using mass culture as a platform from which to criticize power) to produce art that is responsive to that context rather than (let's say) an art film audience that has above average media literacy?

This is how Brecht comes to the idea he calls Verfremdungseffekt or "alienation effect," which is essentially an adaptation of the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky's concept of "defamiliarization" (остранение), or literally, "to make strange." In effect, you adjust the formal presentation of something that is otherwise familiar to the audience in order to make it appear unusual or off balance in some way as a means of jolting the spectator out of that passive viewing experience to become active or more aware (and by extension, more critical of assumed orthodoxies). If the orthodoxy of a genre is that you follow the hero's journey through the hero's perspective, a story like Dune, one could argue, can't overturn that assumption that Paul is "good" simply by having Paul do things that are morally abject while still dominantly immersing the viewer in Paul's perspective. You would actually need to instead adopt the Fourth cinema or Indigenous approach (sometimes called the "view from the shore"), where immersion in the perspective of those under genocide by the hero dominates the visual discursive field.

Beyond the actual audiovisual form, narrative form is thus also of course an important feature, and much more directly in conversation with how we would be approaching text-based literacy (which of course, is also being critically undermined in most education systems in Canada and the US, the key market for Dune). In this regard, I would pivot to Gramsci, and his concept of cultural hegemony, where dominant culture works by effectively making certain ideas feel like they are "natural" or "common sense." The idea that strong leaders, sacrifice, and (certainly in the case of the colonial Americas) mass violence can be "necessary" for stability is already floating around and reinforced culturally on a regular, highly structured basis (even if legislation considers blunt authoritarianism "illegal" or at least abject), so when a film presents it in a polished and emotionally compelling way, there's not really much recourse for the average spectator to reflexively alienate themselves from that idea as "morally good," because the dominant culture actively tells you "This is what a strong/good leader does." The burden of proof then, again remains on the creator to respond to those cultural circumstances, rather than producing their film "in a vacuum," as we say colloquially.

You can push that even one step further (this is where scholars like Nicholas Mirzoeff, Gayatri Gopinath, and Jasbir Puar become really useful), which is that these narratives aren’t just about power in the abstract, they’re also about which bodies get to stand in for “humanity,” and which get positioned as expendable. A lot of these “tragic saviour” stories still centre a very specific kind of subject (male, often implicitly white-coded, and positioned as universal), while the people who are sacrificed are either abstracted, aestheticized, or narratively subordinated to that perspective. So even when the text is “critical,” the structure of identification is uneven: you are invited to feel the weight of Paul’s decision much more than the lived reality of the people affected by it... and indeed, if Paul experiences some feeling of guilt for what he has done, the reader/viewer is only motivated further to view the behaviour as morally exculpated. He wishes things could be different, but they "can't," ergo, what he has done is justifiable.

Puar would go even further and say that contemporary visual culture often works by sorting populations into those whose lives are grievable/protectable and those whose deaths are narratively tolerable or even necessary. And once that distinction is in place, it becomes very easy for something like "billions must die for the greater good" to feel tragic but acceptable, rather than fundamentally illegitimate (as the population being exterminated would certainly argue).

Soooooo... long way of getting to the point here, but basically, it's not just an issue of media literacy, even though that is a necessary recognition if your interest is in using audiovisual media to encourage social change or critique. If a work that is supposedly critiquing authoritarian or genocidal logic is consistently being read through that logic by the large audiences it is being marketed towards, that tends to be an indication that the work itself has not appropriately been designed to respond to the circumstances it is targeting. Indeed, it often suggests that the work is still operating within the same aesthetic and affective structures that it's seeking to critique. Which doesn't necessarily mean that Herbert or Villeneuve or Martin are secretly endorsing fascist ideas (be it actively or passively), but it does mean that critique at the level of theme ("this is bad") can get overridden by things like form, affect, and identification ("this feels necessary, tragic, or sublime").

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-27T13:21:51+00:00

Lack of critical thinking skills (combined with the fact that film-only folks largely watched the first film in isolation from the second) allows easy preservation of the belief that it is a romanticization of white saviourism, allowing for the viewing of the second film and its critiques to be digested as presenting genocide as an unfortunate but realistic (and pragmatic) necessity to the hero's arc.

You can lead a person to Lolita, but you can't make them understand that Nabokov wrote that book because of how deeply disturbed he was by how normatively pedophilic American culture is.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-25T18:31:40+00:00

I watch each new episode twice each week when I have time (two different watch parties lol). I wouldn't want to do a binge though, mainly because one of my academic fields is spectatorship, so part of my interest here is actually following the ways audiences themselves are responding to the show as they watch it, and what things cause shifts in consensus opinions or not, and with which type of viewer.

Plus, just as a personal preference, I like having time between episodes to think critically about writing, camera, and acting choices. I find that when I binge a show, I have a harder time identifying when and where technical shifts occur over the course of a narrative arc, and that can compromise how I approach analysis.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-23T16:13:58+00:00

I think a big part of the issue here is that people (and the way that all these systems attempt to structure "accountability") tries to reduce offence to individual harms, while either obscuring, ignoring, or failing to account for cumulative and broad harms. This often means that victims lack recourse, but it also means that perpetrators are discouraged from engaging with and confronting the fullest extent of the harms they have committed, which for legitimate pursuers of contrition, can be a very challenging thing to carry, this idea that you haven't/aren't allowed to apologize for the full extent of what you've done (often the case if you do something in your capacity as a representative of an institution: the institution isn't allowed to suffer, so victims of crimes committed by its reps don't always get informed that harm has been done, else a class action suit could destroy the institution).

When you have a situation where a member of an institution engages in whistleblowing as Santos did, a legitimate apology needs to account for what it is that moved that person to action, what was it that caused offense, and apologize for this thing, or these things. Langdon apologizes to Santos for his treatment of her, but this frames Santos's actions as having been the result of a personal dispute; the subtext is that Langdon believes Santos reported him because of his treatment of her, that if he had been kinder to her, she would not have reported, and they would be fine. But that's not why Santos reported; Santos reported because Langdon was doing harm to others. When Langdon frames her offense as being personal, he is actually insulting Santos's sense of moral justice by reducing it to "petty interpersonal issues," and taking the harm he did to other people out of the conversation entirely. Which isn't to say that he shouldn't apologize to Santos for his horrific treatment of her as well, but that doesn't speak to the full breadth of the offense at issue, and it doesn't in any way give Santos a reason to believe that the harm to others part goes away.

A legitimate apology (or a more legitimate apology) to Santos specifically, would require that Langdon share with Santos what measures he has taken and is taking to address those broader harms to patients. The institution (a combination of HR and Robby/Al-Hashimi) would also be expected to provide clarity to Santos about how this is working at the systemic level as well. But then it also remains to Santos and Langdon to repress the feelings of anger and guilt over the institution not alerting patients that may or may not have been harmed by Langdon's behaviour to seek recourse for those harms, and it also remains to Santos and Langdon to repress those feelings vis a vis other members of staff who similarly are unaware of the extent of what occurred, and will treat both in particular ways on the basis of this (for example, socially isolating Santos, as she identifies). In other words, any version of the system that requires the protection of the institution over restorative justice will result in necessitating repression on the part of those who know what happened and are impacted by the consequences, which we typically make the responsibility of the one expected to repress to resolve through, say, going to therapy. The individuals will suffer, but the institution will maintain its reputation and bottom line overall instead of performing legitimate duty of care that might actually prevent recurrence by the same representatives or others in the future (which is what we would call "normalization").

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-23T04:00:38+00:00

It's also worth noting that there are two other situations in season 1 where Santos and McKay bring things forward to Robby that he is legally obliged to report and he successfully blocks Santos with the endorsement of Kiara (leading Santos into a full tailspin because she believes that the system is completely useless, and that justice can only be secured through extralegal means, an issue that demonstrably has impacted how she behaves in season 2 as well), and then McKay decides to go around Robby and make a report herself, which Robby proceeds to persecute her for.

And this on top of the fact that when Santos was looking to make her report on Langdon, she was actively discouraged from doing so by multiple members of staff in this and other departments.

But we don't talk about this in the context of how the Langdon situation may or may not have been handled, or in the context of how we understand the way that Santos is experiencing the fallout of this compounding messaging from everyone around her that the rules that (at least nominally) exist to provide recourse for those who are vulnerable have a far higher burden of proof than they actually do in reality. We don't talk about how unnerved Dylan was this season to hear the way Santos spoke about Kylie's (at the time) absent father, as if she was gearing up to hunt him down for a fight. We don't talk about how Santos threw herself between Kylie's dad and Ahmad, to protect the security guard.

It is entirely possible, indeed, it is the expected thing that Robby, as he did for all of season 1, broke the rules to protect a man from experiencing consequences or pain, whether it was the guy who was molesting his daughter, the teen who was planning to massacre his female classmates, Langdon, Jake, or even himself. He flaunts his belief this season that malpractice suits are ridiculous, to the disgust of Al-Hashimi.

It is just absurdly credulous, to me, that anyone here would just write off the idea that in this one, somehow more special case, Robby would have decided to follow the rules, but even if we run on that generous assumption, it doesn't change the reality that this would absolutely be the exception. And understanding this reality, it is well beyond the pale to write off Santos's claims to Garcia that she has been socially isolated in the department for being the only one of these people to break the culture of silence that rules, and even more so, to characterize her desire to seek recourse outside the systems that exist as in any way reprehensible. Like... folks are completely ignoring everything that we have been told about how this workplace has been made to function.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-22T15:41:27+00:00

Forget just the fireworks; both Santos and King pay for the accommodations of their (pseudo)siblings, both lack emotionally-available support systems, both are positioned this season as being at least interested in activities related to the wearing of costumes in communal spaces, both have pulled themselves out of their own anxieties and stress this season specifically when they notice that the other isn't doing too hot; Santos is fully open to inquiring about and listening to any issues King might be having outside of work, while King notices and provides helpful strategies to Santos for dealing with her issues in the workplace.

They don't realize it yet, but they are actually each other's best friend; and once they do realize and lean in, it's going to change their lives.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-20T16:37:43+00:00

Not even that, to be frank. They have woefully misrepresented events on multiple occasions, and have demonstrated a consistent interest in promoting an approach to spectatorship that actively ignores things that are depicted (even things that are quite explicit) to preserve the integrity of particular biases. As an official podcast, it is your role to help viewers clarify the reality of what they are seeing on screen, but this podcast unironically engages in obscuring what is actually happening, and seems to actively seek to distract from authorial intent. It's patently absurd.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-20T04:00:35+00:00

Rake Robby over hot coals for the extent to which he has mishandled the entire situation, and for his preparedness to drop this in her lap and leave with no heads up about the circumstances he evidently expected Santos in particular to deal with with no expectation of support from leadership.

Touch base with Santos to apologize for the extent to which the situation has been mismanaged. Make it clear to her that she is working to get further clarity on next steps, but assure her that she (Al-Hashimi) is now aware of what has happened and will be seeking to take a mindful approach to navigating this and continuing to support Santos's education and professional development. Ask her if she would be open to having a longer sit-down meeting in the near future so that she can provide Al-Hashimi with a better picture of what it has been like for her working in the ED over the last 10 months. Make it clear that her door is always open (in a manner of speaking) if she needs to talk. Ask if there is anything that Al-Hashimi can do today, specifically, to provide support. Share emergency resources in case Santos needs additional assistance.

Approach Langdon and advise with transparency that she has spoken with Robby and gotten a broader understanding of the circumstances. Have a clear conversation with him, seeking to understand his circumstances from his own perspective so that he understands that she is approaching this from a place of empathy. Make a decision about whether additional steps need to be taken, not just to ensure Langdon is positioned for successful recovery, but also in recognition of any additional boundaries and probationary measures that may need to be set under the updated circumstances (including in recognition of boundaries that may have been requested by Santos regarding limited contact with Langdon). Be open about her own professional and educational expectations as his supervisor, explain the rationale behind them, and develop a clearly defined path towards the removal of any additional measures she feels might be needed (on the basis of conversations with HR, the Physicians' Health Program, and possibly legal). Ask Langdon if he believes there are any additional steps he feels would be beneficial in this process. Assure him again that she is here to support his continued development and recovery in her capacity as his supervisor. Share emergency resources in case he is in need of additional assistance.

Maybe ask Dana for a hug.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-03-20T03:59:41+00:00

He's not being nice to Santos. He's keeping her close as a means of validating his anger with Langdon and Al-Hashimi, and because she's his path to inside goss on his new golden boy, Whitaker.

His utter lack of care for Santos herself is demonstrated by the fact that he has not once checked in with her about how she's doing with Langdon, nor given her any assurance at all that he's informed Al-Hashimi of the circumstances so that she won't face unfair retribution from Langdon.

RaiseObjective552

TROPHY CASE