Here's an open challenge to my buddy Charles: can he verify that Ezra Miller is a real-life trickster? Ezra Miller has been in entertainment news lately for any number of shenanigans: assaulting women, grooming children, and possibly even kidnapping people and hiding them from authorities. Miller himself was hard to track down for a while. His "The Flash" movie, an expensive Warner Brothers project, might end up on the chopping block if Miller can't improve his public image (I say his, but Miller calls himself "nonbinary" and prefers to be called they/their). Warner has already cancelled at least two other expensive projects: "Batgirl" and "Scoob!" "Batgirl" was supposed to feature Michael Keaton in a minor role as an older Batman; "The Flash" was supposed to feature Keaton, too, along with Ben Affleck (as multiversal Batmen), and actors like Keaton and Affleck don't come cheap, so if "The Flash" gets cancelled because Ezra Miller can't calm himself down, Warner Brothers will take a huge loss, having wasted so much money and time on three fairly ambitious projects.
If I remember correctly, Charles, who specializes in trickster figures in literature among other things, says that the trickster sows chaos, disturbing the established order and often occupying a liminal (in-between) space in the world. A trickster is generally amoral since morality tends to be part of a larger structure, and the trickster is antistructural (to misuse, somewhat, a term from cultural anthropology). This means a trickster's actions can help the common good, but they can also cause mayhem and even death. So from a moralistic point of view, a trickster can be good or evil, but from his own point of view, the trickster is merely following his nature—if he can even be said to have a fixed nature. In a sense, he does: he's always reliably opposed to order, structure, and law.
I got the idea of thinking of Ezra Miller as a possible real-life trickster after watching the following Ryan Kinel video, in which Kinel starts off by referring to the "chaotic force" of Miller. (Kinel has been following the Miller saga for a while now.) That set off a light bulb in my head. Miller is nonbinary, i.e., he leans toward sexual ambiguity, which arguably puts him in a liminal space. He's also had several run-ins with the law and appears to live in blatant defiance of established social norms. All of this feels very tricksterish to me, but one factor might be missing: tricksters are called tricksters because they trick people, i.e., they mislead, confuse, bamboozle, hoodwink, and mystify. Miller doesn't seem to be doing that at all, except to the extent that he often appears able to elude law enforcement. Anyway, here's Kinel's latest video on Ezra Miller. Be warned: Kinel is a rightie, and like a lot of rightie critics looking at the Warner Brothers situation, he thinks the films are being cancelled because they're a load of woke trash, and test audiences are rejecting them. Non-rightie critics are saying that "Scoob!" and "Batgirl" got written off as a way to save money by avoiding massive taxes, so it's not obvious what the real truth is. Watch Kinel with all of that in mind.
So I guess the challenge for Charles—who probably doesn't have the time to engage in this silly pursuit—is to lay out the criteria for a trickster and see whether Ezra Miller checks all the boxes. I'm leaning toward "Yes, Miller is a trickster," probably because I want that to be true.
Personal note: all the news that's coming out about Ezra Miller makes him seem like quite the piece of shit, and maybe he is. As an actor, though, he's likable and engaging. He invests his signature character, The Flash, with a great deal of life and personality, and I liked Miller when I first saw him on the TV series "Royal Pains," where he played the troubled son of rich parents. I haven't seen his "We Need to Talk About Kevin" (opposite Tilda Swinton), but I've heard that that was a good, creepy film. Like a lot of fine actors, Miller may well be a nasty piece of work in real life, but at the very least, I appreciate his talent, and I can only hope he gets his head out of his ass. He appears, otherwise, to be on a collision course with destiny.
He/she/it is good at its job, but someone/thing I wouldn't want in my life. And it amazes me how many people can't separate a person's job from their biased ramblings and rants in the media thanks to their multitudes of cults (worshipping extreme religions, media/sports stars, political parties, etc.) they personally adhere to. Personally, I'm glad Joe Biden isn't my relative because I'd be seeking out professional help for his cognitive decline, but here the job is more important than a person's real, declining life to his cultists.
ReplyDelete'So I guess the challenge for Charles—who probably doesn't have the time to engage in this silly pursuit—is to lay out the criteria for a trickster and see whether Ezra Miller checks all the boxes."
ReplyDeleteI see you already arrived at a satisfactory (to me) answer.
More seriously, if it were as easy as simply "laying out the criteria" for a trickster and then checking some boxes (very reminiscent of how Raglan, Rank, and the like approached the hero's life), trickster studies wouldn't be nearly as interesting. Different scholars have different sets of criteria, but most of them agree that he is very slippery and tough to pin down. I can hear you protest, "Well, if you can't define the trickster, what good is it as an analytical category?" And there are indeed scholars who argue just that. I am not one of them, though; there are a lot of useful analytical categories that are fuzzy around the edges.
Anyway, the bottom line is that the challenge you have set me would be a far more involved task that I have the time or motivation for. I will say this, though: The trickster is a literary/folklore archetype. Trying to apply it to real-world people makes things even more complicated and (from my perspective) less interesting (I'm not a psychologist, after all).
Hm. And now, I am sad.
ReplyDeleteSo is the term "real-life trickster" never to be used?
Oh, no, you can use it all you want. I mean, we call people "scrooges" and such, so why not? I guess what I was trying to say is that you will probably never see a perfect correspondence with a real-world individual. The most significant difference is that tricksters in literature and folklore often get away with their antics and are usually the protagonists of their tales, whereas in the real world a "trickster" rarely gets away with it for long. Like you said, Miller seems to be on a collision course with destiny--which is something that would almost never happen to a trickster. At least, that "collision with destiny" is unlikely to have lasting effects on the literary/folklore trickster.
ReplyDelete(For what it's worth, I was feeling like absolute crap when I read your post yesterday and responded, and thus I was probably a little less charitable than I would normally be. Not an excuse, just an explanation.)
I'll take that as a definite "no," then. And I learned something new: one significant quality of the trickster is the ability to get away with causing mayhem. Tricksters don't suffer consequences. So in the list of trickster characteristics, this is one box that can never be checked when talking about potential real-life tricksters. And it sounds like an important box, too.
ReplyDeleteYou may recall my "The Tao of Chance" review from a long time ago, in which I used the box-checking strategy to examine the question of whether Chance the gardener from "Being There" could legitimately be called a Christ-figure. As methods go, it might be clunky, but it's the sort of analytical process a doctor might use to make a diagnosis.
Indeed. It's certainly a valid approach... but with the trickster making a definitive list of boxes can be very tricky! You'd probably have to then start weighting the different characteristics to come up with an overall score. That's not something I plan on doing in the near future, but you have gotten me thinking about it.
ReplyDeleteAnd, yes, the "ability to get away with crap" would be a heavily weighted box. There is a trickster figure in Korean folklore who appears in a serialized novel from the turn of the twentieth century. The story borrows many famous episodes from folktales, but the conclusion sees the trickster being haunted by his crimes and ultimately turning himself in--as a real-life human with any sort of conscience might be expected to do. In the world of that novel, a more realistic world that focuses on law and order, the trickster cannot exist.
I know we've hashed out most of the issues in this comment thread, but now you've got me thinking that I should write an entry on Liminality about the possibility of real-world tricksters....
Have you ever seen "The Old Man & The Gun"?
ReplyDeleteI wrote a review for it in 2018, but have you had a chance to see it since then?
No, I haven't, but it sounds like I should.
ReplyDelete