12/8/2023 0 Comments Usher meaning englishThe show brilliantly cuts through these themes, asking us to look at our own desires that lead us astray, who has influenced us and why they have power over us, and what the true meaning of karma is, all from an abolitionist perspective. Instead, their hands are forced by powerful systems and people who know the positions they’ve put them in and how they can maintain control. The complicated layering and context here is, of course, that people who come from poverty and trauma don’t make so-called bad decisions or harmful decisions because they’re morally lacking. But he’s fearful that Gris would completely destroy his reputation. While in the moment Roderick pretends he’s all in for protecting the company to rise in the ranks, we later see him come home to panic about how he can possibly participate in such evil work. “You play your cards right and one day all this could be yours, Charlie Bucket,” he says to Roderick, making a Willy Wonka reference. Roderick’s choice here is the pivotal moment, we come to find out, because it’s the moment when he decides between truth and ego, or greed. ![]() Gris gives a speech about material possessions that counters Dupin’s Roderick has the angel and the devil on his shoulders. In his office, Gris turns the table on young Roderick and accuses him of not being a team player for simply wanting to tell the truth, once again the truth is made into an enemy and not a virtue from the perspective of a wealthy character. Meanwhile, his brother Leo, a messy bisexual who we first meet cheating on his husband Julius (who goes by Jules, played by Daniel Chae Jun) with a woman obsessed with his fame and fortune, believes himself superhuman, and that’s where he finds his downfall.įollowing his speech in the flashback, we see Roderick go back to Rufus Griswold (Gris, played by Michael Trucco), the head of Fortunato, to confront him about his crimes. It’s a fitting framing of the ways that our own hubris often brings others down with us, and not us alone. His greed, like that of his family, ultimately gets the best of him when he’s the first member to be taken out by his own folly - pulling a sprinkler system to rain down what he thought was water on the party but ends up being deadly chemicals, killing not only himself but everyone else in attendance. He’s selfishly thrown the party out of hedonism and lust, but mainly so that he can get secret footage to blackmail people, and out of spite and rebellion against his father and family. Prospero (aptly named for the Latin word meaning fortune or abundance and borrowed from Shakespeare’s The Tempest), for example, who is a queer man in a polyamorous triad, meets his untimely demise because of the massive orgy he throws. In that regard, Flanagan’s retelling of Usher accomplishes the presentation of queer mess strikingly so. Others have voiced that queer and trans characters on screen and in stories, much like queer and trans people in real life, deserve to get to be messy without it being an indictment of or definition of their queerness. Some queer and trans people demand wholesomeness, hurt by decades worth of transgender people as punchline in movie after movie, for example. This has included constant discourse online in spaces like Twitter and on TikTok picking apart how much sex is “too much” in media, and whether showing people causing harm is inherently encouraging and validating of people’s harmful behavior offscreen. There’s been much conversation around this trend cross-generationally within queer spaces. ![]() But that creates a harmful supposition that we don’t deserve those things if we make mistakes or have been “bad” in any way - and that position is inherently flawed, and messy itself. Some queer media attempts to argue that queer and trans people are good and pure and only victim, that’s why we deserve full lives and human rights. And that value judgment can’t be untangled from their queerness or transness. But much of the queer media from the last decade revolves around or orbits characters who are meant to be sweet, perfect angels who deserve the world specifically only because they aren’t messy. Pieces of media that have most recently grappled with and attempted to deconstruct that include Joel Kim Booster’s 2022 smash success Fire Island, alongside new champions like the recent queer teenage rom com slash fight movie Bottoms, or Rivkah Reyes’ messy queer short film Gianna. ![]() In the last few decades, queer media - even stories created by queer and trans people ourselves - has fallen victim to being washed over with wholesomeness.
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