Media update part three: Podcast

[bironic]

A commenter on "The Greatest" turned me on to Métis in Space, a podcast hosted by two Métis women from Calgary and Alberta who analyze representations of indigenous cultures and themes in sci fi, fantasy and horror visual media. The hosts, Molly Swain and Chelsea Vowel, are (or recently were—I've been listening to episodes all out of order) graduate students in Native Studies at the University of Alberta.

I am loving this podcast. It's entertaining and educational: a perfect combination. I started with episodes that focus on the movies and TV shows I know best, and, man, I thought I was pretty okay at spotting this particular set of stereotypes and problematic tropes, but a few minutes into the first episode it became clear how much more sophisticated the conversation is. I'm so grateful to have access to these discussions and am delighting in—and humbled by—the enriched understanding of people and texts.

So far, I've listened to episodes about:

(-) Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Pangs"
(-) Star Trek: Discovery episode with the planet Pahvo
(-) Apocalypto (Mel Gibson)
(-) Dune (David Lynch)
(+) Lilo & Stitch
(+) Thor: Ragnarok
(+) What We Do in the Shadows

Next up is Westworld 2x8, "Kiksuya," a.k.a. the Ghost Nation episode, and I cannot wait.

FYI for those who are interested, there are also installments about the movie Avatar; episodes of Farscape, SG1, SPN, Star Trek: TOS, TNG & Voyager, Futurama, Highlander; and a Muse music video, among many others. They just wrapped up their fourth season.

Episodes run about 40 minutes. The hosts watch the piece of media beforehand, make tea or open a bottle of wine, then move through their notes in more or less chronological order. There is a lot of laughing.

IMO the podcast is at its best when Molly & Chelsea are eviscerating criticizing something—shown with (-) above. It's sad that there's yet another example of bad representation in the world, but it also provides more to talk about, whereas when they're happy about a source (+), the discussion doesn't rise much above plot summary. Well, I'm thinking of the What We Do in the Shadows episode in particular. In the Thor: Ragnarok episode, they still talked a bit about costume design and makeup, Maori humor and how the Asgardians are coded as both British colonizers and a diasporic indigenous tribe; and in the Lilo & Stitch episode, they touched on things like reversal of the white gaze and the injustices committed by child welfare services agents who break up Native families by, for example, interpreting poverty as neglect.

I'm learning a lot, even when—perhaps especially when—enlightenment means confronting some uncomfortable things about myself and accepting there are more problems than I previously recognized in a movie or show that I liked despite its flaws. Like discovering that something I would have rated '50% okay' on an indigenous representation scale turns out to be more like 20% okay. I found straightaway that I was overestimating how many stars the hosts were going to give something at the end of their review. Opportunity for personal growth! At the same time, it's fun in a hate-watching way to hear even more reasons a terrible movie was terrible, and it's affirming when they touch on stuff I had identified or when I anticipate a critique based on something they taught me in an earlier episode; but the goal isn't to feel smug about knowing everything, which I never will, anyway. :)

In place of writing a whole post about each episode, here are some example specifics from the pilot, on BtVS "Pangs," from memory, having listened ~1 month ago:

• Joss Whedon got it right that the hosts & people they know would go for the anthropologist and the priest first, were they granted a revenge spree.
• Fed up with Western media saying Native American tribes such as the Chumash were "wiped out," "exterminated," when people are still living right there.
• Willow or Anya's cry of "Why won't you die?" while hitting the spirit with a shovel takes on a more ominous meaning: white people want the survivors to just disappear and stop making noise.
• Obvious symbols are obvious, e.g. Buffy's cowboy hat in the dig scene and how the kids ride bikes-as-horses to the dean's house against a Western score, but I definitely missed them.
• Discussion of economic rationales for oppression, tied in to comments from Buffy (casinos) and Giles (colonizer).
• Episode supports the argument that "We gave reconciliation/appeasement a try but it didn't work, oh well, they deserve to die."
• Anya was the hosts' favorite character, Willow their least favorite; white women's guilt/tears; she felt bad about injustices and paid lip service to wanting justice, but in the end was happy to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner.

I'm already seeing more when I watch stuff, including Longmire and the aforementioned Westworld S2, both of which are up on deck for their own posts.

The downsides of the podcast series for me, both minor, are that the conversations can get rambly and that in earlier seasons there were weird skits in the middle about, like, a future alien encounter. I found them annoying and hard to understand because of the sound mixing so I just fast-forwarded to return to the regular discussion. ETA: Oh, and the production values are middling because they have a budget of approximately $0, so there can be background noise. I'd forgotten about one episode where their male guest mouth-breathed into the mic the whole time.