Being Ironic vs. Being a Joke

I own a Hilary Duff T-Shirt.

Some people ask, "Are you wearing that shirt 'ironically,' or do you actually enjoy her music?" Of course, I'm put in a difficult position there: you've given me two choices, and if I blatantly admit to wearing it 'ironically,' then where's the irony? So I have to admit to enjoying her music, at which point you can either say, "Oh, he's being ironic," and laugh with me, or you can say, "This is a grown man who admits to liking Hilary Duff's music to the point that he wears her T-Shirt in his mid-twenties. What a joke." At that point, you're laughing at me. I know, that's a cliché, but it's important that we recognize the difference.

Here is the story of how I obtained said Hilary Duff T-Shirt:

When I was in 10th grade, my dad opened a restaurant in Las Vegas, which he decided to name after his eldest son "Giorgio." The restaurant was located between the Luxor and Mandalay Bay hotels on the Las Vegas strip, and, because the restaurant was named after me, I was given partial ownership. In Los Angeles, I was just a short, scrawny high school sophomore who still collected comic books, but in Vegas, I had my own restaurant. It's impossible to bring that up and not sound arrogant, so you have to milk the irony: "Oh yes, they decided to make me co-owner of the restaurant at age 15 because I'm just that awesome."

The restaurant ended up being a very big deal for my dad. There was a movement of "celebrity chefs" and "celebrity restaurateurs" that were beginning to dominate the Vegas strip, and by opening a second restaurant there, he had proven he could play in the major leagues. Of course, to anyone who actually knows anything about restaurants, my dad has always been a major league player, but Vegas was a whole different ballpark, the scrutiny of which went beyond food and hospitality. The hotel made trading cards with photos of my dad and gave them to hotel guests. Sometimes parents of my classmates would come to my dad at school events and ask him to autograph a trading card.

...and my dad attained that level of celebrity through this restaurant, which was named after me, and which I was "co-owner" of.

Around this same time, my brother Giampiero met Hilary Duff at a screening of Agent Cody Banks. He claimed that he had dropped trou in front of her and had asked her to sign his boxers. Oh, hell no. My brother was NOT about to move in on Hilary Duff. He could have Lindsay Lohan or one of those Olsen sisters, but Hilary was MINE. Besides, did my brother have a restaurant in Vegas named after him? No, only I did. So I figured, whenever Hilary performed in Vegas, I would work my connections and get backstage passes to her show. I would NOT walk up to her and drop trou (I didn't have game like my brother). Instead, I would invite her to my restaurant, which I owned.

So I got the tickets and the backstage passes, along with a round trip plane ticket from LAX to Vegas. The show was in February, four months away. That meant I would have to wait 1/3 of a year before I got to meet Hilary and make my move.

In the life of a teenager, a lot can change in 4 months. I matured emotionally and became (slightly) more rational, so when the time actually came to see the concert, I had accepted there was no way Hilary Duff was going to go out with me, and at this point, I didn't really care. I was dating Celia Hollander now, the coolest girl in school. Plus, Hilary Duff was kind of played out. Lindsay Lohan was poised to make a big comeback with Mean Girls. It was all about Lindsay now. Oh, and even with all the connections that came from being a 15-year-old Las Vegas restaurateur, it turned out I still couldn't get backstage.

Whatever, though. I would still go to the concert...ironically. And I would buy a T-Shirt and wear it...ironically. And when people would ask me why, I would reply, "I just really like her music. It's just so real to me. The lyrics just speak to me in a way that no other musician can." If you couldn't hear the irony in that, you weren't listening. If you didn't get the joke, that was your problem.

...but in reality, I was the joke, and even though I eventually accepted reality, the fact remained: there was a time in my life when I actually thought I had a chance with Hilary Duff. I thought that my newly acquired Vegas swagger meant I was a star, just the same as she was. I could play it off like I was "being ironic," but kidding aside, when I was 15 years old, I thought that the biggest teenage star of 2003, who had dated the likes of Frankie Muniz and Aaron Carter, might have dinner with me if I just went to her concert, told her who I was, and asked her out. For that, I deserved to be laughed at, not laughed with, and to honor that, I have kept the t-shirt and still wear it today.

Retcon vs. Plot Twist

Retcons mostly happen in an ongoing series like a TV show or a comic book. Films, instead, have plot twists. They are basically the same thing: you go through the story with one understanding of the facts, and then your mind is blown as you realize those facts weren't true. The difference is the motive and context.

Movies like Fight Club, Planet of the Apes, Saw, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Usual Suspects, Primal Fear, and pretty much every M. Night Shyamalan movie have plot twists. You go through the movie presented with one set of facts, and then you are surprised later by one new piece of information that changes your interpretation of the entire movie. The plot twist is part of the experience of the movie. Revealing it to you before you see the movie ruins the experience.

A retcon, on the other hand, is a "plot twist" that undoes events in an already completed work, thereby creating a plot twist where none was necessary. Here are some examples of retcons:

The most famous retcon is the TV show Dallas undoing years of continuity by revealing that it was "all a dream," which then gave any TV show license to do the exact same thing and claim they were just parodying and/or paying tribute to Dallas. Roseanne, Married with Children, Newhart, and others followed suit. Other examples of TV Show retcons: Fraiser claiming a prior mention of his dad's death was a "euphemism," as was the "magic box" in Lost. Topanga in Boy Meets World had a hippie dad at the beginning of the series who, several seasons later, magically transformed into a conservative traditionalist played by Michael McKean. George Costanza cheated in the contest. Eric Cartman's mother is actually his father...no, wait, she's his mother, and you'll never guess who his father is!

In the Marvel Universe, Wolverine's metal claws were originally part of his gloves. Then they were skeletal implants lodged inside his forearms. Then they were bones. Also, Jean Grey. She died. Then she came back as Phoenix, and then she died again. Then it turned out Jean Grey and Phoenix were different people, and Jean was still alive. Oh, and Spider-Man. They cloned him back in the 70s and quickly killed off the clone to avoid complications. Then they found out the clone wasn't a clone: the geneticist injected his lab assistant with a virus to look like Peter Parker. No, actually, there was a clone, and he didn't die, and guess what? That guy whose adventures you've been following for the past 20 years? THAT was the clone, and the real Spider-Man has been hiding somewhere for all this time. No, actually, scratch that: everything was exactly how you thought it was. Let's pretend this whole thing this never happened...

This is the problem with retcons. Most of the time, they are cop-outs. The writers make a bold choice, the fans overreact, and the writers come up with a lazy way to undo their bold choice. It punishes the fans who trust the writers and rewards the fans who complain. Yes, the writers have a responsibility to give consumers what they want, but as consumers, we should wait to see the writer's original vision before we judge.

With movies, we don't question the artistic vision in this same way. We might fight it before it's been made, but when it's done, we're done fighting. With the finished product, we either like it or don't like it. We don't feel like we have the power to complain to the artist to get what we want. We move on. I imagine there were many pre-1983 Star Wars fans who wanted Luke & Leia to end up together, but when it was revealed they were brother and sister, those fans went, "Ew," and understood her decision to settle down with Han Solo. There was no "Official Petition to Lucasfilms: Please Retcon the Revelation that Luke & Leia are Brother and Sister So They End Up Together While Sleazy Douchebag Han Solo Dies Alone."

Plot twists are usually an artist's attempt to deceive fans (albeit in an entertaining way). Retcons, instead, are usually an artist's attempt to appease fans...except that fans inevitably hate the execution of the retcon more than they hate the thing that was being retconned.

Example: "Wow, Spider-Man is getting really boring to write now that his identity has been revealed to the word and he's married to a supermodel. Let's undo those things...BY HAVING THE DEVIL ERASE HIS MARRIAGE FROM HISTORY AND HAVING A SORCERER RELEASE A MAGICAL FORCE THAT ERASES ANY MEMORY THAT PETER IS OR EVER WAS SPIDER-MAN."

If that idiotic idea was painful enough to read when summed up in a paragraph, imagine what it was like for the fans who followed the series for years. My guess is fans of Dallas felt similarly. When comparing the "It was all a dream" retcon to the "We changed the past and erased everyone's memory" retcon, the former wins in the laziness department, the latter in the stupidity department., and they both tie in the "disappointment to highly invested fans" department.

...but let's be honest: the idea that we can add information to the past that completely changes it in a way that's more convenient? That adds to the escapist fantasy of entertainment. I waited all through high school for that radioactive spider to bite me and give me superpowers (didn't happen). I waited even longer to meet the hot supermodel and marry her (did happen). But I'm still holding out for that one moment that erases literally everything bad about my past, present, and future while leaving the good things intact.

So, adoring fans, when are you going to write angry letters to the editorial board of my life until they cave in?

Where is my Dr. Strange?

Control

One of the first things I learned when I started my teaching career: "Don't come at kids from a position of power."

I didn't get it at first. Wasn't I supposed to be in a "position of power" to these kids? Wasn't that how I was supposed to get their respect, get them to mellow out, get them to start learning?

Then I thought harder about it. Actually, when I hear the term "Position of Power," the first thing that it triggers in my mind is the 50 Cent song, "Position of Power." It's on his second album, The Massacre, the liner notes of which feature a different photo for each song. For the song "Position of Power," 50 Cent is standing up, hanging out of the sunroof of a Porsche Boxster, wearing a wife beater, a white doo rag and a black stocking cap, wielding a sawed-off pump-action shotgun. Oh, also, there are palm trees in the background, even though all the lyrics are about how he "runs New York." Odd.

Anyway, whenever people at my first teaching job used to talk to me about "coming at kids from a Position of Power," I pictured myself as 50 Cent, who most of the boys in my class thought was a straight up boss. I didn't see the problem. I wanted them to look up to me, the same way I looked up to 50 when I was their age. That was how they would learn Latin. Why didn't anyone else get that?

Eventually, I went back and found that picture of 50 Cent in the Porsche, and that picture looked very different to me when viewing it from an adult's perspective. What kind of man wants everyone to see him with his shirt off, brandishing an illegally modified firearm while driving an expensive car through what looks like an upscale Miami or Southern California neighborhood? Was that how I looked to my students? Was I 50 Cent in the Boxster with the shotgun? (This is starting to sound like a bad variant of Clue.) If so, to half my kids, I looked scary, and to the other half, I looked ridiculous, but to all of them, I just looked like I was in it for myself, not for them. 50 Cent doesn't care about other people's success. Somewhere, his heart turned cold...

It was one of many productive conversations I had with fellow educators about "coming at kids from a position of power." Along the way, here are some specific things I learned never to do:

1) Don't remind people of your superiority by saying things like "I'm the teacher," "Because I said so," "Hate to say I told you so, but...I told you so," "Whose fault is that?" and "Not my problem." When a kid hears any of those things, they assume you don't care about them. All of those expressions are meant to reinforce the kid's subservience to you rather than reinforcing your belief in the kid's success.

2) Don't "escalate situations." If a kid all the way in the back of the classroom punches another kid, do you scream across the room at him? No, you walk to the back of the room, continuing instruction as you do, and then you whisper to that kid, "Please leave." If they push back, just calmly say, "You clearly aren't able to be in my classroom. So, for your safety and everyone else's, go tell [school administrator] what you just did, and they'll help you prepare yourself to rejoin class." Then go right back into instruction. Don't miss a beat. If you yell across the room, the kid will yell back, and the other kids will join in. If you stop instruction, kids will take advantage of the downtime. Your job is to diffuse the situation, not to punish impulsively.

3) Don't ignore anything. Addressing disruptive behavior doesn't magically stop it, but tuning it out doesn't, either. Just because you've tuned it out doesn't mean the other students have. Often times, doing nothing is a passive way of "escalating the situation." The kid sees that they can get away with a certain level of disruptive behavior, so they go farther, wondering how far they can go before you snap. If a kid is acting that way, they want something, and it's your job to find out what. In fact, at the school where I currently work, the first thing any kid sent out of a classroom is asked is "What did you want?" The kid almost always answers, "Nothing." The administrator replies, "What did you do?" The kid answers. The administrator replies, "You did that because you wanted something. What did you want?"

50 Cent doesn't care what you want. 50 Cent only cares about what 50 Cent wants. 50 Cent likes to escalate situations. That's why he mugged Ja Rule, humiliated Rick Ross's ex-girlfriend by showing a questionable video of her on his website, bumrushed the VMAs stage in 2005 trying to fight Fat Joe on live television, had Eminem fire DJ Green Lantern in the middle of a national tour, had Styles P's contract with Interscope Records nullified, and got into lyrical mixtape feuds with countless other rappers. What kind of man does these things? Clearly, a man who's insecure about his own "Position of Power."

I'll repeat what I said in an earlier post: as a teacher, your job is to be the authority figure without declaring your authority, to get respect without demanding respect, and to control the learning environment without appearing like you're trying to control people. You are an authority figure, you deserve respect, and the learning environment can't function without you monitoring it…but if you lord that authority over kids, they will respect you less, and you will ultimately lose control of the learning process.

"Coming at a kid from a position of power" is something that a person in an actual "Position of Power" would never do. If you have to remind someone you're in charge, you're obviously not in charge. Cute Porsche, though. It matches your shotgun!

How I Met the Woman in the Refrigerator

http://lby3.com/wir/

"Women in Refrigerators" Syndrome is a phenomenon occurring mostly in Bronze & Modern Age superhero stories where women are added into the story specifically for the purpose of being killed off so that a male character can learn a valuable lesson and/or so that the male writer can write stories that help him live out his fantasies.

It started in 1973 with a comic book series called The Amazing Spider-Man. The series was going on eleven years, and the hero had the same girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, for most of those years. However, shortly before 1973, the series changed writers, and the new writer, Gerry Conway, thought Gwen was a boring character. So he killed her. He never entertained the idea of writing more interesting stories about her, deepening her past to make her more interesting, or even just having the two characters break up. No, he had to kill her. In a reprinted edition of the story, Conway reflects on the choice in an editorial note, saying that the character's blond hair was a major motivating factor. "I had a thing for redheads at the time. Gwen had to go."

I have a thing for redheads, too. In high school, I dated a girl who was blonde. I never thought about KILLING HER so I could be with a redhead.

When I met Sam Raimi (director of the first 3 Spider-Man films) at the Los Angeles Comics Convention in 2002, I asked him why he didn't put Gwen Stacy in the first film. He told me that the most significant thing about Gwen Stacy is the fact that she dies.

Well, Sam, whose fault is that?

There is no rule saying that, if you put Gwen in your Spider-Man story, she has to die. In Ultimate Spider-Man, the modern re-imagining of the series, it's Spider-Man who dies...WHILE SAVING GWEN. I've been saying for 2 years that I hope they choose to end the new Spider-Man film series the same way. Some are saying Gwen will die in the new film so the story can be true to the comics. I think that would be cheap and predictable.

Speaking of cheap and predictable, did anyone catch the "How I Met Your Mother" finale?

Let's just put it this way: the mother, Tracy, is Gwen Stacy.

Robin is Mary Jane Watson, the red-headed supermodel that Spider-Man dates after Gwen's death. She's been a familiar face for a long time, longer than Tracy/Gwen has been around, even, and the fans have always liked her. They appreciate her wit, her bluntness, her charm, and her resilience in overcoming a troubled past. Yet when the series first started, she was none of those things. Her past was revealed piece by piece, and her personality changed throughout the series...just like regular people do. The fans welcomed the character development and found it interesting, even if it meant that in the end, she was slated to end up with the hero's wealthy, materialistic, playboy best friend, Harry Osb---I mean Barney Stinson.

With Tracy/Gwen, the writers put minimal effort into getting the fans acquainted with her. They kept misleading the fans, telling us she was his soulmate, but in the end, she wasn't even a person. She was just a lesson he learned that made him a deeper, more self-reflective male character.

It wasn't her death that bothered fans; it was how and why the writers chose to kill her. They didn't feel she was interesting enough to write about, so they cut her story short and replaced her with a supermodel (or in this case, a Canadian Pop Star) to serve as the goodhearted nerd's prize. Then they turned around and said, "Well, of course we didn't feature her character more throughout the series. The only significant thing about her is that she dies." Yes, because that's how YOU CHOSE to write her story.

The only redeeming thing about the story of Gwen Stacy's death is that, at the end, Peter, no longer Spider-Man, goes back to his apartment to grieve for the woman he has just lost. Mary Jane is waiting for him there, also in mourning, but Peter tells her to leave, saying that she's just a happy-go-lucky social butterfly who "wouldn't be sorry if your own mother died." MJ storms out in tears, but then, standing in the doorway, she stops, and the last frame we see is her closing the door in front of her, not behind her. She doesn't forgive him, but she decides to stay because she knows she is not the person he thinks she is. The scene doesn't continue in the following month's comic, and no writer has ever elaborated on what happened after she closed the door. They didn't have to. The message speaks for itself: Spider-Man can climb buildings, lift cars, and dodge bullets, but MJ is the stronger person, and he needs her strength, not the other way around.

In the closing scene of Spider-Man, fans got that; in the closing scene of How I Met Your Mother, fans got a fake gray hairpiece and a smurf you-know-what .