Under "interlude"

Hello again. As you might be able to tell from the dates of the posts, I wrote the last interlude partially in response to Hurricane Irma hitting us in Florida. We didn't get much damage, but Tampa seems to finally have been hit by a hurricane, which hadn't happened for nearly a hundred years. What did happen was that my house lost power for a day and a half and it made me reflect on how much I take for granted what electricity allows us in the first world. Now let's dig into the interlude!



Pompo plays my Kyle MacLachlan a lot of times--David Lynch used to cast MacLachlan as these characters who would speak for him in films. I've had the thought about Wonder Woman's lasso before--Iron Fist came to me when I lost power. (Ironically, a few days after the power came back on, I was walking around in the dark and walked right into my bookcase, so maybe I would never be smart enough to use my flashlight hand anyway.) I think Aquaman falls in there somewhere as well--has there ever been an Aquaman story where he negotiates treaties between dolphins and humans? Forgive me the tangent, but there was an issue in Grant Morrison's Animal Man run where Buddy Baker, the titular Animal Man, starts supporting eco groups and fights against the ritual murder of dolphins (in Denmark I guess? from a quick Google search), and after someone wrote a letter to the comic saying it was annoying that Morrison was making up situations for Buddy to intervene in, rather than taking real life examples. The editor writing the letter column pointed out that this was a real thing that happens. Something about it just seems unreal!

Marston really did raise his children with Olive Byrne as if they had another biological father who had passed away, but it was at Byrne's insistence. Jill Lepore's book (once again, The Secret History of Wonder Woman) traces how even though Byrne doesn't seem to have been overly conflicted about living with Marston and his wife, she does seem to have been ashamed about the prospect of people knowing about it. In a way, we can relate this to my view of America: uninterested in actually holding itself true to the values on which it is based, the country instead tries to hide the fact that it doesn't actually foster the individualism, equality, and freedom it markets to the world.

Fred, being a ghost, is quick to use vulgar language throughout the interlude. I don't mean in reference to just swearing (which he may or may not do? I don't remember), but that practically everything he says is designed to grate on at least on the audience member's nerves.

When Pompo imagines someone in Wonder Woman under Diana's lasso admitting that they are all just characters in a comic book, he's coming to an idea I've considered elsewhere (see "Chasing Victor") but is actually already addressed to some extent by Brian Michael Bendis in the last arc of Alias. For those of you who watched Jessica Jones and didn't read Alias because you felt like you knew the story, it's a loose adaptation of the comic. Purple Man does play a key antagonistic role in Alias, but there's a lot of other weird stuff in there, and for one Purple Man insists that all the characters in the comic are characters in a comic, so a bit of fun meta-fiction there.

"Last night, I had another Gal Gadot dream," Pompo says at a transitional point in the "monologue." This is pretty much stealing from Twin Peaks, where Gordon Cole, the character David Lynch plays, tells his fellow FBI agents, "Last night, I had another Monica Bellucci dream." I just had to edit what Pompo says to mirror Cole's words more clearly (Pompo had said "last night" at the end of the sentence previously). In Twin Peaks, it gives Bellucci a fun way to cameo that also honors her as an actress and in some way references Gordon Cole's status as David Lynch, the artist whom we might see as the one dreaming Twin Peaks up for us viewers. From there, I knew Gal Gadot would talk about America in the dream and you can't help but take that to the American Dream. I hope the dialogue speaks for itself to some extent, even though I know it's not on the level of Bellucci's consideration of dreams within Lynch's dream in Twin Peaks. Basically I wanted to explore the space between the potential of all that America claims to stand for, and the actual realization of the country.

A few things I will elaborate on further: yes, the acronyms of figures in the dream are in large part for me to make a PCP joke. Sorry. This also mirrors Cole's dream in Twin Peaks, but in Waiting for Gadot, Gadot does not full-on appear, instead I imagine her role might be played by anyone, likely someone who looks like everyone else in the play. (It might already be clear, but I'll just say it: in some bizarre science fiction way, I see this play as a form of one-man show.)

Fred's comment about Thomas Jefferson makes a connection between Marston and a founding father. I have a passing memory of what I thought was a John Gardner quote (from searching the internet, either someone else must have said it, or maybe I made it up?) about George Washington: that during the revolutionary war he shot and killed an American soldier for some ridiculous reason (once again, the internet points to him shooting deserting soldiers, but in my memory this was an even sillier reason to end someone's life). This might seem like a vague and pointless thing to bring up since I can't find the quote, but the reason I share it is to consider the symbolism of George "I cannot tell a lie" Washington--just imagine that Washington did shoot a soldier for not getting their horses prepared quickly enough when the soldiers needed to break camp. This could have happened--Washington isn't, as much as we might want him to be, an angel. Let's get back to Jefferson... Here I think rumor is a lot worse than truth: Jefferson took a slave woman as a lover after his wife died and they had children together, which would be denied by many until DNA evidence could prove it. The version of the story I knew also had Jefferson not making plans for his family and his lover and her children being sold back into slavery upon his death--which I guess didn't happen. But it could have happened... I think it's important to remember that our heroes had the ability to do horrible things. Thankfully, while I was writing I made some edits that let this line stay as it was written, as I note only that America, like Marston, denied children their birthright.

I thought about the irony of Francis Scott Key writing the national anthem during the War of 1812 the other day and I almost immediately came to the line, "Land of the free, home of the slave!" I'm sure people have frequently come up with that one, but it captures some of the true irony of our nation's history--and how it is ironic to wish to return to those "great" times.

After the dream, Pompo becomes a reference machine! First we speaks of Captain America and Wonder Woman as "bad citizens," which I mean in the sense of Don DeLillo, as figures who trouble power and power's ability to corrupt. The "dream deferred ready to explode" is a reference to the great Langston Hughes poem, "Harlem." Shamefully, then, Pompo moves to a reference to "the implication" from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Finally, Pompo obviously shaved his hair between the first and second interludes. I figured his hair would go through a further transition, so he ends up wearing a toupee that should bring to mind a certain someone to readers, if I'm doing my job right. I'm still wondering how this will effect the final interlude coming up...