'She-Hulk' tackles sexism; 'Red Door' delivers poetry

This week's reviews are densely packed, including two well-received streaming shows and ... a book of poems?

'She-Hulk'

Disney+ continues to expand the Marvel Cinematic Universe through surprisingly societally conscious streaming series.

And now that Bruce Banner's cousin, up-and-coming career lawyer Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany from "Orphan Black"), has acquired Hulk powers of her own from accidental exposure to Bruce's gamma-irradiated blood, I look forward to the office sitcom promised by this show's trailers, about how the existence of superpowers and costumed crime-fighting would interact with the American legal system.

Before "She-Hulk: Attorney at Law" gets to explore that territory or show how Jen's love life gets upgraded by transforming into a giant green Amazon, the pilot episode inspired quite the fierce debate among my circle of online correspondents because Jen managed to master coping with her inner Hulk better in a single episode than Bruce could do in 15 years, MCU time.

I'm reminded of the characters in "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" debating what it meant for a Black man to adopt the mantle of Captain America. For as many serious and rage-inducing traumas as Bruce has suffered, Jen correctly points out that every woman is expected to hold her temper through countless, endless microaggressions.

For those who object to this framing, let me clarify that "She-Hulk" is not saying Jen has a harder life than Bruce, who's attempted suicide, but rather, Jen's life has presented her with an entirely different set of obstacles and frustrations, which have developed different responses to her stresses than Bruce has built up.

None of this makes our beloved Bruce Banner any weaker or less resilient as the Hulk. It simply means that, especially for women with aspirations of competing with men on their turf, society requires them to flex the emotional control muscles they need to succeed, whether as She-Hulks or otherwise.

Give this one a trial run, gang. If you're sufficiently receptive, I suspect a lot of you will dig it.

More 'Sandman'

Remember me reviewing the 10-episode first season of Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" on Netflix last week? As of Aug. 19, there's a two-part 11th episode, based on the comic book's issues 17 and 18, "Calliope" and "A Dream of a Thousand Cats."

"A Dream of a Thousand Cats" uses reasonably effective CGI rotoscoping to stand in for hand-drawn animation as we're treated to the history of a world in which cats ruled over humans. It's a world that was replaced by our own reality, as a Tom Sturridge-voiced feline version of the Dreaming's Lord Morpheus explains to one cat, while presenting a vision of what she and her fellow felines will need to do to restore their former glory.

The punchline is that Morpheus' solution would require cats to behave contrary to their selfishly contrarian nature, but the final scene remains unsettling because it confirms how even kittens would choose to treat their human owners.

"Calliope" speaks to the terror every author feels upon encountering writer's block, as once-popular novelist Erasmus Fry (Derek Jacobi) passes his ownership of the enslaved ancient Greek muse Calliope (Melissanthi Mahut) onto younger best-seller Richard Madoc (Arthur Darvill), thereby provoking the ire of Calliope's ex-husband, the recently freed Dream of the Endless.

In a version of reality where supernatural muses literally supply inspiration to human storytellers, both Fry and Madoc can't help but come across as plagiarists of Calliope, and Dream's back-to-back revenge scenarios for Madoc holding his former love captive are chilling to any writer.

An excellent update to the already well-told original tale is making Madoc a faux-feminist who touts his ally credentials even as he holds his female muse hostage.

And yes, the breakdown of the relationship between Calliope and Morpheus constitutes its own tale, which viewers of "The Sandman" on Netflix are likely to see adapted from the comic book down the line.

'The Red Door: A Dark Fairytale Told in Poems'

By now, observing that the supernatural romance subgenre has long since been relegated to the white-bread young adult adventure shelves has itself become a cliché, so Shawn C. Harris' "The Red Door: A Dark Fairytale Told in Poems" stands apart as especially refreshing.

Poetry has never been a field of writing I've been particularly adept at either interpreting or producing, in spite of stints in academia that included patient mentoring by the likes of poet Mary Karr. I'm therefore always impressed by authors who can produce verse evocative enough to penetrate even my middlebrow shell.

Harris constructs a complex narrative out of 54 short poems that can each be appreciated independently, but don't expect to skim unchallenged through this book's compact page count.

Harris samples heady tastes of the older recipes underlying familiar fairy tales - ranging from Snow White to Little Red Riding Hood, with an emphasis on Jean Cocteau's influential 1946 "Beauty and the Beast" - to whip up a modern mutual seduction between a haunted human beauty and her no-less-beautiful beast.

Even after the passing of her powerful but gentle father, the significantly named Tirzah Persephone Horowitz (nicknamed "Terry") bears a robust family background as a Black Jewish American girl (who likes other girls), with a surviving mom, two brothers and other distinctive relatives whose brief appearances nonetheless render them authentic through snippets of dialogue that feel overheard rather than consciously crafted.

Indeed, as Terry travels to the city of Tzfat in Israel, where she encounters an enigmatic, compelling woman known only as Sorrow, several of Harris' more richly rendered refrains deserve to be recited aloud, like song lyrics, capturing experiences and sensations that manage to seem at once exotic and universal, drawing just enough from that with which we're already intimately acquainted, to intrigue us with fragmentary glimpses of things we can only guess at.

Harris' descriptions don't shy from either the explicit or the graphic, as befitting the risks we soon discern in Terry and Sorrow's developing relationship. All relationships require change, but as Terry begins to grasp the gulf between her and Sorrow's respective worlds, the girl who repeatedly insists, "I'm still me," is forced to grapple with how much of her former self she's willing to surrender for new love and pleasure.

Harris' characters are so fully realized that even a culturally unschooled cishet gentile guy like me could connect to them emotionally right away, with fewer Google searches of key terms than I expected, since Harris also possesses the skill to clarify through context.

If you love monsters, or if you suspect some darkness lurks within yourself, you owe it to yourself to open Shawn C. Harris' "The Red Door: A Dark Fairytale Told in Poems," available through Ben Yehuda Press at http://www.BenYehudaPress.com.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]