Author Topic: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography  (Read 4481 times)

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Offline poparena

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Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« on: February 07, 2012, 02:59:41 PM »
Psychogeography - The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.

Psychochronography - The study of a time period through a specific singular object.


What follows is a series of short, irregularly updated essays concerning the time period in which the Animorphs book series was published, focusing on the emotional, artistic and political landscape of which the series was a part of. I plan to do one essay per book. As always, discussion and debate is encouraged. :)

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#1 - You don't know anything about reality, Jake (#1 The Invasion)

It's June 1996. "Tha Crossroads" by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony take #1 of the billboards for the entire month, a tribute song to the passing of rapper Eazy-E to AIDS. Eazy-E is best known as one of the founding members of N.W.A. along with Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, and is still considered one of the pioneers of gangsta rap, a genre of music known of its use of crime and drug iconography. Supporters of the genre call it a documentation of inner-city life, while detractors claim it as both promoting certain criminal behaviors as well as stereotyping African American youth as uncultured and unintelligent. While the genre originated as far back as the 1980s, it was 1996 when it arguably hit its final high mark with the arrival of Jay-Z, Tupac releasing the first rap double album, and Snoop Dogg being acquitted for first-degree murder.

Regardless of your taste in gangsta rap as a musical genre, it found an important place in 90s American culture as one of the few things to paint a negative critical image on, well, 90s American culture. The 1990s, now more than ever, felt like a safe decade, a comfortable decade. I often think of the 90s as the tropical vacation resort of decades, pleasant and a tad artificial.  Vietnam and Watergate were becoming distant memories (Richard Nixon had passed away in 1994). The Cold War was over. The economy was good. The only major military action in that decade, Operation Desert Storm, is considered one of the quickest and cleanest wars in history. President Clinton was the Democrat's answer to Ronald Reagan, a goofy celebrity president who played saxophone on Arsenio Hall.

It was in this landscape and Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant released Animorphs, a science fiction young adult series about a group of teenagers who discover a secret invasion of mind-controlling aliens. Animorphs is a lot of things, a mixing pot of various cultural, political and ethical ideas that I feel can only be accurately strained in the context of the 1990s. This is why I haven't actually read any of the updated reprints (though I have purchased all of them in support of Applegate), because I feel something in lost in translating the story for a 21st century audience. Yeerks don't work in a world where the word "terrorist" is constantly being thrown around to label boogeymen, while massive protests are toppling governments. The Yeerks as a concept can only really function in a complacent, unsuspecting world.

Complacent is the key word here. It's no coincidence that the series opens in a mall of all places, a symbol of American consumerism. It's also no coincidence that 3.5 of the main characters are white, and all but one live comfortably. Jake and Rachel are white and live in upper-middle class families. Jake's father is a pediatrician, his mother a writer and his brother a high school heartthrob and basketball legend. Rachel's mother is a lawyer and her father is a news anchor. Cassie's family live what has to be an expensive piece of real estate and are living their dreams of helping animals. Marco, who is half-white, has fallen on hard times at the beginning of the series, but before the supposed death of his mother, his life was also extremely comfortable, to the point where yacht trips were a regular occurrence.

The only Animorph that doesn't fit into this mold is Tobias, and that is perhaps the reason he is the most accepting of the situation. He never had the idyllic 90s lifestyle that the rest of the Animorphs enjoy and is more capable of divorcing himself from it. And it is that lifestyle that the Yeerks are invading. In just the first book, we discover that the Yeerks have their fingers in schools, police and community projects such as the Sharing. The first book is largely about the Animorphs struggle against this realization, that these smiling white cornerstones of American life are secretly corrupt. This is often the subject of gangsta rap. N.W.A.'s "**** Da Police" presents a fantasy trial in which rappers prosecute police officers for discriminatory behavior, calling them out on their privileged status in the community. Meanwhile, the moment in which the Animorphs realize that things are serious is when they discover that a local police officer is a Controller, one of the Yeerks who have infiltrated their society and dwell in their secret base under the city ("**** the police, coming straight from the underground").

This series is not just about the Animorphs Vs. the Yeerks, but about the Animorphs Vs. the 90s. In order to save the world, the Animorphs must remove themselves from what the world currently is, because it's that world that the Yeerks have already conquered before the book series even begins.
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esplin

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #1 on: February 07, 2012, 03:57:34 PM »
Awesome read.  <3 nwa.

I would like more content but the short and sweet aspect isn't something to complain about.  I thought it was quite interesting and an excellent analysis.  I love the 90s myself and spent the first 10 years of my life in it but I think your nostalgia is showing. :P

Offline poparena

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #2 on: February 07, 2012, 04:01:30 PM »
Well, "short and sweet" is kind of a necessity, I got over sixty of these to write. :P
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esplin

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #3 on: February 07, 2012, 04:11:04 PM »
Yeah I understand that.  I thought about it more while getting ready to make dinner.  Maybe longer isn't really the right word.  I'm to be helpful but maybe I should just stick to being a fan. 

Is there nothing more to say about book one?  How about societies opinion on aliens, secret societies, on genetics.  Stuff like that?  Am I helping or hurting lol.

Offline poparena

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #4 on: February 07, 2012, 04:13:16 PM »
All of that will be covered eventually. :)
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esplin

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #5 on: February 07, 2012, 04:14:06 PM »
:thumbsup:

Offline Noelle

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #6 on: February 07, 2012, 06:16:28 PM »
I don't really have too much to add, a lot of interesting parallels have been pointed out.  I definitely agree that the series, to be properly analyzed, has to be analyzed in the mindset of the time period it was written in.  I wouldn't say so much that they have to remove themselves from what the world currently is, more that they have to wake up and realize that it isn't the world they think it is.

I think the urban culture/corruption analogy fits.  This book is the first picture of what it is like to fight the corruption in the system, and having to do so without the help of the law.  Definitely more of a wake up call for people who have lived a rather idyllic lifestyle such as the standard "American Dream."  I'm curious to see how the other essays turn out.

Probably not very helpful.  Good essay anyway.

Offline Oceanspray

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #7 on: February 08, 2012, 01:45:43 AM »
Many people who read this series as it was being published can identify with this time period.  Most of us were still children at the time.  We lived in a world with dial-up internet, box television sets, and cell phones the size of bricks. 

Re-reading the series today, I notice how much things have changed.  Broadband/the internet, flat-screens, and cell phones etc.  Cell phone cameras alone could seriously impede a covert invasion.  Add social networking and high traffic image forums and suddenly one picture could be disseminated to the public in as much time as it would take to upload from your phone. 

Remember in #42 "The Journey" when the Animorphs freak out over one guy with a disposable camera and how they had to get it back before he could get it developed?  That type of situation would rarely occur nowadays (who carries a disposable camera when you have a cellphone?)  and could be handled so much easier.  If the same situation were to occur today, it would turn into "get that cell phone back before he gives the picture to the whole world!"  The guy could have sent the picture to anyone before he even got home.
« Last Edit: February 08, 2012, 02:34:46 AM by Oceanspray »

Offline poparena

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #8 on: February 08, 2012, 07:09:47 AM »
#2 - It's hard not to stare when you think of what is squeezed inside that skull (#2 The Visitor)

It's still June 1996. The theaters have been packed with summer action movies with films like Twister, Mission: Impossible, Eraser and music video director Michael Bay's second foray into braindead action filmmaking with The Rock. This is all leading up to the biggest film of the year, which we'll talk about in the next entry. In real news, while the biggest scandal going on in the White House was the discovery that the Clintons may have made participated in some not-so-legal real estate investments back in the 70s, the Provisional Irish Republican Army are at the tail end of their struggle to separate Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom with armed robberies and explosives that will result in the formation of the Criminal Assets Bureau, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia are bombed by Hezbollah Al-Hejaz for housing foreign military personal which results in strained relations with Iran, and a fireworks factory in China explodes, killing 36 people.

So it is not to say that the entire world was calm and complacent during the time, merely the United States. While land mines were killing Chechen separatist leaders, Congress was debating Internet decency laws. That said, news media always needs a villain, and in the first half of 1996, they had three big ones: Ted Kaczynski, Martin Bryant and the Montana Freemen. While all of them were very different in their crimes, they all supported an image of being mentally deranged. Eccentric at best, crazy at worst. First, and most famously, we have Kaczynski, most popularly known as the Unabomber, an anarchist extremist who sent out mail bombs between 1978 to 1995, mostly to convince media outlets to publish his manifesto. A recluse who lived in a cabin for over twenty years without electricity or water, his mug shot after his arrest in 1996 that of a bearded mountain man, it was easy to pin the "crazy" label on him.

Meanwhile in Australia, 28-year old Martin Bryant gunned down 35 tourists at the historic Port Arthur prison colony, one of the deadliest shootings perpetrated with a single individual. It was also easy to label him as crazy, a wandering beach bum who had inherited a fortune from an older woman whom he was possibly having sexual relations with. To this date, Bryany's motivation for the attack are unclear, he once claimed it was connected to the Dunblane school massacre earlier that year, in which a man named Thomas Hamilton had walked into a Scottish primary school and killed sixteen children, one teacher and himself.

In a less deadly but no less crazy situation, June saw the end of an 81-day standoff between the FBI and the Montana Freemen, a Christian Patriot movement that declared themselves separated from the United States and constructed their own governing system and currency. This was a third in a line of government sieges against various militia and religious extremist groups, the first being against the Weaver family in at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992 (three deaths) and the second being against the Branch Davidians protestant sect outside Waco, Texas in 1993 (eighty-four dead). To say the least, the US government had no interest in repeating those bloody affairs, and after nearly three months of long-range negotiations the Montana Freemen, who lived in RVs and flew an American flag upside down, finally surrendered.

What all these people had in common was that they were various insanities were easy to identify and they were almost completely indefensible (not that people didn't try, especially in the Unabomber's case). These were the kind of people we all thought about when we saw the silhouette on the Neighborhood Watch signs, the kind of people we thought about whenever America's Most Wanted would come on the screen. Okay, maybe not always to the extreme of these individuals, but in a time before 9/11 made people scared that any brown-skinned man could be a terrorist and Dateline made people scared that any adult male could be a pedophile, it seemed as though the people who wish to inflict serious criminal harm on someone was easier to identify. There's one such individual in the second Animorphs book, a man who approaches Rachel with clear intent of assaulting and potentially raping her. Rachel knows this, we know this, it's very obvious.

And this man is not a Controller.

The Yeerks have no use for obvious creeps and crazy people. They would never infest Kaczynski, Bryant, the Freemen or anyone else who would bring attention to themselves through such extreme behavior. At this point in the series, the two people we know for sure are Controllers are Tom, Jake's upstanding brother, high school basketball star and spokesperson for the Sharing, and Vice Principle Chapman. One of the central scenes in this second book is the attempted rape followed immediately by Rachel being forced to accept a ride from Chapman, and it's Chapman that Rachel stresses about. In an idea that would be repackaged in The Matrix three years later, the Yeerk invasion forces the Animorphs into a position of not being able to trust anyone, not just the obvious "bad people." It is not that, with the Yeerks, anyone is an enemy. It's that everyone is an enemy.
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NateSean

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #9 on: February 08, 2012, 11:42:14 AM »
Have you thought about including the links to these posts in the description sections of your opinionated reviews? These would make excellent companion pieces to your video reviews and maybe introduce more people to RAF.

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #10 on: February 08, 2012, 05:16:20 PM »
As a nerd who loves essays on pop culture I fully approve of this.

Edit: Fun fact, this is the 7th result for the term psychocronography on google, though 4 of the results between are all for entries on the same Doctor Who blog.
« Last Edit: February 08, 2012, 05:31:40 PM by Jax Attack! »

Offline poparena

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #11 on: February 09, 2012, 03:29:29 PM »
Edit: Fun fact, this is the 7th result for the term psychocronography on google, though 4 of the results between are all for entries on the same Doctor Who blog.

The guy who writes for that blog is the one who came up with the term, and is partly my inspiration for doing this project. :)

#3 - There's an elephant stomping over the convertibles! (#3 The Encounter)

It's August 1996. At this point, Animorphs was being printed every other month, hence the two-month gap. Tupac and Toni Braxton danced around the top of the billboard charts in July before giving way to a monstrous blight on popular music known simply as "Macarena." Oh my god, this annoying prattle of a song was everywhere! It took the top of the charts from August all the way to the end of October, partly due to it becoming the official song of the 1996 Democratic Convention. The music video was awful, two middle-aged Spanish guys sing into a mic while a bunch of girls in disturbing cotton-candy colors go on about how you can't have them. At this same time, the Spice Girls were building up steam in the United Kingdom, and it's no wonder why kids like me threw themselves into the arms of Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails and Korn. Yes, I'm blaming the Macarena for my horrible taste in music when I was in junior high.

In real news, the 1996 Summer Olympics begin and end in Atlanta, Georgia, which was interrupted halfway through by a terrorist bombing that resulted in one death. Security guard Richard Jewell, who had saved dozens of lives by discovering the bomb and moving people away from the blast area, is falsely accused by the media for the bombing. Boris Yeltsin is reelected as President of Russia, Prince Charles and Princess Diana are divorced, and Bob Dole is nominated for President of the United States. In science-fiction inspiring news, the Galileo space probe indicates there may be water on one of Jupiter's moons, NASA announces that a Mars-originating meteorite contains evidence of primitive life-forms, and the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, is born.

In personal news, August 15th was my birthday, in which two major interconnected things happened: I went and saw Independence Day, and I got the first Animorphs book as a present.

Independence Day, which became the highest grossing film of that year, is pretty much the antithesis of Animorphs. Giant spaceships hover down and just blast the **** out of American monuments, to which the President responds by getting in a fighter jet and personally shooting the mofos down. It's a huge, crass in-your-face affair, delivering destruction porn in a way that only a pre-9/11 film could, with no sense of weight or casualty despite entire cities getting wiped from the map. The aliens have no sense of strategy, they nuke cities while mostly ignoring military bases, then wait around like they have nothing to do. Even Visser Three would question these methods. In many ways, this film feels like wish fulfillment for the uber-patriotic, World War II-loving American citizen who wants another righteous war to make them feel good about themselves after Korea and Vietnam tarnished that image and the 90s left them feeling as though America was limp and ineffective.

Because there's no way to read Independence Day as anything but an AMERICA-****-YA kind of film, even if it had another title. The alien invasion is said to be global, but we get only the quickest of glances of how the rest of the planet is handling the situation. All we see the aliens attack are the White House, the Empire State Building and U.S. Bank Tower, symbols of the three most prominent American cities. When we fade into New York City, the Statue of Liberty toppled to one side. This is not an attack on the human race, but an attack on American iconography. In the end, the President teams up with a bunch of grizzled American citizens, Jewish scientists and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air at Area 51 to launch a counterattack on the Fourth of July.

In July, the film was promoted on the cover of Time Magazine with the line "Sci-Fi Makes a Comeback." Was science fiction ever gone? One could turn on the TV and find Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Babylon 5, The X-Files, Mystery Science Theater 3000, seaQuest DSV, Sliders, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Dexter's Laboratory, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Biker Mice from Mars and the very brief return of Doctor Who. One could go to the movie theaters and see 12 Monkeys, Escape from LA, Phenomenon, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Star Trek: First Contact and Mars Attacks! There was an entire cable station called "The Sci-Fi Channel." And in the Young Adult section of the local libraries and book stores, a book series called Animorphs was becoming very popular very fast.

So of course science fiction wasn't making a comeback, it was still ever present. What Time Magazine meant by "Sci-Fi" was a return to bigger and louder B-movies from the 50s and 60s, a time when robots fought Aztec mummies, green slime monsters attack space bases and a giant preying mantis goes on a rampage. Films of which Independence Day is basically a modern update of. Science fiction didn't return, big ugly monsters breaking things returned. Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, which came out the same year, is a tribute to these kind of films while always winking at the camera. Independence Day plays it straight.

Animorphs draws inspiration from old school science fiction like this as well, among many other sources. It's clear that at least Michael Grant is a big science fiction fan, and the series is constantly making sci-fi references. The thing is, though, Animorphs draws from the intellectual side of this era, not the "things go boom" side. While Independence Day seeks inspiration from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and... ok, well, War of the Worlds, but all the wrong parts from it... Animorphs draws from The Day the Earth Stood Still (an alien arrives to Earth to give its people a warning), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (aliens take over peoples bodies), and The Thing From Another World (an isolated group deal with an alien threat). Much like the Animorphs is a part of its time, these films were a part of theirs, playing on people's Cold War fears and their paranoia that anyone could be a damn dirty communist. They were also far more subtle and intelligent than any of the B-grade schlock that was coming out. Animorphs and Independence Day may have come from a common ancestry, but their family trees split very far apart.

Case in point, in the third Animorphs book, there is a giant spaceship not too dissimilar from the ones seen in Independence Day. However, instead of positioning itself over a major landmark and blowing it to hell, it was merely a cargo vessel shipping things from point A to point B. Instead of letting the populace gawk at it for hours, it kept itself cloaked and hidden. A giant fortress in the sky, and the people below didn't even know it was there. And despite the grandeur of this, it was not the focus of the book, instead focusing almost entirely on the inner torments of Tobias and developing his character and giving it dimension. While things did end in a huge explosion, this was not the conclusion to a story, but a mere step in a larger story.

It was still a fun birthday.
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NateSean

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #12 on: February 11, 2012, 10:46:06 AM »
Well, happy belated birthday at anyrate. I should have known you were an August baby. You and my youngest brother have a lot in common.

I like the focus on the contrasts between Independence Day and Animorphs. I love both, inspite of what the critics say about Roland Emmerich, ID4 was a kickass movie full of, as you say, stuff blowing up.

Another interesting contrast is that, although posessing an alien weapon that gave them advantage, the Animorphs were still just minors who were very limited in what they could and couldn't do. Everything they did was either in secret or in complete defiance of a system that puts restrictions on teens for their "own good".

In Independance Day, almost everyone was an adult capable of making their own decisions. No one was forced to do anything and everyone had a choice to either rise (hooker escaping the fire while everyone else panicked, drunken crop duster quitting drinking and deciding to sacrifice himself to blow the alien spacecraft to pieces) or fall. (the President's advisor being a closed minded and decidedly not-Jewish prick)

You could easily say that the aliens gave them no choice. But everyone has a choice and you can always choose to do nothing.

The Anis always had to choose. Each book, each mission, Jake put the vote to them. Either you're in or you're out. And for the Anis, the right choice was never as black and white as "if I don't get out of this car I'm going to burn and die." It was more like, "If I don't go along on this mission, some innocent kid will wind up a tool in an alien invasion. I won't be able to sleep tonight and my parents will ground me if they catch me, plus I'll have to miss a class and to do extra work to make up for the test I blew because I couldn't study last night. Because I was busy saving a handful of people who may or may not even be grateful to me for this fact. 'Scuse me a moment, stress vomit."

Offline sublime88stang

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #13 on: February 11, 2012, 01:30:24 PM »
Wow this has been a good read so far. Really reminding me of the way the 90's were. I wish we could go back to those days.

esplin

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Re: Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography
« Reply #14 on: February 21, 2012, 09:27:27 PM »
Loved chapter two and three.