Throne of Blood (1957)

directed by Akira Kurosawa

Japan

108 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I feel like I'm not qualified to give my opinion on this film, being relatively un-versed in Akira Kurosawa. I've seen probably his most famous works and I would count him as one of my favorite directors, but I cannot speak about his technique at length in the same way that someone who has studied him (and cinema in general) could. But I am still going to review it because I do not know when to be quiet.

Another aspect of this film that renders me unable to talk about it intelligently is its basis in a minor work by the obscure Muromachi-era poet and playwright, William Shakespeare. I'm not very familiar with his works either, and in fact I only read Macbeth last month in preparation for watching Throne of Blood. However, I don't feel like reading it was necessary, because I found that, while watching the film, trying to compare it to the source material really just kind of gave me a headache. I could see where the overarching plot was taken from the play, but all in all I think it's best to examine this movie on the basis of the themes it presents - though they are shared with Macbeth - rather than look at it as a 1:1 adaptation of its source material.

The film begins during a war, but we never really see the war itself. Frantic, breathless reporters ride back to Kumonosu-Jô, Spider's Web Castle, telling of the downfall of one garrison after another, until the situation is abated somewhat by the warriors - and companions - Washizu and Miki. These are our main characters, with Washizu standing in for Macbeth and Miki as Banquo. Roughly - again, I don't think it's too good of an idea to think too hard about Macbeth while we're watching this. But what we learn is that both, though possibly Washizu more so, are brilliant military commanders and upon their return to the castle both are to be granted an increase in rank. But before this happens, they make their way through the mist-shrouded, ominous Spider's Web Forest, becoming lost on the way and stumbling upon a spirit spinning silk in a lean-to in the middle of the woods. I watch a lot - a lot - of horror movies, and I have largely lost the ability to be scared by film. But I felt dread in my gut during the scene where Washizu and Miki, unsure if they can believe their eyes, watch this specter slowly spinning while reciting a song about the impermanence of man and his folly. The quality of the photography renders the spirit as something that feels wholly unearthly, and the trick of dubbing the actor's voice so that it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once added both presence and terror. This is our stand-in for the three witches. The spirit tells the two warriors what is to be their future: First, they will both receive promotions, then Washizu will go on to become lord of Spider's Web Castle, and Miki's son his heir. The spirit vanishes, and in an exchange, the two warriors discuss the impossibility of such a prediction... but the seed has been planted, and once the promotions do come down exactly as the spirit foretold, their fates are irrevocably decided.

It's very interesting to me to think about where the moment when Washizu's destiny became locked in might be. In my opinion, although the spirit seemingly knows the future and has seen all that Washizu will do and become, the heart of this story and the reason why it speaks so much to the darkness hidden within ambition is because Washizu very much does control his own fate. The first part of the prophecy was, indeed, prophecy; neither he nor Miki could have known they would be promoted upon returning to the castle. But as far as we know, had Washizu not killed the lord and embarked on a journey of immense and harrowing bloodshed, he may have become lord anyway through any number of events which could have unfolded. Washizu dooms himself because he dares to believe he's the sole arbiter of his fate. His role as lord is not coming to him fast enough, and he can't be certain of it, so he chooses the bloodiest, most direct path to securing it.

We cannot ever neglect Lady Macbeth. Her name is Asaji in this adaptation. To say much has been made of this character would be a vast understatement of her presence in the popular reception of Macbeth. To me, and especially in this film, certain characters can only partially be viewed as distinct entities and should instead be thought of more as extensions or alternate sides of Washizu's self. I have not given much thought to what Asaji was actually hoping to get out of goading Washizu into killing the lord and assuming his position. She of course would receive the benefit of being married to a lord, but her utter lack of emotion and almost instinctual recommendation of murder makes her feel nearly more inhuman than Washizu himself. I think she serves as a kind of external subconscious. Washizu at first may not be the kind of man who could murder his lord, but those thoughts are within him and, taking the form of his wife, outside of him as well. Their roles reverse somewhat as the story progresses, with Asaji becoming debilitated by an obsession with cleaning her hands of blood that only she can see and Washizu slowly being driven insane by paranoia and lust for power.

It goes without saying that Akira Kurosawa is one of the best directors ever. He does things with film that I've never seen anything even remotely comparable to. From his use of atmosphere to the ridiculously elaborate sets he built, his distinctive directorial techniques when creating jidaigeki make everything he did in that genre miles away from anything else being made at the same time. The thing that captivated me most about this film's production is the unbelievably intricate costuming. The man in charge of the costuming was also the film's art director, Yoshirô Miyaki, who worked on production design for literally every good Japanese movie you've ever seen over a span of about fifty years. Aside from that I cannot - though I would love to - find much more about the detail that went into outfitting everybody in this film. I also can't talk about it that much in terms of historical accuracy, that not being an area I'm too familiar with, but just watch this and look at every stitch putting together every plate of armor, every helmet, every woman outfitted in uncountable layers of fine cloth. It's really something else.

Now for once I can talk about something that I am familiar with, and that's Toshirō Mifune. Good god have I seen a lot of movies with him in them, as will anybody with even a passing interest in Showa-era Japanese film. He was in everything. But I really believe that Throne of Blood might be his best role. We all kind of know his deal; he usually plays brash, somewhat arrogant samurai types, or, later, various stiff-upper-lipped military generals - roles that involve a lot of machismo that most of the time goes unquestioned. His turn as Macbeth/Washizu is one of very few times I've seen him in a role where his usual tough-guy schtick is his undoing and is deliberately played up to create this slightly terrifying, unhinged warlord character. He's almost unrecognizable here. There are other people in this movie, even actors who are themselves quite famous (side note: I have no idea why it was so weird to see Takashi Shimura in full armor), but Mifune is really the centerpiece. My favorite fun fact about this movie is that he really was getting shot with arrows during his downfall scene at the end of the film. He was wearing padding under already heavy armor, but still.

I say this often, but this is really a movie that's tough to sum up accurately in the space of a few paragraphs. The scope of the production, the sheer scale of the physical construction and architecture, the thousands of extras used to fill out Washizu's army, the dedication to the costuming - really, I do handicraft myself sometimes, and I will not shut up about the costuming, because I know how absurdly time-consuming making all of that had to have been - all of it can't be done justice to in words. The film is bookended by a kind of Greek chorus lamenting the destruction of Spider's Web Castle, which we never see, but which feels inevitable - one can imagine a place that fraught with blood and obsession becoming so deeply haunted it can no longer be allowed to stand, nature must strike it down. That this is an amazing film is obvious, but what makes it so amazing is the elements that it borrows from non-film media such as kabuki plays. Masaru Satō, one of my favorite film composers, creates a score that's highly traditional with none of his usual jazzy exuberance. (As I understand, he was very early in his career  when he scored this.) My thoughts on one of the best movies of all time are redundant, but I want to encourage everybody to watch this. It's a delight, as is every Kurosawa film. Formal education on film as a medium may allow you to expand your vocabulary for describing why this is such an excellent movie, but it's not necessary for realizing that it's really something special.

Summer of Ubume (2005)

directed by Akio Jissōji

Japan

123 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I read Summer of the Ubume a few months ago and it's never really left my mind since then, but somehow I failed to notice that there was a film adaptation of it. And, what's more, it was directed by one of my favorite directors, Akio Jissōji. I had no foreknowledge of this movie's existence, so I wasn't giving the question any thought, but if you had asked me who I would want to direct an adaptation of Summer of the Ubume, I would probably have named Jissōji before anybody else.

I'm not going to attempt to go through every plot point of the book, because if nothing else, Summer of the Ubume is a tremendously complicated story. There are about a hundred different threads that mostly all end up connecting at some point or another, as well as what feels like a hundred different characters, major and minor, who are involved in the central mystery. That "central mystery", if I may do it a great injustice by summing it up in just a few words, is this: A daughter from a reclusive, ostracized family who have run a medical practice for several hundred years appears to have been pregnant for 20 months, ever since the unexplained disappearance of her husband under mysterious circumstances. There is no "main character" so to speak - possibly in the book, but not really in the film - but the two central players are Sekiguchi, who feels more like a non-person in this than ever, and Kyogoku, Sekiguchi's enigmatic occultist bookseller friend, who also moonlights as a Shinto priest and an exorcist. I would argue that Kyogoku is the most important character of the whole thing, but again, it's difficult to explain exactly why without writing an essay on this story.

If that name sounds familiar, it should. Summer of the Ubume was written by Natsuhiko Kyogoku. (Also worth noting is the film's original title, which is translated literally into its English one: Ubume no Natsu). The author and the character don't just share a surname but part of their given name as well; book-Kyogoku's name is Akihiko, although this is never mentioned in the film. And "Kyogoku" isn't even his real surname, it's a nickname based off the bookstore that he runs, but again, not mentioned in the film. It's very difficult not to wonder if the author wrote this character as something of a stand-in for himself, and honestly, if so, I don't have a problem with that at all. Movie- and book-Kyogoku feel exactly like how it would be if an author were to somehow gain the ability to transport themself into their own story: He's preternaturally savvy about everything that's going on, and although he interacts with other characters, he seems like he's never in doubt of how the story is going to end. Most of his actions throughout the film and the book are done to manipulate other characters into seeing his point of view, which is the truth, or as close to it as you can get. I found this all fascinating, not pretentious, although I recognize how it could easily come off that way. Having a very thinly-veiled stand-in for the author transforms Summer of the Ubume from a mere work of fiction into something that stretches the boundaries of the term "fiction" itself. With no background, this doesn't come across as well in the film; Kyogoku instead just seems like a guy who has all the answers for no reason, but he still works as a character.

While this whole movie works on its own, I think there's a lot about it that underscores the difficulty in adapting a book. This movie is two hours; the book took me several days to read and required participation on my part in the form of generating a mental picture of what was going on and keeping track of the plot and characters. I wouldn't say that this movie has any flaws, but you lose a lot of what made the book so unique: Namely, the literal pages upon pages of Kyogoku philosophizing on the nature of reality and the limits of human perception, which forms the core of the story, but there's also a little more background on Sekiguchi's time in the military, and a fairly large subplot about the depth of his involvement with the impossibly pregnant woman (I didn't mind this being glossed over, however, because it was gross). This kind of feels like a movie you have to study for, but then the book itself also feels like you have to study for it.

So let's move on to more of what the story is about. Towards the beginning of the film, Kyogoku talks about what will become the backbone of the film: That human perception cannot show us the "truth" of reality, and there's nothing that is truly, objectively "strange" in the world, because seemingly supernatural events, and the perception of them as such, are inextricably tied to the brain's limitations in experiencing reality. Essentially, because we experience reality through the filter of our own interpretation of it, we can never know what the "truth" is, if there even is such a thing. This is not just a simple story involving a family curse and an old legend, it's something that questions the very nature of such things. It's the philosopher's ghost story: A premise that acknowledges the supernatural as really existing in the minds of those who experience it, but then shows how fallible those minds are. Kyogoku's end-game when he reveals that the location of the husband's body was known all along is an exposure of the human brain's flawed ability to perceive the world.

Jissōji's unmistakable style is perfect for portraying all of this in a visual medium. Admittedly this is the first of his later movies that I've seen (aside from the episodes of various Ultra series he directed); his earlier films like Poem and Mandara left an indelible mark on my very soul and will never be topped by anything else he made. But this is good, this is really good. Decentralizing Sekiguchi in the film changes the story from having an unreliable narrator to the story itself being unreliable; now, instead of figuring out the cracks in how Sekiguchi is remembering and perceiving events, we have to figure out what we, the viewers, are unable to see. There's always a feeling that there is a larger truth in the film that we are not quite ever able to reach - flashes of a disturbing bird-winged woman hint at this. Another framing device I really enjoyed was the occasional interlude of a storyteller presenting an illustrated version of the events of the film to a group of children - bonus points if you spotted that the storyteller is played by tokusatsu veteran Noboru Mitani, probably best known from Ultraman Taro and Space Sheriff Gavan. (Kyogoku the author also appears in a vanishingly small cameo role.)

All in all I guess the only real complaint I have about this aside from the inherent changes made when a book is adapted for film is that it could have been a little spookier. The exorcism scene in the book was a terrifying whirlwind; I could not put it down. It is a central moment in the film as well, but it's (necessarily) protracted. If anybody's seen The Wailing, I imagined something more like the absolute powerhouse of an exorcism scene from that film. Kyogoku is not exorcising any literal spirits, just dispelling the misperceptions of human witnesses, but although nothing haunts Summer of the Ubume aside from our own grudges and flaws, the eeriness of it comes from realizing the limits of our perception. However, despite Jissōji's immense skill in creating an atmosphere that is deeply unnerving for no apparent reason (the whole of It Was A Faint Dream feels like a panic attack), unless this movie was about eight hours long, it couldn't capture one hundred percent the immersiveness of the book. This is not a mark against the film itself, because I think this movie is excellent, it's just different from the book.

Gamera 2: Attack of Legion (1996)

directed by Shusuke Kaneko

Japan

99 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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After Gamera: Guardian of the Universe launched the series into modernity with a movie that was more grown-up than any of the Showa-era films, it would be difficult to follow up with a sequel that would both match the tone of Guardian of the Universe and still be as good without feeling like a rehash, but that's exactly what Attack of Legion did. Somewhat unusual for kaiju film, this is a direct sequel: no one knew what Gamera was the last time, but now they do, and although they're still wary, only having had one encounter with it before, they at least seem to know enough not to shoot a bunch of missiles at it this time.

We start off in snowy, snowy Hokkaido. I love to watch movies shot in Hokkaido during winter because it amazes me that any place can be that snowy. One of Japan's highest-grossing films, Antarctica, was shot in Hokkaido with the intent of making it look like Antarctica (obviously), and to incredibly realistic effect. The whole of the country, not just Hokkaido, is buried under snow as Attack of Legion begins, so this definitely feels like a Winter Movie™. 

The primary antagonist is again introduced by way of shots of various scientific and military institutions tracking it on radar and basically all going "huh?" The audience should be very familiar with this by now and know that those mysterious things theorized to be birds/radar blips/floating islands/etc. are, in fact, an incoming giant monster. But again, the people of Attack of Legion have only had one prior kaiju encounter, and we can forgive them for not being savvy yet. And then, when the title card rolls, it does something interesting and gives us some foreshadowing by using the character for "me" in Gamera's name as a crucifix shape - more on that later.

First I want to talk about Legion for a minute. Forgive me for my enthusiasm here. Bug kaiju aren't something I've ever been overly fond of because I feel like they oftentimes lack nuance; in design they are by necessity quite intricate, to replicate the small and almost alien body structure of a bug, but when it comes to backstory and character detail, I feel like there's a tendency to have "it's a giant bug" be as deep as they get. Not so for Legion. These guys are almost not kaiju but something else entirely that I don't know how to describe. The name sums it up: there's an absurd amount of them. More even than the hordes of Gyaos in the previous film. They're alien organisms that landed on Earth ostensibly because our radio signals were making them nuts, since their own method of communication relies on electromagnetism. But for all intents and purposes, they are bugs. We also get an upsetting couple of minutes of Gamera being completely covered in the tinier Legion, which was also done with the Meganula swarming Godzilla in Godzilla vs. Megaguirus. I feel like this is a relatable moment in both films because all humans can empathize with seeing another creature covered in bugs. None of us ever wants to be covered in bugs.

This film echoes what Guardian of the Universe did with Gyaos by establishing Legion as not just a fantastical creature but an organism, a biological lifeform that is, during the course of the film, studied and (at least partially) understood. I absolutely love this theme of making kaiju the object of study and bringing them from the quasi-supernatural realm of godlike beings (I'm coming up on the "more on that later") to a category of life that, while outsized, is still within the animal kingdom. There is a dissection scene that was one of the highlights of the film for me because the physicality of it was everything I want out of a kaiju film. Not just seeing huge, untouchable creatures fighting each other, but bringing them down to a human scale, showing people touching and interacting with them in a controlled, non-chaotic setting. It's one thing to have a kaiju that looks good when it's trashing a city, but it's another to have one that looks good lying on an operating table with its guts out. Just for nerd reasons, setting aside my usual ambivalence about bug kaiju, Legion is one of my favorites I have yet seen.

The military is understandably ill-prepared in this film because Legion is so powerful and destructive that to show us a military that is prepared to deal with it would beggar belief. However, the military is not presented as misguided at best and trigger-happy at worst the way they were in the last film, which on the whole is somewhat disappointing to me, because I rub my hands together and cackle when a kaiju film casts the government and/or military as inept and interfering. I love to see real-world incompetence or unpreparedness thrown into light via confronting it with a beast or two (or a legion of them). But everyone here is pretty easy to sympathize with, although still very blind to the destruction we're visiting on the Earth. And the sheer scale of kaiju devastation is incredible even for this kind of film: Sendai is essentially leveled in the middle of the film and, unlike some Godzilla movies that only show us the true breadth of civilization that's been annihilated towards the end, we're left to sit with a now-non-existent Sendai for the rest of the running time as a thing that can't be undone.

Now, I'm saving this for last because I want you to skip it if I start sounding really ridiculous, but I have to talk about the vaguely Biblical theme to this film. Please excuse me, because this only occurred to me as I was falling asleep after watching the movie, and it may be something I just made up. The film itself makes its connection to the Christian Bible explicit when it names Gamera's opponent Legion, as well as using the cross motif in the opening credits, but I feel like it also goes further than that in establishing Gamera as a kind of messianic figure. Not only does Gamera arrive to rescue a sinful, misguided human populace in our time of need, it also apparently dies in the middle of the film, only to be resurrected, again, in our time of need. But the interesting thing here is that Gamera does not seem to be a savior solely of humankind: Gamera is a messiah who is here to save the soul of the entire Earth. I find the idea of a Jesus-like figure who is not concerned with humanity by itself, but rather with humanity as just a single one of the many species on a living, breathing planet, very interesting. A savior for every species, not just us.

This is another knockout entry in this trilogy from somebody who really, really knows how to infuse kaiju cinema with depth and an engaging storyline. In any kaiju film, there is the human element; the human characters who are there by necessity because storylines where kaiju are the main and only characters only work in highly specialized situations. But there is also, in the background, Gamera doing its own thing. Attack of Legion presents us Gamera as an unknowable being. We follow the human characters and see Gamera's actions from their perspective because it's the only way we can relate to anything, but beneath that is something else. Gamera is a creature that is self-directed and ultimately we are not privy to what it's thinking. We can say "Gamera is here to save us!" but Gamera is really here to do whatever it wants. I have seen shades of this concept explored in kaiju media that leans hard towards horror, but never how this film does it from a matter-of-fact, non-terrifying angle. I think that reflects a bit of the ecologically-minded nature of this trilogy: A message that animals have interior lives that are completely alien to us, and that this is not something to be suspicious of or to fear, but something to be respected and fought for.

Colossal (2016)

directed by Nacho Vigalondo

Canada, South Korea, Spain, USA

109 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I was recommended this by somebody who knows I'm really into kaiju, and it made me realize that I had no excuse for not having already seen it. It's been out for seven years, I'm a fan of Nacho Vigalondo, and it does have a giant monster in it (a giant robot too!), despite not being what I would really call a "kaiju film", strictly speaking. This is a movie that uses monsters to represent many different concepts, most of them relating to the manifestation of the unconscious and our responsibility as individuals, and at best, it's a really interesting, original film with ideas that I truly haven't seen before, while at worst, some of it just... doesn't work. This review will contain major spoilers.

Anne Hathaway plays Gloria, an alcoholic rapidly losing control of her life, although the people around her also really suck and I'd argue they're responsible for half of her problems. After getting kicked out of her boyfriend's apartment, she returns to her dismal hometown, setting up in a ramshackle house that belonged or belongs to some little-elaborated-upon relative. While she's there, she meets Oscar, a "friend" from when she was a kid, who seemingly wants to lend her a hand, giving her a part-time job at his bar and occasionally dropping off random furniture. At the same time, news breaks of a giant monster attacking Seoul, South Korea. We should basically all know this by now, but the monster is connected to and controlled by Gloria, appearing in a specific district of Seoul at 8:05 in the morning when Gloria also happens to be in a specific spot (a park outside a school) at that same time. Although she doesn't realize it at first, she can control the monster's movements, and is absolutely horrified to find out that her actions have physical, material results, leading to the deaths of an unspecified number of people and immeasurable property damage.

Usually I don't put too much stock into names in fiction unless it seems really obvious the author is trying to tell us something, because personally, I know that when I write, I just name my characters whatever comes to mind first. But for some reason I think it's interesting that the lead is named "Gloria". Maybe it stuck out to me because it's a name that I think of as an "old person name", at least in the English-speaking world; Vigalondo is Spanish, and it may have different connotations elsewhere. It was only introduced to English audiences in the 1890s, as the name of a character in a novel who was herself Portuguese. So having a young, English-speaking woman with that name felt unusual to me. The name literally means "glory", obviously, and it is part of the Spanish and Portuguese titles of the Virgin Mary. One could argue that the Gloria in this film does give birth to the monster through a kind of immaculate conception, but I think naming her something that means "glory" is also relevant to her status as a hero, a rescuer, someone who evolved from believing she was the center of the world for selfish reasons to realizing that, in this context, she kind of is the center of the world, and she needs to use that power responsibly. There are problems with this, of course, and I'll talk about those towards the end of this review.

The monster is not just a monster. It's never just a monster. In this case it is a physical manifestation of the protagonist's inner feelings, which mostly constitute self-hatred. I think part of the metaphor here may have been the idea that if you're unkind to yourself, the world as a whole suffers, and that by improving yourself, you improve the world. That certainly does happen in Colossal, literally: When Gloria stops acting like a drunk idiot and realizes that her actions are having real-world consequences that are harming and even killing people, the monster also stops being a force of destruction, and the world suffers a little less. This is also emphasized by the fact that her old buddy Oscar turns out to be a cad and a scoundrel, and unfortunately he also happens to have a giant external id running around in Seoul, in the form of a robot. Whereas Gloria is devastated when she learns the results of what just felt like harmless drunk fun and immediately curtails her behavior, Oscar figures since he wasn't technically, physically there, who cares? Those people are far away, I didn't hurt them with my own two hands, so whatever. I can stomp on anything I want because it's not really me doing the harm. And one of the results of this is that the film shifts from being about Gloria trying to get her life together to being about Gloria getting into this really quite terrifying abusive relationship with Oscar - not a relationship in the romantic sense, but in the sense that he's forcing her to remain in physical proximity to him and do what he wants because he knows how to manipulate her. He knows that as long as he's there threatening to wipe out Seoul, she'll stay to try and stop him.

Now... I'm making a good-faith assumption on Vigalondo's part and assuming he realizes that he's using an entire country as helpless bystanders for his metaphor, and realizes that that is kiiiind of not a great look. That two white Westerners' actions can be so influential as to have an entire non-Western country under their thrall is self-congratulatory at best. I have to say I almost got to really disliking this movie at the end, when the day is saved because a white woman Knows What To Do. The Korean military is useless, the citizens are at the mercy of these two people an ocean away, until Gloria steps in. I know that pretty much everything in this movie is meant to be taken as a metaphor, but when the metaphor involves actual, real-life people, you have to be a lot more delicate. Also, Toho sued the production company (this is what happens when you say the G-word in public as a filmmaker), which is rumored to have been why the location was changed to Seoul instead of somewhere in Japan, which would fit more with the popular conception of kaiju movies. So it doesn't really matter where Gloria's monster is materializing - it just had to be somewhere far off that isn't Us™.

I also forgot most of the time that this is apparently supposed to be somewhat of a comedy. I don't think there was anything in this film I found funny. There were moments where I could recognize that things could be taken as funny, like Oscar stomping around on the playground while people scream in the background, but I had a reaction much more like Gloria when she realizes what she's done. It's all just kind of too harrowing to be funny.

This is a really inventive movie that does what everybody should do with monsters, which is use them to explore human psychology (because it's us that creates the monsters, which means that in some way, the monsters are us, right?). It delivers an interesting message about growing out of self-hate and being dragged down by jealous people, and also about selfishness. When everybody starts getting tired of Oscar watching the viral "thug life" slap gif over and over, he says "I'm not the one watching it a thousand times, everyone else has". This is a perfect example of how nobody ever thinks anything is their fault - Oscar's never the bad guy, the bad things are being done by other people. He's not contributing to the problem, how can he? He's just his little old self, just one person. But the whole end message of this is that one person can make a massive difference. I just wish it hadn't fallen into the gravity well of the White Savior narrative to achieve that message.