Episode 50: Transcript
Episode: 50: The Power of Names
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, a science fiction writer who obsesses rather a lot about science.
Annalee: [00:00:11] And I'm Annalee Newitz, a science journalist who writes science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:15] Today we're going to be talking about the power of names in science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction and fantasy are full of people who changed their name or have a secret name or get misnamed for some reason, and it's a huge big deal.
[00:00:31] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:58] So we were partly inspired to think about this topic by some of the recent conversations around deadnaming and particularly evolutionary psychologist Jordan Peterson saying that requiring people to use the correct names and pronouns for trans people is quote unquote “compelling speech” and should not be allowed because you can't make people talk if they don't want to. I mean, you know, people could just not talk, I guess.
Annalee: [00:01:21] Yeah. This is from something that he said several years ago, but it's kind of just continued to float around in discussions around especially gender neutral pronouns, neo pronouns. His idea that laws around human rights that include trans people and that include for example, saying that if someone in your workplace consistently dead names you or misgenders you, that that's a violation of your rights. He's really against that because he feels that it's “compelled speech” to force someone to use your preferred pronoun.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:54] Ugh.
Annalee: [00:01:54] And like I said, this is something he said a while ago and it continues to bubble up all the time.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:59] It's definitely still a huge meme.
Annalee: [00:02:00] It’s become a big part of the discourse and it was really something that got us thinking about the power of names. Not necessarily pronouns, which is going to be its own separate episode.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:10] We're going to totally dig into pronouns, soon.
Annalee: [00:02:11] We’ve decided, we decided, okay, we can't even tackle pronouns here. So we're going to put a pin in that. So get ready for later.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:20] So a names really define who we are. They're a crucial part of our identity and they're kind of intrinsic to our selfhood, but in science fiction and fantasy, they're more than that. They're kind of this magical talisman.
Annalee: [00:02:31] So why is naming such a big deal in science fiction and fantasy, Charlie Jane?
Charlie Jane: [00:02:37] It does go back to a lot of folklore around names being a source of power and the idea that knowing the true name of a person or a thing gives you power over it. This is something that's true in a lot of real-life folklore. In the fairytales like Rumpelstiltskin, where finding out the true name of Rumpelstiltskin allows you to escape from him. And there's tons and tons of myths where knowing someone's name or hiding your name is a source of power.
[00:03:02] In the Odyssey, Odysseus hides his name from the Cyclops and says that his name is no one and that allows him to outsmart the Cyclops. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea stories, names are the source of power. They're how you control things. And actually we've got a clip here of Ursula Le Guin talking about how magic works in the Earthsea stories.
Ursula K. Le Guin: [00:03:24] Magic in Earthsea is mostly naming magic, which of course is an old kind of magic on earth practiced by many, many peoples. If you know the true name of a thing or a person you have power over it. You can control it.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:38] And you know this is like so many fantasy worlds, partly because it's a feature of real life mythos and real life magical systems. So many fantasy worlds have this idea that names are a source of magical power. Patricia McKillip, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain stories, Jim Butcher's books, Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance trilogy. In Spirited Away, if you lose your real name, then you become enslaved and trapped forever and you have to hold onto your name if you want to keep your freedom. In Once and Future King, Wart turns out to be actually Arthur and becomes King Arthur.
[00:04:13] There's so many stories where the true name of somebody is a source of power. And then, some of the biggest franchises right now revolve around the idea of a name being a secret, like on Doctor Who the doctor's name is a secret that can never be spoken or silence will fall. And we've got another clip. This is a River Song. When we first meet River Song, the way that we know she's super special and important is that she knows the doctor's real name and she whispers it in his ear and this is the doctor responding to that.
Doctor Who Clip: [00:04:40] The Doctor: River, you know my name.
Autodestruct in 10…
The Doctor: You whispered my name in my ear.
9… 8… 7…
The Doctor: There’s only one way I would ever tell anyone my name. There’s only one time I could.
5… 4… 3…
River Song: Hush, now. Spoilers.
2… 1…
Annalee: [00:05:02] That’s such an amazing moment in the show.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:03] I love it. It's such a cool moment. And it really does set up River Song as being somebody really special. And then of course, River Song's name is also a clue later because it's actually Melody Pond and like, sorry, spoilers. And it's like a whole thing. Nobody's name is ever what it is in Doctor Who, I feel like.
Annalee: [00:05:20] Yeah, it's interesting that in fantasy it's always about gaining some kind of, magical control over someone. Or as you said in the case of Doctor Who, which is of course shading over into science fiction now it's more just a way of showing who you really are, right? So that she, because she knows his name, he can be assured that she is someone who is important to him.
[00:05:44] And then there's a whole other realm of sort of science naming, which we talked a little bit about in our scientific racism episode a few weeks ago, where there's a tradition of scientists starting with Carl Linnaeus, of trying to name every single creature and plant on earth. And every single bacteria later on and archaea and every kind of life. And that gives us a kind of power too. And I think that there is a kind of moment there, especially when Linnaeus is alive, where he's kind of living in a world where alchemy is still kind of a science, and there's this weird bridging of the magical power of naming and the scientific power of naming and how those confer authority on the person who has the names.
[00:06:34] But it also kind of unlocks the world because once everything has a name, you can kind of, I don't know, reorganize it maybe? Or…
Charlie Jane: [00:06:41] You can categorize, you can put things in their proper spot in the natural history museum or whatever. And you know what I mean? It goes back to the Bible, Adam and Eve name all the creatures and that's how they have dominion over them. And Jacob wrestles an angel who refuses to tell Jacob his real name even after Jacob wins. And it's like a whole fricking thing.
Annalee: [00:07:00] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:00] And I feel like part of what is going on is that we talked about how Doctor Who is more of a science fiction story, but actually Doctor Who has a lot of fantasy elements, it's very high fantasy at times. And I feel like it's no more high fantasy than when we're hearing things like the Doctor's name must never be spoken or everything will end or something.
[00:07:19] And I feel like one of the ways that you can tell that something is kind of more of a fantasy in some sense or more epic fantasy, really, is if this question of names and the secret name become like a big deal. It's in Harry Potter, Voldemort is secretly Tom Riddle—
Annalee: [00:07:34] He Who Shall Not Be Named.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:36] Right, and in Star Wars everybody has a secret name in Star Wars. Darth Vader is really Anakin Skywalker. You know Rey has like 20 different names in the new Star Wars movie. It's like a whole thing.
Annalee: [00:07:47] Well, they’re like secret identities too.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:49] Right and that's how you know that Star Wars is kind of a fantasy because… One of the many ways that you know Star Wars is kind of a fantasy, let's be real, is because of this obsession with names. But then there's cyberpunk. Annalee, tell us about cyberpunk.
Annalee: [00:08:02] So I was thinking a lot about this because Vernor Vinge, who's one of my favorite science fiction writers, has an early novel from 1981 called True Names, which was super influential and is kind of a more fantasy version of Neuromancer. It deals with a lot of the same stuff. Vernor Vinge was a computer scientist, he taught at UC San Diego for most of his life. And when he was writing, he was trying to imagine a place that would be like cyberspace. And his name for it in True Names is The Other Plane—
Charlie Jane: [00:08:39] That's awesome.
Annalee: [00:08:40] And his hackers, who… of course, William Gibson has hackers that are portrayed as kind of cowboys or kind of detectives. But the hackers in Vernor Vinge’s novel are called warlocks. And so he's playing with these. And of course this was because Vinge was coming out of actual hacker culture. He knew that people talked about themselves as wizards. And like that was a thing that early people playing on the sort of pre-internet version of the internet, on ARPANET and things like that were sort of self-identified wizards. And so he was using, I would say, you know a little bit cheesier nomenclature.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:19] But awesome.
Annalee: [00:09:20] So he's got his warlocks and they go into the other plane and they use pseudonyms in the other plane, handles, I guess.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:30] Handles.
Annalee: [00:09:30] And if someone finds their true name then they can compel that warlock/hacker to do things for them. And it's all basically a cyberpunk world. Like it's set in the real world and they fear the US government has them under surveillance or is trying to get them to do things and they're dealing with creatures who are basically AI, not actual ghosts or spirits or force apparitions or whatever. But at the same time, like you said, because it has this element of naming, it kind of draws really heavily on fantasy tropes.
[00:10:04] And I think it's so, to go back to what I was saying about Neuromancer, kind of borrowing from westerns and film noir, it's interesting that because of that, Gibson doesn't really have in Neuromancer a lot of stuff about naming. Except for the AI, of course who is named at the end and kind of merges with another AI and they kind of get a new name and that's all bad ass. But my point is that I think you're right that there is something to fantasy being associated with this concern about what is the real name of a person or thing, who gets to do the naming, who has control over the names. And I think it must be because fantasy is so connected in our minds with traditional stories, too, with traditional mythology where this is a big theme.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:48] So we're going to take a little break and then when we come back we're going to talk about the names that people claim for themselves.
[00:10:53] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:08] In addition to this whole idea of having a secret name that nobody can ever know, there's also a thing in sci-fi and fantasy where people will announce, my name is no longer Fred. It's now—
Annalee: [00:11:19] Kylo Ren!
Charlie Jane: [00:11:20] Kylo Ren, yeah, exactly. I mean Kylo Ren is the perfect example of someone who changes his name and in fact we've got a clip of Kylo Ren talking to Han Solo about this.
Kylo Ren: [00:11:29] Your son is gone. He was weak and foolish like his father, so I destroyed him.
Annalee: [00:11:35] We've kind of been over this all before, we know what's going on here. But at the same time, like, again, it's very much about how changing your name is a signal that you're different. You're a different person. It’s a break with the past and there’s something, well, explicitly magical about it. Because, my guess is that, you know, the more Kylo-y that Kylo gets, the more his powers in the dark side kind of get poofed up and, you know—
Charlie Jane: [00:12:05] He gets really poofy.
Annalee: [00:12:07] He gets really, I, it's like his hair. I can't think of any.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:10] It’s his hair.
Annalee: [00:12:10] It's like whenever I think of Kylo Ren, I just think of poofy hair. So.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:13] He takes off that helmet and suddenly his head is like three times bigger.
Annalee: [00:12:17] Yeah, it's gotta be the dark side that's like, he's got some kind of gel that just keeps his hair puffy. So tell me a little bit about superhero names, Charlie Jane, because I know you're immersed in this world of superhero comics way more than I am. And they're always changing their names and swapping names and I can't keep track of how many Lanterns and Flashes there are because there's like 20 of them.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:40] Well, that's a separate problem. But it is true that—
Annalee: [00:12:43] There's also Infinite Earths, by the way, talking about names of things.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:46] Yes, there are Infinite Earths. But yeah, no, in superhero comics, it's a huge, big deal because everybody has a superhero name that’s their code name.
Annalee: [00:12:57] Right.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:57] And people will change their superhero name and it's like a huge event when this happens. And usually it's accompanied by a new costume and a new kind of whole outlook on life. You know, Jean Gray became Phoenix and then she became Dark Phoenix and then she became Pink and Purple Phoenix. I don't know.
Annalee: [00:13:13] In fact, it's definitely emotional because we've been watching the Batwoman series and when Batwoman finally gets her like flowy red wig…
Charlie Jane: [00:13:23] I love the red wig.
Annalee: [00:13:23] I was so upset. In fact, you and I had to have like a pretty long processing conversation where I was just like, no, I do not like the red wig. I do not want the red wig. I don't feel like this is my Batwoman anymore. And I was coming up with alternative—
Charlie Jane: [00:13:37] But that’s also when she takes the name Batwoman.
Annalee: [00:13:38] I know, but I even said to you like I'm pitching an alternate idea. She could just have like a red cowl. Like why does she have to have the wig? It feels like it changes her. She takes the name and it's an emotional transition but also a power transition.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:52] Right. And people in superhero comics are always changing their names. It's a way of putting their past behind them and like X-Force, Mr. Sensitive becomes The Orphan. There's so many examples of this. There's actually a TV Tropes page called “Meaningful Rename.” That's a godsend.
[00:14:10] There's also a ton of anime names, like the list of anime characters who change their names at some point in order to show that they've taken a new path or whatever, or rejected their past is just endless. There's so many of them. My favorite example is that there's a character in a show called Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, who's a super villain named Master Pain. He's like the main villain of the series.
Annalee: [00:14:29] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:29] And at one point he decides he's going to turn good and he changes his name from Master Pain to Betty.
Annalee: [00:14:35] I mean, obviously.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:37] I think Betty is like—
Annalee: [00:14:37] Betty Page is, isn't she the source of all goodness pretty much throughout the 20th century?
Charlie Jane: [00:14:43] Pretty much, yeah. She's pretty much the one redeeming—
Annalee: [00:14:45] And the 21st century.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:45] Betty Page is pretty much the one redeeming feature of the 1950s I feel like.
Annalee: [00:14:49] Yes. I, yeah. That, and like maybe The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:54] It is a thing where unlike with the secret names we talked about before, someone who changes their name kind of publicly or announces like, I'm no longer Mr. Sensitive, I'm now The Orphan.
Annalee: [00:15:05] I'm now Betty.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:05] It's, yeah, I'm now Betty. That's public and your old name is publicly known. You're not trying to keep your old name a secret. It's not like Voldemort pretending that he was never Tom Riddle or Darth Vader not wanting to be known as Anakin Skywalker. It's a public thing and it does get very similar to deadnaming. If people want to bring up the former name of somebody who has publicly disavowed their old identity.
Annalee: [00:15:28] Now, is that just kind of like a rebranding or it's meant to signal like a character arc. But it's maybe hard to kind of do that character arc without finally just saying, look, now I'm called something else.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:43] It definitely is a kind of rebranding, especially when it comes with a costume change, especially when it comes with, I’ve now got a really silly helmet.
Annalee: [00:15:50] Or a really bad red wig. I’m still really upset.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:53] I love the red wig. We’re going to have a whole episode about Batwoman and we’re going to like—
Annalee: [00:15:57] I’m really, really upset.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:59] The Batwoman episode is coming soon.
Annalee: [00:15:58] It gets in her face while she's fighting.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:01] It doesn’t.
Annalee: [00:16:02] It makes no—
Charlie Jane: [00:16:02] She has special powers.
Annalee: [00:16:05] We watched it! No, but we saw the fighting scene where it was like literally getting in her mouth. It was, anyway, if you're going to pick a weird hair thing to stick on your cowl, like at least ponytail, I dunno, braids? Anyway, sorry.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:20] Batwoman should not have braids. We’re going to have a whole Batwoman episode and we’re going to debate the wig.
Annalee: [00:16:24] Yeah, all right.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:25] But it is a rebranding exercise, often. I mean, in real life if you change your name, if you've transitioned, say, or if you get married or some other reason you want to change your name, that usually is a very private personal thing. But when it's a thing where you're basically like, I'm no longer this terrible villain, I'm now a hero. Or I'm now the Phoenix because I've risen from the ashes. It's usually a big splashy public thing. It is kind of about changing your image in a weird way.
Annalee: [00:16:53] Like Google being subsumed within Alphabet. I still don’t quite.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:57] I guess that's now being undone.
Annalee: [00:16:57] Quite understand what all of that was about. But yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:01] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:17:02] And so you sort of already talked about the difference between having a secret name versus having a name change. But there is a whole trope in superhero stories about hiding. You have a secret identity that is your real name. And I mean, one of the things that's been interesting about Watchmen, the new TV series, has been how that show plays around with the reasons why people might want to have superhero identities. Because if people knew who you really were, they would murder you because they don't like your justice activities.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:40] Or they'd murder your loved ones.
Annalee: [00:17:42] Right. The point is that these are heroes/police officers who fear that basically terrorists will kill them. We almost never see that in other comic book scenarios. Is that right? Superhero scenarios or is that, am I just totally naive?
Charlie Jane: [00:17:58] No, that's always the usual explanation for why people have superhero names.
Annalee: [00:18:01] So it's like this is how I protect my family. This is how I protect. So there's a rigid distinction between the personal life of the superhero and the rebranded or just plain old branded like Superman life or Batman life or Batwoman life, or whatever.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:16] And another thing that happens in superhero stories a lot is that people will take on the identity of another hero. If Batman has to disappear for a few months, somebody else will become Batman for a while. Some other person will be like, I'll be Batman until you get back.
Annalee: [00:18:30] Well, and then there's these long family legacies, right? Like you know, there's been 20 million Flashes or whatever, or—
Charlie Jane: [00:18:36] Yeah, no, and those are often literally family legacies. Like they're often passed down almost hereditarily. There's also the great Starman comic from the 1990s by James Robinson and Tony Harris, where the son of the original Starman is trying to take over as Starman, but he's kind of a fuckup and he's working in a junk shop and he is kind of ambivalent about this legacy that he's trying to take on.
[00:19:00] I feel like part of what superhero stories do really well is the idea of taking an identity that someone else created and trying to kind of repurpose it for yourself. And that often does get into like claiming the mantle, which means taking on the name of this hero who's gone or who quit or whatever.
Annalee: [00:19:17] And now at this point in superhero comics, it can get pretty meta because there's also the act of writing comics at this point, you're taking on the mantle of this whole history, stepping into writing something like Spiderman or Superman. It’s like, okay, you've got all these different versions of that hero going back pretty far. I mean, in the case of some of the DC characters, you know, we're talking almost 90 years. So…
Charlie Jane: [00:19:40] For sure.
Annalee: [00:19:40] That's kind of crazy when you think about it. So I guess like what we're looking at now is two different ways of thinking about true names.
[00:19:49] One is a name that you hide for pragmatic reasons to protect yourself and your loved ones. And, and that's in a sort of realistic frame or maybe naturalistic frame of superhero comics or even cyberpunk. But then there's also this idea of a true name within fantasy that you hide because if someone knows it they have power over you.
[00:20:13] Which I mean, those two things are linked, but they are different. I mean they're definitely different strands of thinking about the same questions around your true identity.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:23] They sometimes go together but often they are very different because, like I said, when you change your name, you want people to know the previous name so that you can underline that you're not that person anymore and that you're now, you know, Betty or whatever.
Annalee: [00:20:36] It really gets into questions of identity, too. And to take a sort of galaxy brain perspective, it's, I think that it's, in a way, it's two different ways of imagining how we relate to ourselves. Like, what does it mean to have a self? Is your self something that you protect because other people will hurt you or is your self something that you protect because sharing it gives people the ability to use you in some way or to take control of you. Which, again, isn't the same thing as hurting you or hurting your family. And of course, also attached to that, it's about the identity of other people, your relationship to other people or things. Because if you look at it in the sort of Ursula Le Guin context of say the Earthsea books, knowing the true names of anything gives you the ability to manipulate them. So there's the possibility that people might know who you really are, but then also you can have that power to know the true nature of other things. I don't know.
[00:21:36] It's interesting to me that in a superhero context, it's only people that have these kind of secret names. But in a fantasy context—
Charlie Jane: [00:21:45] It's everything.
Annalee: [00:21:45] It's everything. It's like animism or something.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:47] That’s interesting, yeah.
Annalee: [00:21:49] It's very cool. I much prefer a reality where there is a true name and a true identity to all things.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:57] I think that's, it's a really cool idea. And obviously Le Guin does it amazingly well.
Annalee: [00:22:02] Lots of fantasy authors do it really well and lots of, even just regular old authors that aren't necessarily doing fantasy. So, yeah. All right, so let's take a break and when we come back we'll think about what happens when we need other people to know our names and call us by them.
[00:22:18] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:32] Part of having a name is that you want other people to say your name and to say your name correctly and otherwise we get into Jordan Peterson territory of, “You’re compelling speech” or whatever. And you know.
Annalee: [00:22:43] I just keep imagining him saying like, I've decided that I only like to call women Betty. And if you're asking me to call you Annalee, you're compelling me to use some name other than Betty.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:53] That is kind of the logical end point of his argument is that he should just be able to call everybody Flöööb. Flöööb.
Annalee: [00:22:59] I love the name Flöööb.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:01] I feel like Flöööb. We’ll all just be Flöööb with like three umlauts.
Annalee: [00:23:03] Okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:04] So history is full of situations where people were coercively given a name that wasn't their original name. It happened to slaves on the plantation. It happened to slaves in antiquity. It happened to people at Ellis Island coming into the United States and wanting to assimilate. They were told, well your name is no longer whatever name it was in the old country, we're going to give you a simpler, shorter version of that.
Annalee: [00:23:25] Or just misspell whatever we think that you've said or whatever.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:29] And you know, I feel like science fiction and fantasy kind of reflect that history in various ways. There are definitely scenarios in science fiction where people are non-consensually given a name that's not theirs. A big recent example is in Game of Thrones where Theon Greyjoy gets captured by Ramsey Bolton and is forced to take the name Reek, which is sort of, you know, it's obviously a degrading, humiliating name.
[00:23:52] And meanwhile Ramsey Bolton at the same time is taking on a new name because he was originally Ramsey Snow and he gets to become Ramsey Bolton because he's been legalized. He's no longer a bastard.
Annalee: [00:24:03] That's right.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:03] And so there's this complicated thing that happens where one person is getting an exalted name while forcing the other person to take on a degraded name.
Annalee: [00:24:11] Yeah, that's right. And I think that actually brings us to a third way of thinking about names and identities because part of the power of names in Game of Thrones and lots of other stories about kind of aristocratic inheritance has to do with how your name connects you to a family or to a wider community. Because, especially in this kind of medieval fantasy context, it's not just kin, it's a power structure. It can be a lot of different things. You can adopt people into it. So yeah, your name becomes a form of legitimacy.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:45] And refusing to give you your proper name as a way of kind of revoking your legitimacy or whatever. And in the TV show Arrow, which I'm obsessed with, Oliver Queen goes through a bunch of different superhero identities. At first he's The Hood, then he's The Arrow, then he’s The Green Arrow. But there's also a storyline in the middle of the third season where the super villain, the kind of cult leader, I guess, Ra’s al Ghul forces all of Oliver Queen to take on a new name, Al Sah-him and become Ra’s al Ghul’s heir. And this means that he has to kind of renounce all of his friends because otherwise his friends will be killed and we've got a clip of Oliver Queen taking on the name. Al Sah-him.
Arrow Clip: [00:25:25] I’m Al Sah-him. Warith al Ghul, heir to the Demon, and you will obey! Put your weapons down.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:36] Oftentimes accepting a name that's been forced on you by somebody else is a sign that your spirit has been broken or that you've been brainwashed or that your identity has been stolen. But then there are times when being given a new name is like an honor. It's like we're bestowing on you because though your heroic actions, you get to have a new title.
Annalee: [00:25:55] You get to have a new role and I think this goes back to what I was saying about how names connect you to a family or to an inheritance or to some kind of group that has power. And that's why earning a name can be so important. And that's why, as you said, in superhero comics, changing your name can be important, but there's a big difference between rebranding and gaining a name. And one expression of this, of course, is if you're in a military-type structure, you get new titles as you move up the ladder.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:28] You get ranks, yeah.
Annalee: [00:26:29] You get new ranks and it happens in academia as you go from an Assistant Professor to an Associate Professor to a full Professor. Woo.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:37] Woo.
Annalee: [00:26:37] I know, that's at the top of the heap. And then it becomes a part of how you call on your authority. You know, you can say like, excuse me, I'm a full Professor with tenure. How dare you, Assistant Professor attempt to make me use a different pronoun than I would prefer to use.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:59] Stop compelling speech.
Annalee: [00:27:02] I just don't like it. So I think that it brings me around to thinking about how much names are really about how other people see us and how important it is to our identities to be recognized with the names that we want.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:22] Right.
Annalee: [00:27:21] I've been researching a lot about ancient Roman civilization and you brought up how names were compelled in antiquity. And one of the things the Romans love to do is give their slaves Greek names because that was a way of belittling them. And as soon as slaves would earn their freedom, which happened quite a bit, especially during the Imperial Period, they would often try to change their names. And their children would kind of throw off these names and try not to have Greek names and try not to have signs in their name that they had once been slaves or had been related to slaves.
[00:27:59] And so it becomes a big part of gaining power, gaining social status, is like, shedding that imposed identity.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:06] So an extreme example of somebody who doesn't get called by their real name is Data, who in the second season of Star Trek, The Next Generation has an issue with the new ship’s doctor, Dr. Pulaski, who refuses to pronounce Data's name properly. And we've got a clip of that.
TNG Clip: [00:28:20] Pulaski: Data [Da-ta, pronounced with short a], look at this.
Data: Data. [Day-ta, pronounced with long a]
Pulaski: What?
Data: My name. It is pronounced Data. [Day-ta, pronounced with long a]
Pulaski: Oh.
Data: You called me Data. [Da-ta, pronounced with short a]
Pulaski: What's the difference?
Data: One is my name. The other is not.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:34] Why is that such a big deal? I mean, she's just changing one vowel.
Annalee: [00:28:37] It's the ultimate microaggression isn't, it?
Charlie Jane: [00:28:39] It really is.
Annalee: [00:28:41] I mean, she's refusing to use the name that Data prefers. It kind of goes back to this compelled speech thing that we were talking about where Data says this is my name and she's like, what difference does it make? Like why do you care about what your name is? And it's like for Data, of course, like his whole identity, again his source of self-hood and feeling like he's equal with his human counterparts comes from being able to assert his own name. Like it's very important.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:10] And by the way, that clip comes from a YouTube video called “Data bitch slaps Dr. Polaski,” which I think is like a very accurate, excellent title.
Annalee: [00:29:18] That’s not the actual name of the episode.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:20] It should be the name of the episode.
Annalee: [00:29:21] It should be.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:21] That would be a great episode title.
Annalee: [00:29:23] Yeah, I mean it's interesting because it also gets into other issues around naming where a lot of people live in polyglot cultures where people may not be able to pronounce each other's names very well. Like it's not like a Data-Data [Day-ta, Da-ta] situation. It's like where you grew up and you just learn one language and then you meet people whose names are in a different language and it's really hard to pronounce them.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:48] For sure.
Annalee: [00:29:48] And so there's all these politics around that too. And so I think it's interesting to see it in that context and realize like, no, it's not really about Data wanting her to use the proper pronunciation in the sense of like having the right accent. It's like, no, this is about her acknowledging that he's a person.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:06] Exactly. It's about his right to be an individual and his right to exist as more than just a machine. And she's just basically, you know, stabbing him in the face with her microaggressions.
Annalee: [00:30:19] Yeah, I mean it's almost like she gave him a slave name, you know, because she sees him as a slave. She sees him as an object who's just a tool to do things for her. And so that's why she can't imagine why he would have an opinion about who he should be or what he should be called.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:35] Yeah, fuck Dr. Polaski.
Annalee: [00:30:38] She only got one season, eh. So I mean, again, this is to underscore how much names in science fiction and fantasy really do have power and it can be empowering. I love that we've kind of come full circle here where we started by talking about names as secrets and vulnerabilities and now we're thinking about names as power and how it connects you to something larger like a family or it connects you to something even larger, like having human-equivalent status in a world of humans. And a lot of that again rests on how other people use your name. It’s really, none of these stories are really about a person using their own name because it doesn't matter really like what you do with your own name in the privacy of your own home. It's really when you go out into the world, what name you ask people to call you, whether that's your superhero name or your dark side name…
Charlie Jane: [00:31:42] Right. It's all about your identity in the world and as it's constructed with other people. It's not, you know, like so many aspects of identity. It's all consensual. It's all kind of something that we have to build with the help of our fellow humans and sometimes our fellow humans are dicks, unfortunately.
Annalee: [00:31:58] Yeah. It's interesting that even secret names, it's not like it's a thing that you take out when you're by yourself to enjoy. They still only matter in a social context. They matter if someone else finds your name or if you give that name to someone else to use or they find it out to use you. And so, names, they are about building our self-hoods, but they're about building our self-hoods within a larger world. And so that's why names are an important part of world building and an important part of understanding how a character fits into a larger picture. It's about how they see themselves, but more importantly how they fit into the public.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:40] We’ll take a really short break and then we'll come back with a segment we call Research Hole [mimics echoes] hole hole hole...
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Charlie Jane: [00:32:59] So Annalee what's your research hole?
Annalee: [00:33:01] I think a lot about the movie Phantasm from 1979. It is a crazy horror movie that involves aliens from Venus stealing dead bodies in order to shrink them down into reanimated tiny people to do slave labor back on Venus. Also, it involves floating silver balls that stab you in the head and suck all your blood out through your brain. So, obviously it's a fantastic film, but I recently learned that not only does it have the floating silver balls that suck your brain out, but there's a whole family drama backstory with the director's mom.
[00:33:41] So it was directed by Don Coscarelli and his mother Kate Coscarelli wrote a novelization of Phantasm. So this is his mom who he's quite young when he makes the film and his mom's maybe in her early- 50s and I just want to read you a little excerpt from her novelization of Phantasm.
[00:34:02] This is from the opening scene where we get our first glimpse of the scary aliens cause they kill some people who are fucking in a cemetery. So here's the people fucking in the cemetery.
[00:34:10] “He looked up at her writhing and gasping as she waived those gorgeous knockers in his face and suddenly he could restrain his passion no longer. As he came, his tender organ stretching and straining inside that strange and warm orifice. She, too, seemed to reach that peak and descend.”
[00:34:30] Okay, so this is a mom. A mom writing the novelization of her son's movie. Awesome. The best part, though, is that Kate Coscarelli went on to have a really great career in her 50s, 60s, and 70s writing hot bodice ripper romance novels.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:50] Yes.
Annalee: [00:34:51] And so you can go find Kate Coscarelli’s work. I think probably her career wound up being a lot better than Don Cascarelli’s career. Although, of course, Phantasm has a good place in my heart, a warm place. I discovered this all by reading an article by John Cribbs on The Pink Smoke, thepinksmoke.com, which is just a collection of amazing essays about films and I would highly recommend, well, watching Phantasm and reading Kate Coscarelli.
[00:35:19] All right, Charlie, what's your—
Charlie Jane: [00:35:20] That is super fascinating.
Annalee: [00:35:21] Tell me your research hole. It was, I couldn't even believe it and I was like even more excited that someone, that John Cribbs had been like, I'm going to tell you all about all this stuff. And I was like, this is why I love the internet. Thank you, John Cribbs.
[00:35:35] Tell me about your research hole.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:37] So my Research Hole is about a movie called Death Ray on Coral Island, which was basically the first real science fiction movie made in China. It was released in 1980 and it's an adaptation of a short story of the same title by an anthropologist named Tong Enzheng, who had obviously survived the Cultural Revolution and decided to write this story about basically a professor who invents a new kind of atomic battery, but discovers that some unspecified foreign power that is kinda hinted to be a fusion of the United States and the Soviet Union wants to steal this atomic battery and use it to power a super laser that will enable to them to conquer the world. And so the heroes have to go to Coral Island, fight off a shark using this laser and stop the evil foreigners from using it to take over the world.
[00:36:29] And basically it's a movie that apparently has kind of not great special effects and it's a little bit cheesy, but it's also kind of exciting and has a lot of like interesting political themes. And it was during this like brief moment in China that's referred to as the golden age of science fiction, which only lasted five years, from 1978 to 1983. People started publishing a ton of science fiction as part of Deng Xiaoping’s drive to modernize and reintroduce an interest in science and technology to Chinese culture.
[00:36:57] And then in 1983, basically, they slammed the door shut on this and had like a campaign against spiritual pollution, basically arguing that a lot of this science fiction was unrealistic. Which some of it was. Like, there's one story that was highly criticized called “Miracle on the World's Highest Peak” where a scientist managed to hatch a dinosaur egg on top of Mount Everest using the special properties at the top of the mountain.
Annalee: [00:37:22] I mean, why… that sounds…
Charlie Jane: [00:37:22] That's sort of a precursor to Jurassic Park, but a little bit less scientific.
Annalee: [00:37:25] Yeah, that seems realistic to me.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:26] So it was this brief moment in China, like literally just half a decade where they were creating science fiction stories, and they made one movie that was this kind of like spy caper about heroic scientists, which I'm always here for any story about heroic scientists racing to save the world from a death ray.
[00:37:45] Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the movie online. It's been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York a few times recently, but I'm dying to track down a copy because it sounds amazing.
Annalee: [00:37:53] Yeah, it does sound really amazing. Also, I love the idea that the bad guys who are building the laser are a combination of the US and the Soviet Union, which, too real.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:04] Yeah. I mean, basically at the time—
Annalee: [00:38:07] Dang.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:07] —China was having problems with both the US and the USSR, and they just were like, well, what if they team up? And, you know.
Annalee: [00:38:12] Yeah, what if? What if: 2020.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:17] Plausible. Yeah. Anyway, so that’s my research hole.
Annalee: [00:38:19] On that happy note…
Charlie Jane: [00:38:20] Yeah, thank you so much for listening to Our Opinions Are Correct.
Annalee: [00:38:23] Yeah, thanks.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:23] We really appreciate your support. If you want to support us more, we have a Patreon at patreon.com/OurOpinionsAreCorrect. You can also follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod. Sign up for our Facebook page at Our Opinions Are Correct, or subscribe to our podcast through all of the services that allow you to subscribe to podcasts. Libsyn, Google Play podcasts, Apple podcasts, it's all out there and we really appreciate it. If you want to leave any reviews for us on Apple podcasts, that really helps.
[00:38:53] Thanks so much to our heroic and brilliant engineer, Veronica Simonetti at Women’s Audio Mission for making us sound so much better than we normally would. And thanks to Chris Palmer from the music. And thanks again to you for listening. Bye!
Annalee: [00:39:06] Bye!
Together: [00:39:07] Bye!
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