Why Stuttgart of all places??
So, as you my dear flist know, I'm from Germany, and I sometimes dredge up background stuff about European politics because I find it important.
This is my journal, and I get to write about what I find personally important, anyway.
So I'm going to explain about Stuttgart. There are several possible explanations of why Stuttgart of all places, and they happen on an IC and an OOC level both.
Spoilers are a given, as this is a srs bsns post If you haven't seen the movie yet and don't want to be spoilered -- avoid!!
So, a little multiple choice test.
Why did Joss Whedon pick Stuttgart?
a) As a very obscure slur on Loki's very wide scope of sexuality in Norse myth?
b) He stuck a pin in a map of the world?
c) Because of an Art Deco train station?
Actually, odd as it may be, both a) and c) are true, or rather are something you can make a point for.
Well, Joss Whedon is Joss Whedon, and he has had his finger right on the pulse of time since 'Buffy' back in the nineties, so I simply imply that he knows stuff that average people maybe don't. At least not outside of Germany.
It starts with a lovely Art Deco train station that was quite the sensation at the time it was built, and that could be, minus the booth and trains and lockers, be a part of Asgard as imagined in Kenneth Branagh's 'Thor', as it's quite as grandiose and stark and futuristic as that place in design. Especially that one big staircase down from the hall -- totally Asgard.
It's a bit run-down now because the railway people have been plotting its demolition since the 1990s, wanting to build a new underground train station where the trains run through instead of the terminus the Art Deco place is now.
Now, Stuttgart is in Swabia, which may be Germany at its most German as far as some clichés go -- engineering, industriousness, research & development, inventiveness, parsimony. Yep, the Swabians get the same money-pinching image the Scots get in the UK.
So, Deutsche Bahn wants to build that great feat of engineering in Stuttgart, capital of Swabian car builders (both Porsche and Mercedes-Benz have their headquarters and main factories there!!) and money-pinchers, and the numbers they quote go, "Wait a minute, do we really need this and is it too expensive?" and then they find out that there were all sorts of graft and shady dealings (inevitable if public or semi-public construction is involved, anywhere in the world, don't tell me otherwise), the station is going to cost a lot more than originally projected (and most of those costs at the expense of the Swabian tax-payer), people start protesting and digging deeper. And find that the whole thing might be much more difficult, engineering-wise, than the planners let on, that the current state governor (equivalent of) has his fingers deep in all those pies connected with the juicy land parcels freed up by taking out all the rails and putting them underground, and that there are caves and holes and gypsum deposits underneath the whole valley the main part of Stuttgart is nestled in that will make tunnelling underneath there very dangerous and iffy.
Politicians are snotty about it and the Deutsche Bahn is all 'We do what we want!'
People stage a bit of an uprising that takes everybody by great surprise as it is the SWABIANS rebelling, the model citizens of Germany, the industrious ones, the ones that put their energies into building their homes, doing good work, raising their kids and lovingly washing their Benzes every Saturday. Oh, and Kehrwoche. That's the rota the Swabian housewives take in the apartment blocks where each family/housewife of said family gets to keep the staircase and shared facilities spotless for one week? Janitors are for sissies and cost money. These are tidy people. Educated people. Well-off people. Dutiful. Have been ALWAYS voting conservative since time out of mind. You get the picture.
When such people stage a rebellion to save their train station and the trees in the very bourgeois park next to it from greedy corporations and politicians, you know that something has gone seriously, seriously wrong.
And then, the politicians send in the police in heavy riot gear on a demonstration of high-school kids and old age pensioners, and one old man, a retired engineer named Dietrich Wagner (the most German name there can possibly be!) gets his eyes shot out by a water cannon trying to defend school kids from the riot police. There is damage and police brutality the sort of which the Western world is next going to see in the Occupy protests, and that in peaceful calm little Stuttgart!! The whole fucking world takes notice. You might remember my LJ posts at the time. They are here.
Half a year later, the voters decide they don't want the politicians any more that had water cannons trained on their children and on old men, and elect the first Green state governor ever anywhere in Germany. There is a lengthy mediation process with a very wily old fox of a senior politician as the mediator, and at the end, there is a long-ass technical simulation of the running of the new station, a possible compromise, and a state-wide referendum where the voters decide, hands-on, that they want the new statioin built under the compromise reached in the mediation process. There are still people very much opposed to it, so the poor Green state governor now has the dubious honour of defending the project he was elected to topple -- but it was all done openly, transparently, with conditions that totally fuck up the secret real estate deals that came to light, and with complete and direct democratic legitimation.
I often come through Stuttgart by train going to see my family, and back, and one time, I skipped a train and went around and took pictures while the debate was still raging fiercely. And now, people are getting used to the idea of transparency and democratic participation instead of mere representation and backroom politics, and the Pirate Party is on the rise, of which I've become a member, too.
Back in early October 2010, this made such a splash in the media, Joss Whedon had to be aware of its existence, as somebody who presumably reads the news and pays attention to the world?
So, making that movie, he probably realised that one pet peeve with American movies is that everything important always happens in America while the rest of the world blurs to a vague general Elsewhere? And if they go Elsewhere, they either go to London or Paris, or to someplace that is definitely exotic and/or dangerous, from Moscow to Afghanistan to some vague unnamed South American country?
Not so Joss Whedon -- he takes his movie abroad because the world and his audience is much bigger than America, and he wants his audience to be aware of it. He goes to a civilised place. To a place with a historically bad rep (Germany), where people are rumoured to crave subjugation and always kneel -- he even takes Captain America along to refer to that yet once again over.
But no, that doesn't happen any more. People kneel at first -- while probably going 'What the hell is he on about?' -- 'Shit, I have no idea!' -- but no, Stuttgart is actually the place where people have stopped kneeling, and craving subjugation for the sake of comfortable security in their lives.
So, of course there is an old man who gets up and won't be cowed. International media mostly interprets the man as a Holocaust survivor/resistance fighter, but seeing this is 2012, he's not ancient enough for that. These people are in their late 90s if still alive. That's just an old man who won't be cowed, because Stuttgart is a place where old men won't be cowed any more. And yes, there are always men like Loki who will lull the population into a fake complacency of 'You don't have to decide, we've got this', but you don't have to grandiosely pull Hitler out of a hat for that. Sorry, Loki. There are always men like you. Stefan Mappus for example.
Suck it up, Loki. You don't get compared to Hitler any more, that is old.
Also, the name. Stuttgart means something like 'Mare's Yard', 'Stute' being the German word for 'mare', a word that took a turn for the opposite in English as the word 'stud' for a general register and pedigree of horses turned into meaning 'stallion used for breeding', but in German, it's mare. And we probably have read up enough on Loki on Wikipedia to know he turned into a mare, had himself bonked by a stallion, and gave birth to an eight.legged foal, Sleipnir? So the 'enclosure for mares' is just the right place for him, seeing he's been a mare himself. That's the part which is a sexual slur on Loki's myth, which may or may not be in this one's past. Sleipnir exists, we see him in 'Thor', but I don't think there's any reference to that anywhere in Marvel canon? That's much too dirty for comics. Only Joss Whedon will allude to it very, very obliquely here.
So, it's the train station related no-longer-kneeling down people of Stuttgart, and their horse procreation related name, which made Joss Whedon bring Loki to Stuttgart, of all non-American first world places he could have gone to.
But what about Loki himself?
Why did Loki pick Stuttgart?
a) Because of engineering?
b) Because of a dangerous error in judgement?
c) Because he always wanted to pluck out an eyeball to the strains of Schubert's Rosamunde?
In this case, answers a) and b) are right, because, as I said above, Stuttgart is known for car-building and engineering and that R&D candyland? If anywhre, it's the region around Stuttgart. Yes, it makes complete sense that, should there be any place in the world where there is a complete cylinder of unobtanium iridium used for research and engineering purposes, it's near Stuttgart.
You find all those firms and trade fairs and events around there, too, big corporations and small innovative start-up businesses, the whole industry and its hangers-on assemble there in Swabia. All that really bleeding-edge stuff, virtual reality and machine vision and digitalised factories, gravitates around that place. I keep entering events in Stuttgart and around it into the event calendar of the magazine web site at my soon-to-be-ex slavery that is dedicated to digital engineering. Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Stuttgart. Of course they have iridium there. And of course the people working with it will be attending cultural events.
Also, the dangerous error in judgement -- Loki relies on his impression that Germans, and Swabians in particular, will always kneel, will do what 'those above' tell them, won't bother to stand up and say no. While Erik Selvig does need the iridium, Loki also needs to set up a large beacon to draw the soon-to-be Avengers/S.H.I.E.L.D. to him and get him captured, so he can get at them from inside. He just needs those Stuttgarters to kneel for long enough until somebody arrives to properly fight him, and then he'll come with only token resistance, to get to the people he really wants to get to -- the people Thor fell in with!
Only, the Swabians just aren't the good little subjects any more that will always kneel, and there is an old man who just won't back down, and if Steve and Tony hadn't arrived when they did, he'd have had to start a premature massacre nobody really wanted or needed. I doubt he meant to rule a bunch of upper crust Swabians for very long -- just as I actually doubt he seriously meant to rule Earth. Honestly, who would want to?
But that is an entirely different kettle of fish, and not the subject for a loooooong journal post, but for a fic which I am actually writing...
Crossposted to Dreamwidth and LJ -- comment wherever you like!
This is my journal, and I get to write about what I find personally important, anyway.
So I'm going to explain about Stuttgart. There are several possible explanations of why Stuttgart of all places, and they happen on an IC and an OOC level both.
Spoilers are a given, as this is a srs bsns post If you haven't seen the movie yet and don't want to be spoilered -- avoid!!
So, a little multiple choice test.
Why did Joss Whedon pick Stuttgart?
a) As a very obscure slur on Loki's very wide scope of sexuality in Norse myth?
b) He stuck a pin in a map of the world?
c) Because of an Art Deco train station?
Actually, odd as it may be, both a) and c) are true, or rather are something you can make a point for.
Well, Joss Whedon is Joss Whedon, and he has had his finger right on the pulse of time since 'Buffy' back in the nineties, so I simply imply that he knows stuff that average people maybe don't. At least not outside of Germany.
It starts with a lovely Art Deco train station that was quite the sensation at the time it was built, and that could be, minus the booth and trains and lockers, be a part of Asgard as imagined in Kenneth Branagh's 'Thor', as it's quite as grandiose and stark and futuristic as that place in design. Especially that one big staircase down from the hall -- totally Asgard.
It's a bit run-down now because the railway people have been plotting its demolition since the 1990s, wanting to build a new underground train station where the trains run through instead of the terminus the Art Deco place is now.
Now, Stuttgart is in Swabia, which may be Germany at its most German as far as some clichés go -- engineering, industriousness, research & development, inventiveness, parsimony. Yep, the Swabians get the same money-pinching image the Scots get in the UK.
So, Deutsche Bahn wants to build that great feat of engineering in Stuttgart, capital of Swabian car builders (both Porsche and Mercedes-Benz have their headquarters and main factories there!!) and money-pinchers, and the numbers they quote go, "Wait a minute, do we really need this and is it too expensive?" and then they find out that there were all sorts of graft and shady dealings (inevitable if public or semi-public construction is involved, anywhere in the world, don't tell me otherwise), the station is going to cost a lot more than originally projected (and most of those costs at the expense of the Swabian tax-payer), people start protesting and digging deeper. And find that the whole thing might be much more difficult, engineering-wise, than the planners let on, that the current state governor (equivalent of) has his fingers deep in all those pies connected with the juicy land parcels freed up by taking out all the rails and putting them underground, and that there are caves and holes and gypsum deposits underneath the whole valley the main part of Stuttgart is nestled in that will make tunnelling underneath there very dangerous and iffy.
Politicians are snotty about it and the Deutsche Bahn is all 'We do what we want!'
People stage a bit of an uprising that takes everybody by great surprise as it is the SWABIANS rebelling, the model citizens of Germany, the industrious ones, the ones that put their energies into building their homes, doing good work, raising their kids and lovingly washing their Benzes every Saturday. Oh, and Kehrwoche. That's the rota the Swabian housewives take in the apartment blocks where each family/housewife of said family gets to keep the staircase and shared facilities spotless for one week? Janitors are for sissies and cost money. These are tidy people. Educated people. Well-off people. Dutiful. Have been ALWAYS voting conservative since time out of mind. You get the picture.
When such people stage a rebellion to save their train station and the trees in the very bourgeois park next to it from greedy corporations and politicians, you know that something has gone seriously, seriously wrong.
And then, the politicians send in the police in heavy riot gear on a demonstration of high-school kids and old age pensioners, and one old man, a retired engineer named Dietrich Wagner (the most German name there can possibly be!) gets his eyes shot out by a water cannon trying to defend school kids from the riot police. There is damage and police brutality the sort of which the Western world is next going to see in the Occupy protests, and that in peaceful calm little Stuttgart!! The whole fucking world takes notice. You might remember my LJ posts at the time. They are here.
Half a year later, the voters decide they don't want the politicians any more that had water cannons trained on their children and on old men, and elect the first Green state governor ever anywhere in Germany. There is a lengthy mediation process with a very wily old fox of a senior politician as the mediator, and at the end, there is a long-ass technical simulation of the running of the new station, a possible compromise, and a state-wide referendum where the voters decide, hands-on, that they want the new statioin built under the compromise reached in the mediation process. There are still people very much opposed to it, so the poor Green state governor now has the dubious honour of defending the project he was elected to topple -- but it was all done openly, transparently, with conditions that totally fuck up the secret real estate deals that came to light, and with complete and direct democratic legitimation.
I often come through Stuttgart by train going to see my family, and back, and one time, I skipped a train and went around and took pictures while the debate was still raging fiercely. And now, people are getting used to the idea of transparency and democratic participation instead of mere representation and backroom politics, and the Pirate Party is on the rise, of which I've become a member, too.
Back in early October 2010, this made such a splash in the media, Joss Whedon had to be aware of its existence, as somebody who presumably reads the news and pays attention to the world?
So, making that movie, he probably realised that one pet peeve with American movies is that everything important always happens in America while the rest of the world blurs to a vague general Elsewhere? And if they go Elsewhere, they either go to London or Paris, or to someplace that is definitely exotic and/or dangerous, from Moscow to Afghanistan to some vague unnamed South American country?
Not so Joss Whedon -- he takes his movie abroad because the world and his audience is much bigger than America, and he wants his audience to be aware of it. He goes to a civilised place. To a place with a historically bad rep (Germany), where people are rumoured to crave subjugation and always kneel -- he even takes Captain America along to refer to that yet once again over.
But no, that doesn't happen any more. People kneel at first -- while probably going 'What the hell is he on about?' -- 'Shit, I have no idea!' -- but no, Stuttgart is actually the place where people have stopped kneeling, and craving subjugation for the sake of comfortable security in their lives.
So, of course there is an old man who gets up and won't be cowed. International media mostly interprets the man as a Holocaust survivor/resistance fighter, but seeing this is 2012, he's not ancient enough for that. These people are in their late 90s if still alive. That's just an old man who won't be cowed, because Stuttgart is a place where old men won't be cowed any more. And yes, there are always men like Loki who will lull the population into a fake complacency of 'You don't have to decide, we've got this', but you don't have to grandiosely pull Hitler out of a hat for that. Sorry, Loki. There are always men like you. Stefan Mappus for example.
Suck it up, Loki. You don't get compared to Hitler any more, that is old.
Also, the name. Stuttgart means something like 'Mare's Yard', 'Stute' being the German word for 'mare', a word that took a turn for the opposite in English as the word 'stud' for a general register and pedigree of horses turned into meaning 'stallion used for breeding', but in German, it's mare. And we probably have read up enough on Loki on Wikipedia to know he turned into a mare, had himself bonked by a stallion, and gave birth to an eight.legged foal, Sleipnir? So the 'enclosure for mares' is just the right place for him, seeing he's been a mare himself. That's the part which is a sexual slur on Loki's myth, which may or may not be in this one's past. Sleipnir exists, we see him in 'Thor', but I don't think there's any reference to that anywhere in Marvel canon? That's much too dirty for comics. Only Joss Whedon will allude to it very, very obliquely here.
So, it's the train station related no-longer-kneeling down people of Stuttgart, and their horse procreation related name, which made Joss Whedon bring Loki to Stuttgart, of all non-American first world places he could have gone to.
But what about Loki himself?
Why did Loki pick Stuttgart?
a) Because of engineering?
b) Because of a dangerous error in judgement?
c) Because he always wanted to pluck out an eyeball to the strains of Schubert's Rosamunde?
In this case, answers a) and b) are right, because, as I said above, Stuttgart is known for car-building and engineering and that R&D candyland? If anywhre, it's the region around Stuttgart. Yes, it makes complete sense that, should there be any place in the world where there is a complete cylinder of unobtanium iridium used for research and engineering purposes, it's near Stuttgart.
You find all those firms and trade fairs and events around there, too, big corporations and small innovative start-up businesses, the whole industry and its hangers-on assemble there in Swabia. All that really bleeding-edge stuff, virtual reality and machine vision and digitalised factories, gravitates around that place. I keep entering events in Stuttgart and around it into the event calendar of the magazine web site at my soon-to-be-ex slavery that is dedicated to digital engineering. Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Stuttgart. Of course they have iridium there. And of course the people working with it will be attending cultural events.
Also, the dangerous error in judgement -- Loki relies on his impression that Germans, and Swabians in particular, will always kneel, will do what 'those above' tell them, won't bother to stand up and say no. While Erik Selvig does need the iridium, Loki also needs to set up a large beacon to draw the soon-to-be Avengers/S.H.I.E.L.D. to him and get him captured, so he can get at them from inside. He just needs those Stuttgarters to kneel for long enough until somebody arrives to properly fight him, and then he'll come with only token resistance, to get to the people he really wants to get to -- the people Thor fell in with!
Only, the Swabians just aren't the good little subjects any more that will always kneel, and there is an old man who just won't back down, and if Steve and Tony hadn't arrived when they did, he'd have had to start a premature massacre nobody really wanted or needed. I doubt he meant to rule a bunch of upper crust Swabians for very long -- just as I actually doubt he seriously meant to rule Earth. Honestly, who would want to?
But that is an entirely different kettle of fish, and not the subject for a loooooong journal post, but for a fic which I am actually writing...
Crossposted to Dreamwidth and LJ -- comment wherever you like!