Essays and articles
Killer Robots Can Dance, Too: Funwashing Tech
First published in Overland | October 2025
Twenty years ago, Pauline Hanson appeared on Dancing With The Stars. The fact that she managed to avoid far-right dog-whistles — there’s no “waltzing while dressed in a burka”, for example — may strike us as something of a miracle. But it was also the entire point. This was a prime example of “funwashing”: taking part in a popular event or show to improve one’s reputation. Watching Hanson dance made her seem more relatable, even likeable, to mainstream Australia. See? She’s struggling with a cha-cha, just like you or me!
The goal of funwashing is to humanise its subjects — but what happens when you attempt to funwash things that weren’t human to begin with?
Read the full essay at Overland.
Pilgrim’s Progress: Scott Pilgrim versus Main Character Syndrome
First published in Overland | March 2024
Main Character Syndrome can be as innocuous as walking through the city at night, music blaring in your headphones. Suitably soundtracked, you suddenly feel as if you’re the star of your own movie and everyone else is your supporting cast. But what if seeing your life as fiction, and yourself as the protagonist, also limits your ways of interacting with the world?
I spent part of my summer bingeing the Netflix animated series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. There’s plenty to recommend about it — paparazzi ninjas, veganism-based superpowers, someone punching a hole in the moon — but its most surprising element is how it takes a bold and unexpected stand against the idea of a protagonist as a narrative necessity.
Read the full essay at Overland.
Product Placement, the Movie: How ‘Pre-Awareness’ has Come to Rule Hollywood
First published in Overland | July 2023
Recently, the company behind Jesus-themed TV show The Chosen described the Bible as ‘the biggest IP of all time.’ Blasphemy? Maybe. But it’s a logical framing of the Good Book in light of Hollywood’s current obsession with intellectual property. There’s more Lord of the Rings to come. Another stab at Harry Potter, this time for TV. Disney is turning all its old animations into live action and CGI, and superheroes born almost a century ago are still fighting crime in blockbusters today. There are dozens upon dozens of reboots, remakes, and reimaginings looming on the horizon.
It seems nothing’s worth watching unless you already know its name.
Read the full essay at Overland.
The Joke’s On You: The People’s Joker and the Ownership of Myth
First published in Overland | May 2023
“You would have to be absolutely batty to miss this rare chance to be among the few people in the world to see this movie!” proclaimed the promo for a secret screening of ‘An Untitled and Perfectly Legal Coming-of-Age Parody Film‘.
Directed by Vera Drew, ‘Untitled and Perfectly Legal’ is the autobiographical story of a young trans woman navigating the aggressively male world of alternative comedy during her transition. It’s often very funny — early jokes accompany praise of successful male comedians with “before the unpleasantness” — but it’s also emotional, at times heartbreaking. Vera’s deadname is bleeped out each time it’s spoken, and her relationships with her mother and boyfriend are rollercoaster rides that are all sharp turns.
Read the full essay at Overland.
What Stopped the Superheroes: COVID and Comic-Book Continuity
First published in Overland | June 2020
In a recent article for The New Yorker, Kim Stanley Robinson acknowledged sci-fi writers can’t see the future. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘if you read science fiction, you may be a little less surprised by whatever does happen.’ If you regularly read superhero comics, however, you’ll be primed for the present crisis in somewhat different ways.
Superhero stories are propelled by the need to avert ever-approaching apocalypses, although it wasn’t always this way. In his earliest tales, Superman fought foes like corrupt politicians, domestic abusers and slum lords. But serialised stories require a constant raising of stakes, with each new threat more dire than the last. Soon enough, superheroes found themselves saving the world on a monthly basis.
Read the full essay at Overland.
You Have New Gods Now: the Radical Vision of X-Men Comics
First published in Overland | December 2019
In 2007, Douglas Wolk’s book Understanding Comics coined the phrase ‘the spandex wall’. That’s what superheroes are to comic books, the ‘public face of the medium’. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that superheroes have taken over blockbuster movies to such an extent that cinema might now seem like their natural habitat. Which begs the question, as a Guardian headline asked back in April: ‘Why are comics shops closing as superheroes make a mint?’ The article offered no easy answers.
Wolk says that the comic book is a form that ‘intrinsically lends itself’ to superhero stories. It’s often remarked that this is because the special effects they demand only cost as much as their penciller’s and inker’s rates, and it’s even suggested that their hyperbolic dialogue – all gritted-teeth exclamations – began because periods were too difficult to make out due to crude printing processes.
Read the full essay at Overland.
The New Homicidal: the Many Lives of the Joker
First published in Overland | October 2019
DC Comics’ Joker – the Clown Prince of Crime – didn’t have an origin story for his first decade. In his earliest appearance in Batman #1 (1939), he was a white-faced clown, already merrily poisoning his victims, leaving their faces twisted into death-grins. Now, however, the character has his own origin movie: Joker, directed by The Hangover’s Todd Phillips. You can’t get away from it right now. Ever since it won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival, hot takes on the film are everywhere, declaring it in turn a masterpiece, a disappointment, an indictment of Trump’s America or an instruction manual for mass shooters.
It is in the Killing Joke comic by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland (1988) that the Joker’s backstory was famously fleshed out: a failing stand-up comedian agrees to help criminals rob a factory; however, after finding out his family have been killed, he falls into a vat of chemicals while fleeing Batman, staining his skin and colouring his hair. This ‘one bad day’ drives him insane and the Joker is born. That’s one version, anyway. The Joker isn’t a reliable narrator, and at one point he shrieks, ‘If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!’ Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) nods to this with the Joker’s shifting stories about how he got his facial scars.
Read the full essay at Overland.