Beyond the straightforward theme of sending young people to fight and die in war, Alexander Huls reads the new film as a partial defense of Generation Y, with Ender saving the world at the request of condescending and ungrateful Boomers:
Boomers tend to represent Gen Y’s virtues simultaneously as faults (Millennials are great at tech! Millennials are narcissistic and distracted workers because of tech!) but the film understands the impulses behind them. Technology is presented not as an indulgence, but a highly useful tool Ender wields to achieve productive results and self-exploration—not narcissism. When Ender feels outraged that Graff revokes his email privileges, the movie presents the hero’s anger not as lost entitled access to technology. He’s upset that he’s lost what he uses the technology for: meaningfully connecting with people he cares about.
Millennials will likely be happy with the portrayal. They, after all, played a major part in propelling Ender’s Game to its canonical status. This adaptation honors the text they grew up with while heightening the generational conflicts in it, going even rougher on the adults.
Andrew O’Hehir reads into a historical analogy probably not intended by author Orson Scott Card or the filmmakers:
“Ender’s Game” can definitely be read as an allegorical treatment of the other American original sin, besides slavery: the destruction and replacement of Native American society, which stood in the way of our nation’s manifest destiny. The sentimental idea that whites who killed or uprooted the Indians became infused with their spiritual or moral essence did not begin with New Agers in the 1960s. It goes clear back to the invented legend of the first Thanksgiving feast and the apocryphal peace treaty between William Penn and the Lenape chief Tamanend (aka Tammany) in 1683.
Harris O’Malley, who stubbornly refuses to see the film due to Card’s history of homophobia, points out that the book preaches a message of tolerance:
[F]or someone who seems consumed by hate, he has produced what is, in many ways, his own counter-argument. …
Ender’s ultimate strength isn’t his willingness to win at any cost, it’s his empathy. To quote Ender: “In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.” Ender’s own horror at the realization that he has committed xenocide is born out of that empathy; in the end, he realizes that the “buggers” were never truly the threat that everybody thought them to be.
It’s a shame that Card seems incapable of equal understanding, instead of grumpily complaining about the intolerant reception of his own intolerance.
Rany Jazayerli, a long-time fan of Card’s writing who grew increasingly pained by the author’s hateful rhetoric in real life, grapples with further complexities:
We all feel alienated at some point, but the book’s message resonates even deeper with those who really stick out from the crowd. The empathy extends to the reader. There are no gay characters, but that is presumably because most of the characters are prepubescent children. (Ender is essentially asexual.) But there are girls at Battle School who play important roles; there are characters who are dismissed by other kids because they’re too short; there are Jewish kids who get mocked for the size of their noses.
I am neither gay, nor a girl, nor short. I am, however, a Muslim who grew up in Kansas in the 1980s, and I struggle to think of a more perfect recipe for creating a sense of isolation in an American teenager. … It was in the context of trying to find my place in the world, of struggling to reconcile my faith with my country when I had no role models to show me the way, that I encountered the following passage about Ender and his Battle School classmate Alai. It stopped me cold:
“I don’t want to go,” he said.
Alai hugged him back. “I understand them, Ender. You are the best of us. Maybe they’re in a hurry to teach you everything.”
“They don’t want to teach me everything,” Ender said. “I wanted to learn what it was like to have a friend.”
Alai nodded soberly. “Always my friend, always the best of my friends,” he said. Then he grinned. “Go slice up the buggers.”
“Yeah.” Ender smiled back. Alai suddenly kissed Ender on the cheek and whispered in his ear, “Salaam.” Then, red-faced, he turned away and walked to his own bed at the back of the barracks. Ender guessed that the kiss and the word were somehow forbidden. A suppressed religion, perhaps. Or maybe the word had some private and powerful meaning for Alai alone. Whatever it meant to Alai, Ender knew that it was sacred; that he had uncovered himself for Ender, as once Ender’s mother had done, when he was very young, before they put the monitor in his neck, and she had put her hands on his head when she thought he was asleep, and prayed over him. Ender had never spoken of that to anyone, not even to Mother, but had kept it as a memory of holiness, of how his mother loved him when she thought that no one, not even he, could see or hear. That was what Alai had given him; a gift so sacred that even Ender could not be allowed to understand what it meant.
If you don’t see the importance of this passage, I envy you. Alai is clearly a Muslim, and in the 1980s, Muslims were portrayed in American popular culture as one of three categories, if they were portrayed at all: crazy ayatollahs, greasy lecherous oil sheikhs, or bomb-wielding hijackers. Ender’s Game was literally the first time I had encountered a positive portrayal of a Muslim character in American fiction. It floored me. I finally saw a positive image of myself in print, and it came not from a fellow Muslim but from a wildly popular Christian author who could trace his American lineage for generations.
Previous Dish on the film and the controversy over Card here, here, and here.
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