I just saw Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr. It is, of course, a classic film, and its director is to be complimented for establishing many of the tenets of the horror genre even before the invention of pacing, plot, or night. Luckily, movie-star good looks had been discovered just a year or two previously, and so we are treated to scenes of an extremely attractive young actor wandering about on a brightly lit set, interrupted by the occasional ominous, overwritten title board. In no particular order, he imagines himself dead in a coffin with a window conveniently cut in it for easy viewing; encounters an equally attractive actress who engages him in a battle to see who can open their eyes more widely; and passes out at various critical junctures, allowing an old man with a funny hat to kill the vampire and generally do most of the heavy lifting. Other high points are when the actress mews like a cat (as the result of sound limitations, apparently, not supernatural forces, and a close up of the mouth of a girl turning into a vampire so that we can see that fangs had not yet been invented either. Anyway, eventually the leads take a boat onto a lake, in the fog. The end.

There are good bits — the use of sentient shadows is creepy, and the coffin sequence is effective. But, jeez, the thing is just interminable. I’ve seen some episodes of the TV show “Dark Shadows”, which is paced in a similarly paralytic fashion, but at least there the melodramatic tropes are vaguely coherent — just slow as sludge, which actually comes off as funny. Vampyr is more fractured and pretentious than that, and really kind of intolerable…just watching the DVD counter as the minutes ticked down to the conclusion. Oh well…I guess the tedium is the way I can tell its culture.

Sean Collins wrote about an SPX panel on the state of comics criticism here The panel included Dan Nadel, Tim Hodler, Gary Groth, and Douglas Wolk.

Anyway, Collins said some things I thought I’d comment on, since that’s what comics critics do. Also, I just figured out how to use blockquotes, and I’m kind of excited about it.

he point that Doug enabled me to make is that most comics and graphic-novel coverage in mainstream-media publications, as well as most alternative/indie-comics coverage in Wizard and other superhero-centric print and web publications, is written from an advocacy position…. When you have an editor who is usually fighting to carve out a spot for these things because she feels that comics is an art form worth talking about, and you as a writer tend to feel the same way, they’re not going to use that space to have you explain why Will Eisner’s later work is overrated.

I certainly understand the desire to use your space to talk about things you want to promote. This is, incidentally, hardly a mindset restricted to comics; I write music reviews for Bitch, and while it’s nothing like an absolute policy, they clearly, in general, prefer to run positive critiques. Still, for myself, I think that its often worthwhile to talk about things that aren’t so great. Its helpful to the reader in that it gives a better idea of where the publication comes from, and can also warn them off something that isn’t very good. Besides, aesthetic discussions are boring if everybody’s blowing sunshine up each others ass. Which brings me to the last point; mainly, a good negative review, like a good positive review, can be entertaining and enlightening. It seems to me like it might be really worthwhile to point out that Will Eisner’s latest work is overrated — and a lot more respectful to comics as an art form than to engage in relentless boosterism.

I obviously wasn’t alive during the ’50s-’60s-’70s era Gary champions, but I’m not 100% convinced that this Golden Age of Criticism really existed. I mean, it existed in the sense that there were great critics writing about various art forms, sure (though not comics, not really). But Gary seemed to be arguing that the likes of Pauline Kael were the Gene Shalits of their day. I think it’s a safe bet that if the average reader of this blog asked her mom and dad who Pauline Kael was, they’d have no idea. As an audience member pointed out, criticism isn’t consumed by large numbers of people because most art isn’t consumed by large numbers of people in ways that would make them receptive to criticism. As she said, this is doubly true of comics, where large numbers of people aren’t consuming that art form at all, so yearning for a more vibrant critical milieu for comics is in some ways a fool’s errand. But while I could be wrong, I think it’s unlikely that this mass audience for criticism ever existed even for more popular art forms.

The best movie criticism I’ve ever read is James Baldwin’s long, amazing essay “The Devil Finds Work.” The best literary criticism is probably Henry Fielding’s “Joseph Andrews”. The best comics criticism was probably Johnny Ryan’s team-up of Art Spiegleman and the Red Skull, or else a short piece by Charles Schulz in an anthology listing all the foodstuffs that caused Little Nemo bad dreams. The Pauline Kael I’ve looked at seems all right, but certainly not up to that standard. Not sure that I exactly have a point,except that the phrase “vibrant critical milieu” inevitably makes me pray for a massive, universal plague of laryngitis and/or keyboard failure.

Doug advocated for the value of “bomb-throwing” — divisive pieces intended to provoke debate. I’m not crazy about this at all. For every act of bomb-throwing into which went a considerable amount of thought, like the Journal’s Top 100 Comics of the 20th Century list or Understanding Comics, there are probably three times as many straw-men massacres. Chris Ware sucks, most alternative comics are autobiographical and therefore boring, the only comics worth a damn are “New Mainstream” genre titles, no one tells stories anymore, the Internet is the future of comics, superhero stories are inherently worthless and no one in the real world likes them, manga is all the same, super-popular webcomics > pretentious art comics that nobody reads, etc. Yes, they frequently provoke intelligent responses, but more accurately way they necessitate intelligent responses lest the white noise they generate drown out actual argument and criticism.

I think this is deeply confused. Collins is arguing that the problem with bomb throwing is that it drowns out “actual argument and criticism.” But I think you’d be just as right saying that mealy-mouthed space-filler is in danger of drowning out people with actual opinions. Collins more or less says this himself in the bit above where he talks about the fact that many publications only want to run positive (and presumably safely positive) reviews. I don’t know; personally, I like to read critics who shake me up a little. In any case, I don’t see why trimming moderates like Hillary Clinton should be ipso facto presumed to be more thoughtful and/or right than nutters like Ron Paul.

I wish it were pointed out more often that there’s really no such thing as “the Journal.” There’s Gary, and there’s whoever’s the editor, and then there’s a bunch of writers who submit reviews and essays with no editorial guidelines and no back-end content editing either. (At least in my experience.) I know what “the Journal” is supposed to mean, but in reality it means the opinions of R.C. Harvey, Noah Berlatsky, Joe McCulloch, Tim O’Neil, me, Chris Mautner, Michael Dean, Kristy Valenti, and a couple dozen more all at once.

It’s certainly true that Gary doesn’t have anything like the monolithic control that, say, Dave Sim seems to think. (Except for one very brief message board exchange, I’ve never actually even spoken to Gary myself.) On the other hand, I think the Journal does have a pretty strong editorial identity. It’s highbrow and combative because that’s what Gary’s like, and it is still very much his magazine. At the same time, the Journal is very committed to letting its writers say whatever they want — which is a pretty rare thing in publishing. The point is that the variations in opinion at the Journal aren’t a sign that “The Journal” doesn’t exist in some coherent form; rather it’s in many ways the most identifiable thing about the magazine.

I wish the phrase “the dumbing down of American culture” were removed from this discussion.

Amen.

A version of this review of the Catwoman movie ran several years back in the Chicago Reader.

Bad As It Wants To Be

Some of the earliest sexual fantasies I can remember involve Catwoman. Specifically, they center around a Batman audio recording I listened to when I was eight or younger. I can’t remember where I was at the time, and I’m pretty sure I heard the tape only once. Nonetheless, I remember the plot clearly; Catwoman had developed a kind of super-catnip, and she used it to control Bruce Wayne’s mind and force him to help her steal jewels. I could go on in detail; the story’s extremely muted eroticism was seared into my pre-adolescent brain, even though — or perhaps because — I didn’t know exactly what catnip was. From context, I vaguely assumed it involved needles, a misunderstanding that it took me at least another ten years to clear up.

The specific details of my, um, relationship with Catwoman are idiosyncratic, of course, but the fact that I have a relationship isn’t. She may not be Mickey Mouse, but it’s safe to say that a large number of people have thought about Catwoman in the 60-plus years since she was first invented by Bob Kane. She’s a firmly established part of what comic-book writer Alan Moore calls the “fictional planet — the place we have with us ever since we started listening to stories.”

Moore adds that “We spend a lot of time in these imaginary worlds, and we get to know them better than the real locations we pass on the street every day.” This is why making a movie about Catwoman — or Spider-Man, or King Arthur, for that matter — is such good business; the audience already knows and loves the people in the film. It’s almost like watching a friends’ home movies. Critics forced to sit through uninspired sequel after uninspired sequel often start moaning about late capitalism, or marketing machinery, or Hollywood’s general lack of daring. But the truth is that the public has always liked to hear about the same damn people doing the same damn things over and over and over. Today, we call these pulp stories; they used to be called myths.

The argument that super-heroes are somehow the latest incarnation of a universal, Joseph-Campbell-approved Bildungsroman is frankly preposterous, no matter how often it’s wheeled out by desperate comic-book fans. Superman is not Zeus, and the Elongated Man is not the holy lingam. But while the content of pulp and myth may be different, the way they are produced has some similarities. Myths had no single creator; they were group productions; lots of poets and singers and just ordinary folks told each other stories about the gods, adding to them as they went. But nobody owned them — they belonged to everyone. In pulp stories, of course, we generally do know the actual originator; we can point to Edgar Rice Burroughs and say, there’s the guy who made up Tarzan. Nonetheless, the creation often looms so much larger than the creator that it eclipses him or her altogether. Today Tarzan is as much a creature of Johnny Weissmuller as of Burroughs, and perhaps even more a product of the people who worked on that animated cartoon, whoever they were. He’s a composite creation, cut off from Burroughs in a way that Hamlet, for instance, will never be cut off from Shakespeare.

Super-heroes may be our cultures’ most communal possessions for the paradoxical reason that comic-books are so little read. For most people, if a movie or television character originated in a comic-book, he might as well just have sprung full-formed out of nowhere. This gives super-heroes a certain fluidity, which is, again, similar to mythological figures. Just as Argus had anywhere from four to a hundred eyes, so a single super-hero may change radically from story to story, depending on who’s doing the telling. In the first Superman comics, for example, our hero could only jump, not fly; in the Christopher Reeve movie, he can make time run backwards by reversing the direction of the earth’s rotation, a preposterous idea that I’ve never seen utilized in a comic-book. Sometimes Superman is married to Lois Lane, sometimes he isn’t. And what about the “alternate-universe” story where the infant child rocketed from Krypton is found, not by the Kents, but by an Amish family, and so becomes a pacifist, with tragic consequences for all?

If a major figure like Superman is treated with such freedom, a minor one like Catwoman must count herself lucky if she’s even vaguely consistent from appearance to appearance. In fact, as the excellent fan-produced Feline Fatale website amply documents, most aspects of the Catwoman character have been up for grabs over the years. Her origin has varied widely; at first she was an amnesiac stewardess (yes, that’s right, a stewardess), then an abused housewife, and now, thanks to writer Frank Miller, she’s a hard-boiled ex-S&M hooker who snaps out lines like “You know why I hate men?….Never met one.” Her powers, too, have come and gone; sometimes she has a whip, sometimes she has cats trained to do her bidding, sometimes she knows martial arts, and sometimes, of course, she has super-catnip. Even her costume has been reworked; early on she wore a full, furry cat-head replica; later she changed to a more manageable eye-mask and a purple knee-length dress with a green cape. Her most recognizable outfit — the catsuit — didn’t become de rigeur until Julie Newmar’s shiny, form-fitting debut on TV’s Batman series. In Batman Returns, Michelle Pfeiffer moved the franchise more firmly towards fetish gear, with a notoriously uncomfortable latex get-up; Pfeiffer had to use powder to slide it on. More recently, the comic-book Catwoman has been wearing goggles, of all things.

But though one has a lot of leeway when telling a Catwoman story, the character still has to be recognizable. That’s the challenge of writing about pulp icons; you have to come up with a way to make the story your own while making sure it remains everyone else’s too. A current success is the WB’s popular Smallville. The show is about Superman as a teenager, before he got his costume and all his powers. The series works as decent melodrama, and it gains much of the weight it has from the audience’s familiarity with the details of the Superman narrative — heat vision, Lex Luthor, Lana Lang, Krypton. In other words, its creators reference a shared body of knowledge, and by doing so, demonstrate their respect for both their material and their audience.

The same cannot be said of the people responsible for the new Catwoman movie. As an experience, the film is familiar enough, but it’s the familiarity of cliché, not archetype. One-named director Pitof’s visuals are relentlessly, anonymously stylish — one sequence on a basketball court could be mistaken for an exceptionally long and pointless soft-drink commercial, while another where cubicle workers speed up to show the passage of time looks like an ad for telecommunications software. The actors appear to be as non-plussed by the visuals as the audience; Sharon Stone is especially peevish, but everybody looks as if they wished they were someplace else. The plot, such as it is, involves toxic beauty cream and many, many shots of Halle Berry’s rear end. Among men, the financial success of the enterprise will clearly rest on the second of these; for straight women, the only possible attraction is the kitty cats. Be warned, however: there are many fewer cute feline reactions shots in the movie than you would have a right to expect from the previews.

Obviously, no one involved in this disaster cares anything at all about Catwoman. Even so, the script ignores the character’s legacy in a manner that can only be described as gratuitous For example, in all her previous incarnations, Catwoman’s alter-ego was named Selina Kyle. Now some secret identities — Dick Grayson, for example, or Oliver Queen — have aged poorly. But what on earth is wrong with Selina Kyle? Nonetheless, it’s gone; in the movie, Catwoman’s alter ego is…Patience Phillips. If that sounds a bit too much like Peter Parker, it’s no accident; Berry’s Catwoman has a lot more in common with Spider-Man than she does with the Batman villain. Just as Parker gains the proportionate strength and speed of a spider, Patience’s mystical cat benefactor grants her “fierce independence, total confidence, and inhuman reflexes.” With her super-self-esteem, Patience becomes Oprah Winfrey in a Mexican wrestling outfit, telling off all those who need telling off and boldly owning her consumer preferences. As an extra bonus, she gains many of the attributes of cats, such as fear of rain and — in a scene reminiscent of Splash — an unseemly appetite for raw fish. On the subject of litterboxes, however, the film is mercifully silent.

The one aspect of the traditional Catwoman character that the movie *does* seem interested in retaining is her moral ambiguity. In the comics, Catwoman began her costumed career as a burglar, and though she’s been reformed at various times and in various incarnations, she’s usually been kept at least a little villainous. Patience Phillips does, in fact, have a first-rate motive for turning to crime: she has just lost her job. Luckily, though, she is not the sort of girl who thinks like that or, indeed, who thinks much at all. When Catwoman does rather dutifully steal some jewels, it’s only because, you know, cats like bright, shiny things. In any case, Patience’s heart doesn’t seem to be in it — she almost instantly returns most of them in a bag marked “Sorry.”

Berry’s Catwoman, then, isn’t selfish or greedy or even especially angry. She just has poor impulse control. This neatly inverts the whole raison d’etre of the character. The old Catwoman was sexy because she was dangerous, skillful, and unattainable; Batman was attracted to her at least in part because she was a worthy foe. Berry’s version, on the other hand, is supposed to be appealing because she’s animalistic — i.e., sexually aggressive, spontaneous, and fun to be around. Most of all, she’s available: when a bartender leers at her, she doesn’t hand him his head, but instead almost purrs with appreciation. Berry’s up there to be eye-candy, and her desperate desire to be ingratiating makes all the tight leather and exposed collar-bones seem more than a bit pitiful. When Catwoman dumps Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt) because she’s just gotta ramble, baby, it’s hard not to think that he’s well out of it.

At the film’s close, Berry’s Catwoman mews that she’s “bad as I want to be,” which is a little misleading In truth, Catwoman is as bad as *Warner Brothers* wants it to be; they’re the ones who made the movie and, moreover, the ones who own the rights to the character. That’s because even though Catwoman’s been around for more than half a century, and even though her creator is dead, she’s still under copyright. So are most super-heroes, which is a shame. At one time, tales involving communally created characters were told by whoever remembered and could best repeat them; nowadays they’re told by whoever happens to have the ear of a media oligarch. This produces some lame art, and it also keeps a lot of good art off the shelves; the excellent live-action Batman TV-show, featuring Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt as Catwoman, has still not been released on DVD because of licensing disputes. More importantly, though, granting corporations the rights to ideas that have for all intents and purposes entered the public domain turns people into passive observers of their own culture, and of the insides of their own skulls. I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want Time Warner claiming ownership of any part of my psychic space. It makes me feel a bit like Patience Phillips/Catwoman: torn between two identities, each one stupider than the other.