I saw John Carpenter’s The Thing for the first time a last year, and became kind of obsessed with it. Since then, I’ve been renting other John Carpenter movies, but I haven’t liked anything I’ve seen nearly as much. I just saw Halloween, which is supposed to be one of his best, and…eh. It was certainly okay, but I’m not exactly sure why it’s supposed to be so special. Maybe it’s because so many of its tropes (the final surviving girl, the killer in the mask, slaying the villain and having him come back over and over) have become cliches — but were any of them really such great ideas in the first place? The way the teenagers keep getting killed whenever they express sexual desire is pretty entertaining, and Carpenter’s eerie synth score is creepy. The camera movement is very fluid, and the perspective-of-the-killer shots are fun — especially in the opening scenes where Michael puts on the mask and you see through his restricted vision. But the psychologist nattering on about how ultimately bad, bad, bad Michael Myers is just kind of tedious, and the movie’s efforts to turn a serial killer into some sort of primal force of eldritch evil seem overblown and dumb. I guess that’s really where the film loses me; if you’re going to have a supernatural villain, have a supernatural villain. If you’re going to have it be a bad guy, have it be a bad guy and expend some effort on making him seem actually dangerous. As it is, Myers inability to kill Curtis just seems like incompetence — he keeps missing her with the knife, and she then beats the crap out of him over and over. The only thing that makes him at all credible as a threat is that he keeps getting these totally un-earned do-overs, coming back from the dead for no apparent reason. It’s like the movie couldn’t come up with a really dangerous threat, so has to fall back on special pleading. (Texas Chainsaw Massacre does a much better job having villains who are really scary but vulnerable. The murder scenes also manage to be a lot more shocking and visceral.)

I also finally saw the Japanese horror classic Ring-U recently — and that was a whole lot more satisfying. The evil is more clearly occult, and while it’s not exactly what you’d call coherent, it does have a poetic consistency. The plot involves a video; once you see it, you have one week to live. The tension created by the time limit, and the character’s desperate efforts to find out what’s going on, are much more suspenseful than the random, sudden violence in Halloween — where the viewers know that something bad is going to happen, but the victims generally don’t. The mix of eldritch magic and modern technology is very well done, and the pacing is perfect — we don’t see how the curse works until the very end of the movie, and the payoff is suitably bizarre and eerie. Halloween also doesn’t have anything anywhere near as weird as the scene where the Ringu heroine stands up to her waist in water at the bottom of a well caressing a child’s skeleton. You’ve gotta love that.

I consumed a couple of devil narratives recently: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel Lolly Willowes and John Carpenter’s movie Prince of Darkness. As both of my regular readers know, as I’ve gotten older and more crotchety I’ve increasingly tended to prefer pulp fiction to the literary variety, so by all rights I should be enthusiastic about Carpenter’s exploitative gore-fest and dump all over Warner’s slow-moving domestication of the infernal.

Not this time though. I love Carpenter’s “The Thing” with a deep devotion, but “Prince of Darkness” is, alas, a lame imitation. The characters are thoroughly uninvolving, and the special effects are — especially by Carpenter’s standards — supremely half-assed and unimaginative, but what really sinks the endeavor is theological confusion. Carpenter’s Satan is kind of a space alien, kind of an extra-dimensional particle, kind of somehow related to theology, maybe related to the future; in other words, it’s Satan as a poorly thought out conspiracy theory, which ends up resolving into Satan as just another boring monster. The characters are constantly making impossible leaps of logic and then looking at each other with deadpan amazement — the corrosion on that eighties-looking sci-fi tube is millions of years old? My god, it must be…Satan! There’s a power surge on the combobulating thingamawhatzit! The horror, the horror! Without a central core, Carpenter trys to distract us with every horror trick in the book; dead men rising and walking, woman transformed into scabrous demon, a plague of insects — even a brief demonic pregnancy which, like the rest of the film, results in precisely nothing. The story lacks the cahones to actually deal with the cultural weight of pretending your special effects monstrosity is actually THE ancient evil, and th. In the end, the idea of Satan as space villain waiting to destroy the earth is a lot less scary than the Church’s conception of Satan as eternal personal tempter, and the final Christ-like sacrifice seems deeply unearned; a parody of, rather than an evocation of, the crucifixion.

“Lolly Willowes” on the other hand, is delightful. Most of the book is a delicately sad, but always witty, account of the painfully restricted life of Laura Willowes, an unassuming woman from a high bourgeois family who is just slightly too eccentric to marry (she tells one suitor he reminds her of a werewolf) but not eccentric enough to actually do anything unconventional. She lives fairly happily with her father until he dies, and then fairly unhappily with her brother, who, along with his devout wife, bores her quietly but steadily. Then, suddenly, about three-quarters of the way through the book, Laura decides to move to a tiny rural town (Great Mop), where she promises her soul to Satan, acquires a black cat as a familiar, and lives, as far as we can tell, happily ever after. The confluence of domestic drama-of-manners and black magic is handled with subdued humor; my favorite moment is when Laura realizes that “Even as a witch, it seemed, she was doomed to social failure, and her first Sabbath was not going to open livelier vistas than were opened by her first ball.” Shortly after this, though, Laura is whirled away in a dance by a comely village maiden — the diabolical lesbian subtext is certainly intentional.

Towards the end of the book Laura speculates on the Devil’s nature:

To be this — a character truly integral, a perpetual flowering of power and cunning from an undivided will — was enought to constitute the charm and majesty of the Devil. No cloak of terrors was necessary to enlarge that stature, and to suppose him capable of speculation or metaphysic would be like offering to crown him with a few casual straws…. Instead his mind brooded immovably over the landscape and over the natures of men, an unforgetting and unchoosing mind. That, of course…was why he was the Devil, the enemy of souls. His memory was too long, too retentive; there was no appeasing its witness, no hoodwinking it with the present; and that was why at one stage of civilisation people said he was the embodiment of all evil, and then a little later on that he didn’t exist.

This idea of the devil as implacably outside of time sounds a lot like the Kantian vision of God and the moral law — always the same, judging and/or knowing mortal souls that bob through time. It’s a personal devil, who cares about human souls intimately, though for what purpose and to what end isn’t exactly clear. Partially, the book suggests, simply to mark those who wish to be marked, folding in those who reject God? Or to show the arbitrariness of civilization, the crumbling around the margins of respectability focused in those who are excluded? In any case, he uncertainty here seems to me to be that of mystery and suggestion, rather than incoherence. The “cloak of terrors” in “Prince of Darkness” certainly isn’t necessary — Warner’s devil is more mystical and more mysterious without it (though he does condescend to turn some milk sour.)

Warner’s isn’t my favorite devil ever (that would probably be C.S. Lewis’ version in Prerelandra, which manages to be evil, banal, creepy, mysterious and despicable all at once.) But I do think that, if you’re going to use Satan, you really need to be willing to engage in some level of thoughtful theology. I know the Enemy died when God did, but it seems like if they’re good enough to put in your plot, they should be good enough to treat with a modicum of respect.

I just finished reading the “Marvel Zombies” volume, which is really pretty much complete shit. The premise is that all the marvel heroes and villains have been turned into zombies, and they’re hungry for meat. As a zombie tale, it misses the point entirely. The best zombie stories rely on a tension between one’s enthusiasm for seeing the zombies destroy and main and one’s sympathy and identification with the human victims. They also draw an ambiguous line between zombie and human; on the one hand, the zombies look like us and are similar to us in some ways (greed, rage, etc.). On the other hand, they’re clearly and obviously different. Most of all, zombies win because of numbers — they’re scary and disturbing because they lose their individuality and become animal, undifferentiated id. But in this story, all the zombies retain their personalities; you’ve got the guilty spider-man zombie, the leaderly Captain America zombie, the angry hulk zombie. They’re just hungry, decaying bad guys — another bunch of super-villains. Ho-hum.

As a super-hero story, it sucks too. Basically it’s just a series of cutesy punch-lines for continuity buffs. The wasp can shrink down and make her Magneto dinner last longer. When the Hulk turns into Banner the human flesh he just ate breaks through his stomach. Wouldn’t it be fun to see Silver Surfer pulled off his board and devoured? How about Galactus, huh? Of course, little effort is made to explain who all these characters are, or even to create some sort of context or, god forbid, a story. If you wanted those things, you wouldn’t be here, would you?

Not that it’s entirely unentertaining. As an act of puerile desecration for the aging geek, it’s kind of fun to see the Hulk bite off the Silver Surfer’s head, or hear Peter Parker whine incessantly about eating his aunt. But you’ve gotta wonder about the future of the super-hero endeavor when the shrinking fandom is increasingly fed on decayed, self-cannabilizing tidbits like this. Marvel zombies indeed.

So, as happens every four years, I’m obsessed with the presidential election — I”m now trolling political blogs regularly to find out whose ahead of whom or who said what stupid, boring thing that Iowa voters are supposed to care about because each and every one of them is was, like me, born without the brains god gave a louse turd. Seriously, is there any more pointless, vile way to spend one’s time than listening to John Edwards explain that his new year’s resolution involves reminding himself that somewhere in America a child is hungry? Or listening to Hillary Clinton say anything? Arggggh.

Anyway, I’m a Barack Obama supporter, pretty much — I even gave his campaign $20, which is probably the kiss of death for him (everyone else I’ve ever contributed to went down in flames.) Obama actually lives less than a block away from me; he was my state senator, and I’ve voted for him in multiple elections, including in his unsuccessful run for the House of Representatives against Bobby Rush a while back. He tends to actually be able to answer a straight question with a straight answer; he’s smart and thoughtful; he was right about Iraq when it counted, he’s fairly liberal, and in general I think it would do this country a lot of good to have a black president.

If you’ll notice, there’s nothing in that endorsement which mentions any sort of policy positions. It’s basically, “I like him”, which, as this article notes, is why people tend to support Obama, or any candidate. Pundits will often whine and groan about this; the whole problem with our system is that people focus on personalities, why won’t anyone pay attention to the issues, etc. etc. I agree that the process is debased, and that part of why it’s debased is that it is about ineffable personalities…but I don’t think that the reason for this has anything to do with the American people’s foolishness. Instead, I blame the Fouding Fathers. In their infinite wisdom, those white guys in wigs designed a system where the President can’t really do anything. Voting on policy is dumb, because once the candidate gets into office, there’s a very limited number of things which he (or she) can actually do. It all has to go through Congress and the courts and so on and so forth. In a parliamentary system, you actually vote for a whole party with a platform, and then when they get in they enact it — or, if they can’t, the government falls, and you try again. But our system is deliberately personality based, so it’s no wonder that people tend to vote on personalities.

Not that the policies of the person in power don’t matter — they do. But you can’t really tell what they are from the campaign. Bush started as a “compassionate conservative,” remember? But unlike in a parliamentary system, there’s no way to actually hold anyone accountable once they get into office. You can just flat out lie about what you’re going to do, and once you get in you can blame your failures on Congress, or on just not getting around to it, or on whatever — what’s to stop you? So the solution is to vote for someone who’s not a liar, which again puts you down to personality. But, of course, the candidate’s all come off as plastic pre-fab overly solemn sentimentalists; the question then is, which of these assholes do you dislike least? For me at the moment that’s Obama, but I’m sure that if I’m exposed to him for four years, I’ll have had my fill of his particular brand of arrogance, condescension, self-regard, and sentimentalism.

I can’t believe I care about this stuff. Even arguing about Art Spiegelman is less despicable. I should go wash my keyboard out with soap now….

Feeling Their Pain

Origin myths are as much about the present as they are about the past, which is why they can be so contentious. Is a monkey your great-uncle? Who cares? And nobody would, except that the answer has implications for how we think about ourselves, and for how we run our society.

Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains: Prophets, Slaves, and Rebels in the First Human Rights Crusade is, as the title suggests, not a dry-as-dust account of the dead past, but rather an origin story complete with a Moral Lesson for Our Time. As is usual with such things, this last serves primarily to muck up a perfectly entertaining narrative.

And make no mistake: Bury the Chains is entertaining, with enough drama, irony, and blood to fill a wildly successful Ken Burns mini-series. The book traces the rise and fall and final success of abolitionism in Britain during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Along the way, it talks about the horrible conditions under which British seamen lived, slave revolts in Haiti, the French Revolution, growing crops in Africa, and the state of infrastructure in England. Slavery, Hochschild argues, touched virtually everyone in the world during its heydey, and the narrative breadth of Bury the Chains goes a long way towards proving that point.

But while the theme is epic, the handling of it is merely serviceable. Hochschild writes with the ingratiating self-consciousness of a determined popularizer. Every historical figure, it seems, is described with a burst of pseudo-Dickensian enthusiasm: thus, Granville Sharp, a leading British anti-slavery campaigner, has “thin lips, a long nose, [and] a fierce, determined gaze accentuated by an outward jut of the chin.” Nor will Hochschild say “attitudes towards slavery changed” when he can say instead that “forces burst into life.”

This is not great prose, obviously, but it bounces along quickly enough in the breezy style of a Time magazine article. That contemporary touch is intentional. Hochschild is a progressive — he is one of the founders of Mother Jones magazine — and he is using the past as a tool to inspire present-day liberals. For Hochschild, abolition in Britain was the grand-daddy of all progressive movements. Abolitionism, he argues, was the first human-rights campaign. Moreover, it was the abolitionists who, during the mid-1700s, first developed the tactics of activism: the boycott, petitions, the left-wing-celebrity book tour. The abolitionists even had perhaps the first radical reporter; a man named Thomas Clarkson.

Clarkson is a neglected figure, much less well-known than William Wilberforce, the Member of Parliament most associated with anti-slavery legislation. But though he’s been largely forgotten, Clarkson’s story is a compelling one. While a clergyman-in-training at Cambridge, he wrote a prize-winning essay in Latin denouncing slavery. This was merely meant to be an exercise, but the details Clarkson uncovered while researching his composition so horrified him that he devoted the rest of his life to abolition. After making this decision, he threw himself into the cause, spending sixteen-hour-days looking through the records of slave-ships to learn all he could about the industry and its practices. Later, he traveled incessantly to drum up support for emancipation; on one trip he logged almost two thousand miles, a phenomenal distance in the late 18th century. His greatest work was probably a pamphlet called the Abstract, which summarized the anti-slavery evidence placed before Parliament; it became, according to Hochschild, the best-selling non-fiction anti-slavery document in history, and the first piece of modern investigative journalism ever published.

Hochshchild makes every effort to spread credit around in his book. He does not, for example, try to deny Wilberforce’s contribution. In addition, as a politically correct liberal, he takes care to point out the important contributions of female anti-slavery societies and of blacks themselves — the Haitian revolution made it clear that if the slaves were not freed by law, they might well free themselves in a much more bloody manner. Yet, despite this even-handedness, it is Clarkson who Hochschild singles out early in the book as his “central character.” Why?

There seem to be two reasons. First, Clarkson lived a long time. He was there when Parliament first debated abolition in the late 1780s, he was there when the cause foundered in the 1790s, and he was there when it was taken up again in the early 1800s. He saw the slave trade banned in 1807, and was still alive to celebrate when all British slaves were finally freed in 1838. Large sections of Bury the Chains don’t mention Clarkson at all, but the narrative always comes back to him, still committed, still working away.

The second reason for the focus on Clarkson, however, is probably more important. Clarkson is the hero of the piece because he is the figure who seems most analogous to a modern human rights activist. Clarkson, like other abolitionists, devoted his life to fighting for the “rights of others people, of a different skin color, an ocean away….” But where men like the Evangelical Wilberforce were clearly motivated by religious concerns, Clarkson was more secular. Earlier anti-slavery literature had relied on arguments from Scripture, or on the religious doctrines of the Quakers, who were, as Hochschild acknowledges, the leading force behind the early abolition movement. Clarkson eventually became a kind of honorary Quaker himself, but his anti-slavery writing were based less on theology than on humanity, in both senses of the term. His best-selling Abstract read “more like a report by a modern human rights organization than [like] the moralizing tracts against slavery that had preceded it.” Clarkson relied on reports of atrocities against bodies, not against souls, to move his audience.

For Hochschild, then, the great achievement of the abolitionists is the replacement of God with “empathy” as a motivating force in world affairs. This substitution is, of course, an unalloyed good in Hochschild’s view. God was for remorseless hypocrites like John Newton, the Evangelical slave ship captain, who thanked his Lord for allowing him to prosper in his chosen profession. Empathy is both more honest and more trustworthy.

But is it? The empathy of the abolitionists was, as Hochschild points out, closely linked to condescension. One of the most powerful images of the abolition movement was a drawing of a slave kneeling in chains with the inscription, “Am I Not a Man and A Brother?” Hochschild points out that abolitionists preferred to see slaves as helpless victims begging for aid, rather than as dignified men and women like themselves. But while Hochschild sees this as lamentable, he does not view it as an essential part of the anti-slavery ideology. Liberals, he feels, can take the empathy and leave out the contempt.

Well, perhaps. But the history of modern activism suggests that things aren’t quite so simple. Hochschild says that the abolitionists would be thrilled by the trial of Slobodan Milosevich, for example, but I think that their imaginations would be much more fired by a less distant, less legalistic campaign: pro-life. The anti-abortion movement — with its ties to evangelicals, its focus on helpless victims, its gripping horror stories — is much closer to the abolitionists in spirit than any left-wing movement I can think of. And the pro-lifers are perfectly aware of the connection, as you’ll find if you type “William Wilberforce” and “pro-life” into a search engine.

The truth is that the abolitionist’s legacy of liberalism and progressivism belongs at least as much to the political right as it does to the political left. It was Kipling, an imperialist, who argued in “The White Man’s Burden” that imperialism is justified on humanitarian grounds. It is The Economist, a libertarian magazine, that provides the best investigative coverage of world events. It is George W. Bush who speaks idealistically of a democratic — but not a Christian — Middle East. We live in a world where all have been injured, and all must have empathy. Morality used to be measured by how loudly you prayed; now its measured by how loudly you sympathize. Perhaps this is an improvement, though I doubt it makes much different to the vast mass of humanity, who just wish we’d shut up and leave them alone.

A version of this essay first appeared in The Chicago Reader

So I just read this article by Kiel Fleming, which purports to explain why Calvin and Hobbes is the best strip ever (better than Peanuts, even.) It’s not intended to be a serious or logical argument; the five “reasons” for Fleming lists to support his view are just gags from the strip (Calvin and Hobbes is the best strip in the world because it includes Calvinball and Susie Derkins — that kind of thing.)

Fair enough — but in fact this take on C & H actually does sum up my own attitude towards the strip. Not the part about it’s being the greatest thing ever, but the part about it’s being a series of fairly funny gags, and that’s about it. Great claims have been made for Calvin and Hobbes, but I don’t see much about it that distinguishes it qualitatively from something like, say, Foxtrot. Bill Watterson’s pretty funny, but most of his humor falls comfortably into competent sit-com territory — snappy one-liners playing off routine formula (my, bad boys sure are something, aren’t they?) He doesn’t have anything like the surreal goofiness of Gary Larson or Berkely Breathed, and he’s miles away from the quietly doddering genius of Schulz. Calvin’s imaginary life (the strip’s central hook) is cute, but fairly pedestrian. He imagines himself as a dinosaur, he imagines himself trapped by space aliens, he imagines making duplicates of himself — and then at the end of the strip we see the world as it really is, where the space alien is actually his teacher, or whatever. The whole thing is grindingly literal. Even the ambiguity — as in the moments where questions are raised about whether Hobbes is or is not real — seems plodding. Certainly there’s nothing as weird or as ontologically indeterminate as Snoopy’s fantasies. Most of Calvin and Hobbes really boils down to “kids say (or do) the darndest things.”

What really distinguishes C&H from its competition is its pomposity (the leaden decision to name the strips stars Calvin and Hobbes more or less sums up Watterson’s clumsy philosophical flailings) and its excellent art. Watterson’s probably the best artist (other than Schulz) I can think of in the strip form over the last couple of decades. His facility and invention, especially in many of his Sunday strips, make his work a treat to look at. And Calvinball and the rest of the gags are quite funny too. I don’t hate it or anything; it’s just not all that.

Dark Horse is publishing this Korean mahwa by Kim Sung-Jae and Kim Byung-Jin, and it’s of the more perfunctorily told narratives I’ve come across in a bit. The story purportedly involves twins, one of whom is the rightful emperor and one of whom is a demon spawn of some sort. An ugly jewel icon thing is supposed to distinguish between them in the cradle, but the two are unaccountably left alone, allowing evil demon baby to shove the jewel thing into the chest of the good guy. Good baby grows up to be tortured and, for unclear reasons, virtually unkillable. He is exiled and wanders off to hook up with some random warrior clan, to whom he brings much woe and lamentation, for that is his curse. Said clan includes several supposedly colorful, but actually completely indistinguishable, characters, who provide what passes for comic relief between the alternating scenes of vicious dismemberment and inarticulate angst. Chunchu, who brings death to all and then whines about it, is way, way, way less interesting than Elric or Thomas Covenant, and it’s been a good long time since I wanted to read about either of those folks.

It’s hard to be that pissy about it, though, since it’s obvious that the writing here is little more than a distant afterthought. There’s a lot more attention paid to the art, which, while it doesn’t blow me away, is certainly nicely done. Kim Byung-Jin tends towards a less realistic style than some I’ve seen in this genre, but that works quite well for the creepy hyper-deformed baby sequence, and he does have the chops to pull off an excellent naturalistic wart-hog close-up when the script calls for it. Some of the heavily-muscled warriors recall the unfortunate excesses of super-hero comics — torsoes just aren’t anatomically built like that. But then, the close-up expressive limpid eyes often hit that shoujo sweet spot.

So yeah, pretty mediocre. But “Genocide Fiend” is a great title.