Monthly Archives: January 2012

Lost and Found Horror

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The Blair Witch Project (1999) is the most likely starting point for the “found footage” sub-genre of horror. If you want to nit-pick, the first film to use the found footage concept was the Italian sleazefest Cannibal Holocaust (1980). But the film never pretended that the found footage (filmed by a “lost” documentary crew) was real in our world. Instead, the documentary footage was contained within a narrative that was clearly fictional. The Blair Witch Project, on the other hand, never stopped pretending. Even the marketing campaign (which included a fake documentary on the “legend” of the Blair Witch) passed the film off as real footage of the filmmakers’ last days.

Since Blair Witch there’s been a steady trickle of these films. They are not a new genre so much as a hybrid genre that steals ideas from older horror movies, and combines them with the conceit that the film depicts real events, or at least that the film was produced by individuals who are actually present within the story (usually amateur filmmakers). This means poor lighting, shaky camera-work, and unknown actors who can pass as normal people. But the films still contain the tropes that moviegoers expect from mainstream horror. After The Blair Witch Project (killer in the woods genre) came [REC] and its inferior American remake Quarantine (pseudo-zombie genre), Diary of the Dead (zombie apocalypse genre), Cloverfield (giant monster genre), Apollo 18 (alien genre), and Paranormal Activity (haunted house genre).

But how real is found footage? If I were being stalked by a ghost/slasher/zombie/serial killer/tropical cannibal, the last thing I would do is record my demise for posterity. No offense to my tiny audience, but I don’t give a flying fuck about entertaining you in my final moments. And who in their right mind would waste time  recording the ghost or giant monster that’s trying to kill them (as well as the touching romantic sub-plot during the lulls in the violence)? The common defense of the genre is that we live in the Youtube and cellphone camera age, and the genre simply reflects the fact that we are saturated with amateur video. But amateur footage of protests, crimes, terrorist attacks, etc. tends to be brief, incompetently filmed, and rarely has anything resembling likable characters or a plot. In other words, actual amateur video bares no resemblance to the professionally crafted narratives that lurk underneath the “found footage” concept. And there’s the little fact that it’s impossible to record video of ghosts, zombies, or giant monsters because those creatures don’t exist.

And yet audiences eat this shit up, and I’m right there with them. My favorite set of films in the genre is the Paranormal Activity franchise. The first Paranormal Activity is not particularly innovative. It’s cut from the exact same cloth as a thousand other haunted house movies, and it’s at least as campy as anything starring Vincent Price. But I found it scarier and far more entertaining than The Haunting, Amityville Horror, The Others, or any other haunted house movie that exists in a fictional universe. Paranormal Activity 3 is the perfect example of the genre. The entire premise is ridiculous: a demon is terrorizing a family in 1988, and the dad just happens to be an audio/video expert who rigs his house with video cameras and always walks around with a massive camcorder. The film is unabashedly cheesy, and even includes the old ghost-under-the-sheet gag. But it’s great! The simple plot sucks you in and the old-fashioned scares still work. The viewer quickly forgives the implausibility of a man walking around with a camcorder all the time, because how else would there even be a movie?

It’s not the phony realism that matters, but how that realism connects the audience with a familiar narrative. To put it another way, found footage works not because we belong to the Youtube generation, but because we belong to the Real World generation (youngsters can replace Real World with Survivor or Real Housewives of Who Cares or whatever reality TV series floats your boat). So-called reality TV is quite fake. Real people are encouraged to behave in unnatural ways for the sake of our entertainment. They are less inhibited, more reckless, and generally stupider when in front of the camera. Then a team of professional editors and writers crafts an artificial narrative from countless hours of random shit caught on tape. Through this process reality TV creates the ultimate illusion – that normal people are actually interesting to watch. Normal people can have exciting singing careers, or scheme to win a million dollars, or have lives filled with catfights, hot tub sex, and soap opera drama.

The found footage genre works in much the same way. The pretense that the film is real isn’t so much about fooling people but in bringing the audience further into familiar narratives that they love. The shaky camera and unknown actors create an illusion of reality. Scary and exciting things don’t just happen to movie stars. They can happen to normal people, just like you or me! But this illusion of reality is plastered over a conventional genre film. So the scares are structured in a narrative format that we instantly recognized and appreciate. In movies and in “real life,” a ghost wouldn’t reveal itself right away, but would instead spends several days doing little things to build up the suspense. It would be a disappointment if the “real” haunted house experience lacked the requisite tension and cheap thrills. After all, what’s the point of being haunted by a demon if he doesn’t even do it right?

Circle of Blood

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This originally ran on Comixology.
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“Super-hero” backwards is “noir.” The opposite of the upright avatar of justice with entirely sublimated sexual urges is the morally ambiguous anti-hero driven by money-lust and just plain old lust. The super-hero wears his underwear on the outside and saves the universe; the noir hero curses the universe and is pulled around by what’s inside his underwear. Noir is about shadows and helplessness and the best-laid illicit plans ending up in ruins; super-heroes are about light and empowerment and the best-laid illicit plans ending up in ruins.

Which is to say that, while super-heroes and noir appear at first to be irreconcilable, on closer look they do have a fair bit in common. They’re both male genre literature. They both have a strong moral code enforced by corporal punishment. And they both have, shall we say, ambivalent feelings about women. It makes sense, then, that there’s a long tradition of combining the two, starting at least with the first Batman stories, reaching its high point, I firmly believe, with Bob Haney’s goofily brilliant Batman/Deadman team up in Brave and Bold #101, and continuing on to this day with anything Frank Miller has ever touched (including, of course, Batman.)

One of the most interesting super-hero/noir mashups I’ve seen is the 1986 Punisher mini-series Circle of Blood by Steven Grant and Mike Zeck. The Punisher has always been only sort-of/kind-of a super-hero. He wears tights, but merely, you sense, because that’s the best way to stay inconspicuous in the hero-ridden Marvel multiverse. He fights for truth and justice, but he does it by shooting people.

Steven Grant is well known for his writing about comics as well as for his comics themselves (he did some guest-writing on my blog not too long ago), and you can see his critical acumen in his script. Basically, where Frank Miller tends to use noir to make his heroes seem even more bad-ass, Grant uses it to question and ultimately undermine the moral certainties on which the super-hero genre is based.

Zeck draws the Punisher as a pumped-up manly-man whose bobble-head is dwarfed by acres of steroidal flesh, and this is a good metaphor for the way Grant writes the character. From the neck down, the Punisher is a super-hero juggernaut, hyper-competently disposing of roomfuls of thugs in classic Bat-mode, or bashing his way through a prison in a fashion reminiscent of the contemporaneous Rorschach.

From the neck up, though, the Punisher isn’t hyper-competent at all. Instead, he’s more like the classic noir dupe. Though he has a certain tactical animal cunning, his inner monologue is obsessively repetitive in a way that suggests borderline idiocy — where Batman’s traumatic backstory has, supposedly, made him smarter, the Punisher’s has left him, in Grant’s writing, a monomaniacal mental and emotional basket-case. The Punisher is, like most noir men, childishly easy to fool. He stumbles into traps, is bamboozled by a shady conglomerate called the Trust, and, inevitably, betrayed by a woman. His solve-it-by-shooting-it approach to every problem results in heaps of dead bodies, including that of one child. Said child’s death sends our hero into a self-pitying funk, complete with flashbacks and profound utterances (“It’s got to stop. The poor children.”) which, at least from my perspective, makes him appear more damaged, dangerous, unsympathetic, and unheroic than ever.

The Punisher’s final act in the comic is to allow the woman who betrayed him (Angela) to fall off a cliff. His motivation seems less abstract justice than simple spite, and one has to wonder, as he limps off into the sunset, whether the world wouldn’t maybe be a safer place if the bad guys had won and offed this dangerously imbecilic killing machine. The use of noir here actually, and I think intentionally, calls the whole concept of super-heroics into question. The hired thugs in the series are dressed in the Punisher outfit and actually believe themselves to be the Punisher — and the parallel is quite clear. The Punisher himself, after all, seems like a brainwashed sleepwalker, not to mention a criminal. In the not-light of noir, the super-heroic law-and-order certainties become naïve, dangerous idiocy, while righteous vengeance turns into a flimsy excuse for self-aggrandizing fascistic violence.

Of course, you can turn this around and argue that the super-hero genre actually validates noir’s amorality. Just because Grant portrays the Punisher as a dangerous numbskull doesn’t mean that readers will stop identifying with him. He’s the hero, after all, and when, in his quasi-sentient way, he lets Angela fall to her death, you can certainly hear a chorus of “yeah, kill the bitch!” echoing from the peanut gallery. Does breaking a man’s little finger make Rorschach a monster, or does it make snapping people’s fingers seem kind of cool?

Probably both. Super-heroes and noir are polar opposites — but on a magnet, the poles are, of course, closely attached. Like Westerns, spy thrillers, and most male genre literature, both super-hero and noir are built around an exciting frisson of justified violence — a circle of blood. If you want to break out of that circle, you probably need to reach for a less closely-allied genre, or else try to dispense with genre altogether. Once you do that, of course, you’re talking to a much smaller audience, and not writing for a mainstream comics publisher. The irony is that by creating a thoughtful, popular comic questioning the Punisher’s war on crime, Grant probably helped to make that kind of war — with its more explicit blood, sex, and amorality — a mainstream staple.

Twilight vs. Buffy — Battle to the Death?

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Inspired by Joy DeLyria’s post about Evil in Speculative Fiction, Charles Reece and I have been engaged in a knock-down/drag-out about the relative morality of Buffy’s vision of vampires and Twilight’s vision of vampires. It’s been pretty enjoyable, so I thought I’d highlight it in a post. My comments are in italics; Charles is in plain text.
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Noah: This is a way in which Twilight is much superior to Buffy, I think. Twilight vampires can choose good or evil just like the rest of us. Most of them choose evil because they need to drink blood and they’re very powerful, but it doesn’t have to be that way, as Carlisle and his family show.

This complicates the criticism that Bella should kill vampires the way Buffy does too. Vampires have souls in Twilight; killing them is as morally repugnant as killing people. Of course, they’re mass murderers too, many of them…but extrajudicial killing even of murderers is not morally neutral.
 
Charles:I think the veggie vampire idea is pretty dumb, too, certainly worse than Buffy’s problems. They’re a master race who are expected to treat us as equals. Yeah, bullshit. They might argue over whether they should breed us without legs and keep us in cages, though. If we were lucky, a Peter Singer would be turned. True Blood, as dumb as it is, is probably a more realistic depiction. They don’t eat us for pragmatic reasons, as a matter of realpolitik. We outnumber them and move about in the daylight (a problem that makes Twilight even dumber for getting rid of it).
 
Noah: I don’t really get your objection, Charles. You argue that they’re stupid because they’re not acting like a master race…but it’s you who is arguing that they’re a master race. That’s really not Meyer. She sees them as having souls. To the extent that the veggie vampires are better than us, it’s because they’re vegetarian. Suffering and renunciation makes you superior, not strength. I guess lots of people think that’s inherently stupider than realpolitik, but I strongly, strongly disagree.

Buffy raises theological issues (why are vampires hurt by crosses?) that it is completely unwilling to answer. Twilight is much more ready to confront them — by, for example, getting rid of the cross nonsense and talking explicitly about theology. Where Twilight’s world falls apart is not in the logic of the vampires per se, but with its secret world conceit. Vampires kill way too many people; either they would have been discovered, or else all of humanity would have been dead a long time ago. The mechanics just don’t work. (Buffy has this problem too…but it tends to get around it by just treating the whole thing as a joke. People just conveniently forget after they meet vampires, which is treated as a goof. This points to one of Buffy’s big strengths over Twilight, which is that the writing is much wittier and smarter on the microlevel, even if a lot of the big issue plotting is less thought through.)
 
Charles: By “soul”, I assume you mean a “conscience,” which we have, too, but if something’s deemed a lower form of life, we apply different rules. That’s why I think vegetarian vampirism is an inherently dumb idea, not necessarily the characters themselves for not eating humans. Basically, it’s a fantasy that power has no effect on beliefs. That’s pure bullshit.

I don’t see why masochism makes you more superior than strength. The former perfectly supports the latter.
 
Noah: No; by soul, Meyer means “soul”, not conscience. She’s a Christian. The two concepts aren’t reducible to each other. Buffy uses the former too; it just isn’t willing to think about what that means.

As for your comments on power — that’s just more realpolitik bullshit. Cynicism sneering at ideology by erasing its own deep commitment to its own ideology. If you think that’s sophisticated thinking, good on you I guess.

Meyer’s vision of renunciation and suffering is explicitly tied to love. Strength comes out of caring for others and for your family rather than from having super strength. Bella saves everyone she loves through nonviolence. Reducing that to masochism seems fairly myopic…but consistent with cynical realpolitik nonsense, sure.

It’s not a fantasy that power has no effect on beliefs. It’s a fantasy that human choices matter, and that power alone is not determinative of actions. For many of the vampires, power makes them cruel killers. Carlyle’s power, on the other hand, makes him a better man. It absolutely affects him; it just doesn’t have to make him a monster. If you reject that, you reject free will, and good and evil become meaningless. In that world, owning a gun means you’re inevitably going to start shooting your enemies in the head. I just don’t understand why that’s a complex or even remotely interesting moral vision.
 
Charles: Yes, of course Meyer believes in a soul, but who cares? Many power-mad people believe in a soul. My point to you was that you were setting it up as if it mattered to a godlike species with clearly superior power that they had a soul when it comes to how they’d treat us. What effect, if it’s not as a conscience, does having a soul have on them in that scenario? It would otherwise seem completely useless. Now, granting that (which you do with your talk of a free will), what’s the chance that a master species who needs us as food would treat us better than we treat chickens and cows or even indigenous populations of the past? It’s a fantasy about power, essentially worshipping it — submission, or what you seem to favorably call suffering and renunciation. I’d suggest that the only way the rights of humans would be recognized is through resistance. Unless, of course, you’re lucky enough to be turned. Even better if you’re turned by the good vampires, who keep their good old fashioned humanistic values, so none of this matters much to the silly narrative.
 
Noah: Human beings’ relationships with each other are often horrible, but it simply is not universally true that human cultures always in every instance treat neighboring cultures with less power as chickens. It’s not true that everyone with a gun always in every case shoots everyone who doesn’t have one. Suggesting that they do is knee-jerk cynicism. It just further justifies me in my long-held belief that at its heart realpolitik is deeply naive.

Maybe this confusion is because you haven’t read the books, but…it’s not the humans who submit and renounce. It’s Carlyle and his coven. The book doesn’t worship or idolize power (or, you know, not especially on the scale of pop culture.) On the contrary, it’s unusually committed to pacifism and resolving conflicts peacefully. Its moral center is occupied by a group which specifically renounces violence and bloodshed. Bella’s triumph is in forcing the vampires to resolve their problems peacefully. That’s fairly unusual by the standards of pop narrative, and I think meaningful (though not exactly logical.)

Part of your problem is that you want the vampires to be treated as a strictly materialist other race. Meyer doesn’t do that. The vampires are, among other things, angels; being transformed is a utopian dream of becoming perfected, where perfected means not just more powerful, but also more good, and less willing to use that power (also, and not coincidentally, it means becoming more egalitarian in terms of gender roles.)

Oh, and having a soul. Soul is really not a concept that can be reduced to material or psychological explanations; if it were, you wouldn’t need or use the concept at all. Lots of people with souls don’t have consciences; whether you can have a conscience without a soul is an interesting theological issue that I’m not up to parsing. Anyway, the point is that the soul is as much about your moral standing as it is about your actions, and as much about your relationship with god as with other people. You comment that lots of people who believe in souls act badly doesn’t actually have anything to do with the conversation, as far as I can tell. As Joy says, the point is that in the moral universe of Buffy, the vampires have no standing. In Twilight they do. That creates a very different ethical world.

That ethical world is not always thought through very clearly, and as John notes the banal wish fulfillment and the spiritual vision (not to mention sheer cluelessness) get in each other’s way to no small extent. But getting mad at it because it doesn’t embrace pragmatism seems really misguided. There are a lot of things that are silly about Twilight, but its failure to adopt the ethics and outlook of Richard Nixon is simply not one of them.
 
Charles:

it’s not the humans who submit and renounce. It’s Carlyle and his coven. The book doesn’t worship or idolize power (or, you know, not especially on the scale of pop culture.) On the contrary, it’s unusually committed to pacifism and resolving conflicts peacefully. Its moral center is occupied by a group which specifically renounces violence and bloodshed.

I’m not mad at it for being a fantasy like the unrealistic ones Joy is calling for. I’m not mad at all, in fact. I just don’t see it as any more plausible than the Buffyverse. It is, if anything, a step backwards. The only reason the humans don’t have to make the choice between resistance (as in Buffy to some degree) or submission is precisely because the good Twilight vampires choose to renounce their superiority. Basically, your defense is that it’s moral for the good guys to have power. How is that different from a Nixonian worldview? We avoid war because of a show of power against others who have power. Everyone is afraid of too many casualties on their respective sides. There’s your peace. Where we differ is that I find it highly implausible to draw any moral lesson from the narrative, since it relies on the assumption/hope/wish fulfillment that in the case of asymmetrical power, there will be a significant enough resistance against the biological and cultural order of things, “renunciation” of their status, from the haves to save the have-nots. Sure, there were admirable and highly moral people who recognized the rights of the redskins back before America was a country, but look how that turned out. If you insist on drawing a realworld moral analogy, then it fails miserably.

Regarding the soul, no, we don’t need the concept at all, but since we’re granting the supernatural worlds of these fantasies: Buffy and Twilight don’t much differ on their views. It’s the soul that functions to give an agent the ability to care about humans. Since Buffy’s vamps don’t have souls, it makes the human response more obvious: resist. With Twilight, since the vamps have souls, we have reason to question whether they might share some of our values. Okay, then deal with that. How should we react to them? Trust that enough of them are decent folk who’ll resist their biological urge and their superior power, or prepare for the possibility that they might just give in. Would angels, demons and vampires really be held to same morality as humans? More importantly, would such beings think that the same moral obligations obtain to their status? Meyer just assumes this to be case. I don’t, but I’m not a Christian.

What’s better about Buffy’s supernaturalism is that it doesn’t much trust in its inherent potential for goodness (I agree that all of these stories are inconsistent). It’s more skeptical of beings with great power. Angel was even more explicit regarding this, but essentially the powers-that-be weren’t obviously humanistic, like the good vampires of Twilight. And look at the guilt experienced by Angel, living off of rats, hiding from everyone for years, feeling remorse for what he did without a soul versus Edward who only fed on bad guys. Meyer really wants to believe in the goodness of power, so much so that she stacks the deck. That way, we don’t have to feel so bad about identifying with a vampire. Why would nonhumans be humanistic? That’s all fanciful nonsense. Fine by me, as long as you treat it as pure fantasy without drawing any realworld morality from it.
 
Noah: Charles, Twilight isn’t about a balance of power being the only way to create peace. Carlyle and his coven choose peace with humans because they believe it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re afraid of humans.

The difference between Buffy and Twilight is that Buffy arbitrarily decides that it’s bad guys are outside the moral order. It says that our enemies don’t have souls. I think that’s pretty profoundly different from saying that yes, your enemies are also people, even if they look and act very differently from you.

Both Buffy and Twilight are pretty into power. It’s a hard thing to escape in pulp narratives. I mean, can you think of any adventure narratives that unequivocally separate power and goodness? Twilight doesn’t do it entirely, but Carlyle is the book’s moral center, and the reason he is the moral center is not because he’s the best fighter or the most powerful (like Superman or Buffy) but because he chooses to go against his nature and not kill. He makes treaties with the wolves when he can; he doesn’t kill humans; he makes treaties with other vampires when he can.

You’re objection really is based on your insistence that (a) vampires aren’t human, and (b) the powerful will always prey on the weak. Twilight rejects both of those assumptions, the first because it believes that creatures with souls are creatures with souls and the second because it believes that creatures with souls have the ability to make moral choices. Again, I find those contentions entirely reasonable ethical descriptions, much more so than a naive mapping of Darwinism onto social interactions. You really think you need to be Christian to think that people who look differently from you might have some kind of moral standing?

Twilight’s commitment to the idea that people who look and behave differently from each other are still people is why it’s surprisingly queer friendly, by the by. Much more so than Hunger Games, though not more than Buffy, largely because Buffy’s desouling of the vampires isn’t grounded in any particular ideology — it’s just a convenient plot point. The show doesn’t really believe in it, so it doesn’t ever really work through the genocidal ethical implications consistently.
 
Charles:

Carlyle and his coven choose peace with humans because they believe it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re afraid of humans.

The balance of power is their acting on the behalf of humans against the bad vampires. They behave with human morality. That’s why they’re good, which brings me to:

Twilight’s commitment to the idea that people who look and behave differently from each other are still people is why it’s surprisingly queer friendly, by the by.

This is like those Christian de-queering camps, right? Love the gay as long as he behaves like you do. That’s not a celebration of difference. Good vampires are the humanistic ones who act against their kind.

You’re objection really is based on your insistence that (a) vampires aren’t human, and (b) the powerful will always prey on the weak. Twilight rejects both of those assumptions, the first because it believes that creatures with souls are creatures with souls and the second because it believes that creatures with souls have the ability to make moral choices.

Vampires are genetically different. I’m not sure why possessing a soul makes them the same as us. They’re beings of a different order, just like angels. They don’t have to face their mortality for one and need us as food for another. It’s simpleminded to assume they wouldn’t come up with a different morality. While it’s true that I’m not very trusting of power, my objection here has more to do with your belief that a carnivore is being moral only by not being a carnivore. Rather than address this potential conflict of moral systems, Twilight circumvents it with the fantasy of good vampires who’ll save us. Again, True Blood thinks this through a lot better than Twilight.

You really think you need to be Christian to think that people who look differently from you might have some kind of moral standing?

Quite the opposite.

Noah: The werewolves can’t act like us; they change into werewolves. Twilight is happy with people acting very differently as long as they don’t kill each other. It’s quite queer friendly, and not in a Christian gays-must-be-like-us-way. It’s less so than Buffy, which has actual gay characters and is definitely pro-queer, but much more so than Hunger Games, which peddles gay stereotypes with enthusiasm and equates gayness with decadence and evil.

Vampires aren’t genetically different. They don’t exist; they’re magic. They’re not carnivores unless they want to be, much like humans. It just seems silly to me to insist that any fantasy that doesn’t ascribe to materialist fantasies about the universal applicability of Darwinism to social situations is necessarily simplistic.

Also, relativism is not necessarily a more complex or thoughtful moral stand. Murder is wrong; I’m willing to go with that cross-culturally, thanks, even if it means that Aztec culture was really kind of fucked up.

C.S. Lewis has some really thoughtful things to say about why creatures who are intelligent and have souls are all much more alike than they are different in the first book of his space trilogy. And I believe that applies to angels for him too; angels aren’t different than us in the sense that we have nothing to do with them, so much as they’re different from us because they’re what we could be, or can aspire to. In any case, angels, humans, non-humans — we’re all part of the same moral world.

Which I really like about Twilight. There are just a lot of fantasy series, from LOTR to Buffy to Priest and on and on, where villains are denied moral status. Body count films can be really fun, but they really do play into the logic of war and genocide in a way that makes their prevalence a little disturbing. I’m happy to have a major megasuccessful series that explicitly rejects that, and says instead that killing is killing, even when the enemy is terrifying and seems so different that you are tempted not to call them human.

I don’t really get where you see the good vampires fighting on behalf of the humans in Twilight? That’s not the plot at all. The good vampires and the bad vampires are at each other’s throats (as it were) for reason having to do with their own internal politics. They defend Bella, but that’s because she’s family, not because she’s a human. Carlyle doesn’t kill humans, and works as a doctor to help humans, but he doesn’t set himself up as a superhero running around defending random humans from vampires. It’s not a fantasy about superpowered people saving everyone, as in most superhero comics — and, indeed, at the end, all the vampires haven’t been killed, and humans aren’t all “saved”. At least, the books aren’t like that, and the movies I”ve seen don’t seem to be either…I’m not sure where you’re getting that?
 
Charles: As with the vampires, the most moral werewolf is the one obsessed with a human. Jacob is moral for deserting his pack. The good vamps and the good werewolves are brought together over protecting a human. There’s no more of a notion that vampire or werewolves might have moral status outside of being just like humans than there is in Buffy. The essential difference is that Buffy uses her powers to combat evil rather than compromise with it.

If vampires aren’t genetically different, then why does it matter if Bella is a human or vampire when giving birth? Why do vampires need human blood? Why do vampires sparkle in the sunlight? Etc.. The magic has genetic effects.

And I’m not really talking about moral relativism, but the new universal biological order that would occur with the introduction of a new species superior to us on the food chain. Is it relativistic to suggest some animals eat other animals and some eat plants, and that affects how they see the world? Is that an excuse for murder? ‘Murder’ would get redefined universally in such a situation. At least, a new definition would have to negotiated.

And isn’t a major part of the internal conflict of vampires over how they relate to humans? Regardless, the main characters and their story has a lot to do with the vampires that the audience is supposed to sympathize with helping/saving/protecting the main human the audience is supposed to identify with. The more you defend Carlyle, the more he sounds just like the majority of the people on the planet. The family is most important, and he’ll do what he has to protect them, but not much else. Yeah, he’s a decent fellow (from a human perspective, at least), but that’s a pretty average moral center.
 
Noah: Wait…I think there is some nonsense in Twilight where she babbles about genetic difference. I had repressed it because it was idiotic….

It’s supposed to be really difficult for vampires to give up blood. Carlisle was the only one who did it, and he’s attempting to prosletyze other vampires to do it as well, by persuasion rather than by fighting them. Renunciation, self-sacrifice, love, starting with family but including others. I don’t see why that’s a worse morality than, hey, my enemies are absolutely evil, so I should kill as many of them as I can.

It’s certainly true that the plot revolves around Bella to a ridiculous degree. But I don’t think it’s right to say that Jacob is more moral because he’s more focused on humans. He isn’t more focused on humans; he’s only focused on Bella. And I don’t know that the book really presents him as a moral paragon; he’s pretty clearly a horny teenager, not a moral paragon. The book certainly believes that peace is good and prejudice against others who are different is bad, but again, I’m not really seeing what’s wrong with that or why it’s particularly unrealistic. Again, I just don’t believe that pragmatism is either more moral or more realistic than other philosophical systems, and applying pragmatism to vampires and werewolves seems kind of ridiculous on its face.
 
Charles:

Renunciation, self-sacrifice, love, starting with family but including others. I don’t see why that’s a worse morality than, hey, my enemies are absolutely evil, so I should kill as many of them as I can.

I’ll give this one more go: Renunciation, sacrifice, etc. aren’t inherently good acts. They’re good if done for a good cause (cf., a gay renouncing his desire to be more like — and thereby more accepted by — his conservative Christian family). The vampires are evil unless they act like humans. That’s no different from the Buffyverse. Buffy uses her power to vanquish evil. If your enemies are really absolutely evil, then fighting them is a good act. Instead, Carlyle is attempting to make compromises with those who want to devour us humans. I’d suggest that extremism in defense of not being eaten is no vice.

And what is Carlyle if he’s not pragmatic? That’s the position your defending, not me.
 
Noah: Are you on crack? The pragmatic choice for Carlyle is to accept that he’s a vampire and eat people. He needs blood; he’s a different species (as you’ve said) — surely the Obama solution is to just try to eat as few people as possible and maybe not torture them before finishing them off. Instead, Carlisle renounces his power out of love and decides to suffer so that others won’t be killed. Again, I fail to see why that’s a compromised renunciation.

And one more time…the vampires don’t act like humans. I mean, there are superficial similarities, but they still do stuff like go hunting with their bare hands and play vampire baseball and have sex for weeks at a time and so on and so forth. They are not unqueer, in various ways. They are seen as good not as long as they act like humans, but as long as they don’t kill people. Which really seems reasonable to me.

An eye for an eye is still pragmatism. Even so, the claim that genocidal warfare is necessarily safer and less destructive than moderate efforts at peace is neither self-evident nor, as far as I can tell from human history, accurate. Buffy makes genocidal warfare the easy choice by making the enemy utterly inhuman and outside moral strictures. Meyer isn’t willing to do that in the same way. In the Buffyverse, vampires really can’t choose good. In Twilight, they could all potentially stop killing people if they wished. That doesn’t excuse them at all; on the contrary. But it means that killing them isn’t different than killing a human murderer. As I said, I think that that’s a significant, and welcome, difference.

Utilitarian Review 1/28/12

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On HU

In our Featured Archive Post, the mysterious cough syrup celebrates the work of Jason Overby.

I sneer at the saccharine atrocity that is the new muppet movie.

Tom Gill on a classic Tsuge manga.

Tom follows up with a discussion of Tsuge and the zen concept of evaporation.

I argue that sci-fi and fantasy takes on race need to be more aware of history.

Qiana Whitted discusses African-American literature and African-American classics the comic.

Joy DeLyria on good and evil in Buffy, Battlestar Galactica, and sci-fi/fantasy.

I put up a black and white gospel download mix.

Ng Suat Tong on Olivier Schrauwen’s The Man Who Grew His Beard.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I review Tim Wise’s new book Dear White People and disagree with him about Ron Paul.

At his blog Bert Stabler and I chat about academic Marxists.

At Splice again I argue that Newt Gingrich is good for no one.
 
Other Links

Elias Hiebert has a nice reply to my discussion of Crumb and blackface.

Jason Thompson has a massive essay at io9 about the collapsing manga industry.

Qiana has a post at her new blog about blackness in EC monster comics.

Rand Paul on the idiocy of airport security.

Matthias Wievel at tcj.com on the new Fanta Carl Barks collection.

Best Music Writing is now taking nominations for its 2012 anthology.
 

Tom Gill on Tsuge and Evaporation

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In comments to his post on Tsuge, Tom Gill has a lengthy discussion of Tsuge’s relationship to the zen concept of evaporation. I thought I’d reprint it below.

Dear Domingos,

You ask: Do you think that the fish going away is a symbol of what Tsuge calls “evaporation”?

The short answer to your question is “yes indeed.” Evaporation, or jôhatsu in Japanese, is an important cultural trope in Japan. Certainly it relates to the Zen Buddhist idealization of “nothingness” (mu), which is discussed at some length in the interview you cite (originally in Japanese, translated into French). To disappear, to become nothing: that is the dream of Zen thinkers. In Tsuge’s works, (1) death, (2) escape, (3) enlightenment, (4) laziness/irresponsibility, are intertwined concepts. To evaporate is to die, to escape from responsibility, to disappear to a perhaps more enlightened elsewhere. As well as the philosophical/religious aspect of this metaphor there is also a political/sociological one. Tsuge’s semi-autobiographical heroes reject the materialism of mainstream society, or simply cannot relate to it. To be lazy, to refuse/fail to conform to the socially sanctioned image of the “salaryman” is a kind of statement, aligning one with a romantic, escapist, world-renouncing strand in Japanese culture. I discuss it as a masculine fantasy in a paper I published a few years ago: When Pillars Evaporate: Structuring Masculinity on the Japanese Margins.

Here I oppose the concept of evaporation/jôhatsu to that of the great pillar, or daikoku-bashira, which means both the central pillar supporting a house and a man who is the economic supporter of the household. I stumbled upon this theme while studying Japanese day labourers, the topic of my 2001 book from SUNY Press, Men of Uncertainty. This is why I am interested in Tsuge: he is a kind of hero of the jôhatsu side of Japanese culture. His comics, and also his essays, would no doubt appeal to the more thoughtful day labourer. It may be a translator’s little joke, but the prize-winning memoir of a day labourer, San’ya Gakeppuchi Nikki (A Diary of Life on the Brink in San’ya [a slum district of Tokyo]) was rendered into English as A Man with No Talents – essentially the same title as Tsuge’s book-length manga Munô na Hito, translated into French as L’Homme sans talent. The author of that book is totally anonymous, using the pseudonym Ôyama Shiro, and shuns publicity as Tsuge does.

What I am trying to say is that though Tsuge Yoshiharu is a unique artist/autor, he did not spring out of thin air. He is rooted in a strong tradition of world-renouncing, foot-loose, romantic losers. Like Tsuge and his fictionalized protagonists, day labourers traditionally drift from town to town, stay in the cheapest possible inns, and have no clear idea of their future. The Tsuge protagonist is described as a tramp or vagabond (clochard) in the interview you cite, probably a translation of “furôsha” – day labourers are frequently described similarly. Here is a short extract from my paper, which may be relevant to this discussion. In it I discuss what happens when older day labourers give up the struggle to make a living out of manual labour and apply for welfare.

getting welfare does inevitably affect one’s personal identity. Solitary day laborers have already abandoned or rejected the image of the daikoku-bashira as a man supporting a household; once they apply for welfare, they effectively admit that they cannot even support themselves.… Thus themes of strength and weakness, independence and dependence, mobility and immobility, twine themselves around the day laborer’s career and changing identity.

Protean Passivity at the Margins
These ambiguities are expressed in some of the language associated with day laboring. They often describe themselves as having “drifted” (nagareru) into the doya-gai (skid-row district), a term that elegantly combines the concepts of mobility and passivity. The imagery surrounding these drifting day laborers is often liquid and piscine. They are called ‘angler-fish’ (ankô) as they wait on the seabed of society for a job to come along. They may be caught in abusive labor camps called ‘octopus traps’ (tako-beya). When a man is mugged while sleeping in the street they call the incident a ‘tuna’ (maguro), likening the victim to a tuna helpless on a sushi chef’s chopping board. Day laborers who fail to get a job say they have ‘overflowed’ from the market (abureru); if depressed they may ‘drown themselves’ (oboreru) in vice; and when troubles appear insurmountable, they may disappear overnight, or as they put it, ‘evaporate’ (jôhatsu suru).

So Tsuge’s little fish comes from a strong cultural tradition in which fish and their environment are metaphors for the human condition. Consider also Tsuge’s salamander, and the floating fetus, in my previous contribution to the Hooded Utilitarian.

In the interview you cite, Tsuge describes a particularly literal and personal case of “evaporation” – when he decided to leave Tokyo, abandon his entire life, taking a train to Kyushu where he hopes to marry and settle down with a female fan of his work whom he has never met. (It is interesting to note that where male escape fantasies often include leaving one’s wife and family, for Tsuge married life is part of his post-evaporation scenario. Loneliness and desire are always in the mix for Tsuge.) He goes through numerous distractions, and actively considers marrying a couple of other women he meets on the way, but in the end he gives up and returns to Tokyo. The adventure is described in one of his essays, “Diary of an Evaporation Journey” (“Jôhatsu Tabi Nikki”), written in 1969, published in Yakô (Night Journey) magazine in 1981, and republished in his 1991 collection, Records of a Poor Man’s Travels (Hinkon Ryokôki)

He discusses it in the interview you cite, alluding to the final line, in which he states that he is now married with a kid, but feels that maybe this is his evaporated self. The implication seems to be that we cannot necessarily distinguish between the life we think we are actually living and those that we think we are merely imagining.

Anyway… yes, there is a desire expressed in the Nishibeta story to be like that little fish in the final frame, to swim away, down the river, destination unknown. Have you ever felt like doing that?

You can read all HU posts on Tsuge here.

Review: The Man Who Grew His Beard

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The Man Who Grew His Beard is a somewhat unexpected offering from Fantagraphics, a publisher known for its broad interests in classic American and European reprints, grungy undergrounds, “reality-based” dramas, and autobiography. The chief aspect which surprises in this anthology of stories by Olivier Schrauwen is its deeply entrenched formalism. Perhaps the closest thing to it in the Fantagraphics catologue might be Kevin Huizenga’s periodic forays into formal playfulness in Ganges, but even here the mood is much closer and more empathetic; not so much the arm’s length mental instability that can be found in Schrauwen’s narratives.

Schrauwen’s stories demand a certain degree of rereading, a flipping back and forth between pages and stories to decipher the playful code keys elaborating on the language of comics — the cartooning short hand, the persistent thematic fixtures and their variations. The story “Hair Styles”, for example, gives us a 6 fold division of grooming which is then further subdivided into a kind of follicular phrenology — a visual depiction of a kind of cartooning determinism where form dictates function.

Thus, a character with “crazy hair” ultimately acts in a wild and disinhibited manner before being put in his place.

 

In contrast, the taxonomist among these practitioners is singled out for effusive praise by a bespectacled onlooker (one presumes an analogue for that species of writer now known as the comics critic).

The besuited illustrators are very far from the general conception of cartoonists and take on the semblance of academicians in a drawing room. The task at hand (the aforementioned taxonomy of cartooning hairstyles) and the nature of their dressing are intentionally incongruous. On the one hand, the story could be seen as mere playful nonsense. On the other, a wry comment on rigid or fanciful cartooning systems; a gentle poke in the ribs for those taken with definitions and categorizations, a reminder of the medium’s humble roots.

The rest of Schrauwen’s stories suggest that this is as much self-criticism as a humorous review of cartooning practices, for much of the work in this collection has a jaunty yet “high-minded” tone. This attitude is carried over to Schrauwen’s next story, “The Assignment”, where the participants are now challenged to create a story featuring a cat, a table, a bottle of milk, a mouse, a piece of cheese, and Mr. Peters.

 

Part of this is a transposition of Mattioli’s Squeak the Mouse which is itself derived from Tom and Jerry. The final drawing of a dead cat is deemed unacceptable by the instructor-critic whereupon a graphic dissection of everything that has preceded this point is carried out — the gradual peeling back of the layers of skin and intestine of a dead cat to reveal a point of origin.

 

This codifying and deciphering of different realities is seen again in the story “Outside/Inside” which presents us first with the physical interactions of Schrauwen’s familiar bearded protagonist before proceeding to the multi-colored ramblings of a deranged mind to explain everything that has gone on before.

 ___

This motif is recalled in the penultimate story in this collection, “The Imaginist”, where the shadowy hues and lines capturing the broken, shriveled body of humble reality are juxtaposed with the kaleidoscope of hues which make up a stroke victim’s imaginary world. In all of these tales, there is the suggestion that there is nothing quite so shabby as reality.

These exercises are diverting but fall short when compared to the first story in Schrauwen’s collection (the wordless “Chroma Congo”) where the barriers are flexible, mutable, and barely discernible; a world perched precariously on the edge of dreams and the fantasies of Leopold II (who appears again as a mystical talisman in “The Imaginist”).

 ___

The protagonist (that familiar bearded figure again) is sensitive yet solitary, compassionate yet complicit. His rotting mind is conjured up in an ant-ridden slab of Belgian chocolate, the over-sized bilious faces, and the stunted monstrosities which inhabit the African landscape. It will come as no surprise that Schrauwen’s work has been compared to that of Winsor McCay (the colors, the permissive attitude towards perspective and proportion) both in reviews and in his publicity material.

The chromatic shakiness — that disavowal of shadow in favor of bright, light pastels — recalls Herge’s Tintin, the riverboats which stream before our eyes, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. There is not one glimpse of an actual African. This world of menacing hippos, screaming monkeys, and rifle safaris seems a silent comment on the validity of Conrad’s vision of a dark continent of swaying “scarlet bodies” wearing mangy skin[s] with pendent tail[s], shouting “periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language”, “like the responses of some satanic litany”.

 ___

All of this far away from that semblance of normality (the Belgian sausages and cold beers at sundown) and civilization built on the banks of the Congo as seen in the final pages of the story.

 The Royal Belgian Express “heading for its damnation”, the tracks seeming “to lead right into the hole of a giant witch.”

Further Reading

A review by Bart Croonenborghs

A review by John Dermot Woods at Faster Times

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs — The Old Gospel Ship

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A white and black gospel mix; download The Old Gospel Ship.

1. The Old Gospel Ship — Ruby Vass
2. Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord) — Johnny Cash and Anita Carter
3. Green Pastures — Emmylou Harris and Ricky Skaggs
4. Touch the Hem of His Garment — Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers
5. Working on a Building — The Swan Silvertones
6. A Voice From On High — Stanley Brothers
7. Wreck on the Highway — Roy Acuff
8. He Will Set Your Fields on Fire — Kitty Wells
9. John the Revelator — Blind Willie Johnson and unknown female singer
10. Sinner Man — Sensational Nightingales
11. You’ve Got to Move — The Two Gospel Keys
12. Hammer and Nails — Staple Singers
13. O Death (Death in the Morning) — Marion Williams
14. A Conversation With Death — Lloyd Chandler
15. No Disappointment in Heaven — Bob Wills
16. Get Down On Your Knees and Pray — Del McCoury Band
17. By and By (part 1) — Soul Stirrers with R.H. Harris
18. By and By (part 2) — Soul Stirrers with R. H. Harris
19. Didn’t It Rain — Ward Singers
20. What Would You Give (In Exchange for Your Soul) — Bill Monroe and Doc Watson