Monthly Archives: February 2012

Black Leather Corset of Dune

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This first appeared quite a while ago in the Chicago Reader.
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Porn is the genre fiction that dare not speak its name. When you think of genre, you tend to think of sci-fi, detective, horror, western, romance, or the like. Porn doesn’t make the list — instead, its set off in a box by itself, for special censure or (less often) praise. Yet, when you look closely, porn doesn’t really seem all that anomalous. Like other genre art, it’s broadly popular, has its own predictable tropes, and appeals primarily (though not exclusively) to one gender. Porn isn’t an absolute evil ruining our children, nor is it a liberating force releasing the power of our repressed sexuality. It’s just another marketing niche.

This isn’t meant as a sneer. On the contrary, once you stop thinking about porn as moral outrage or anthropological curiosity and start thinking of it as just another pulp genre, it’s a lot easier to see its virtues and, for that matter, to put its vices in context. Like other great genre narratives — Agatha Christie’s novels, say, or John Carpenter’s movies — good porn fulfills the most obvious expectations in surprising ways while veering vertiginously between extreme technical competence and grungy amateurism. Most of all, porn, like pulp, is studiously uninterested in good taste, which means that the best examples have an energy and an imagination hard to duplicate in more sedate forms.

There’s certainly nothing sedate about Patrick Conlon and Michael Manning’s Tranceptor comic book series. The titular (in various ways) Tranceptors are a kind of female dominatrix priesthood who ride through a post-apocalyptic landscape in carriages pulled by buxom leather-clad fetish horse-girls and/or well-hung leather-clad fetish horse boys. Our heroine (called simply Tranceptor) has inventively intimate encounters with her horse-girls (chains, water, lather, various attachments), with another Tranceptor named Ravanna, and with Hyu, the cute station sub-groom who looks decidedly underage. Most spectacularly, the Tranceptor is raped by Ravanna’s pal, a disgusting mutant-lizard thing named Sslthsss. (There is no apparent lasting physical or psychological damage — the Tranceptors are a tough bunch.)

This is all trashy, stylish good fun. Conlon’s a tattoo artist, and he and Manning have that testosterone swagger down cold — the first Tranceptor volume, for example, opens with a tour de force of faux noir, sensual solid black shadows and stark whites washing over piles of fetish gear and a voluptuously writhing sleeping female form, complete with obligatory ass shots and nipple eruptions. The cynically exploitative surface flash is certainly part of the charm — but it isn’t the only thing going on, either.

Like all pulp, porn tends to cross-pollinate with other genres. The sci-fi/sex fertilization has been particularly intense. *Heavy Metal* is an obvious touchstone, but a big part of the avant-garde sf movement from the seventies on has involved explicit erotica. Writers like Samuel R. Delaney and John Varley lovingly fetishize gender transformation and interspecies intercourse — and include a fair bit of explicit sex. One paradigmatic example, Piers Anthony’s semi-masterpiece “The Barn,” features an alternate universe where some human beings are deliberately brain-damaged and then placed in barns where they are bred and milked like cattle. Our dimension-hopping protagonist gets to offer his services as stud as the story boldly explores the realm where “controversial and brave” slides right into “surreptitious stroke material.”

What’s especially enjoyable about Tranceptor is that, while it is in many ways heir to this tradition, it is much more comfortable with its pulp status than its highbrow predecessors. Delaney uses his forays into porn in a contradictory (but hardly unique) effort to cement his bona fides as a highbrow artist. Piers Anthony is a bit more confused — but it is certainly clear that he is conflicted about his status as pornographer. That’s not all to the bad — the intense anxiety of “The Barn” is part of what gives it its squicky charge. But there is also something to be said for being on top of your shit. Conlon and Manning’s perversion isn’t so much fraught as it is enthusiastically delectable. Probably the best image in the comic is a panel of Sslthsss, arms and legs wrapped around a structural beam, head resting on his hands, as he watches his mistress below him suck off one of her horse boys. The lizard-thing looks like a happy cat, thoroughly entertained. And to complete the picture, he’s got one of the station men named Raika tied up and dangling from his tail, and his outsized member is dripping cum on the poor guy’s head.

In high-brow sf — or for that matter, in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s historical/porn/literary hybrid comic *Lost Girls* — this sort of perversity tends to serve as a labored allegory of freedom, mutability, or desire. It’s the pulpy goodness about which the highbrow wax nostalgically literary — as when Moore, for example, laboriously leads his characters into a roomful of costumes in order to drive home the joys of role-playing. In *Tranceptor*, on the other hand, the perversion is weighted, not by exegesis, but by pulp tropes. For example the Tranceptors are treated like typical mysterious sci-fi matriarch — say one of the Bene Gesserit from *Dune*. In this context, when the seated Ravanna reaches into Raika’s pants and casually pulls out his penis, it comes across as both funny and weirdly transgressive — especially since Sslthsss is holding his arms so he can’t escape. Over the following two-page hand-job, Conlon and Manning use a range of hysterically intricate motion lines to show her finger motions, while all the time she natters on like a typical scheming villainess.

The last panel of the sequence, in which we are looking down at Ravanna from Raika’s viewpoint as she looks up at him — is a blend of dominant and submissive fantasies bound up with genre clichés into one supremely sexy package.

In Michael Manning’s Spidergarden series, moments like this are woven together in a seamless whole, creating a world in which gender, sexuality, and identity flow and break down in a humid orgy of paranoia and soap-opera romance. Tranceptor hasn’t yet quite reached those heights, though their are hints that it might. Most promising is the series obsessive doubling. The second issue is split between the scenes with the Tranceptor (so bright they almost seem washed out) and those with Ravanna (very dark, with half-toned greys against solid black backgrounds and the shadowy Sslthsss lurking in the background.) The dark/light binary is mirrored and extended by others; there are two identical horse girls, two identical horse boys, two Tranceptors, two young men taken from the station (Raika by Ravanna, Hyu by the Tranceptor.) Where all this is leading isn’t exactly clear at this point in the series. But good vs. evil and blatantly contrasting nemeses are tried and true genre devices — and a genre device is, really, just another name for a particular cathexes of possibility and desire. In this sense, porn isn’t just a genre: it’s the genre. No wonder Conlon and Manning are able to make such perfect pulp out of it.

Gluey Tart: This Night’s Everything

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Akira Minazuki, 2011, June

 
I love this cover. Love it. Minazuki’s style really does it for me because it’s sort of realistic (I said sort of), understated, and charmingly awkward. Not hugely awkward – charmingly. I insist. Minazuki also did Tonight’s Take-Out Night,” which I loved (you can tell because I still remember it, which rarely happens in a months-later kind of way). I’ve also seen a scanlation of another of her stories (about a shinigami) that I loved as well. So we’re four stars solid behind Akira Minazuki.

Her story lines aren’t quite typical, and her characterizations include the subtle details that allow you to jump fully into the story. What could be better than a death god, you might ask? I’ll tell you. Assassins. Assassins trump everything else, especially if they assassinate in sharp, mod-cut suits and use swords. Swords, people. (Some of you might remember my admitted fondness-shading-toward-obsession for assassins of the sword-wielding, brooding headcase variety, a.k.a. Aya in Weiss Kruez. Most of you have no idea what the hell Weiss Kruez is, of course, and while that makes me sad, I’ve come to accept it.)

There was some kind of war in the immediate prehistory of this book, which somehow included individuals fighting on their own with swords (or so it appears in the flashbacks), and some of those lone fighters were recruited to guard the Professor, about whom we know little except that he must have won, since he now runs this large organization of bodyguards and assassins who clear the Professor’s path or some such fascistic euphemism. Nanao has been with the group for ten years and hides his pain behind the refrigerator – I mean, behind a façade of good humor and easy charm.

And we have Aoi, whose name I can remember, although that’s only because I keep thinking it’s “Aioli.” I don’t like mayonnaise, though, even fancy French mayonnaise with garlic in it. Whipping oil and raw eggs together until they’re gelatinous and slimy strikes me as a deeply perverse thing to do. Also, Aoi is a lot of vowels. As an English speaker, all those vowels without the calming influence of a consonant seems to be asking for trouble. At any rate, Aoi shows up, a 19-year-old recruit who takes himself very, very seriously and gets paired with Nanao, who keeps getting his partners killed. Oops. Ha ha!

This starts out as a genre I think of as friendship porn. There is close camaraderie, there is banter, there is some thawing of the quiet, stoic, uptight, enigmatic dude (known in the business as the QSUED, he makes absurd proclamations like “How can hands that kill people show any concern?”) brought about by the largely unflagging cheer, flouting of rules and decorum, and casual flirting of the other guy (or the OG, who says things like, “A little resistance makes it hot, right?”). The OG makes it clear he likes the QSUED, even though he’s haughty and hard to deal with, and the QSUED makes it clear he is brooding and enigmatic and we aren’t going to find out what the hell he might or might not think. The key is that the QSUED would never let the OG take the liberties he does with the QSUED’s dignified person if he didn’t really care about the OG. At some point he graces the OG with a small, enigmatic smile, so you know that deep down, he does have feelings. AWWW!

As is so often the case, this creator has some odd ideas about courtship. Nanao returns from an assassination, blood splashed across his face, eyes wild, and climbs on top of a horrified Aoi. Nanao explains that the killing gets him hot and Aoi just needs to help him get off. Perfectly reasonable, right? Aoi manages to slow things down by almost biting off the two fingers Nanao has stuck in his mouth, and soon Nanao figures out the Aoi is a virgin. He puts this together with a previous observation that Aoi’s sword is unnicked and determines that Aoi isn’t really a soldier, like he is, and wonders, “What kind of mistake got him tied up in this?”

Having decided that Aoi is essentially pure and untouched, Nanao decides to keep him that way. Years into their partnership, we find out that Nanao has delivered all the killing blows, sparing Aoi that loss of innocence. (I would call this splitting hairs, but it makes all the difference to Nanao.) Now, I don’t know about y’all, but I find all this very romantic.

After years of being an assassin, Aoi eventually, as you might expect, has to kill someone. It is impressively bloody and dramatic, and Aoi completely falls apart. Now, again, I’m not entirely sure I’m sold on this aspect of the characterization, since this guy’s been helping Nanao take people down for years, and I’d think he might have gotten over the whole thing a little. But never mind. It’s fine because it finally gets our boys together in an emotionally and physically intimate way. I love the way all this is drawn, by the way. Nanao is giving Aoi his first blow job (or his first anything), and here’s Aoi:

Ohhhhh!!!!!! Angsty!!!!!! Now we finally get the sex scene we’ve building up to for about 87 pages (give or take a splash page). It’s angsty as well, but also tender. And hot. Totally worth the wait, if not for the actual sex, then for the morning after, when Aoi finally spills his secret.

Now this sets some shit in motion. Nanao goes off to take care of things for Aoi, and it’s a big-time sweep-him-off-his-feet gesture. It changes everything and sets their murky organization after Nanao’s head. Things happen, other things happen, Aoi gives in to the inevitable “love him need him gotta have him for my own” revelation we all saw coming from page one (especially if we happened to look at the cover), and the sailing off into the sunset of yaoi bliss thing is even handled in a sort of dangerous, edgy way that I found deeply pleasing. Possibly thrilling, in, you know, a kind of subdued way.

I very seldom get all directive on you, the reader (in part because I’m not entirely convinced there will be any readers), but in this case I’m telling you, seriously, check this out. Will you love it if you don’t love assassins? I can’t say because I don’t understand people who don’t love assassins and therefore have no idea what they might find pleasing. Mayonnaise, probably.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman Chronicles volume 1

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I just finished DC’s Wonder Woman Chronicles volume 1, which collects Wonder Woman’s appearances in chronological order. This first volume collects Wonder Woman’s first appearance in All-Star Comics 8 (December 1941-January 1942) through Sensation Comics no. 9 in September 1942, and also includes Wonder Woman number 1.

I’ve already talked about several of these comics in the Bound to Blog series (for example, I talk about Wonder Woman #1 here, and Sensation Comics #1 here.) But there are a couple of things that struck me while reading the collection as a whole.

No Intro

There’s absolutely no introductory material at all, unless you count a small note in the table of contents that says, “The comics reprinted in this volume were produced in a time when racism played a larger role in society and popular culture, both consciously and unconsciously.” That is undeniably true

but still, it seems like there might be more to say. Who wrote these comics? Who drew them? How popular were they? What did people think of them? Why are we reprinting them?

Of course, the answer to the last question is basically, “because they are there,” and also, “Wonder Woman still has a fanbase, so if you stick her face on a cover, you can sell some copies, even if no one really thinks this material is particularly worthwhile — or, for that matter, thinks anything about it at all.”

Not that this is just about Wonder Woman. I’m sure DC’s other chronicles editions don’t have intros…the point is to make them as cheap as possible, I’m sure, in the hopes of selling to a not-especially-well-defined audience of WW fans, kids, and the curious or confused. But even the DC Wonder Woman Archive Edition (hard backed, more expensive, slightly more material) has an intro (by folk singer Judy Collins) that is more along the lines of an extended blurb than an actual effort to provide some context.

I’m sure some might say this is for the best — why have some professor get between the kids and their pop culture ephemera? The problem is that pop cultural ephemera is ephemera; if that’s what it is, why reprint it? And, indeed, DC’s various archival projects have tended to founder from lack of interest, being released at glacial speeds before instantly going out of print. Those boring professors, it turns out, are part of minimal cultural validation — and without that minimal validation, old pop cultural ephemera is largely irrelevant.

Steve Trevor, He-Man Convalescent

Steve Trevor appears on the very first page of Wonder Woman’s first story in All Star comics. In that debut appearance, he’s unconscious.

He then stays unconsious throughout the entire tale. He gets some moments of lucidity in flashback, but by the end of the story, he’s still conked out. It’s only in the 2nd WW tale (in Sensation Comics #1) that he comes to his senses. After that he’s in the hospital convalescing. He sneaks out when he learns of deadly danger to the country…but by the end of the comic, he’s back in bed again, with WW as Diana Prince (who changed places with his nurse…don’t ask) caring for him. Next issue he’s up and around, but by the end:

It’s only in Sensation Comics 3, the fourth WW story, that Steve Trevor escapes from the hospital, forcing Diana Prince to get a job not as his secretary, but as his boss’ secretary.

In other words, the ur-Steve Trevor, as Marston conceived of him, is not a fighter nor a love, but a hospital patient. The true Steve Trevor is the wounded — or, perhaps more accurately, infantilized — Steve Trevor.

In Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power, and Reistance, Gill Plain argues that:

War creates a situation in which the gender debate is subsumed by a meta-narrative of power. It represents a conflict that divorces and prioritises the division between activity and passivity from the founding binary opposition masculine/feminine. War almost represents itself as a constructive reinscription, or even a rejection of the age-old formulations of gender…. In the course of purusing the division between a non-gender-specific activity and passivity, woman is ‘decentered’… The woman has once again become invisible.

For Plain, then, war destabilizes gender by divorcing activity/passivity from gender — but in so doing, it erases women’s difference, and so erases women.

I think, though, Marston, radical feminist and dirty old coot, has found a way around this dilemma. He uses the destabilizing effect of war to create an emasculated hero — the wounded soldier, whose incapacity is the sign of his boldness and strength. But for Marston, the fact that passivity is disconnected from women does not result in ungendering. On the contrary, it becomes a masochistic fetish. Steve regresses, authority is upended…and patriarchy becomes matriarchy. Woman isn’t erased; she’s explicitly elevated as caregiver and (maternal) hero. Which is (in Marston) what men want:

That’s an awesomely, fluidly flaccid twisted leg Peter has drawn there — and Steve is, of course, explicitly getting off on his own castration. War for Marston isn’t a disaster so much as an opportunity for men to embrace their weakness…and let women take over.

Myself for a Rival

A number of the stories in this volume end with a panel like this

What’s interesting about this is that…that’s it. The trope is stated…and then dropped, over and over again. The love triangle is pointed at, but never really becomes central to the plot (the way it is with the Clark/Lois/Superman triangle, even in the early years to some extent.)

It seems like, for Marston, there’s a pleasure in the masquerade of changing identities, and a frisson in the unrequited melodrama…but very little interest in actually presenting either Diana or Wonder Woman as angst-ridden or, for that matter, weak. There’s almost a condescension about it, like she’s pretending she’s worried to make Stevie feel important, the little darling. As I’ve mentioned before, double identities in Wonder Woman feel more like play than agonized bifurcation, a polymorphous feminine role-play rather than an agonized Oedipal bifurcation. After Marston died, of course, Diana’s love vicissitudes move from marginal tease to major plot points. With Marston’s feminism removed, everybody seemed more comfortable with a passive object of desire, rather than with the all-powerful Mommy, stooping to love.

Adding Incompetence to Insult

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This originally appeared on Comixology.
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I’ve been following the When Fangirls Attack linkblog (Update: sadly largely defunct now.) recently. Among other things, it’s a good way to find out what moronic cheesecake schlock the big two have served up this week. I think there have been at least three prime slices of said cheesecake since I’ve been following the blog with some regularity, namely:


Cover of Blackest Night.

 


Cover of Marvel Divas

 


JLA: Cry for Justice

And, what the hell, here’s a blast from the past or two as well.

 

 

The thing is, I have no problem with cheesecake. I even like cheesecake. Anita the Swedish Nymphet? Japanese Vogue? Michael Manning’s fetish porn? Sure; I vote for all of those. Or for the classic pin-up art of Dan DeCarlo:

 
Or Jack Cole:
 

 
Or even Larry Elmore’s trashy fantasy illustration:
 

 
Yet, despite my general appreciation for the form (in various senses), I find super-heroine cheesecake irritating and often borderline offensive. Why is that?

I think there are a couple of reasons. In the first place, super-heroines are, you know, heroes. They’re supposed to have stuff to do, crime to fight, justice to uphold, and so forth. For Dan DeCarlo and Jack Cole, the woman are just there to stare at; they’re hot, hot hot. That’s the whole raison d’etre; there’s no effort to pretend that you care what these women think, or how they act, or whether they defeat the villain without falling out of their tops and being exposed to the vastness of space.

I guess there’s a school of thought which would argue that turning women into objects like this is bad. And (despite the strong demurral of a couple of my lesbian friends) I do think there’s something to that. But, on the other hand, if you’re going to have pictures of sexy women, and the pictures of sexy women are why you’re there, maybe it makes more sense to just admit that, and not disingenuously pretend that you’re interested in what’s going on in their heads. If you make it simply about visual stimulation, it’s simply about visual stimulation, and doesn’t have to have anything to do (or at least, not much to do) with real women. Once you start pretending that you’re talking about a smart, motivated, principled adventurer, on the other hand, you end up implying that said smart, motivated, principled, adventurer has an uncontrollable compulsion to dress like a space-tart on crack. Which is, it seems to me, insulting.

The second thing is that, if you must make your adventurer into a fetish object, it seems like the least you could do is make her tough. That outfit that Larry Elmore’s fantasy warrior is wearing above is clearly ridiculous, and not a whole lot more practical than Star Sapphire’s get-up. But, at the same time, Elmore’s warrior looks badass. She’s got a giant sword and she looks thoroughly pissed off. She’d cheerfully castrate you without a second thought. And that’s the way to go: if you’re going to do action-hero cheesecake, then bring on the masochism: get off both on how hot the action hero is, and on how thoroughly she can beat you black and blue. It’s feministsploitation; not feminism exactly, but a fetishization of feminism, and it makes some sense at least to the degree that the fetish clothing and the putative power of the character are coherently working together, both in that the power makes the character more sexy and in that that the clothing adds (not necessarily logically, but still) to the sense of the character’s potency.

This sometimes works for super-heroine cheesecake too (Frank Miller’s Catwoman is an example). But more often, you get images like those above, where Star Sapphire’s costume makes her look vulnerable, not tough…or the Marvel Divas cover, where everybody but Hellcat is making with the bedroom eyes, and the only threat is that Black Cat’s costume may pinch so tightly that she actually pops apart at the waist, causing everything from the torso up to go swooshing about like a deflating balloon.

Which brings us to the last and perhaps most important point. Super-heroine cheesecake is often offensive just because it’s so thoroughly incompetent. Star Sapphire’s costume, for example, goes right past sexy and on into ludicrous. For the Marvel Divas cover, the artist couldn’t even come up with more than one body type – and he can’t even draw the one he’s got. As I already intimated, Black Cat’s top and bottom look horribly mismatched; similarly, Hellcat seems to have borrowed her breasts from Giant Girl. All of them look like toys, not people. And that Justice League cover starring Supergirl’s chest…why would you even do that? How is it sexy to have a disembodied bosom flapping about your foreground? And as if that’s not bad enough, as Katie Moody says in comments on the Beat; the artist seems to have accidentally left out our heroine’s ribcage. Or maybe it’s deliberate; did Supergirl lose her skeletal structure during one of the post-Crisis reboots? I must admit I haven’t been following the continuity that closely….

In any case, the point is, you look at drawings by DeCarlo or Jack Cole or yes, even Larry Elmore and they get the proportions minimally right (Elmore’s barbarian’s breasts are big, but not that big); they select flattering clothes (DeCarlo’s dress with its va-va-voom horizontal stripes); they take the time to figure out fluid poses (Cole’s sophisticated lady arranged in classic curves upon the couch.) In short, the artists seem to care about women enough to have looked at one or two of them at some point.

Not that I’d argue that good art can’t be sexist; craft and talent aren’t everything, or even necessarily all that much, in these matters. But they are something. Even if you’re pandering, doing a professional job of it implies a certain minimal level of respect not only towards your audience, but towards your subject as well. You look at super-heroine cheesecake, and you get a sense of a boys’ locker-room cluelessness so intense that it is indistinguishable from disdain. Honest sensuality in these circumstances would be a relief. Sexism may be bad, but incompetent sexism is just intolerable.

Utilitarian Review 2/25/12

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On HU

In our Featured Archive post this week, Erica Friedman explains what’s the big deal about Sailor Moon.

I talk about rape, love, and Sally Jupiter from Watchmen.

Jones, One of the Jones Boys on the reactionary sexual morality of Garth Ennis’ Preacher.

Nadim Damluji on new Indian comics opposing the caste system.

Richard Cook looks at horror television and why The River is so bad.

Vom Marlowe on the cozy absurdity of Midsomer Murders.
 
Other Links

Kathryn Van Arendonk on whether television is still episodic.

Kristy Valenti on dick lit: Paying for It and Habibi.

A trailer for a new Wonder Woman documentary.
 

Who knew cottage gardens were such dangerous places? Midsomer Murders

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So I’ve spent most of January and February plagued with some kind of….plague.  It’s horrible, but it does mean I get to catch up on all the TV I’ve missed in the past couple decades.  I blew through New Tricks earlier, then I watched Murder in Suburbia (not bad, really, and I liked Ash, though I usually guessed who dunnit in the first ten minutes) and then, for reasons known only to itself, Netflix suggested I might like a garden gnome musical and I had to have a soothing lie down*.

When I came back, I was armed with another friend’s suggestion: Midsomer Murders.  Supposed to be the best acting evah.  Which actually it really kind of is.  John Nettles, who plays the lead detective, can do more with his eyebrow than most actors can do when chewing the scenery and screaming.

The basic premise of the show is this: DCI Tom Barnaby is a police detective in Midsomer, a pretend county in England that’s filled with picturesque but extremely violent villages.  Barnaby always has a sergeant or factotum.  In the early series, it’s Sergeant Troy, a handsome young man with even fewer brains than Barnaby.  I quite like Troy, even if he is rather homophobic and kind of a jerk at times, he’s very kind and has a good heart.  Troy eventually grows up to be his own detective and after five or so years, we get another sergeant, Dan Scott, who is a city-slicker lower-class modern-thinking twatwaffle.  Er.  Not that I dislike him or anything.  Fortunately, Scott is eventually replaced by a much nicer, quite brilliant extremely kind, canny, and earnest Ben Jones, who started as a beat cop and got drafted by Barnaby.

So a crime will happen and then Barnaby will show up with his assistant and begin detecting.  In between detecting (and sometimes during), we’ll occasionally get glimpses of Barnaby’s wife, Joyce, and adult daughter, Cully.  Joyce is a gourmand who can’t cook and has a passionate love of acting and art.  She’s got a kind heart and often is volunteering in various causes to save the world.  Cully is an actress, but she has a bit more of her dad’s practical streak.

The charm of this show is in the setting and characters, the absurd cottage cozy murder plots, and in the fine wordplay.  This is not a show to watch if you’re looking for realism in your motivations and villainy.  It’s not about that.  It’s also not about accurate police procedures–during most shows, Barnaby shows up to talk to important witnesses, who nearly always are:

  • Conveniently called away on the phone, by a visitor or relative, or realize they’re late for an appointment.  If I was the copper, I’d say, “Look, this is murder.  You can be late to the annual orchid grower society meeting.  Answer my questions fully or I’ll haul you to the nick.”  Barnaby nearly always lets them go, and they’re often killed before their next appointment with him.
  • Extremely shifty, to even the most oblivious eye.  “What were you doing on Tuesday the thirteenth at 7 pm?” Suspect’s eyes dart around the room, “At home.  Alone.  Watching telly.”  Does Barnaby ever ask what they were watching, to see if he can catch them in a lie?  No, he does not.
  • Basically barking mad.  (Practically everyone on the show is.)  “I couldn’t have been murdering anyone!  I was preparing for the annual bell-ringing competition and nothing can get in the way of that!”
  • Standing in their living rooms, in pub common rooms, or in the center of a church aisle, surrounded by other interested listeners.  It’s not unusual for him to question several people, in a group, at the same time.  “What were you doing on Tuesday the thirteenth at 7 pm?” he’ll ask the husband.  “We were watching telly together.  We had a quiet night in, didn’t we, dear?” says the wife.   And her husband will nod.  Even though the wife was out shagging the vicar and the husband was practicing skeet shooting.  Or murdering someone.  Only at the end of the show does Barnaby ever notice that this might not be the Best Interrogation Technique Evah. And since he asks the questions in public places, there’s always convenient eavesdroppers who can tattle to the village gossip or the local murderous fiend.  Or who are the local murderous fiend.

It doesn’t do great things for Barnaby’s detecting, but it does up the body count, which is part of the fun.

Most of these shows have a pile of corpses at the end.  A murderer will thwap someone to death with a shovel over a thousand year blood feud and then have to kill six other people to cover it up.  Nobody’s ever a serial killer, although there are occasionally people who suffer fits of hereditary madness which drives them to various Foul Deeds.

So I’ve burbled on about how silly the detecting is, but let me give a glimpse of the charm of the show (because honestly, it does have plenty of charm!).

So as not to spoil lots and lots of episodes, we’ll start with the pilot, which should give everyone a decent feel of the show.  It begins with two aged spinsters who compete to see who can find a Super Special Sekrit Orchid (I told you-flowers are dangerous!) in the local woods.  Whichever one of them discovers the orchid proves it by marking it with a stake and then taking a photograph.  Spinster One, whose name I have already forgotten, bicycles out to the woods with her basket and camera and special stakes.  While out there, she finds the orchid, and while photographing it, discovers something shocking.

She races home, slams the door, makes two short phonecalls, and then dies.  Suspiciously.  Her friend and neighbor, Spinster Two, tells DCI Barnaby that it couldn’t have been an accident and that it was murder.  Dun, dun, dun.

So Barnaby heads off to investigate.

There’s a local landowner who’s marrying his ward, a batty sister-in-law, the ward’s troubled artist brother, and the undertaker and his mother.  The undertaker is My Very Favorite.  He dresses like a Victorian gentleman, right down to a coat with tails and a little black ribbon in his hair, and he serves deeply troubling tea cakes on a very fancy cart.  He’s gay as a spring morning and he and his mother have been blackmailing the entire village.

Of course, this eventually gets them brutally slaughtered, but since they show up looking exactly the same in another village ten seasons later, I’ve decided that they were sneaky enough to fake their own deaths and escape.  According to the show, it’s just that they’re cousins or something, but I know Deep In My Heart that they survive.

Ahem.

So anyway.

There’s quite a few different suspects.  The sister-in-law of the local lord, who thinks she shot her own sister with a rifle during some kind of pidgeon slaughtering party.  The local ineffectual country doctor whose wife is having an affair with the local lord’s estate manager (and he’s very pretty–I can see why she strayed).  The straying wife, who is worried about being caught.  The daughter of the doctor who is having a fling with the mad artist (who always wears a truly tragic pair of denim overalls and chews the scenery like he got a degree in emo artist.)  The waif like ward.  The waif like ward’s artist brother.  And some other people, who I forget.

While Barnaby wanders around interviewing people, you get to see lots of gorgeous scenery and cottage gardens and English shooting parties and quiet country lanes.  Barnaby does have a very thoughtful mien and a quiet way about him.  I suspect that dogs would curl up happily at his feet–good stillness.  Troy, the current sergeant, is like a young overexhuberant bull, brashing his way through undergrowth and making rash assumptions about whodunnit and generally being kind of a homophobic jerk.

Much of the mystery, as many of the mysteries in this show are, is concerned with who was having naughty fun times in the woods on a blanket with whom.

As soon as I’d figured out that this was the big mystery, I suggested to my mom that obviously it was the brother and sister, because the whole show had a Greek/Shakespearean tragedy feel to it, and what better tragedy than random incest?

And so it proved.

Barnaby eventually figures it all out by contacting the now-adult childrens’ nanny and things are revealed and the wedding gets called off and the two young lovers commit suicide in the wood via shotgun. You know, as people do.

There’s some clever clues, phone calls, obscure words, etc. in the grand tradition of cozies everywhere.  I’ve lost track of the number of times people get shot to death with arrows in Midsomer county, but it’s a lot.  There’s psychics and witchcraft, the second sight, new age weirdos, writers’ societies, art fraud, retellings of Hamlet, shoutouts to Dorothy Sayers, poisoning by mushroom, hemlock, and various other dodgy substances, as well as a couple of deaths via pitchfork.  Not to mention those being driven to suicide, mistaken identities, Meaningful Messages With Flowers on corpses, and so on.  There’s a great episode where the local theater troup puts on Amadeus and the plot of the play and the retelling of the mystery weave together–it includes a truly horrible guy committing accidental suicide via razor on stage during the dress rehearsal.

Tiny intense hobbies take up peoples’ worlds, as they do in real life, and those often form the basis of the plot.  Villains are just as likely to kill over who was prouder of their rose bushes as they are to get an inheritance.  Small town dances, choir rehearsal, bell ringing, book groups, local history library photo retrospectives, fly fishing, magic tricks, Masonic societies (including the silly aprons), and more.

If you’re tired of watching ultra-realistic grim urban crime about the destruction of society that reminds you too much of yesterday, give this a try.  My favorite so far is probably the revenge plot where the villain stakes a guy in a croquet circle and then catapaults the oenophile to death with vintage wines using a small siege engine (Season 8, Episode 6).

These are currently streaming on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

 

* Someone here suggested I continue What The Hell Did I Just Watch into a regular feature.  Maybe Netflix thought so, too.  If you all feel the need for a garden gnome musical review, I’ll take it under advisement, but I may also need suitable bribes.  Liquor.  Brownies.  Exotic drawing ink.  A large wall against which to thwap my head until the images leave it.  You know.  The usual.

The Horrors of Broadcast Television

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This is a continuation of my post on “found footage” horror.

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The River is a fascinating show. Not fascinating in the sense of being well-written, or suspenseful, or really any good at all. Rather, it’s fascinating because of how thoroughly shitty it is. Despite high production values and experienced producers, The River sucks at everything. It’s a rare accomplishment, even by the low standards of broadcast television.

Created by Oren Peli (Paranormal Activity), The River is a horror series about Lincoln Cole (Joe Anderson) and his mother, Tess (Leslie Hope), who are searching for Lincoln’s long-lost father, the famed explorer Dr. Emmett Cole (Bruce Greenwood). Emmett disappeared several years ago in the Amazon rainforest. The expedition is funded by TV producer Clark Quitely (Paul Blackthorne), who offers to provide a boat and a crew, but only if he gets to film everything that happens. So Lincoln and Tess become the stars of a reality TV series, along with a tidy group of stock characters. There’s the cute love interest for Lincoln, the ethnic engineer and his daughter, the evil mercenary, the sassy black cameraman, and the nerdy, Jewish cameraman. After leaving the Amazon River to float down an uncharted tributary, the group is soon beset by ghosts, magic, and sundry evil things.

What sets The River apart from other horror series is the found footage concept. Every shot comes from either the (in-story) cameramen or the stationary cameras mounted around the boat. Presumably, the footage somehow made it back to the U.S., where the suits at ABC broke it down into hour long chunks (with commercial breaks!) before airing it. It’s a silly premise, but no sillier than any haunted house or slasher movie. It’s a decent enough idea for delivering cheap thrills each week. But a decent idea doesn’t amount to much when the execution is garbage.

The first problem is the cast, or really the lack thereof. As any slasher fan knows, horror stories need big casts to kill off. And a horror TV series needs either a very large cast or plenty of guest stars to bump off, otherwise the story cannot generate any suspense. The audience instinctively knows that the core characters are not going to die early in the series, because if they died the story couldn’t go on. But The River has barely half-a-dozen characters, and with such a small cast it must conserve every character like they’re water in the desert. So only one person has died after three episodes (the Jewish cameraman of course, as he was just too Woody Allen-ish to survive in the jungle).

The horror is further undermined by the hokey family drama that passes for a sub-plot. Did Tess leave Emmett or did Emmett leave Tess? Was Tess having an affair with the sleazy TV producer? Will Lincoln ever forgive his dad? Does anyone care about this shit? Of course not! I don’t care about these characters and I don’t want to care about these characters. This is supposed to be terror in the Amazon, not Days of Our General Hospital.

At least with the producer of Paranormal Activity at the helm, The River should be a technically flawless example of found footage horror. I say “should,” because it’s actually a terrible example of the genre. As I discussed in the previous post, found footage copies the shaky camerawork, the crappy angles, and bad lighting of amateur video, which makes it easier for the audience to suspend disbelief and buy into the lie that the footage is real. The River occasionally uses these techniques, but then it ruins everything when it switches to perfect angles and soft lighting for those oh-so-dramatic moments. And the actors, despite being in the rainforest, always look clean and pretty. My disbelief is not suspended, because the show is too slick for its own good.

And then there’s the censorship. I understand that this is broadcast television, which is regulated by the FCC. I understand that a good portion of the American public is deeply offended by the female nipple and the word “fuck.” And I understand that it must be frustrating at times to work for a lousy network like ABC. But there’s something far more pathetic than a show where no one ever curses. It’s a show where characters regularly curse but the profanity is carefully bleeped out (even the mouths are shaded, just in a case an easily offended lip-reader is watching). Excuse my French, but what the fuck are they trying to prove? Presumably, they want the audience to believe that the characters are real and speak just like normal, foul-mouthed Americans. But the censorship wrecks the found footage conceit. The whole point of found footage is that it’s supposed to look like someone found a camcorder lying in a gutter. The content is raw and uncensored, creating the illusion of reality. As for The River, the only plausible assumption is that ABC “discovered” the video recordings of an expedition that encountered real magic, ghosts and other crazy shit. And naturally the suits at ABC bleeped out the profanity before sharing this earth-shattering footage with the public, because they’re insane.

Can anyone name a decent horror series on the broadcast networks? I loved The X-Files when I was a kid, but that was a long time ago, and many of the episodes have not aged well. Perhaps broadcast television – with its censorship and commercial breaks – is simply not a suitable medium for the content and storytelling techniques of the horror genre.