Virtual Justice on a Virtual Frontier

Posted on January 31, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

Emily Bazelon likes superheroes. Her New York Times Magazine article “The Online Avengers” chronicles the adventures of Anonymous hackers who use their powers to combat cyber-bullying. Bazelon says Anons tend to think in “polarized terms,” viewing their cases as “parables with an innocent victim, evil perpetrators and ineffectual (or corrupt) law enforcement,” all staples of the superhero genre. But Bazelon enjoys some of those polarized terms too, describing how her aliased Avengers “team up” or “join forces” to expose “wrongdoers.” She draw one activist in origin story rhetoric: “He vowed that day he would do something about Rehtaeh Parsons’s death.”In Bazelon’s defense, the rhetorical infection seems to originate with the Anons she interviews. “We wanted to strike fear into their hearts,” declares one Batman wannabe. They even wear Guy Fawkes masks from Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta.

But it’s the wrong metaphor. These aren’t caped crusaders patrolling the mean streets of Gotham. The streets are Facebook and Tumblr. The superpowers are laptop-based. Many of the crimes—posting a video on YouTube or a message on Twitter—take place in the no man’s land of the world wide web. The bad guys can live anywhere on earth, but they elude justice by exploiting a virtual frontier.

What we have here is a Western.

Owen Wister largely invented the genre when he published The Virginian in 1902. His bad guys disappear into the mountain sanctuaries of Wyoming: “He that took another man’s possessions, or he that took another man’s life, could always run here if the law or popular justice were too hot at his heels. Steep ranges and forests walled him in from the world on all four sides, almost without a break; and every entrance lay through intricate solitudes.”

When journalist Amanda Hess dialed 911 after receiving death and rape threats via Twitter, the Palm Spring cop who arrived at her door dismissed them because the “guy could be sitting in a basement in Nebraska for all we know.” The bad guy was safe in the intricate solitudes of his IP address. Hess documents her experience, and dozens like it, in her recent Pacific Standard essay “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet.” When Caroline Criado-Perez received similar threats after petitioning the British government to include women on its currency, she retweeted them until the international attention forced police to respond. They said it was Twitter’s problem. Twitter said threatened users should contact local authorities.

Wister’s Wyoming faces the same failure of law enforcement. Because “the law has been letting our cattle-thieves go,” a former judge declares: “We are in a very bad way, and we are trying to make that way a little better until civilization can reach us. At present we lie beyond its pale. The courts . . . into whose hands we have put the law, are not dealing the law. They are withered hands, or rather they are imitation hands made for show, with no life in them, no grip. They cannot hold a cattle-thief.”

But Bazelon’s Avengers are skilled at tracking cattle-thieves’ user IDs through walled websites and forests of social media. When four teens in Texas tweeted gang rape threats at a twelve-year-old in New Zealand, the team of Anons unmasked their Twitter handles and forwarded evidence to the boys’ highs school administrators. The Virginian’s punches are “sledge-hammer blows of justice.”OpAntiBully settles for screenshots.

When Rehtaeh Parsons’s mother received evidence of her daughter’s rape, she turned it over to OpJustice4Rehtaeh, an Anonymous group she originally distrusted as nameless vigilantes. But, she told Bazelon, “if pressure from this group is what it takes, let them do what they do.”

Wister’s judge reasons similarly: “And so when your ordinary citizen sees this, and sees that he has placed justice in a dead hand, he must take justice back into his own hands where it was once at the beginning of all things. Call this primitive, if you will. But so far from being a DEFIANCE of the law, it is an ASSERTION of it—the fundamental assertion of self governing men, upon whom our whole social fabric is based.”

Local authorities tend to disagree. When badgered into reopening a rape case by OpMaryville and Justice4Daisy, the sheriff of Maryville, Missouri complained: “They all need to get jobs and quit living with their parents.” Parsons’s alleged rapists—or at least the two who posted the YouTube video of the crime—are now facing child pornography charges, though a police spokesman warned that OpJustice4Rehtaeh could come under investigation too.

Meanwhile, Cattle-thieves have their own advocates. Hess reports that the Electronic Frontier Foundation—a free speech and privacy rights group—lobbied against the Violence Against Women Act because an amendment to the act updated phone harassment to include any electronic communication. When Hess started receiving threatening voicemails on her own cell phone and police still refused to make a report, she took the law out of their withered hands. She tracked the guy’s IP address, filed a civil protection order, hired a private investigator to serve court papers, and got a judge to approve a restraining order that included everything from Twitter to hot air balloon messaging.

Which is to say Hess is no vigilante.

When the Virginian catches horse-thieves, he lynches them. That means Wister and his judge have to spend a lot of their frontier rhetoric differentiating this private but supposedly law-and-orderly form of capital punishment from the “semi-barbarous” lynching and burning of “Southern negroes in public.” Apparently the swift hanging of “our criminals” puts no “hideous disgrace upon the United State.”The judge doesn’t quibble over the definition of a “criminal” though, since the term denotes someone who has been legally tried and convicted, a luxury Wister’s frontiersmen forgo.

The Virginian ends his adventures when his once-skeptical love interest accepts his system of retribution and marries him. By the end of Bazelon’s article, her lead Avenger has lost his girlfriend of nine years—she complained he never turned off his laptop at night. Hess mentions a boyfriend but would rather write about the “Frontier of Female Sexuality” and “the gun-toting, boob-grabbing douchebags who are subsidizing your online porn habit.” She’d also like to see internet harassment prosecuted as a Civil Rights issue, a wonderfully civilized aspiration far beyond the pale of the current U.S. legal system.

In the meantime we’re left with faceless superhero wannabes trying to make our virtual frontier better until civilization can reach us.

What is an African American Comic?

Posted on January 30, 2014 by Qiana Whitted

When Philadelphia journalist Orrin C. Evans published what would become the first and only issue of All-Negro Comics in 1947, he boasted that the comic book showcased original stories about black life and adventure with African and African American characters in positions of authority, strength, and trendy style. The comic’s commitment to wholesome, affirming images of black people was underscored by the fact that its artists, too, were African American. Evans even included a photograph of himself inside the cover, thereby confirming the extent to which the comic earned the “all” Negro distinction.

By the mid-1950s, readers of black-owned newspapers had become accustomed to seeing the work of black comics creators like Chester Commodore and Jackie Ormes included among the reprints of syndicated comics. When the daily edition of the Chicago Defender failed to include black comic strips, readers wrote to complain:

This question, posed in March 1956, may sound all too familiar. Nevertheless, much has changed since the 1950s. So much so that “African American Comics” could easily constitute a category of its own (and not just as a display during Black History Month). But exactly what kinds of comics would fall under this designation? Would it only include publications that follow the All-Negro Comics model where black writers, artists, and editors can claim “every brush stroke and pen line” of the final product, or should the term be expanded to any comic about African Americans? Should the stories reflect particular ideological investments? Be recognized by a specialized community of readers and critics?

I also struggle with these questions in my research and teaching in African American literature, where the relationship between naming, visibility, and power is much more pronounced and deeply connected to the exclusionary politics of literary canons. In the classroom, I’ve had to step away from the anthologies that track a narrow, reactionary path from the New Negro to the Black Arts aesthetic. I try to emphasize instead how each successive wave of redefinition attracts new possibilities along with new intersectional silences and contradictions, or as the late Amiri Baraka put it in his 1966 poem, “Black Art”: “Fuck poems/and they are useful.”

The history of African Americans in comics reflects many of these same cultural tensions, but the narrative unfolds much differently. I recently taught a course on “African American Comics” that began with examples of 19th century racial caricature. We studied George Herriman’s comics, discussed All-Negro Comics, as well as genre comics from the 1950s-1970s before moving to more recent graphic novels. I did not begin each new comic identifying the racial identity of its creators, unless one of them made it an issue, for instance, as Christopher Priest did in his terrific introduction to the trade paperback of Black Panther Vol 1. The Client (reprinted here.) The class went very well, but by the end I knew that my title had been inadequate – if not inaccurate, since I also included Aya: Life in Yop City (African, but not American).

So I’m genuinely interested in what people think. What is an African American comic? Is there a way that this term might be useful? Is it too reductive or so broad that it loses all meaning? With Milestone Comics recently celebrating its 20th anniversary, these concerns seem more relevant than ever. We could even extend the question to other social groups – women’s comics? LGBT comics? And remember, Black History Month is upon us. So refusing the question doesn’t mean that someone else won’t try to define it for you.

Mike Mignola’s Middling Baba Yaga

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

A couple days back I wrote a post in which I argued that the story in Hellboy: Wake the Devil was thoroughly mediocre, and wondered why the series has garnered such praise. A couple folks responded in various venues that the series gets better (which it well may.) And several folks said that what I really needed to do was look at the art, not the narrative.

I’d sort of suspected as much, but hadn’t really thought about the art because it made little if any impression on me. But, what the hey, I thought I’d go back and see if looking closer changed my mind.

So here’s a page from Mignola’s Baba Yaga story, included in the third Hellboy collection.

I like this page as much as I like any of the art in Hellboy I think, more or less. It’s fairly stylish; the top panel has a nice use of negative space for example. Baba Yaga floating in the air there is a weird image; the pestle streaming out behind her looks like smoke made out of rock; I had to look at it a few times to figure out what it was, which I think adds a nice sense of wrongness to the image. The color palette is good too; different shades of grey and black, the coffins fading out into nothing over at left. The hands reaching up like crosses is a good conceit; the little patches of dirt around them arranged in a kind of Kirby krackle, a nod to one of the most obvious influences on Mignola’s style. Counting the corpses fingers is goofily macabre as well — maybe the single best idea in the issues of Hellboy I’ve read, and that panel of her reaching down to touch the fingers reaching up glances towards abstraction in a way I can appreciate, her claw a twisted organic thing, detached from the rest of her by the panel borders.

So that’s the good. The not so good is the last two panels. The image of Hellboy there seems pointless. It looks like a default pulp tough guy lift from a Frank Miller comic; there’s nothing particularly interesting about the pose or the image, and it just jettisons all the spooky tension or weirdness. Even the color pallet is fucked up; your grooving on all these washed out greys and bleak blacks, and suddenly there’s that red. After that odd image of the hand touching the hand, you cut back to your hero, so the destabilized severed uncertainty doesn’t freak anybody out too much.

And finally, the last panel of Baba Yaga is just not all that. This is the first time we really get a look at her, and she’s a big disappointment. Yellow eyes, check; big nose and mouth, check. Mostly she looks like a not very intricate or interesting gargoyle.

The Baba Yaga reveal is especially underwhelming because there’s no shortage of superior takes on that character. For instance:

That’s an image by Ivan Bilibin, and it manages to do just about everything that Mignola is reaching for and missing. Even though this Baba Yaga is distant and only in silhouette, you can feel the tension in her posture, the sweep of hair away from her head and her bent knee above the pestle turning her into a bird of prey about to launch. The use of negative space and the positioning of the moon is superior too. In Mignola’s image, the moon sits just off to the side of Baba Yaga’s head; there’s no real feeling of motion — it’s just a marker to tell you she’s in the sky. In Bilibin’s, on the other hand, the moon’s set far below and under Baba Yaga, and the angle of her pestle makes it seem like she’s just about ready to tip over it in a vertiginous rush, flying up into space.

There’s no shortage of other Baba Yaga versions. Here’s another amazing one by Bilibin.

That’s the expression Baba Yaga should have, damn it; a look that could curdle milk and dry up your testicles.

Here’s one by an artist named Rima Staines.

Again, that seems not just technically superior, but much more powerfully imagined. Her expression looks almost nice-old-woman friendly till you look closely and see the sneer and those teeth. And I do believe she’s feeding that cute little house — though what she’s feeding it I wouldn’t want to speculate.

One more maybe; this is by Dario Mekler.

That’s a more cartoony take, but it’s got a ton of energy. I love the scribbled smoke coming out of the roof, the way the moire patterns in the hut seem to make the eyes vibrate, the simple, stick-figure lines of the girl, so that she looks fragile and just about ready to snap apart…and Baba Yaga herself, barely visible, meshing with the lines of her hut, like another one of those twisted trees, waiting.

Bilibin’s drawings of Baba Yaga are famed classics; Staines and Mekler both seem to be significantly less famous than Mignola. But their versions are all much more imaginative, inventive, and engaging than the one in Hellboy. They all also, I think, have more narrative tension or interest. “What is Baba Yaga feeding the house?” and “What is going to happen to that girl?” are both significantly more intriguing, and more energized, questions in the art than the banal pulp violence that one image of Hellboy promises.

Again, I don’t think the Mignola art is horrible. It’s certainly better than most mainstream comic book illustration. It’s clear, it has some flair to it. But with a subject like Baba Yaga, and a reputation like Mignola has…well, it seems weak. Why would I want to look at this when my browser can take me to an infinite number of more interesting Baba Yaga’s? I’m just having trouble seeing how mediocre to bad pulp writing and decent but nothing special pulp art add up to a great comic.

Watching the Detectives

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

Benedict Cumberbatch can’t throw a punch. At least not when he’s playing Sherlock Holmes. Khan in Star Trek into Darkness throws plenty of punches, but he’s a eugenically bred superman. Dr. Watson reports in A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, that the “excessively lean” detective is “an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman,” but we have to take his word on it.

I wouldn’t know what a “singlestick” is if not for Jonny Lee Miller’s portrayal of Holmes in the aggressively updated CBS series Elementary. A singlestick, it turns out, is a stick you smack your opponent on the top of the head with. That’s what the BBC wanted to do to CBS when they heard the Americanized Holmes was premiering in 2012, because CBS had been in talks about producing a version of the BBC’s already aggressively updated Sherlock. But then the BBC would have to accept a head smack from Warner Bros. since Sherlock premiered a year after the 2009 Sherlock Holmes hit theaters.

Sherlock is the bastard brainchild of two Dr. Who writers; Elementary midwife Robert Doherty cut his teeth on Star Trek: Voyager; and the Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes started life as a comic book that producer Lionel Wigman penned instead of the usual spec script. When director Guy Ritchie got his hands on it, he was thinking Batman Begins. The Marvel formula was succeeding at box offices by then too, so Holmes’ superpowered intellect would have to be “as much of a curse as it was a blessing.”

A young Holmes should have nixed the forty-something Mr. Downey, but who can say no to Iron Man? Especially when Ritchie planned to restore all of Doyle’s “intense action sequences” other adaptations left out. You know, like when Holmes sneaks aboard the bad guys’ boat in “The Solution of a Remarkable Case”:

“With a lightning-like movement he seized the hand which held the knife. Then, exerting all of his great strength, he bent the captain’s wrist quickly backward. There was a snap like the breaking of a pipe-stem, and a yell of pain from the captain. Nick’s left arm shot out and his fist landed with terrific force squarely on the fellow’s nose.”

Oh no, wait. That’s not Sherlock. That’s Nick Carter. I’ve been getting them confused lately, and I’m not the only one. Carter premiered as a 13-episode serial in New York Weekly in 1886, the year before A Study in Scarlet premiered in England’s Beeton’s Christmas Annual. Carter was created by John R. Coryell and Ormond G. Smith, but Street & Smith (future publisher of the Shadow and Doc Savage) hired Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey to write over a thousand anonymous dime novels between 1891 and 1915 when Nick Carter Weekly changed to Detective Story Magazine.

Doyle wrote a mere four novels and 56 short stories, with the rare “action sequence” lasting about a sentence: “He flew at me with a knife, and I had to grasp him twice, and got a cut over the knuckles, before I had the upper hand of him.”New York Times film reviewer A. O. Scott labels Holmes a “proto-superhero,” one who’s “never been much for physical violence,” crediting the Downey incarnation for the innovation of making the detective “a brawling, head-butting, fist-in-the-gut, knee-in-the-groin action hero” (what one commenter called “The precise opposite of Sherlock Holmes”). The film opens with Downey in a bare-knuckled boxing match, displaying the skills Doyle only hints at. Apparently Holmes once went three rounds with a prize-fighter who tells him, “Ah, you’re one that has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.”

Nick Carter, on the other hand, has the fancy: “He bounded forward and seized in an iron grasp the man whom he had just struck. Then, raising him from the floor as though he were a babe, the detective hurled him bodily, straight at the now advancing men.” Yes, in addition to all of Holmes’ sleuthing powers, Carter has superhuman strength. And a bit of a temper—the secret ingredient American producers feel is missing from all those stodgy British incarnations.

Jonny Lee Miller’s Holmes doesn’t hurl men like babes, but he has broken a finger or two sucker punching serial killers. The leap over the Atlantic has made the Elementary detective’s passions more violent than his London predecessors. He also has a tendency to wander onto screen shirtless, displaying tattoos and a well-curated physique. His drug problems seems to be a carry-over from his Trainspotting days, which means the English accent is as authentic as Cumberbatch’s. In fact, Miller and his BBC counterpart co-starred in a London production of Frankenstein in 2011. You’ll never guess who played the doctor and who the monster. Literally, you’ll never guess—because Miller and Cumberbatch swapped parts nightly. Mr. Downey was busy completing the sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, and so was not available for matinees.

Plans for a Sherlock Holmes 3 have been in talks too, but Downey was busy with Avengers, Iron Man 3 and now Avengers 2. Why settle for a proto-superhero when you can play a real one? At least the long-delayed season 3 of Sherlock finally arrived. It was perfectly fun watching a barefoot and CGI-shrunken Martin Freeman chat with Cumberbatch’s growly dragon in Hobbit 2, but nothing beats the Holmes-Watson bromance—a delight the otherwise delightful Jude Law and Lucy Liu can’t quite deliver with their Frankenstein partners. Sherlock is also the last show my family still watches as a family, so I don’t mind the BBC cauterizing the Nick Carterization of the character.

Of course Nick has evolved since the 19^th century too: a 30s pulp run, a 40s radio show, a 60s book series. I have the anonymously written Nick Carter: The Redolmo Affair on my shelf. It’s a musty James Bond knock-off I found in a vacation house and kept in exchange for whatever I was reading at the time. I can’t bring myself to flip more than a few pages: “I streamrollered my shoulder into his gut and sent us both crashing to the deck. I got my hands on his throat and started squeezing. His fist was smashing down on my head, hammering into my skull.”

In Nick’s defense, Doyle considered Sherlock Holmes schlock too. He hurled him over a cliff so he could stop writing his character—but the detective keeps bouncing back. Elementary is certain to be renewed for a third season, and the Sherlock season 3 finale is a cliffhanger with the next two seasons already plotted. The biggest mystery is how they’ll keep Cumberbatch out of a boxing ring.

The Good, The Bad, and the Fascist

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Lots of folks have told me to read Mike Mignola, most recently Craig Fischer. So when I saw the second volume, “Wake the Devil”, at the library the other day I figured I’d give it a shot.

And the verdict is…eh. Either the hype is way out of proportion, or “Wake the Devil” isn’t the thing to read. For whatever reason, though, and however you look at it, volume 2 of Hellboy is a thoroughly mediocre piece of genre nothing. Characterization barely exists, while the plot mostly involves various monstrous super villains making ominous portentous speeches and then getting their slimy butts kicked as Hellboy cracks wise and talks tough. If you think Lee/Kirby were geniuses of pulp construction — then, yeah, this still wouldn’t be especially good.

For that matter, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, which is somewhat similar in its reliance on mythological baddies and in its video-game one big-boss-battle-after-another structure, is significantly wittier and more inventive — and, for that matter, more viscerally suspenseful. Riordan’s characters are kids; they’ve got great powers, but they’re not always sure how to use them, and when they fight monsters they’re scared. In Lost Hero, there’s a scene where one of the kids, Leo, has to rescue his friends from a bunch of cyclops, and finally lets loose with the fire powers he’s been afraid of, and he blasts them.

He pointed one finger in the air and summoned all his will. He’d never tried to do anything so focused and intense—but he shot a bolog of white-hot falmes at the chain suspending the enging block above the Cyclops’s head—aiming for the link that looked weaker than the rest.

The flames died. Nothing happened. Ma Gasket laughed. “An impressive try, son of Hephaestus. It’s been many centuries since I saw a fire user. You’ll make a spicy appetizer!”

The chian snapped — that single link heated beyond its tolerancepoint—and the engine block fell, deadly and silent.

“I don’t think so,” Leo said.

Ma Gasket didn’t even have time to look up.

Smash! No more Cyclops—just a pile of dust under a five-ton block.

I wouldn’t make any claims for that as great literature, but it’s exhilarating and awesome and fun, with a nice Looney Tunes timing, and you care because he was at risk and you’re rooting for him and then he triumphs.

But Hellboy is the impassive undefeatable gunslinger from the beginning. He never seems to doubt his ability to win, and the comic never doubts it either. He just blasts one baddy after another, be they vampire, lamia, or whatever. You never feel exhilarated or impressed, or even interested. The comic is one long crescendo, without any build-up or melody. It starts off irritating, and by the end you just wish it would shut the fuck up. Even the gratuitous deaths of some minor extra side-protagonists can’t elicit much more than a shrug. Some action movie cannon-fodder got offed. Might as well have killed a storm trooper. Ho-hum.

The utter lack of emotional resonance means that the good guys and bad guys become virtually interchangeable. It’s true that the bad guys are clearly labeled as Nazis — but even so, it wasn’t clear why I should root against them. They didn’t actually seem to care about Jews or racial purity from anything that they said; they just wanted to destroy the world. And halfway through, I wanted to destroy Mignola’s world too. If a dragon from the deep rose up and swallowed Hellboy and the earth as well, leaving the second half of the volume just big, blank, black pages, I would have said, hey, the story’s over, I don’t have to read anymore, cool. I’d even enjoy seeing Hellboy have his boasting and wisecracking shoved up his infernal and impassive ass-crack. It’s true that most of the villains were boring and stock too, but their constant defeat did lend them a kind of pathos. The one sad guy who reanimates his friend as a head in a jar only to have them both killed shortly thereafter; Rasputin (yes that Rasputin) whining to his mama at the end because Hellboy beat him again — I mean, I don’t want to read any more about either of them, really. They’re no rat creatures. They just have slightly more personality than Hellboy. It’s not a high bar, but better to clear it than not.

Bad guy boasts. Hellboy boasts. Bad guy gets stomped. Repeat.

The clumsiness and the lack of inspiration in “Wake the Devil” does lead to a kind of brute, Neanderthal genre insight, though. The comic really isn’t about anything but good guys and bad guys hitting each other, those “good guys” and “bad guys” designated by arbitrary fiat. One side is good, the side you root for, which wins. The other is bad, the side you root against, which loses. That’s the algorithm — the ideologies (destroy the world! bathe in blood! whatever!) barely register as anything but an overheated garble of rhetoric. The cops stomp their hellboots on that whining, sneering face for all eternity — and who cares what the face tries to say before the boot comes down? Behold the Superman as anti-fascist fascism — the devil who beats the devil.

Worst Movie of the Year

Posted on January 26, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

So I was just thinking about this and, though I do really hate Her, and though I saw plenty of other crappy movies too, I’m pretty sure that Olympus Has Fallen is the worst movie I saw in 2013.

For that matter, Olympus Has Fallen is I think one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, period. Not worse than Schindler’s List, but possibly worse than Amistad. Having trouble thinking of other competition that isn’t Spielberg, but I think that’s just because I saw Amistad and Lincoln back to back and it scarred me.

Anyway what about you folks? What was the worst movie of 2013?

Utilitarian Review 1/25/14

Posted on January 25, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Darryl Ayo on Before Watchmen and the children’s crusade.

I wrote about how guys in romance are hotter than the girls, and often richer too.

Lee Relvas on being a working-class artist.

James Romberger looks at Douglas Fairbanks’ The Mark of Zorro (and makes a storyboard for the film.)

Sarah Shoker on feminism, the Little Mermaid, and Frozen.

Samantha Meier with her first column on women underground cartoonists, looking at women’s comics anthologies.

Frank Bramlett with this week’s PPP post, asking how do comics artists use speech balloons?

Chris Gavaler on why superheroes should be in the academy (plus a syllabus.)

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I argue that 1984 is a romance and Julia is a MPDG.

At Salon I’ve got a song for each month of the year.

At the Center for Digital Ethics I talk about the ethics of quoting from social media.

At the Dissolve I review:

Old Goats, a crappy senior citizen buddy movie.

Mercedes Sosa, a lovely doc about the radical singer.

At Splice Today I talk about:

—how to be anti-war a film needs to not be a war film (looking at Full Metal Jacket and Atonement.)

—Armond White and why 12 Years as Slave as torture porn isn’t a bad thing.

Other Links

Michael Carson talks about Lone Survivor and the ironic kitsch of war movies.

Andreas Stoehr is completely wrong about Her, but his review is still lovely.

Osvaldo Oyola on Ms. Marvel and revisionist feminist history.

Christina Kahrl on how Grantland screwed up in outing a trans woman.

Grace takes down Dinesh D’Souza with Gifs.

Sarah Kendzior with a great piece about academic publishing.

Raymond Cummings provides a public service message from Barack Obama.

Molli Desi Devadasi on problems with the sex work rescue industry.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: January 2014