Utilitarian Review 1/30/15

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Erin Polgreen wonders whether journalism comics can be funny.

Chris Gavaler on superheroes, billionaires, and his mother.

Me on blasphemy and Charlie Hebdo (and the most offensive cartoon you’ve never seen.)

Ng Suat Tong with a list of the Best Comics Criticism of 2014.

Em Liu examines Hollywood’s problem with the Asian male.

The spike from Jacob Canfield’s post has largely passed; we’re back to wending our quiet and mostly anonymous way through the internet. Sort of a relief.

Shonté Daniels with a short review of the stealth video game The Marvelous Miss Take.

Chris Gavaler argues that we are in the age of popularism (move over post-modernism.)

And finally I urged everyone tell Jonathan Chait to shut up.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic

— I interviewed Johnetta Elzie about women in the Ferguson marches.

—I reviewed Point of Honor, which tries to create a post-racial Confederacy.

At Ravishly

— I wrote about the gendered genre confusion of David Rees’ Aphex Twin/Taylor swift mashups.

—I interviewed Kathleen Gilles Seidel, one of my favorite romance novelists.

—I talked about Ms. Marvel fighting Islamophobia in San Francisco

—I explained why being lazy is good for your marriage.

At Splice Today

—I explained why liberals shouldnt’ want Palin to run.

—I advised Freddie deBoer to be a uniter if uniting is what he’s into.

At the Reader I talked briefly about Kaki King, guitar god.

Other Links

Katherine Cross on Jonathan Chait and toxic activism.

This Sady Doyle Chait takedown is maybe my favorite.

And I still really like this Angus Johnston piece about defusing conflict on the left (and in general.) I like the updates as well.

The CTA and Reverse Racism

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
___________
My wife is white, and she was taking the train to the Southside where we live. The train was crowded, almost entirely with African-Americans. One black man saw her sitting, and harassed her for the entire 20-minute train ride. How dare you be here when you know that this is a black train going to the black Southside, he told her. “Here’s this white women taking a seat. Are there any black women who need a seat? Or any black men. Or anybody?” He talked at length about how white people disrespect black people. He kept repeating, “You think you don’t have anything to do with it, but you have to pay.” It was that “you have to pay” that my wife found especially worrisome. Other people on the train punctuated his dialogue with laughter or shouts of encouragement.

She got home safely and was none the worse for wear. And nothing like this has ever happened to her before; she doesn’t feel unsafe taking the train as a rule, and not infrequently chats pleasantly with fellow riders. Still this incident was obviously very uncomfortable, and more than a little frightening. It also shows, I think, that the liberal default claim that “there is no reverse racism” is not entirely accurate. My wife was harassed, threatened, and told that she should not be allowed to use public facilities because of the color of her skin. It’s hard to imagine how you could define racism in such a way that her experience wouldn’t qualify. Certainly, if the reverse had happened—if on a train full of white people going to the Northside, a black person had been singled out and harassed on the basis of her race while other white onlookers cheered—it would be considered racism, and rightfully so.

There are a couple of possible takeaways here. First is the obvious point that black people, like white people, can be hateful if given the chance. That hatefulness can take a number of forms, but one is racial prejudice.

Racial prejudice doesn’t exist in a vacuum though. And in this case, the context, or the possibility, of black prejudice against white people is predicated on the context of white prejudice against black people. What happened to her only makes sense because of black history.

I don’t mean that the history of white oppression is an excuse for what happened to my wife. There isn’t any excuse for it, and treating people as if the sin of their skin color trumps who they are as individuals is simply a restatement of racism, not a mitigation of it. Rather, what I’m saying is that the black-on-white racism directed against my wife was made possible by the structural white-on-black racism that has shaped Chicago.

My wife’s assailant said that the train to the Southside was a black train. But it wasn’t African-Americans who decided that the Southside would be black. It wasn’t African-Americans who decided that Chicago should be the most segregated city in the country. For that matter, it wasn’t African-Americans who decided that people in the US should be categorized first and foremost on the basis of race in order to morally justify and practically facilitate slavery. My wife was visible as a white person going to a majority-black section of the city because her country and her city had made a systematic, centuries-long effort to mark and segregate black people. Without that history of racism, the reverse-racism my wife experienced would be impossible.

In a recent piece at Counterpunch, Tanya Golash-Boza argues that racism harms not just black people, but white people as well. She points out, for example, that when qualified people of color are passed over for advancement, less qualified white people get the jobs, so that “mediocre white people are teaching our children, leading community businesses, and fixing our telephones.” She adds that the structural concentration of wealth in the U.S. goes, not to all white people, but to a select few, so that racism is part of a system in which most black and white people “are fighting over the crumbs.”

My wife’s experience could be seen as another, even more direct way in which structural racism against black people can, in particular circumstances, result in harm to white people. The creation of racial difference and of segregation results in categorization on the basis of race.

Golash-Boza concludes: “Once we see the harm that racism causes all people in our society, it will be easier to form multi-racial coalitions to eliminate racism.” I’d like that to be true. But I think that when pointing out the harm that racism does whites, it’s important to realize that those harms are accidental—a kind of gratuitous fall-out of the hate and misery intentionally targeted at black people.

My wife’s story is the story of Chicago’s Southside, which is the story of America, which is in a lot of very important ways the story of racism. Doing a cost-benefit analysis on how and whether racism hurts white people can elide the uncomfortable fact that racism is entwined with the very existence of “white people” as a category, and for that matter with American (and certainly with Chicago) identity and history. Wanting to get rid of racism, then, isn’t so much about cost-benefit analysis. Rather it’s about no longer wanting hatred to be what we live with, day in and day out, what we see in the faces around us, and what we come home to every night.

Everyone Tell Jonathan Chait to Shut Up

Posted on January 30, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Last summer, I wrote a piece for the Atlantic in which I argued that Orange Is the New Black (OITNB)fails to effectively critique prison as an institution because prison as an institution in the United States is directed mostly at men, and OITNB presents prison as bad because it victimizes women. The piece went semi-viral as a hate read, and was widely denounced. Jezebel wrote an article with the very Jezebel title “Writer Doesn’t Understand Why Show About Women’s Prison Has So Few Men.” Music critic Brandon Soderberg called me as a “clueless cracker pedant” on Twitter. Folks I liked and respected told me in no uncertain terms that what I had written was unfeminist and generally awful. There was a massive comment thread with people lining up to tell me I was stupid and should shut up. The left, the damn left, in all its insular self-righteousness, would not tolerate brave dissent such as mine.

Or at least, that’s the conclusion I would come to if I were Jonathan Chait. Chait has written a long article for New York magazine in which he bemoaned the return of political correctness and the toxic culture of the left. Chait points to Hanna Rosin, who wrote a book about the current plight of men, and was ridiculed with a hashtag; he also singles out an invitation-only Facebook group where people argueloudly with each other. My experience could be another data point for him, yet one more example of how “swarms of jeering critics can materialize in an instant” terrifying the heterodox leftist or liberal into silence.

There’s a couple of problems with Chait’s thesis, though. First of all, there’s just nothing in his article or in his examples that makes a case that discourse on the broadly defined left is somehow nastier than discourse on the right, or in the center, or out in directionless space. The first controversial piece I wrote for the web was for The Comics Journal. I reviewed Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and my piece was headlined “In the Shadow of No Talent.” TCJ readers lost their shit and at least one person wished for the death of me and my family. It was exactly the sort of intemperate lashing out at dissent that Chait denigrates — but it didn’t have anything to do with political correctness or a culture of Marxist intolerance. It had to do with comics fans not wanting to hear me tell them that the thing they liked wasn’t any good.

Since then I’ve been told that I am stupid and that I should shut up by lots of Men’s Rights Activists, some feminists, some romance fans, many comics readers, fans of Breaking Bad, fans of The Hobbit, some leftists, and many right-wingers. I’ve even been abused by a fair number of supposedly free-speech-loving liberals and libertarians, who, when it comes to online behavior, aren’t any more tolerant of dissent than anyone else as far as I can tell. In a recent discussion of Charlie Hebdo, one First Amendment lover told me that if I didn’t like America, I could leave it — because free speech means exiling folks who say things you don’t like. Maybe, as Gawker’s Alex Pareene says, the liberal Chait is especially thin-skinned when it comes to criticism from his left. But one thing’s for sure: In terms of yelling at each other online, there are no red states and no blue states. There are only states of intemperate ire, and lots of them.

Chait is right, I think, that social media has changed the way social pressures work when it comes to speech. It used to be that conversations in the public sphere were limited and controlled by institutions. What you could say was controlled by what magazines (like, say, The New Republic, where Chait used to work) would print. That’s still true to some degree. But it’s also true that social media has made it possible for people who didn’t have a platform to speak loudly, astutely, randomly, continuously, profanely, violently—and often right there, just under an author’s prose, in the comments section. The roar can be deafening, and sometimes frightening.

I use the word frightening advisedly. Chait in his piece does that odd thing free-speech advocates sometimes do, and downplays the importance, or dangerousness of talking and expressing opinions. ” Mere expression of opposing ideas, in the form of a poster, is presented as a threatening act,” Chait sneers, denigrating an academic who found a pro-life sign on a college campus offensive. But speech is threatening, often, and aggressive. You could argue that a professor physically grabbing a sign from a student is an escalation, and I’d agree with you. But it’s not an escalation from zero

Chait is telling people on the left that they’re totalitarians; I’m telling him that he’s a fool. The intent, in both cases, is to cause a reaction, to disturb, to mock, to change the world, in some small way. If speech were utterly inconsequential, if it had no power, there wouldn’t be any point in defending it. The argument for free speech, surely, has to be built on the notion that speech does in fact have power. It’s because speech is worth listening to that you defend it, not because it isn’t.

And the cacophony of the internet is, contra Chait, often worth listening to. It’s given a voice to many folks who didn’t have one before. Chait takes a swipe at the 1990s’ anti-sex work policies of Catherine McKinnon, but he doesn’t mention that the social media he sneers at has been a huge boon to sex workers themselves, who can finally create their own platforms after decades of being silenced by both the right and the left.

Similarly, black women and other women of color have a major presence online, and are able to talk back to folks like Chait (or like me) in a way that wasn’t possible even twenty years ago. Chait doesn’t always like what these people tell him — he seems particularly disturbed by Brittney Cooper’s argument that reason is not always a useful tool against racism. But that’s how free speech works; people will sometimes say things you don’t like.

There are downsides to all this roiling speech, too. Chait seems to think the most serious problem is that white men and white women are sometimes told that their whiteness disqualifies them from speaking. “Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing,” Chait moans.

And sure, as a white person, I find it unpleasant when my brilliant, beautiful ideas are dismissed because I’m white or male. But that problem pales (as it were) next to receiving actual death threats, being doxxed, or having SWAT teams sicced on your house — none of which Chait mentions, because none of those things are regular occurrences on the left. But other communities haven’t been so lucky. Being white on the internet may be a hard, sad, road, but it’s nothing compared to being a feminist video game developer. For that matter, being white on the Internet is not generally anything compared to being black on the Internet. As Ferguson activist Deray Mckesson told me, “the death threats aren’t fun. They put my address out there, that’s not fun. I get called a nigger more than I’ve ever been called that in my entire life. I’ve blocked over 9,000 people, so I don’t personally see it as much anymore, but my friends do.”

The Internet makes it possible for more people to speak more effectively than ever before in history. That also means it allows more people to issue death threats, shout obscenities, and harass others than ever before. Free speech, and for that matter democracy, has always been a balancing act between the polis and the mob — between unleashing speech to empower people, and trying to figure out how to prevent the power of speech being used to oppress, to terrorize, and even (through that call to the SWAT team, for example) to kill.

The Internet, and social media, have exacerbated these tensions; they increase the potential of speech, for good and ill. Those are problems we have to wrestle with. Jonathan Chait isn’t up to the task, in part because his obsession with the left leads him to focus on ideologies rather than methods; on who he wants to shut up, rather than on figuring out which kinds of speech, whatever the content, should be allowed, which shouldn’t, and how to deal with the difference. Fortunately, the Internet is full of talking people who, civilly and less so, can tell him where he’s wrong, and that he should shut up.

Early 21st Century Popularism

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

There I’ve named it. Centuries from now, fans and scholars will look back at this past decade as the birth of Popularism, the movement that stamped the coffin lid on postmodernism.

I attended the Modern Language Association conference in January, and according to the “What’s On” section of The Vancouver Sun I read over my first breakfast, the city was more “erudite” than usual that weekend. Imagine 8,000 English professors converging on one city block. And yet this year’s star speaker was Sara Paretsky, “best-selling mystery writer” of the “revolutionary novels” featuring detective V. I. Warshawski. I’d spied some of her paperbacks in airport bookstores on my trip over. That’s not evidence of an academic bastion. That’s collapsed rubble.

My complimentary Sun also included an article on the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra; “the old days of new music” were “a tough slog for general audiences” but now “are over.” Instead, Jocelyn Morlock, VSO’s composer in residence, is emphasizing “pure fun” and “party atmosphere.” “To a large extent,” she explains, “new music has become more attractive to audiences because the attitude of composers themselves have changed. Composers want to connect with their audiences rather than baffling or alienating them.”

Compare that to composer John Harbison’s 1960s studies with Milton Babbitt, who New York Times Magazine editor Charles McGrath dubbed “the reigning prince of atonality.” Harbison’s “reluctance to abandon melody,” McGrath wrote in 1999, “made him an outcast. He still remembers a moment when one of his grad-school classmates turned to him and said, ‘You’re really just a tune man, aren’t you?’’” The tune man went on to win a MacArthur “genius” award, while being labelled a New Romantic, a term he hated: ‘I think ‘Romantic’ is just a cover for whether or not people like something.’”

Harbison also likened operas to literature: “there’s the literary novel and the novel that’s sold in airports. Opera is in the same place where the literary novel is.” A decade and a half later, the literary novel is nowhere near opera. It’s hanging out with those airport paperbacks now. The infectious beat of genre fiction has gone highbrow. Since winning a 1999 Pulitzer for a novel about comic books, Michael Chabon has been rehabilitating the words “entertainment” and “pleasure” as the not-so-erudite goals of literature.

In the art world, the equivalent to a catchy melody is representational painting, something Mt. San Jacinto College professor John Seed would like to see more of. In a 2013 Huffington Post blog, Seed listed 40 representational painters (culled from 135) who he’d like to see in the Museum of Contemporary Art. “Like other leading American and European contemporary museums and galleries,” writes Seed, “MOCA has narrowly defined contemporary to mean works that have their roots in Duchamp, Warhol and postmodern theory.” Instead, Seed wants the museum to “woo back the respect of its public” by acknowledging that “Postmodernism officially expired.”

That death means all airport reading can discard the “Romantic” covers. Even academic scholarship wants public respect now. The NEH announced in December a new agency-wide initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, emphasizing that “the humanities belong to all the people of the United States.” Their new “Public Scholar” grant wants scholarly books “accessible to general readers” and “conceived and written to reach a broad readership.” University presses, the reigning princes of academic atonality, are joining the common people too. Last year, an acquisition editor at the University of Iowa Press contacted me to ask if I would be interested in adapting my pop culture blog into a “crossover” book designed for a general interest audience, what the press predicts will play “an important role in the future of university publishing.” As a result, On the Origin of Superheroes: from the Big Bang to Action Comics No. 1 will be out in fall 2015.

Over fifty books in comics studies were published last year—including from Oxford and Cambridge—but I’m the only person on my campus who fields the question: “Oh, are you the comic book guy?” Unlike Harbison’s graduate-school snobs though, my colleagues ask it with a pleased grin, followed by an admission of a similarly lowbrow interest of their own. As a result, I keep stumbling into interdisciplinary projects. Cognitive psychologist Dan Johnson and I have begun a second round of studies exploring the so-called division between “literary” and “popular” fiction.”Atin Basu, a professor of economics next door at the Virginia Military Institute, and I are applying game theory to zombie movies. Nathaniel Goldberg, a Washington and Lee colleague in Philosophy, and I are thinking about Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and philosopher Donald Davidson’s Swampman. Our Art department’s Leigh Ann Beavers is teaming up with me to design a new spring course on making comics—though we may go with the more erudite title Graphic Narratives. None of these projects may be “revolutionary,” but they are “pure fun.”

A major in my English department is writing her senior thesis on Fifty Shades of Grey. And why not? It’s a cultural object worth analysis. This invasion of the popular into the serious worries some folks though. Last year, Adam Brooke Davis warned in the Chronicle of Higher Education about “the overwhelming weight of pop culture,” after discovering that his advanced creative writing students were more likely to have read The Hunger Games than short stories by Annie Proulx or Ha Jin. That was a surprise? Isn’t that the definition of “popular”? I’m not a particular fan of Suzanne Collins or E. L. James or Sara Paretsky, but I don’t object to their book sales. It’s just something else to study.

By mid-century I predict the aesthetic pendulum will start slicing back in the opposite direction. Until then, I’m enjoying the party.

The Marvellous Miss Take

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Shonté Daniels

The Marvellous Miss Take is one of the best stealth games I’ve played in a long time. I should be honest and note that the game was released on Steam and GOG back in November, so I’m really late to the party. However, I don’t think Miss Take received as much praise as it deserves, and I want to spend some time to acknowledge how simple and enjoyable it really is.

The story revolves around Miss Sophia Take who is on a mission to reclaim her late great aunt’s collections of paintings that were stolen from Sophia and placed in different galleries all throughout London. With the help of Harry Carver, an ex artist and expert thief, and Daisy Hobbs, a seventeen-year-old loner who can pickpocket anyone in seconds, the group (two women, one person of color, all playable to boot!) becomes the foxiest bunch of thieves in the city.

The Marvellous Miss Take is all about stealing art in the most collected way possible. The game breathes composure. Nothing feels better than sauntering over to a painting after avoiding suspicious guards, stuffing the art into your pocket and slowly walking away as if daring the security to watch you exit through the fire escape. Even the music sways in a combination of smooth jazz and trip hop that contradicted the amount of anxiety I felt hiding behind a pedestal hoping not be seen. If you’re caught, all serenity is lost, and the game ends.

The harder it gets (more police men, more cameras, more guard dogs), the more the game requires silence, patience and thought. Unlike other stealth games, like Splinter Cell or Hitman, violence is never an option in The Marvellous Miss Take. There were multiple times where I wished I could choke the guards into unconsciousness, or shoot the cameras until they broke, or anything to speed through a level without any threats. These were useless wishes, yet it was refreshing to not have them granted. Violence is incredibly common in popular games today; having no trace of violence felt like an innovation.

The most enjoyment lies in the game’s balance. Miss Take rewards players for finishing a level quickly, but also punishes them for going hastily. Running, for example, is tricky because the sound of running can alert guards to a thief’s location and reveal their hiding spot. But running can also help evade security by forcing them in one direction while the player tip toes in another. The key is to always be a few steps ahead of your enemies. Successful heists feel like a game of chess that results in a satisfying checkmate.

As challenging as it is, the game doesn’t come without a few flaws. For instance, I had a guard get stuck in a doorway, making it impossible for me to get out without getting caught. But those issues rarely occurred, and don’t outweigh the enjoyment I had for playing a stealth game that won’t let you leave a gallery after a successful heist without Sophia’s signature, chic sun hat.

The Marlvellous Miss Take is a wonderful game that felt like a brainy puzzle game. It’s combination of chill music, nonviolent action and cool characters created a stylish environment unlike many games before it. At the end, having collected all of Sophia’s aunt’s paintings, I felt as if I really did bring righteousness back into a previously unhip world.

Hollywood’s (Real) Problem with the Asian Male

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Em Liu

“There are no Asian movie stars” – Aaron Sorkin

We absorb poisonous images from the fiction we consume.

Hollywood’s brand of fiction is especially toxic, and one of the most perennially problematic images in Hollywood is that of the Asian male. At a basic level, the problem is a simple lack of representation: there are very few roles for Asian American actors, and lead roles are almost nonexistent. When an Asian male actor is actually cast in a speaking role, his character is often either an emasculated, inarticulate, socially inept chump like Long Duck Dong (Gedde Watanabe) from John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles or else an asexual, stoic, martial arts warrior like Bruce Lee (in any Bruce Lee movie).

This issue is often dismissed as affecting only the small number of Asian American actors trying to make a living in Hollywood, for whom the highest levels of the profession may remain unattainable. However, a lack of diversity in fiction has been linked to children’s lowered self-esteem and increased racial biases. Our consumption of the characters and dramas of our own creation feeds the way in which we view ourselves. A lack of realistic portrayals of Asian American men onscreen can therefore affect the way young boys see themselves, and how we as a society see them.

The history of film is punctuated with exceptions to the rule about once every fifty years. American cinema began on a high note with the career of Sessue Hayakawa, described in a biography by Daisuke Miyao as the first male sex symbol of the industry, years ahead of Rudolph Valentino. Hayakawa’s most famous early work was Cecil DeMille’s 1915 silent film The Cheat, a disturbingly violent rape fantasy, in which Hayakawa portrays villain Haka Arakau, an ivory dealer with sinister designs towards white female acquaintance Edith Hardy (Fannie Ward), to whom he offers a loan of $10,000 with her sexuality as interest. During a violent confrontation, there is an implied onscreen (forced) kiss scene, during which the audience is privy only to the back of Arakau’s head, and Arakau physically brands Hardy as his property with a hot seal. Despite often being typecast in what today strikes us as obviously problematic roles, Hayakawa was nevertheless quite popular with female audiences of the time.

One of the first films to attempt a heroic portrayal of an Asian American male was Samuel Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono (1959), a B-movie starring the late great James Shigeta as Joe Kojaku, who like his Caucasian roommate and partner in the police force Charlie Bancroft (Glenn Corbett) is American-born and speaks with normal American speech patterns. The two detectives have the same career, similar interests, and love the same woman (Victoria Shaw), who is the key witness in the murder case they are investigating. Unlike the dark villain roles to which Hayakawa was mostly restricted, Kojaku’s story is that of an upstanding member of the Japanese American community who ends his story with a classic Hollywood kiss. The film remains problematic in its catharsis, which dismisses racism as a fantasy of a lovelorn mind. But the film still looks progressive compared to current representations of Asian American males.

Since 1959, Hollywood’s portrayal of Asian male sexuality has stagnated. Andrzej Bartkowiak’s Romeo Must Die (2000) infamously cut a kiss scene between Jet Li and Aaliyah’s characters when the scene didn’t test well with audiences. Even Disney’s groundbreaking animated film Mulan (1998) failed to put more then a dent in the cemented American concept of the asexual Asian male. Leaving aside Eddie Murphy (as travel-size dragon Mushu), the cast is comprised of prominent Asian American actors, including James Shigeta (as the General) and Ming-na Wen (as Mulan). Captain Li Shang (BD Wong), Mulan’s commanding officer and presumed love interest, is a developed, dynamic character. His sexuality is not ignored, but even gently highlighted in an endearing scene in which Shang disrobes and Mulan’s interest is clearly peaked. It is heartbreaking to find fault in a film that is appropriately cast, sensitively animated, and manages to highlight both Asian male and even female sexuality. But it is not difficult to identify that fault. The confident, masculine, and merciful Shang is suddenly inept and nearly mute when confronted with the sexuality of the woman he has in fact been in close contact with the entire film. He awaits the suggestion of his emperor to pursue her. The most suggestive line (“Would you like to stay forever?”) is given to Mulan’s grandmother (June Foray). Asian male sexuality is implied, never explicit. To this day, Mulan is the only Disney “princess movie” without a kiss.

These are, of course, all decades-old examples, and yet little enough has changed that Aaron Sorkin felt compelled, in an email leaked in the recent Sony hack, to point to a lack of Asian movie stars as a fatal weakness for a potential film adaptation of Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys. There are of course exceptions to Sorkin’s assertion, but most of these, such as Keanu Reeves and The Rock, are actors of safely ambiguous ethnicity. This is not to suggest that these men are any less Asian American actors, but if the goal is to end Hollywood’s tendency to fuel stereotypes attached to specific aesthetic (read: racial) qualities, then the unambiguous are those who matter. And there are very few – John Cho (J.J. Abram’s Star Trek, Danny Leiner’s Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle) is one of the few modern examples, occasionally supported by other actors like Sung Kang (Justin Lin’s Fast Five), and the unfortunately lesser-known Daniel Henney (Disney’s Big Hero 6). Modern Hollywood films featuring an Asian male, let alone an Asian male with an actual sexuality, are difficult to find and generally show up in the forgotten corners of Hollywood: in the low-brow, low-impact films like Fast Five and Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. Like The Crimson Kimono, these are the artistic B-movies of today.

Thus is born the movement to see more depictions of Asian men, including their sexuality, onscreen. As the white female half of an AMWF relationship and a fiction diversity advocate, I am an unapologetic member. However, there is currently a troubling emphasis on the need for the Asian male to simply “get the girl” onscreen.

This approach is visible in Hollywood even when a “progressive” role is actually attempted today. The best example is Justin Lin’s Fast Five, a film which succeeds in depicting an Asian male character kissing a woman on screen, but which fails to present the kiss as anything other than misogynistic sexual conquest. The film operates on a superficially-feminist level: these women can handle a gun and drive a racecar. They’re badass, ergo, the film is feminist, and men are thus free to objectify. But these characteristics simply add to the qualifications necessary for a woman to be considered desirable. Having demonstrated themselves appropriately collectible, all three women, in a series of flash-forwards, are shown at the end of the film as safely arrived under the protection of domestic patriarchy: one is literally pregnant and barefoot at home with her husband; a second is fetishized in a upwards tilt as she kisses a man while sitting on his lap as he speeds down the autobahn; and the third, who as a cop who has fought against the team of protagonist bandits the entire movie, also reappears on the arm of the bandits’ leader.

We have reduced the issue to that of the onscreen kiss, when in reality the problem is much greater than that. We do not need to see an Asian male character kiss a woman onscreen; we need to see an Asian male character as a genuine object of desire. I should note here that being the object of desire should not be confused with objectification. Objectification reduces a person to an object desired only for consideration, collection, and consumption. As the object of desire, however, the fullness of the humanity of the person need not be compromised, as others recognize the attractive qualities of the whole person and desire to be in relationship with him/her. A film like Fast Five in which an Asian male is sexually successful is not progressive unless the relationship itself can be portrayed believably.

The problem with the representation of the Asian male in Hollywood is not that he fails to “get the girl”, but rather that he fails as a viable object of desire by another believably whole character. This is what was so revolutionary about John Cho’s role in the recently cancelled ABC sitcom Selfie (as usual, television proceeds when Hollywood hesitates). Cho never kisses his partner onscreen. But he succeeds in presenting an attractive, funny, thoughtful, and appealing male persona, desirable not only to the primary female lead, but to all viewers of the show as well.

Without a holistic representation of the humanity of the Asian male onscreen, we make no progress even when an Asian lead character is romantically opposite another. At worse, we revert to the Hayakawa’s portrayal in The Cheat – the Asian male who is reduced to the most bestial form of his sexuality. At best, we see Asian male sexuality viewed through the usual dirty lens of Hollywood’s trite misogynism, as in Fast Five. Such a simplistic take on the issue degrades the humanity of both women and Asian men.

The Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) published a practical list of ways to confront the stereotypical portrayal of Asian Americans in media. These suggestions recognize that we need to reach a point when the Asian character can be comfortably and accurately represented in all forms of fiction – not just in the low-brow B-movie, but in the high-brow, the drama, the sitcom. Sorkin is right: there is an unfortunate dearth of Asian movie stars. But movie stars are made, not born, and it is within the fortunate purview of Sorkin, Lin, and their peers to create them.
___________
Em Liu is a fiction enthusiast particularly interested in depictions of women and minorities onscreen. She blogs over at FictionDiversity.com, and you can follow her on Twitter at @OLiu1230.

Best Online Comics Criticism 2014

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Ng Suat Tong

2014 was a pretty bad year for comics criticism. On the basis of my simple survey there was hardly anything of note from the first third of 2014 as far as comics criticism was concerned (though things did pick up in the latter half of 2014). So if you find me clutching at straws in some of the entries below, well, you know the reason why.

Apart from the perennial issues of racism and sexism in superhero comics (or maybe in general?) there weren’t many critical controversies in 2014. I can’t say that this failure to engage with fellow critics and their ideas is a positive sign of health; especially if this reticence is symptomatic of intellectual torpor or a lack of breath in comics thinking.

[Your annual Comics Criticism Metaphor]

Needless to say, the selection below is incomplete and careful readers of comics criticism (?) should list any notable articles they’ve read in 2014 in the comments section.

(1) Listed by author in alphabetical order.

Merve Emre and Christian Nakarado on architecture in the comics of David Mazzucchelli and Chris Ware.

Brian Cremins on transcendental style in the comics of Julia Gfrörer and Jessi Zabarsky. Or consider the first part of his lecture on “Comics Books and Visual Literacy”; both of which are related to his long term work on nostalgia and comics. Or consider his “How to Read The Curse of the Werewolf.”

Julia Gfrörer – “Shadow Puppets”

R. C. Harvey – “Understanding Barnaby”. This may be the most comprehensive analysis of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby available online.

An alternative selection might be Harvey’s piece titled, “The Perversion of the Graphic Novel and Its Refinement” This one is about comics biographies and a reiteration of Harvey’s version of “comics fascism” (i.e. the essential nature of visual-verbal blending). His most notable target in the past has been Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant but he hasn’t rehearsed this pet peeve in quite a while. Here he is on a stumbling block in comic biographies:

“Generally speaking, a biography’s impulse is to include all the chief details of the subject’s life. As we see in SuperZelda, the effort to include all such matters in graphic novel form effectively destroys the form. Unless the biographer expands the number of pages in his/her work to gigantic dimension, the natural impulse—the best way to achieve a manageable length—is to resort to words for telling the story, and in obeying that impulse, the biographer inevitably uses pictures only to make the pages look pretty. As a result, the pictures don’t add any narrative content. The comics form works best as a form when it can portray at some length an incident or event, an impossibility if the over-all objective is to cover all the chief events in a person’s life in as few pages as possible.”

Jeet Heer on Herblock’s legacy and deification in a new HBO documentary. Or consider part of his ongoing work on Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie.

Adrian Hill – “Falling into Place.” On Malcom Mc Neill and William S. Burrough’s Ah Pook is Here.

Ryan Holmberg – “Matsumoto Katsuji and the American Root of Kawaii.” Or his article on Enka Gekiga: Hiyashi Seiichi’s Pop Music Manga.

Illogical Volume on Pax Americana – “An Experiment in Assisted Re-Viewing.” Or consider David Uzumeri‘s annotations for the same comic.

Domingos Isabelinho – Chester Brown as a Gothic Artist.

Etelka Lehoczky on S. Clay Wilson’s Pirates in the Heartland.

Joe McCulloch on Recidivist Vol. IV.

Tahneer Oksman on Julie Delporte’s Everywhere Antennas.

Ken Parille – “Don’t Move: The Still Life of Peter Morisi”

Megan Purdy – “Love Is Far, You Can Wait for It”

Abraham Riesman – “The Secret History and Uncertain Future of Comics Character John Constantine.” I don’t know if this article offers a tremendous amount of new insights into the character but it’s probably as good an overview of the character in toto as you’ll find online. I’m going to guess that it was the editor who decided to put the words “comics character” in the title of the piece (maybe even the words “uncertain future”).

Jonathan Rosenbaum – “Peanuts, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (this was published in 2013 but only appeared online in 2014).

Nicole Rudick on Julia Gfrörer’s Black Is the Color.

Joanna Scutts – “War in Panorama” (on Joe Sacco’s The Great War).

Matt Seneca on Richard Maguire’s Here.

Bob Temuka – “Superdeath”

Nicholas Theisen on Hannah Miodrag’s Comics and Language.

Paul Williams on Martin Vaughn-James’ The Projector. This one comes from a new-ish blog about 70s comics. There really isn’t much writing on this particular comic out there.

Matthias Wivel – “The Cage Stands As Before: The Comics of Yvan Alagbé”

(2) Notable Guest Articles on The Hooded Utilitarian

Brian Cremins – “Walt Kelly and Me”

Shaenon Garrity on Bloom County – “The Truth, Steve.” This is a nice summary of Bloom County‘s place in the comic strip firmament. I liked it better than Calvin and Hobbes back in the 80s anyway.

Michael A. Johnson on the ethics of war photography in War Photographer.

Kate Polak on empathy in J. P. Stassen’s Deogratias. In relation to this, also read Michelle Bumatay‘s review of La Fantaisie des Dieux: Rwanda 1994 which is published at her personal blog.

Pogo Watermelon

(3) Notable Controversies

R Fiore on Walt Kelly’s Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics: “Sometimes a Watermelon is just a Watermelon.” Also see Noah’s reply here and Brian Cremins article noted above.

One of those pieces which I expected to elicit more discussion but didn’t. Part of the problem is that almost no one has read or has any interest in the earliest incarnation of Pogo. The comments section remains interesting however.

As comics criticism has gained sophistication over the years, it’s become easier to identify the politics of various “heritage” comics critics. Fiore, for example, falls somewhere along the spectrum of Neo-Liberal to Neo-Con. Which generally marks him out for ideological disagreements with the editor of this blog and many of its contributors. Noah would no doubt find it disgusting that some people find Fiore’s piece worthy of consideration for a place on this list.

The discussion surrounding this piece also demonstrates the sharp divide that has occurred in the last decade or so. Fiore is venerated among many old time readers and writers of comics criticism but he’s quite the unknown among the younger set. His views frequently come across as old fashioned and conservative within the “art” comics community and they are often given short shrift and scant respect. In one corner we find the TCJ stalwarts who consider Fiore “one of the ten best writers to ever cover the medium“, and in the other a progressively engaged community which finds his thoughts increasingly out of touch. This could be taken as a sign of (comics) critical health.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: January 2015