The Talented Ms. Highsmith

Posted on September 22, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Before meeting Alfred Hitchcock on a train to Hollywood fame, Patricia Highsmith wrote comic books. It was 1942, the height of the Golden Age boom, and a pretty good first job for an English major fresh from commencement. She started at the now largely forgotten Standard Comics but graduated to Timely (AKA Marvel) before leaving the field in 1948—when superheroes were dropping faster than Tom Ripley’s murder victims.

When she published The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955, the comics market had been bludgeoned to near death by Congress and the Code. She had not been called to testify before the Senate because she had killed off the fact of her first career with a splatter of white-out. Comic books? What comic books? If outed by some sleuth of an interviewer, she might admit to having dabbled with Superman or Batman, but she had probably climbed no higher up the superhero pantheon than the Black Terror, a skull-and-bone chested knock-off since abandoned to public domain.

But for a highbrow author trying to bury her lowbrow past, Ms. Highsmith planted a lot of clues. Tom Ripley’s first victim (of tax scam, the murders come later) is a comic book artist who, Tom therefore assumes, “didn’t know whether he was coming or going.”He even knows that the artist’s “income’s earned on a freelance basis with no withholding tax,” making him an easy mark. Tom’s single real friend, Cleo, doesn’t draw comics, but “painted in a small way—a very small way”; her “imaginary landscapes of a junglelike land” were “no bigger than postage stamps” (like panels in a Thrilling Comics adventure perhaps?). Even Dickie, Tom’s first murder victim, is a painter, albeit a “lousy amateur,” though Tom pictures his pen-and-inks of ships as “precise draftsman’s drawings with every line and bolt and screw labeled.” Tom even takes up a brush himself, imitating Dickie’s mediocre smears.

As far as superpowers, Tom is an old school master-of-disguise. When defrauding that comic book artist, he becomes General Director of the IRS Adjustment Department, drawling “like a genial codger of sixty-odd” years. He wields an eyebrow pencil and a bottle of peroxide wash too, but knows a touch of putty on the end of his nose would be too much. The art of impersonation is a matter of mood and temperament, adopting just the right facial expressions and gait. Besides, he’d always “wanted to be an actor,” and after beating his would-be BFF with a boat oar and stealing his identity, he gets his chance. He even adopts Dickie’s flawed Italian, and of course his signature (“seven out of ten experts in America had said they did not believe the checks were forged”).

Highsmith is a mistress-of-disguise too. Comics were the least of the skulls and bones in her closet. After Hitchcock made her name by adapting her first, 1950 novel, Strangers on a Train, she published The Price of Salt as alter ego Claire Morgan. I’ve not read it, but I think Dr. Wertham and his buddies in the Senate would have cited Ms. Morgan’s sexual proclivities as further evidence of the unwholesomeness of the comics industry. Claire, like her creator, was bisexual, and, worse, dared to end her lesbian romance on a note of hope for her unrepentant protagonists.

Mr. Ripley has the same origin story. He’s stalked by the specter of his own homosexuality, repeatedly labeled “pansy” and “sissy” and “queer.” As a result, he can’t embrace any sexuality. “I can’t make up my mind whether I like men or women,” he jokes, “so I’m thinking of giving them both up.” But where does all that smoldering energy go? Blunt objects. His second murder weapon is an ashtray. The victim is a “selfish, stupid bastard who had sneered at” Dickie, “one of his best friends—just because he suspected him of sexual deviation.” When Tom was alone in a boat for the last time with Dickie (oh, don’t even start on the oar-sized penis jokes), he realized he could have “hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed him, or thrown him overboard.” The thwarted sexual impulse is steered into violence. For that tentative reason, I’m not appalled at Ms. Highsmith for ending her crime novel on a note of triumph for her unrepentant protagonist. Like Claire, Tom goes unpunished.

Or at least not legally punished. The damage he commits on himself is deeper. When forced to abandon his socialite existence as the gentlemanly Dickie, he “hated becoming Thomas Ripley again . . . as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes.” His former self, “Tom Ripley, shy and meek,” becomes just another performance—like the one a certain superpowered alien from Krypton adopts. He decides to “play up Tom a little more . . . He could stoop a little more, he could be shyer than ever, he could even wear horn-rimmed glasses and hold his mouth in an even sadder, droopier manner.” When Highsmith said she wrote Superman and Batman, she meant Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, the yin and yang of her shapeshifting murder’s Tom and Dickie duality.

Superman and Batman make an appearance too. Yes, Tom fits the standard orphan model (“My parents died when I was very small”), but Highsmith pulls back her superhero mask even further as Tom stands aboard a ship, all but certain he’s finally to be arrested: “He imagined strange things: Mrs. Cartwright’s daughter falling overboard and he jumping after her and saving her. Or fighting through the waters of a ruptured bulkhead to close the breach with his own body. He felt possessed of a preternatural strength and fearlessness.”

In another, less homophobic universe, Mr. Ripley might have saved himself by using his considerable talents for good. Instead, he bludgeons the Comics Code established the year before he was published:

Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal

No comics shall explicitly present the unique details and methods of a crime

Criminals shall not be presented so as to be rendered glamorous or to occupy a position which creates the desire for emulation.

In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.

And most importantly:

Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at or portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable.

Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.

It’s enough to twist even Batman and Superman into sociopathic serial killers.

Hitchcock is the Birds

Posted on September 21, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

The usual symbolic interpretation of the deadly massed birds in Hitchcock’s 1963 film is that they’re a sign of the terrifying feminine, and/or grasping maternal. Melanie drives out to Bodega Bay to get her grasping playgirl claws into Mitch; Mitch’s mom freaks out much like the birds. The clash of terrifying female desire around this one good looking guy results in a nature freak out and violent squawking.

It seems like there might be a more direct way to read the birds though. In particular, Tippi Hedron has said that Hitchcock during the filming essentially stalked her; he made sexual advances, insisted on separating her from the rest of the actors, and was generally a crazed controlling jerk. He also famously in the attic scene actually tied birds to her to get the right shot; some of the blood on her you see was apparently real. She suffered multiple cuts and broke down in tears at one point. This is in the interest of the film, rather than in the interest of his being a creepy stalker, supposedly, but it seems like at some point the two stop being especially distinguishable. Hitchcock as stalker blurs into Hitchcock as perfectionist director; he gets to hurt and control Hedron wearing either (bird) hat.

The birds then are Hitchcock’s catspaw; he ties them to Hedron in an excess of jealous vindictiveness, to show her who’s boss. And if the birds function that way in that scene, why not throughout? Apparently Hitchcock warned Rod Taylor (who played Mitch) to stop cuddling Hedron as soon as Hitchcock yelled “cut”; there seems to have been some jealousy there. And similarly, the birds seem set up to punish Melanie for her sexual desire. The first attack occurs as she’s coming across the bay and about to meet up with Mitch for a potentially romantic chat. The escalating violence seems designed to prevent the further development of their relationship. Rather than excess maternal force, you could see the birds as an enactment of the paternal law; proscribing sexual activity in the jealous name of the father/director. As in all those slashers, the girl who has sex must die.

The Birds work well as a meta-patriarchal avatar precisely because their in-film motivation is so poorly defined. Why do the birds attack? The characters say repeatedly they don’t know, and no reason is offered. But of course there is a reason why the birds attack. It’s because Hitchcock tells them to. The fakeness of the birds (many of them were puppets, and you can tell) only adds in this reading to their symbolic resonance. Hitchcock has created these birds out of wholecloth for his sadistic purpose. That purpose is control, violence, order—the striking birds’-eye view shot of Bodega Bay with a street afire nicely melds the rage for order and destruction, or for destructive order, each person dying in agony in his or her place.

The birds then aren’t a symbol of inhuman mystery so much as they are a sign of a particularly human glee in fucking with other humans. Melanie and Mitch tease and play practical jokes on each other, but the biggest, meanest, most remorseless practical joke is the film itself, which flagrantly reaches into the romantic comedy that seems to be underway and fills it with bloody beaks and death just because it can. The birds are Hitchcock’s remorseless, bitter, bitterly excessive way of making sure yet another of his icy blondes gets what she deserves. Those long, sharp beaks aren’t maternal; they’re misogynist.

Utilitarian Review 9/18/15

Posted on September 19, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Qiana Whitted on blues comics.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from mid 1947.

Chris Gavaler on discovering desire via Frazetta.

< href="https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2015/09/purity-culture-with-fangs/">Me on the film Teeth, and purity culture with fangs.

Me on spaghetti westerns, men, women, and guns.

Me on Andrew Breitbart and his eulogists.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Broadly I wrote about how criminalizing midwives hurts women and babies.

At Quartz I wrote about Amber Batts and how criminalization hurts sex workers.

At Playboy I wrote about how there is no evidence of a Ferguson Effect.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—how a Breitbart writer accidentally palled around with a terror suspect.

—how campaign finance reform isn’t a very exciting platform for Bernie Sanders.

At Ravishly I reviewed the Perfect Guy, which is pretty good if you think all men are evil and should die.

At the Reader I wrote a little review of the great Japanese goofball rockers Mugen Hoso.

Other Links

Jay Gwaltney on text sex games.

Fascinating interview with Timothy Snyder about the Holocaust and state institutions.

Sarah Nyberg on being a troll, and changing.

Molly Smith on decriminalizing sex work in Scotland.

Aaron Bady on Taylor Swift and colonial fantasy.

Andrew Breitbart and His Eulogists

Posted on September 18, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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Rush Limbaugh made an ass of himself last week, as he often does. In consequence, the death of Andrew Breitbart had a half-life short even by the standards of the Internet news cycle. There’s apparently only room on the web for one right-wing pundit spat at a time. You can opine on Breitbart’s legacy or sneer at Rush’s misogyny, but doing both at once is too soul-killing for even the most soulless pundit.

The speed with which Breitbart’s communal eulogy has effervesced into its respective Internet archives is a strikingly neat self-refutation of its own main thesis. That main thesis is that Breitbart’s death was an event that should be of actual importance to some range of people who were not his friends or family. David Frum insists, “It is impossible to speak nothing of a man who traced such a spectacular course through the contemporary media,” and goes on to lament that “It’s difficult for me to assess Breitbart’s impact upon American media and American politics as anything other than poisonous.” Conor Friedersdorf characterizes him as “a singular figure unlike any other in American politics or Web publishing.”

Andrew Sullivan goes even further in his quest for meaning, arguing that Breitbart’s early death is a sign of the intense pressure faced by the new media blogocracy. Constantly checking Twitter and site stats, barking 24-7 after the latest culture war blip, Breitbart was, apparently, crucified upon the cruel cross of his Blackberry.

“Human beings were not created for that kind of constant unending stress, and the one thing you can say about Andrew is that he had fewer boundaries than others. He took it all so seriously, almost manically, in the end. The fight was everything. He felt. His anger was not feigned. He wanted to bleed and show the world the wounds. He wanted to scream. And he often did. And when you are on that much, and angry to that extent, and absorbed with that kind of constant mania, and obviously needing more and more validation, and on the online and real stage all the time, day and night, weekends and weekdays… well, it’s a frightening and dangerous way to live in the end. He is in that sense our first new-media culture-war fatality. I fear he won’t be the last.”

The title of Sullivan’s post is “Breitbart—And Us.” It’s a telling phrase. Because… who is that “us” exactly? When you first read it, it seems like it’s supposed to mean, you know, “us”—everybody and their siblings.

But by the end of the piece, it’s clear that we’re not talking about a universal “us.” Surely I can’t be the only one on the planet who doesn’t own a Blackberry. In fact, when Sullivan says “us,” then, what he actually means is “us, the really successful new media pundits.” Breitbart’s death is significant to Sullivan not because it offers some sort of universal warning about the human condition, but because Breitbart and Sullivan are (despite differences in politics) basically a lot alike. They’re extremely successful people in the same industry. It’s not exactly a revelation that driven people obsessed with their jobs are in danger of heart attacks. But it hits Sullivan close to home because Breitbart was a driven person not just in any job, but in the same job Sullivan has.

It’s natural enough to be interested in, and to want to talk about, your colleagues. It’s water-cooler gossip; everybody does it. But since pundits do so much talking in public, I think it can be easy for them to forget that their water-cooler gossip isn’t necessarily transcendentally important. I can’t say I followed Breitbart’s career closely. But you read his eulogies, and what do you get? A personally charming and generous muck-raking journalist with shoddy standards and a big mouth, who managed to land a big story or two, slander some innocent people, and mostly generate a lot of hot air. It’s a character that was hoary in 1951 when Kirk Douglas played it in Ace in the Hole. The fact that Breitbart was one of the people to bring the archetype into the digital era is of interest primarily to those in the industry. To everybody else, it’s just the latest iteration of a familiar truth; e.g., whatever venue you find them in, journalists are scum.

Andrew Sullivan likes to tout the digital media’s escape from the hidebound orthodoxies and navel-gazing of traditional media. But if the rapidly evaporating Breitbart furor shows anything, it’s not that the man was a visionary pioneer, or that he epitomized the decline of our culture, or that our age is more stressful than any other. Rather, it’s that online journalists are every bit as self-obsessed as their print forbearers.

Men, Women, and Guns

Posted on September 17, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Dorado Films recently bundled together two late sixties spaghetti westerns — Django Shoots First! and Gatling Gun — as a budget twofer. Outside the classic Sergio Leone films, I’m not that familiar with the spaghetti western genre, so I was interested to check it out. And it was indeed educational. Here’s some things I learned about men, women, and guns.

1. Men sweat. Women take bubble baths. — As you’d expect, men are dirty and stinky like men should be. In fact, Robert Woods, who plays hero Chris Tanner in Gatling Gun, has carefully applied sweat to the middle of the back of all his shirts to show that it is hot and that he sweats, though because he is a hero he does it in a predictable and orderly fashion.

A woman, though, does not sweat. Not even when her dad has just been shot dead in front of her and she’s tied up and forced to ride across the desert in long-sleeves and bustles. Her make-up doesn’t even run.

Therefore, somewhat counter-intuitively, women need to take baths all the time. Bubble baths are ideal because all those bubbles can hide that dashing stranger from the sheriff so the two of you can betray your husband. Alternately, the bubbles can help hide your naughty bits when the sweaty evil minions drown you in the tub.

2. Heroes don’t get shot. Women can’t shoot. — It’s not quite true to say that heroes don’t get shot. They do of course get the occasional flesh wound just to show they can take it. Django (Glenn Saxson) gets tagged a couple of times in Django Shoots First!, and in Gatling Gun Chris Tanner gets a really nasty wound in his hand and has to dig the bullet out because he’s just that tough. Still, in general, it’s kind of amazing how utterly (ahem) impotent guns are against these guys. Tanner even dodges a fusillade from a Gatling gun. That’s some poor shooting there, bad guys.

Women on the other hand don’t even get the privilege of missing the heroes. In Django, the scheming bitch, Jessica Cluster (Evelyn Stewart), steals her sweetie’s gun as she kisses him, and then she tells him he’s a weak, sentimental fool and she hates him, ha ha. He looks suitably castrated, she pulls the trigger…and there’s no ammo. He removed it because he’s smarter than her and only guys know which end of that thing is up anyway. Then he sets her up so another ex-lover kills her. How’s that for castration, bitch?

The same thing (more or less) happens in Gatling Gun…and even to the same actress! This time Evelyn Stewart is Belle Boyd. She keeps a small pistol under her pillow, and after Tanner kills everyone she knows, she (being justifiably upset) prepares to shoot him with said pistol. But! He took the opportunity to take all her ammo while he was having sex with her the previous afternoon — fucking her while fucking her, as it were. “When you sleep with a pistol under your pillow,” he tells her sententiously, “you should be careful who you choose as your bedmate.” Don’t cross dicks with me, sweetie.

You’d think she’d take that amiss, but instead at the end of the film she rides off into the sunset with him. Maybe because humiliation is sexy? Or because he was just that good in bed? Or, more probably, because the two other women in the film got killed, and the hero has to ride off into the sunset with somebody.

3. Misogyny will wipe away all your sins. Class prejudice and race prejudice are bad, and the best way to show they are bad is by associating them with women, because who trusts a women?

In Django, the misogyny-for-a-greater-good is relatively subtle, and even accomplished with a touch of humor. Django’s a down-at-the-heels drifter deadbeat who challenges the big-deal, well-dressed banker Mr. Cluster (Nando Gazzio) for dominance in the town. Jessica, the banker’s wife, is both a money-grubbing, castrating bitch (constantly demeaning her husband) and a snob (she sneers at waitress Lucy (Erika Blanc), provoking a catfight.) Jessica’s greed and desire for luxury map easily onto her upper-class evilness.

The duplicitous effeminacy of the swells is further emphasized at the film’s conclusion, when Django, now wealthy and married to Lucy, swaggers foppishly around the bank he owns. Suddenly, a rough and tumble outsider enters and threatens to do to Django what he did to Cluster. By marrying Lucy and settling down, Django’s been feminized — and now he’s the enemy!

Gatling Gun doesn’t bother with the tongue-in-cheek cutesiness. The evil half-breed Tapas (John Ireland) is in love/lust with Martha Simpson (Claudie Lange). He gives her money, but she still rejects him because she’s an unrepentant racist. Tanner sleeps with her himself to get information out of her. She spills the goods on Tapas…at which point Tanner turns on her, sneering at her for her unfaithfulness and her prejudice. In a final fuck-you, he tells her he himself is a quarter Cherokee. Shortly thereafter she gets killed as punishment for her sins, which include racism and having the temerity to bad-mouth one man to another man even if they hate each other. Whatever color, whatever creed, guys gotta stick together.

4. Look not to exploitation fare for enlightened gender politics. I did kind of know that one already, I’ll admit. Though, to be fair, I don’t know that the treatment of women is really much worse than what you find in most present-day action flicks. The spaghetti westerns are just — for better and/or worse — more honest about it.

Purity Culture With Fangs

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

A little bit back I read Dianna E. Anderson’s Damaged Goods, about purity culture in the US. Purity culture is an evangelical movement which promotes sexual abstinence till marriage; sex outside of marriage is seen as sinful, and women who have sex before marriage defile their relationship with God. Purity culture is a subcultural phenomenon, located specifically within evangelical circles. But it’s linked to broader mainstream ideas about women as virgin/whores, who have (or should have) no sexual feelings themselves but are still, somehow, responsible when men desire them. Women are both vapid victims and monstrous seducers, blank slates and inimical destroyers.

The 2007 rape/revenge comedy Teeth cheerfully sends up all those ideas, complete with more castration scenes than you can shake…well, maybe best not to complete that metaphor. The film features Dawn (Jess Wexler), a purity culture devotee, who gives speeches about saving yourself from marriage and wears shirts saying, “Sex Changes Everything!” Nonetheless, she is attracted to new kid Tobey (Hale Appleman) and almost goes all the way with him. When she pulls back, though, Tobey tries to rape her. Which is when she discovers she has teeth in her vagina, and inadvertently chops off his dick.

Dawn is at first traumatized, not least, perhaps, because the rape/revenge so directly encapsulates her own purity culture dogma. Toby was tempted by her and destroyed; misogynist meme fulfilled. As Dawn reads up on vagina dentata, she learns that she’s a dark force to be conquered by some hero; her sexuality isn’t her story, but some other dudes. And sure enough, another guy shows up volunteering to do that conquering. He seduces her with a vibrator and lots of candles, and they have some lovely sex…until he reveals that he bet his buddy he could sleep with her. He tells her this while they’re in flagrante, she gets pissed…and yep, sure enough, off with his dick. Dawn isn’t even horrified at that point, just exasperated. “Some hero,” she mutters as she stomps out, leaving the whimpering, bleeding castrati behind.

Dawn isn’t upset with herself for chopping off this guy’s penis because she realizes it’s not her fault. He’s the idiot who took advantage of her, not the other way around. Rather than a paradigm where she has to resist and resist, and then is culpable if someone forces her, she moves to an ethic of consent. And consent, as that second guy learns, cna be withdrawn any time; when she wants to stop, you better stop. Or else.

Dawn goes on to deliberately seduce and kill her skeevy abusive step-brother, and another random older jerk. Rather than being the thing to be conquered in someone else’s story, she ends up the one doing the conquering, with the guys just a plot point in her self-actualization. You could see this as dehumanizing in some sense; “castrating vagine dentata” isn’t exactly the usual version of a wholesome, healthy career choice or lifestyle. But on the other member, one of the things the movie suggests is that the wholesome, healthy romantic teen comedy narrative is in a lot of ways gross and misogynist. Would you rather be in a John Hughes film where the harassing dipshit who shows off your underwear is seen as haplessly cute? Or is it better to be the heroine of a rape/revenge narrative where you get to cut off that assholes’ balls? Empowerment isn’t the be-all and end-all, but it certainly has its pleasures, not to mention its teeth.

What’s Funny About This Picture?

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I was seven the first time I saw this illustration. I’d never heard of Frank Frazetta, but forty years later I still recognize the style. I assumed it was an Eerie or Creepy cover, but flipping through online databases and comic-con long boxes unearthed nothing. My memory had added a throne, so my description to vendors didn’t help either.

I knew it was early 70s because I’d seen it during a family vacation in Cape May, NJ. We went multiple years, but stayed only once in the Sea Mist Hotel–on the second or third floor, the right side, in what seemed like an improbably large open space.

An adult cousin–I don’t know which of my father’s nephews–was suddenly staying with us too. He’d arrived on a motorcycle and slept in a sleeping bag in his underwear on the floor. I slept in my briefs, but with pajamas over top, so his relative nakedness confused me, a change in the rules.

The magazine was his. It confused me too. It was sitting on a large table, more or less chin height, as I studied the cover at what must have been a distance of inches. It didn’t occur to me to open it or to pick it up. Though there was nothing taboo in its placement, no sudden parental shuffling of papers, I felt something transgressive. The breasts presumably. I’d seen my mother naked, but this was different, another shifting of known rules.

This was 1973, only months before my parents’ separation. I turned seven in June. Frazetta penned “72” next to his signature, but the magazine logo hides it. I had no idea he’d illustrated a National Lampoon until the cover popped up on my laptop during a recent Google search. No. 41, August, so on stands in July when my cousin grabbed his copy on the way to a beach getaway.

I’m still not sure what it’s doing on the front of “The Humor Magazine.” Frazetta drew the occasional Playboy-esque cartoon,

but “Ghoul Queen” is closer to the distortions of his fantasy style. Still, the ghouls are more comic than menacing,

and their queen’s hip-to-waist ratio exceeds even Frazetta’s usual idealized proportions.

An editor’s note claims he drew it for a previous “Tits ‘n’ Lizards” issue, but that’s just an example of the magazine’s “Humor.” Looking at the cover now, I’m still confused. Female nudity aside, the image seems to be about race. A white woman reigns over her dark-skinned minions. This could be the White Goddess and her African worshipers in 1931’s Trader Horn.

Instead of Aryan curls, Frazetta endows his goddess Asian overtones–or is that just make-up? This bejeweled yet rag-wearing Queen must spend a lot of time plucking her eyebrows.

Despite all the abundant white flesh glowing in front of them, the ghouls’ eyes are averted. The Queen is displayed for the viewer only. The image dramatizes the Mississippi racial rules that Emmett Till violated in 1955. A white woman’s body is always taboo to dark-skinned males, no matter how outlandishly posed.

Sculptor Tim Bruckner also suggests a homoerotic dimension to Frazetta’s sex fantasy: “having to decide what some of the ghoul pairs were doing behind her was something best left to the imagination.”

Are those expressions of monstrous pleasure? Are the obscured arms of the rear figures directed toward their crotches? Do the splayed fingers and curved wrists of the foregrounded hands denote submission? Does the apparent orgy explain their disinterest in the Queen’s body, or is this how dark males control their desire for white female flesh? And why the hell did Frazetta draw an extra left hand groping around her hip?

I see other anatomical issues (her face is too small, her breasts too round), but I’m more concerned with the ones I can’t see. Like her right leg. The pose suggests that the knee is bent so that the right calf is vertical, like so:

Except that space is occupied by a ghoul. The Queen’s leg isn’t hidden by his back–their bodies overlap as if collaged from separate planes. The two images don’t belong together. Maybe that’s why the ghouls aren’t ogling their queen, and why her gaze skirts past them too. It would also explain the floating hand. Frazetta was revising. The 3-D impossibility is further augmented by the two-dimensions of the image. It’s a painting, so obviously two-dimensional, but Frazetta emphasizes that fact by not filling the entire canvas. The sky behind the figures and the ground in front of them are the same continuous, unpainted space. He even flattens the vulture so its outlined body is almost as undifferentiated as the moon.

None of this struck my seven-year-old imagination. After an anxious glance at the Queen’s towering authority, my eyes dropped to the discordant subplot at the bottom of the page. The snake offers a range of mysteries (is it attached to the lizard’s head? what are those snail-like appendages?), but I was busy contemplating the two other figures.

I’m tempted to say this is the moment I first realized I was straight. But I didn’t realize anything. I just sensed something inexplicable. When I rediscovered the image online, I wasn’t sure it was the same–where was the throne?–until my eyes dropped to the skeleton’s hand again. I could feel it as if looking at a photograph of my younger self and remembering the sensations of the frozen moment. The dark-skinned ghouls and their domineering queen had nothing to do with me, but that skinless skeleton hungrily pawing an unconscious woman’s body, that’s who I identified with. That was me.

It’s not the cover image to my sexuality I would choose. It merges incompatible desires–is the skeleton’s mouth wide with arousal, or is he (“he”) anticipating a juicy meal? Either way, he’s a predator. Though not, apparently, a hunter. The woman is a discarded scrap, literally below the interest of the queen and her ghouls. Even the snake-lizard stares off indifferently as the woman’s face is obscured by its Freudian body. I understood her then and now to be unconscious, though she might as easily be dead. Perhaps her erect nipples signify living prey.

So my first inkling of sexuality was triggered by a fantastical representation of date rape. The girl’s been roofied. It’s a dire contrast to the Ghoul Queen–a woman commanding a gang of four grotesque but muscular males who have the physical ability to overpower her but instead bend and crawl at her feet (while possibly having anal intercourse). She is the painting’s largest figure, the tallest, spanning nearly the height of the frame, her figure embodying unchallenged authority. If not for the voyeuristic nudity, you might call her image feminist.

But then there’s the roofied girl, a depiction of abject weakness, the pose reducing her to a faceless and defenseless torso. The Queen’s power is positioned over this lower image, appears somehow predicated on it. While her impersonal eyes assess her ghouls, her imperial foot pins the unconscious girl’s hair. She is literally standing on her.

There’s a range of unstated narrative possibilities–does the Queen maintain power by sacrificing her Caucasian sisters to the dark horde? are only skinless and so racially unidentifiable ghouls allowed to fondle white flesh?–but the pose says enough. The girl is the Queen’s victim, not the other monsters’.

Why was my skeleton hand drawn to the unconscious girl’s breasts, but not the Queen’s? They’re smaller, so less intimidating? The Queen is equally exposed, but wholly in control of the fact. I can ogle her, but only because she seems to permit it, her chin angled invitingly away. But at any moment, those eyes could turn and gaze back at me. Did my seven-year-old bones inch across the roofied girl’s ribs because she has no eyes to see me? Did my memory fabricate a throne because a seated Queen is less horrifying?

Apparently Tim Bruckner was uncomfortable with these questions too. When he adapted “Ghoul Queen” into a 3-D miniature, he altered more than two dimensions. “It was important to pare down the composition to its essentials,” he said.

Non-essentials include ghoulish racism, slithering homophobia, and date-rape misogyny. But the skeleton remains–though not the nature of its now non-predatory hunger. “There’s nothing coy or retiring about a Frazetta woman,” explained Bruckner. “Even simply standing with a pike, her hand on her hip, being admired by one of the undead, she announces her presence with every sensuous curve of her body.” Bruckner literally turns my skull’s desire toward a stance of female power.

But I still wouldn’t choose the revised Ghoul Queen for my cover art. National Lampoon dubbed their issue “Strange Beliefs,” a better title for the painting too, though I doubt the editors knew they were lampooning American sex and racial norms. They presumably didn’t know they were lampooning me.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: September 2015