Black Bill Gates

Posted on February 16, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

“I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making,” Beyoncé declares in her new video “Formation.” It’s an unapologetic, swaggering declaration that she is a businesswoman and a power to be reckoned with. That’s not an unusual boast for the singer—her 2013 video for “Partition” opens with her languidly ordering about a (notably white) servant. But it does clash a little with “Hymn to the Weekend“, the video she released only a few weeks before in collaboration with Coldplay.

As I discussed last week, “Hymn to the Weekend” is set up as an Orientalist tourist video. Coldplay singer Chris Martin drives around in a cab, staring out at Mumbai, and relishing exotic displays of street art and the high spirits of street kids. India is figured as exotic and exciting. But it’s also presented as poor, earthy, real, visceral. For the video, the people of India are fun to stare at because they are not Bill Gates, and because they are outside the logic of the capitalist west. Here, the video proclaims, as Martin moans on about feeling drunk and high, is an ecstasy that isn’t about money and fame. It’s an experience you cannot purchase, even with your tourist dollars. It must be lived.

Though Beyoncé is dressed up as a glamorous Bollywood singer, she doesn’t change that narrative. She’s certainly opulent—but that’s figured as a mystic, distant opulence, set against spiritual landscapes, not as a wealth obtained through sweat and smarts. She exploits Orientalist tropes to make herself exotic and exicting, but those tropes end up defining and limiting her. In joining with Coldplay to make herself a Orientalist mystical totem, she gives up her role as entrepreneur.

She takes it back in “Formation,” though. In her own video, Beyoncé isn’t stuck in any one role. Instead, the video, set in New Orleans, puts her in a range of identities, from upscale buttoned up gentlewoman to street-level twerker, from historical to present-day. “Through this reckless country blackness, she becomes every black southern woman possible for her to reasonably inhabit, moving through time, class, and space,” Zandria Felice Robinson writes. Beyoncé is both marginal and empowered, both looker and spectacle.

It’s important that that the culture that inspires the video is treated with much more respect than in the Coldplay collaboration, in no small part because the community in question is one that Beyoncé identifies with. This isn’t just a matter of presenting herself as part of Southern black culture; it’s also about knowledge and respect. “Hymn to the Weekend” could have gotten a Bollywood star to appear alongside Beyoncé, but no one cared enough to bother making that happen. As a result, the video feels like something done to, rather than in collaboration with, Mumbai and its culture. In contrast, “Formation” includes New Orleans bounce performers Messy Mya and Big Freedia. It honors queer dancers and rappers whose style has been much imitated in the mainstream, but whose personal artistry is rarely acknowledged there.

“Formation” also differs from “Hymn to the Weekend” in that it presents marginalization not as exotic spectacle, but as struggle. The most instantaneously famous images from the video are of a black child dancing in front of an ominous line of police, and of Beyoncé lying on a sinking patrol car as the video’s close. The New Orleans presented in the video is not a tourist destination. It’s a city under siege, both by neglect in the wake of Katrina, and by state violence. There is joy there, but there’s also an insistence that the joy is not meant to be comfortably viewed from a cab. It’s an act of defiance.

And part of that defiance is the video’s deliberate, amused consumerism. “I’m so reckless when I rock my Givenchy dress/I’m so possessive so I rock his rock necklaces.” Beyoncé is Bill Gates; she wants, or already has, power, wealth, glamour, respect, and brains. She’s a businesswoman, which means she’s the entrepreneur making the video, not just the person the video is about.

Beyoncé’s been criticized at times for embracing capitalism and the iconography of wealth. But the “Hymn to the Weekend” video is a reminder that capitalism isn’t just about money. It’s about inequities of power, about who is owned, and about who gets to be the one who does the owning. The children Coldplay watches in Mumbai don’t get to say, with Beyoncé in “Formation”, “I’m so possessive,” because they aren’t seen as having their own desires. They are treated as the things to be consumed, not the consumers.

“Earned all this money, but they never take the country out me,” Beyoncé declares. Through double consciousness, she can be Bill Gates and herself at the same time. Poverty isn’t natural or fun. The people who don’t have power, want power, and are justified in wanting it. To tell them they should be different in kind from the capitalists is just what capitalism, and capitalism’s police force, always tells them. Beyoncé, at least in “Formation,” isn’t buying it.

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Posted on February 15, 2016 by Matthias Wivel

Daniel Clowes’ latest book, Patience, came out in Danish (and a few other languages, as far as I know) just before Christmas last year, as part of an effort by the publisher, Fantagraphics, to jump start international sales and avoid having them cannibalized by the American edition. Here’s a brief first take in anticipation of the discussion the book will hopefully elicit upon its official American release next month.

Patience is a love story dressed up as equal parts social realism and time travel adventure. It is also Clowes’ first unequivocally romantic work. Its protagonist, the self-described loser Jack Barlow, and his beloved wife Patience are expecting their first child. But one day he comes home to find her murdered on their living room floor. He spends the next seventeen years monomaniacally—and in vain—trying to find the murderer until, suddenly, he is given the chance to travel back in time, save Patience and make sure their child is born.

It does not quite go as planned. Jack is impulsive and possessed of a real temper, which time and again sends events careening out of control, crisscrossing the timeline. It is perhaps Clowes’ most entertaining work since the his early humor pieces, a real page turner with an unpredictably spontaneous, but predictably funny character at its center. Much like Clowes’ previous protagonist Wilson (2010), in fact—another self-sufficient yet hapless sap of the kind he so excels at.

Jack is in many ways a fleshed-out version of the censorious, self-delusional Wilson, who also seeks to restore his broken family. In spite of his many shortcomings, it was hard not to like him, and that goes double for Jack even though he is even more of a dubious acquaintance. Where Wilson studied rain drops, Jack stares at the wall, blinds drawn. And whether we are talking 2013 or 1985, the wall is full of holes—the result of off-panel tantrums or panic attacks, one senses.

Jack’s thought processes, ways or reasoning and, at times, actions border on the sociopathic, which calls to mind Clowes’ perhaps most disturbing character, the borderline superhero Andy from his masterful The Death Ray (2004), who lucidly assumed the role as supreme arbiter over other people’s life.

Yet we still like Jack because he is so unequivocally driven by love—a love which here literally transcends space and time. Actually, the time traveling brings out the oedipal undertones of it, not least clearly at the moment when he finds himself in front of his fatherless childhood home. The riddle of the Sphinx is here a murder mystery the solution to which depends on whether Jack is fundamentally subject to the same crushing predestination that brought King Oedipus low. Can we change the future?

Clowes transposes this struggle against determinism to Patience’s efforts to break with the social conditioning she has inherited as the child of a broken working class home in the Midwest. A large part of the story takes place in the small town in which she grew up, during the years immediately before she met Jack. Patience sometimes assumes the role of second narrator and her portrayal is the heart of the story. She is the whole person Jack aspires to be.

These passages are exemplary of how subtly and bracingly Clowes describes crushing social circumstances and thus recall earlier signature works such as the ensemble piece Ice Haven (2001), which also took place in a small American town, and the more intimate post-school comedy Ghost World (1997), which was fundamentally about transcending expectations.

Clowes’ well-known misanthropy is remarkable subdued in this story—even his Kubrick-like irony is downplayed. Only in the rather uninventive description of Jacks future in the year 2029 does his disinterested line come up short and resort to camp.

Clowes’ cartooning is here more nonchalant than usual. One gets the sense that he does not mind if his drawing comes across as inelegant. For the most part, however, this seems an entirely natural choice for this particular story—on paper his most fantastic. And even though Clowes is not possessed of the uncanny design genius of his paragon Steve Ditko, his surreal interludes in which he invokes the heady abstraction of prime Doctor Strange as well as the bizarrely loaded symbolism of Ditko’s objectivist comics seem perfectly calibrated and emotionally earned in this story about the order of things.

Utilitarian Review 2/13/16

Posted on February 13, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Emily Thomas on new text games.

Chris Gavaler meditates on auteurism in superhero comics.

Review of corporate training goof Welcome to the Jungle.

Review of Jason DaSilva’s doc about his ms, When I Walk.

Review of Gavin McInnes’ crappy How To Be a Man.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from May/June 1952.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote about:

—Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and how making your female characters stronger makes them weaker.

—how Silence of the Lambs is scared of Clarice. (it’s the 25th anniversary today.)

At the Guardian I wrote about:

—the Fifth Wave and colonialism against white people.

—Man in the High Castle, 11.22.63, and how we love counterfactual stories.

At Playboy I wrote about how cassette tapes never went away.

At the Establishment I wrote about:

—A.O. Scott and art as criticism as art as criticism.

—Trump, torture, and reparations.

At Splice today

—I wrote about what would happen if Rubio won NH. which didn’t happen, as it turns out.

—I asked Bernie Sanders, fool or liar?

Other Links

Parker Molloy on problems with Kenneth Zucker’s therapies for trans youth.

Juiia Serano on the same.

How to Be a Man

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on the Dissolve.
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Nothing about the description of How To Be A Man induces confidence. Mark (Gavin McInnes), an ex-comedian with a pregnant wife, discovers he has breast cancer and decides to record life lessons for his son-to-be, teaching him how to fight, drink, pick up girls, and otherwise do stereotypical man-things. He recruits Bryan (Liam Aiken), the 22-year-old son of an old flame, to videotape him. The two bond over guy humor and recreational drug use, eventually teaching each other—wait for it—how to be a man.

That sounds pretty dreadful in concept, but in execution, it’s worse. This film brings a resolute lack of wit and a numb stupidity to stereotypical concepts like mid-life crises and regressive gender stereotypes. For all its burble about toughness, How To Be A Man doesn’t even have the elementary courage of its own hackneyed formal conceit. The film is supposed to be structured around Mark’s video transmissions to his son, a concept that seems to call for a found-footage approach—or at least for some sort of play with the space between what Bryan records and what the audience sees. But the film within a film is all but ignored in the interest of running through a series of stupid setpieces: Mark quits his advertising job in an excess of egotistical bombast. Mark’s wife calls him a child. Mark picks up girls. All with a minimum of invention, and a maximum of banal crudity.

The crudity is supposed to be winning. A scene where Mark tells Bryan (loudly, with hand motions) how to perform oral sex gets a standing ovation from the assembled bar patrons, who are presumably meant to cue the viewing audience that this is some wild, awesome writing and acting. The truth, unfortunately, is that the writing is flabby and tedious, and McInnes’ delivery has little charisma or charm. The film is like being stuck in an elevator with a boorish drunk for an hour and a half. The fact that the boorish drunk gives a wink every so often to let viewers know that yes, boorish drunks are really irritating, doesn’t salvage it; it has the reverse effect.

Most of the boor’s spouting has to do, as the title says, with being a man—how to be tough, how to wow women, how to take risks and follow a dream. Much of Mark’s advice is patently poisonous, and he just about wrecks his life, which would seem to undercut his status as testosterone guru. But it doesn’t. Instead, the good things Mark does are part of being a man; the bad things are simply a failure to be manly enough. Thus, Mark’s advice to act like a dick and threaten people lets Bryan jettison his uptight roommate, whose main, unforgivable sin is being kind of freaked out that Bryan was using heroin in their apartment. Mark’s fashion advice leads Bryan to ditch his funky hat and appealingly schlubby clothes for bland preppy blah, à la Ally Sheedy’s transformation at the end of The Breakfast Club.

The path to being a man, then, is narrow and fraught: No silly hats, no expressing interest in astrology, no drinking wine instead of beer. Certainly, no homosexuality: The film’s one gay character is an abusive cocaine dealer, and physical affection between men is treated as a scandalous joke. How To Be A Man isn’t so much a how-to guide as a frightened list of anxious proscriptions.

The source of that anxiety isn’t hard to locate. Both Bryan and Mark at different points suffer humiliating beatings at women’s hands, and beyond that lingers Mark’s fear that the womanish illness of breast cancer has doomed him. Both the beatings and the breast cancer are played for laughs, not because the film sees fear of femininity as ridiculous, but because men with women’s diseases, or men beaten up by women, are feminized, and therefore funny. A morbid, snickering, terrified misogyny runs through the film like a sad trail of fart jokes. Toward the end, Bryan, following Mark’s dictates, imagines the girl he’s trying to pick up as disgusting and diseased; loathing women gets him sex, and makes him a man. Masculinity appears, for the filmmakers, to be based on fear, hate, intolerance, and mediocre bathroom humor. In short, How To Be A Man is an insult to men, to women, and to everyone else.

When I Walk

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran at The Dissolve.
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“We are all alone in this world, even though we have support systems,” Jason DaSilva’s mom tells him early on in the documentary When I Walk. It’s a harsh thing for a mom to say, and even harsher in context. DaSilva, the filmmaker, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2006, at age 25. MS is a degenerative disease that robs its victims of motor control, and often of vision. In the scene in question, Jason is telling his mom that he’s worried about how he’ll manage on his own. To which, again, her reply isn’t, “I’m here for you,” but more like, “We’re all alone anyway. Deal with it.”

His mother’s advice is typical of the first part of the movie, not because of its bleakness so much as because of the way it jars. As a filmmaker, DaSilva quickly decided to make a movie about his illness after he was diagnosed. But while the disease provides a topic, it doesn’t give the film a coherent narrative, or an emotional center. When Jason’s mom urges him to be positive, her advice rings hollow, but the documentary doesn’t seem to know how to question it. When Jason goes to India for a film project and tries various cures, from yoga to transcendental meditation, his investment in them, or his degree of hope, isn’t explored convincingly, either. At one point, he talks about how women aren’t as interested in him since he’s had MS, and then shows a number of pictures of “beautiful women” he has dated in the past, with their features blanked out. He’s erased their features for privacy reasons, but the result is awkwardly ghoulish. It feels as if who they are is less important than that he has pictures of them, or, more charitably, as if he isn’t sure what he wants to show, and is trying to get something on the screen even if it’s just a blank.

That all changes dramatically when Jason meets Alice Cook at an MS support group. Alice is at the meeting because her mother has MS, and soon she and Jason are dating. In one exhilarating scene, she gets on a scooter to see what life is like from his perspective, and the two of them go zipping gleefully around the Guggenheim.

As Alice and Jason’s relationship deepens, it quickly becomes apparent that the film isn’t about Jason’s illness, but about their love affair. Alice expresses some discomfort about being on film, but the movie’s most powerful moments are all hers. Jason’s loss comes through most vividly not through the deterioration in his condition, but through Alice’s desperate confession, “I don’t want Jason getting any worse. But it just keeps coming.” The day-to-day grind of the illness is brought home not through his difficulty in putting on his pants, but through Alice’s frustrated, guilty decision to go on a hiking trip alone in order to briefly escape the constant demands of being a caregiver.

Even on that hike, though, she’s taking footage for the film itself, both helping Jason with his project and sharing her experiences with him. She’s part of him, and vice versa—and again, in many ways viewers learn more about him, his illness, and what it costs him by listening to her than by listening to him. The film becomes more sure-footed, and more certain, as Jason loses control of his body, not because the disease gives the film meaning, but because Alice does. When I Walk makes it very clear that Jason isn’t all alone despite his support system. Rather, his support system, including his mom, makes him who he is, even more than his malfunctioning legs and hands. His life isn’t his disease, and neither, after an uncertain start, is his lovingly collaborative film.

Battle of the Corporate Training Exercise

Posted on February 9, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran at The Dissolve.
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Comedies’ goal is laughter above everything else, and in that pursuit, they’re sometimes allowed surprising leeway in terms of plot and tone. Welcome To The Jungle, about an ad-agency team-building exercise gone horribly wrong, takes that breathing room and runs with it. The film starts off as an office comedy with nods toward The Office and Dilbert, and feints toward Full Metal Jacket. Then, as the cast ends up on a remote island, it gleefully devolves into Lord Of The Flies. The archetypal moment may be the charmingly awkward, obviously fake battle between Jean-Claude Van Damme and a tiger—logic and suspension of disbelief casually defied in the name of high-camp vaudeville.

Van Damme, as team-building coach Storm, appears to be having the time of his life parodying every other role he’s ever played. The rest of the actors seem to enjoy the script’s loony opportunities as well: Rob Huebel as the evil VP Phil swings from corporate backstabber to lunatic Kurtz without ever losing touch with his oleaginous essence, while Kristen Schaal as Brenda gets to launch into discursive monologues about everything from bunny rabbits to the state of her bowels. Adam Brody as diffident beta-male hero Chris has less room for overacting, but he still manages to sell his role, remaining low-key and earnest in the face of escalating preposterousness.

In addition to the absurdist comedy, Welcome To The Jungle has a satiric edge. The movie is smart enough to make the connection between petty boardroom oneupmanship and action-movie tropes, and deft enough to ridicule them both for their panicked performance of testosterone. Chris’ boss (played by Dennis Haysbert) strokes his corporate awards suggestively. Van Damme emits crazed primal screams one moment and flinches from needles at the next, in an ecstasy of macho self-parody. Multiple onlookers comment on the homoeroticism of Chris and Phil’s final mud battle.

The film is hyper-aware of the ridiculousness of the patriarchal obsession with masculinity-as-penis-size—and yet, in the end, and rather helplessly, it’s still mired in a banal narrative of masculine self-actualization. The plot comes down to Chris trying not to be (as the film delicately puts it) “the world’s biggest pussy.” Since the focus is on Chris’ manliness or lack thereof, his romantic interest Lisa (Megan Boone) is, inevitably, the only character in the film who doesn’t have anything interesting to do. She looks attractive, she expresses sincere sympathy when Chris talks about how he’s just too darn nice, and she waits patiently for him to complete his narrative arc and become the kind of man who can sweep her off her feet. Comedy frees up the plot and allows even Van Damme to play against type, but there are limits. The leading lady still has to be dull.

So Welcome To The Jungle abandons its own doofy tiger in favor of Chris’ more conventional, generic inner beast. That’s disappointing, but not exactly surprising. As the film suggests, it’s hard to escape the corporate calculus, no matter how far from the office you try to travel.

The Visual Superhero (Analyzing Comics 101)

Posted on February 8, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

Having already talked about framing and layout and closure and abstraction, I’m backing up now to what should be square one for “Analyzing Comics 101.” Who are the creators doing all of this framing, etc.? Although Will Eisner’s 1940s Sunday newspaper section The Spirit is a significant exception, superhero comics are typically created by multiple authors, with production divided into five semi-independent roles.

Writer: Creator who conceives the story idea, plots the events, plans the content and sequence of panels typically through a written script, and/or composes the words that appear in caption boxes and word balloons. The various writing roles may involve more than one individual.

Penciler: Artist who sketches the pages, typically based on a writer’s script. A superhero comic typically has only one penciler.

Inker: Artist who finishes the pages by penning over the penciler’s breakdowns. More than one inker may be involved in a single issue, and a penciler sometimes inks her own pencils.

Colorist: Artist who designs or co-designs color or gray tones and adds them to the inked pages.

Letterer: Artist who draws the scripted words (but not sound effects) inside balloons and boxes.

The words and images in a comic book are the product a complex and sometimes overlapping creative process. Although rarely credited, a penciler often co-writes by making encapsulation and layout decisions and sometimes creating content based on the credited writer’s story summary. 1950s Marvelman writer Mick Anglo wrote no scripts, but “would instead suggest a basic plot outline to an artist, giving him a specific number of pages to fit the idea into. Once the art was complete, Mick would then write in the actual wording for the letterer” (“Miracleman Alias Marvelman”). Stan Lee followed the same process in the 60s, dubbing it the Marvel Method. Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko would also sometimes conceive and pencil stories independently, leaving margin notes for Lee to expand into dialogue and narration. Job applicants seeking writing positions were hired based on their ability to fill in four pages of empty talk balloons and caption boxes from Fantastic Four Annual #2, further suggesting that pencilers were often the primary “writers” at Marvel.

Even when working from full scripts, pencilers may exert a great deal of creative control. According to 90s Deathlok writer Dwayne McDuffie, penciler Denys Cowan “felt free to alter my panel breakdowns and shot descriptions whenever he had a better idea” (28).

Neil Gaiman even encouraged Andy Kubert to alter his 2003 scripts: “Feel free to ignore my suggestions if you can see a better way of doing it. (You are the artist.) … Also, there’s an awful lot to cram in here, so let me know if you need more room, and if I’m trying to jam in too much…” (Marvel 1602).

Penciler and inker relationships are complex too. Inker Eric Shanower was notorious for adding details to layouts, while Vince Colletta was notorious for eliminating them. John Byrne even voiced homophobic complaints about Bob Layton’s inking of his work:

I actually feel physically ill when I look at Bob’s stuff. […] It’s like everything is greasy and slimy. […] all his men are queer. They have these bouffant hairdos and heavy eye make-up and an upper lip with a little shadow in the corner which to me says lipstick. Even the Hulk. I will never forgive him for what he did to the Hulk’s face in the annual that we did together.

I remember my father looking at […] the finished inks […] and my father said, “Well this guy’s queer.” No, he didn’t look queer in the pencils, Dad.

When John Byrne inked Steve Ditko in the 80s, their styles clashed queerly too, creating Byrne-detailed figures arranged in signature Ditko poses.

Unless the penciler is instead painting in a color medium—Alex Ross prefers gouache watercolors—color is added to comic pages last. Before Photoshop, this was accomplished during the printing process by overlaying color-separation boards and screening ink by percentages in dot patterns. The colorist would select color combinations for each discrete shape, and multiple assistants would cut the shapes from each board. Color decisions might also be indicated by the writer in a script or by the penciler in the margins of the layout. Because the artists’ boards remained black and white, colors can be altered with each publication. Alan Moore and Garry Leach’s first chapters of Marvelman originally appeared in black and white in Warrior magazine in 1982; the retitled Miracleman #1 was reprinted in color in 1985 by Eclipse Comics; and Marvel Comics reprinted it again in 2014 with a new color design by Steve Oliff. (Kevin Melrose discusses this in more detail here.)

The final product of a comic book consists entirely of ink on paper (originally the lowest grade, pulp paper), but the images are the result of multiple processes. At times it is useful to discuss each contribution independently, while at other times such divisions may be burdensome or indeterminable. Nathaniel Goldberg and I in “Economy of the Comic Book Author’s Soul” analyze contributors as a single, pluralistic author whose words and images display unified intentionality. We might also analyze a given comic as though it has agency itself. Unlike a traditional painting—which may be copied and mass distributed—a comic book is its multiple copies. The artboards may be considered works of art too, but the artboards are not the comic book produced from them. A comic book has no single original.

Superhero comics, because they tell stories through representational images, also create tensions between how a subject matter is depicted and the subject itself—in other words, between the story world of the characters (diegesis) and the physical comic book in the world of the reader (discourse). No tension between diegesis and discourse occurs in prose-only texts because the words on the page in no way resemble the world they linguistically evoke. But because comics discourse includes representational images, their diegetic content is ambiguous. Is a drawing of a superhero a photo-like document of the superhero as others in the story see him? Or is the drawing an interpretation of the character which may be in some way diegetically inaccurate?

This tension does not occur (or occurs much less) in the non-fiction of graphic memoirs and graphic journalism because the images represent real-world content and so are understood as interpretations. Graphic novels, because their content is fictional, create a greater tension, and superhero comics, because they are an amalgam genre that includes fantasy and science fiction, heighten it by depicting subject matter that both does not and often cannot exist. The diegesis-discourse tension poses a question: Do comic book superheroes exist as they are depicted, or do they exist independently from their depictions? This is a philosophical question I can’t resolve here, but the tension is a factor when analyzing superhero comics visually.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: February 2016