If You’re Lucky, You’re a Furry in 2K16

Colin Spacetwinks is a furry writer and loquacious fan of comic books.  Last May, they released an impressive history of the furry fandom using the medium of Twine, an innovative tool for stories and games which allows for endlessly branching narrative strands. Everyone’s A Furry 2K16 not only documents the wildfire-like emergence of funny animal-identified folks since the advent of the internet, but also details a very personal history of utilizing online communities as a space for queer exploration and self-reflection when other options are scarce.  Colin and I have had similar experiences growing up with furry, so I asked them to chat about the project and to dish about this and that.  This interview has been edited for clarity.

Mouse: Everyone’s A Furry 2K16 is a history of what we call the modern furry community through your own experience utilizing Twine as a storytelling medium.  What drew you to use the Twine in particular, taking on this project?

Colin Space Twinks: It was actually sort of strange, because although I talked on and off about furry history all the time – on twitter, on tumblr, wherever – what really motivated it was actually someone asking me about it instead of me going off, apropos of nothing. I got interviewed to talk about some of the economics of the furry art market, and why so many artists seemed to find it easier to generate income and reliable funds, with less hassle from clients, in the commission market there.  Once that interview ended, my mind got to thinking about how “Jeez, all the pieces on furry culture and history always tend to come from people on the outside looking in” and how I was kind of tired of that, and how the history of furry itself was actually very poorly documented, scattered about here and there. Add in a bunch of other fascinations, gripes, things on my mind, and suddenly, one afternoon, I research and write this entire piece.  I wanted to get something down and out there before other outlets started to really make their own pieces on furry as it was starting to mainstream. Something coming from the inside, and more accurate, as well as featuring personal, more anecdotal pieces that wouldn’t be part of those things.  You wouldn’t get “here’s how queer people have connected deeply with furry for years now” in like, say, a Salon piece going “Seriously, what’s up with furries?” for example.

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M: Absolutely not.  Half my writing on the Hooded Utilitarian is griping about lazy journalism about furries.  You do a little digging into furry origins in comics and Science Fiction fandoms, which you might be into if you know to dig into Fred Patten’s archiving but not from outside sources.  That early material is fascinating to me, because once furry became a discreet identity, there suddenly was a sharp divide between which comics made the cut to become just “Comics” like Usagi Yojimbo, which debuted in the furry zine Albedo Anthropomorphics and is now a widely respected title, and those which were relegated to this separate lower-grade “furry” status.  Omaha the Cat Dancer is important to both, and paradoxically, the series has fallen through the cracks.

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 ST:  You see this especially in the late 90s debates between slices of furry fandom, and later in the early 00s in the ridiculous net war stuff – also pieces of furry history that’d fall through the cracks elsewhere – this desperation into separating things that were “furry,” (bad) or “not furry,” (good), often using the short hand of “anthro” to imply that this wasn’t ‘furry’ – it was good and mature and other people liked it, so it couldn’t possibly be it. You still see it come up sometimes, like when people are talking about Lackadaisy, or other furry media they like, this want to push away from this kind of definition that they despise, or are ashamed of for whatever mix of reasons.  This was why I brought up Carl Barks’ and Osamu Tezuka’s material right from the start, because they wouldn’t be classified as ‘furry’ at all by most, yet they absolutely put out erotically charged furry material, relegating them to the bin everything else would get discarded in. Can’t play ‘no, it’s better than that’ when it’s right out there.

M: And independent comics owe a concrete debt to Omaha, in the formation of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.  But I often find that title conspicuously omitted from the roster of legal victories for comics.

ST: Absolutely. It’s hard to know if it’s intentional, or if Omaha has just been passively forgotten, year by year, despite receiving praise from comics giants at the time, before “furry” was a particularly codified thing.  It absolutely hasn’t gotten the kind of canonization a lot of other indie material from the era did.

M: Kim Thompson of Fantagraphics was a champion for interesting funny animal comics.  His passing was a blow to American comics in general, but I think in particular to the work of preserving the legacy of work that appeared in anthologies he edited, like Critters.  But there’s at some point a cultural split, and you’ve astutely pointed out that it probably has a lot to do with the emergence of the Internet.  (Ed. Note, Mouse has worked as an editorial intern for Fantagraphics.  Kim Thompson was very kind to her).

ST: Yeah. It’s a really interesting thing, because it doesn’t happen ’till the late 90s and early 00s – and in the early to mid 90s, furry comics are getting printed like wildfire, because the speculator market was ridiculous and everybody was grabbing a slice before it popped. At a time when furry material by furries had some of its greatest mainstream exposure, it wasn’t considered as such – not just yet. It’d take until more people had a net hookup for it to happen.  So it’s this strange thing to see, as furry comics retreated back into the domain of the internet, that was when people started picking at stuff from the outside (or, often, from insiders hiding on the outside, for whatever reasons). Cruising through tons of 90s publishers, you can find these old, uncollected furry comics that would’ve been available nationwide, and nobody said a peep.  And again, not to mention how Lola Bunny in 1996 blew so far outside of the confines of ‘furry’ that people who know nothing about this whole subculture and the clashes and everything. That she exists in some whole other world.

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M: You talk about how there are a few acceptable furry characters, Lola, Gadget Hackwrench, Minerva Mink, who exist in this de-pressurized environment where they are safe to be considered as (presumably cis male) objects of desire, while furry on the Internet kept getting weirder and queerer.

ST: Yeah. That was a crucial point for me, because at the time, when everybody was responding to the 00s stuff, that was when the invention of the ridiculous term ‘fursecution’ came up. Initially, people really thought it was furry specifically that people were hassling and hating… but if you checked all these other forums and websites, what they discussed, and who were “acceptable” furries… in retrospect, it became very clear that bashing furry was mostly being used as a shield to oblique hating queer folks online. Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, trans people, any variety of queer folk. The bad writing of things like Jack and Better Days got their share of slams, but the absolute widest amount of damn near cyber-stalking and harassment was pretty much universally directed at queer folks in the furry community.  Because if people were perfectly fine discussing how much they wanted to have sex with these furry women but were constantly picking on gay furries – no matter how serious or ridiculous they may have portrayed themselves, and extra hate for the flamboyant – well, it established a pattern.

M: There’s absolutely resistance, from outside of and also from within the community, to the idea that furry is a vector for queerness, weird sexuality, any kind of unorthodox gender expression, when it clearly is for many, many, many people.

ST: Right. It was a place for a lot of folk who couldn’t find themselves elsewhere offline, didn’t feel comfortable in the spaces they did find. Whatever the case, a lot of people came crawling into furry, finding a place to explore sexuality, gender, in a way the felt… less stressful, I suppose?  I think of particular old Furcadia rooms where people were definitely working around and through gender, but somewhat clumsily, lacking the terms or spaces we’d have now. But it was important to have something, somewhere.

M: Like a decades-long therapy session running silently in the background, where you might internalize that you are Mrs. Frisby and Justin the rat is your boyfriend.  Or maybe that’s just me.  I’m joking (I’m Not).  But speaking personally, my furryness is absolutely inextricable from my being a big gay gender weirdo.

ST: Hahaha, we all find ourselves in different ways. Books and movies keep selling this grand, deeply dramatic transformation, but an astounding amount of us, especially in the modern age, work out our sexuality and gender in weird online spaces. We don’t have the big slow-mo zoom-in moment where we go “And then I knew” over appropriately dramatic and meaningful material. A lot of us get there in ways that certainly wouldn’t be your award bait for just sounding too goofy, too ridiculous.  People want your sexuality, your gender exploration to be this Serious Affair, and it absolutely can be in these spaces, but people don’t wanna admit that people do an awful lot of processing in these spaces.

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M: Sometimes your “eureka” moment, if you have one, is looking at a pink husky’s butthole on the adult section of Furbuy.

ST: Hahaha, yeah, pretty much!  So the whole history of furry, in comics, zines, and everything, is wrapped up in a whole bind of sexuality, especially moving out from the 90s and into the 00s, with a lot of furry webcomics in particularly delving into homosexuality and gender exploration.

M: Going to college to be gay was, and is, a THING in furry comics.

ST: Absolutely! Oh god, it was massive!

M: It gets a lot of teasing but I love it.  I love Associated Student Bodies.  A good friend just sent me some issues of Circles in the mail.  I read the Class Menagerie as a kiddo.  They’re clumsy and arguably amateur if you choose to think about it that way, but they speak from a place of real earnest gay longing that, as you’ve mentioned, mainstream comics publishers are absolutely inept at capturing.

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ST: Exactly! They’re clumsy, yes, but like, they feel more real for it. We didn’t have the poetic words, the glorious prose, the Serious Stories, so we just worked ourselves out online in these webcomics and written serials that were very sincere, very honest ways of working through ourselves.  Like, 1998, 199, it’s… 4 years till MA legalizes gay marriage? It’s not even thought of as a possibility at the time, and we find ourselves craving these places to be open and safe with our sexuality and gender thoughts, but also wanting to talk about the struggles we feel too…  So we end up with a lot of “gay at college” comics, tackling both of these – where we can be very very queer and simultaneously mention “Hey, shit SUCKS for us,” inventing a space for ourselves in our fiction we don’t find IRL.

M: Associated Student Bodies, I think has a feeling of, hm… “This comic is about cartoon lions and wolves, so maybe this is a world where condoms aren’t necessary.”  Circles on the other hand is very candid about its characters living with HIV/AIDS.  They’re maybe not mutually exclusive approaches to processing things.

ST: It’s just processing, non-stop, basically, and everyone having room to do that in their own unique way, while creating a community.  Not to mention, furry gave an alternative if you didn’t like or feel comfortable with what queer mainstream gave you, if you had spaces or access to it in the first place.

M: AYEP.

ST: There’s all this very corny art of stuff like watercolors of gay coyotes looking up at the stars you can find in VCL artists from the time – and it was so different than what a lot of mainstream gay material sold you then. This sort of sweet, romantic sensibility, and yes, very, very corny. But we wanted corny!  Not to mention, the freedom of having all sorts of different kinds of bodies.  If we think modern gay mags and the like are bad at offering body variety… hooh, the 90s.  So we latch onto this world of modern or fantasy set walking, talking animal people having these dramatic and clumsily written gay romances and It means the world to us, because so much of it is us, and so often, made by us.  Inventing what you don’t have.  You can find it in the print material, but especially in the webcomics.

M: Definitely.

ST: Even back then, webcomics were so big you couldn’t possibly read them all – and there were so many in the furry field, just… processing!  But all people want to latch onto is the “legitimate” stuff, so Blacksad keeps coming up on the “good” furry content lists, and the like, and, notably Blacksad runs into the same heterosexual stuff – making the women less furry, more ‘acceptably’ sexy.  If the artist considered Blacksad sexy, he’d be drawn with just cat ears and a weird nose for animalistic features.

M: I’ve had my words with Blacksad.

ST: Haven’t we all!

M: I can always spot a furry in comics if they draw furries well.  That’s a little obtuse, maybe, but hoo-boy, there are some gruesome drawings of Rocket Raccoon out there.

ST: Hahaha, it’s like I’ve said elsewhere, drawing animals and animal people have dropped out of superhero artist fundamentals, for want of just imitating Jim Lee.  But now we end up in a weird point in 2016, where after all this, after all those inner and outer and inner-outer  debates and wars… less and less people care about the old stigma of furry. It’s a weird place to be!

M: We have Zootopia.  I’ll call it out as furry (those are some well-cartooned animal peoples), plenty of others are at liberty to not do so for their own comfort.  But we’re getting around to your thesis.  Everyone’s a furry.  Or from its evolution from mainstream funny animal cartoons to a specific subculture to big business again, there’s something special about cartoon animals.

ST: Yeah. After all this, all that hemming and hawing, people making ‘exceptions’ for certain furries, just time passing made a lot of the old rules about what was acceptably furry and not just started to drop.  Like, Disney puts out a movie with a furry nudist colony featuring a panther luxuriously licking at his leg and buff tigers in sparkle short shorts dancing all around. And people are just… going with it. Drawing their own fursonas or furry comics without having to go “it’s ANTHRO” or all of that.  So now people are re-embracing it, whether or not they know any of the history behind how we got there in the first place.

M: So much of it gets lost, in dead links or in the hearts of people who for whatever reason no longer want to be part of the fandom, or in new folks swept up in just the tidal magnitude of new material being produced all the time.  Burned furs ghost and resurface as porn publishers, or folks need to dip out to avoid the constant teasing or harassment, or maybe they’ve gotten through their processing and are at the time in their life when furry isn’t necessary for working their stuff out.

ST: It’s a lot. I chat regularly with a former Burned Fur, who read the twine and like we went back and forth about the history there. I did some old net spelunking and tracing the other day, found one artist who quit furry in about ’99, ’00, and now just recently has a furry body pillow up for sale. Some people have quit permanently and are never coming back, some are returning in quiet waves. Some never left, and chugged on quietly – Terrie Smith, iconic 90s furry artist, never stopped, and even has Havoc Inc as a webcomic that’s been stuck on a cliffhanger since 2013, I think.  People worry about mainstreaming and furry not ‘being cool’ or some exclusive club, but like, fuck that, for all the obvious reasons.

M: I love Terrie Smith.

ST: She’s fantastic! Really molded and influenced so much of the 90s furry style – watercolors and markers, really vivid.

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M: And Havoc, Inc. was about a gay relationship that Marvel and DC wouldn’t touch.

ST: And still are awfully skittish about, when they feel confident enough to try at all.

M: And if you’re on the net, you get to see the dirty stuff, how Ches and Deck are definitely polyamorous.  Things about those characters that weren’t exactly printable, even in the boom of black-and-white comics.

ST: Yeah. Like, you can find het couples being sexy and sexual, especially in 80s superhero stuff, like Green Arrow and Black Canary – but get to gay, and it’s almost always happening off panel, if it happens at all. Lots of very chaste, very adorable gay boys, who barely so much as kiss.  Steve Orlando, thank god, broke this pattern in the biggest ways with Midnighter.

M: Growing up on furry comics, seeing something from marvel like “Oh, Doctor Strange is gay now and also dead” just doesn’t impress me.

ST: Ahaha, it’s also rough times, because any gay character you get in superhero comics now can’t possibly last, especially as a solo – they don’t have time to develop, they can’t get a supporting cast, they can’t be themselves, they can’t have a full story. The print market doesn’t have the economic security it used to, so constant reboots and events happen, and when publishers do take a whack at something different, everyone knows they’re running on a very tight clock.  So if you want to get the real stuff, the space to really deal with these things, you get online. Back then, and now.  A lot of queer characters, especially at Marvel now, end up on team books, where their only other queer interaction is with their designated romance, if they get one at all.  There’s no queer life – there’s very limited slots for interaction, and their almost never the lead character. And again, they’re on a ticking clock, and if they’re in a teambook, they surrounded pretty much entirely by straight people…  So it’s bread crumbs. Well meant breadcrumbs, but bread crumbs.  In comparison, the sincere clumsiness of a 1998 “gay at college” furry webcomic is a fucking feast.

M: And the state of furry now is… implicitly queer.  Or is it?  To be honest, I don’t follow along with too much straight furry culture these days.

ST: THIS is where mainstreaming gets weird. I don’t worry about furry ‘not being cool’, I worry about queer furries getting pushed out, and the worst aspects of furry communities – homophobia, transphobia, racism, et all – getting amplified. And lacking a clear history, one of the things I wanted to try and rectify, it’s very easy for one to come in and claim “oh, yeah, it’s always been very straight here in furry”.  Which isn’t helped by outside “legitimate” pieces on furry culture either intentionally or unintentionally always focusing on het stuff.  So I don’t know if it’s implicitly queer right now! It absolutely was when so much of the net was hell bent on hating furry, but right now? It’s in flux.  People have to sort of assert and be loud about the queerness of furry space and not let people revise history or push queer folks out to make it ‘acceptable’ and very very straight.

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M: So to me it’s absolutely necessary for pieces like Everyone’s A Furry 2K16 to be out there to document our history in an environment when lazy journalists invent things about us out of whole cloth, or can’t even report on violent attacks on us without breaking out into laughter. To present a personal history, which fills in so many gaps in between bullet points.

ST: Yeah. It meant a lot to me when I started getting responses from people who have been in furry since the 70s, 80s, thanking me for writing a piece like this, capturing stuff people either don’t see or intentionally ignore.  So while furry’s starting to “legitimize”, I don’t want that legitimization to come with the cost of draining furry out of all its queerness, its safe spaces for queerness – which its already lost some, to either tech obsolescence or just getting pushed out – and amplifying all the worst aspects we have, just like any subculture has.  It does make me feel better that a lot of the old guard, the really shitty ones, don’t have the pull they used to. People don’t like what they’re selling, or aren’t paying attention to them in the first place.

M: It’s not a monoculture or really even a “fandom.”  I’ve had the great fortune of finding my friend group, and hey, my spouse(!) through furry.  I can insulate myself from the heinous behavior that does go on, like it does in any social group.  But I agree, we need to speak up for ourselves, for or reasons for being here.

ST: Yeah, it’s definitely different than things like anime fandoms or the like, because there’s no central… professionally produced piece we circle around. We make our own things, we have dozens upon dozens of subgroups. All that’s really similar is an enthusiasm for talking animal people. Not even everybody in furry has their own fursona, it’s a really wide variety of interests in this one thing.  So yeah. One of the things I’m trying to do with and after Eveyone’s A Furry 2K16 is get that history in. I’m trying to push myself to start getting some of those 90 print comics and zines, sort of assemble a library and timeline of all this stuff that has become forgotten… because who would’ve ever thought it’d be important?  And maybe, hopefully, get Omaha The Cat dancer some of the recognition it lost back.

M: GODSPEED!

Die, Shark, Die

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This post originally ran on CiCO3

Jaume Coller-Serra’s new film The Shallows follows Blake Lively in a test of wills against a great white shark. Apart from an unintentionally farcical and groan-inducing last act, it’s a pretty well shot and acted story. It is one of countless stories about wild beasts threatening the lives of humans. Most of these are, from a statistical or scientific perspective, no less ridiculous than The Shallows‘ silly conclusion. These stories almost always involve absurd science. And towards what end that bad science is deployed tells us a lot, as does the selection of which killer animals are portrayed.

In The Shallows Blake Lively’s character is out surfing when she happens upon a whale carcass. A shark near the carcass sees her as a potential meal and decides to have a bite to eat. Over the next day the shark ignores the massive quantity of food available with the whale carcass while stalking Lively, and during that time eats two and a half other people.

All this is exceedingly unlikely. The shark ate somewhere around 200kg of people over those two days which is, using the most conservative estimates, around two months of food for an adult great white (other studies suggest this is closer to six months worth of soylent green). So the shark ignores (or leaves, it’s not clear) a massive whale carcass which could feed a host of sharks for months and instead goes after a bunch of swimmers and surfers that don’t have the yummy (for sharks) smell of rotting meat. And it does so in order to overeat by quite a bit! For contrast in the infamous 1916 New Jersey shark attacks a shark ate a maximum of .3 people over twelve days (though it killed four).

This is common in these kinds of stories. For example the T-Rex in Jurassic Park should be done eating after she eats the company stooge. That’s (probably) enough calories for a T-Rex for two days. That it keeps hunting seems pretty unlikely. The shark in Jaws eats even more beyond its likely diet. And it is exactly this voraciousness that identifies the creatures as antagonists in these stories.

There is a species power dynamic in play obscured by this. My back of the envelope math says humans comprise about .0000042% of deaths in fatal human-shark encounters. No big surprise here. It’s common enough knowledge that humans kill exponentially more sharks than the other way around. And given the challenge in imagining a shark’s point of view, it isn’t all that surprising that humans with almost no exceptions tell the stories of those .0000042% of fatalities rather than the 99.9999958% percent of them. Sure, the Discovery Channel trots out the annual shark slaughter statistics during “Shark Week” but they’re invariably mixed with stories of shark attacks lending a false narrative symmetry even as the statistical symmetry is denied. Man-eating bear, wolf, lion, snake and other such stories all follow this same pattern.

This is how power generally works, both between our species and others and inside our own species. The oppressive relationship is inverted no matter what the science says. So despite all populations using and selling drugs at nearly identical rates, it is Black people who are portrayed as the drug-dealing criminals thus positioning them not as victims of racist mass incarceration, but as justifications for the oppressive system. Despite Israel dispossessing Palestinians on a daily basis, it is Palestinians who are portrayed as the violent aggressors, much as natives are commonly portrayed in US Western stories. The dynamic is analogous to how the tv show Zoo tells of a worldwide animal revolt that threatens humanity while we are in the midst of an anthropocene/capitalocene mass extinction event. The bad science of insatiable predators is deployed to justiy the bad practice of exterminating them.

The inter- and intra-species analogies are, of course, imperfect even as the racist narratives invoke a certain dehumanization. But the racialized component of which killer animal stories are told tells us just as much about inverted narratives of threat and power. For some animals do kill, and even kill and eat, vast numbers of people every year. Blake Lively will likely never star in one of these stories.

Nile crocodiles kill somewhere between several hundred and several thousand people every year in Africa throughout their range. We don’t even have sound estimates because relatively few resources are dedicated to tracking African deaths. Crocodiles eat people on a daily basis because people have to spend so much time in crocodile habitats with minimal protection. This isn’t a problem of reptilian predation, this is a problem of capitalism and colonialism. The stories told of crocodiles eating humans are instead like Lake Placid, a fun film that is science fiction both because of the vast numbers of people consumed and because of which people are consumed. Out of some three dozens feature length films about killer crocodiles and alligators, I know of only one that takes place in Africa, 2006’s Primeval, a racist story of white people in constant danger from both Burundians and the crocodile.

Though not eating us, snakes kill tens of thousands of people every year, predominantly in South and Southeast Asia (and to a lesser extent in Africa and parts of South America). These incidents are tied to poor labor and housing conditions which are, again, a problem of racism and colonialism. The Anaconda tetralogy and Snakes on a Plane do not tell these stories.

The most deadly animal, though, by a wide margin, is the mosquito. Mosquito-related deaths which number in the hundreds of thousands every year despite malaria being, for the most part, easily treatable were resources dedicated to the task.

These killer animal stories are not told on screen because the victims aren’t fully human in the eyes of those choosing what stories get produced. And those stories with fully human victims like The Shallows invariably invert the material world predator-prey relationship. The exceptions are exceedingly rare and even then are told with circumscribed or regressive politics. The Ghost and the Darkness and Prey for example, are pro-colonialism stories of animals preying on humans based upon the man-eating lions of Tsavo. The body count is attributed to lions and not the colonial railroad project (a dam in Prey‘s version) that brought people into the lions’ habitat in the first place. But telling such stories can illuminate vast political economic problems and indicts the systems that produce the death tolls. Capitalism and colonialism continually produce horror stories of animals killing people with body counts beyond all but apocalyptic imaginations. Jaws simply cannot compete.

All About Him: Huston’s The Dead

“He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude.”
-James Joyce, The Dead

Director John Huston’s 1987 film adaptation of “The Dead,” the final short story of James Joyce’s collection Dubliners, adds to and alters the text of Joyce’s original story, to both good and bad effect. There are several possible reasons for the alterations. Certainly some are added to support the filmmakers’ interpretation of Joyce’s story, but more pragmatically Huston may have expanded Joyce’s story because a feature film is expected to take up at least ninety minutes. The text of “The Dead” can be read in less time than that and so for the purpose of commercial cinema distribution, incidents were added and scenes were extended. Others have speculated that Huston’s son Tony Huston, while writing the screenplay according to his father’s wishes, still further distorted the text to reflect the personal marital conflict in his, Tony’s, life. However, whatever the causes for these modifications and insertions, they are equally designed to foreshadow Gretta Conroy’s actions at the end of the story; the additions justify a view of Gretta’s character as selfish and thoughtless of her husband Gabriel’s feelings.

Through a close analysis of the text of “The Dead” and of Huston’s film also entitled The Dead, together with an examination of the critical responses to the narrative, I will show how Huston imposes his distorting interpretation on Joyce’s text. Though some might claim that like many of my pieces for this site, I’m again applying “P.C.” views anachronistically to older works, I will demonstrate how Huston creates a negative view of Gretta that is not found in the text, a negative view that is nonetheless reiterated time and again by the (most often male) critics of this film. I will show that Huston’s interpretation of the short story is not singular, since literary critics of Joyce’s original story have also overlooked aspects of the narrative to impose their heteronormative and male-centric reading of the relations between Gretta and Gabriel Conroy.

John Huston said of Joyce’s Ulysses that it was “probably the greatest experience that any book has ever given me. Doors fell open” (Huston, 48). Perhaps for that reason, Huston chose to adapt “The Dead” into the final film of his lifetime, working on it as he was dying of lung disease. While Huston often makes good choices in his decisions in the processes of his frequent adaptations from literary sources such as in The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in the case of The Dead, for all Huston’s reverence for Joyce, the director felt that he should elaborate, clarify or impose his own interpretation on points that Joyce had deliberately left ambiguous. Yet, it would be a mistake to assume Joyce’s irresolution is an oversight on the author’s part. If there are open-ended threads in Joyce’s text, they are there to support the complexity of the protagonists’ behavior. However, Huston attempts to resolve these unresolved narrative passages and he tries to clarify the text in cinematic terms in the only ways he and his son were able within their medium. Unfortunately, the alterations and additions corrupt Joyce’s perfectly orchestrated whole.

Noting the profound influence that Joyce had on Huston’s work throughout his life, Weiland Schulz-Kiel distills the complexity seen in works by both artists: “Joyce and Huston show us views of life as they emerge in their stories’ characters. These interpretations can be discerned in the thoughts of the characters, their consciousness, and in a more concealed form in their words and actions” (Cooper, 213). Shultz –Kiel correctly notes a common strategy employed by both the author and filmmaker to reveal their vison of the world though their artistic productions. However, the depiction of Gabriel, for whom Joyce writes interior thought is complicated because of the nature of film, which relies on direct dialogue and on screen action. Huston resolves the problem of revealing internal dialogue, particularly in the final climatic scene, by using a voice-over.

However, neither version offers any of Gretta’s interior motivation. Her consciousness must be inferred. The reader/viewer only has her spoken words and actions to determine her interior world. Readers are not privy to her point of view in the way that they are to Gabriel’s. It is clearly in the different presentation of the male and female protagonists that Huston sensed an area of flexibility or malleability where he could impose his own interpretation. In fact, the text tracks Gabriel’s position, whereas Gretta is largely revealed to the reader through either Gabriel’s view of her, or from the point of view of the omniscient voice of the narrative. Cinematically, Huston also brings her to life through her interactions with Gabriel. The viewer only sees her when he is present.

Indeed, in Joyce’s story all the descriptions of Gretta’s appearance come through Gabriel’s voice. The most denigrating of these is a recollection of his mother’s comment that Gretta was “country cute,” and the most flattering from a highly romanticized version of Gabriel himself as an artist when he explains how he would like to paint her (127) . He says “there was a grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something…he would show of the bronze of her hair…” (143). In the first case, Gabriel’s memory comes from annoyance about his mother’s criticism of his choice of a spouse, in the second instance, it is similarly a description filtered through the articulation of his self-image. It is all about him; almost nothing about Gretta is actually revealed to the reader.

In the film, the director’s daughter Anjelica Huston is cast to play the role of Gretta, she is an actress whose strong on-screen physicality and elegance is hard to underestimate.

Donal McCann not getting Anjelica Huston

Donal McCann not getting Anjelica Huston

Many critics and academics have seen Gabriel in a positive light. However, Joyce himself clearly saw Gabriel as flawed. In “The Dead”, the main protagonists, Gabriel and his wife Gretta, attend a dinner party held by the elderly Morkan sisters, Kate and Julia. Gabriel and Gretta are late to arrive at the party, which Gabriel immediately upon entering claims “my wife here takes three mortal hours to dress herself” to place the blame on Gretta for their tardiness (Joyce, 120). At this point he goes off with the young maid Lily to remove his winter clothes, but his very second line in the story is to direct Gretta (without addressing her by name) to go upstairs without him, and they are thus separated by his design for most of the earlier portion of the story.

Gabriel has a moment with Lily, who he has watched grow up and who is removing his galoshes where he makes it clear that he has observed her growing maturity—“I suppose we’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?” and she responds, “the men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you,” a bitter assessment of male duplicity that apparently includes him, which causes him to blush (121). This short episode shows him to be a man who has a sexual appetite, even though he would prefer to think of himself otherwise.

Luke Gibbons notes that Huston uses Lily’s appearance both to emphasize Gabriel’s erotic nature by “projecting a displaced eroticism” onto her and to draw a comparison to Gretta’s younger self (Gibbons, 114). He further notes that after a poem added by Huston that was not in the original text, a point to which I shall return, Lily and Gretta are visually conflated, “as Huston frames this shot, the profiles of both Gretta and Lily mirror one another, as if Lily were a flashback to Gretta in her youthful days” (140). Lily reappears in Huston’s version for example to put on Gabriel’s galoshes to reiterate how he sees his wife through a similarly sexual lens.

Once at the party, Gabriel spends his time in anticipation of a speech that he will make at the culmination of the expensive, elaborate meal that will be served, nervously rehearsing and questioning his concepts—condescendingly, he worries that the people comprising the gathering are not as intelligent as he, that any poetry he might choose to quote might be something which “they could not understand” and that he might be perceived as “airing his superior education” (Joyce 122). He does end up making quite a pompous and meandering speech, which goes over well enough, but in the course of the story, the view of its gestation serves to reveal Gabriel as an arrogant, self-important and often thoughtless individual. He never notices that his wife is actually listening to him, as he says “there are always in gatherings such as this sadder thoughts that will recur to our minds: thoughts of the past, of youth, of changes, of absent faces that we miss here tonight” (Joyce 139). Her later reverie about her young dead admirer is perhaps sparked at this moment. Again, neither the text nor the film gives any insight into her interior reaction, yet it seems that he did not really seek to incite such thoughtfulness. His speechifying is insincere.

Throughout the party Gabriel is inattentive, leaving Gretta to fend for herself in the socially charged landscape for most of the duration and when he is partnered for “Lancers” (a quadrilles) with another younger, unmarried woman who is a working colleague of his at his teaching position, a Miss Molly Ivors, he has a tense and protracted argument with her, which continues through the various crossings and is visible to the rest of the guests, including his wife.

Miss Ivors’ disagreement with Gabriel escalates after she notes a series of nearly anonymous reviews he writes for a paper she sees as unpatriotic and calls him a “West Briton” as an insult (127). She suggests that he is out of touch with his Irishness and that to remedy that, he should visit the western part of Ireland that his wife actually hails from. This resonates oddly to Gabriel and he becomes angered, not least because it is an indicator that his wife’s roots are humbler than his own. He goes so far as to repudiate his Irishness entirely: “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” (129). Later, Gretta encounters Gabriel and lets him know that she has noticed his interaction with Miss Ivors as being “a row” (130). By way of explanation, Gabriel tells Gretta of Miss Ivor’s suggestion about him travelling to the west. She is enthusiastic about the idea, and tells him so, only to be verbally rebuffed by her husband: she is “coldly” told by Gabriel, “You can go if you like” (130). Still later, Gabriel approaches as Gretta is standing with Miss Ivors who is preparing to leave and it can be plainly seen that Gabriel and Miss Ivors’ behavior is obviously tension-filled, before the younger woman takes her leave, declining Gabriel’s offer to see her home. Something has occurred between Gabriel and Miss Ivors; to an outside observer it is clear that Miss Ivors’ anger is the result of a frustrated infatuation with Gabriel, but he is too self-absorbed to notice. Gretta however, detects the other woman’s interest in her husband. His gnomic behavior leads her to infer that he is hiding a more invidious relationship with Miss Ivors.

As Anelise Reich Corseuil writes:

…Throughout the film, in the scenes in which Gabriel functions as a filter, he is not shown as a sympathetic character. He is an aloof figure who is only concerned with his own speech, as he is shown as being completely insensible to the characters surrounding him. There is basically no integration between Gabriel and the other characters, as the camera is constantly showing him in his attempt to glance at his speech (73).

Reich Corseuil is correct in her observation of the self-interested depiction present in the film; she points to Gabriel’s lack of empathy. However, she describes his reaction to his wife’s revelations about the dead youth whom she believes has died from her unrequited love by explaining that “in the film a disintegrated narrative allows his consciousness to ‘explode’ just in the end, as a mind divorced from the rest of the film”(77). However, this eruption of empathy comes rather from Gretta’s denial of his sexual passion. He becomes frustrated by her falling asleep. He romanticizes his feelings, yet again turning his emotional state into an artistic/ romantic opportunity to write his own eulogy. In the final scenes in the book, his reaction to his wife’s tragic revelations might be more clearly read as the disappointment of her failure to recognize his poetic, erotic self-projections. Once again he becomes his own audience. Joyce writes, “Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love” (Joyce 152). His “generous” weeping may be seen as either plentiful, or as a gift for his wife, or perhaps from himself to himself, certainly his interior monologue is overly literary and as he references the newspaper’s weather report, Joyce exposes the shallowness of his thinking.

However, as Huston reworks the final scene, he loses much of the irony in Joyce’s telling to reframe Gabriel as a softer and sympathetic man. Huston changes certain pivotal lines from the original, such as in the original: “He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful, but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death,” whereas in the film the line becomes “To me her face is still beautiful, but I know that it is no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death” (151). The cruelty of his thought in the book belies any true expression of love and indeed he has declared that he has never known love, but the film version appears to buttress his new found feelings for his wife and also relegate her youthful person into the past, as this is now the face that belongs to her relationship with him. It demonstrates a wiser and kinder Gabriel.

As the party ends and the guests are all leaving, Gabriel notices a woman hesitating in the shadows on the stairs, and his thoughts, as the epigraph of this paper indicates, appropriate this as yet unknown woman’s experience and objectify her: “what is a woman…listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude” (143). But he soon realizes that she is his wife and that she is listening to one of the guests, a tenor, singing a song which evidently plunges her into a state of reverie. On the way home, Gabriel makes a feeble attempt at humor and when Gretta doesn’t respond to his liking, lost as she seems to be in her own thoughts, he seethes with resentment. He eventually gets past that, only to then condescend to her enough to see her as a sex object, as both in the carriage and at their room, his whole focus shifts to a desire to have sex with her and he is greatly distressed when it becomes clear that this isn’t going to happen.

Instead, Gretta surprises him completely by explaining her distraction by an account of how in her youth she toyed with the heart of a young man named Michael Furey, who eventually died, perhaps as Gabriel guesses of consumption but according to Gretta, “I think he died for me.” She then cries herself to sleep, after which Gabriel thinks on what he has been told.

It is clear from the final passages that Gabriel sees only that Gretta had loved someone else in her past. He ignores the indications given by Gretta that Michael Furey’s feelings were not reciprocated by her and that it was precisely that unrequited love that was the reason for his death, and her subsequent feelings of guilt; instead he jealously assumes that although the man has died, Gretta’s love for him has endured intact and that he himself is and always will be secondary in her affections. He underestimates her greatly in assuming that her vows of love and fidelity for him are less binding than his for her. Additionally, it seems that in his mind, she, the lower-class and less-educated woman, is much more ruled by her passions than he, the cool male intellectual. It does not occur to him that after observing his inexplicable misbehavior at the party, his wife might have told him what she did to wake him to the idea that she was (and is) a woman who has feelings of her own, a person of independent consciousness and a life experience that does not simply revolve around him. She is telling him that she might be desirable to other men that felt she was important also, for instance a young man who withered and died of ill health, but even so cared above all for her…and that her aim in recounting such a personal remembrance to him might be intended to make him treat her with more care and affection in future. But in fact, Gabriel’s entire reaction to Gretta’s story about Michael Furey forms only in relation to himself and his feelings about it, not out of any genuine concern for her.

Gabriel’s behavior is obnoxious throughout the story: he delivers a bad and condescending speech, he objectifies the maid, he has a fight with another woman and he ignores and disrespects his wife. My impression is that Gretta has seen all of this and that her story about Michael Furey is a deliberate attempt to put Gabriel in his place. And Joyce makes it clear that Gabriel does not absorb the lesson, but still remains self-oriented, in sympathy only with himself. This is his greatest failing. It is indicative to me of Joyce’s great understanding of human nature and the interactions between the sexes that Gretta’s efforts are wasted on a fool—and one who is, unfortunately, representative of his gender. However, I seem to be alone in this opinion. As far as I know, all of the literature about Joyce (and the filmed The Dead) disagrees with my assessment, if such an interpretation even occurred to the writers; in truth, I have no evidence and can offer no citations that it ever has.

The Huston film’s newly invented character Mr. Grace is one that confounds Joyce’s intent. Peter Dulgar notes Huston’s addition of Mr. Grace as a “major element in the narrative through his recitation of an Irish poem” and that his

…presence has additional meaning and relevance through Huston’s connection of his poem to Gretta and her memories of Michael Furey. This…is important because it presents the viewer with visible evidence that her thoughts are troubled and reminiscent long before the short fiction introduces that idea through Mr. D’Arcy’s song. In the film, Greta is plagued by her memories of the past from this midway point in the narrative, much earlier than the short fiction’s revelation in the third part (Dulgar 95).

Grace recites the poem “Broken Vows” (actually the poem is entitled “The Grief of a Young Girl’s Heart”). This poem is of uncertain authorship, but its translation is by Lady Gregory, “a writer Joyce particularly disliked” (Cooper, 199) and it speaks from the viewpoint of a girl whose lover betrays her. The poem includes the lines:

You have taken the east from me; You have taken the west from me
You have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
You have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me,
And my fear is great that you have taken God from me! (Pederson, 70).

The overwrought quality of all this aside, the last line also adds a religious element which isn’t present in Joyce’s story, in spite of the fact that both Joyce and Huston were avowed agnostics. But for some reason (perhaps a newfound piety sparked by his own approaching end), Huston imposed religiosity on “The Dead” in this way, and others. According to Ann Pederson, who also believes that the poem “offers us…a more tangible account of Gretta’s as yet unspoken experience” (Pederson, 69), it is presented as an early catalyst for her remembrance of the late Michael Furey. Pederson (and other critics) ignore that Greta never claimed to have been abandoned by Michael Furey, and it does not occur to them that the poem might reflect on what Gretta is feeling about the way her husband is behaving at the party. For her part Pederson feels that the poem somehow works to justify Gabriel by the end of the film to believe that “everything including God has been taken from him” (70). So, in this way, Huston’s film is seen to transpose the wounded party from the female to the male. In Gabriel’s mind, everything is all about him. This despite the evidence in the story and the film that it would seem likely that Gabriel is having an affair with Molly Ivors and so, it is Gabriel who abandons Gretta! Or at least, she might need to consider the possibility.

Pederson observes that in any film adaptation from a text source, “thoughts and feelings on the written page must now be expressed by action or vocalization” and so, she says, the foreshadowing created by the poetry reading “is…a powerful elaboration which builds towards Gretta’s final declaration” and overall, the film’s alterations to the original story “add empathy and literary depth which do not detract from but enhance the whole” (70). The usually perceptive James Naremore claims that the added poem “is entirely in keeping with the themes and milieu of Joyce’s story” and Naremore also observes that Huston has rendered Gretta as “constantly and visibly preoccupied by distant music”—he doesn’t delve too deeply into the narrative consequence of these alterations though, other than to say that now by these additions “characters, whom Joyce presented in much more ambiguous terms, are as ‘readable’ as the actors in a good melodrama. Meanwhile, things that Joyce left unsaid or open to conjecture are fully explained” (Cooper, 199). Roger Ebert adds his own Christian-centric twist: “The key emotional moment in ‘The Dead’ does not belong to Gretta, who still mourns for her dead young lover. It belongs to Gabriel, who weeps for the man his wife once loved, a man he never met or even heard of before tonight. To cry for a stranger is to shed tears for the human condition, to weep because in giving us consciousness, God also gave us the ability to know loss and mourn it” (Ebert). The critics of the story and film take it as a given that Joyce intended for the focus of the story to be on the epiphany of Gabriel, who as Linda Costanzo Cahir put it “moves from a state of egotism and isolation to one of empathy” (Cahir 210) and Huston’s film supports a focus on Gabriel rather than Gretta, inflating his significance while diminishing hers. The false note of reverence that also taints the proceedings is, again, of Huston’s invention.

Writing critically only on Joyce’s text story, Anthony Burgess also mistakes the significance of Gretta’s self-recrimination, perhaps because he sees her as “a girl of inferior education” in relation to her husband, who despite this unfortunate clash of classes “does not despise her” (!), which would seem to paint him as generous in his affections even as it diminishes her agency (Burgess, 43). No, she should be grateful that he marries her and in this way brings her so far above her rightful station, even if she does have to suffer such condescension as her mother-in-law calling her “country-cute”—Burgess believes that her telling to Gabriel about Michael Furey comes about merely because she is “distracted,” as one presumes is the wont of stupid peasant women (43). Burgess locates the specific catalyst of her distraction in the tenor’s belated recital. In addition, Burgess equates Gabriel’s disproportionate resentment regarding Gretta’s account, with Joyce’s creation Bloom’s reaction to the “adultery” of his wife with “multiple …fellow-sinners,” as well as with a cuckolding supposedly suffered by Joyce in reality, among other absurdly judgmental comparisons of what is by all indications a chaste relationship that Gretta had, long before she met her husband (44).

But Huston and son seem to have aligned their adaptation with Burgess’s analysis and taken it yet further.
According to the family’s biographer Lawrence Grobel, Tony Huston was invested in tailoring the film’s script to suit a personal angle:

“The Dead” meant so much to him; he still hadn’t gotten over the shock of hearing his wife (Margot) tell him in September he wasn’t welcome in their house anymore–the irony wasn’t lost on him that as he worked on a script about a man discovering that his wife never loved him as passionately as he would have liked, his own wife was telling him the same thing. Didn’t his father once comment that Margot reminded him of Gretta in Joyce’s story—years before they considered making the movie? (Grobel, 15).

In fact, whether the additions are of John Huston’s doing, or Tony’s, or both, their harsh view of Gretta’s unanticipated revelations to her husband are forced on the viewer by the additions to the film, as elucidated by Michael Patrick Gillespie: “self-absorption stands as only the kindest interpretation of a gesture that, if it were at all calculated, could only be seen as profoundly cruel” (Gillespie, 158). Further, Gretta’s claim that her young man “died for the love of me” is dismissed as “unapologetic egotism” and her tearful falling off to sleep after recounting her tale is described as resembling a “post-coital slumber, oblivious to the presence of her wounded husband and presumably no longer engaged by recollections of her former lover” (158). If one does not comprehend Gabriel’s earlier actions as appearing to indicate, or outright reflecting, infidelity, and/or degrees of public disrespect to his wife, then I suppose one might assume she is needlessly cruel. But the fact is, his behavior is highly questionable. Or perhaps, one thinks Joyce wrote the earlier scenes for no reason other than to set up aspects of Gabriel’s character and the petty, selfish Gretta is only present in the story to persecute her poor sensitive husband.

It should also be said that not every one of the Hustons’ additions abuses the source text. There is a substantial and effective digression that occurs in the scene when the aged Aunt Julia sings with the bemused indulgence of the assembled partygoers: the camera wanders away from the primary action to pass among an assortment of objects around the house, a handheld travelling shot that as Jeffrey Meyers details, goes “upstairs to an empty room, focuses on the cherished doll house, embroidery, old photographs, glass slippers, rosary and crucifix…the camera was like a ghost going through this world…this intensely lyrical moment creates subtle tension and gives visual clues to the dominant theme: the enduring influence of the dead on the living” (Meyers, 405). The passage avoids the visual redundancy of simply focusing on the singer and the varying reactions of her audience, which would have echoed scenes elsewhere in the film, instead thoughtfully rendering an intangible feeling engendered by the music in specifically cinematic terms. In its nature, this is a positive addition, one quite in keeping with the feeling of Joyce’s story, but that fully utilizes the medium of the adaptation. Another worthy cinematic digression occurs at the end of the film, when Gabriel is ruminating after his wife has gone to sleep, about the eventual death of his Aunt Julia. At that juncture we are shown in a flash-forward vignette Julia dead in a room of her house with the rest of the family attending.

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This scene not only concretely visualizes a passage of the original story, but it also brings in the subject of the very first story in Dubliners, “The Sisters” which describes a very similar scene of bereavement, a corpse arranged in a home for viewing by family members. “The Sisters” initiates some of the themes brought together and in effect bookended by Joyce in the final story, “The Dead” and incorporates it into the film in an elegant way.

__________________________________________________

Thanks to Marguerite Van Cook and William Boddy.

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Primary Sources

Joyce, James. “The Dead” in Dubliners. New York: Dover Publications, 1991. Print.

The Dead. Dir. John Huston. Perf. Anjelica Huston, Donal McCann. Vestron Pictures et al, 1987. DVD: Lion’s Gate, 2009.

Secondary Sources

Burgess, Anthony. Re Joyce. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000. Print.

Cahir, Linda Costanzo. Literature into Film: theory and practical approaches. Jefferson NC: MacFarland, 2006. 210-214. Print.

Cooper, Steven (Ed.). Perspectives on John Huston. New York: G.K. Hall & Co./Macmillan, 1994. Print.

Corseuil, Anelise Reich. “John Huston’s Adaptation of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’: The Interrelationship Between Description and Focalization.” Web: Dialnet. December 1 2015. <dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/4925255.pdf>

Dulgar, Peter. “The Dead and the dead: Adaptation of temporal structure from short fiction to film.” Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 12, 2012: 86-103. Print.

Ebert, Roger. “The Dead.” The Chicago Sun-Times, December 18 1987. Print.

Gibbons, Luke. “The Cracked Looking Glass of Cinema: James Joyce, John Huston and the Memory of ‘The Dead.'” The Yale Journal of Criticism, V 15 #1 Spring 2002. 127-148. Print.

Gillespie, Michael Patrick. “The Irish Accent of The Dead,” in John Huston: Essays on a Restless Director. Ed. Tony Tracy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company Inc, 2010. Print.

Grobel, Lawrence. The Hustons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Print.

Huston, John. An Open Book. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1994. Print.

Meyers, Jeffrey. “Raising The Dead.” in John Huston: Courage and Art. New York: Crown Archetype, 2011. Print.

Pederson, Ann. “Uncovering the Dead: A Study of Adaptation,” Literature/Film Index 21:1 (1993): 69-70. Print.

Loosely Related, Wacky Misadventures

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Todd: You know, sometimes I feel like my whole life is just a series of loosely-related wacky misadventures.

Diane: I think that’s just what being in your twenties is.

From Bojack Horseman, season 5, episode 2, ‘Chickens’

When I was a child, a certain relative used to berate me for things I hadn’t done. Not just crimes that I might plausibly have committed – like, say, being rude, or not studying enough for a test. No, one recurring theme of her anger was how I was certain, when I grew up, to put my parents in a nursing home. Having driven my father to his death from overwork through my insatiable appetite for swimming lessons, I would abandon my mother to gasp out her final breaths in agonising solitude, probably in some kind of kerosene bath. This after having sucked them dry, my long suffering parents, of all the money they had sacrificed their very lives to accumulate, all for my sake, yes, all for me.

Ah, nostalgia. These days, anyone who knows me well will say that I’m a dour sort of person, not a fan of much aside from sleeping and the internet. It would be tempting, though not exactly rigorous, to point the finger at my childhood, genetics and experience being entangled as they are. I don’t pretend to know how much of my general anomie is attributable to a childhood during which death and money were always on my brain, always closely associated, for reasons we will get to later. I don’t want to imply that my family was otherwise than deeply loving. But if anything, this made the underlying message of all those guilt-inducing monologues all the more horrific: not only are you murdering actual people by your selfish demands for movie tickets, you are killing those who love you most.

When I was in my first year of university, I started listening to Belle and Sebastian. They never made my cry, although I often thought there would be something cathartic about doing so. I do remember how a very intimate part of my psyche quivered – yes, that is the operative word – listening to the background stylophone part in ‘Sleep the Clock Around’. I don’t know how many times I listened to ‘Sukie in the Graveyard’ – several dozen, fifty five? – but for a while, I took it as a kind of manual for life. Like Sukie I would be exuberant yet unhappy in an aesthetically pleasing way. I would slum it financially, in an artistic fashion. I would be sexually open but emotionally abstracted from my various affairs, on a quest for romantic self-knowledge rather than actually participating in anything that could be classically defined as romance.

I go through stages with Belle and Sebastian. There are times I go for days listening to their back catalogue on Youtube. Sometimes the music and lyrics still make me quiver, and sometimes, listening to them makes me want to put my head through the screen with embarrassment on their, and my behalf. I always go to see them when they’re in town, either alone or with a friend, and I hope I don’t stop doing that, and that they don’t stop coming. At a festival, I pushed my way to the front before they came on, to make sure I got a good spot. The opening band was the Hold Steady, and for a forty minute set I was moshed back and forth by an audience comprised of large beefy guys of extensive hairiness. When it was time for B&S to start, these men melted away to be replaced by a row of skinny, pale-faced children (or child-like adults), wearing glasses and swaying gently from side to side with expressions of deep melancholy.

*

There is a particular genre of art devoted to evoking, to a greater or lesser extent, the mood and period of life represented for me by those Belle and Sebastian albums. It’s a genre which spans numerous forms, and includes but is not limited to: Frances Ha and Mistress America by Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig (movies), This Side of Paradise by Scott Fitzgerald (novel), Girls by Lena Dunham (shadow puppet theatre), God Help the Girl by Stuart Murdoch (movie), My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum (essay), Goodbye to All That by Joan Didion (essay), and Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s tumblr. (RBW writes the excellent Netflix series Bojack Horseman).

The protagonist (or writer, in the case of the autobiographical essays) is always an avatar of Sukie, or so it seems. They’re almost always white, and you can tell by their lingo, lifestyle accoutrements, etc that they were born into the middle or upper class. At the time of the story, though, they’re experiencing a particular kind of broke-ness characterised by housing instability and poor decisions about cash – say, flying to Paris on a whim and a credit card. They don’t have any dependents – where money changes hands, it’s always parents providing support rather than the other way round. (Children are out of the question). They’re always an artist of some sort – writer, dancer, musician – but don’t seem to spend a lot of time making actual art. They live in New York, and this fact is highlighted. There are chaotic and often hilariously awful romantic and sexual encounters, but sex isn’t exactly the point – the real quest is for ‘a deeper understanding of oneself’.[1]

There are stylistic things in common, too. A sense of distance – the story represented as if it’s already a part of a romantic past, mythologising life even as it’s happening. (Why are Belle and Sebastian covers always in black and white?) Often, there’s only effectively one character (the protagonist), the others being less individual people than dramatisations of certain situations or fears that the protagonist has faced, and the challenges faced by this protagonist tend to be internal rather than external. Losing a job, say, might lead to embarrassment, rather than being unable to care for your sick parent (or to pay for their well-deserved kerosene bath). What’s at stake is never genuine poverty, or loss of life or health, but a particular conception of self. The quest is working out what this self-conception should be.

*

There was this one summer we all pretended to be adults and lived in Florida for a few months. The original idea was to move to New York and do comedy, but the apartment fell through so we decided to go somewhere else…

We rotated who slept where every night – two in the master bedroom, one in the smaller bedroom, one on the living room couch. I didn’t mind sleeping on the couch, because it meant I had the whole downstairs to myself and it meant when the first person came down for breakfast at two or three in the afternoon, I would wake up too and I wouldn’t miss anything.                 

We had dial-up internet. We made each other food. We had a make-your-own-pizza night. One night Ben made us all soup in bread bowls and I put too much salt in mine…

One day I swam out really far and I swore I could feel the undertow carrying me out to sea. I thought I was going to die, but I was too embarrassed to call for help. I slapped the waves with my arms full of jelly and kicked my soft legs as hard as I could, struggling back to shore.

#thisismyyouth

From Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s tumblr, boringoldraphael.tumblr.com

Obvious stuff: these features I’ve identified don’t have to be shortcomings. Being white and rich doesn’t preclude you from being the subject of passionate, interesting art, and no story can be all things or reflect all people. I’ve never minded the whiteness of ‘Girls’, which presumably reflects Lena Dunham’s own experience, and therefore what she feels most qualified to dramatise. As Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it: ‘My question is not “Why are there no black women on Girls,” but “How many black show-runners are employed by HBO?”’.[2] Still, like bottom trawlers depleting global fishing stocks, continually mining the same milieu runs a risk of diminishing returns. Watching Frances Ha (and its quasi-follow up, Mistress America) just after watching Girls gave me a queasy feeling. Adam Driver is a wonderful, charismatic actor, as are almost all the cast of Girls, but I’m sick of seeing them and their family members in coming of age stories in New York.

More damningly, the absence of permanent consequences to failure is part of what appeals, but also puts a lid on how meaningful or memorable these stories can be. I admit to being obsessed with money and death to the point of minor dysfunction (thanks, wacky ethnic relatives!), but, well, they are objectively important parts of life. Without them, it can feel like there’s not really much at stake – if things go wrong for the hero, this will presumably be followed by further wacky misadventures until they go right again. I fully acknowledge, though, that people’s mileage on this issue will vary – First World problems are real problems, after all, and people in the First World have feelings too, and just because, say, people living through a civil war don’t spend their time panicking about, say, the intrinsic meaninglessness of existence doesn’t mean it’s not a profoundly real experience for those who do think about such things. (And who says people in civil wars don’t experience existential panic? Has anyone asked?) What’s considered ‘important’ enough to be represented in fiction is always going to be subjective, no doubt the work that feels intensely truthful to me seems ridiculously trivial to someone else, and who am I to comment.

Another elision: for stories supposedly about artists, there is surprisingly little space devoted to showing how people actually make, or become good at making, art. By ‘becoming good’, I don’t mean accumulating turbulent life experiences to turn into a novel – I mean actually doing stuff, and doing it again until you get better at it, the arduous process of Malcolm Gladwell-ing your way to the top. Possibly the process of learning to write, dance, etc is inherently boring and undramatisable, like making an action sequence in a movie about hackers (what are you going to show, lots of fingers stabbing at a laptop?) Possibly the issue cuts too close to the bone for the creators, and has to be presented at arm’s length to avoid uncomfortable self-exposure. Still, these stories can’t help but function as a sort of humblebrag, a case of highly accomplished people trying to charm you with a dumbed-down version of themselves. There’s something unreal about these artistic avatars, stripped of the hustle and determination they must have shown to get to a position where they can successfully self-deprecate. Look at how young and adorably clueless we were, they seem to say. Look at our lovability, and love us!

It strikes me now that the people I knew in New York all had curious and self-defeating sidelines. They imported garden chairs which did not sell very well at Hammacher Schlemmer or they tried to market hair staighteners in Harlem or they ghosted exposés of Murder Incorporated for Sunday supplements. I think that perhaps none of us was very serious, engagé only about our most private lives.

From ‘Goodbye to all that’, by Joan Didion

*

Money and death were always linked in my relatives’ minds. The word they used as a synonym for earning enough to support yourself and your dependents was ‘survive’. As in: ‘You can make pocket money working as a [academic, teacher, postman], but is it enough to survive?’ Wasting time, failing to study enough at school, any kind of decision in favour of less rather than more future earnings: all of these were linguistically equated to a rejection of survival, aka, a rejection of life itself, aka, a suicidal death wish.

Given my family’s status as recent migrants, from a country that only recently made the transition from Third to First World status, this wasn’t exactly a crazy attitude. Neither, however, can it be described as entirely sane. They grew up poor, my relatives, poor to a depth of material deprivation that hardly exists in a contemporary Western nation. They were born to the kind of lives where the word ‘survive’ was not just a metaphor, but actually made some kind of literal sense. They may not be poor now, but these early experiences have given rise to a set of attitudes they’ve sought to inculcate in the next generation, with mixed success. A strong preference for concrete achievements, like degrees and jobs, over more nebulous ones like self-discovery. Distrust of introspection, which might so easily shade into ‘navel gazing’ – a dangerous distraction from the more fundamental business of getting and spending and accumulating. A work ethic which, in their adopted Australia, might be regarded as bordering on the pathological.

When I was a child, a certain relative (the same one who used to berate me for transcending the laws of time and space to put my parents in a nursing home) used to occasionally remark in tones of great disgust, “Life is good.” This was not in any way reflective of her own attitude. She made it clear, more or less explicitly, that she thought life was pretty shit. Rather, it was an insult deployed to describe other people, maybe me, maybe some acquaintance who was committing the cardinal sin of enjoying themselves too much. Having too much fun – or just being happy, full stop – was evidence of a shallow and vacuous character.

It’s not that I’m ungrateful, really. This is not a story of my persecution at the hands of my crazy ethnic relatives. In a lot of ways, they were objectively correct – life was good for me, in contrast to the deprivation they experienced. And to the extent that I had the privilege of growing up to be a dreamy, spoiled brat, it was thanks to their actions: their strength, their sacrifice a necessary condition of my current lifestyle and aspirations. You can see, then, how this genre might not appeal to them; how they might, at best, be nonplussed by all of these stories about twenty-somethings on a journey to ‘find themselves’. You can see how they might, at worst, find the entire concept a little bit rage inducing and punchable.

For all that, though, I do believe there is something beautiful and idealistic and right about these stories. They speak to something which shouldn’t be ironicised away, namely, an impulse to find life and love and all good things. “It makes me want to run out and find the love of my life,” as someone wrote in the comments on the Youtube clip for ‘Dylan in the Movies’. I don’t want to be the kind of person who mistakes the ‘The Life Pursuit’ for life, who thinks the world is really made up of skinny white people wearing berets looking wistfully out into the middle distance. Still, nauseating though it may be, I also don’t want to cease being the kind of person who still on occasion gets weepy over Belle and Sebastian albums.

*

He stretched his arms out to the crystalline, radiant sky.

                  “I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”

                                    From This Side of Paradise, by F Scott Fitzgerald                                   

Self-knowledge is a worthy goal, and this passage is beautiful. But if self is the only thing you know, or are interested in knowing, then you are probably an asshole.

*

What would a successful ‘twenty-something’ story look like – one which preserved the romanticism, the elegiac feeling evoked by the stories described above, but avoided their solipsism, elisions and unexamined privilege? Obviously I can’t answer that question here without, say, being a literary genius, but I can describe some works which manage to an extent to avoid these pitfalls.

In Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, Toru Watanabe studies English, hates phoneys, and does his best to ignore Japanese politics, all while wondering around an emotional landscape supersaturated with loss and longing. While nursing his suicidal sort-of girlfriend Naoko, he meet exuberant, sexually liberated Midori. At first, I was scared that Midori would be a sort of a literary Manic Pixie Dream Girl (see, for instance, her super hotness and predilection for dragging the unwitting Toru to watch porno movies). As the story progresses, though, she reveals a disarming mix of resilience and vulnerability. This is her, explaining to Toru how she cares for her father, who has brain cancer:

Relatives come to visit and they eat with me here, and they always leave half their food, just like you. And they always say, “Oh, Midori, it’s wonderful you’ve got such a healthy appetite. I’m too upset to eat.’ But get serious, I’m the one who’s actually here taking care of the patient! They just have to drop by and show a little sympathy. I’m the one who wipes up the shit and collects the phlegm and mops the brows. If sympathy was all it took to clean up shit, I’d have 50 times as much sympathy as anybody else! …

What do they think I am, a donkey pulling a cart? …

I can be hurt, you know…

And on top of it, you see your savings disappear. I don’t know if I can keep going to university for another three-and-a-half years.

Money and death, my twin preoccupations, are very much present in the novel. I counted four suicides and one unexplained disappearance, apart from Midori’s father’s cancer, and even the nominally ‘healthy’ characters all seem to be teetering on the brink of an unnameable despair. There’s an implied soundtrack of nostalgic music (the title is a bit of a giveaway), but here, unlike in other of his novels, Murakami knows exactly how to walk the fine line between sentiment and sentimentality. Toru’s enough of an everyman that you can project yourself onto him, but particular enough to be a person instead of just a surrogate for the reader. (The bit about his annoying roommate is hilarious). He feels no malice towards anybody, and is straightforward to the point of naiveté. He is studying English literature, but never mentions any literary aspirations of his own – or indeed, any aspirations at all. In career terms, he is perfectly passive, but this passivity isn’t rewarded by artistic or other success. His triumph at the end of the novel is, to borrow my relatives’ term, ‘survival’. What he survives is not so much career disappointments or injuries to his self-esteem, but a more free-floating kind of despair.

As a novelist, Murakami has often been charged with the same accusations of childishness and emotional stasis as Belle and Sebastian. This is fair enough. His protagonists are almost invariably men in their late 20s or early 30s, living in Tokyo, less overtly self-obsessed than, say, Hannah Horvarth or Amory Blaine, but still preoccupied with the question of who they are and what to do with themselves. Still, there’s an additional depth that saves Toru from the solipsism and narcissism which plague the former characters, an assumption of responsibility towards other people. An awareness that loss and entropy and decay are things that actually happen in life. Which can deform a life, not only a self-image, and not just temporarily, either.

*

‘Survival’. Real physical and financial scarcity, and the imperative to escape. After a point, it becomes a psychological crutch, a way of not taking responsibility for your own decisions. Who can blame you for any choice you made, if it was what you needed to do to ‘survive’?

I don’t doubt my relatives’ tales of poverty during their early years, but I do wonder about their reliability as narrators when they describe the period that came after. Certainly after moving to Australia they were no longer poor (or not on paper, at least – psychologically there might have been a different situation). They must have had more choices than they let on. There must have been hundreds of moments when they might have moved in the direction of fun and fulfillment, rather than financial accumulation. Casting every decision in hindsight as being the only possible choice under the circumstances, the only thing a responsible adult could do given the yawning beaks of their dependents, is a great way of avoiding regret, guilt, internal conflict. Or rather, displacing it onto someone else. ‘All of this was for you!’

What happened, I think, is that my relatives’ view of themselves, and of their viable possibilities, was formed against a backdrop of material deprivation. They were able to escape this deprivation through a combination of personal fortitude, intelligence, and luck. But having escaped, they found themselves set in ways of thinking which precluded their fully enjoying their good fortune. They would always be afraid, and enraged with other people who (in their view) were too dumb or innocent to know that there was something to be afraid of.

*

The last point I want to make about the ‘twenty-something coming of age’ genre is the most esoteric. There are plenty of ‘young artist’-type protagonists, but where are the stories about people who like maths or robotics or computer science or engineering? To put it more bluntly: where are the nerds?

Murakami, again, provides something of a counterpoint:

Shinjuku Station is enormous. Every day nearly 3.5 million people pass through it, so many that the Guinness Book of World Records officially lists JR Shinjuku Station as the station with the “Most Passengers in the World.” A number of railroad lines cross there, the main ones being the Chuo line, Sobu line, Yamanote line, Saikyo line, Shonan–Shinjuku line, and the Narita Express. The rails intersect and combine in complex and convoluted ways… During rush hour, that maze transforms into a sea of humanity, a sea that foams up, rages, and roars as it surges toward the entrances and exits. Streams of people changing trains become entangled, giving rise to dangerous, swirling whirlpools.

It’s hard to believe that every morning and evening, five days a week, this overwhelming crush of human beings is dealt with efficiently, without any major problems, by a staff of station employees that no one would ever accuse of being adequate, in terms of numbers, to the task.

The only real interest [Tsukuru] had was train stations. He wasn’t sure why, but for as long as he could remember, he had loved to observe train stations—they had always appealed to him. Huge bullet-train stations; tiny, one-track stations out in the countryside; rudimentary freight-collection stations—it didn’t matter what kind, because as long as it was a railway station, he loved it. Everything about stations moved him deeply.

From Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami

Colourless is, in many ways, quite a bad book. Nevertheless, it has redeeming features, not least of which is the unusualness of its protagonist and his interests, at least in the genre I‘ve described. Outside of science fiction, very few ‘literary’ works try to capture the profundity or beauty of a complex mechanical or logistical system just working. Neither do they seek to represent or explore the inner life of the sort of person who has these interests.

I don’t mean to suggest that the lack of romantic young mathematicians in fiction is on par with, say, the exclusion of working class people, or people of colour of any class. Nonetheless, it is a Thing and it has ramifications. It shouldn’t be the case that writers concerned with interiority should only be interested in the inner states of a very particular kind of person: artists like themselves. Some might argue that the sorts of people who do equations in their spare time don’t make very appealing protagonists, but this is nonsense. Randall Munroe’s lovely comics about romance at xkcd.com should put paid to the idea that people who like numbers don’t have any feelings.

What I am going to say next may be reaching a bit, but here goes: I think there is a connection between the extreme whiteness of the authors of most of the ‘twenty-something coming of age’ genre, and the near total absence of the physical/numerical sciences in these stories. Again, I am going to say it in the bluntest way possible: Asians do maths.

Yes, yes, I know. It’s a stereotype. Not every Asian guy in the street is Terrance Tao. Still, Asians do value maths more highly in comparison with the Western baseline, there’s no denying it. The West gave us ‘Beauty and the Geek’, where you’re invited to laugh at the idea that a ‘nerd’ (always male, because the show doesn’t even consider that women who like computers might exist) could ever pair off with a beautiful woman. Mainland China gave us ‘If You Are the One’, a hilariously brutal dating show where everybody wants to go home with the engineers.

Here I will reach a little more, and ask: could there be a link between my Asian relatives’ terror of poverty, and the fact that I can’t think of a Western analogue to Tsukuru – a protagonist caught in a whirlpool of longing and nostalgia, who still loves trains? Could it be that the fear of real material deprivation, so absent from Hannah Horvarth’s and Frances Ha’s lives and so present, from an early age, in mine, lends itself to and a heightened sensitivity to the romantic possibilities of numbers, finding answers to logistical problems, and Building Stuff?

I have no idea. I am intrigued, however, by what impressionistically seems to be a relative abundance of Asian creators of science fiction (on both page and screen) compared to their absence, as both characters and creators, from the more ‘literary’, feelings-heavy works of the kind I’ve described above. I wonder what it would look like if the gatekeepers of film and TV showed more interest in stories with Asians in them which weren’t about, say, kung fu. And if on the supply side, Asians as a group became a little more willing to treat our interior states as being something worth excavating, a process which might yield value to ourselves as well as others.

*

Questions: at what point does introspection become narcissism? The gossamer line between taking your own feelings too seriously, and not seriously enough.

The kind of question whose very asking is a sign of privilege.

Material scarcity versus psychological dilemmas.

What to withhold, and what to reveal.

When to reflect and when to act and when to go to bed, go on the internet and not get up for a very long time.

*

Earlier this summer I was walking down West End Avenue in Manhattan and remembered, with a sadness that nearly knocked me off my feet, just why I came to New York seven years ago and just why I am now about to leave.

From ‘My Misspent Youth’, by Meghan Daum:

______________

“Here,” he said, “get yourself some healthy food. You look awful.” I said he had done more than enough for me and that I couldn’t accept money on top of everything else, but he refused to take it back. “It’s not money,” he said, “it’s my feelings. Don’t think about it too much, just take it.”
From Norwegian Wood

______________

Andy: So what do you do?

Frances: Eh… It’s kinda hard to explain.

Andy: Because what you do is complicated?

Frances: Eh… Because I don’t really do it.
From ‘Frances Ha’, by Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig

______________

“I probably still haven’t completely adapted to the world.’ I said after giving it some thought. “I don’t know, I feel like this isn’t the real world. The people, the scene: they just don’t seem real to me.”

“You mean, if you knew me better, you’d force stuff on me like everyone else?”

“It’s possible,” I said. “That’s how people live in the real world: forcing stuff on each other.”

“I’m glad I ran into you,” I said. “I think I’m a little more adapted to the world now.”

Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place.
From Norwegian Wood

[1] See ‘The Loves of Lena Dunham’, by Elaine Blair, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/07/loves-lena-dunham/

 

[2] It doesn’t really work when Lena Dunham tries to write people of colour. A Korean girl with parents who bankroll her vanity art gallery? Yeah, no.

Sex, Violence, Druuna

Trigger Warning: This article talks about sexual assault and rape, at length. In an attempt to reduce inadvertent exposure to the material discussed, I will provide links to specific sequences.
_______

In 1986, Heavy Metal changed their format from monthly to quarterly. As part of this format change, they began to print full stories instead of serializing them. Mostly, these stories were originally printed in Europe – where the Francophone market published 48 page collected editions called albums.

The third full album printed in the new quarterly format was Morbus Gravis (Severe Disease) by Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri, in the Summer 1986 issue. This feature introduced Druuna, a sexually charged woman navigating her way through a nightmarish dystopic society with nothing but her wits and her sexual availability to keep her alive. Over the course of the story, she is forced to expose herself, prostitutes herself for medicine, and is forced to perform fellatio at knifepoint. In retrospect, this was tame.
 

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In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) this appalling level of sexual violence, Serpieri (and Druuna, especially) became massively popular among the Heavy Metal readership. So much so that a parody strip was published asking the question “Where is Druuna now?” (Answer: married, with two kids.)

The appeal was not and is not difficult to understand. Serpieri is a master craftsman. From the various sketchbooks that have been published, it is obvious that he enjoys drawing women. Naked women. Sexy women. And because he enjoys drawing them, he has gotten really good at it.

Any casual connoisseur of pornography can tell you that the act of sexual intercourse is not inherently anything – visually sexy, meaningful, or even necessarily pleasurable. It’s the elements that make up the context of the act that add significance. Even something as simple as bad lighting or poor framing can push a visual depiction towards embarrassing or arousing.

Making something look sexy is not an easy feat. Serpieri knows this and the amount of effort he puts into his work is obvious. He is an incredibly talented illustrator who also happens to have a very good grasp of sequential narrative. That he likes to use those talents to draw people having sex would seem like a net positive – until you realize that a lot of the sexual activity is non-consensual. But he has somehow managed to draw the assault as sexy, which makes the realization very uncomfortable when it hits.

Serpieri works best as a pin-up illustrator, creating one off images that are designed to titillate and arouse the viewer. These are, to a one, perfectly suited to do just that. There is no problematic text to distract from the purity of the visual depiction. Which feels like an argument for the platonic ideal of looking at women without talking to them, so as not to spoil the illusion, but there you go.

To be sure, there is a straw-man argument to be made (half-hearted at best – like you’d find from a certain kind of Twitter account holder, one who doesn’t like to be challenged on his enjoyment of problematic entertainment) that the story is set in a dystopic future where survival of the fittest is the rule and depicting sexual violence is both natural and understandable. After all, that’s what happens when society collapses and there is no means of enforcing mores like consent. Sure, but it is really necessary to depict it so much? And if society has to collapse for these kinds of things to be normalized, why does rape still occur in this day and age?

Serpieri himself claims that Druuna’s approach to sexual pleasures is actually a challenge to Judeo-Christian mores on sexuality. Which would be laudable if there wasn’t quite so much rape. And it’s not like Serpieri is unable to depict healthy, consensual sexual situations. He is. He just choses not to, for reasons.

To be clear – Heavy Metal had a long history of problematic stories. Sexual assault and rape are not the sole province of Serpieri. And he was not the first artist to produce beautifully rendered, overly sexualized science fiction that didn’t make much sense (I’m looking in your direction, Fernando Fernandez). However, to the extent that Druuna became emblematic of Heavy Metal as a publication, she also became emblematic of the sexual assault problems at the heart of the most problematic stories published by that magazine.
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Screen Shot 2016-06-14 at 9.48.03 PMIn the Spring 1988 issue, Heavy Metal published a follow up Druuna story. In this story, Druuna is only raped once – by someone she knows and was actively fooling around with before he brutally and suddenly crossed the line into non-consent (page 42). About the best I can say is that it’s a very realistic example of a date-rape scenario. The sequence to that point is incredibly erotic, but subsequent rereads retroactively taint any potential for arousal.

The real sexual violence in the story is reserved for Hale – a woman that Druuna meets in the wilderness. Shortly after they meet, Hale’s father is killed by a group of soldiers. One of those soldiers immediately rapes Hale and takes her as his possession. The most disturbing part of this is the panel where we see Druuna and one of the soldiers standing by passively while we can read the off-panel dialog of Hale screaming “no” and being ignored (page 23). The page turn shows the actual rape in progress. As a piece of sequential storytelling, it’s very well executed. Both the reaction shot and the actual rape are excellent example of show, don’t tell. But that’s about all it has going for it. That and the heartbreaking shot of Hale wrapped around herself post-trauma.

Druuna’s advice to Hale is to just let it happen (!) because whatever the soldiers can do to them can’t be worse than the monstrous mutants who wander the wastelands could do instead. Survival is the key, and the best advice is to endure. Which is an interesting thing for a young, impressionable young man – a demographic that was reading Heavy Metal at the time – to read. Especially so close to such a graphic sexual assault.

Hale is raped a second time, and the act is used to drive the plot. While the soldier is distracted, a mutant comes out of nowhere and drags him away (page 29). Hale is laughing hysterically at her salvation and near-death experience and the death of the soldier is given a little too much dramatic emphasis, considering that he was mid-rape when he was whisked away. Again, Serpieri is a good enough sequential storyteller that we get to see this occur, from the rape onwards.

Completing Hale’s arc, we are shown a single image of her working as a prostitute in a military barracks and we hear nothing more about her for the entire series.

In the Summer 1988 issue of Heavy Metal, an editorial addressed current events. It seems that copies of the previous issue had been seized at the Canadian border for being in violation of code 9956 – a writ denying the importation of material dealing with sex with violence, bondage, etc. The editorial admits there was “sex with violence” in Druuna.

But there is a side of the strip that seems to have been ignored. Beyond the breasts, beyond the sex, there is an extraordinary power within the story – the horror of a world gone mad. We were not condoning the violence, simply presenting a frightening oftentimes exaggerated look into a future even more violent than the times we live in now.

That very issue, they featured a slew of stories from the Spanish version of the Illustrated Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Because they’d been censored, you see. This was a free speech issue.

Heavy Metal has always been a commercially-minded magazine. That approach has worked out very well for them and gave the publication a kind of self-aggrandizing swagger. You knew they were going to be over-the-top and merchandise everything, so nothing came as a surprise after the first five or six years.

Heavy Metal in the late 80s was filled with material by Daniel Torres and Peter Kuper – to the point where they felt like house artists. However, no character captured the public attention like Druuna. The two first books were republished as stand-alone hardback editions, as well as a slew of sketchbooks and other art books. Serpieri reprints became big business for Heavy Metal. So much so that these are all still in print, decades later.
 

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An interesting side effect from the free-speech editorial board was that Heavy Metal began to censor some scenes of sex and violence. The series The Waters of DeadMoon received the most obvious changes, but Serpieri’s later works were given special attention. A few panels were altered, but mostly word balloons were placed at strategic spots to cover penetration, like a modern day da Volterra. In later years, this got to be almost farcical and a bored archivist could spend hours spotting the unnecessary bowdlerizations. In one later story, an entire six page sex scene disappeared, leaving readers confused.

Ironically, there was a note in May of 1992 (the first issue that Kevin Eastman’s name shows up in the masthead as publisher) that read

We have gotten a lot of flack about censorship in the Raoul Fleetfoot story (January 1992). Those little black bars covering up “casual indiscretions” were part of the story and not our way of screwing around with the First Amendment.

Given previous behavior, it would not have been that unlikely a conclusion to arrive at. I certainly came to the same conclusion when I read the story in question.
———————————–

In the November 1992 issue, the third Druuna story, Creatura, was published. Infamously, this story contains a four page sequence (pages 45-48) where Druuna is drugged and gang-raped. On the last page of the sequence, she wakes up and the following internal dialog shows up in a thought balloon.

Forgive me, we might have been able to live together. Your little devils gave me so much pleasure, you know? I don’t know how much those drugs were responsible… But I can reassure you it was a wonderful experience.

Which is, in my opinion, the crux of the problem with these stories. If there were no word balloons, it would be entirely possible to read at least one of the pages of the sequence as just a very well-drawn group sex scene, with attendant pornographic associations. It is drawn sexy. That’s how Serpieri draws these things – he’s very good at what he does and his artistic choices are on the page. With the context added in, the juxtaposition of sexy and horrific makes the mind recoil in realization.

However, the apology that the victim utters (even if it’s only in her mind) seems to absolve the instigator of the assault (a woman) retroactively on the theory that it was fun, once Druuna got into it. I cannot think of a more dangerous sentiment to present to the kinds of people that would find those pages more sexually arousing than horrific; keep in mind that I count myself as one of those individuals.

The first Druuna story was published in 1986, the year I entered high school. Heavy Metal was not news to me – on the contrary, my father had the complete run as I was growing up, so there was not a time when I did not know that Heavy Metal existed. But the perfect bound quarterly issues starting in 1986 did not fit into the official commemorative binders that held the first nine years of the publication. The new issues sat alone and were easier to consume as they came in.
The second story was published when I was still in high school and Creatura came out when I was living at home, having dropped out of college. In those pre-internet days, anything pornographic was a precious item and this one was mailed directly to my house. I’ll spare you the gory details, but I honestly wonder how much those three stories impacted my sexual development.

If you can read Marain, figuring out my FetLife profile shouldn’t be that difficult. I’m not going to make it easy for you, but I will say that enthusiastic consent is a massive turn-on for me. And even the slightest hint of reluctance makes me very uncomfortable. I guess that means I got the right message? It’s difficult to say for sure if I am representative of the average reader reaction or an outlier.

I will say this, though – I tend to be attracted to women with bodies that are similar to Druuna’s and that’s probably not a coincidence.
—————————————

Five additional Druuna stories were published between 1993 and 2003 (fun fact: more Druuna stories were published under Kevin Eastman as publisher than not), but I’m not going to recap them all in nauseating detail. They all are all set in more or less the same technorganic futuristic hellscape, a place full of horny soldiers, brutal authoritarianism, sadistic sexual predators, disease, ravenous mutants, and bewildering recurring characters.

There is a lot of philosophy and soul-searching. Consensual sex is found throughout the series, but usually only in the context of idyllic dream sequences that serve to demonstrate what the world could be like. On the other hand, the constant threat of violence and sexual assault seem to serve as a cautionary element, describing how the world is messed up.

Which works, on an allegorical level. But the stories themselves tend to duck and weave considerably around the outright identification of self-identification as allegories. In fact, Serpieri’s hyper-realistic artwork tends to work against reading these stories as allegorical. These are specific events, happening to specific people.

If Druuna is, indeed, some kind of ur-woman, what do her repeated sexual assaults mean, exactly? Are they meant to imply something about the universal condition of women? That’s pretty bleak, no matter how you turn the interpretation. However, if there is no meaning to these assaults, then the allegory argument falls apart on first principles.

It is entirely possible that I think too much about these things.

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One final story: When I was in a mall outside of Antwerp earlier this year, I was flipping through Anima, the first new Serpieri book in thirteen years, at FNAC. My girlfriend looked over my shoulder and noted that the book was not just “a little rapey” (as I had described his work in Heavy Metal) but depicted actual rape, complete with knives to throats during intercourse. Considering that the book is largely silent, this is both a testament to his sequential art capabilities and his pre-occupation with sexual assault.

Paolo, you’ve still got it!

Jeeves and Social Change

jeevesWhen I was thirteen years old my reading habits, which had previously been limited to J. R. Tolkien, W .E. Johns, and their ilk, expanded. Filled with intellectual curiosity and a massively inflated sense of my own understanding of the world, I tried to tackle books which, in retrospect, were far too intellectually unwieldy for me at the time. I dutifully read a volume by Eric Hobsbawm cover-to-cover despite understanding only one sentence in five. Orwell spoke to me (as he does to every teenager) although I could not quite square his politics with the smattering of Marxism I had read. Plath, of course, resonated.

One gem I uncovered during that period was the English comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse and when I look back on my formative years as a reader I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t have been better for me to set aside the weighter tomes (all those hours spent looking at Shakespeare) for a while and instead have devoted myself fully to the task of devouring the Wodehouse canon.

I found Jeeves and Wooster to be Wodehouses’ most compelling creation (history appears to be on my side on this point). Each J. and W. story follows, broadly, the same plot; Bertram Wooster, a well-meaning but somewhat, to use Jeeves’ affectionate words ‘mentally deficient’ man-child of independent means, gets into some kind of a mess and Jeeves, his faithful butler, rescues him from it. Bertie’s misadventures are rarely his own doing – they are generally instigated by an old school chum who has had a fall-out with his affianced and in need of help, or an aunt who is trying to out-maneuver her husband. Bertie’s problems are almost entirely external; left to his own devices he can generally be found sitting around in his New York or London apartment, spending time with his friends at the Drones (a gentleman’s club for boisterous – fourth sons with a lot of money and no occupation) or some of the more fashionable areas of France, reading a pulp detective novel, recovering from a hangover, or indulging in a little gambling. He occasionally finds himself temporarily besotted with a member of the opposite sex, but the danger soon passes. As each novel progresses a comedy of errors ensues. Various parties appear to foil the plans of Bertie and those he holds dear, often in the form of some terrifying patriarch who, as a result of some misunderstanding, wants to tear our young hero limb from limb. Just as we reach the moment when all seems lost, Jeeves swoops in with one of his ingenious plans and the whole matter is resolved.

One does not read Jeeves and Wooster for the story, of course, but for the language. One can let a Wodehouse novel fall open and, briefly surveying the page, find a marvelously-wrought sentence. Consider, for example, the following, found in Carry On, Jeeves:

Lady Malvern was a hearty, happy, healthy overpowering sort of dashed female. Not so very tall but making up for it by measuring about six feet from the O.P. to the Prompt Side. She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built around her by someone who knew that they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips this season.

In just three sentences Wodehouse leaps from the theatre (‘o.p.’ and ‘prompt side’ being opposite sides of a stage) to the language of fashion. The word ‘dashed’ wonderfully evokes not just a language but a world-view laden-heavy with the Edwardian era. His very phrasing at once evokes and gently ridicules a world of waistcoats, high collars, and entitlement.

Despite the oft quoted phrase that analysing Wodehouse is like ‘taking a spade to a souffle’, we have a variety of terms which we can bring to bear upon the numerous literary devices found in his prose. He is the master of dramatic irony (in Right Ho Jeeves Bertie sips a cocktail and feels like ‘Cesar having one in his tent the day he overcame Nervii’) and the transferred epithet (‘I pronged a moody forkful’). It is perhaps his bathos which produces in me the most glee. In Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, as a pair of lovers have a tearful and passionate reunion Bertie, witnessing the scene, muses that the toast he is eating is a bit cold, but that’s quite alright – he rather likes cold toast so long as it has plenty of butter on it.

We can describe the mechanics of Wodehouse’s prose, then, but there is a gulf between taxonomy and analysis. Here the spade soufflé analogy becomes apt, as Wodehouse’s works are often determinedly detached from historical and social realities. Evelyn Waugh, writing in praise of his peer, describes the world Wodehouse presents works as ‘idyllic’, and Auden described him as ‘one of the great English experts on Eden’. The two wars which Wodehouse lived through, including internment in a Nazi prison in France and a shattered reputation in England, never intrude upon his works. As a professional book botherer and Wodehouse fan one would think I would have a lot to say on his works, but I often find that there is little in Wodehouse which is not already on the page.

The quaint and insular world of the English gentry which Wodehouse presents is not entirely apolitical, however. Some have found in Wodehouse a reversal of roles and an unbalancing of the social order. Sophie Ratcliffe argues that in Wodehouse stories those of the lower social orders (butlers, chorus girls), often prove themselves to be more capable than those who were seen as their social betters. She defends the point by observing that in his correspondence Wodehouse shows a ‘lack of snobbery and prejudice’, being as diligent in writing to a former housekeeper as to George Orwell.

Following Ratcliffe, one can read Wodehouse as social critique. Bertie is unwittingly snobbish and child-like. He is a well-educated imbecile who wields his impressive vocabulary like a blunderbuss. He has achieved almost nothing in life (the prize for scriptural knowledge which he won as a child comes up with comical regularity). His opulence and unconscious disregard for anyone outside of his social class is striking. He worries, often, about Marxist radicals baying for his blood and when one sees how he lives one can understand why. It is a testament to the insularity of his world view that Bertie’s implied reader is one of his own (‘I don’t know if you were at Cannes this year…’ he writes).

Despite the heroic role given to the lower classes in Wodehouse’s works, it is rare we have more than a few lines of dialogue from the subaltern. Even Jeeves lives a life largely shrouded in mystery, appearing only to assist the young master in his time of need. We know that Jeeves likes to bet. He sometimes takes fishing trips. He has an extended family which is particularly replete with aunts. He routinely quotes Shakespeare and Tennyson, but these things appear only as glimpses of a larger, submerged, whole. We see him only through Bertie’s eyes – as a kind of dutiful sorcerer (he eats a lot of fish) and idealised mother rather than a human being. Even when Jeeves narrates one of the short stories he sticks to the particularities of the matter at hand. His inner life remains, frustratingly, obfuscated.

When Sebastian Faulks took the reigns he pushed this criticism a little further – his version of Jeeves lost a relative in the Boer War and, when he reports this, receives no sympathy. Some of Bertie’s lot lost money when Emily Davison threw herself before a racehorse and they are far more concerned about a poor bet than the social changes promised by women’s liberation. Faulks, unlike Wodehouse, situates Jeeves and Bertie in history, even if that history seems to pass them by, making their time on this earth jarringly finite (in one of his letters Wodehouse laments that his novels would become ‘historical’ after the war given that Bertie would not be able to afford a butler with income tax as it was).

This is not to say that the changing political climate in England never pushes against the boundaries of Bertie’s world in Woodehouse’s books. Plum was fully conscious that he was capturing the dying days of the British aristocracy; Bertie attempts (unsuccessfully) to learn how to darn his own socks, and at one point witnesses a Marxist rally (only because a chum was trying to win over a lady there present). The world never pushed too hard, however. Bertie encounters threats to his way of life, but those threats, like those internal to his world, are always resolved.

It is hard to read too much social criticism in Wodehouse, then, because there is no sting. Wodehouse does not want to see the British gentry come to an end – his work is a celebration of useless people. Bertie’s shortsightedness does not make him a monster, but a child, and Wodehouse, if anything, wants to protect him. We find Bertie, like my thirteen year old self, poised, precariously, on the cusp of adulthood, but (unlike self) he never quite falls. This is, perhaps, why he has such fondness for overbearing aunts, why he is terrified by father figures such as Robert Spode, (who reminds him of his old schoolmaster and tries to talk to him like an adult). Marriage is a prospect Bertie often, in moments of madness, embraces and then seeks to escape from. Bertie, Peter Pan-like, lives out a fantasy of perpetual youth. He belongs to a world of no responsibilities, where nothing really changes, where Jeeves’ maternal embrace will always encircle him. The predictability and insularity of Bertie’s life is comforting. Aunts will be disappointed. Old school chums will fall in, and out, and back in love. Fearsome men like Roderick Spode will make sincere attempts to kill Bertie. Social change looms. But at the end of the day Jeeves sweeps in and fixes everything.

Review: Blutch’s Peplum

Publisher’s Synopsis

“…. a grand, strange dream of ancient Rome. At the edge of the empire, a gang of bandits discovers the body of a beautiful woman in a cave; she is encased in ice but may still be alive. One of the bandits, bearing a stolen name and with the frozen maiden in tow, makes his way toward Rome—seeking power, or maybe just survival, as the world unravels…. Peplum weaves together threads from Shakespeare and the Satyricon along with Blutch’s own distinctive vision.”

Blutch (Christian Hincker) is the 2009 winner of the Grand prix de la ville d’Angoulême.

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Is there any suggestion that Blutch’s Peplum is inspired by the Satyricon of Petronius apart from the fact that the author has told us so?

There is the presence of the protagonist’s young male lover, Giton, as well as the licentious poet Eumolpus (both unnamed in the comic but central figures in Petronius’ work). There are also at least two instances where Petronius’ Satyricon is “quoted” if not wholly then at least in part.

Yet the comic is fixed in a strange but plausible landscape; it is less earthy, less strange and altogether less theatrical and decadent then the book and Fellini’s film. Both the original and film versions of Satyricon are filled with the rank physical reality of sex, not the curious delusion which Blutch’s protagonist engages with throughout.

If anything, Peplum is a kind of delightful mongrel taking in the high adventure of the pepla genre, the theatricality of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the moral entertainments of Eric von Stroheim’s Greed (or even The Treasure of Sierra Madre) as well as Petronius’ fitful and (for historical reasons) fragmented narrative. Edward Gauvin (the translator; citing Blutch himself) suggests the strong influence of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, presumably for its tribal motifs, strange accouterments, sparse landscapes and ritualized violence. All of this told in a virtuoso voice laced with a smattering of European high culture and Blutch’s own conception of the pagan world. The adventure and the splendid drawing is what keeps Blutch’s audience engaged as the artist’s mind wanders across this landscape of high and low.

Yet it must be said that even this synthesis has its counterpart in Petronius’ novel. The most famous and well preserved section of the Satyricon is that section known as Trimalchio’s feast where there is an equally debauched mixture of excess and high culture. Here, for example, is the rampant luxury of overeating mixed with recitations of Homer:

“So let’s start enjoying ourselves again, that’ll be better, and let’s watch the recitations from Homer.’

In came the troupe immediately and banged their shields with their spears. Trimalchio sat up on his cushion and while the reciters spouted their Greek lines at one another in their usual impudent way, he read aloud in Latin in a sing-song voice.”

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It seems improbable that Peplum was cast together haphazardly if only because of its rhetorical symmetry. As Gauvin, relates in his introduction:

“[Jean-Louis] Gauthey commissioned an epilogue from Blutch and devised the book’s structure: Ten chapters prefaced with new vignettes and chapters heads.”

The album begins and ends with Encolpius greeting his goddess, first as a miraculous vision and at the end as a deathly visage. In our second encounter with Encolpius, he murders Publius Cimber in private and gains his name, while in the penultimate section of Peplum he kills a rabid woman perhaps to save his own life, perhaps to protect his very chastity. In the third chapter of Peplum, Encolpius is tortured by severe sea-sickness and asks for the merciful release of death; in the corresponding section in Chapter 8, he is tortured (on a ship) for posing as Publius Cimber by the brother of the same.

In the fourth chapter, Encolpius encounters a tribe of women with amputated limbs. He is tied down and pummeled by a rush of phallic arms and promptly ejaculates.

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In the analogous seventh chapter, he longs for coitus with the most beautiful woman he has ever seen but is ultimately impotent. There is every reason to believe that Peplum is in part a study of repressed homosexuality. It will seem odd to state something so obvious but neither of the comic’s illustrious forebears seem the least bit concerned about the sexuality of its protagonists despite the rampant pederasty on display.

What the comics does share with the Satyricon is that element of class conflict, that vivid description of lower class Roman society coming into contact with the upper classes. Like Trimlachio, the wealthy freedman of the Satyricon, Encolpius has risen through the ranks if not in kind then at least in name. His shifting fortunes—first tortured for impersonating a noble man and then celebrated for the act of killing—reflects the way in which the “supernatural” was thought to have a part in the acquisition of wealth. When he finally reaches the center of empire in the epilogue, he is distinctly out of step, a stick in the mud. Peplum isn’t as rich as its source material in this respect but neither is this its central theme.

At the pivot point of chapters 5 and 6, Encolpius first finds his young Ganymede, Giton, before forsaking him for the illusion of his goddess (his Lady of Auxerre), a speechless statue (or human?) frozen against all reason and physical probability. Encolpius doggedly persists in his denial of the tangible world, its substances and its consequences: first interrupting a staged mythological performance of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur, killing the latter for his lack of grace on stage; then suffering impotence in the face of real physical (heterosexual) desire, any semblance of love thwarted by his idealization and greed.

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This section constitutes Blutch’s main transcription from Petronius, namely Encolopius’ (impotent) encounter with Circe. From J. P. Sullivan’s translation of chapter 128 of Petronius’ Satyricon:

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Does my mouth offend you in some way? Does my breath smell through not eating? Is it the unwashed sweat from my armpits? If it’s not any of these, am I to suppose you’re somehow frightened of Giton?’

Flushed with obvious embarrassment, I even lost whatever virility I had. My whole body was limp, and I said:

‘Please, my queen, don’t add insults to my misery. I’ve been bewitched.’

It is a loose adaptation but done with a kind of subtle commentary; for a number of panels have been lifted from old photographs of Nijinsky’s ballet for the Ballets Russes, The Afternoon of a Faun.

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The ballet is inspired by the famous poem of the same name by Stéphane Mallarmé (L’Après-midi d’un faune, 1876) and imagines a dream-like state where the faun encounters two nymphs and cannot be entirely sure if they are real or imagined.

“I’d love to make them linger on, those nymphs.
So fair,
their frail incarnate, that it flutters in the air
drowsy with tousled slumbers.
Did I love a dream?
My doubt, hoard of old darkness, ends in a whole stream
of subtle branches which, remaining as the true
forests, show that I’ve offered myself (quite alone, too)
the roses’ ideal failing as something glorious––
Let me reflect . . .
what if these women you discuss,
faun, represent desires of your own fabulous senses!”

The faun, like Encolpius, is navigating the realms of reality and the purely intellectual, eroding the lines between both. In an article at the New York Times, Jeffrey M. Perl explains that his is a “search” for the:

”…distinction between real and imagined experiences…[…]… The skeptic faun has proof the nymphs existed—the love bite on his chest—but he mistakes proof for a mystery. The faun’s doubt about his afternoon has become the real experience. The creations of the mind, like poetry, exist.”

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Unlike the faun of Mallarmé’s poem who remains at rest, wandering in his imagination undecided and unresolved, the protagonist of Peplum, the false Publius Cimber, exchanges the reality of his pederastic love for the fantasy of an unattainable goddess—a desire so absolute that he ignores the gold and precious stones in the treasure house where this goddess is stored, a delusion so captivating that all other encounters are rendered sterile.

What follows is Encolpius’ capture, unmasking as a false Publius Cimber and torture.

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Then somehow miraculously the ship sinks and he is cast upon an island where he immediately faces a life and death struggle with a blood thirsty ravenous woman who he promptly cuts down.

But not is all as it seems. Consider the fact that the protagonist is last seen in chapter 8 with his eyes gouged out and is then seen lying in the hold of the ship in painful slumber before a caption enigmatically states that:

“The great ship sank one night. The chorus of the shipwrecked.”

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Why then are his eyes suddenly restored even as he lies in the bottom of a small boat (a ship of fools) rowed by an equally blind Charon mercifully dispatching his compatriots with a knife. It is almost as if Encolpius has to be blinded before he can truly see. Is all that follows merely a specter before death? Has he finally arrived at the end of his travels on an isle of the dead, an Elysium where his one wish, his one desire for a reunion with his goddess is fulfilled and shown to be absolutely corrupt and extinct? And is this land of the dead merely the one which most of us take for that of the living? This is by no means a happy or desirable end; this awakening from a pliable and abstract slumber to a haggard reality.

And here is where the comic’s chiastic structure lends additional meaning to the proceedings. Where the performance of Julius Caesar’s assassination was greeted with the silence of the murderers and readers at the start of Peplum, the gladiatorial might of Encolpius against the ghastly apparition of death is heralded with a laurel wreath and acclaim despite his protestations—he is the new champion and Caesar of this nether world, his face scarred with the shadowy countenance of brutality and revelation.

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Writing at TCJ.com, Sarah Horrocks sees the central motif of Peplum as being that of surviving “the after-effects of an encounter with sublime beauty”:

“The question of how to negotiate desire in the face of the thing which destroys all other desires; how to live after seeing death–this is the panic that terrifies Peplum’s central protagonist…[…]… He has seen part of God’s face, and been driven mad by her…When finally his goddess abandons the mortal plane and assumes her shape as abject corpse, Encolpius has been deranged into this dark strange howl of a man who answers humor with horror. If in the presence of the divine he was rendered into infantile psychopathy, in its absence he has become the demonic knowing man, suffused with the horror of living.”

One of Ryan Holmberg’s complaints in the bellicose comments section of Horrocks’ review is that Blutch’s comic revels in its vulgarity and the deplorable view that serious works of art should engage in the sheer sordidness of life:

“It felt like skimming across the surface of cliches of “edginess,” accentuated with moody brushwork and smudges, without taking anything too far too any extreme to break with good taste…[…]…I think this graphic novel participates in that common move, where representations of evil are automatically taken as more authentic than representations of good, where death and violence are seen as more real, where shock is used (or attempted to be used) as a substitute for more subtle thinking about a subject.”

This thesis is worth considering.

At one level, it does seem that Blutch is providing a counterpoint to the light-hearted easy heroics of the pepla (that strangely bloodless yet epic world of the ancient Romans) as well as the bizarre sexual antics of the Satyricon (or even Apuleius’ The Golden Ass). What we get are intermittent injections of violence and the fruits of violence, the bestial nature of the ancient world.

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Yet there is little sense that this comparison is taken lightly, or that it dismisses hallucinatory fantasy or the pleasures that can be taken from idealistic art or lighter fare. The audience in Peplum seems to be constantly amused by the antics of Blutch’s hero: from the crows which greet Encolpius and the grave robbers in the first chapter.

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…to the strange children hiding in the trees of the barbaric hinterland. There are the thoroughly amused city dwellers watching a mythological play, Giton giggling as he watches his lover murder a cave dweller with absolute callousness; and the exuberant witnesses of Encolpius’ gladiatorial exploits on the isle of the dead—all of them laughing and applauding for seemingly aberrant yet mystical reasons (is this a kind of “sublime laughter”; the knowing chuckles of those who see the complex whole).

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The protagonist’s longing for an eternal untarnished beauty is shunned and ridiculed throughout the text but his final act of violence (after a string of atrocities) is greeted with a kind of ironic acclaim which he rejects. There is the sense that the protagonist consistently engages in acts of violence to protect his own avarice, his own sense of what is of eternal worth; like an artist depicting these things without reflecting on their real world counterparts. Blutch is a glorious artist and the inhumanity he depicts so utterly adroit that we can often quite easily suspend the apprehension of its horrors.

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Is this a limitation in the artist or a limitation in the art? It might be said that Encolpius’ coupling with the wild woman at the tail end of the comic is more feral, more terrible, and more ugly then the slaughter depicted above; if only because he faces this head on and not as a background to his own avarice; his shaved head suggesting that he has joined his compatriots in the charnel house. In this way at least, Peplum is as much a meditation on the practice of art (its difficulties, dilemmas, and temptations) as it is one centered on artistic influence and aporia.

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Yet the final state of the protagonist is hardly one to be desired; now firmly residing in the dour reality of unmitigated brutality, lost to the black humor of life. It is as if both the protagonist (the artist and performer of this strange world) had lost the power to see. And that, in one sense, is the “meaning” of Blutch’s epilogue.

The revelers and storytellers of this latter day Satyricon are gathered in a large space telling tall, humorous tales of human misconduct (are the stories of Peplum the stories they have told?). The secluded villa of their congress is shrouded in the savage inking of darkest night. Their sublime laughter like the birds, children, and Giton before them resounding through the halls. One storyteller speaks of “folks who were so hungry they ate the insides of their cheeks.” The protagonist can only talk sullenly of mothers with half eaten babies clutched to their breasts.

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This is the final line of Petronius’ Satryicon, a story without an ending (the work is largely lost) given new meaning in Peplum. Encolpius’ mastery of death and reality seems to flow seamlessly into his insensitivity to pleasure, song and poetry. He has become the unwitting master of Hell.

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(1)  From an interview with the artist conducted by Matt Madden:

“I adore Fellini Satyricon and I’ve watched it a bunch of times, but I made a decision not to look at it while I was working on Peplum. In fact, I had Orson Welles on my mind instead…[…]… I was especially looking at his low-budget Shakespearean films—Othello, The Chimes at Midnight—that he made with little money or resources. I love how economical he is in those films, those minimal sets, that whole aesthetic was really what I was after. I didn’t want a lavish epic. I wanted something simple…[…]… I really wanted it to feel like a B-movie.”

(2)  Sarah Horrocks mentions Blutch’s interest in the “sublime image” and also Julia Kristeva writing’s on the same. So I thought I’d include a short section from Kristeva’s Power of Horror to refresh our memories:

“The ‘sublime’ object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be. As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the sublime triggers—it has always already triggered—a spree of perceptions and words that expands memory boundlessly. I then forget the point of departure and find myself removed to a secondary universe, set off from the one where ‘I’ am— delight and loss.”