The Dishonourable Woman

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

Let me attempt to describe the experience of watching the BBC’s widely acclaimed 8 part mini-series, The Honourable Woman. Imagine walking into a five star restaurant and being ushered to your seat by a beaming maitre d’ with a cultivated English accent. The immaculate dinner service is laid out on a pristine white tablet cloth and the wine is served to you in fine crystal goblets. The initial tasting seems quite promising. Then you take a full mouthful of the fine red wine and it leaves you with the distinct impression of pure unadulterated piss. The only thing that could have possibly made this experience more memorable is if a cockroach had crawled down your throat as you swished the wine around in your mouth. Was this a mistake? Did you do something to offend the gods or the owners of the restaurant? Did you deserve it? (maybe) Or is this all they’re capable of—excellent table settings in the service of excrement.

The Honourable Woman is the brain child of Hugo Blick who was also responsible for the somewhat overrated crime drama, The Shadow Line. It stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a Jewish heiress named Nessa Stein who witnesses the brutal assassination of her father as a child. He is ostensibly killed by radical Palestinians in revenge for selling arms to Israel. Now fully grown and the CEO of her father’s company, she is in the final phases of a plan to lay a fiber optic cable network throughout the West Bank. But that enterprise only forms one part of her larger project of altruism and reconciliation. Her educational foundation (run by her brother) also funds a series of universities throughout Israel with a mind to providing equal access to higher education for both Arabs and Jews.

Yet her righteousness and sense of ethical obligation is of an even high order then is shown by these acts. As is revealed in later episodes (but well telegraphed to viewers from at least the second episode), she was kidnapped and raped during a visit to Gaza some 8 years back, and forced to have the child of her Palestinian rapist.

For some inexplicable reason, a number of reviewers have highlighted Nessa’s sense of agency and ability to outwit the various machinations of the organizations which circle her (MI6, the CIA, the Israelis, and various shadowy Palestinian organizations). Nothing of the sort occurs in The Honourable Woman.

Nessa is persistently caught on the back foot and is almost always at the mercy of her tormentors. This is by no means a subset of the “realism” which Blick presumes to have foisted on his audience, for Nessa is entirely positioned as a self-sacrificing martyr. She is twice kidnapped, twice raped, physically abused on several occasions, betrayed at every point, constantly threatened with murder, and so thoroughly psychologically tormented that she sleeps in a safe room every night. She faces all of this with the equanimity of a modern day saint; all cropped hair and rays of light shining down on her stained, anguished face like the light of God.

In her sexual torment, she joins a select group of female saints, for there are precious few of these who are recorded as having been raped (though no doubt many were). It is no coincidence then that Gyllenhaal frequently appears to be channeling Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the few saints to have been thus abused. In the penultimate episode of Blick’s concoction, Nessa even wears a white pant suit to a groundbreaking ceremony in Hebron just as was Joan’s wont. She is very nearly offered up to the flames when a bomb goes off at the same ceremony, the shrapnel tearing into her back leaving the marks of a flagellant.

Nessa initially resists her rape at the hands of her Palestinian kidnappers but then quietly lies down and accepts her fate when she sees her friend being assaulted. Years after this, she is date raped while in a depression fueled alcoholic haze. This she seems to accept, at least at first, with a drunken pragmatism. The MI6 minder/friend who ensures her swift medical care even asks her if she has been engaging in high risk behavior over the years. When questioned by the Palestinian leader behind her rape (and her brother and father’s deaths) as to her lack of desire for revenge (as is his own desire), she babbles through tears that she has often asked herself this question following her innumerous scourgings, and has concluded that she “deserve[s] it.” It certainly helps that said evil Palestinian mastermind resembles nothing less than a James Bond villain with an intravenous line substituting for a white Persian cat and wobbly optics.

I’ve seen some talk concerning this drama’s subtlety and convoluted plotting. The first point, at least, can be quickly dispensed with. If the foregoing description hasn’t already made this clear, Blick’s ideas are wielded like cudgels. For instance, we understand that Nessa has daddy issues because her father scrutinizes her from the heights of a family video projected on her study walls even as she fucks a MI6 mole (presumably a subset of her high risk sexual behavior).

Any talk of complex plotting certainly demands a lengthy harangue if not frequent slaps with a large wet fish. If there is one reason why the central conspiracy would never occur to the average viewer, it would be because it resides in that fantasy land lying between ignorance and pure imbecility.

The plot deserves to be spoilt quite thoroughly. In short, in the final episode, the United States is revealed to be working in concert with the Palestinians (I don’t know who; maybe Fatah and various other rogue groups) to create a climate receptive to Palestinian Statehood right under the noses of the Israelis. Following the bombing in Hebron, the U.S., who masterminded this false flag operation with the Palestinians, will no longer veto any U.N. applications with regards the recognition of the Palestinian state.

Yes, you heard that right—the writers of The Honourable Woman have the U.S. (or at least its Secretary of State) working with the Palestinians to thwart Israel in a false flag operation. This would be the same United States which opposed Palestine’s full membership in UNESCO in the face of overwhelming support (107-14) in 2011; the same United States which cast the single “No” vote in July 2014 on the issue of investigating war crimes committed in Gaza; the same United States which voted overwhelmingly to send more funding to Israel for the Iron Dome missile defense system and to allow Israel to raid its arms stockpiles to rain more misery on the Palestinians.

To add even more salt to the wound, one of the closing scenes has a news report stating that China and Russia might veto said U.S. plans not to oppose Palestinian statehood. Let me see, this would be the same China and Russia which have voted “yes” to Palestinian recognition, “for” UNESCO membership and “for” non-member observer state status. Care to guess how the U.S. voted on all these issues? These two nations also voted decisively to support the investigation into war crimes in Gaza in 2014. But do we really have any right to be surprised at this in a delusionary world where rape is martyrdom, and a device to give depth and agency to women? The asinine logic on display here derives from the same place as those who feel that Schindler’s List was about Nazis saving the world from Jews.

Zionist commentators are of course horrified at the abuse meted out at Israel in The Honourable Woman. But let us count the ways in which the state of Israel has been denigrated. Firstly, Jews are portrayed as arms merchants which is certainly an injustice since Israel doesn’t traffic in arms. The Israelis (Shin Bet? Mossad?) are also shown tapping into Palestinian cell phone traffic through Nessa Stein’s fiber optic cable which is of course absolutely disgusting and unthinkable! The Israeli representative in London also admits to plans to capture and interrogate a Palestinian businessman who is making deals with the U.S. Secretary of State, but guess what? They’re so ineffectual that they’re beaten to the punch by the nefarious U.S.-Palestinian cabals running amok throughout London. The latter elite agents fake the suicide of one of their own in order to silence him. These same Palestinians have the ear of politicians and secret agents throughout the English speaking world, which must explain why U.S. and U.K. have been such “fine” supporters of their cause through the years.

The Palestinians have it much easier. They’re portrayed as drug addled rapists, general haters of women, mass murderers of their own countrymen, criminal masterminds consumed by vengeance, and as generally confused with regards to morals. Nice Palestinians? I don’t think they exist in the world of The Honourable Woman. The only good Palestinian in Blick’s masterwork of blockheadness is a dead Palestinian or at least a silent one. Even the Arab-Muslim hating worlds of Homeland and 24 didn’t hit rock bottom quite so hard. The BBC is often said to have a balance issue with regards Palestine, but on the basis of the dramas which they have commissioned, I think we can safely say which side of the scale they have their thumbs on.

There is a more charitable way to read Blick’s drama, and that is to see in it a call for reconciliation and a (wishful) metaphor for Israeli-Palestinian relations. This is most clearly seen in the narrative path taken by Nessa’s Palestinian confidant, Atika. Atika turns out to be a vengeful subversive lying in wait to do harm to Nessa and her family. Among other things, she leads Nessa’s brother to his doom in the penultimate episode of the series. Yet her demands for violent compensation stop short of Nessa’s rape (which she tries to stop) and she is the only person with sufficient compassion to care for the product of that assault. In the final act, she is killed while saving Nessa and her kidnapped child from some fellow conspirators less enlightened (presumably) than herself.

If viewed from a biblical standpoint, both Nessa and Atika can be seen as scapegoats with the former “offering” sent into the wilderness (for Azazel, see Leviticus 16:8) and the latter given as a blood sacrifice to God. This explains Nessa’s constant position of suffering in this farce as well as her sense of culpability; they are acts of contrition on behalf of the nation of Israel. Yet the twisted nature of the characterizations and political drama overwhelm any such noble intentions. Any fixation on this line of reasoning will inevitably lead the viewer to wonder why the only “saint” allowed for in The Honourable Woman is a Jewish one.

The Honourable Woman is certainly sufficient cause for the donning of sackcloth in shameful repentance, and no doubt obscene enough to earn a host of Emmy and BAFTA nominations come award season. It is an embarrassment for all involved whatever their declared political leanings—a beautifully composed addition to the annals of degenerate propaganda.

How to Read Hilda

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

(with apologies to Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart)

Luke Pearson’s Hilda series seems to have fallen into that strange fault line lying between comics elitism and wide commercial acceptance. The comics series’ wholesome embrace by the mainstream press seems to have been met by a less than commensurate response by comics critics in particular; this despite an Eisner award and the occasional short but glowing review by the specialty press.

The attractions of the Hilda series are quite easily surmised. There is the clever knitting together of various northern European traditions, the artist’s increasing competency with page composition, his good ear for simple but humorous dialogue, his pleasing character designs, and his consistent and attractive line which has achieved a fine flowering in The Bird Parade and The Black Hound.

Reviewers have found it useful to compare Pearson’s work to that of Tove Jansson, Jonathan Swift (with regards Hilda and the Midnight Giant) and, more often, Hayao Miyazaki. This is understandable considering the independence and confidence of his heroine, her love of nature, her devoted pet (Twig), and her navigation of a mythical Nordic landscape (which might be compared with Miyazaki’s work on Spirited Away). One presumes that the series also owes some debt to the work of Bill Watterson in its formation of an all-consuming world of uninhibited fantasy, as well as the central relationship between parent and child (though I feel it is no accident that Hilda is being brought up by a single parent). Hobbes in Pearson’s creation is a series of not so imaginary friends crawling out of the wood work. In fact, at one point, Hilda is shown to be delighted at the possibility that the invisible voice in her head could be an imaginary friend (it is actually an elf).

Suggestions that Pearson’s series has nothing to offer adults should not be entirely glossed over. There is every reason to believe that the classics of children literature offer something tangible to adults reading them (written as they are by grown ups); even if we might be tempted to think this an illusion brought on by melancholic nostalgia. As with many children’s books, there is an overarching sense of morality in Pearson’s comics, sometimes overt but frequently more subtle and veiled. The former instance can be seen in various passages from Hilda and The Bird Parade where Hilda consistently resists pressure from her peers to commit acts of nuisance and finally of violence. There is also a gentle study of prejudice in the form of Hilda’s friend, the Wood Man, who is greeted initially with indignation at his domestic intrusions until he helps her find her way back home when she is lost in a deep forest.

Pearson’s more clandestine evocations can be most clearly seen in the second book in the series, Hilda and The Midnight Giant.

The cover to The Midnight Giant is clearly a reference to Goya’s (or Asensio Julia’s depending on your point of view) The Colossus.

Goya’s work has been appropriated by various cartoonists over the years; sometimes in the service of frank homage—as has been the case with Mike Mignola—and in other instances for reasons somewhat antithetical to Goya’s own politics—as has been the case with Attack on Titan. The exact nature of the giant in Goya’s painting is ambiguous and there have been arguments positioning it as a figure of tyranny, a protector, or a mysterious force.

In The Midnight Giant, Hilda and her mother suddenly come under attack by invisible foes throwing stones through their windows; these acts culminating in an attempt at forced eviction by these minute malcontents. The attack is largely ineffectual and the perpetrators are swiftly chased away with a broom.

Only when Hilda (with the help of an elven sympathiser) signs a large sheaf of papers representing a kind of legal authorization can she finally be allowed to see the entire Elven civilization upon which her home has been built. In tiny Kafkaesque vignettes, Hilda works her way up the chain of command from the town mayor, to the Prime Minister and finally to the Elf King—all of whom repeat the same mantra of lacking hands (literally) to change things and their being “lots of forms” signed in the discharge of this silent war. Summarized in this manner, Pearson’s intentions would appear both bald and facile. In reality they are buried beneath a surface which exudes color, European tradition, adventure, and a comfortably large world of the imagination. Any sense of oppression or linkage between invisibility and intellectual blindness is barely hinted at.

Part of the trick of writing and drawing a children’s comic is that balance between charm and terror. The tone of the Hilda series is such that we feel confident that Hilda and those closest to her will never be in any real danger. Yet there remain moments of contained sadness as when the elven communities predicament is brought home to Hilda and her mother on the penultimate page of The Midnight Giant.

“They haven’t even noticed what they’ve done…”

If there are any concerns about the subjugation of the weak or even the amnesiac qualities of our basic histories (the editor of this site likes to mention James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me), then these are made flesh when the gentle giants step on Hilda’s house and nearly kill her mother. These unseen calamities also form the basis of Pearson’s Everything We Miss (a more adult-oriented work).

Hilda’s inability to see at the start of The Midnight Giant is part of a more extensive meditation on knowledge and perception in Pearson’s comics. Hilda’s next adventure finds her in Trolberg which has been built in the middle of trollish lands with bell towers built at strategic points in order to dissuade violent incursions by trolls. These trolls —a wide-mouthed monstrosity in the tradition of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son—have a notorious reputation for eating humans but are also described as being rather peaceable in book 1 of Hilda (Hildafolk, since retitled Hilda and the Troll).

This leads us to another one of the underlying questions in the Hilda series—the tension between the knowledge and experience of others (as captured in the first book we see Hilda reading, “Trolls and other dangerous creature”) and our own perceptions of reality. I suppose one could also see in this the relationship between hermeneutics and empiricism. In Pearson’s first book, Hilda is convinced of the danger posed by trolls and bells a troll rock which she wants to draw. Much like belling a cat, she expects to be alerted if and when the troll rock stirs to life. As it happens, she falls asleep and wakens to find that the troll rock has disappeared. That night she is woken by the “jingle” of the belled troll who she imagines has come for some form of retribution. Her friend, the wood man, on reading her guide to trolls informs her that the practice of belling is now “commonly accepted to be rather cruel” and that she should “always read the whole book.”

Hilda doesn’t really have the time for this of course. After all, there’s some concern that she’s about to be eaten by a troll—a concern which proves to be totally unfounded since the troll not only leaves her alone but returns her sketch book to her. The guide book has been useful in revealing her mistake but is eventually found to be somewhat faulty (at least in this instance) with regards to the nature of trolls. Hilda encounters a similar situation in Hilda and The Black Hound where cursory knowledge and the fear of otherness lead inevitably to the wrong conclusions concerning the existential threat facing Trolberg (as well as more forced evictions). There is everywhere the suspicion of single points of knowledge and second hand paranoia. One might also wonder why the first inhabitants of Trolberg decided to name the city after their infamous enemies (apart from its descriptive utility of course). I presume for the same but varied reasons the first European settlers decided to name their cities in deference to the languages used by the first Americans.

I should note here that this focus on ignorance, invisibility and careless destruction is so light that the interviewer at Der Tagesspiegel crouches his question concerning the relevance of The Midnight Giant to the situation in modern day Israel with another question concerning “over-interpretation.”

Pearson’s concerns are naturally much greater than this single issue but point to every instance where ignorance creates chaos and ghostly eradication (see for example the way in which Hilda and her mother step through the Elvish town without damage when they are ignorant of its existence).

In so doing, Pearson carves out even more questions concerning the nature of good and evil. For instance, are the actions of Hilda and the giants excused because of their ignorance and obliviousness to those around them, or is there more to our moral calculus then mere intention?

This fascination with the ambiguity of life is carried over to other aspects of the series. Pearson is perhaps most pointed on this issue in Hilda and the Bird Parade. The parade in question has been formed to celebrate the arrival of a big raven seen to be an earthly manifestations of one of the ravens know to sit astride the shoulders of the Odin-like god whose statue lies at the center of Trolberg. The raven makes clear to Hilda that its arrival (or failure to arrive) has no effect whatsoever on the town’s harvests, but that is not what the townsfolk believe. Yet like a priest suffering the superstitions of his parish, the raven has been returning faithfully to the town each year in order to allay their fears. A perfectly fine message for a world supposedly grown tired of the irrational, but a somewhat paradoxical conclusion to reach in a world filled with elves, giants and a raven which can change its size at will. The raven, in fact, finally reveals that it is a thunderbird which hardly seems a great argument against the supernatural.

All this would seem to suggest a world weighed down with uncertainty, conflict and cares; hardly ideal reading material for under 10s. Yet as virtually every review of this series will attest, this is almost never the case. Hilda may make mistakes but she is never cynical; her universe is large and filled with hidden wonder and mystery.

…her family ties are uncorrupted and enduring, the wilderness occasionally frightening but kind. The world we live in can sometimes appear loathsome and hideous, but once we were children.

___________

Further Reading

Chris Mautner interviews Luke Pearson:

Pearson: “I wanted a character who was very positive and who would get caught up in adventures as a result of her own curiosity, empathy or sense of responsibility. The kind of character who has an adventure because she really wants to, not because she’s forced into it…I knew she should be interested in everything and constantly questioning the things that happen to her…The only firm “don’t” I gave myself is that she should be non-violent and that she never resolves anything with a fight.”

“Mautner: Many of the Hilda books thus far, especially the new one, involve creatures and characters that seem menacing or meddlesome at first but turn out to be harmless or beneficial. I was wondering how conscious you were of this theme and how it ties into your desire to have Hilda avoid violence.

Pearson: I’m very conscious of it and worry about how quickly that could (has?) become trite…It’s definitely connected to avoiding violence but also to avoiding antagonists in general…I’m not against depicting violence or anything and it does occur to some extent…I tried to show that the Hound is dangerous; it’s not a misunderstanding or anything. I’m inclined to finish each book on a positive note because they’re standalone stories and everything needs to be resolved in some way. I just don’t want the resolution to ever be Hilda bashing some evil creature’s head in and for that to save the day.”

Captain America: Half-Truths

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

I was looking forward to reading Truth: Red, White, and Black following the smattering of positive notices the comic has received on HU of late. Noah’s recent article certainly gave me the impression that this was a comic which would transcend its roots in the superhero genre. The words “difficult”, “bitter”, and “depressing” are certainly words to embrace when encountering a Captain America comic.

I’ll not stint in my praise of the parts which do work. I like the naturalness of Robert Morales’ period dialogue and the shorthand used to delineate 3-4 characters in the space of a sparse 22 pages in the first issue. I like that Faith Bradley takes to wearing a burqa just to make a point. The idea that the first Black Captain America should be sent to prison the moment he steps foot on American soil is not only sound (linking it with the events of the Red Summer of 1919 mentioned earlier in the book) but resonates with reality.

I like that Baker has a way with faces and makes the characters distinct even if they are almost all dispensed with in the course of 4 issues. His devotion to caricature (he is a humorist at heart), on the other hand, lends little weight to proceedings which are deadly serious—the violence is anaemic, the action flat, the misery imperceptible, and the double page splash homage to Simon and Kirby’s original Cap utterly out of place (or at the very least executed with little irony). I like the idea that when Isaiah tries to save some white women about to be sent to the gas chambers, they react to him with a fury as if asked to couple with a dog. It’s a troublesome passage of course since it implicates Holocaust victims in their own brand of racism.

One big problem for me, however, was that the comic wasn’t depressing enough. If the super soldier experiments are meant as a distant reflection of the Tuskegee syphilis study, then the comic doesn’t quite grapple with the true nature of tertiary syphilis and, in particular, the effects of neurosyphilis. The latter condition is described quite bluntly in Alphonse Daudet’s autobiographical In the Land of Pain and the effects are nothing short of a total breakdown of the human body, oftentimes a frightening dementia. Not the blood spattered walls which we see in one instance when a soldier is given an overdose of the super soldier serum but years of irredeemable and unsuspecting torture.

A nod to this lies in one of the test subject’s post-treatment skull deformation as well as Isaiah Bradley’s ultimate fate, but it barely registers in the context of a form wedded to the Hulk and the Leader. Yet even these moments are quickly discarded in favor of action and adventure—there is simply no time for the horror to deepen. The great lie underlying this tenuous reference to human experimentation is that no one has ever become stronger due to a syphilis infection—which is exactly what happens to a handful of test subjects. Not only is the condition potentially lethal in the long term but it has destructive medical and psychological consequences for the families of the afflicted as well as the community at large. To lessen the moral depravity of this historical touchstone in favor of saccharine hope seems almost an abnegation of responsibility.

The reasons for the strange disconnect between purpose and final product are perhaps easy to understand. No doubt editorial dictates and the limits of the Captain America brand came swiftly into play. But there remains the secondary motive of this enterprise. Reviewers have naturally focused on the “worthy” parts of Truth but in so doing they fail to highlight that it is in no small part an attempt to insert the African American experience into the lily white world of Simon and Kirby; an updating of entrenched myths and propaganda resulting in a nostalgic reinterpretation of familiar tropes (confrontation with Hitler anyone?). As such it partakes deeply of the black and white morality of the original comics— its easy virtue and comfortable dispensation of guilt.

It’s telling that Merrit (drug dealer, arsonist, murderer, and kidnapper), one of the most egregious villains and racists in the entire piece, is also a Nazi sympathizer. The other unrepentant racist of the comic (Colonel Walker Price) is a murderous eugenicists with his hands on the very strings of racial and genetic purity. Is racism only for villains? Why not rather the very foundations of American society; an edifice so large as to be almost irresistible. There are small hints of this throughout the text of course, but the desire for closure and the sweet apportioning of justice overwhelms a more meaningful and truthful thesis. While there is every reason to believe that racism against African Americans has improved haltingly over the decades, I would be more guarded in my optimism if our attentions are turned to people living in the Middle East and Latin America. In the real world, Captain America wouldn’t be one of the enlightened heroes of the tale, but one of the torturers and perpetrators. Even Steve Darnall and Alex Ross had the temerity to recast Uncle Sam (the superhero) as a paranoid schizophrenic in their own comic recounting America’s woes.

And what of the final fate of these villains? Well, we all know what happend to Hitler and Goebbels. That leaves Merrit who sits scowling in jail presumably imprisoned for life and Price who is threatened with exposure at a stockholder’s meeting by Captain America. And what of real life eugenicists such as Harry H. Laughlin, Charles Davenport, and Harry J. Haiselden—death by natural causes one and all, certainly not the judicially satisfying conclusion of public disgrace. The organizations which funded their work still abound in good health; their followers retiring to the safe havens of rebranding and renaming.

In the final analysis, Truth is still meant to be an uplifting story of tainted patriotism. As social history and activism by the backdoor Truth is commendable but it’s almost as if the authors were afraid to make too much of a fuss. Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years A Slave has no such qualms and is an orgy of violence, despair, and depression—a film which I have no intention of ever watching again. I have no intention of ever reading Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s Truth again but, in this instance, for all the wrong reasons.

How to Cry: On Ice Castles

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

Systematic readers of HU will note that Noah has been running periodic weekend surveys in the interest of fostering chatter and garnering recommendations for further reading and viewing. In general, it’s all been a bit highfalutin; almost like an exercise in canon making by the service lift. Noah is basically a serious man despite all avowals to the contrary. Even his community survey on computer games wondered out loud whether they were “art” and misogynistic.

But do you remember when HU promoted low brow endeavors—I suppose superhero comics might be considered in some circles to be the lowest brow of all—and denigrated the canon? If HU really is a smarmy pit of frivolous bad taste, why hasn’t it asked the really tough questions—like which movie endings always make you cry?

For isn’t crying in a darkened room a thoroughly worthwhile experience—a cathartic event on the level of watching an injured bull struck down in the ruedo. Of course, this presumes that the entire experience doesn’t disrupt your manhood or defile your intellect. [I should add here that no comic book has ever made me cry—the form seems to score very low in its ability to manipulate its audience.]

Now I think Noah has admitted to crying together with some art objects like Laura Kinsale’s latest novel and Ian McEwan’s Atonement but the former is like saying you cried at the end of Cinema Paradiso and the latter like admitting you wept at the end of City Lights or Nights of Cabiria. All these examples seem far too beholden to conventional good taste.

But what about crying at the end of Ice Castles?

The last time I watched Ice Castles was in August 2014, which is about 35 years since I first saw it in the late 70s when it was first released. This was also around the time my mother brought me to watch Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, an experience which has more or less scarred me for life (I was about 5 or 6 at the time; now released on Blu Ray for those so inclined).

Not having seen what might justifiably be called one of the most beloved movies about figure skating for over a quarter of century meant that I could recollect the one line plot summary but not the particulars. Still, I told my wife that Ice Castles was a Korean-drama made two decades before they made K-dramas. And after watching the thing, she concurred. Dying, suffering, and love suffused heroines are fixtures of Korean and Asian primetime television where the US can only boast of the likes of Outlander (which hasn’t been terribly romantic as far as I can tell). Love and sex are in abundance on American primetime TV but not so much romance; perhaps an accurate reflection of a society now grown cynical of fidelity and affairs of the heart.

Donald Wrye directed the 1978 version of Ice Castles and he is a middling director by reputation. It doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference since Ice Castles is the Casablanca of low brow weepies—a confluence of factors have colluded to make the slightest of material work to the greatest benefit. It is in many ways the perfect “onion.”

The plot is well summarized at its Wikipedia page. In essence, Lexie (played by a young Lynn-Holly Johnson) is a skating prodigy who suffers a tragic accident just as she is about to make it big in the world of skating—she falls and becomes blind due to a brain haemorrhage.

It is only in retrospect that I realized that Wrye had filled the first five minutes of the movie with thinly veiled symbolism. This seems to have been part of the 70s zeitgeist and infected not only De Palma’s reworking of The Phantom of the Opera but also the films of Dario Argento. Yet it seems strange that it should sink its teeth into an unassuming movie about young love. There are a few bars of ominous music played against a blurry white backdrop—a kind of opening which would not look out of place in an Ingmar Bergman movie. Then there’s a slow off focus pan to a winter landscape and a small frozen over lake where Lexie is seen indistinctly skating in mild snow storm. The lake itself is covered in snow a few inches deep and the skater is seen doing her routine in these mildly treacherous conditions.

Some viewers have complained that it takes almost an hour before the key tragedy occurs but the movie is liberal with its premonitions of blindness. It’s the gaping white blurry monster which opens the movie and it’s seen once again just before Lexi falls on an outdoor rink at a post-competition party where she feels out of place. Near the hour mark, there’s a large ice sculpture which Lexie stares at for what seems like half a minute—an eternity in a genre devoted to cut and dried tropes and techniques. The screenplay as a whole positively shuns exposition and embraces conspicuous periods of silence. The sculpture itself is soon transformed into a large white cataract which fills half the screen due to the low depth of field of the cinematographer’s choice of lens.

Lexi has just split up with her boyfriend (played by Robbie Benson) and this physical obstruction to her senses and vision seem almost like a metaphorical representation of her spiritual turmoil. She’s even decked up in thick make-up where the rest of the film only shows her with a more natural complexion (hidden message here folks). When Lexie finally falls and loses her vision a mere 5 minutes later, it is no more than a physical manifestation of her soul. In many ways, Wrye seems to have taken the famous theme song from the movie (used in countless weddings in the 70s and 80s no doubt) to heart; that song being “Through the Eyes of Love (written by Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager and sung memorably by Melissa Manchester). I would not be surprised to hear that Sager had read the screenplay prior to setting down her lyrics.

That the movie is deeply conservative seems self-evident but this too, apparently, was by chance. The trivia section of IMDb suggests that Lynn-Holly Johnson declined to do a nude scene repeatedly over the course of filming. Nor is Lexie the kind of heroine demanded of the modern day marketplace. The movie is about Lexie’s inner core of strength but she is also soft-spoken, traditionally feminine, and inclined to take advice from her father and boyfriend—she is, in a word, dependent on those around her. Her accomplishments are not solely the product of self-reliance but of love and family. She is, in other words, completely normal. Her final scene together with her family and partner is an encapsulation of these seemingly primitive values.

Roger Ebert once accused the makers of Ice Castles of “emotional bankruptcy,” but its motives are much more fundamental; engaging the irrational, and child-like parts of us. Most viewers of Ice Castles understandably focus on the romantic and inspirational aspects of the film, but Sager seemed to grasp its true intent. Her lyrics to the famous theme song are much more ambiguous about the nature of the love being extolled and do not apply exclusively to the amorous parts of our nature. The most passionate kisses seen in the final segment of the film are those of a father for his daughter. In a world grown fat on narcissism, the idea that our accomplishments would be unthinkable without family and friends seems thoroughly implausible. It is this aspect of Donald Wrye’s confection which thoroughly grates on our sardonic adult selves—this faith in those closest to us seems unworthy and false. If we manage to cry with Ice Castles, it is in part because we’ve remembered a part of ourselves long since forsaken.

The movie ends where its begins—Lexie can skate again and she’s together with her boyfriend. Except that she’s blind of course. But was she thus aflicted in the first scene as well, the one where she’s skating in a blinding snow storm?

Wrye also directed the 2010 TV remake of Ice Castles but that strange spark and happy confluence of unexpected decisions seem to have deserted him; the kind of decisions born of seemingly unwarranted dedication and (occasionally) insufficient time and money—the hardness and frugality of the locales and sets, the persistent lingering on faces, the tentative steps carefully built into Lexie’s final routine, the unaffected and uncertain acting of the stars both young and old; their commitment to the barest of material and almost palpable happiness at the movie’s close. It is hard to imagine anything more genuine then Robby Benson’s smile at Lexie at the end of the show.

Gone are the serendipitous (?) snow storms, cheap clothes, cataract inducing ice sculptures, and old fashioned (even for the time) chasteness. The remake is an unneeded gilding of the lily and an object lesson in how even the meanest of entertainments require a certain level of craftsmanship. It’s strange that this pair of undistinguished films should prove so educational in terms of the film editor’s art (the original was edited by Michael Kahn, Melvin Shapiro, and Maury Winetrobe).

Ice Castles isn’t one of the greatest films ever made. It’s not even considered one of the great movie romances by aficionados of the form. I can’t imagine anyone will be watching Lynn-Holly Johnson skate on a frozen pond in 50 year’s time. But Ice Castles did make me cry.

_________

[All screen captures from M.Lady’s Inspirational Sports Movie List.]

Brief Notes on The Encylopedia of Early Earth

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

“Without myth, however, all cultures lose their healthy, creative, natural energy; only a horizon surrounded by myths encloses and unifies a cultural movement.”

The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche

Isabel Greenberg’s widely lauded The Encyclopedia of Early Earth is a tale of love, myth, and storytelling. Here are Judaic legends, nods to the epic poems of Homer, a smattering of creation myths and various versions of the known world retold, expanded, and reorganized.

The editor and narrator would appear to be a young man from The Land of Nord which is the North Pole for all intents and purposes; but, as with most things in Greenberg’s comic, this becomes the subject of syncretization. The word “Nord” is not only a premonition of our hero’s initial travels through a Nordic landscape but is also a near homonym for the land of Nod, east of Eden—a byword for wandering. For this is our storyteller’s secondary calling as he sails and paddles in uncharted waters through the lands of a mythical Europe and Babylon to a strangely inhabited South Pole.

This is all part of Greenberg’s deliberate act of subterfuge, mystification and reimagining; making old things new in a world grown weary and overly familiar with our immediate legends and even those of our neighbors.

New words are added on to existing myths deepening their perspective—the Well of Urd (destiny) is now called the Well of Life but the world tree, Yggdrasil, remains as a familiar guiding post. The triad of gods who created the first man and woman of Norse mythology (Ask and Embla) remain but soon become affixed to a retelling of the tale of Cain and Abel. This Arian trinity—the Eagle God and his two Raven children—might be connected with the raven god of Inuit legend and the thunderbird but they are also Huginn and Muninn astride Odin’s shoulders, the ravens of biblical stories and perhaps even the winged disc (faravahar) of Zorastrianism.

In Greenberg’s opening story, “The Three Sisters of Summer Island”, the eponymous sisters find a baby boy “along the banks of the Sky Lake.” Unable to decide who should care for the baby, they consult a shaman who helps them divide the boy into three parts, each containing a different aspect of his soul. By displacing the more familiar tales of child rescue or abandonment (those of Moses and Sargon) and through its setting in the frozen north, the story manages to retain echoes of the legends concerning Sedna—the giantess and mistress of the seas and underworld of Inuit myth whose fingers when cleaved from her body became seals, walruses, and whales (in some versions, salmon or different species of seal).

The three sisters of Greenberg’s story—Gull-Wing who is “brave and headstrong”, “River-Reed who is “always laughing”, and First-Snow who is “thoughtful and wise”—might be seen as a minor borrowing from the three sisters of the Iroquois creation myth (corns, beans, and squash), taken away one at a time by a mysterious visitor to their fields before being reunited at its conclusion; but they really partake of any triad of brothers or sisters in European and Middle-Eastern folklore.

Greenberg’s settings are largely divorced from factual history, indulging instead in the artistry and inventiveness of medieval drawing and maps. Perhaps marginally more precise and truthful then the work of the solitary cartographer of Greenberg’s tale who never leaves the palace in Migdal Bavel, inventing dangers and destinations out of whole cloth; but really deriving from the same space—the isolation of the artist.

Migdal Bavel is itself a medieval Babylon resting comfortably in the arms of biblical legend and the art of the medieval illustrator. The chapter titled, “The Mapmaker of Migdal Bavel” brings to mind famous incunabula like the Nuremberg Chronicle or Braun & Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum. The former book, like Greenberg’s comic, is an illustrated world history taking inspiration in parts from the Bible.

The whale which swallows the storyteller towards the close of the comic is not merely the big fish of the Book of Jonah but is cut from the same cloth as “the earliest maps with sea monsters” —the Beatus Mappaemundi (see Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer)—where a man, most likely Jonah, is seen inside a large fish or sea monster.

While the back cover of Greenberg’s comic disavows any resemblance to a “real encyclopedia,” the work does suggest a modestly encyclopedic search for influence and connection among the religions and myths of “early earth”; a land of prehistoric imagination. And just as these legends shift in content from tribe to tribe, so too do these tales remain the same yet changed—folded, twisted and mixed into half-recognized forms, like our own imperfect memory of dreams.

In the tradition of works like Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, even our storytellers become intertwined. They are in order of appearance the storyteller from the Land of Nord, the old crone from the land of Britanitarka, and the compositors of the “Bible of Birdman” stored in Migdal Bavel. In this way, our storyteller is no longer firmly planted in a specific time and space but becomes an unlikely traveler traversing borders and tribal specificities, a fabulist who will never return completely to his (or to be more precise, her) homeland or time in history—an ancient global citizen.

While the central narrator of The Encyclopedia of Early Earth is still a man, Greenberg’s tales are invariably told from the perspective of a woman—from the three sisters of the opening story to the ambiguous sexuality of Bird Man-father who also lays eggs to create his children, Kid and Kiddo.

In this pantheon, it is Kiddo the bird man’s daughter who is the creator of the early earth, “a beautiful, complex world of gardens and rivers and mountains and forest…and…tiny little creatures.” At one point, she exhibits a Zeus-like sexual attraction to one of her male creations (cf. Pygmalion and Galatea). This together with her jealousy and rage when she is betrayed (she creates a fearsome deluge) all contribute to this gelding of the familiar legends of old.

Her father’s conception of the world, in contrast, is purely in his “mind’s eye”—a thought, a mathematical equation, a matter of perspective, the “spirit of science” which is the belief that “the depths of nature can be fathomed and that knowledge can heal all ills. Of this Nietzsche wrote:

“Anyone who recalls the immediate effects produced by this restlessly advancing spirit of science will recognize at once how myth was destroyed by it, and how this destruction drove poetry from its natural, ideal soil, so that it became homeless from that point onwards.”

Kiddo’s creation is a world of matriarchal lineage as evidenced by Greenberg’s opening story where there is a conspicuous absence of fathers (or even male helpmeets) accompanying the three sisters of Summer Island. The ruler of Dag (the land of Nordic appearance) is a female as is her oldest surviving relative and adviser. Our young storyteller who uses his skills to escape the violent and mercurial clutches of the rulers of Britanitarka and Migdal Bavel is at least partly based on that most famous of all legendary storytellers, Scheherazade. As should be clear, he too has had his sex inverted.

Yet it would be a mistake to take the comic as a whole for a subtle but scholarly investigation of the politics and interconnectedness of world mythology. It is far more concerned with poetry than the rational and scientific. Where Joseph Campbell searched for the Ur-myth in the common experiences of primitive man—the trauma of birth, the mother’s breast, the labyrinthine circuit of internal organs, the fascination with excreta, and various other Freudian concepts—this Encyclopedia of Early Earth never devolves into an exercise in studiousness but remains to the end a search for the essential, alluring spirit which guides myth and tragedy.

_______________

Further Reading

Isabel Greenberg in an interview with Paul Gravett.

“My stories are mostly about human relationships really. I think when I was reading and researching folk tales and religious stories, I liked how many of the themes and ideas were universal. Competitive siblings, jealous lovers, childless parents, parentless children, themes like this crop up over and over, because they are fundamentally human. I like stories like that. And I think really I just like stories where Love Conquers All !”

“I looked a little at Scandinavian Folk art, but I am probably more influenced by Medieval Art, Islamic Miniatures, 19th century drawings done by explorers, illuminated manuscripts, antique encyclopaedias and old maps. I research quite widely and am always buying books!”

Interview with Alex Dueben at Comic Book Resources.

“The story within a story structure I took from things like One Thousand and One Nights.”

“I work a lot in black and white and with limited color, mainly because I am actually quite bad at coloring and find it very hard! …In Nord and the South Pole, I used a lot of blues, but I used more wash than block color, to give it an icy, insubstantial feel. In Britanitarka, there are still a lot of blues, but they are more flat color and I put in more grey and flashes of red. In Migdal Bavel, I added some deep oranges and reds and yellow’s in, as I wanted the city to have a different feel to it.”

Chinese Choices

Posted on August 11, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

Li Kunwu and Philippe Ôtié’s A Chinese Life is the kind of book I would normally resist reading; the chief reason being it’s overly familiar subject matter.

For a period during the 80-90s, it seemed almost impossible to escape the Cultural Revolution Industry. These were the scar dramas which followed in the footsteps of the scar literature; the subject de jour once Deng Xiaoping pronounced that period between 1966 to 1976 as being “ten years of catastrophe” (shinian haojie). As far as the Western sphere is concerned, one should not underestimate the effect the commercial success of works like Jung Chang’s Wild Swans had on this era. For Chinese writers and filmmakers who had stories to tell and willing publishers and financiers, the Cultural Revolution soon became ten years ripe for cultural monetization.

As far as Chinese contemporary art is concerned, a collector once laughingly told me that Chinese artists had discovered that the key to financial success was to make art which is “political.” Not an approach alien to the professional writer who understands full well that controversy sells, but here made more acute by the Western preoccupation with China’s political woes almost to the exclusion of all else (anyone read any non-political Chinese literature lately?).

The 2012 Nobel Literature prize winner, Mo Yan, presents us with the opposite side of the coin. The disgust with which some Western-based China watchers and dissidents greeted his elevation to the ranks of the literary “elite” was largely based on his poor politics and only secondarily his lack of literary merit. In short, he is perceived in some parts to be a party boot licker or at best a literary coward without a strong inclination to be exiled and imprisoned like a latter day Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or, more precisely, the Nobel Peace laureate, Liu Xiaobo. Mo Yan’s novels are in fact frequently political but not in the way favored by Western journalists and academics. He is, in fact, the wrong kind of Chinese novelist.

A Chinese Life is a bit late to the party and passed with minimal notice in the year of its publication. Its contents would appear to be of a piece with the literature and movies which have inundated the West since the opening of the Chinese market. As a comic, it is solidly mediocre, the kind of “worthy” book some would point to if questioned concerning the suitability of comics for adults. It does gain some gravitas from its roots in autobiography but, as always, the failure here lies in the lack of narrative imagination and literary beauty—as history, it is far too shallow; as a work of literature, plodding and unemotive. It was, in short, an absolute chore to get through and ranks as one of the worst things I’ve encountered concerning China’s late 20^th century history. The fault lies largely with Ôtié who fails to sculpt Li’s story into an engaging whole. All that remains is Li’s frequently interesting draftsmanship; he is a good artist undone by a poor storyteller.

If a reviewer like Rob Clough is made to wonder whether A Chinese Life is propaganda, it is simply the result of the largely unexamined and uninterrogated life which fills these pages—an approach which informs not only the third and final book of A Chinese Life (the one concerning modern China) but, for all intents and purposes, its entire length. If there is one exception to this rule, it would be Li’s thoughts on the “6/4” incident.

So what made me borrow and read this book? Well, it was this snippet from a review by Rob Clough:

“The whole philosophy of the book is very much “the past is the past”…we once again go back to the Deng doctrine of “Development is our first priority”. As Li describes it, it’s the only priority.

This leads to an interstitial scene where Li and Otie argue about how best to present his view on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Otie stresses to him the importance of this event to Western readers, and Li is resistant, because he said that he wasn’t anywhere near Beijing, only listened to the reports on the radio and has no idea what actually happened. Because he “didn’t personally suffer”, it wasn’t something that was really part of his story like the Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward…He notes that while he understands that lives were lost and people suffered, he considered the event within the context of Chinese history. Essentially, he was tired of China being a whipping boy for foreign interests and invaders. He was tired of instability. He was tired of being behind the industrialized nations of the world. The most salient quote is “China needs order and stability. The rest is secondary.” The past is the past. Development is the first priority.

It’s a statement that makes a degree of sense within the context of a countryman who suffered during the prior youth revolution (indeed, some women in his story fear the events of the protests as the potential return of the Red Guard)…It is disappointing, however, to see an intelligent man like Li who fancies himself a moralist in rooting out corruption to simply toss aside human rights and freedoms as expendable when the corporate well-being of China is involved. It is a kind of moral compartmentalization that reeks of hypocrisy, the same kind of hypocrisy he faced (and was part of) during the Cultural Revolution. It values dogma (or progress) over humanity.” [emphasis mine]

But what exactly does a word like a “progress” mean to a person like Li? His words are sparse, his actual intentions up for conjecture. When Li indicates that, “China needs order and stability. The rest is secondary,” should we take his words as those of a coward, a hypocrite, or one with little respect for “humanity?” Can there in fact be any conception of human rights in a state without order and stability?

What can it mean for a man like Li to hear of distant reports of protesters being killed when the reports in earlier times had been those of war and cannibalism; the evidence before his eyes that of people dropping like flies by the wayside. The past clearly isn’t the past for Chinese citizens like Li. If anything, it thoroughly colors their perception of China’s present day fortunes.

Two other reviews online arrive at the same point as Clough in the course of their largely positive reviews:

“Li is far more a witness than a commentator. He declines to cover the events of Tiananmen Square because, he says, he wasn’t even there (but that scene with his co-writer Philippe Ôtié shows him wriggling apologetically to avoid it – it was obviously a bone of contention), and you won’t see Tibet mentioned once. He’s far prouder of what China has accomplished in thirty-five short years…” Stephen at Page 45

“Although this 60 year story largely ignores China’s fragile relationship with Taiwan and Tibet and only briefly mentions Tiananmen square, Li acknowledges these weaknesses by openly accepting that this is a story of his life, a single man, and no single man lives through all the history of his entire country (he didn’t know anyone affected by Tiananmen and therefore had little to say).” Hardly Written

The reviews which accompanied the publication of A Chinese Life seem more useful in revealing the differing attitudes of readers (presumably) from the West and the mainland Chinese; for Li’s attitude towards the Tiananmen demonstrations are hardly novel and have been ennunciated periodically over the years by the Chinese people. On the other hand, it is all too clear that the Tiananmen Massacre is one of the central prisms through which the West understands China, in much the same way the word “Africa” conjures up images of war, famine, and disease for the casual reader.

These reviewers would appear to be readers who have grown up in stable and ordered societies while Li has actually been one of those deluded and disappointed revolutionaries; one who has been recurrently attracted to mass movements. These experiences have clearly allowed him to entertain doubts concerning received notions of what is best for China and what human beings need first and foremost. And in this instance at least, ideology has come in second best.

Progress and human rights may not be mutually exclusive but it seems obvious that Li views the democracy movement and potential revolution of June Fourth as detrimental to the former and, as a consequence, to the latter. The prescription which America has recommended and administered to its client states has been political freedom (this word used loosely) before economic freedom, while Li clearly believes that the reverse is the surer course towards true liberty—patiently awaiting the creation of an educated middle class more attuned to the demands of a democratic system and who will, hopefully, make greater demands for political expression. Such has been the course for the former dictatorships in South Korea and Taiwan as well as the authoritarian democracy of Singapore.

What is the objective of political freedom if not the happiness of its people? For many Chinese today, mere sustenance, attaining a first world lifestyle (for all its ills), and the well being of their family members come before notions of a democratically elected government, especially when that tarnished model of democracy, the United States government seems effectively little better than the authoritarian one they are currently experiencing. The rampant capitalism which is America’s true essence, on the other hand, seems rather worth emulating; greed being altogether more attractive as far as human nature is concerned. Liu Xiaobo is a poor thinker when it comes to the history of the Western powers but he affords a somewhat different perspective when it comes to China’s economic “rise”:

“The main beneficiaries of the miracle have been the power elite; the benefits for ordinary people are more like the leftovers at a banquet table. The regime stresses a “right to survival” as the most important of human rights, but the purpose of this…is to serve the financial interest of the power elite and the political stability of the regime… […]…an autocratic regime has hijacked the minds of the Chinese populace and has channeled its patriotic sentiments into a nationalistic craze this is producing a widespread blindness, loss of reason, and obliteration of universal values…The result is our people are infatuated more and more with fabricated myths: they look only at the prosperous side of China’s rise, not at the side where destitution and deterioration are visible…” [emphasis mine]

A recent survey by researchers at the University of Michigan indicates that China’s Gini coefficient for income inequality could be as high as 0.55 having recently surpassed that of the United States. According to a report from Peking University, China’s Gini coefficient for wealth inequality comes in at 0.73 which is slightly lower than that of the U.S.. If there are lessons being learnt from the West, it would appear to be all the wrong ones. Consider the words of Liu Xiaobo in “On Living with Dignity in China” and see if they might not also be applied to the America we all know and love:

“In a totalitarian state, the purpose of politics is power and power alone. The “nation” and its peoples are mentioned only to give an air of legitimacy to the application of power. The people accept this devalued existence, asking only to live from day to day…This has remained a constant for the Chinese, duped in the past by Communist hyperbole; and bribed in the present with promises of peace and prosperity. All along they have subsisted in an inhuman wasteland.”

[I should note here that the 2013 BBC Country Rating Poll suggests that the citizens of China and the United States have equal amounts of antipathy towards each other.]

Given a choice between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, the American public chose the lesser evil—the man who has delivered some change and only marginally more murder—the man with no moral center. It is not hard to see that Li might view his own choice in a similar light. And he is living with his choices as are the rest of the Chinese people. As I sit in the comfort of my home, in all my life not having suffered one day of hunger, repression, and fear as severe as those experienced by Li Kunwu through China’s turbulent 20^th century, I am inclined to be more understanding and less judgmental.

Ms. Marvel: Deliciously Halal?

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

Would you give G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona’s Ms. Marvel to your daughter or young nephew to read?

I think the answer in most instances would be a loud and affirmative, “Yes!” It is after all quite inoffensive and mainly concerns the travails of school and family life; if complicated in this instance by the fact that the main protagonist is a Pakistani-American Girl. The comic is friendly, instructive, educational, and has a placid attitude towards the dangers of everyday existence. It would seem to be, in a word, “safe.”

And what exactly are the dangers Kamala Khan faces in her first three issues? She is tricked into taking alcohol by insensitive classmates, breaks her curfew and is grounded, is sent to detention for accidentally destroying school property, helps a pair of accident prone lovers, is involved in a friendly hold-up at a corner store, and is injured during the accidental discharge of a firearm.

In many ways Ms Marvel is a return to the more gentle pleasures of the comics of yore; dialing back the myth of a violent America propagated by TV shows like CSI, Criminal Minds, NCIS et al.—where murderous psychopaths reside on every corner and corpses are to be found on every other doorstep and school dormitory. Can a superhero comic subsists on stories culled from ordinary high school life? Well, the sales figures on future issues of the comic should tell the tale in due course.

The central issues at stake in Ms. Marvel are conformity and difference, subjects which are balanced precariously at this historical moment in America (and Europe) where the simple act of wearing a hijab might be cause for derision.

Perhaps the comics’ greatest achievement is to make the life of a Muslim girl in America perfectly ordinary. Part of the success of Jaime Hernandez’s Locas lies in just this effect—the way it shapes our understanding of an unfamiliar culture, revealing its core of basic humanity. Something similar occurs in Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation where the setting (environmental, legal) and motivations may seem strange but the reactions completely “human.” With that moment of recognition, Iranians stop becoming headline material or screaming terrorists (a la Ben Affleck’s Argo) but individuals in all their complexity.

I don’t think Wilson’s work is quite at that level in Ms. Marvel but there is a trace of gentle subversion about it; much of it related in humorous vignettes. A visit to the neighborhood mosque for a halaqah (religious study circle) is not an occasion for harsh harangues of deeply conservative mullahs but some questions concerning Islamic theology and issues surrounding the place of women within the mosque and society. The first page of issue one has Kamala sniffing a “greasy BLT” which is described as “delicious, delicious infidel meat”. This is followed by the suggestion that she try fakon instead (“it’s not that terrible”). Buddhists face similar philosophical “problems” when encountering vegetised meat dishes; a culinary art form in itself.

Wilson’s subversiveness doesn’t lie simply in these small challenges to authority but in more subtle mouldings of this thoroughly “white”, Christian-Jewish form of expression—the American superhero comic.

Present day Islam is not especially enamored of figurative works of art, but the image of Kamala confronting the Avengers in the form of Iron Man, Captain Marvel and Captain America is clearly an instance of borrowed iconography. Lamps are not rubbed in the course of issue one of Ms. Marvel but the Terrigen Mists and the appearance of the Avengers suddenly within its folds do suggest the appearance of Jinn bearing gifts, and we all know how badly that usually turns out. The soundtrack to their arrival is a qawwali song by Amir Khusrow (“Sakal ban phool rahi sarson”), sufi devotional music which some might find intoxicating.

That’s Captain America as an Islamic mystical being straight from the pages of the Qur’an (as angels are from the Bible). But more than that, the image is clearly a syncretisation of well known religious forms—it is a Transfiguration with Moses and Elijah on both sides of a female Jesus. Iron Man has his left hand raised in a gesture which either suggests the Trinity or the giving of a benediction. Captain Marvel herself is posed in a manner which immediately brings to mind images of the Assumption of the Virgin—right down to her flowing waist ribbon. The birds surrounding her are presumably modern day versions of the cherubs we see in Renaissance paintings. To borrow a phrase from Ms. Kamala Khan, it’s all “delicious, delicious infidel meat.” One assumes that Kamala—aged sixteen and forbidden to mix with boys at alcohol fueled parties—is a virgin herself. One also assumes that Wilson and Alphona are not entirely convinced of the merit of the iconoclastic claims of hadith literature.

AND LO! The angels said: “O Mary! Behold, God has elected thee and made thee pure, and raised thee above all the women of the world. Surah 3. Al-i’Imran, Ayah 42

Christopher ZF writing at The Stake is eager to let readers knows that:

“In this instance Kamala’s gods are not God, but another trinity that inspires her: Captain America, Iron Man, and the central religious figure of Kamala’s imagination: Captain Marvel….The manner in which Wilson and artist Adrian Alphona handle what could be a potentially fraught subject is instead refreshing in its candor…this scene is not a ham-handed, irreligious, or silly affair….”

The caution is understandable though obviously not my cup of tea.

This appropriation of imagery is clearly tied up with Kamala’s own conflicted sense of identity and her cultural influences (both knowing and unknowing)—a desire to fit equally into “normal” white American society and the traditions of her parents, with these parts seemingly irreconcilable. She’s a dark haired Alice in Wonderland, taking the bottle labeled “Drink Me” to become small or the cake with “Eat Me” written on it to become a leggy white blonde—all of this done in the interest of assimilation. The creators obviously thought long and hard (or maybe not) when they decided to make her a “human with Inhuman” lineage. Kamala’s vision is no more than a reflection of the mishmash which constitutes her subconscious desires. As “Iron Man” says to her, “You are seeing what you need to see.” If only Captain America was more halal.

Noah writing at The Atlantic doesn’t quite see it that way though. Concerning Kamala’s shape shifting powers he writes:

“You could see this power as a kind of metaphorical curse, reflecting Kamala’s uncertainty; she doesn’t know who she is, so she’s anyone or anything. I don’t think that’s quite what it signifies, though. Changing shape doesn’t mean that Kamala erases her ethnicity…Rather, in Ms. Marvel, shape-changing seems to suggest that flexibility is a strength. Kamala is a superhero because she’s both Muslim and American at once. Her power is to be many things, and to change without losing herself.”

And that is undoubtedly the final destination of Wilson’s story. The first three issues are in all likelihood a journey to that point of realization.

Perhaps the greatest subversion of all is that Ms. Marvel might be the most religious comic book published by Marvel in decades. Not anywhere as overt as the Spire Archie Christian comics but arguably in the same tradition. Islam both informs Kamala’s action and the conflicts she faces at school and at home.The centrality of Islam in Ms. Marvel was probably considered uncontroversial by Wilson’s editors (save Sana Amanat who is Pakistani-American) because of the ethnicity of the main protagonist—in America, race and Islam seem almost indivisible and therefore “excusable.” At the risk of stating the obvious, this rigidity in terms of race and religion is part of Wilson’s challenge to her readership in a country where the word “Muslim” often conjures up images of “brown” or black individuals. The fact that a blonde, white woman is taking moral action on the basis of the Qur’an is an essential part of Ms. Marvel’s narrative.

In Culture and the Death of God, Terry Eagleton writes that:

“Societies become secular not when they dispense with religion altogether, but when they are no longer especially agitated by it….as the wit remarked, it is when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it is time to give it up….Another index of secularization is when religious faith ceases to be vitally at stake in the political sphere…this does not mean that religion becomes formally privatized, uncoupled from the political state; but even when it is not, it is effectively taken out of public ownership and dwindles to a kind of personal pastime, like breeding gerbils or collecting porcelain…”

American society is “agitated” by Islam but Muslims have almost no voice in the political sphere. Kamala Khan may be the central figure of Ms. Marvel but she is an “other”—not us, someone strange, someone else—with seemingly little to say about how Americans should lead their lives; she has no religious or moral prescriptions which could affect white America. She is someone else’s porcelain collection. This makes the comic “tolerable” in the eyes of Marvel’s paymasters even while Disney enforces a policy of not taking the Lord’s name in vain in song.

The commentators at Deseret News have an even more innocuous explanation for this new venture:

“Comics are a “survey of the pop culture medium,” Hunter said, adding that the religions brought up in modern comics reflect modern society.

He said mainstream culture is talking about Muslims. According to the Pew Research Center, the Muslim population in the United States is projected to rise from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million in 2030, which shows Muslims are a growing market and topic in the U.S….Ms. Marvel’s Muslim heritage was chosen as a reflection of what the mainstream culture is interested in…Publishers are not just appealing to certain religious markets, however. They’re also using religious comics as a way to tap into the market of unbelievers, too, Lewis said.”

How wonderfully bland it would be if this was the comic’s sole raison d’être. This gentle and most politically correct of comic book stories is sometimes more clever than it seems.

____

Further Reading

(1) G Willow Wilson on Kamala’s powers. Lots of background information in this interview:

“Her power set was actually the toughest thing, I think, to narrow down in the character creation process,” Wilson said. “I really did not want her to have the classically girly power sets – I didn’t want her to float. I didn’t want her to sparkle. I didn’t want her to be able to read people’s minds. I think a lot of these sort of passive abilities are often given to female characters – becoming invisible, using force fields. I wanted her to have something visually exciting, something kinetic…. The idea of making her a shape-shifter nicely paralleled her personal journey.”

(2) Mariam Asad, Zainab Akhtar, and Muaz Zekeria discuss “What the new Ms. Marvel means for Muslims in Comics.”

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