Constructionism: What the Hell?

Posted on January 2, 2009 by Tom Crippen

I’m reviewing of Essential Dykes to Watch Out For and it’s taking forever. Here’s one snag I just noticed. In her introduction, Bechdel recounts her discovery of constructionism, which she defines this way: “Apparently no one was essentially anything!” But in Dykes we find a frail little boy named Jonas who insists on taking hormones so he can be a girl, at which point he becomes quite a sassy, self-confident little creature. But if no one is essentially anything, what’s the point of messing around with your body?

Does Jonas/Janis mean:

1) Alison Bechdel is no constructionist?
2) Constructionism makes an exception for transsex operations because those are transgressive enough anyway?
3) [ some undefined third option ] ?

Lachrymal Ducts of Old Shanghai

Posted on January 2, 2009 by Bill Randall

Reading Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Abhay Khosla confirmed why I don’t read Khosla: I don’t know 90% of the comics he covers. But I do like the tension in these two quotes:

[#1] With art comics, the conversations that I tend to see, it’s not as much about actually caring about what happens to the characters who live in the four-corners of the page. … I’ve never seen anyone go nuts on the internet over what happened to Crying Asian Man from some Adrian Tomine comic. “I’m going to predict what happens to Crying Asian Man in the next issue of Optic Nerve.” Never seen that. I’ve never seen a Crying Asian Man fan-site, or anyone dressed as Crying Asian Man at a comic convention, or Crying Asian Man slash-fic.

(Now, since “Crying Asian Man” sounds like “Crying Freeman,” from now on I’ll see Adrian Tomine’s deathly still hipsters threatened by a yakuza assassin’s speedlines.)

And:

[#2] Comics, animation, both seems to dis-empower the artists even though they’re art-driven media.

(He’s drawing a distinction here between writer-as-creator and artist-as-creator, but I think the former point informs the latter in a slanted way.)

Think of Nancy. There’s Bushmiller’s Nancy, the Gilchrists’, and John Stanley’s comic-book Nancy. Bushmiller’s defines the character, but didn’t create her. She’s almost Platonic:

She doesn’t need the artists who drew her, or the writers who wrote her: model sheet immortality.

That’s seemed to me like a condition of cartooning. The characters tend not to change, and actively resist it. So they transubstantiate into models, toys, and character goods, and any one artist’s intentions are just a footnote. (Cartooning as iconography, as opposed to drawing as record-of-seeing).

But prose fiction, Optic Nerve‘s model, can be read as a record of a character’s change. The payoff’s often enough the character realizing the change, epiphany at the end. In comics, as in genre fiction, I think the stability of the characters works against this– Optic Nerve and many of the 90s wave of literary graphic novels have paralysis as a theme, full of characters frozen in ice.

This could be a fundamental difference in the media. The comics that deal in time have done so over decades: Cerebus, Gasoline Alley. Even the Palomar stories seem to return to state whenever Gilbert does one of those episodes where all the characters show up for a big party.

(Nitpick: Edmund Gosse was a hack just as a scholar! Father & Son lives on.)

Anita The Swedish Nymphet

Posted on January 1, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

So, yeah, I brought the new year in by doing an illustration and then watching this 1978 Swedish exploitation flik starring Christina Lindberg. And wow, what an utterly bizarre movie. Anita is literally a nymphomaniac — that is, she has a psychological compulsion to have sex. So far, it could be a porn set-up, and obviously soft-core is a lot of the point here; Lindberg is extremely good-looking if you have any interest at all in the innocent waif look, and she seems to take her shirt off every other scene or so. And obviously, the clinical set-up is more or less an excuse to have her do that. But the movie never quite treats it as an excuse; instead, Anita’s compulsion is played for sympathy/psychological drama as much as for thrills — Lindberg is a decent actress, and she seems genuinely distressed by sleeping with all these guys, having her reputation destroyed, her horrible relationship with her parents. The sexual encounters are also played really grimy and depressing and sordid for the most part, more depressing than arousing.

The exploitation elements and the pyschological drama and sordidness collide in some (I think intentionally) hilarious ways. There’s one scene in which Anita starts out singing a demure series of songs at a dinner party with her parents — and then she does a striptease for all their friends. And her parents are just like, oh, gee, what should we do now that our daughter is thrusting her crotch at Dad’s boss?! And they don’t do anything! It’s completely surreal and weird; like Bunuel just wandered in, directed one scene and left. There’s also a laugh-out-loud funny moment where a young, earnest psychology student explains to Anita that to save herself from nymphomania, she must have an orgasm as soon as possible — and he’s telling her this at the breakfast table with two other female roommates present! I guess since he’s a student he can’t afford a room with a couch….

That psychology student, incidentally, is pretty much a sweetheart and fairly good-looking to boot; his obsession with Anita is certainly creepy, but compared to most of the guys she deals with he’s obviously a gem. So…he screws her into orgasm and she is cured, right? Uh uh. The end of the movie is somewhat incoherent, but as near as I can tell, Anita manages to obtain an orgasm…by sleeping with a woman. Then she joins a lesbian sex show, and thereby discovers she has lost her compulsion to sleep with men. Only then does she screw the psychology student, and they live happily ever after.

Obviously, this is an example of Fanny, and it’s icky fascination/disavowal/lascivious sympathy with female deviance/psychology isn’t any kind of feminist message. And, inevitably, the cure for lots of sex is better sex, rather than, say, no sex, or less sex, or, you know, taking up a hobby. But there’s also (and somewhat out of left field) an acknowledgment of the importance of female-female relationships (the movie passes the Bechdel test). And there is some effort to find a man for the heroine who is moderately attractive. Though, of course, we never exactly see her falling in love with him (rather than vice versa.) He just sort of gets her as a prize for being such a good guy and sticking with her and not having sex with her when she couldn’t control herself and generally being there for her over a long period of time, all of which is cool but not necessarily a reason in itself to have sex with him. Though that’s better than having sex with someone for being a nerdy loser with no redeeming qualities, I guess.

Freeing Your Bushel and Your Bible Will Follow

Posted on January 1, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

…or something like that. Anyway, I’ve linked to a couple of my drawings, over the last couple of days, but I decided I’d just post them here because, damn it, man’s uploads must exceed his bandwidth, or what’s a blog for? So here they is, with links to their pages on the Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible Site, so you can see which Bible verse I have arbitrarily attached to them if you so desire: