My review of the mediocre new Ginuwine album is online at the Knoxville Metropulse.
Monthly Archives: July 2009
Twilight: Con and Con
I’ve become embroiled in a bit of a to-do over at Brigid’s Robot 6 roundtable on Twilight and the San Diego Con. I thought I’d move my response over here, partly to give readers here a chance to watch me burble, but mostly to avoid hijacking poor Brigid’s thread anymore than I already have.
All right…so for those who haven’t been following the brou-ha-ha… At the con, there’s going to be a showing of the new Twilight movie. That means there will be a lot of tween girls at the con. Some fanboys are concerned that these tweens will ruin things for the “normal” fans. Several female comics bloggers replied hey, screw you fanboy. And who can blame them, really?
Anyway, Brigid, as I said, had a roundtable amongst her cobloggers at Good Comics for Kids to talk about why the fanboys need to buck the fuck up (I don’t think she’d put it that way, but tha’ts the gist). And, as I’ve indicated, I’m with Brigid and co — buck the fuck up fanboys! But I was a bit taken aback to discover that one of the fanboys singled out for chastising was…our own Tom Crippen. As you may or may not remember, Tom expressed reservations about manga and geez, the fangirls do not forgive or forget. Kate Dacey called him on the carpet:(in the original post, and with slightly more detail when pressed in comments) for calling shojo manga “girl’s stuff” and for saying it had a “kindergarden feel”.) In comments, Melinda Beasi added that such language “insulted and belittled” the women who read shojo.
So that’s the state of things. I’m going to go off on a bit of a tangent now, but I’ll get back to poor Tom and his belittling, never fear.
One of the more interesting points raised in comments on the roundtable thread is that virtually nobody actually thinks Twilight is all that good. I haven’t read it myself (though I’m hoping to see the movie this week.) But most commenters agreed that it was not especially well written and that the central relationship was creepily abusive and dumb…not necessarily the sort of thing you’d be eager for tween girls to read.
So how do you defend the fans of a crappy piece of art? Several possibilities were floated. Brigid suggested that fans of Twilight don’t necessarily agree with or fall for the book’s message:
But just because people read something doesn’t mean they buy it wholesale or take it as a model for their own relationships. Part of my daughter’s reaction to Twilight was her distaste for the relationships portrayed in the books. They gave her a chance to think about different types of relationships and articulate her own feelings, which I think was a valuable thing.
This is pretty much the cultural studies argument; pop culture is empowering because marginalized groups creatively take what they want from it and leave the rest. I have to say, I find this argument pretty hard to accept. I don’t doubt that some girls do read the novels critically and dislike bits of them. But I don’t think the books and movies have become bestsellers because the fans think they’re dumb. They’ve become bestsellers because fans like them, and their questionable relationship advice too. Or, to put it another way, pin up art wasn’t popular with guys because they liked to deconstruct the male gaze.
Robin B. says “We need to trust in the people that read the books, whatever messages the stories may send, to be smart about what they take away from them and apply to their lives” — but why do we need to do that? People (not excluding me) are often stupid and make horrible choices on a fairly regular basis. People (again, not excluding me) are often quite untrustworthy. I’m willing to accept that young girls aren’t dumber than anyone else…but everyone else is plenty dumb. If, for the sake of argument, we say that these books tend to encourage abusive relationships, why should we assume that the girls who read them are not going to learn some unfortunate lessons from that? Because, you know, and not to blame the Twilight books specifically, but…tween girls in this culture, do, on occasion, find themselves in abusive relationships for real. And sometimes they think those relationships are okay, or their fault. And one could argue that there are media images and cultural products that contribute to that mindset. Which isn’t to say “ban the Twilight books!” But it is to say, if you think they contribute to those images, maybe you don’t need to necessarily make excuses for them either.
In any case, Robin B. goes on to explain a more straightforward method of separating fans and work:
It’s a question of dismissing people, here, not the works themselves, and I think that’s the real problem for me. I can hate Dan Brown’s books (and I do) but I would never dismiss a Dan Brown fan just because they like Dan Brown.
Which sounds reasonable enough; just hate the consumable, not the consumer. Except…well, let’s go back to Tom.
Remember, Tom was accused of calling shojo manga “girl stuff” and of referring to the art as having a “kindergarden feel.”
Put aside for the moment that shojo is, in fact, by definition, girl stuff. And further put aside the fact that it is deliberately and extravagantly cutesy — big eyes, flowers, often weird fetishization of infantilized characters (a lot of shojo has extremely weird issues around childhood.) Put aside all of that. The point here is that Tom was doing with manga exactly what everybody says should be done with Twilight fans. He didn’t call anyone a kindergardener; he said the art had a “kindergarden feel.” Further, went out of his way to make it clear that he was expressing his own personal distaste for the material without insulting the readers of it (on the contrary, he was actually saying that he had missed important things, and asking for recommendations.) Tom never once says anything, positive or negative, about manga fans; he confines himself entirely to to talking about the comics. And yet, he’s still being held up as an example of evil intolerant fanboy pilloried for being “unwillingness to try and understand why manga—or, for that matter, Twilight—appeals to girls”. This even though Tom repeatedly throughout the roundtable *asks for manga recommendations* — and even expresses interest in and appreciation for, some shojo art.
So a couple of points here. First, I think this shows fairly clearly that, no matter who you are, there’s a strong urge to circle the wagons when your fandom is assaulted…or even mildly poked. This can play out in various ways, depending on power dynamics, history, and the relative personal vicissitudes of those involved. You can get borderline racism (as with that disco record burning thing in the late 70s). Or you can get unpleasant connotations of misogyny, as with the male fans whining about women at their con. Or you can just have fairly innocuous internet bickering. I don’t think for a moment that these reactions are morally equivalent…but I do think they spring from similar impulses. And it makes me kind of wonder how all those teen girls would respond if you went up to them and said, “You know, Twilight is really sexist and bad…but yeah, you go girl!” Would they really be entirely pleased?
I just want to touch on one other thing before finishing up. Kate Dacy quoted one thing that really irritated her from a male commenter on Valerie D’Orazio’s blog:
“And now, you want to talk about the TWILIGHT fans. Hell, Val they aren’t even fans of the story. They just want the actors. If it was just author Stephanie Meyer there, and no movie, no actors, the turn out would be just about nil.”
Dacy said in response “What bothers me most is the underlying assumption that girls (and women) don’t know how to be proper fans, that they’re only there for the hot guys and couldn’t care less about the books or the creator.”
On the one hand, I absolutely agree with Dacy: the comment is insulting, and also just wrong — I’m sure the fans would be incredibly psyched to meet Meyer. After all, without any doubt, some significant percentage of those fans are *writing Twilight fan fiction themselves.* Quite possibly explicit Twilight fan fiction.
Because you don’t need the hot actors to have a prurient interest in your fandom. There are other erotic levers that can connect you to your obsession. Indeed, I think it’s worth wondering whether there are anything *but* erotic levers. Vampires. Romance. Vampire romance. Hot guys, hot girls. Where exactly is the non-prurient bit? Or, alternately, if you will — manly men in skintight costumes engaged in intense, sweaty mano-a-mano combat. With the occasional preposterously clad, pneumatic heroine thrown in for good measure.
In a consumer society, consumption is a fetish. The fetish is an object you invest with power and worship — but that power is *your* power. It’s not you, but at the same time its the most important part of you. Arguments about fandom get so hot and heavy because they aren’t just about what you like or don’t like; they’re about power, love, gender, self, identity. Respecting people even as you disrespect their consumer choices is a laudable goal in some sense. But people aren’t so easy to locate. They’re not just taking up space at the con. They’re in the books or comics they read, the horrible relationship advice that causes them to swoon, the cheesecake they lasciviously drool over. They’re in their ideas. And some of those ideas (tween girls aren’t normal; abusive relationships are cool) deserve to be mocked.
Update: Over on the other thread, Brigid had an interesting take on the kindergarden thing:
Are we talking about apples and oranges here? Hello Kitty has a kindergarten feel. Fruits Basket, not so much. In fact, I think most shoujo manga is not so much cutesy as hopelessly sentimental. Vampire Knight made me feel like I was back in high school again, so much so that I stopped reading it because I’m done with high school emotions and had no desire to relive them.
If anything, the guy manga has more of a kindergarten feel because a lot of it features girls who look very childish—as I write this, I’m looking at Amefurashi, a shonen manga, which features a girl who looks like she is about 10, holding a whip. I don’t see much of that sort of character design in girls’ manga. The page layouts are often quite complex in shoujo manga, and the characters look and talk like teens/adults.
I should add that I”m grateful for the discussion Brigid and her co-bloggers put together, It gave me a bunch of things to think about, and I enjoyed the chance to kibbitz in comments and here. I’d urge folks to check out their blog, Good Comics For Kids.
Update 2: I talk more about Twilight here/
300: what it means
The Daily Show did a segment about 300 and various jokey parallels with U.S. politics, and then the Daily Dish gathered up links to the clip and to several blog discussions of the film’s (not very strong) sense of history.
I saw 300 a few months ago and didn’t have much of a reaction except this: its Sparta-Persia matchup seems like a dream image of how the Taliban might see the world. There’s the scrappy band of underdogs who live the hard but good life and who will fight and die before they accept comfortable submission to a debauched empire. And then there’s the debauched empire, where women don’t wear a lot of clothes and men put their tongues in each others’ ears. The empire has money and numbers on its side. The underdogs have nothing but courage and morality.
Where the parallel falls down is that the Persians are dark and from the east, the Spartans white and from the west. Apparently those factors beat anything else involved.
Check Out That Form
I’ve been looking at Jack Cole’s pin-up art as collected in Alex Chun’s excellent (and aptly named) “The Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole.” If you have any affection for pin-up art at all, it’s pretty great. Cole’s impossibly fluid lines are perfect for limning impossible proportions, and the grey washes he uses adds weight in all the right places:
I posted yesterday about Dan DeCarlo’s pin-up work. One of the things about DeCarlo is that, when you look at his pin-ups, you instantly tend to say “My God! I’d always wanted to see Veronica do that!” Or not as the case may be…the point is, it looks like Veronica. Cole is very famous for his non-racy work as well, but you don’t get the same effect. You can occasionally look at a Cole drawing and say, yeah, it makes sense that this guy drew Plastic Man. Butt you never look at a cartoon and say, “Hey! That’s Woozy Winks looking at that girl’s unmentionables!!”
The reason for this, at least in some sense, I think, is that Cole’s a better artist than DeCarlo — or maybe not better exactly, but more versatile. DeCarlo’s style is a wonderful style, but it is only one style. Whether he’s drawing innocent comics for teens or racy illustrations for grown ups, his pictures look like they take place in the same world, with cartoony, expressive faces, stylized, slightly stiff movements, clear lines, and so forth.
Cole has a style too…but the style is defined by his facility more than by any particular look or character. Plastic Man, the pin-up work, and his late Betsy and Me strip are all recognizable as the work of the same artist, but they’re all also really different — not just in terms of how the strips look, but in what they try to do. In the intro to the pin-up book, Chun says that Cole had to relearn how to tell gags when he left comic books for magazines. That’s a pretty interesting claim, inasmuch as Plastic Man was, like, all gags wasn’t it? And gags which were a lot funnier than those you get in these pin-up bits.
But Cole was doing magazine work, and so he was doing magazine work; he didn’t seem to want, or need, to try to carry over his interests from one project to another. Sure there are a couple of moments that recall Plastic Man level nuttiness:
But for the most part he’s happy to stick with boring one-liners that rely very little on the kind of frenetic visual hijinks he used in his comic books. (Again as opposed to DeCarlo, for whom the clunky humor of the pin-up gags wasn’t all that far removed from the clunky humor of Archie.)
Looking at Cole’s seemingly effortless transformations from one medium to the other, you sort of wonder if Plastic Man really was his most personal work, just because Plastic Man the character is so resolutely impersonal. The whole point of Plastic Man, after all, is that he can fit himself to any form, just like his creator. It’s a weird, ultra-professionalized version of auteurishness; his signature style is no style, or every style. And it’s probably why, while he’s much admired, he doesn’t exactly have any acolytes. DeCarlo has the Hernandez Brothers, Winsor McCay has Chris Ware…but you can’t easily, or perhaps at all, imitate a style the main hallmark of which is the ability to do everything. Cole’s art is a triumph of form over content. It’s impossible not to admire, but it’s very hard to feel a sense of personal connection with it. And indeed, when you look at Decarlo’s women, you get the sense that they’re people, with something going on behind their mobile features. Cole’s women, on the other hand, often have narrowed eyes and impassive expressions. Who needs soul when you can shape the surface however you’d like? His polymorphous is perverse not because it hides a twisted psyche, but because it refuses to refer to the psyche at all.
Milton, you’re a genius!
I’ve mentioned my cafe buddy Milton a couple of times. He’s not dumb, but he’s usually a couple beats behind in a conversation. Worse, he doesn’t take his lag into account. He jumps in with irrelevant questions, he sums up what you’re saying and gets it wrong — things like that.
The other day we were talking about the girls who work in the cafes where we hang out; that’s a favorite topic, of course. I told him about Emily, who was greatly loved and admired before she went home to Vancouver. She worked the early morning shift, so Milton had never met her.
Emily had a fabulous, sunny personality and greeted everyone walking thru the door like they were an old friend. The old Quebecois gents — retirees or fellows headed to work at 7 in the morning — would all call out “Abientot, Emily, au revoir” as they left, and she would give them a big wave and smile. Very sweet.
She was also very good looking, in a blond, broad-shouldered, farm-girl way. A lot of times people say “big boned” when they mean fat. Emily actually was big boned.
I made the above points to Milton. “… when they mean fat, but she actually was big boned,” I said, winding up.
Milton: “Oh, I know who you mean. Pam.”
Pam was a big favorite of ours, but she didn’t work the early morning shift or call out to customers as they walked in the door. Also, she was noticeably fat, not big boned. “Well, no,” I said to Milton. “Because Pam, you know, she actually was pretty overweight.”
Milton: “Yeah. When you said ‘big boned,’ I just thought that was what you meant.”
Milton, you’re a genius!
Nonexistent political cliche
I can’t believe no one ever thought of this:
Like a shoe store in an earthquake.
The idea: take “Waiting for the other shoe to drop,” normally used when a damaging bit of news has been released and another damaging bit is expected, and apply it to a politician who is suffering a whole series of damaging revelations. It’s typical for big scandals to go thru a phase like that, when the hits just keep on coming, headline after headline, and reporters love the shoe-drop figure of speech. But nothing about shoe stores in earthquakes; I even checked Google.
Victory
On line at the Cafe Depot today, the woman ahead of me was talking on her cell phone so hard she couldn’t follow what was going on. When she was fumbling around for her money, and still talking, I got mad and reached over to touch her shoulder. Me: (level but stern): “You’re taking my time. Stop talking.”
The woman was perfectly polite about it. She got her money out, and noted that she had been reaching for it, then paid and took her coffee before she started talking on the phone again.
I always feel silly after I get angry, so it touched me when Lynn, the young monarch of the Cafe Depot counter people, thanked me for saying something. The cell phone people drive the Depot staff crazy, she said, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Then, over by the milk and cream pitchers, a young fellow on staff appeared at my elbow and thanked me too. I had no idea I’d been doing the right thing! I thought I’d just got mad and lost my cool.