Yearly Archives: 2009

The Name of My Mary Sue Is Michael Corleone

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We’re having a roundtable about Mary Sues, with Noah leading the way here. I never heard the term before, but I think I can add an example: Michael Corleone. When the writer seems to gloat over how wonderful a character is, you’ve got a Mary Sue, and the Godfather novel does a lot of gloating about Michael; the movies, though more classy and understated, also adore him. Book and movies remind us over and over that Corleone is cool, controlled, lucid, unflappable, and (when it comes to business) infallible. I was writing here about the character:

… he is a born leader, a paragon of competence and nerve, a decorated war hero and cool-headed tactician. He is the dream self-image of Mario Puzo, that poor shambling yutz who wanted to pretend he was hard, compact and capable.

I think Michael Corleone works as a Mary Sue for a whole lot of people, for myself and a ton of other men born a little before, during, and a long time after World War II. Maybe the younger fellows have lost interest in him; I don’t know. But we’ve got decades’ worth of American males who dote on the Godfather films and the special punctilio of its characters, and especially on Michael Corleone, the paragon and epitome of the Godfather style. 

Notice that Michael Corleone doesn’t quite fit either Mary Sue category described by Mandy in a comment to one of the posts here. Unfortunately I can’t find the post/comment, but if I remember right Mandy says there are two types: the winsome, wonderful Mary Sue who’s adored by his/her fellow cast members, and the brilliantly resourceful Mary Sue with his/her endless bag of gadgets and skills.

Batman and James Bond were examples that came up for the second group. Michael Corleone belongs with them because of his competence, but at the same time he marks a difference. Batman and James Bond know how to do all sorts of things, and they carry all sorts of gadgets, and that’s supposed to be what a second-category Mary Sue is all about. Michael Corleone doesn’t master birdcalls or fingerprint analysis or carry around a laser suitcase. He’s always on top of it, but he doesn’t really do anything.  Starting out, he kills Sollozzo and McCluskey; the act condemns him to a criminal career and proves his competence at the basics of the family business. But after that Corleone is strictly management.

The winsome Mary Sue is all about others’ reactions: the whole reason she exists is to be found charming, courageous, sexy or whatever by the rest of the cast. To borrow a phrase from sociology, she’s outer-directed. The second kind of Mary Sue, the endless-skills variety, is more inner-directed. A second-cat Mary Sue has to know judo and safecracking whether or not people admire him for it. (In practice, of course, people do admire a second-cat MS, but that’s icing as opposed to cake.)  

Michael Corleone is something different, an outer-directed second-category Mary Sue. Operationally, he does nothing but plot strategy and interact with his colleagues, and according to the series he does these things in glorious fashion. But follow along closely and the strategizing starts to look a bit thin. How does he know Tessio sold him out? Because Tessio is smart and selling out the family is the smart move. But if Tessio is so smart, doesn’t he realize that being smart will automatically make him Michael’s prime suspect? Well, no, he’s not that smart. Michael is a master strategist in a world where the author makes sure everyone else spots him 10 points. Michael’s great master strokes are presented as triumphs of brainpower, but all he does is send people to kill his enemies. The brilliance involved here is not too advanced: “I know, dress our guy as a cop! And for Roth, have the guy carry a newspaper under his arm! Nobody will suspect!”  

That leaves interacting, which technically would mean how he deals with other people. But in practice the focus is just as much how he comes across to other people, and also to us. Michael Corleone’s competence is so ideal that it transcends specific abilities and becomes a matter of temperament, and his temperament is right in front of us, on display. He sits there, keeps his poker face, coolly meets our gaze, and you know he’s a competent kind of guy, a “man of respect.” But what if nobody respects him? Like the winsome Mary Sue, he’s a failure unless enough other characters give him the proper reaction. But, boy, they sure do, and for the ones that don’t there’s a hard lesson headed their way.

Action isn’t Michael Corleone’s thing; he behaves, and the behavior itself has got a twist to it. He’s a forceful, dominant personality, but he keeps quiet, sits still and doesn’t throw his weight about. He just takes what’s being given and turns it back, his face unblinking, and in the end he decides all. Senator Pat Geary sneers at him and tries to shake him down, and an hour of screentime later we see Geary broken, a bloody dead girl next to him in bed, and he’s nodding as Tom Hagen tells him the way things are going to be. Michael never raised his voice, never lifted a hand. But he’s deadly, you can tell by looking at him, and his deadliness takes practical form in his command of a deadly organization. His fitness to head that organization is signaled by the cool (no, “steely”) self-command he shows as he faces his enemies and underlings.

Which is convenient for us (for me and my fellow Godfather fans as I imagine them). If we had to be like Sonny Corleone, big James Caan stomping about and shouting, the mismatch would become a bit too much. Michael Corleone does what we do, which is to sit still and watch our mouths, and he turns it into strength, not weakness. The time comes for him to flex that strength, put it into effect, and, well, other people do that for him. Meanwhile, Michael keeps sitting around and coolly measuring out his thoughts and being careful about what shows on his face, and we’re happy. The deal hangs together even if a certain amount of stupidity is woven in. We buy the gimme that Michael is a tough guy who never does anything tough, and the one that has him beating opponents at checkers-level strategy contests. He helps us get by the way we are, which is a powerful incentive to buy a fantasy. And the disincentive, the implausibility, has to do with work, and work is a vague thing to us.

Nowadays most of us work in offices doing jobs that are fairly pointless when considered by themselves. Even if the details can be explained to a nonpracticioner, there’s not much reason to do the jobs themselves, not on their own. They make sense only as component actions of a vast process, one that’s undertaken by no one in particular and benefits nobody we know. We don’t expect to understand other people’s jobs, and we don’t expect them to understand ours. If they did understand, we wouldn’t expect them to be interested. Everyone has his compartment, and what we share outside the compartments is just us, making small talk. Michael Corleone works just fine for us, a dream version of ourselves that is 90% demeanor and 10% a vestigial work element.

The same slippery ground of unrealness travels from beneath our feet to the world of the Corleone family and its operations. It’s all “them” territory, as in “They”ll take care of it.” In our work lives we’re “them,” in the Godfather series the “they” work falls to buttonmen and we’re off with Michael Corleone, lounging quietly in our chair, in command.  As the Godfather series goes on, the actual work of the Corleone family becomes hazy. The killing of Luca Brasi early in I is a big deal because he is an exceptionally good assassin; lose him and the family is crippled. By the time the movie is over, Michael can engineer a string of simultaneous deaths, a miracle round of killings, and we’re barely aware of who does what. Apparently the talent grows on trees. In fact when II ends Michael throws away one of his top assassins to get at Hyman Roth, an enemy who is on the ropes and trying to flee the country. The loss of the assassin is not a huge deal: a setback, possibly, but the family continues right along. 

You can’t be proud of a fantasy like that. A bit of narcissism can work wonders in fiction, but a little too much is way too much. People get cloyed and disgusted, or else they see thru the whole deal at once and recognize how the same old dumb desires are being catered to. The selfishness and tunnel vision built into the deal are pretty awful when you stop to think: the killing of that girl so that Senator Geary can be blackmailed doesn’t even rise to a Barbara Gordon moment; the characters and movie wad her up like Kleenex. And if the Godfather series was just about a brilliant, cool-nerved Mafia leader who always gets his way, it would wear out its welcome pretty quickly. But Michael suffers. Though he’s a Mary Sue step by step, day by day, his big story is all about how he screws up, how he throws away his life. He winds up nowhere, sitting by himself and feeling bad, much like some of us on particular Sunday afternoons but in a far grander edition. He’s not moping, he’s bleak; he’s looking at the devastation he’s wrought, not job interviews he bungled. He has carved his way thru the world, made giant choices (an empire over love, vengeance over family), and now he takes the measure of the soul his actions have given him. It’s really not the same as me on a Sunday afternoon; but it looks the same, and the feelings have a lot in common, and if Michael is suffering I know there’s some kind of seriousness to outbalance and neutralize the vanity of his story’s appeal. His mistake was to love his father too much and to fight too hard in the world, and these are nothing like the mistakes I’ve made, or most people make, but his story still becomes a tragedy, and told well enough the whole dream becomes beautiful.

Grampaw

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I missed the good news that Drawn & Quarterly’s bringing over Susumu Katsumata’s short story collection Red Snow. It’s surprising, as nobody remembered his work until Seirinkogeisha put out the collection in 2005. Unlike also-forgotten stablemate Tatsumi, Katsumata can’t claim to be historically important.

His stories are better than Tatsumi’s shorts, though: timeless, bawdy, mysterious, like an earthy Kwaidan. Cartoon figures sneaking bits of pleasure in the grass, water sprites breaking things. They reveal a handmade craft that fits next to the Moomins and Monsiuer Jean.

If timeless, these stories feel old, too. They appeared mostly in the anthology Manga Goraku between 1978-80; the feeling of reminisce echoes Tatsumi’s rue. Both are old men’s manga in their way, best read over milky homebrew and several packs of borrowed cigarettes. In August, under a fluorescent light, while grumbling over back pains.

Not too much to my taste, unlike the also-announced collection of Imiri Sakabashira. I’ve liked Sakabashira’s manga and artwork a good long time. It feels a lot less fusty than either Tatsumi or Katsumata. Actually, it’s more kin to Yo Gabba Gabba. With cigarettes. I’ll give some to the nephew when he’s considerably older.

Another Question: Who’s This Thierry Guy?

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I could swear there was a book that analyzed comics as a medium and was written by a European with “Thierry” somewhere in his name. I thought Fantagraphics published it, but the company’s site doesn’t list anything like the book in its section on pure-print titles. Anyone? 

Who Has Catalogued the Watchmen?

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I’m doing a column on Alan Moore and Watchmen, and as part of my preparation I just went thru the comic and made notes about the various recurring images and symbols that pop up thru the length of the work. Has anyone else done this? It seems like an obvious step for some geek (aside from myself) to take, and I’d like to backstop my attempt with somebody else’s.

Don’t Italicize the Bolded

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I’m reading the Atlantic’s piece about Alan Moore. It seems okay to me, nice writing and whatnot. But when he quotes dialogue, the author italicizes the words that were bolded in the original. I’ve seen a few people do this and the effect is always bad. A comics page is not the same as a text page. Words get bolded on the comics page only to break up the visuals; the emphasized words don’t jump out, they just give the eye enough traction to make it through bits of print that otherwise would be lost amid all the pictures. In straight text the words aren’t going to be lost; put words here and there into italics and they become a bit overbearing. So we get Dr. Manhattan, that limp, far-away personality with one eye on the tachyons, biting his words off like an undergraduate intellectual in mid-debate:

“Time is simultaneous,” he explains in the comic to his girlfriend, Laurie, “an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.“

What do we call that? Misguided fidelity that produces a mistake.

Snapper Sue

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A week or so ago I did a post in which I compared contemporary iterations of Wonder Woman to Mary Sue. Mary Sue, for those not in the know, is the derogatory term given to an egregiously wonderful original character and/or author surrogate inserted into a piece of fan fiction. As many commenters noted in the comments to this post, the Mary Sue phenomena has many analogues in non-fan-fic texts, from D’artagnen to James Bond.

Anyway, everyone seemed to pretty much enjoy talking about Mary Sues, so we decided to do a roundtable on it. So I’m starting things off here.

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When I started thinking about Mary Sues in canon, one name that scuttled to mind was Snapper Carr. Who the hell is Snapper Carr, you ask? Well, as folks who have read way, way too many comics may or may not know, Snapper was a kind of mascot to the Justice League of America back in the titles early 1960s heydey under the creative team of (I believe) Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky. Anyway, Snapper was just some idiot kid who liked to snap his fingers, and who talked in a kind of bastardized, pseudo-hip patois, which sounded exactly as if it had been invented by clueless, middle-aged men trying desperately to connect with those darned kids. Nonetheless, despite his lack of powers, or skills, or, indeed, discernible brain activity, Snapper not only got to hang out with the Justice League, but actually helped them on their cases. Snapper’s debut occurred in a battle against Starro, the giant space starfish. If I remember correctly (and no, I’m not going to go reread the fucking comic. It was bad enough the first time.) Starro had mind-controlled much of a town, with only Snapper Carr unaffected, because he had no mind to control. No, actually, it was because he had been using lime on his lawn, and starfish don’t like lime. Or something like that. Anyway, the point is, for no real reason, Snapper held the key to defeating the intergalactic echinoderm, and so he got to be buddies with all the JLA’ers, and then he even stuck around for further adventures, until the inevitable happened and he was corrupted by Grant Morrison, given a short leather skirt and sent to destroy the JLA, at which point he was immediately annihilated becasue he STILL DIDN’T HAVE ANY FUCKING POWERS!

I don’t know, maybe that happened. Or not. (Actually, I think Snapper did get powers at some point in the 90s; something to do with super-powered snaps? No, really.) Anyway, here’s Wikipedia with a more sober analysis:

As the JLA could not have the sidekicks of all its members occasionally wandering through its secret headquarters, but needed a character to whom the reader could relate, the group needed a distinct character not associated with the home town of any of its members. In order to rationalize that an ordinary person could become an honorary member of the JLA, he had to be important to them at the moment of that group’s formation. The solution, devised by Gardner Fox: young Lucas — called “Snapper” for his penchant for snapping his fingers — is immune to Starro’s attacks, by the good fortune of his just having put lime on the lawn. It is Green Lantern who recalls that various sea invertebrates are susceptible to lime, and by these means, Starro is defeated.

The most pertinent part of that paragraph is the first sentence. Let’s repeat it, because, hey, what’s a few bytes between friends?

As the JLA could not have the sidekicks of all its members occasionally wandering through its secret headquarters, but needed a character to whom the reader could relate, the group needed a distinct character not associated with the home town of any of its members

Right; Snapper is there like the other sidekicks to give the juvenile readers someone to relate to; a young everyschmo who could buddy around with the super-heroes just like all the kiddies want to do. Since his point is gratuitous youth audience identification rather than gratuitous author identification, and since he’s just way-more-effective-than-he-should-be rather than actually the-most-effective-and-wonderful-person-in-the-world, he’s not exactly a Mary Sue, but he’s a kind of cousin, I think — a Snapper Sue, if you will.

Snapper Sues are kind of ubiquitous, in older comics especially — Speedy, Aqualad, Wonder Girl, and, of course, Robin all qualify. And they do show up in other venues as well; Wesley Crusher, for example, seems like a Snapper Sue, thrown in so kids can imagine how cool it would be if they were on the Enterprise with all those awesome heroic social workers.

The thing about Snapper Sues is…I mean, does anybody like this character? If you’re a kid, and you’re reading a super-hero comic, why do you need some Snapper Sue to identify with? Kids don’t in general seem to have any trouble pretending to be Batman, or Spider-Man, or Flash, often all within the space of a minute or two, if my own son is any indication. I mean, my kid likes Robin fine…but he doesn’t identify with him specially, or like him more than any other super-hero. And I can’t imagine him being at all interested in Snapper Carr — because, you know, the guy doesn’t have any powers. Where’s the fun in that? Similarly, I was fairly young (15) when Wesley Crusher first appeared…but, like everybody else, I didn’t identify with him; on the contrary, I loathed him. Or again, Zan and Jayna on the Super-friends — I never liked them; I was always like, what the hell are they doing there? Those aren’t real super-heroes; somebody please make them leave me alone.

In short, the whole phenomena just seems incredibly ill-conceived and confused, based on some bizarre idea that kids can’t’ identify with anyone older than they are. But, of course, kids prefer to identify with people older than they are. Kids like Batman; you don’t need Robin to sell the idea. And you certainly don’t need Snapper Carr. The more I think about stuff like this, the more I wonder…did those comic companies way back in the sixties even have marketing departments? And did the people in them drool and gibber, or did they mostly just drool?

There is at least one iteration of the Snapper Sue archetype that I think did actually work…or that, at least, seemed to make some kind of marginal marketing sense. That’s Kitty Pryde of X-Men fame. Kitty definitely fits the Snapper Sue model; she’s young, she seems clearly meant to be an object of identification, and she was, while not all powerful, definitely competent and resourceful to an extent that often started to seem like special pleading (saving all the other X-Men when she had barely started in the game; or turning into a super-ninja at the drop of a hat…I’m the only one that ever read any of that Kitty Pryde and Wolverine mini-series, aren’t I? Sorry; we will not speak of it again.)

Still, Kitty at least did have unique super-powers rather than just being a carbon-copy sidekick (Kid Colossus! Wolverboy! Storm Girl!) And, perhaps more to the point, she seemed to be an effort to pander to a demographic that could, in fact, stand to be pandered to. That is, Kitty seems aimed at tween girls. Tween girls have traditionally been something of a hard sell for super-hero comics. It therefore makes some kind of sense to try to reach out to them to expand your audience.

Again, I’m not saying Kitty Pryde was perfect. Giving her a name that sounds like a catfood brand seems like it was maybe a mistake, for example. And I honestly don’t have a sense of whether she was effective in appealing to young girls— though I will say that the X-Men of that era, with Storm and Phoenix and Kitty and later Rogue and others did seem to do relatively well in having a varied cast of female characters. But the point is, Snapper Carr couldn’t even in theory possibly appeal to anyone; Robin/Kid Flash/ad nauseum seem redundant, inasmuch as if they appealed to anyone, they’d appeal to the exact same people who were already identifying with the non-sidekick super-heroes anyway. Kitty at least seems like a Snapper Sue who you can look at and say, okay, I can see what they’re trying and why theyr’e trying it. She was never exactly my favorite character…but I never got the sense she was exactly appealing to me, and she didn’t make me hit my head and say, what the fuck? In comics, I think that qualifies her as an example of marketing genius.

Update:Tom on Michael Corleone, Miriam on definitions and me again.