Monthly Archives: July 2012

Surface Pleasures

Posted on by

In her recent post on the postmodern sublime in comics, Marguerite Van Cook paraphrases Frederic Jameson on our crazed cultural landscape.

Jameson points out that the sublime of postmodern is not the dark and brooding place of the high romantics; it is not the depressed world of brooding heroes. Somewhere along the line, all of that angst and personal introspection has been replaced by another world of bright shiny surfaces, replicas and fragmented visions in a world now experiencing another kind of psychic onslaught. Jameson talks about the postmodern sublime as a type of container for all this madness, which he describes as a type of schizophrenia.

Marguerite goes on to look at various comic-book chroniclers of the post-modern sublime, concluding with Al Columbia.

Al Columbia’s Pim and Francie perhaps sums it all up. They run not walk to the sanatorium. Columbia’s characters are no longer in revolt, they are beyond that cognitive choice. Rather they live in a world that does not differentiate morality and feelings. Columbia draws snatches from various artists styles. They hover ghostlike, pulled back from our collective memory as they sit on pages that are torn, fragmented and abused in a confrontation of what it means to be a new product. Jameson suggest that nothing is left to shock us, but I’d suggest that Al Columbia does just that. In this final image the boy takes a straight razor to Bambi. He eschews the choice of Mickey and assaults us in the soft spot. Bambi, the sacred lamb, the sacred cow, the holy sanctified symbol of innocence, is offered to the madness of the postpostmodern. Bambi’s limbs lie dismembered in the grass and we are oh so close by, to see them.

Jameson, Marguerite, and Columbia are all presenting us with a postmodernism as hell; a shiny, emotionless strobing of patterns whose only meaning is an ersatz copy of meaninglessness. The real has vanished utterly, and all that’s left are images of images, a cardboard graveyard of stale tropes through which wander wayward consumers, robbed of even the dignity of despair.

That is certainly one face of postmodernism…but I wonder if it’s really the most insidious one. To me, anyway, the focus on the postmodern schizophrenic apocalypse can obscure maybe the most obvious thing about our current cultural moment — which is that postmodernism is really pleasurable. Gliding out on those ever-shifting shallows, with the real and its hierarchy of earnestness vanishing like the afterimage of that web page you just left, while every song in the world is simultaneously uploaded to your cortex — who can resist such blithely excessive dreams?

Comics is so rooted in nostalgia that it maybe makes sense that it sees the post-post-everything as an impetus mostly to gnash and mourn and re-reject decades old funny animals and the now irrelevant sentiments they inspired. Other cultural forms, though, have embraced the zeitgeist with more eagerness.

Electronica is perhaps a too-obvious example. Listening to the recent release Tipped Bowls by Taragana Pyjarama, you aren’t dumped into a schizophrenic void. On the contrary, the first track, “Four Legged,” orchestrates the future-synth automatons of our overdetermined dreams into a rising symphonic rush of exaltation, panning and swooping over digitized fijords like tiny joyful digitized tourists. “Growing Forehead” takes that most human of sounds, an inhaled breath, and cuts and reiterates it until it’s just another computerized meme afloat in ecstatic programmable melody; transcendence as binary conversion. “Pinned (Part 1),” is a staggering agglomeration of beats and bloops, like a video game caught in a spin cycle, while “Pinned (Part 2) is a funkier but still inner-ear-disturbed strut, stochastic patter resolving and threatening to dissipate, resolving and threatening to dissipate, all with a catchy tunefulness, as if we’ve wandered into a world where even the busted appliances spit out pop.

That world is our world, of course; high culture and low culture and random furniture and passing cats (especially passing cats!) all sliding across one endless screen. It’s nauseating and soul-destroying, certainly. But it’s also vertiginous and, in a song like “Ballibat,” such a lovely, smoothed-out mash-up of timeless futurism that you wonder if, in this post-present, you even need a soul.

Election vs. the Wire: Brutal Cage Match of Gritty Despair

Posted on by

Where oh where do I begin in my attempt to get you to watch Election and Triad Election?  I could start in oh so many places.  I could start by telling you that Johnnie To is one of the greatest living action film directors, a man who invests his films with his peculiar thematic and aesthetic fixations while only rarely forgetting viewer pleasure. I could talk about the grace and beauty of his frequently long takes.  I could talk about his other films, like Breaking News, which begins and ends with nine-minute, single-take action sequences, one a shoot-out, one a car chase filmed from inside the lead vehicle. I could talk about the small repertory company of actors and writers he works with again and again. Or I could just talk about The Wire.
 

Tony Leung Ka Fai as Big D

 
It’s a cliché, of course, to recommend something to someone these days by using The Wire. “Oh, it’s like the British The Wire,” or “It’s like The Wire of theater” or “You know this guy wrote the episode where Stringer dies,” and it’s sometimes difficult to divine what we mean when we say this.  On some level, we’re just talking about quality, right? We mean that this is an exceptionally well-crafted piece of televisual entertainment. But we also mean that there’s a low level of bullshit and wish fulfillment to its unfolding, a willingness to confound audience expectations and a refusal to pander more than is necessary.  By this standard, of course, Season 5 of The Wire isn’t The Wire and neither is anything involving Bubs after Season 4, but we just let that go because, goddamnit, it’s the greatest work of narrative art created by man in the last however many years we want to use to temporally bound our judgment, right?

Okay, so The Wire-as-compliment is a cliché. But clichés become clichés because they have a certain value and in Election/Triad Election’s case, the cliché is particularly apt.

Election and its sequel Triad Election are two halves of a gangster saga set in Hong Kong a couple of years after reunification with mainland China.  The premise is not what you’d expect from a Mob Epic. It’s not about family strife, or a war between different mobs—there is one, but if you blink you’ll miss it—or control over territory. No one goes to a therapist or has domestic troubles. No. For if the American Gangster Epic is frequently about the interaction between Capitalism and Family steeped in immigration and the American Dream, the Election films are squarely about Capitalism and Democracy, with Tradition and Individuality thrown in for good measure.
 

Simon Yam as Lok

 
The first film opens on the dawn of an upcoming election, but it’s not for Mayor or Local Dog-Catcher, no, instead it’s for Chairman of one of the dozens of Triads in Hong Kong. A group of old “Uncles” meets to discuss who should be the next Chairman, the flashy and highly profitable Big D (played by Tony Leung Ka Fai) or the sturdy, dependable, quietly ambitious Lok (played by Simon Yam).  The early contrast between the two couldn’t be clearer, as Big D is shown buying flashy suits while Lok, a widower, goes to a local butcher for meat to feed his son.

The Uncles quickly settle on Lok, despite Big D’s attempts to bribe his way to the Chairmanship.  In his rage, Big D refuses to accept defeat and attempts to steal the Dragon Baton, the symbol of the Chairman’s power, without which he cannot rule. A Macguffin Hunt begins throughout Mainland China while the Uncles try to stop violence from breaking out on the streets of Hong Kong.

Louis Koo as Jimmy

I won’t spoil what happens next, as it all gets resolved in ways you wouldn’t expect and defy the western gangster conventions with which To is clearly enamored, but along the way we meet a few other key figures, including Jimmy (played by Canto-Pop idol Louis Koo), a businessman and mid-level Triad operative who just wants to make his money, Big Head (Lam Suet) a dutiful, tradition-minded dunce, Jet (Nick Cheung) a feral enforcer who obeys orders like a dog and Kun (Gordon Lam Ka Tung) an ambitious and violent soldier. Eventually, the hunt for the baton and the election dispute are resolved, paving the way for Triad Election.

In Triad Election, the same cast of characters returns, and it is two years later.  The winner of the previous film refuses to step down despite the fact that the Chairmanship is a term-limited position. Meanwhile, due to his business dealings, Jimmy is forced to run for Chairman by the Mainland Security Bureau even though he wants to quit the Triad, which he only joined for protection in the first place. If the first film is a dark but often fun romp that unfolds in unexpected ways, Triad Election is a slow and violent descent into multiple kinds of personal hell, as the various players lose all they really care for—including their humanity—as their desire to win overtakes them.

Despite having the backing of big players like Quentin Tarantino, Election only received an art-house release in the US, while Triad Election (which is incomprehensible without the first film) received a wider release and, predictably, flopped. But thanks to Netflix Streaming, that Valhalla of the Worthy and Cheap to License, both are finally available in an easy-to-obtain form, and what’s more, like The Wire, they reward rewatching, as the films are densely packed, stylistically exquisite and nearly exposition free.
 

To’s visuals often place characters in heavy shadow, here we see
several of the Uncles gathered to discuss the vote

Many pixels have been spilled documenting David Simon’s perspective on our crumbling institutions of government.  As he told The Believer, societal institutions are like the Gods in Greek Tragedy, inexorable, powerful forces that undermine individual agency.  The truth teller in a Simon piece is always the head that’s eventually going to be on the block. Attempts to improve the overall situation are doomed to succeed only on a small level, and only for a brief period of time, but are still noble and worthwhile.  Simon believes in individuals. Individuals may, in fact, be the only thing in which he’ll invest his faith. This forms a tension with his Democratic Socialist political leanings and this tension is part of what makes his work so electric and alive when it is at its best.

The perspective of the Election films inverts this equation. In To’s Universe, individuals are the problem and institutional tradition’s bulwark against individual will is the only thing standing between order and chaos. The problem in the Election films is that post-Millenial capitalism, with its empowering of individual will, embrace of selfishness, and temptations of money has eroded these institutions to the point where they are a hollow, symbolic shell.  To makes this point again and again, most vividly in the first film when the chase for the baton climaxes in one Triad brother beating another with a log while the victim recites the oaths of the Triad, hoping (incorrectly) that they will protect him.  The Hong Kong of Election is devoid of Bunny Colvins and McNultys and Daniels, it is instead a world where the sun is setting on an old guard who do not realize that their time is up, that “brotherhood” has become meaningless, that, to paraphrase one of the candidates, money is all that matters now.

The films are, then, an allegory that speaks to our present moment in America, despite being a violent realization of Reunification Anxiety. We live in a time where the series of “gentleman’s agreements” undergirding many of our institutions have completely eroded.  We now need sixty votes to pass anything or appoint anyone in the Senate due to filibuster abuse. The various financial scandals—in particular the recent LIBOR manipulation—stem in part from relying on people choosing to do the right and honorable thing. One party campaigns on Government not working and then, when elected, ensures that it doesn’t. The open politicization of the Supreme Court has eroded its credibility to such an extent that the Military is now the only widely trusted public institution.  The picture of our future painted by the Election films is a dark one.  If anything, the films seem fairly convinced that we’re all doomed, that because we do not keep to our traditions democracy is on its way out and that business, aided by a corrupt government, will win every time.

This is not a worldview that I personally agree with, but then again, David Simon’s pro-individual-but-we’re-all-fucked-anyway cynicism grates on me too.  Luckily, both works also contain rich strains of ambiguity and conflict. For example, the Uncles safeguarding the traditions of the Wing-Ho society are feeble old men, many of them easily bribable, dim-witted, and lecherous.  We learn early on in a throwaway line that the last election for chairman was rigged. And, while To is oddly sentimental about Triad ways, pausing with stirring, nostalgic music to watch the old Uncles take tea together, using what were rumored to be real secret hand gestures in an initiation ceremony, some of this can simply be chalked up to To’s Michael-Mannish love of men manning up and being manly-men while also I might have mentioned doing man things, but sensitively.

To’s films frequently take place in a world that’s not-quite-ours. Exiled—a quasi-Western set in Hong Kong and Macau—replaces blood with red dust. The Mad Detective’s world is fractured, allowing fantasy and reality to spill into each other.  Sparrow posits an underground of competitive pick-pockets in an elegant, swirling city that’s equal parts Hong Kong and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Throw Down takes place in a world where everyone knows Judo.  In the Election films, there are no guns (one is held and waved around but never used). This lends the violence an excruciating visceral quality. Each assault (with rocks, logs, fists, hammers and, often, sabers) is fully felt by the viewer, even though the violence is (with two very important exceptions) visually restrained, choosing instead the tools of sound, shadow and your imagination.

Throughout, there are also little details that reveal themselves in later viewings.  The way that Jimmy, the businessman and reluctant candidate for the Chairmanship, is the only lieutenant who knows the proper way to drink wine, and is first shown looking on with dismay as his desiccated boss commands a busty prostitute to jump up and down in front of him faster and faster. The look on Lok’s face when he learns he will be chairman that lets you know early on he’s not quite the modest hard worker he seems. The subtle, matter-of-fact camera work that lends the work a lean and mean economy. The way the propulsive drum-and-guitar score of the first film becomes a sparser, darker, atonal piano-and-strings affair in the second.
 

It’s easy to miss amidst everything else how beautiful many of To’s compositions are.

There is a part of me that is concerned that, by writing two pieces of breathless enthusiasm in a row for despairing entertainments about contemporary life, I’m both revealing biases I was heretofore unaware of and cutting way too far against the Hooded Utilitarian grain, but the Election films are, taken together, a dark-hearted masterpiece. Even thought they’re imbued with a nostalgia I don’t share for a lost time that almost certainly never existed, To’s mastery and reinvention of genre tropes are on equal display, and his ability to use pulp conventions to create a sweeping autopsy of the world around him is remarkable.

This Is…SPOILERAMA!!!!

Posted on by

“Volunteer” Utilitarians testing Spoil-O-Vision at the Hooded Institute of Technocracy

 

A Manhattan couple take a taxi to Broadway, where they are set to see the latest whodunnit theater play. As they exit the cab, the driver notes:
“Hey, you haven’t given me a tip!”
“So sue me, asshole,” the man wittily ripostes.
Then the driver leans in, and proclaims:
“THE BUTLER DID IT.”
—old New York joke, and the essence of spoiling

In my recent review of the megaflick Prometheus for this blog, I was bedevilled by the usual pesky need, out of courtesy for the innocent reader, of avoiding “spoilers” — those nuggets of information that can drain away all surprise and suspense from the viewing experience.
When did this obsession with shunning spoilers begin? When Sophocles wrote Oedipus the King, complete with twist ending, his ancient Greek audience was perfectly aware that the sought-for culprit turns out to be the King himself. Didn’t faze them a whit! And children don’t mind at all being told a story to which they already know the end. In fact, they insist on being told their favorites over and over again.

Yet I can’t deny that a spoiler can do just as its name implies, spoil the pleasure of a tale. I still can’t forgive the moronic Newsweek critic who gave away the twist in the film Jacob’s Ladder. Thanks a lot, motor-mouth.

There has to be a way to reconcile the critic’s need to discuss a story and the reader’s expectations of surprise.

In search of a solution, I hied myself off to the forbidding Mt.Berlatsky fortress-like headquarters of the secretive Hooded Institute of Technocracy. There, H.IT.’s semi-deranged genius boffins spent a million man-hours perfecting the answer to my prayers.

The result was Spoil-O-Vision, a technological marvel that is the final coffin for story spoiling!

Your humble servant, Alex, testing Spoil-O-Vision in its beta version.I don’t, I, I do not want to talk about it.

How does it work? Simply drag your mouse’s cursor over the blank space, as you do when you cut ‘n paste text for a plagiarised term paper. Below, for instance, is a spoiler for the aforementioned Jacob’s Ladder:

At the end, we learn that the main character has been dead for years, and the entire movie is his ghost’s delusion of life. A premise ripped off from Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, as the Newsweek asshole helpfully pointed out… uh, you HAVE read that Bierce story already, right? No? Oops.

Now I can discuss, say, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd without revealing that

the murderer turns out to be the book’s first-person narrator

And now I can finally disclose those Prometheus spoilers!

Ha! Made you look!!!

At the end of the movie, the surviving crew members penetrate to the heart of the alien citadel of the Engineers, only to find an arena where synthetic life-forms based on characters from ancient Ridley Scott movies fight . Thus darkness from Legend grapples with the Alien, Marcus from Gladiator duels with Feraud from The Duellists, Thelma and Louise trade gunfire with Lucas from American Gangster, while the Blackhawk Down helicopter pursues Deckard in his Blade Runner hovercar. The spectacle is presided over by a 200-year-old Scott, who reveals to the crew that they are also synthezoids, but won’t be needed until the sequel.

But Spoil-o-Vision does have its dark side. Consider the following:

You have just downloaded and activated a copy of the HellHound 3000 virus. If you can read this text, it means your computer has been taken over and your files have been corrupted.
Thank you for having volunteered for this experiment.

Our ..heh, heh…head of research would REALLY like…heh, heh…
to get to know you even better than he already does

Joe Sacco’s Journalism

Posted on by

 

Joe Sacco’s Journalism collects some of the author’s shorter work which first appeared in various magazines, newspapers, and books. Only those utterly devoted to Sacco’s output are likely to have seen every one of these stories and even in that instance, their compilation in one ready volume should be most welcome.

While Sacco isn’t exactly coasting, he seems to have settled into a certain groove over the past decade—a sure-footed method of attack and transcription that ensures a minimum level of quality. Despite the title of this new book, Sacco’s work here can be more precisely described as reportage which focuses on persons as opposed to the grand scheme of things. This label should not obscure the fact that he does steer his stories in fairly predictable directions while infrequently providing direct opinion (in contrast to the prose form afterwords found in this anthology). He almost never offers up solutions to the problems he encounters and purposefully shuns overt editorializing.

Sacco’s preface (“A Manifesto Anyone?”) clearly articulates the selling point of his comics: the personal touch; the tabletalk; the stray details which betray the messy art of journalism; the fulsome embrace of subjectivity. All these and more present themselves as essential parts of Sacco’s journalistic toolset; his art singling out telling moments in the course of an interview away from the oppressive and quieting glare of a video camera, adding to the stark description of mere prose.

Even so, the comics form presents a number of problems for would be cartoon journalists quite apart from their labor intensiveness and lengthy gestation periods. One of these problems is highlighted by Sacco in his preface:

“Aren’t drawings by their very nature subjective? The answer to this last question is yes…Drawings are interpretive even when they are slavish renditions of photographs, which are generally perceived to capture a real moment literally. But there is nothing literal about a drawing.”

One might say that journalistic drawings inhabit that (un)happy land between the reader’s imagination (in pure prose) and concrete reality (in photography). The former can never be countermanded while the latter—a potent source of “easy” empathy—is beholden to Cartier Bresson’s Decisive Moment.

With comics, the abilities of the artist are paramount, and here far more than in most other cartooning genres. While the emotions in Sacco’s stories are communicated with skill and the faces of his characters reasonably distinct, they are still removed from the direct human connection of photo portraiture. What is often lost in translation is that sense of connection to reality and someone real, an affinity which cannot be adequately conveyed through his stylized cartooning which in the early days broached on caricature. Sacco compensates for this with various forms of artifice. Thus Zura and Raisa (from “Chechen War, Chechen Women”) though separated by 30 pages seem almost indistinguishable, the artist reinforcing that element of despair and the commonality in their suffering by means of repetition.

 

%r2 width=

 

That same tortured face is seen again on page 70 of the collection and a story about Chechen refugees. It is up to the reader to decide if this represents the artist’s persistence of vision or the limitations of his style.

Sacco is of course nothing if not self-critical, these feelings frequently manifesting themselves in the form of self-derision. In Journalism, Sacco can be seen prodding his mercenary journalistic instincts—that cultivated ambition which must surely be a part, however small, of every reporter’s motivation and which just as surely must be quashed in those who have any level of conscience. In “Trauma on Loan”, we find Sacco champing at the bit when he is almost denied an interview with two victims of torture:

“You brought them here to reopen their wounds. No point worrying about their feelings now.”

At other times, it is simply a case of a journalist’s bread and butter, the search for some “real action” to spice up a story. The kind of story which most soldiers want to avoid.

 

He is similarly unerring in pointing out his weakest stories. In this case, he singles out “Hebron: A Look Inside” (2001) which he describes as his “least successful piece of comics journalism.”

While Sacco’s tropes will be familiar to long time readers, his comics on Iraq do seem somewhat distinctive within the context of his oeuvre. Not because they are unquestionably the best stories in this anthology. Far from it—that accolade might be better directed at his deeply felt portraits of the most wretched peoples of this earth (his encounter with some Dalits in “Kushinagar” for example). The author is also quite right when he suggests that the first story in his Iraq triptych (“Complacency Kills”) doesn’t “[add] anything new to the immense literature of ‘men at war’.” That story does, however, stand out because of its novelty in tone: the journalist now no longer mining the same vein he’s been chipping at since the days of Palestine; no longer fleshing out the sympathetic and distorted faces filled with hunger and despair; no longer solemnly depicting the genocidaires and unremitting faces of evil but here presenting a more genial portrait of the brutalization of his fellow Americans assigned the task of patrolling the highway between Haditha and Hit.

The philosophical conflicts of these fighting men are put on display, their essential humanity conveyed, and their deaths filled with a sadness which is never maudlin. All this perhaps a side effect of embedded journalism—strangely forgiving of the tormentors but still finding a kind of balance in the middle of the rest of this collection. Sacco is patently opposed to the war, yet he gently skirts the immense futility of the soldiers’ deaths. The reader never gets that sense of waste littered throughout Tardi’s comics on the Great War; all that incipient fury held in check by the dictates of reportage which, in this instance, eschews the imagination (the piece was first published in The Guardian) and the even greater suffering of the resident non-combatants—the shadowy figures traversing the highways patrolled by the American forces.

These anonymous figures get names in the story that follows (“Down! Up!”). While aesthetically less impressive, this piece does suggests that Sacco’s skills are best demonstrated not by his stories of the tortured and maimed but by more mundane subjects. This is an extended piece on trainees attached to the Iraqi National Guard (ING) and their interaction with their liberator-colonizers; the captors and their captives secreted away to some mysterious training destination; the actors playing at master and slave in the comics equivalent of a confined space of undescribed backgrounds; the plot bending the knee to the dictates of human interaction, the faces of every individual contorted into extremes.

So much passion on display and yet, Sacco is clearly wrong in suggesting that it is the comics medium which hasn’t allowed him “make a virtue of dispassion.” This may be the case on a personal basis (and perhaps that is all he means) but it seems excessive to shower blessings on the “inherently interpretive medium” of comics. The truth is that comics are quite capable of conveying facts with dispassion as evidenced by the vast majority of comics non-fiction. Just like authors who cast their words firmly in the direction of human cost stories, it is Sacco’s personal proclivities (and not any comics essentialism) which is responsible for the shape and tone of his comics. The decisions in comics journalism are perhaps more obvious than those in video or photography, yet it should be clear from controversies like those surrounding the depictions of Bosnian Serb concentration camps that even photo journalism is also open to interpretation and partisanship.

“Another trap promoted in American journalism schools is the slavish adherence to “balance.” …Balance should not be an excuse for laziness. If there are two or more versions of events, a journalist needs to explore and consider each claim, but ultimately the journalist must get to the bottom of a contested account independently of those making the claims. As much as journalism is about “what they said they saw,” it is about “what I saw for myself.” The journalist must strive to find out what is going on and tell it, not neuter the truth in the name of equal time.” – Joe Sacco (from his preface)

Similarly, Sacco’s disavowal of “balance” seems overstated if not a deliberate misunderstanding. The pursuit of balance has little to do with not taking sides, coming down in the middle, or pissing off both sides as he caricatures in his preface. Rather it suggests a dedication to teasing out the intricacies of any given situation and recognizing the limitations in human understanding. His advocacy of the journalism of “what I saw myself” obscures the essential mystery of “truth.”

The clarity and concerted purpose of Sacco’s work often elides the complexities of each flashpoint he visits—the very reasons for the insolubility of their problems. Only in “The Unwanted”, his report on the Maltese-African immigration problem, do we get some sense of this intractability. While Sacco’s sympathies lie firmly with the political refugees, he describes keenly the Maltese sardine can of fear, economic hopelessness, and easy racism. The predicament presents itself as a microcosm of the problems faced by Europe as a whole.

In this sense, his extended examination of the African migrant issue can be seen as “balanced” (an insult in Sacco’s book), allowing us to apprehend the dilemmas while preserving his consistent sympathy for the downtrodden

Not so the familiar and lengthy reportage on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the former Yugoslavia. The stories from these war zones present us with an almost Manichean world of the oppressed and oppressors, a long tradition in comics as it happens. A mild-mannered challenge in the Hague by a Serb-American defense attorney fizzles out pretty quickly. The Israelis are represented by a recalcitrant Zionist in “Hebron: A Look Inside.” The powerful, as Sacco puts it, “are excellently served by the mainstream media or propaganda organs.”

“I don’t feel it is incumbent on me to balance their voices with the well-crafted apologetics of the powerful.”

A perfectly sensible view which only leaves the reader the task of deciding which side is the more powerful and which has the greater voice in the mainstream media.

Without any furrowing of the narrative, genuine understanding can hardly be realized. Where one approach might convince us of the righteousness of our aid, our charity, and perhaps our armed intervention, the alternative might give us reasonable pause to consider our moral reflexivity. The former approach lulls us into complacency, the latter challenges all received ideas and sympathies. Sacco’s frequent advocacy of an unwavering crystallized truth suggests that he is not primarily a journalist and reporter but a political activist; one who has consumed the facts, the scholarship, and the primary sources and sees himself as an evangelist, giving voice to those who have none and presenting himself and his works as one of several rallying points in the journalistic sphere.

Hence his protestations against journalistic “balance”, the practice of which must seem hollow and self-serving in the face of taking sides and championing the needy. This is a noble endeavor but like all messages from the pulpit, one that must be tested thoroughly before acted upon. And if we agree with Sacco when he holds to Robert Fisk’s adage that “reporters should be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer”, we should first consider being “neutral and unbiased” on the side of tangled truth.

 

* * *

Further Reading

(1) Kathleen Dunn’s review at The Oregonian. This article contains a lot of basic background information on Sacco.

(2) David Ulin’s review at the LA Times.

“The rap on Sacco, of course, is that he is less a journalist than an advocate, who in such works as “Palestine” and “Footnotes in Gaza” blurs the line between observer and activist. That’s true, I suppose, in the narrowest sense, but it’s also reductive, and with “Journalism,” he convincingly refutes the argument.

Sacco is rigorous about telling both sides of the story, developing sympathy for the American soldiers even as he questions their presence in Iraq. The key is his attention to the human drama, which blows open in the final frames of the story, where he describes the fate of a river unit with whom he’d gone on patrol.”

 

“Ribbit” Means Goodbye

Posted on by

This piece first ran on Comixology.
_______________

Quentin Blake’s 1984 illustrated children’s book, The Story of the Dancing Frog, starts off innocuously enough. A young boy, Jo, asks his mother to tell him a story of their family. She obliges by launching into the story of Great Aunt Gertrude, who married a sailor “with a black beard and smart uniform.” The sailor (who is never named) is away often, which is sad, but, as the mother notes, “they were happy when they were together, and they had a house by the sea and Gertrude would watch for his ship returning.”

Then one day, as you’ve probably guessed, his ship doesn’t come back, and Gertrude receives a letter saying he has drowned. “You can imagine how awful it must have been to get a letter like that,” mom says. Gertrude goes out to the river to walk alone, and thinks about throwing herself in “so that she could be drowned too, like her husband, and finished.” Blake’s sketchy pen and watercolor illustration portrays that moment from some distance, as if Gertrude and the river around her are fuzzing out, preparing to dissolve.
 

 
Instead, though, she looks up and sees a frog dancing on a lilypad. Without quite knowing why, “she walked into the water and picked up the frog and carried it home.”

The picture of Gertrude picking up the frog is both moving and goofy. Gertrude is half in the water, her facial expression hard to read. The trees form an arch overhead, and her dress is pulled back by the water. It’s a ritual and sensual scene, like a rebirth or a wedding. The frog, on the other hand, is clearly not quite up to the role of Prince — it looks helpless and bizarrely cheerful with its googly eyes and gangly body, no more aware of the affection it’s inspired than an infant. Its obliviousness, though, only makes the moment more poignant. Without knowing it, it is both lost husband and child that never was, a lifeline that cannot possibly bear the weight put upon it.

Or maybe it can. Gertrude goes back home and digs a hole in her backyard. The hole is a pond for the frog, but Blake’s drawing makes it look, also, like a grave. Then she fills the hole with water, so the frog can swim in it.

Quickly after that, the story moves away from grief, as well as from all semblance of realism. Gertrude and the dancing frog (whose name, or perhaps just his stage name, is George) go on the road, steadily growing more and more successful. George performs tricks and dances in glamorous settings, a dashing little blob of green.

There are some other incidents: Gertrude turns down an offer of marriage from a lord; George is caught in a hotel fire and must leap to safety into a bucket of water from the thirteenth floor. But basically that’s the story. Gertrude loses her husband and finds a frog and spends her life with it. When I read it to my son, he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why it made me cry.

The reason, of course, is that (the possibly nameless) George both is the (nameless) husband, and is not. George comes out of the water that the husband went into, and takes his place — living the life with Gertrude that the husband lost. Gertrude, on the other hand, never comes out of the pond; her whole story is her grief, an impossible dream of happiness. And yet, at the same time, she does come out of the pond, holding a friend (a child?) around which she manages to build a life, not in spite of her grief, but because of it. When Jo wonders why Gertrude chose the frog over the Lord’s offer of marriage, the mother answers “Well, I suppose you could say they looked after each other over the years.” And, indeed, we see at the end scenes of an aging Gertrude and an (impossibly old at this point, surely) frog entering their twilight years in the south of France. They live amidst idyllic watercolors and beside an ever-present little pool, a reminder of where George came from and where someone else went.

At the end Jo has one more question.

“Was that a true story?”

“More or less.”

“But frogs don’t normally dance, do they?”

“Not normally, no.”

“And no one could really catch a frog and put it on the stage.”

“You can do all kinds of things if you need to enough.”

The fact that Jo and his mother never mention a father in the family gives the story an added, speculative resonance. This is intensified, perhaps by the sepia palette used to illustrate them, which is similar to the muted colors used on Gertrude after she hears of her husband’s loss. The book, as Quentin Blake has pointed out is called, not The Dancing Frog, but The Story of the Dancing Frog. Perhaps what came out of the river is not a frog, but a fairy tale — a dream to live out as life till one is ready to join one’s heart beneath the waters.

Utilitarian Review 7/13/12

Posted on by

On HU

Featured Archive Post: I talk about the weirdness that is Garfield’s Nine Lives.

I write about seeing yourself as Rogue seeing yourself in Lacan

James Romberger on comics by Meskin, Johnson, Strnad/Corben and more.

Caroline Small on why David Lowry is a crappy spokesperson for copyright policy.

From the archive, Kelly Thompson on Rogue.

Richard Cook with a history of early superheroines in covers.

Marguerite Van Cook on the postmodern sublime in comics.

A downloadable mix of jazzy fuzoid.

I talk about Carla Speed McNeil, Anna Freud, and beating fantasies.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I review Merle Haggard’s last great album.

Also at Splice I argue that more books doesn’t mean better schools. Also, a bonus drawing of an alien waiting for the bus by my son.
 
Other Links

Brigid Alverson profiled.

Jessica Valenti on the difference between funny and unfunny rape jokes.

Mary McCarthy speaks out for lazy parents everywhere.

And Alyssa Rosenberg dubs me an honorary hypersensitive lady.
 

Everybody’s Daydream, Everybody’s Finder

Posted on by

Dreams seem like the most private of things, and yet in some ways they’re the parts of us that are least us. With consciousness sidelined, everything and everyone else takes their place in your head. Freud and Jung may not have been exactly right that you can unwind a person by unwinding their dreams, but I think they were correct to claim that dreams aren’t so much a window into the soul as a creepy acknowledgment that the soul you’d thought you’d kept in a safe place is always already in somebody else’s pocket.

In “Sin-Eater”, Carla Speed McNeil’s first sci-fi Finder story, one of the main characters is a woman named Emma. Emma regularly has elaborate, disassociative dreams in which she imagines herself a fabulous princess in a distant realm. Sometimes when she’s gone, she lies as if asleep; sometimes she continues on with her life raising her kids and making her gardening eco-art without thinking or feeling or remembering how she did it.

Emma’s fantasy world is, obviously, a metaphor or analog for McNeil’s world which, like Emma’s, is elaborate and fantastical — a cyberpunk fantasy bricolage filled with talking animals and prophecies and even a venereal fey plague that gives people fox heads. Emma, then, is McNeil; a builder constructing a solipsistic interior castle, worlds within worlds, with emotions flickering across the page like carefully limned expressions across a mirror, the edifice an exercise in joyfully/painfully misrecognizing the self in its all its iterated containers.

But at the same time as Emma spirals inward, she spirals outward as well. The woman with the fantasy-world inside her is not exactly an original idea. I thought immediately of Neil Gaiman’s A Game of YOu, which could well have been an inspiration for McNeil (the timing’s about right, and Gaiman pops up in the copious notes at least once.)

Slightly further afield, I was reminded of Anna Freud’s 1922 essay Beating Fantasies and Daydreams in which she analyzes the fantasies of “a girl of about fifteen.” The girl is, of course, Anna Freud herself, and she traces her own rich fantasy life to a daydream she had as a five or six year old involving an adult beating a boy. Following in her own father’s footsteps, she interpreted these dreams as fantasies about father love; the father was beating someone else, which meant, according to Freud, that “Father loves only me.”

The daydreams were highly sexual, and in a guilty effort to suppress them and simultaneously enjoy them, Freud elaborated long, intricate narratives and worlds. Here’s her discussion of her main hero (she refers to herself in the third person.)

One of these main figures is the noble youth whom the daydreamer has endowed with all possible good and attractive characteristics; the other one is the knight of the castle who is depicted as sinister and violent. The opposition between the two is further intensified by the addition of several incidents from their past family histories-so that the whole setting is one of apparently irreconcilable antagonism between one who is strong and mighty and another who is weak and in the power of the former….

All this takes place in vividly animated and dramatically moving scenes. In each the daydreamer experiences the full excitement of the threatened youth’s anxiety and fortitude. At the moment when the wrath and rage of the torturer are transformed into pity and benevolence-that is to say, at the climax of each scene-the excitement resolves itself into a feeling of happiness.

If you’ve read “Sin-Eater,” the connection between Anna Freud’s fantasies and McNeill’s fantasies should be apparent enough. Like Anna, McNeil’s story is obsessed with abuse — the main character, Jaeger, has a past which is basically one long series of fights, anchored by his decision to become a sin-eater, a sacrificial station that involves ritual beatings. As a sin-eater, Jaegar takes others’ wrath and rage and transforms it into pity and benevolence — a process aided by a mysterious healing ability which allows him to recover even from brain damage.

Moreover, “Sin-Eater,” like Anna Freud, has daddy issues up the wazoo. Emma’s former husband, Brig, psychologically abused her and her three children; Jaegar, who is Emma’s boyfriend, is a kind of substitute father figure — which is complicated by the fact that Brig served as a kind of substitute father figure for Jaegar himself. At one point, Jaegar actually builds a fake apartment for Brig to go to, fooling him into thinking his family is there rather than elsewhere. The displaced family obscures the fact that it’s not the wife and kids, but Brig and Jaegar who are constantly displaced, swapping one for another — as in this mirrored doubling.

Or another example:

In the notes, McNeil says that this character is an early prototype of Jaegar. This early form is nonhuman, obviously — but it also has a beard not unlike Brig’s. And this dual Jaegar/Brig character is definitely an ambivalent father figure; it dispenses wisdom, but it is also connected to the oracle, which on the previous pages made Rachel (Emma’s oldest daughter) reveal her deepest fear. Rachel says her worst fear is “better the devil that you know” — an ambiguous statement that might be a little clearer if she’d said “better the daddy that you know.” Or, to put it another way, her greatest fear is the oracle, who towers over her as if she’s a small child and to which she reacts with a mixture of awe, fear, and petulance.

Again, this frightening oracle transforms into the proto-Jaegar, just as Jaegar takes Brig’s place in the family. The shuttling of father figures in and out puts a different twist on Anna Freud’s interpretation of her dreams. For her, the beating figure is the father, and those beaten are rivals for his affection. But if the father figure can shift from one place to another, why couldn’t he be the beaten as well as the beater? Couldn’t the point be vengeance upon the father by the (daughter identifying with) the father, a bid not for the father’s favor but for an economy which would grant power over the father to force him to identify with the (beaten) daughter? Father, then, becomes beaten and beater, and the happiness is from switching him from one to another, so that each punishes and then is punished for punishing, a cycle in which the powerful are humbled and the humbled empowered, so daughter is ever daddy and daddy is ever daughter.

Certainly in Sin-Eater the fathers take a massive and almost unending whupping. Brig is tricked, crippled, and finally rendered a howling, slobbering shell of himself; his son Lynn (who sometimes identifies as a girl, and sometimes as a boy), even injects him with battery acid. Jaegar, as we’ve mentioned, is constantly getting beaten up, falling from windows, mutilating himself, letting others mutilate him, and then healing and coming back. Ultimately he takes responsibility for the sins of Brig as well…spiritually changing the bad father to the good father, who apologizes and atones. (Plus there is the added bonus that Rachel can flirt with Jaegar unashamedly; he’s not her “real” father, after all.)

Which is to say, though the different clans and the background notes and the make it feel like a personal construction, “Sin-Eater” ends up as something very like idfic, pulling its power from the same well of chastened Daddy-lover fantasies as something like Twilight.

No wonder, then, that Jaegar is himself in many ways a drearily familiar archetype — the tortured tough-but-tender loner with heart-of, whose masculine ability to withstand pain functions as an excuse to subject him to hyperbolic and repetitive sensual violence, just as his mysterious outsider status turns him into a perpetually sexy invader of the quiet homes. Rachel accuses him at the end of the book of running out on the family because he fears that if he becomes less mysterious, they will reject him. But surely it’s McNeil herself who wants the outsider to be an outsider — she’s the one who made him in all his fascinating outsiderness after all. He’s a hyperbolic caricature of the bad boy who can’t commit; he gets physically ill when he’s cooped up too long, and then has to masochistically damage himself to regain equilibrium. Constantly disappointing and atoning, he’s forever attractively distant and adorably sorry for his distance; always that elusive first love, never the boring…well, daddy.

McNeill’s dreams, then, like Emma’s, are of genre — the most secret recesses of her heart are tropes. McNeill certainly knows that; she includes many wry allusions to other cultural touchstones (the Peanuts reference is a favorite especially.) Which would be fine…if I hadn’t run out of patience with the elusive, invulnerable Wolverine and all his sexily ambivalent loner brethren some time back. I don’t want to love him; I don’t want to enjoy his torment; I just want him to go away. But there he is, the angsty grain of sand at the center of the gloriously dreaming bivalve. Alas, I’m afraid that particular irritant’s been scraping my psyche too long already for me to really appreciate the pearl, however lovely its fashioning.