Monthly Archives: January 2013

Django vs. Lincoln

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The entire roundtable on Django Unchained is here.
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I made the odd choice to see both Django Unchained and Lincoln during the same evening, which made for an interesting resonance between the two films. On the one hand, you’ve got a grim-but-lightweight meditation on slavery and the awful-yet-exhilarating things people did to get out from under its thumb, and on the other, you’ve got a more serious treatment of the matter in Quentin Tarantino’s blaxploitation revenge thriller. I kid, of course, but it’s notable that while Lincoln is supposedly a serious, highbrow take on what had to be done to end slavery in the United States, Django is much more effective in evoking its horrors, putting a more personal face on the issue and really getting the viewer on the side of the oppressed. Or maybe that’s just my impression due to the juxtaposition of the two, along with my own personal tastes for the relative filmic styles of Tarantino and Steven Spielberg.

By the way, unlike some commentators around these parts, I don’t really have any antipathy toward Spielberg, and I generally like his movies; they’re slick, commercial productions that are almost always put together marvelously, clicking along like well-oiled machines that are constructed in such a way that their clever workings are exposed for all to see so we can be fascinated at their intricacies. This is fine when it comes to entertainments, but when applied to serious subjects, the self-satisfaction can become extremely irksome, with messages pounding viewers over the head with their obviousness, characters mawkishly affirming proper virtues to those around them almost up to the point of turning toward the camera to give some extra pointers to the folks at home, and the ever-present John Williams score swelling grandly to remind everyone of the gloriousness of what we’re seeing. It’s oppressive, a sensibility that, in seeking to highlight the magnificence of the events depicted, smothers them in “importance”, making sure nothing is misinterpreted.

That said, Lincoln certainly isn’t terrible, and while some of Spielberg’s schmaltzy impulses are on display, they can’t obscure a wonderful performance by Daniel Day-Lewis and some fascinating looks at all the behind-the-scenes maneuvering, dealmaking, and outright lying that had to be done in order to accomplish something worthwhile in the dirty business of United States politics. It’s not a movie for idealists, since even with all of the appeals to the rightness of the cause of outlawing slavery, the message seems to be that one has to sacrifice one’s ideals in order to accomplish anything of worth. The big moment in this regard comes when Thaddeus Stevens (as played by Tommy Lee Jones), a fiery abolitionist who had long spoken of a belief in the equality of all men, gives a speech in which he insists that he only supports equality in terms of the law, rather than in a moral sense, and it’s presented as a triumphant moment, with swelling music and triumphant reactions from his fellow supporters of the 13th Amendment. It’s a surprisingly cynical scene, but Spielberg has to include a moment in which Mary Todd Lincoln’s black servant lady leaves the chambers in tears, in case we get so carried away by the speech that we also adopt the belief that while slavery is evil, freed slaves really shouldn’t be allowed to vote (and not women either, since that also gets a mention in another on-the-nose moment).

Me, I much prefer Tarantino’s approach, which is to bury the disturbing historical attitudes and occurrences in layers of cool filmmaking, surrounding them with his usual visceral action, incendiary performances, gorgeous camerawork, and perfectly-selected music cues, making the horrors of slavery an intrinsic part of life in the brutal world he’s recreated/constructed here, an impossible-to-ignore inhumanity that makes for an upsettingly recurring gut-punch throughout. In a different setting, this would be an enjoyably violent crime/heist movie, but by centering it around slavery, Tarantino forces us to contemplate the disgusting ways in which people once openly treated one another, by making sure to treat the all-too-realistic brutality differently than he would the “normal” moments of violence that regularly turn up in his films. Instead, he turns scenes of whippings, men being forced to fight to the death, and dogs ripping a man apart into moments of horror, accentuating the bodily damage done (while obscuring the actual action, as if it is being glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye) and showing us people’s squeamish reactions. On the other hand, Tarantino makes a mockery of the racist attitudes people used to justify their actions, with Leonardo DiCaprio’s monologue about phrenology as the reason black people are inferior to whites coming off as the rantings of an insane tyrant and a gang of white supremacists who can’t manage to construct hoods that don’t render them blind seeming too stupid to live, revealing their philosophies as those of people struggling to hold on to power in a world that is quickly passing them by.
I guess it all comes down to highbrow vs. lowbrow, literature vs. pulp. Attempts to educate and edify viewers often come across as heavy-handed, which might be unavoidable, but I know I prefer a rousing entertainment that manages to include enough substance to make one think. Of course, the impulse to talk down to an audience must be hard to ignore, as was demonstrated to me by Django‘s equivalent to the aforementioned Thaddeus Stevens scene, in which Samuel L. Jackson’s “house negro” character complains vociferously when former slave Django gets to stay in his master’s house. His line about having to burn the sheets Django slept in elicited a huge laugh from the packed theater I watched the movie in, which was kind of disturbing. Maybe there is some value in making sure the “correct” message comes across, or maybe that’s just my politically-correct 21st-century mindset in action. Really, it’s best not to worry about the possible misinterpretations of the less-enlightened and trust audiences to understand. That’s what I like about Tarantino (and often find tiresome with Spielberg): he’s not afraid to be misunderstood (unless it comes to character motivation, apparently), and I don’t think he cares if people find his films offensive. Would that I could be so unworried about people’s opinions.

 

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AbEx vs. Comics: Which Is More American?

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I’ve done a ton of post about Bart Beaty’s writing — but I think this will be the last. No promises though!

Anyway, I read Beaty’s book Frederic Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture recently. In general I found his argument quite convincing — that argument being that,

(a) Wertham was not a monster, and that his good works — such as providing clinical services in Harlem and providing key evidence to support Brown v Board of Education — more than outweighed his negative impact on the comic industry, and

(b) that negative impact has been seriously overstated anyway, and has been used as an excuse to neglect other more important reasons for comics decline — like television.

Anyway, as I said, Beaty largely convinced me. I was interested, though, in one paragraph towards the end of the book in which he is actually criticizing Wertham. Beaty says he disagrees with Wertham about the divide between high culture and low culture, and about the clear superiority of high culture. He argues that the privileging of high culture has hurt America — and he adds that “it is high culture that has most aggressively championed the conservative culture of individualism — often through the figure of the artistic “genius”— against more inclusive and progressive social possibilities.”

To back up this claim, Beaty says this:

It is no coincidence that at the time of the comic book controversy the Central Intelligence Agency was funding international touring exhibitions of American modernist art that had been championed by conservative critics such as Clement Greenberg and Dwight MacDonald. Art, the product of a individual creative expression, existed in the postwar period in opposition to mass cultural kitsch, and the celebration of art acted as a hegemonic force in American culture. Wertham did not recognize this fact, and consequently his writings played into the burgeoning ideology of individualism that he otherwise rejected.

Sounds reasonable. Except…well, I just recently read Justin Hart’s Empire of Ideas, about US efforts to influence foreign public opinion. I’ve got a forthcoming review of Hart’s book, so I’m not going to discuss it at any length here, but I did want to highlight a passage about the State Department’s support for abstract expressionism. As you’ll see, Hart’s take is pretty different from Beaty’s.

Stefan then flashed up slides of paintings from a well-reviewed, but highly abstract, show of modern art the State Department had put together for an international tour. “Mr. Benton, what is this?” Stefan barked out. “I can’t tell you,” Benton replied. Stefan continued: “I am putting it just about a foot from your eyes. Do you know what it is?” After Benton repeated that he would not even “hazard a guess of what that picture is,” Stefan scolded him: “You paid $700 for it and you can’t identify it.” Stefan closed his examination of Benton by quoting from a letter he had solicited from one of his constituents, a mural painter from Shelby, Nebraska. The artist from Shelby called the exhibit the “product of a tight little group in New York,” neither “sane” nor “American in spirit.” When Stefan asked Benton whether the exhibit depicted “America as it is,” Benton responded: “that was not the purpose of the art.”

Benton’s rejoinder entirely missed the most important point. The State Department, playing its role in supplementing private cultural exchanges and conversations, put together an art show to counteract what policymakers perceived as the contemptuous attitude of foreigners toward American culture. In so doing, they emphasized certain aspects of American art (abstract expressionism), while largely ignoring others (folk art and mural painting). Benton and his staff made a calculated, strategic judgment about how best to capitalize on American culture to
enhance the nation’s image, but this was an inherently political activity, subject to endless debate about who should speak for America and what they should say. In this particular case, Stefan had the last word when the House voted to slash all funds for public diplomacy from the State Department budget.”

For Beaty, high art was a conservative hegemonic discourse, supported by the US government, which contributed to the dominant American discourse of individualism. But Hart calls virtually all those assumptions into question. The US government did support AbEx — but it did so not to impose hegemony on the US, but rather to impress other nations. Moreover, it was attacked for so doing by conservatives, who successfully (hegemonically?) torpedoed future efforts in this direction. The reason they did so was precisely because of the discourse of individualism — to them, in fact, “individualism” of this sort seemed insane and foreign — or, if you will, un-American. The conservatives probably, Hart suggests, would have preferred folk art (though probably not mass culture art like comics.)

This doesn’t mean that Beaty is wrong, of course. Power and ideology are complicated things; there could easily have been contexts in which AbEx proponents were hegemonic, just as there are perspectives from which a classic liberal like Dwight MacDonald could be seen as conservative.

My point though is that, as I’ve mentioned before, I think Beaty — and comicdom in general, to the extent that there is such a thing — can overlook the extent to which relationship between comics and high art is not antagonistic, but parallel — or, rather, perhaps, the extent to which is it antagonistic because it is parallel.

That is, Beaty is certainly correct that AbEx enthusiastically promoted the ideal of individualism and the unique genius. But I think he misses the extent to which it promoted that ideology not out of untrammeled hegemonic power, but rather as a reaction to it’s own unstable and nervous position — an unstable and nervous position not that far divorced from comics’ own. The cult of individualism in AbEx is a way to justify the painting’s worth..and that justification was needed precisely because a lot of Americans viewed AbEx with a lot of suspicion. That suspicion was different in specifics than the suspicion directed at comics (i.e., arty farty nonsense vs. a danger to children) but I think you could argue that in many respects it was similar in structure and in effect.

If this is the case, Wertham’s assault on comics wasn’t because he failed to see the hegemonic power of high art. It was because he knew well that high art was not hegemonic. He was championing high art because he felt that it needed champions — and one way to so champion it was to point out its distance from bad art (just as comic strip creators distanced themselves from comic books.)

This discussion also, maybe, calls into question some of Beaty’s discussion of individualism. I actually agree that the cult of the genius is deployed against more inclusive social responsibilities in art. But it’s useful to realize that those more inclusive social responsibilities vary widely depending on where you’re looking. They could mean helping the poor and creating a more equitable society. But they could also mean — as just one for instance — a loud and intolerant xenophobia. Or they could mean denouncing homosexuals, which Wertham certainly did. Getting rid of the high/low binary doesn’t necessarily lead to progressive results, and it certainly wouldn’t necessarily lead to artists, high or low, throwing off hegemony, and/or hegemonies. Individualism shouldn’t be trusted, but social responsibility has its downsides as well.
 

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Painting attributed to Irv Novick

I’m OK, You’re Not There

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Self-help is about helping yourself to great whopping heaps of stuff . Money, wives, prestige, adoration, a perfect body to house your pristine ego — it’s all yours for the asking if you’ll just turn your frown inside out, let a smile be your bludgeon, and follow our twelve simple steps!

Or, if twelve steps seem too complicated, you can always go see Yes Man and learn how to do it in one. Carl (Jim Carey) is a sad, sad, and lonely guy; his wife Stephanie (Molly Sims) ditched him after six months, and he has responded by going fetal. He is stuck in a boring dead-end job at a bank, won’t answer his phone, barely leaves his house, and spends most nights at home watching rented DVDs by himself, too bored (we learn) to even masturbate. Finally, he admits he has a problem, and goes to a self-help revival meeting of the “Yes-Men” led by one Terrence Bundley (Terrence Stamp). Terrence claims that “when you say yes…you embrace the possible!” Armed with this singular, and indeed, single, philosophy, Carey heads off determined to say yes every time the opportunity presents itself . Soon he’s giving rides to homeless people, learning Korean, sucking up to his apocalyptically nerdy boss, approving dicey loans, and — most satisfyingly — canoodling with the yummy Alison (Zooey Deschanel) who looks (and indeed, in real life, actually is) about two decades younger than him. Who wouldn’t say yes to that?

Indeed, the whole Yes Man concept is charged with a kind of lobotomized libidinousness. Saying “yes” to everything allows Carl to absolve himself of all personal responsibility. By replacing his conscience with an arbitrary shibboleth, Carl escapes from Adam’s curse. He no longer knows good from evil; he now literally knows only what he says. Liberated from moral choice, he is invested with an irresistible prelapsarian glamour. He charms his immediate supervisor, Norm (Rhys Darby) by attending his Harry Potter costume parties; he charms his best friend’s fiancée by agreeing to host her bridal shower; he charms a jumper back from the ledge by leading the onlookers in a rousing singalong. Moroever, Carl’s newfound charisma has a definite erotic edge. Women in bars and in bridal stores swoon and giggle when he flirts, his toothless septuagenarian landlady neighbor gives him a surprisingly skillful blowjob; Alison falls seamlessly in love with him. Even his ex-wife wants to get back in his bed.

Of course, there are some downsides to the yes-man program. If you never say no, people are going to take advantage of you — and, indeed, Carl’s home is virtually taken over by the parasitic Rooney (Danny Masterton.) More importantly, abdicating personal responsibility isn’t much different than abandoning personhood altogether; Carl sets no boundaries on his self, and therefore, his self basically disappears. His appeal is that he is all things to all people — a nerd to Norm; a daring adventurer to Alison; a drinking buddy to his friend Peter (Bradley Cooper); and so forth. The effect is magical, but it’s neither trustworthy nor exactly human; and when Alison figures out what’s going on, she’s repulsed. “How do I know if anything you did was really true?” she asks him in horror before dumping his bony ass.

It is at this point that the movie really reveals its diabolical genius. Losing Alison makes Carl realize that saying “yes” is not in itself a sufficient philosophy. There’s something else…something missing. But what is it? Confused, he seeks out guru Terence again, who obligingly explains that he must continue to say yes…but only when he actually, really want to! “Yes” is simply a step along the way to the goal of a new, exciting, and fully functional self.

But what kind of functional self is this, anyway? Both Peter and Alison mock the “say yes because you really want to” philosophy as an over-obvious tautology — you need a guru to tell you that? When you start to think about it, though, the philosophy is far from obvious. In fact, it’s the opposite of obvious. It’s flat-out stupid. In the first place, there are some things you simply can’t afford to say yes to, no matter how much you want to — Carl and Alison have mysteriously bottomless reserves of cash with which to indulge their consumer flights of fancy, but that’s hardly true for everyone. And in the second place — well, you don’t have to be a Kantian to realize that even the more complicated Yes Man philosophy presents certain moral problems. Even if you really, really want to do so, there are many things you just shouldn’t say yes to — unprotected sex with a stranger, for example, or murdering your boss, or invading Iraq. It is possible to deeply desire to do things that are harmful to others. Because you’re not the only one in the world, you have an obligation not to fuck your neighbors over just because you feel like it.

Of course, Yes Man pretends that it is about reaching out; helping homeless people, organizing bridal showers for friends, being truthful with your lover. Saying “yes” is supposed to be a way to open yourself to life. In fact, though, the opposite is the case: it is not the universe which fills Carl, but Carl who fills the universe. There he is saving the jumper; there he is match-making; there he is on television at a football game; there he is climbing the corporate ladder, there he is romancing a woman who, by all normal standards, is a good bit out of his league. His inner drama, his healing, is the focus of the narrative, and everyone revolves around it. Carl starts out as a failed narcissist; he ends as a successful one.

This is perhaps most clear in the scene in which Carl’s ex-wife asks him to come to her house. She has just broken up with her lover, and is horribly distraught. Weeping, she comes on to Carl, asking him to stay the night. Trapped by his “yes” pledge, he almost agrees — but then he says “no”. Undoubtedly this is the right thing to do for both of them…but Carl doesn’t explain this, or try to comfort her, or show any especial sympathy for a woman who he claims to have loved. Instead, his voice, when he utters the crucial negative, is both triumphal and somewhat sneering. She made him suffer, and now he doesn’t need her.

Carl’s new self-confidence, his new self-identity, is, in other words, built on the most puerile kind of revenge fantasy. He gets to humiliate the woman who broke his heart. And, of course, the best part is that, once he’s free of her, she ceases to matter. We never see her again — she’s out of his life and now he can concentrate on what’s best for him and him alone. Her pain and sadness aren’t real, because nobody is real; they’re all just small cogs in the blandly improbable wish fulfillment that Carey and company have concocted. In this daydream, all that truly exists is Carl, the self he’s helped, and his own oblivious, ravenous chant — “yes, no, yes, no, yes, no” — spoken not to communicate with others, but to efface them.

Utilitarian Review 1/12/13

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On HU

I’m really pretty thrilled with everything we got to post this week on the blog. Just thought I’d mention that.

Featured Archive Post: Kinukitty on Joann Safar’s Le Petit Vampire.

I wrote on Nicki Minaj and the pros and cons of multiple personalities.

I wrote about Django Unchained and what black people know about violence in America.

Robert Stanley Martin with the first part of his massive reconsideration of Jim Shooter’s tenure as editor-in-chief at Marvel.

Charles Reece on Django Unchained and white folks watching black folks fight.

Katherine Wirick on Kent State, the docudrama, and the obscenity and allure of fiction as history.

Domingos Isabelinho on Fred’s Le Petit Cirque, with tons of gorgeous images from the comics.

Qiana Whitted on moral freedmen and dangerous slaves in Django Unchained.

 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I reviewed Alisa Valdes memoir The Feminist and The Cowboy, in which she talks about the joys of traditional gender roles.

Later in the week Valdes revealed that the cowboy had abused her, so I wrote a follow up piece.

Also at the Atlantic I wrote about how Jeffrey Eugenides’ advice to write like you’re dead is stupid.

At Splice Today I demand filibuster reform now!

Also at Splice I argue that writers should sometimes take no for an answer.
 
Other Links

James Romberger interviewed about his comic Post York.

James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook discuss their work on 7 Miles a Second, the comic they did with David Wojnarowicz which is being re-released by Fantagraphics.

Tucker Stone on the best comics of 2012.

Feministing on Dear Prudence and rape denial.

Amanda Marcotte on why a viral rape infographic is misleading.

A detailed and depressing explanation of why Congress sucks and will always suck.

Amanda Hess defends Zooey Deschenal.
 
This Week’s Reading

Finished The Feminist and The Cowboy. Also finished 50 Shades of Grey, thank god — possibly the worst 1600+ pages I have ever read in my life. Also read Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, which is pretty great.

Quentin Tarantino’s Slave on the Road; or, Josiah Henson Unchained

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The entire Django Unchained roundtable is here.
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Antebellum fugitive slaves were criminals according to the laws of their day. Their labor, their bodies, and any future that they might imagine belonged to the estates of the people who held the bill of sale. And so when enslaved black men and women wrote the stories of their escape in order to advocate for abolition, they took special care in persuading readers not only that the laws they had broken were unjust, but also that they had the moral strength to manage the freedom they had “stolen.” This is why when a Maryland slave named Josiah Henson, having been deceived by the master who vowed to manumit him, raised an axe above the head of his owner’s sleeping son, Henson stopped short of landing the fatal blow. In The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada (1849), he explains:

It was self-defence, — it was preventing others from murdering me, — it was justifiable, it was even praiseworthy. But now, all at once, the truth burst upon me that it was a crime. […] I was about to lose the fruit of all my efforts at self-improvement, the character I had acquired, and the peace of mind which had never deserted me. […] I shrunk back, laid down the axe, crept up on deck again, and thanked God, as I have done every day since, that I had not committed murder. (42-43)

Scenes such as this constitute a fairly common trope in the slave narrative genre, one that literary critic Raymond Hedin described as the slave on the road. These moments, however accurately conveyed, were deployed in abolitionist narratives to refute the notion that without constant supervision, black people would succumb to so-called baser instincts that could turn “a pleasant-tempered fellow, into a savage, morose, dangerous slave” (Henson 41). Fugitive slaves responded by calling attention to the times in which they were out of the watchful eyes of their masters, or in a situation in which a white person was particularly vulnerable – in these instances, the enslaved would demonstrate their self-control and virtuous character by adhering to a higher standard of behavior. Henson, the man whom Harriet Beecher Stowe once tried to credit as one of the inspirations for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, presented himself as a man who held to an especially strict moral code. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Henson would have been able to free himself or his family if he hadn’t eventually broken the law.

I thought about Josiah Henson when I watched the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s film, Django Unchained. The white bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz, has forcibly purchased (rescued?) Django after a shoot out with the Speck brothers, the two slave traders transporting him. With one of the brothers killed and another trapped under his horse, Schultz turns to the small group of enslaved black men that had been chained to Django just minutes before and tosses them the keys to their leg irons:

SCHULTZ: “So as I see it, when it comes to the subject of what to do next, you gentlemen have two choices. One, once I’m gone, you lift that beast off the remaining Speck, then carry him to the nearest town. Which would be at least thirty-seven miles back the way you came. Or…two, you unshackle yourselves, take that rifle over there…put a bullet in his head, bury the two of them deep, and make your way to a more enlightened area of the country. The choice is yours.”

Hearing this, the slave trader under the horse curses the approaching group of newly freed men and then begs for his life as they stand over him in silence. When the rifle shot sounds, a sudden spray of blood and flesh explodes from his head and the scene ends.

“The choice is yours.” With the bounty hunter’s words, Tarantino’s film enters into a larger conversation about race, representation, and the negotiations of moral responsibility that has as much to do with affirming Henson’s decision to set aside his axe as it does with celebrating a kind of vengeful catharsis that is without consequence. The film reminds us that in the slave’s narrative, honor was also a bounty to be hunted; the accounts of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Bibb, and others were strategic and deliberative “fictions of factual representation,” as scholar William Andrews put it, even if they were not as brutally self-serving as Django.

In other words, Django Unchained may be a Blaxploitation Western film (by way of Oscar Michaeux as Brian persuasively argues), but it is also reimagines the slave on the road narrative in a way that favors a highly individualistic sense of honor and responsiveness over collective survival. “Each man to his own Canada,” to quote Raven Quickskill, Ishamel Reed’s fugitive slave-poet. I actually found the postmodern satire in Django Unchained to be as satisfyingly irreverent as Reed’s novels, yet Schultz’s “two choices” – made explicit here and implied repeatedly throughout the film – pose a more interesting question for me about exactly what need Tarantino’s revenge fantasy is meant to satisfy.

(Of this opening scene, it is worth noting that Vertigo’s comic book adaptation of Django Unchained does not end in the same fashion. It closes with the group of black men in deliberation, unlocked chains at their feet, while the Speck brother’s wide blue eyes await their decision. Much of the film’s bloodshed is minimized in the first issue of the serial that is based on Tarantino’s original screenplay with art by R.M. Guéra and Jason Latour. Whether or not the rest of the story will take the same visual risks as a comic like Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner remains to be seen.)

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But we can only go so far with an apples-to-apples comparison of Django and Nat Turner, or Josiah Henson for that matter. Django expresses qualms during his work with Schultz about killing a man in front of his child, while in a different context he maintains his grim disguise when one of Calvin Candie’s “Mandingo” fighters is torn apart by dogs. In the early scenes if Django appears to act recklessly or in anger, his white partner’s arrest warrants are there to protect him from the repercussions of these emotions. Still Django never forgets that he is on the road – or that his humanity is commodified by the color of his skin – and in return for his resolve, he and Broomhilda live to see her master’s house burn to the ground.  Of course, it may sound too good to be true (and one of the more useful reviews of the film assures us that it is) and what happens after the credits roll is unclear to say the least. But as with the cultural analysis of texts like William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, I am curious about what Django’s choices reveal about us and the moment in which we live.

I wonder, for instance, what to make of the fact that this controversial, and now Oscar-nominated, blockbuster film comes at the close of President Obama’s first term in office. Once praised for his even-tempered composure and open-mindedness, Barack Obama’s cool disposition has been relentlessly scrutinized for the past four years, notably during his intense presidential campaign in 2008, in the aftermath of the BP oil spill (“One time, go off!” pleaded Spike Lee), and more recently during his debates with Mitt Romney in 2012. Progressives cringe as members of Congress and the press pool cut him off or when an attention-seeking politician jabs a finger in his face – “Have you thought about getting angrier?” Keith Olbermann once asked. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates astutely notes,
 

 …Politicized rage has marked the opposition to Obama. But the rules of our racial politics require that Obama never respond in like fashion. So frightening is the prospect of black rage given voice and power that when Obama was a freshman senator, he was asked, on national television, to denounce the rage of Harry Belafonte. This fear continued with demands that he keep his distance from Louis Farrakhan and culminated with Reverend Wright and a presidency that must never betray any sign of rage toward its white opposition. Thus the myth of “twice as good” that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—­enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors.

 
Every insult and public outrage is now accompanied by pleas for President Obama to get angrier, drop the Spock routine and act on his emotion; in other words, to make a different choice. Not to overstate the similarities (and I’m sure I’m not the only one to make this connection), but Tarantino’s film seems crafted to elicit the same urge from his audience as Django’s makes his labyrinthine journey into “Candieland.” When Broomhilda’s bill of sale has been transferred and Django stands at the brink of a precarious future that, however fragile, is his own – it is the bounty hunter who decides what comes next. Schultz, after repeatedly advising caution to keep Django in control, is the one who ultimately determines that the collective cost of allowing the slave master to live is too high. Authorized, then, by this impetuous act and driven by the fear of losing his wife, Django steps onto the road and becomes the “dangerous slave” whose Canada is a plantation house splattered with blood.

I enjoyed the film. Though as I watched, I must admit that I found myself wishing that Django had been the one to confront Candie first. None of the carnage that follows means much without his agency in that moment. The fact that he doesn’t pull the trigger says a lot, I think, about the choices that continue to guide our understanding of race, power, and moral responsibility on the road today.

Jamie Fox in Django Unchained

Monthly Stumblings # 19: Fred

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Le petit cirque (the little circus) by Fred.

Fred is the nom de plume and the nom the pinceau of Frédéric Othon Theodore Aristidès. You may have heard about him because of Pilote magazine and his most famous series, “Philemon” (or Philemon if we are talking about the albums). Before that though, Fred had a career behind him as a single-panel gag cartoonist and an absurdist comics artist in the pages of several magazines (the Mad inspired Hara-Kiri especially). It was in said mag that Fred published (from issue # 38, April 1964, until issue # 64, June 1966) his masterpiece “Le petit cirque” (or Le petit cirque if we’re talking about the 1973, 1997 and 2012 album editions). The series, in short episodes of two pages each (with the exception of the first three pages), was also reprinted in Pilote magazine (it appeared in twenty eight issues from # 701, April 1973, until # 741, January 1974).

In 2012 an important retrospective of Fred’s work, Le petit cirque included, was shown at the Angoulême comics convention in France (at the Hôtel Saint-Simon, to be exact). To celebrate the occasion Dargaud published a new remastered edition of Le petit cirque directly shot from the existing original art (which means that pages # 8, 9, 26, 27, 36, 37 – three episodes – didn’t receive the same treatment as the rest of the book; there’s no discernible difference between those pages and all the others though; the editors didn’t explain why this is so). Now I’m waiting for a new edition of Le journal de Jules Renard Lu Par Fred (Jules Renard’s journal read by Fred) with the original page layouts recovered. I hope that someone at Flammarion reads my appeal.

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Panel from page 53 of the 1997 edition of Le petit cirque by Fred.

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The same panel as above from page 51 of the 2012 edition.

Fred himself said, remembering the series’ first album edition in 1973:

I was pleasantly surprised that time! When we took the pages out of the portfolio to print the album, we realized that the original art had yellowed. Time yellows everything, even the mementos hidden in the bottom of a suitcase. Gray had become sepia which added a melancholia of sorts. I love those atmospheres.

As we can see above the 1997 edition reproduced the sepia tones. The lines are far from crisp though and many wash details were lost to resurface in the 2012 edition only. The latter’s matte paper retains some of the beige flavor that pleased Fred. Since Le petit cirque is a comics masterpiece I would say that this edition is one of last year’s most important comics related events. Unfortunately it passed virtually unnoticed.

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The first two tiers of the first page of the series as it appeared in Hara-Kiri # 38, April 1964.

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The same tiers published in the albums (in this case, the 2012 edition). As we can see the logo and the episode titles, when they existed, disappeared.

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The first two panels of episode two (three in the albums) as published originally in Hara-Kiri # 39, May 1964.

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The same panels as published in the 2012 album edition. The logo and episode title were removed, a paper and pencil texture was added (notice the glue smears captured by the photogravure).

We can find the prehistory of Le petit cirque in a couple of circus related cartoon gags, but we can also find it in a series of strange, imaginative professions created by Fred for Hara-Kiri: the knitter of savage balls; the bearded seller of cotton candy (barbe à papa); the representative of holes; the countryside licker of stamps; the celery grinder; the mirror fixer… In one of his “little jobs” Fred created the human time bomb. That’s where the little circus really started: it was destined to be the album’s second episode.

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The little jobs: the countryside licker of stamps. Notice the Fredian twiggy tree and the wind.  Hara-Kiri # 23, December 1962.

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The first half of “L’audition”‘s first page (the audition) with the human cannonball (the human time bomb appears in the page’s second half), Hara-Kiri # 37, March 1964. The little circus before the little circus: it is right there in the second panel.

But we may find the true origins of the little circus not only in time, but also in space, in what Fred calls Constantinople (aka Istanbul). Both of Fred’s parents were Greek living in Turkey when WWI raged on and the war between the two countries was declared in 1919. They both emigrated to meet each other in Paris where Fred was born in 1931.

Fred, again:

It was the first time that I did something solid and everything happened naturally, the ideas, the emotions. Maybe because it’s the story of people without roots, like my parents. After leaving Constantinople they traveled a lot too and it was my father who inspired me to create Léopold. […] The Carmen of Le petit cirque is dark-haired and thin while my mother had brown hair and was rather plumpish, but she inspired me nonetheless.

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The family that inspired Le petit cirque: from left to right: Eleni (Carmen), Yanis (Léopold), and little Fred (who, in the album, has no name); Trouville, 1930s.

Fred’s iconography is very personal and explains the strange poetical power of Le petit cirque: the wind, the leafless trees, the circus, the peasants, the authorities, the mirror, the landscape, the city, etc… Apart from that what’s great about Le petit cirque is its rhetorical complexity.

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Le petit cirque, page 11 of the 2012 edition.

The above page gives the readers one of the keys to read Le petit cirque: the rhetorical reversal of the situations (the daily life of a patriarchal Mediterranean family is shown as circus acts). Another key is what I called, in Monthly Stumblings # 16, the interpenetration rhetorical mode: two distant spaces meet in a third space where both may co-exist at the same time (more about that later). The last panel shows Fred’s leafless trees with the wind blowing strongly from left to right expelling both the reader – the author too in a nostalgic statement about his childhood? – and the character out of the page (the sudden change of point of view from panel five to panel six shows that it’s time to leave already). The overall atmosphere is scrawny and uncomfortable. The vanishing point in the last panel focus Carmen pulling the circus caravan (Fred explained the metaphor: “the caravan symbolizes the family and the head of the family is the wife”; needless to say that this doesn’t convince me at all…). Notice how the horizon line gets lower and lower until we see a towering caravan getting out of reach. On pages 58 and 59 outraged peasants want to argue with Léopold and Carmen, but are overwhelmed when they find out that the caravan, despite its modest exterior appearance, is in reality a palace (not unlike Snoopy’s doghouse). This, of course, is an hyperbole showing Fred’s huge respect for his creatures.

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Carmen discovers the violin tree in page 36 of the 2012 edition.

The violin tree is just one of the interpenetrations that I mentioned above. Others link circus people with animals (a clown is a rooster, etc…). The violin tree is the hope and the means to fulfill one’s dreams. The problem is that Léopold, after picking one of the violins from the tree, breaks a string interrupting the process: the family is doomed never to improve their situation no matter how hard they try.

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The first two panels of page 18 of Le petit cirque‘s 2012 edition. To the circus family the city is a menacing, blocky, empty space. Fritz Lang’s expressionist Metropolis isn’t far; an hyperbole, again.

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Le petit cirque: second and third tiers of page 48 of the 2012 edition.

In the image above Carmen deflates an overblown bourgeois. The stereotype is a bit blunt, to say the least, but there’s an interesting catch in the sequence: the relation between iconic and verbal expression. Fred puts an idea usually uttered in words (“she deflated him”) into drawings. Something that isn’t that usual in comics. The same thing happens in the rooster/clown interpenetration mentioned above: the clown is visually a clown; we only know that it is in reality a rooster because of what the characters say about him.

I could go on doing close readings of all the episodes of Le petit cirque (like the one in which Léopold and Carmen offer a wheelchair to their son and break his leg in order for him to enjoy his present – which he does, of course), but the above is enough, I guess…

In conclusion: the circus family wanders aimlessly in an inhospitable landscape, is harassed and hated by almost everybody else and they suffer setback after setback, but they continue their journey because they have to, winning a few small victories along the way… We only get to the sense of it all though after decoding the logic of the book which is the nonlinear, oblique logic of dreams.

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Fred sets his little creatures in motion; second tier of Le petit cirque’s 2012’s edition’s last page. Another narrative device: self-referentiality.

Kent State — The Movie

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In 1981, NBC aired Kent State, a two-hour dramatization of the May 4th shooting at Kent State University. Although it won an Emmy for Outstanding Directing in a Limited Series or a Special, the film is out of print; the easiest way to see it is to watch the poor-quality copy uploaded to the Internet by the film’s own historical consultant.
 

nbc_kentstate

 
Two years later, four communications professors at Kent State published the results of their study of the film’s effect on faculty, staff, and students. The faculty and staff they surveyed had been present at the university in 1970, but the students had not. The study asked whether viewers perceived docudramas as fact or fiction, and the authors seem to have been surprised by their results:

The students presently at Kent State can scarcely be said to represent a completely uninformed audience. There are symbolic reminders of the event on campus and, far from being forgotten, there is a commemorative ceremony held annually which receives media coverage. For these reasons it would be logical to assume that Kent State students are an informed and therefore critical audience, lacking only firsthand knowledge. Yet, the students used in this study found the Kent State docudrama to be highly believable despite their critical advantage over a completely nai?ve audience. One student said that the film “made the events real.”

This is the perfect simulacrum. People who park their cars on the blacktop where bodies fell require a re-presentation of those deaths, performed ten years after the fact, on a different campus, by no one who was there, in order to be moved.

I watched Kent State, partly as research for my own work but mostly out of curiosity. As a film, it’s just not very good, which may be fortunate; if it functioned effectively as entertainment, if it were skillful and engaging, it might be more obscene than it is.

In the classic sense of obscenity, it exploits the sex lives, real and imagined, of the dead students; Allison Krause lounges in her boyfriend’s shirt and nothing else, sorority girls fall into Bill Schroeder’s lap. Historical consultant J. Gregory Payne wrote about the development of the project, “According to my NBC informants, network programmers felt the screenplay was too political. Apparently the NBC executives preferred a more human focus and had considered developing a romantic theme between some of the principal characters.”

More obscene, to me, is the leaden dialogue. Sandy Scheuer (Talia Balsam) tells another student, “I care about helping people, and my family, and my friends, and grilled cheese sandwiches.” What would be a tolerable, though clumsy, bit of shorthand if it were used to mark the boundaries of a fictional character seems like an injustice when it recreates someone who was real and is dead. It’s not that I believe real people should never be the subject of fiction—I am an eager audience for art that plays with history; but most of the time the historical figures concerned have already left behind a substantial record of their presence in the world. Shakespeare in Love does nothing to diminish Shakespeare while King Lear is still in print, and it matters very little whether the Siegfried Sassoon who appears in Regeneration is strictly accurate when anyone can read Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and know Sassoon as he wished to be known. However, the students of May 4, who were all between nineteen and twenty when they died, are unable to speak for themselves now. Bill Schroeder was a nice kid, an athlete, a Stones fan; he had little time to be anything else.

Worst of the movie’s sins is the contrived dramatic irony that loads almost every line the four students speak: “Big stuff happens and it’s never where you are,” says Jeff Miller (Keith Gordon). It makes the deaths seem prefigured, when the twin tragedies of Kent State were that no one—save the members of Black United Students, who did not attend the Monday demonstration—expected that the Guard would carry live ammunition, and that no one expected Miller, Krause, Scheuer and Schroeder to be the ones to die. The screenplay’s sense of irony brings a false order to the workings of chaos.

The film, though it offers color, motion and sound, is less alive than black-and-white photographs of Allison Krause laughing or Bill Schroeder playing basketball—except for two scenes, both of which get an assist from pop culture contemporary to the shooting. The first is the National Guard rolling into Kent as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio” plays; the second is a young Guardsman resting in a troop transport and playing the Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band” on an acoustic guitar.

The Dead started playing “Uncle John’s Band” live in late 1969, and released it on Workingman’s Dead in June 1970. It is a fantasy of unification, buoyed by three voices in close harmony. By this time the band had been through a traumatic experience at the Altamont speedway: “It was like a nice afternoon in hell,” Jerry Garcia said later. Along with the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, the first two albums by the Band and the work of Gram Parsons, Workingman’s Dead was part of the country rock movement, an attempt to return to the womb of American folk culture. Coming as it did mostly from people who had only a few years earlier attempted to set themselves apart from America in the most dramatic way, this movement could be called a retreat. Considering that they were required to rebuild by hand the America in which they hoped to find a place, you could also call it courageous.

On record “Uncle John’s Band” fulfills itself: the three voices ask for a homecoming and create one as they reach for the chorus. In Kent State, there is only one voice, a small one, and one tinny guitar. The singer is fresh-faced and young, innocent-looking; now he calls softly for a joining of hands, but in less than twenty-four hours he’ll be looking out at the students from behind a gas mask and a gun. Without harmony the song’s requests—Will you come with me? Won’t you come with me?—lose strength and falter, too fragile for their circumstances. People bring pop culture into their lives and invest it with meaning, whether or not it is strong enough to hold up the weight. The night before I wrote this essay, I learned that my father had cancer. I sat in my studio the next day, under his army jacket, and watched the rain fall on Broad Street while “Uncle John’s Band” played, and then I hid my face in my hands.

God damn, well, I declare—have you seen the like?

A more startling intersection between pop and power occurs two scenes earlier. The ROTC building has just caught fire, an event the film does not depict accurately; it shows a group of students lighting the building, then cheering as it burns, when in fact, as my father and many other eyewitnesses have recalled, the students made multiple attempts over the course of roughly twenty minutes to set fire to the building but failed, and had long since wandered away when it exploded into flames.

As the building burns, Professor Glenn Frank (Michael Higgins) says to Professor Ted Arnold (John Getz), “I look at that old pile of burning junk, and all I can see is my old man. And his old man before him, and the grandchildren I don’t have yet. And I wonder what the hell on this earth really matters.” Frank was a real person, a geology professor who saved students’ lives on May 4 by standing between them and the Guard, but this is no real human language; the words assume the shape of profundity but contain nothing. They back away from the building. An assembled crowd of students claps anemically and sings, “Come on baby, light my fire.” The words fade away but the clapping continues. Then it gives way to a low rumble; students and professors turn their heads, there are shots of headlights and huge wheels, and then, as the film cuts to a Dutch-angled shot of a troop transport approaching on the road, we hear the riff that opens “Ohio.”

This is a story my father told me: Gary Lazaroff, one of his college friends, worked at Cleveland’s Gund Arena in the mid-‘70s, and when CSNY passed through on their reunion tour, one of them told him how “Ohio” came to be written. On the fourth of May, Crosby, Stills and Nash were in the process of sobering up from their previous evening’s high when Neil Young appeared. Earlier in the day, he had heard the news from Kent, and had gone out and walked the streets alone, weeping.

I grew up with the song. My father had the So Far LP, and he used to play it every year on the fourth, until the turntable broke and the speakers stopped working. Long before I found out what it meant, it was the sound of a wound, something unresolved, that riff like clenched teeth. At the end of each verse the voices marked out every syllable in the name of the place where I lived: O-hi-o.

The shot goes on for a full minute, as the first transport drives toward us and out of the frame, followed by another, and another, and another. The glare from their headlights blurs the Guardsmen’s faces; astride their Jeeps they look mass-produced. The vehicles seem oversized, out of scale, the embodied will and power of the state. This scene cracks the film’s fac?ade of artificial realism; real life doesn’t have nondiegetic sound, and “Ohio” wasn’t recorded until thirteen days after the Guard arrived in Kent. The effect is conspicuously cinematic, yet nothing else in the film feels as “real.” “In a world that really has been turned on its head,” Guy Debord once wrote, “truth is a moment of falsehood.”

In the end Kent State offered neither a sufficiently comforting myth nor a pleasurable enough spectacle to consume the events that inspired it, as Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation consumed Reconstruction. It produced no image more powerful than John Filo’s photograph of Mary Vecchio with her arms outstretched, and no real lasting effect. The damage it did was minimal. It might even have done some good: if a few channel-surfers happened to learn Sandy Scheuer’s name, if Allison Krause became, for a moment, “real” to a student in the Kent State communications program, that doesn’t make up for the years they should have lived, but it’s better, arguably, than being forgotten.

Still, I hate Kent State, for its inaccuracies, its obscenities and its failures; I hate to look at it and yet I want to. I want to confuse the simulacrum with reality, because I know the simulacrum isn’t bound by reality’s rules. The film does not depict the classroom where Bill Schroeder and Dave Wirick sat side by side that Monday morning, but as the students assemble on the Commons I begin to look for my father in the crowds. Again and again I’m drawn in by the promise of fiction—the hope that, this time, the invisible storyteller might change the story.