A writer named Alexander left this comment on Erica Friedman’s post about Sailor Moon. I thought I’d reprint it here.
Sailor Moon, for me, really gave me the foundation to learn how to be strong as I got older. As a transgender male, it was extremely difficult to come to terms with who I was and stop trying to force myself into believing that my body made me a girl despite the sinking feeling that it was all wrong, and I doubt I ever would have come to accept myself as quickly as I did (though it did take years), had I not had the values of believing in oneself, staying strong, and speaking out for what was right embedded in my heart by this beloved series, a series who also offered a collection of strong, brave mentors and role models. All of the characters breaking through the typical gender binaries really encouraged me in a time I couldn’t find it in myself to accept who I was or what I was going through. Sailor Moon also helped me significantly in dealing with others’ perception of me due to the fact that my boyfriend of two years (and best friend of six) are both transgender males and ridiculed for it on both sides(those who think we’re in a lesbian relationship, those who realize we’re both guys in a relationship.) Characters like Uranus (who, as a transman, I looked up to enormously growing up and felt my heart glow for when Neptune said in a scene in the manga that Uranus shared both male and female traits) and Neptune who, though oppressed by censorship and paranoid parental figures, loved so fearlessly and beautifully that it was impossible not to see its depth, characters like FishEye, who, though he or she was often rejected or taunted, continued to dream and aspire and express them self, characters like the Starlights, who broke all rules in regards gender, particularly during the anime (though manga Seiya will always be dear to my heart)… They were all characters who reflected aspects of who I was that I would never be able to accept in myself, but who allowed me to accept and even respect through their brilliance and inspiration. There we also the others. Hotaru, who, though abused, mistreated, and abandoned by so many for her differences, continued to strive to be a good person and to love. Minako, the leader who struggled to live up to the pedestal she had been placed on by her duty to her princess and friends. Rei, whose fierce personality taught me that it was alright to actually speak up for yourself. Makoto, who was often misjudged and seen as a bad person due to childish rumors and misunderstandings, and yet never fell into the persona others had attached to her. Ami, whose quiet demeanor often left her to toil with her emotions and insecurities alone, and yet made her mature. Setsuna, who saw the possibility of doom ever-present on the horizon, and yet continued onward with hope for a better tomorrow. Chibiusa, whose innocence never faltered, and whose love was unconditional and everlasting, even when bittersweet. The Amazon Quartet, whose wish to hold on to their childhood and fear for what dangers becoming an adult held for them led them into darkness in the anime, and finally, Usagi, whose love was never severed by hate or rage, who fought for all, even if it meant her own suffering or even death, whose experiences made her even warmer rather than bitter, who held no bias in her heart even for those who had wronged her, and who taught me that being mature didn’t mean letting go of your inner child. Honestly, I can go on and on, but I know I’m talking too much. My point is that I truly do believe that Sailor Moon played a significant role in making me who I am today, and without it, I’d probably be pretty lost. I love Sailor Moon. I am a transguy, and I am not afraid nor ashamed to proclaim that.
Two hours away from my apartment is a merchant that sells Tamil & Telugu-language movies on dvd. Here are a few of them.
***
WHAT CAN WE GUESS THE FILM IS… JOG?
Yes?
WHY IS IT WE’RE ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT BOLLYWOOD MOVIES IN COMPARISON TO “SOUTH” FILM?
Well, you see–
I MEAN, WHAT THE FUCK DOES “SOUTH” EVEN MEAN? ISN’T MUMBAI, LIKE, GEOGRAPHICALLY SOUTH OF PARTS OF ANDHRA PRADESH? I CHECKED WIKIPEDIA.
True, yes, but Hyderabad, which is the center of Telugu-language–
AND ISN’T A WHITE AMERICAN’S CONTINUED FOCUS ON HINDI-LANGUAGE POPULAR CINEMA AS UNIQUELY (AND, GIVEN YOUR SNIDE “NEO-MASALA” LABEL, I DARESAY DELETERIOUSLY) ALTERED BY THE FINANCIAL SUCCESSES OF THE TAMIL AND TELUGU-LANGUAGE INDUSTRIES A DECONTEXTUALIZED AFFECTATION OF INDIAN-DOMESTIC ‘COSMOPOLITAN’ BIASES IN — AT BEST — THE CACK-HANDED SPIRIT OF CULTURAL TOURISM, IF NOT OVERTLY A COLONIALIST INCURSION INTO ZONES OF RESISTANCE TO GLOBALIZED SPECTACLE?
Oh no, you’ve been visiting that anarchist bookstore again. Did you steal my credit card?
YES.
Okay, listen: I agree with the words up above that happened to make sense, but –
What you see here is not the extent of the “South” industries’ popular vigor. “Neo-masala,” as I have dubbed it — which is to say, Hindi-language (Bollywood) films either remade from or heavily inspired by Tamil or Telugu-language (South) movies, in pursuit of an old-fashioned populist blend of multi-genred entertainment fronted by macho, swaggering superstar Heroes, albeit via a halfway self-aware narrative apparatus — is arguably on the wane. Or, such is the fear of Mumbai in this early May of a cashed-strapped 2013, which has seen precisely one Rs. 100 crore worldwide grosser (January’s Race 2, the latest contraption from action-suspense specialists Abbas & Mustan Burmawalla) and, more pertinently, the first bona fide fiasco of the neo-masala wave: Sajid Khan’s Himmatwala.
In retrospect, it was embarrassingly easy to root for this to happen. Khan is the brother of delightfully prickly A-list director/choreographer/actress/gadfly Farah Khan (mentioned last time), but generally lacks his sibling’s beguiling approach to oddball throwback cine-pop. Rather, he is a professional vulgarian in the Brett Ratner mold, so dismissive of the pretension inherent to ‘art’ in motion pictures that certain promotions for his latest refused to even refer to the product as a ‘movie.’ It was an “entertainer”: four syllables and two beckoning palms raised toward the critics and aesthetes who’d derided hispriortrio of shrill, wildly derivative comedy blockbusters. And they were all blockbusters, successful to the point that Khan boastedHimmatwala would cross Rs. 100 crore in one week flat.
It did not make half of that in its entire theatrical run. Indeed, it just barely recouped its Rs. 40 crore production costs, which is shockingly bad for a high-profile film dropped without competition into a cherry Easter holiday weekend. Ironically, it’s not really *that* poor a film; a remake of a 1983 Hindi remake of a 1981 Telugu blockbuster, the project rather cleverly nods toward “South” influence as a cyclical thing, while swapping out some of the original’s mercy-for-the-poor thematics for a surprisingly hard-stated feminism, commenting explicitly on December’s notorious Delhi rape case, while couching issues of dowry and spousal abuse in a period context that underlines how such issues linger in contemporary India.
The problem, however, is that Khan is ultimately the sort of populist who, in denouncing the lie of ‘art,’ has neglected the value of craft; this is no longer a pure comedy, it is masala, and you do actually need a practitioner’s respect for basic cinematic values to put together engaging action scenes. So much of Himmatwala, though, is goofy and half-assed – almost defiant in its negligence toward the development of dramatic stakes on the macro and in-scene levels. No wonder the public shrugged.
***
SO, ARE YOU SAYING THE NEO-MASALA TREND IS FINISHED?
Oh god no, not as long as Salman Khan‘s around to kick the corpse. But even setting him aside, there’s signs that the trend may be developing a more trans-Indian outlook. Witness the latest from Bollywood director Apoorva Lakhia: Zanjeer/Thoofan, which has been shot once in Hindi (“Zanjeer”) and once in Telugu (“Thoofan”), with slight changes to the supporting cast in each. The Hindi title evokes one of Amitabh Bachchan’s most beloved ’70s vehicles, but the style is purely today’s:
In summary, that’s Telugu semi-star Ram Charan Teja as a hero cop who beats the shit out of the Oil Mafia when not lighting desks on fire and outrunning floods. He is joined by perpetually overcompensating Hindi glamorpuss/former Miss World Priyanka Chopra drawing an outline around her boobs, doubtlessly in formulation of an allegory for the tasks given to heroines in these types of films. Plus: Prakash Raj, rolling in like a total asshole with a SOUL PATCH and a WHITE FEDORA. When the fuck is Quentin Tarantino or Nicolas Winding Refn gonna discover this guy? Not that he needs western approval – he’s been in over 9,000 movies, cycling through the same three or four roles every time, and he’s *always* great. I’m also told the Hindi version will boast the presence of Sanjay Dutt — basically a living Frank Miller protagonist who happens to be a movie star — captured in the sweaty weeks prior to resuming a prison sentence for possession of illegal arms, so, all and all, I’d call this an “entertainer.”
***
WAIT, ARE TELUGU AUDIENCES ACTUALLY GOING TO WATCH THIS?
Eh, maybe not. Hybrid projects rarely see a lot of success; there’s some pretty sharp divisions in what audiences from different regions of India prefer to see.
I mean, what I call “neo-masala” movies in Bollywood parlance are basically just ‘really popular movies’ among Telugu audiences. And don’t think for a second that said audiences aren’t aware of the cabinets into which their films are willingly placed; sometimes, tongue-in-cheek viewer discretion warnings are issued for A-listers stepping outside their comfort zones:
Obviously there’s *some* variety among all the films that see release — just under 100 feature-length Telugu-language originals appeared in 2012 alone! — but the big-ticket items tend to hew to such a rigid action-comedy-romance-dancing formula you can watch them without subtitles and basically grasp what’s going on. It’s like attending opera. Just the other week my local Indian movie-friendly multiplex was among the 108 screens in the territorial United States to screen the spanking-new Baadshah, allegedly the most expensive Telugu production in history: Rs. 55 crore, or just over 10 million USD.
(I dunno how it got that expensive. Perhaps it was the on-location schedules in Milan and Bangkok. Or maybe it was star player N.T. Rama Rao Jr.’s lavish introductory title card, which sees his face reflected in glittering diamonds which are then fired, with some virility, out of a gleaming chrome pistol.)
Anyway, the movie was completely untranslated, and I didn’t care. You can set your watch by how routinely the songs and fights and laughs appear, with even the very mise-en-scène of director Srinu Vaitla shifting from Tony Scott by way of the CSI opening titles to a blazing front-lit ultra-color sitcom sheen to signal the switchover from one tonal track to another. I personally found myself looking forward to the musical bits, since NTR is a damn fine dancer, and — stereotypes aside — there aren’t actually very many of those in Indian pop film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgIj7V4v90w
The film is looking to be a gigantic hit, supposedly making a run at the U.S. box office top ten on its opening night, which is a first for a Telugu picture, and… hell, possibly a first for a movie that’s straight-up not in English.
***
OKAY, THAT’S ALL VERY NICE, BUT IS SOMETHING SO SEVERELY FORMULAIC REALLY THE BEST THE “SOUTH” INDUSTRIES HAVE TO OFFER?
Oh, no no no, disembodied all-caps narrative device. Clearly, some education is necessary as to my personal favorite species of South cinema: the Batshit Insane Sci-Fi Spectacular!
Anyone will tell you that huge-budgeted Hollywood fantasy/sci-fi releases make back a good deal of their costs these days in overseas markets. It’s natural, then, to expect that bustling international film industries would produce their own like-minded pictures in response. Bollywood, however, has proven remarkably ineffective in this particular area of film production.
The first 21st century attempt to tap into this market was actually a throwback: 2003’s Koi… Mil Gaya, which recalled nothing so much as the 1980s wave of international E.T. the Extra-Terrestrialrip–offs (though, to be fair, E.T. itself drew much alleged influence from a script by Indian master Satyajit Ray). The film was a big success, though, and spawned a fantastically cheesy 2006 sequel in Krrish, a full-blown superhero(!) movie crafted in seeming homage to Mort Weisinger-era Superman stories in which the titular dickhead plays sadistic games with Lois to preserve his secret identity. This was also a big hit, and a new entry in the series is now scheduled for later this year.
Still, successful as they were, for every Krrish there were money pit losers like Drona (a calamitous attempt at a Bruckheimeresque family SFX blockbuster) and Love Story 2050 (sort of like the android bits of Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 crossed with the teddy bear parts of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, if everything was unbelievably fucking stupid). And the king of the chasm — rhetorically speaking, at least — can only be Shah Rukh Khan’s 2011 gaming culture kids’ movie-cum-vanity project gone haywire Ra.One, a 3-D bonanza I saw on an especially packed opening night, due to every first-day afternoon show having been cancelled because the 3-D post-conversion hadn’t been finished in time. By the interval, people were shouting catcalls at the screen, and every would-be dramatic moment in the second half was met with scattered laughter and disbelieving whispers.
Ra.One is nonetheless among the highest-grossing films in Bollywood history. It had to be; the ad campaign was truly excellent. It is the quintessential Blockbuster that Nobody Liked, lacking the lasting kick of renown that marks a true popular classic – to say nothing of any prayer for cultural penetration outside of India. No, for that, we must turn our attentions southward, geographically South, to Tamil Nadu: the home of a true Superstar.
***
Enthiran
Directed by Shanmugam Shankar, 2010
I trust you’ve seen this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yBnl_krN_U
If viral recognition is the last surviving measure of success decoupled from the roaring engine of global capital, then Shivaji Rao Gaikwad, aka “Rajinikanth”… no, Superstar Rajinikanth, has brought down the thunder twice. BEHOLD:
That’s right. On the boombox: same guy.
I don’t know if it says something about Indian popular cinema’s embrace of artifice and theatricality (and the modular construction of the popular cinema itself) that the biggest worldwide video memes struck from the stuff tend to come from super-popular entertainers working their craft straightforwardly — “Benny Lava” (Prabhu Deva) is also a crazy-successful dancer, choreographer and filmmaker — but we’re definitely far enough along now online that the ‘internet popularity’ of certain Indian films can trickle into the more sealed corridors of media discussion. Enthiran, from which the crazy highway robot action two videos up was derived, for example, has been reviewed on miscellaneous pop culture sites like the AV Club, and has gradually wormed its way into the loose canon of non-English sci-fi movies you probably ought to see. For better or worse, it *is* Indian sci-fi to the outside world.
You can’t say they didn’t work for it. Weighing in with a production budget estimated at Rs. 132-150 crore (approx. 24-27.5 million USD), Enthiran is among the costliest of recent Indian films, and while official box office records are not kept for Tamil pictures, it’s generally agreed that its final grosses place it somewhere among the nation’s all-time highest earners, if not right at the top. And while all that expensive sheen doubtlessly carried its own appeal, it simply would not have have had the opportunity to exist if not for the leading man. Even more so than in Bollywood, stars matter to the South cinema, and Rajinikanth, a former itinerant laborer and bus driver, born into poverty, who clawed his way into the public eye over the course of four decades, best embodies a stouthearted set of traditional values – humble, good-humored and idealistic, he never forgets the suffering of the less fortunate.
Today he is old, bald and paunchy, and none of that matters, because the public adores him so much that any hurdle in the path of cinema illusion merely reinforces the humanity at the core of the Superstar.
Pragmatically, you could just stand Rajinikanth up and have him do his funny/brash/decent thing and build a series of mildly self-referential set pieces around him and call it a movie — that and a sprinkle of social commentary was basically the formula of director Shanmugam Shankar’s prior film, 2007’s Sivaji — but Enthiran actually does have some ambition to it. Written by Shankar with longtime collaborator Sujatha Rangarajan and lyricist-turned-dialogue-man Madhan Karky, the plot aspires to epic status, tracking the evolution of an artificial man, Chitti, from unthinking military instrument to lovesick emotional wreck to cackling weapon of mass destruction to tragic martyr, all due to the avarice of humankind. Rajinikanth plays both the robot and its creator, and while Chitti is obviously more of a show-off role, I rather preferred Rajini sir’s Dr. Vaseekaran, a somewhat morally ambiguous character who’s not entirely redeemed at the end – maybe not a *bold* character choice, but still a little out there given the reverence surrounding the Superstar.
Yet the further I get from Enthiran, the more I wonder how “out there” the writers went in composing their script. I mean – sensitive robot bred for combat? Humanity as warmongering villains? Wholesale property damage married to soggy woe-is-the-robot bathos? A narrative point of view perched somewhere amidst childish naivete, giggling self-awareness and broody philosophizing? Tone-smashing moments of slapstick humor? A weird fascination with insects, for god’s sake? Maybe my mind has been ruined by too many comic books, but it really does seem to me that Shankar & co. have drawn an awful lot of unofficial influence from another prominent force in Asian popular sci-fi: the mangaka Osamu Tezuka.
In fact, I would go so far as to declare Enthiran the single most faithful live-action depiction of Tezuka’s manga ever committed to film, despite the fact that none of Tezuka’s specific works are directly referenced. Asimov is explicitly cited, however, and the design of some of the musical interludes suggest Fritz Lang’s Metropolis by way of Daft Punk, so this could all be a rare case of different artists arriving at much the same result by way of shared inspirations. It’s beguiling nonetheless.
Still, Rajinikanth, I suspect — as with Tezuka! — carries a unique burden in embodying total popular appeal. If we are to read Enthiran as a political work, it is both sweepingly humane in the macro and socially conciliatory in the micro. It needn’t be. Sivaji, for all its routine silliness, did have one really unique and striking vignette: a spoof on India’s enthusiasm for skin lighteners, in which Rajinikanth attempts to impress a girl with multiple absurd schemes to erase his brownness, culminating in a song performed in the character of a parodic white man (with touches of, ulp, blackface):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvgI6pxzbSQ
Perhaps it was just too expensive for such jokes, but Enthiran reinforces the common wisdom at every turn. Go through the film slowly, and note the skin color of the random thugs Chitti is made to fight; the darker their skin, generally, the more obviously crude and violent they are. Heaven forbid anyone is caught wearing hip-hop gear – they might as well be clad in placards reading “MENACE.” That the songs of Enthiran are so American rap-influenced only places this strange tension into sharper relief.
And then, of course, there is poor Aishwarya Rai, another former Miss World and a Hindi movie superstar, roped into the heroine’s role presumably to guarantee the widest possible trans-Indian collections. I sound like a broken record discussing women in these movies, but Rai really is stuck with a flagrantly awful part; her love interest character is the sort of schoolgirl naif who’s clearly supposed to be a paragon of traditional virtue enrobed in a ‘naughty’ modern shell, but actually comes across as a genuine idiot, roping in an eager Chitti to help her cheat on her exams and tee-heeing herself into a hideous living caricature of every popular girl who ever friendzoned a wishy-washy Nice Guy, i.e. Chitti, the audience identification figure. She is also threatened with rape, twice, to bolster the masculine hero bona fides of each of Rajini sir’s roles individually. The more potent of the two scenarios pits the modern, cosmopolitan, intellectual Dr. Vaseekaran against a much-darker, traditionally-dressed local thug, brewing up a uniquely toxic mix of color, gender and class stereotypes served straight for public delectation.
To this, we are expected to nod and say “of course.” At a critical juncture in the film, Chitti rescues a woman from her bath in a burning building. In doing so, she is seen naked by the gathered crowd and news cameras. So great is her shame, she flees into traffic and is struck and killed by an oncoming vehicle. This is presented only as proof of Chitti’s tragic inability to grasp social nuance. No questions should be raised about the position of women in such a society. No questions about Aishwarya Rai – still playing a bubbly schoolgirl in her mid-thirties, yet very, very lucky to even be landing lead female roles at such an advanced age. She hasn’t made a film since she had a kid, and put on a bunch of weight. That is the end. Lose that shit, be Miss World, or wait until you’re old enough to play mummies and aunties. That. Is. The. End.
Of course. Of course!
***
Eega
Directed by S.S. Rajamouli, 2012
Don’t get me wrong, I *liked* Enthiran, but it’s the product of fundamentally conservative artists with one eye on the price tag; mass expectations can allow for crazy experiments in straightforward action — and storytelling deviations too, so long as they ultimately facilitate said action — but if you don’t want to piss people off you’ll still have your Superstar dancing and romancing as much as possible, without upsetting too many preconceptions. Rare is the filmmaker that can chase his bliss on his own terms, on such a scale, without the backing of a major celebrity.
Yet even in the formula-bound world of Telugu popular cinema, due just north of Tamil Nadu in supple Andhra Pradesh, there is just such an auteur: S.S. Rajamouli, director of nine feature films, every single one of which has been an enormous popular success. If money talks, it has said “trust this man” of Rajamouli, who in recent years has eschewed the star system entirely, preferring to focus his audience on the stories he tells. Remember when I mentioned above that movies like Enthiran need big stars to even exist? Rajamouli’s movies always have a star: S.S. Rajamouli. Never lacking for eager financiers, he can theoretically do anything. If he wanted, he could replace his leading man at the half-hour mark with a computer-animated insect.
And in 2012, that is exactly what he wanted.
You are correct, that is a fly dodging a bullet in Matrix-style slow motion.
Eega is startling; unforgettably so. Not because there is anything particularly outré about its storytelling — this is the kind of movie where singers on the soundtrack explicate characters’ inner emotions, so that absolutely no potential for confusion could possibly threaten the audience’s most immediate engagement with the film, a veritable zero-subtext zone — but because it is so willing to push its crowd-pleasing techniques so goddamned far over the top that, upon reflection, it emerges as less an ‘entertainer’ than a work of unbridled sadism and perversity. Starring a CG fly that dances at the end of the movie, just like in Shreck.
The first thirty minutes of the film follow the heartwarming journey of a bright, energetic young man as he ruthlessly stalks the girl of his dreams. This is *movie* stalking, though, so we’re meant to chuckle and sigh, wistfully, at his puppy-like hounding of pretty Samantha Ruth Prabhu, who, in the interest of fairness, has been alternately leading him on and rebuffing him for literally years. Nonetheless, she surely does not deserve the knotty sickness that inevitably comes from this dork showing up at her workplace and engaging in howlingly misogynistic banter with her friends:
HIM: You’d look better if you’d tie your hair up instead of letting it down.
HER: I prefer it loose.
HIM: I know you’re loose, so at least keep your hair tight!
Lol! Anyway, I lied about the knottiness, this is actually super-endearing and awesome, and useful too, since Prabhu is apt to use her would-be paramour’s omnipresence as a defensive shield against another shady dude who’s after her: a filthy-rich industrialist who’ll stop at nothing to fuck any women he fancies, and kill any man who opposes his desires. “LAVA LAVA LAVAAAA” the soundtrack purrs as he eyes Prabhu with lechery, the main differentiation between him and the virginal Hero being that the latter would presumably not act on the opportunity to sully his conquest with Filthy, Actual Sex.
Still, after just one romantic song it seems inevitable these kids will totally admit they like-like one another, until the boy is abruptly kidnapped and straight-up murdered by his zillionaire rival, the coup de grâce delivered via a bare foot slowly crushing the Hero’s windpipe. Proving that karma is always effective, however, the boy is immediately reincarnated in a nearby cluster of eggs as the soundtrack cheers “He’s back! He’s back! Life is back!”
Tethered to human memories by sheer force of devotion to his Sita, unmolested in the demon realm of Ravana, the fly sets out to do justice. Street justice.
The remaining hour and a half of Eega functions as an unofficial adaptation of the music video to Alice in Chains’ I Stay Away, with the fly doing his absolute damnedest to irritate the impulsive villain into fatally harming himself. The fly keeps him awake, tortuously, for hours on end. The fly bugs him during a shave so that his throat is cut. The fly causes the man such embarrassment that he blows a major business deal, and then the fly maneuvers him into losing all of his savings (which is to say he keeps all of his savings in a big iron safe, and the money is then lit on fire). Always, we are encouraged to cheer at each new humiliation. In the most bombastic of the film’s vignettes, the fly slides across the gelatinous surface of the man’s eyeball while he is driving, causing a fantastic highway wreck, and then the fly throws his tiny body against the dirt that has poured atop the villain’s ruined windshield, spelling out, in English, “I WILL KILL YOU.”
This is before Prabhu realizes that her non-boyfriend has been reincarnated as a fly. He spells out his identity in her fallen tears. “What should I do now?” she asks. The fly dips itself in paint and draws a straight red line on a photograph of the villain, right across his neck. “How do we kill him?” she asks.
Later, she builds the fly a tiny gas mask and wee iron claws, with which he can tear into the flesh of his adversary.
The lion’s share of credit for the non-animated success of Eega can only go to the surnameless “Sudeep,” a Karnatakan actor and filmmaker, virtually unknown to Telugu viewers, who plays the villain with a comic brio that keeps the film from registering as intolerably cruel on first impression – which, to director Rajamouli, we must remember, is the only impression that matters. Savoring every mouthful of scenery, Sudeep throws himself into madder and madder complications, at one point hiring a wizard to vanquish the fly with magic, though all the cut-rate sorcerer can manage is to bedazzle a pair of birds into a prolonged dogfight. For his troubles, the conjurer winds up gorily skewered by jagged piece of debris, while Sudeep begins to suffocate in a locked room rapidly filling with smoke, only to survive, grudgingly, to suffer again. Did I mention the computer-generated cartoon fly dances to songs at the end?
Ah, but I’m gilding the lily here. In his own way, Rajamouli is just as conservative as Shankar & Rajinikanth; instead of giving a shit about societal behaviors, he flatters his audience’s basest emotional reactions. Revenge narratives are popular all over the world, and India is no exception, with the Telugu industry particularly eager to justify images of Heroes smashing ten, fifteen, twenty men at once with the undeniable motivation of the grudge. Himmatwala had much the same plot, in fact, as did Bollywood films of the period dealing specifically with vengeful reincarnation (the groovy Karz, for instance). Rajamouli thus approaches sadism with a craftsman’s attention to detail: if the Hero is not reincarnated as a human, then how can he take revenge? How can he fight another man? Such destruction would need to be cumulative, slow. It is murder as maths.
And I should say, without hesitation, that it is proper bad-for-you fun, its set pieces well-mounted and its 134-minute run time ideal for novice sampling. It looks very nice. I was shocked to discover the picture was made for less than 5 million USD – it may not be Iron Man 3, but its blend of animation and live-action is really quite good, with any lingering cartooniness to the lead fly folded back into his anthropomorphized ‘acting.’ By its own terms, Eega is not supposed to seem entirely real or logical anyway; Rajamouli even frames his plot as a bedtime story told to a little boy, like in The Princess Bride, but with all the violence a Call of Duty kid demands in this new decade.
Obviously, the lad is too young to think about girls, or to consider the implications of a healthy young woman choosing to devote herself to a sexless relationship with an insect. Or is this Prabhu’s punishment for toying with that poor lovesick stooge? Is her karma instant? Does her film’s director identify with the hero, or the villain? Is there really much difference?
Is the jiva always desirous, in Rajamouli’s cosmos?
***
Dasavathaaram
Directed by K.S. Ravikumar, 2008
But let’s get back to Tamil Nadu. I don’t think I talk enough about those movies. Really, I don’t think I talk a lot about *most* South Asian movies — it’s not like you’d know anything about the Malayalam, Kannada, Bangla (KolkataandDhaka) or Punjabi film industries from this column, True Believer — but the sum total of Tamil cine-chat I’ve dished out so far consists of Rajinikanth riffs and the occasional cite to Oscar-anointed composer A.R. Rahman, and there really is quite a lot more going on than that.
Like, how could I possibly respect myself tomorrow morning without a single mention of Kamal Haasan? Oops, I mean:
That’s right, fuck you, Superstar, this is man for *all* people. Which, in South terms, means that this is purportedly a Hero for Mass and Class alike: an avowed atheist in a religious nation, a ‘method’-type actor among a congress of hams, and an egomaniac, I’d wager, disinterested in even the mild self-deprecation of a Rajinikanth baldness joke. That title card up there? It winks. Because? Of course.
Haasan’s film career dates back to the ’50s, when he was only a child, and extends to just four months ago, with Vishwaroopam, a controversial and hugely odd anti-terrorism thriller he directed and co-wrote to limited regional banning and enormous box office collections. If Rajinikanth is a Superstar, and S.S. Rajamouli a celebrity filmmaker, then Haasan is the rare personality to combine the two. He is eccentric, and whatever small visibility he enjoys in the West has been a product of eccentricity; it is said that Quentin Tarantino saw his 2001 vehicle Aalavandhan under its Hindi title of Abhay, and that one particular sequence — in which the action suddenly transforms from live-action into ’80s He-Man-caliber animation to depict a crazed murder — wound up inspiring a vastly longer and gorier stretch of the American filmmaker’s Kill Bill.
But Haasan too had a magnum opus in him, and he did not prove shy about drawing outside influence. Dasavathaaram was released in 2008, following nearly two years of production work. The director, K.S. Ravikumar, was a frequent collaborator of Haasan, though it was the leading man who devised the story and put the project into motion. Perhaps it could only have come from the pen of an actor, one madly confident enough to essay ten different roles.
Specifically: six Indian men, a Japanese guy, one Indian woman, and two American men, one of whom is United States President George W. Bush.
You can see already why this is my favorite of the Southern Sci-Fi Spectaculars detailed today, even though it is just barely ‘SF’ in the liberal sense. With a scenario prone in its first few reels to leaping across the centuries, and a leading man intent on violating racial and gender boundaries in the name of Universal Heroism, Dasavathaaram initially registers as a predecessor to Cloud Atlas as directed by Neveldine/Taylor on a Syfy original’s budget, introducing Haasan as a super-strong devotee of Vishnu who runs afoul of 12th century Hindu sectarian strife, delivering the film’s first song while elevated bloodily on hooks a la A Man Called Horse while his wife urges him to reject the specifics of his faith.
Both are subsequently reborn in the 21st century, with much irony: she is now devoutly religious, and he is an agnostic NRI scientist working on a secret American bacteriological weapons program, who suffers an acute crisis of conscience when a beloved lab monkey gets into the experimental goods and fatally erupts with the sort of garish CG effects that are just good enough to freak you out underneath your laughter. Knowing that the super-virus is too strong entrust to any governmental entity, Haasan makes a break for it, pursued by himself as the film’s primary antagonist and other main white guy: Christian Fletcher, an ex-CIA operative whom Haasan indulges with an amazing quasi-Jimmy Stewart ‘heartland’ accent, and who the makeup team may have decided to model after famous video game character Duke Nukem.
Before long, though, the film reveals itself as not so much influenced by David Mitchell as another popular art sector: the ‘everything-is-connected’ movie, stretching back to Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, but typified in the 21st century by Paul Haggis’ Crash and the oeuvre of Alejandro González Iñárritu, particularly 2006’s Babel, which seems to have influenced Haasan & Ravikumar in its depiction of international miscommunication. Dasavathaaram even throws in a storyline concerning a Japanese family, although instead of brooding and sexually frustrated, they are now masters of Aikido, and prone to throwing down with any motherfuckers unwise enough to get in their way.
So, it’s sort of the Carnosaur to Iñárritu’s Jurassic Park, except with Brad Pitt as the Mexican nanny and/or Sam Neill as two or three of the dinosaurs. I can’t say that Haasan’s nonstop makeup antics aren’t distracting, but such distractions are clearly supposed to be part of the entertainment, if only to surmise whether the investigatory Japanese dude is an intentional or unintentional homage to Charlie Chan —
Or whether the Old Lady makeup was specifically meant to recall the golden age of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
Irregardless, Haasan does have more on his mind than latex. Two of the three extravagant hours of Dasavathaaram are set in Tamil Nadu itself, where the hapless scientist meets up with centuries-gone beloved — Asin Thottumkal, at full-throttle endearment — and finds himself stranded amidst four of Haasan’s additional personae, each of them representing a different aspect of India’s conflict-prone diversity of religion: the Old Lady, a devout Hindu and the love interest’s grandmother(!!); a cancer-ridden Sikh music star; a gigantic, childlike fair-skinned Muslim; and a dark-skinned, rabble-rousing ‘untouchable’ Dalit Christian. A fifth resident national provides comedy relief in the form of a Clouseau-like police official parodying residents of Andhra Pradesh in a manner I absolutely fucking dare anyone not living in southeastern India to even attempt to comprehend.
No, this is not a globally-minded motion picture, despite its copious English and numerous jabs at American dirty work. More so than any of the films I’ve mentioned here, it is an Indian movie intent on addressing *Indian* concerns, through mechanisms seized from the popular foreign films that play in many Indian theaters. This brand of cultural adaptation is often stereotyped as a Japanese tendency, but globalization perhaps demands it everywhere, now, in the entertainment sphere. Thus, it’s metaphorically appropriate that the most straight-on impressive bit of movie magic director Rajamouli can conjure is a climactic three-man martial arts showdown in which every participant is played by Kamal Haasan, the most fantastical of his avatars finally left so coated with karo goo on his white putty face he seems less a person than a Ray Harryhausen monster, a Superpower’s boogeyman fit only for slaying.
None of this is to say that Dasavathaaram goes down silky smooth. There’s quite a lot of tedious semi-romantic business around the two-hour mark, and Haasan’s enthusiasm for playing multiple roles doesn’t always translate to plot utility – the Muslim characters mostly seem present to declare that all Muslims are not terrorists, and the Sikh singer’s storyline seems plopped in solely to facilitate a musical number, as well as the by-far battiest denouement of the film, in which a stray bullet shoots the cancer out of the guy’s throat. We’re all connected.
But then there is a scene following a budget-busting CG depiction of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, killer of 18,000 Indians, which Haasan — his balls too big for even ten roles to hold — suggests was Butterfly Effected into existence by India’s ancient religious strife, providing a faux-scientific sort of rain of frogs (or a rightly Altmanesque earthquake) to temporarily obliterate the distinctions between faiths. The Old Woman, played by Haasan, embraces the dead Christian, played by Haasan, screaming at her community to stow their bigotry and leave her with the man she has come, in her senility and her sincerity, to consider her son.
It’s a grandiose, cheesy flourish, uninhibitedly sentimental and self-absorbed, but also, for a moment, earned. As Americans settle in for a long summer of mega-monied sci-fi extravaganzas, the least of them more costly than all three of these films combined, each eying as much in the way of worldwide return as possible, it is good to know that aesthetic prudence need not mark each iteration of the genre, fabulous as it nonetheless can remain.
Who stuck an adaptation of the 1999 cartoon The Iron Giant into the middle of Iron Man 3? Not that I’m complaining. Even The New Yorker loved it (as opposed to the formulaic explosions that bookend the movie). Robert Downey Jr.’s abrasive bromance with 11-year-old Ty Simpkins is the film’s brightest and most unexpected subplot. Though it also adds to the film’s overall incoherence. Which, again, might be a good thing. Not since Tim Burton was defining the superhero blockbuster in a single bound have we gotten such a (to use Tony’s term) “hot mess” of a movie.
Even before the young Mr. Simpkins’ entrance, Iron Man 3 was straining its thematic rivets. Aside from the obligatory bad guy machinations, the story scaffold looks like your standard marriage plot variety. Yes, Tony and Pepper are already together at the start, not married exactly, but at least, you know, whatever. Tony quickly overturns the domestic bliss by sending one of his remote control drones to romance his girl while he finishes some work in the lab (anyone notice that Shane Black and Drew Pearce lifted the scene from Watchmen?). Tony is literally phoning it in, and Pepper’s stuck with his empty shell.
Soon the robot drone is jumping into bed with them (yep, Watchmen again) and Pepper is packing. Next thing she’s climbing inside some other super-genius’s brain, and Tony’s pal warns him he’s going to lose her if he doesn’t change. Which he does. When things start exploding, he remote controls that robot suit to encase her instead of himself. It’s actually a bit poignant—especially when Iron Pepper returns the favor by shielding him a moment later.
The weird thing though? We’re only about thirty minutes in. Sure, there’s a reprise when Pepper saves him a second time at the climax, followed by the formal exploding of the Iron drones in evidence of Tony’s now focused devotion to Pepper. He even chucks his cyborg heart over a cliff in the epilogue.
But romance is not the machine driving this movie. In addition to becoming a less dickish boyfriend, Tony has to get over the PTSD brought on by his near-death in The Avengers. This is fairly new terrain for a superhero plot and is one of several ways the specter of Afghanistan haunts the movie. The platoon of regenerative thugs are all maimed soldiers who literally grow back lost limbs. Osama Bin Laden is played by the Mandarin—who is played by a Baptist minister—who is played by a washed-up British actor—who’s played by Ben Kingsley—who most of us remember best as Gandhi. Terrorism, it turns out, is not the problem. It’s the War on Terrorism. Which might explain why the President looks like George Bush and not Barack Obama—especially when he’s being rescued by Don Cheadle. So when Tony blows up his armada of Iron Drones, he’s also saying goodbye to a military policy a lot of Americans would like to see go too.
Except when exactly is it that Tony gets over all that pesky post-traumatic stuff? He’s been tinkering in his basement for months, so why does one Home Depot shopping spree turn him into a McGuiver-esque 007? And what does it mean that he promises Pepper he’ll catch her and then can only watch with us as she plummets to her (apparent) death? And if both the romance plot and the foreign policy allegory agree on vanquishing all that deadly hardware, why does the newly superpowered Pepper need an extra boost of tech to put the bad guy down a final time?
Maybe this is where Ty Simpkins and The Iron Giant come in.
If you’ve not seen the Brad Bird movie, I highly recommend it. My daughter adored it when she was four. A mal-functioning robot crashlands in smallville where a father-less boy hides it in his shed while he and a wacky father-figure partner work to repair it. Sound familiar? It gets better. Like the Iron Man suit, the Iron Giant divides into semi-autonomous pieces, and the story climaxes with the self-sacrificing hero sailing into the sky to prevent a U.S. nuclear warhead from destroying the town. Which, incidentally, is also the climax of The Avengers. The Iron Giant even pays homage to the ur-superhero, Superman, who the Giant emulates to escape his programming as a soulless military machine.
But if being a less dickish boyfriend means finding your inner father figure for a half-orphan, the film mocks the tropes more than it fulfills them. This isn’t Spielberg. It’s a Spielberg parody—a particularly hilarious one. Downey and Simpkins are a comic tag-team that skewer the feel-good formula they’re only half pretending to inhabit. It’s as if we’ve crashlanded in a different movie.
But soon Tony is driving back down the main plotline, his remote control suit soon to follow. And what is it exactly that he learned during the detour? Mock sincerity. Deadpan delivery. Comic timing. All the things we loved about Tony but that no longer worked with Pepper in the room. He had to drop his defenses or lose her. All his jokes were misfires on the home front. So the kid gave him a new comic target. Simpkins replaces Paltrow as sparring partner and straight man. Iron Man is above all else a comedian. Refueled with a live audience laugh track, he’s ready to smash the bad guys again.
This all makes sense for one reason only. Iron Man isn’t Tony Stark. He’s Robert Downey Jr. Yes, Black and Pearce wrote the script, and Paramount dropped some $200 million into the budget, but the film’s structural logic isn’t animated by CGI effects. The movie only works because it’s so damn funny.
Even the post-credit Avengers 2 teaser is pure sketch comedy—Tony and Doc Banner trading barbs in a two-minute therapist routine. The material is pretty hackneyed, but these guys make you want to laugh anyway. Political commentary, character arcs, plot structure—it all melts away when you’re laughing.
Even when I know the ultimate source of it all is as sick as a demented chimpanzee, I still get sucked into it. The straw which finally broke the proverbial camel’s back this time round was a host of Eisner nominations by a group of esteemed judges: Best Continuing Series, Best New Series, Best Writer, Best Penciler/Inker, and Best Cover Artist.
I managed to avoid every single review of Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye so as not to contaminate my ultimate pleasure in reading it. But there were still some whispered rumors that managed to creep through; that this wasn’t your usual superhero comic; that there was some new method at work, some new insight into the genre. And the first three issues of Hawkeye do hold that line to some extent.
It is possible to see an attempt to move away from the usual strictures of the superhero form, a settled and ceaselessly visited structure which has provided the template for most of the “classic” superhero storylines since the 1980s—the world or the superhero’s existence in great peril.
We see this in Daredevil: Born Again where a way of life is extinguished and The Dark Knight Returns where age is the great antagonist. The world is collapsing in Watchmen and that supreme god of goodness is taking his final steps in Alan Moore and Curt Swan’s Last Superman Story. Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Elektra: Assassin seems to break this pattern—the world is never really in danger of being nuked, the heroine enigmatic and never in any real danger; the ultimate premise being to watch Elektra fuck every person in existence to hell. Just one of Miller’s many wet dreams which he decided to share with us all.
The glue which binds most of the superhero “classics” of the late 80s is that atmosphere of persistent oppression, a mood thoroughly rejected by Grant Morrison in his take on Superman a decade later. But much earlier than that, J. M. DeMatteis, Keith Giffen, and Kevin Maguire were reimagining the Justice League as a sitcom in a series which still manages to strike a nostalgic twinge in a few older readers. Maguire’s facility with facial expressions was the foundation of that effort, and the new Hawkeye holds strongly to that sense of comedy though it has a different shtick: there’s the penile obstruction (a sly suggestion to those who would name their genitalia after superheroes)…
…the metafictional digs at language perception; and the fact that all the baddies have a penchant for the word “Bro” (among other things).
David Aja is the dominant partner in this collaboration, especially when it comes to the look and feel of the comic; showing enough chops to take on the mantle cast upon the closet drawer by David Mazzucchelli when he left superhero comics for good. If you don’t sense the evocation of late issue Born Again and Batman: Year One in the following page, then God help you.
The first page of the second issue shows that it wasn’t a fluke when Aja worked with Ann Nocenti on “3 Jacks.”
Fraction and Aja strip out the elements of a single action sequence: the symbols which mark the villains and the heroes; the graceful diagonals of the page broken into small panels and moving from left to right; the bodies swaying in a danse macabre; the twins guns ringing out like a silent soundtrack; an evolved form of Steranko stylishness and page breakdown. It’s all as sweet as the candy which J. H. Williams III used to lace his Batwoman in times past. You and I could care less about the story.
But there it is, weaved thoroughly into the mythos of the Marvel empire. Right from the start, we get the hints and the nods, the insider knowledge needed for the insider fun. The ability to link descriptions of the Avengers with their likenesses and their names; the ability to identify a Marvel rogues gallery; the ability to know who Iron Fist is (and that Fraction and Aja once worked on the character); the ability to thrill at the sight of a third string villain like the Ringmaster because you read The Incredible Hulk and Steve Ditko’s Amazing Spider-man as a kid; the ability to actually care who these people are.
The Ringmaster’s stage is a homage to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (the third issue pulls in The Italian Job) and Aja’s action scenes are consistently stylish…
…the spell broken only by the words and ideas. The second issue seems as well plotted as television’s Arrow, the youth oriented, touchy-feely version of Green Arrow. When Clint Barton (aka Hawkeye) thinks, “Thieves. Working a very long con,” you wonder whether you missed anything apart from the obvious, television-lite set-up which preceded the unveiling of a forgettable super villain. Those expecting Mamet-like moments of intrigue following on those words will be sorely disappointed.
Barton in these issues is a bit like Chandler’s Phlilip Marlowe without the cool dialogue, machismo, and active mind—he’s basically a plains clothes knight of the city who gets beaten up a lot. He uses fists not words and is bereft of any trace of deep intellectual content or motivation. He’s just another nice guy in an unending stream of nice guys in popular culture. He never dies; no, he can’t die because no one actually wants to kill him. They just want to tell him that he’s going to die like every weirdo in the Marvel universe. If readers came here even remotely excited that this was a comic which takes the superhero into hitherto unknown territory, let me dampen that down right now.
The excitement here is that Hawkeye doesn’t wear his costume all that much and acts like a real life human being once in a while. He cracks some jokes and has some sense of his own mortality when he or his friends get shot at. He is hopeless at superheroics (i.e. fallible). He also has to make rent for his poor neighbors, just like a rich Peter Parker would do (except that, you know, Spider-man was poor). Also, he gets to hang out with a bunch of babes. The bar has been lowered to the level of a Munchkin.
The collected Hawkeye (which reprints #1-5) helps us ascertain where Matt Fraction ends and David Aja begins. Issues 4 and 5 of Hawkeye remain as empty of story interest as issues 2 and 3 but stand in stark contrast due to the absence of Aja. Javier Pulido stumbles hard in his first issue and Clint Barton comes out looking like a paper doll in parts.
Pulido retrieves a bit of his dignity in some of the action sequences in issue 5.
That fifth issue did make me read up a bit on Operation Eucritta (say this with a Southern accent if you will). Apparently it’s this:
“An Avenger? On tape committing the assassination of the world’s most wanted criminal terrorist?”
Hawkeye has to retrieve this tape before it’s released to a mass audience of baddies assembled at a private auction in Madripoor.
Before confirming the real line of reasoning behind this plot, I had imagined that it would be just bad PR all round for an Avenger to be seen killing the Marvel Universes’ equivalent of Osama bin Laden, one Du Ke Feng. Of course, doing the same has been such excellent business for President Obama that he’s decided to extend the program to any Tom, Dick, or Harry acting suspiciously. So out with that!
The Marvel database tells us that the Avengers doing the assassinating were Captain America, Wolverine, and Hawkeye; except that those tapes were fakes created to obscure the identities of a bunch of Navy SEALs (the real hit team) and to flush out a spy in SHIELD. Hawkeye has to prevent the auctioning of his personal tape (lost accidentally) because it would put his life in danger.
What?
People need an excuse to kill Cap, Wolvie, and Hawkeye? I thought supervillains did this for free every day of the week but mostly on shipment days? I think they usually arrange to destroy the universe at least once a year as well. No extra charge.
The end of issue 5 is where superhero fantasy meets “real” life, a special corner of heaven where Fraction becomes as solemn as Denny O’Neil in his Green Arrow drug issue:
“The guys that actually did this — they’re doing what they think is right. They didn’t sign up to get their families and friends killed as retribution.”
Except in real life, the terrorists, freedom fighters, and soldiers attached to the individuals assassinated don’t need names to enact “retribution.” They simply kill and maim the soldiers and citizens of the offending nation(s)—a simple and evident fact that is erased in favor of platitudes and cameos by the Kingpin and Nick Fury. In this make-believe world where bad men practice evil for indefinable or ridiculous reasons, violence becomes necessary and inconsequential. The only reasonable answer to violence is more violence.
The new Hawkeye comic is barely acceptable to aging fans and a thorough going embarrassment to those who have promoted its excellence. I would liken it to going back to a middling diner you haven’t been to in decades and discovering that they’ve changed the uniforms. The food? Probably just as bad as ever.
“…it feels like Matt Fraction poured a bunch of unrelated ideas into a Hawkeye-shaped vessel because that’s what was available. I’m not saying there’s some One True Hawkeye out there, I’m saying I don’t think Hawkeye, One True or otherwise, is anything but an extraordinarily flimsy frame on which to hang surface-cool writing like this.”
The Comic Books Are Burning in Hell gang thinking out loud on the possible reasons for the prodigious levels of adulation heaped on the comic (starts around 19 min).
David N. Wright at Graphixia – “Hawkeye and the Problem of Comics as Art.” Comparing a later issue of Hawkeye (not reviewed above) to the work of Chris Ware. The real kicker comes at the end. Doesn’t this all sound rather familiar:
“Fact is, comics stand in relation to art like the internal combustion engine stands in relation to the steam engine: they may well be andecendants, but to think of them in this way does nothing to help us understand either. That comics are often a collaborative, usually repetitive, almost always recycled endeavour opens spaces for new conversations about the nature of the medium. These conversations must occur outside the already established aesthetic principles of artistic production in precisely the same way that a discussion of the steam engine must stand outside a discussion of an internal combustion engine. Comics are a multi-mediated and re-mediated form of practice and cultural production that can only be defined within its own contexts—a context that more than justifies its significance as the most relevant form of twenty-first century aesthetic practice—and that means it can’t be art or Art… or, mercifully, stand in relation to either.” [emphasis mine]
Neal Adams (1941– ) is one of the most famous and influential superhero cartoonists of all time; it thus comes as no surprise that, in the 1975 celebratory compendium The Art of Neal Adams, the cover shows a face-off between the superheroes of Marvel Comics (left) and DC Comics (right)
But who is that funny-animal in a cape playing the peacemaker between the two camps? Just a parody Adams dropped in to deflate the pretension of the set-up?
Not at all! That’s Atomic Mouse, a character created in 1953 by Al Fago (1904–1978) for Charlton Comics. Adams drew a couple of stories for the feature– he has stated that it was his favorite ever strip to work on. Atomic Mouse returned on the cover of the second volume of The Art of Neal Adams, in 1978:
Adams did humorous, funny animal and “big-foot” strips for several years; in fact, below is Adams’ first published comic book page:
Adams also worked for Harvey Comics (Hot Stuff) and did long runs on DC’s licensed Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope books. In his Shop Talk with Will Eisner, Adams stressed the necessity of a ‘big-foot’ style of cartooniness as a foundation for realistic comics art. In fact, Adams never really was a realistic draftsman as were, say, Gray Morrow or Alex Raymond. As Bill Sienkiewicz put it, Adams would basically triple-light Charlie Brown; and as John Byrne said about Adams’ characters, “That’s the way people would look, if people looked that way.’
Adams’ characters are all overactors.
In the theatre, there’s a severe distinction between acting and signalling.
Signalling means communicating by conventional signals of gesture and poise. For instance, after a scene of being rejected for a job, a signaller will literally let his shoulders slump. To show anger, he’ll furrow his brow and draw down the corners of his mouth while clenching his fists. Joy: skipping and smiling. Grief: burying his face in his hands, wiping away a tear.
Adams’ characters are all signallers.
And that’s fine.
Let’s look at probably the most famous sequence Adams ever drew (script by Denny O’Neill):
Panel 1 contrasts a realistic, old Black man (although we might be put off by his ‘shuffling’) with a hysterically over-tensed GL figure. The second panel also shouts ‘I’m doing realism!’ while affecting an extremely dramatic upward angle point of view. The third panel — a down shot for a ‘downer’ moment– shows Adams signalling as blatantly as any Vaudeville ham performer. GL slumps, stares down at the ground in shame…
But it all works. I think comics are more tolerant of overstatement than most other artforms. Whether this overstatement is necessary is another debate…cartoonists such as Adams, Jaime Hernandez, Robert Crumb or Jack Kirby navigate from the subtle to the blaring with a sure sense of what’s fitting.
When Adams turned his hand at overt, Mad-style cartooning his efforts seem a little too over-the-top, as in this TV parody (of McCloud) from Marvel’s Mad knock-off, Crazy — basically, he tries too hard:
Neal Adams in the ’70s
Much better were his relatively straight works for National Lampoon, such as Son O’ God or Dragula — the latter some sort of monument of homophobia in comics and comedy:
He is very much capable of satirising his better-known superhero style, as he did in this 1979 story published in the French humor weekly Fluide Glacial, over a script by Jacques Lob:
A sample panel:
The story featured some mild nudity; Adams only seems to have once really gone soft-porn, in the 1975 underground comic Big Apple. Comics
Neal Adams drew half the story, on the left-hand part of the pages, following the day of a fun-loving yuppie lady; the right-hand dealt with the grimmer day of a prostitute, and was drawn by Larry Hama and Ralph Reese.
I think this is the only published story featuring an Adams-drawn erect penis…
“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
“…Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
–Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Writing on the Game of Thrones season three premiere, a reviewer at the New York Times who confessed to being a fan of the science fiction and fantasy genre casually mentioned that upcoming discussions on slavery and women’s liberation were “heavy handed…particularly for a show set in the medieval period.” Twitter reacted swiftly, with Alyssa Rosenberg from Think Progress satirically tweeting, “may the Lord of the Light save me from people who are made uncomfortable by thinking about issues in their entertainment.”
Shunted away, at a private kiddie table and apart from allegedly serious literature, fantasy fans have been jostling for recognition and fending off accusations that their beloved genre is immature, escapist, and unrealistic. High/Epic Fantasy, in particular, has been accused of being regressive, conservative, and reactionary, intent on preserving an ideology of traditional gender scripts and maintaining a cast of lily-white characters. In western culture(s), epic fantasy is thought to describe the British medieval period, albeit with dragons and magic, but a more accurate description would be that post-1960s epic fantasy is influenced heavily by J.R.R Tolkien, whose irritation with industrialization and what he called “the robotic age” are palpable in his idealized version of rural life as represented in the Shire. In an interview with the International Socialism Journal, China Mieville states that:
You…have to remember that many works within that tradition question or undermine its more conservative aspects. However, it is true that the hold of that conservatism is strong in the genre, and it’s also true that that particular post-Tolkien stream is what most people these days mean when they talk about ‘fantasy’.
It would be unfair to point exclusively at Tolkien for his long-lasting influence on epic fantasy when the genre’s heritage has also been influenced by commercial considerations. Between 1969 and 1974, Ballantine re-issued around seventy classic fantasies in their Adult Fantasy series and published a number of significant new authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Marion Zimmer Bradley. However, none came close to matching the commercial success of The Lord of the Rings.
In 1977, new Ballantine editors, Judy-Lynn Del Rey and Lester Del Rey, believed that fantasy fiction could become a real mainstream success if promoted properly. As an experiment, they took two new authors out of their slush pile, Terry Brooks (Sword of Shannara) and Stephen Donaldson (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever)and marketed them explicitly as books for people who liked Lord of the Rings. Both novels were immediate best sellers and set the stage for the fantasy genre’s commercial viability. The long tradition of conservatism in fantasy has partially been the result of commercial constraints—editors know what’ll sell.
Mieville goes on to list a number of traits he associates with conservative ideology, what he also calls “feudalism lite.”
…[I]f there’s a problem with the ruler of the kingdom it’s because he’s a bad king, as opposed to a king. If the peasants are visible, they’re likely to be good simple folk rather than downtrodden wretches (except if it’s a bad kingdom…). Strong men protect curvaceous women. Superheroic protagonists stamp their will on history like characters in Nietzschean wet dreams, but at the same time things are determined by fate rather than social agency. Social threats are pathological, invading from outside rather than being born from within. Morality is absolute, with characters–and often whole races–lining up to fall into pigeonholes with ‘good’ and ‘evil’ written on them.
These labels pose a challenge to engaged writers and readers of the genre who love the epic fantasy tradition but do not necessarily believe in its innate marriage to escapism, and maybe don’t even believe in conservative ideology’s innate attachment to escape either. Mieville, for his part, has all together eschewed the rural setting so prevalent in epic fantasy and has chosen to feature heavily urbanized settings in his writing.
The conservative tradition Mieville describes is, of course, not the same as American-style conservatism and refers to British high toryism (similar to Canadian red toryism), an ideology which accepts the presence of class inequalities and traditional social stratification as long as society elites provide, through charity or government legislation, assistance to the marginalized. Key words: nobless oblige. Critics of High/Red Toryism describe the ideology* as paternalistic, as its justifications for social stratification have historically relied on a mandate from God. If ever you wondered about the rampant use of prophecies in epic fantasy, then consider its link to high toryism: birth is destiny.
Questions of free will aside, these prophecies often form the basis of what Joseph Campbell calls “the hero’s journey.” Hero leaves home, finds magical helper, overcomes trials, receives rewards. (I call this description the “plot coupons” formula, where the reader can cash in these coupons for a feel-good adventure. Hero finds magic cat; Hero finds magic sex; Hero defeats magic villain etc.) Royalty often provide structure to these quests, functioning as characters that recognize the hero’s achievements, set the hero on his or her quest, or punish the villain.
In her doctoral thesis, Kings. What a Good Idea, Pamela Freeman writes that in stories in which a king is the protagonist, we’re likely to see the oft-used “Rightful Heir” or “Missing Heir” trope. See: King Arthur, Aragorn, Harry Potter, Rand from The Wheel of Time, Eragon, and most novels that involve a young boy that leaves his home to embark on an adventure. On one hand lie patriarchal inheritance laws that govern the transmission of inheritance between male blood lines, an issue of justice and fairness that is familiar to most people, despite or because of its problematic gendered connotations. On a more emotional level, there’s hunger to belong and to complete a family, that the truth about one’s blood line and birth status is worth knowing and that without the truth the person will live a suspended life fraught with emotional anxieties. Conservative or not, this plot-line directly confronts our emotional anxieties.
The question then becomes why people living in democratic countries would be interested in reading books about social stratification and monarchy. Pro-monarchists (the real-world kind) usually defend royalty on the basis that monarchs represent all of their citizens and thus provide continuity and identity to a nation, whereas elected officials can only represent their constituents. (For those who say, “but…presidents?” most pro-monarchists live in constitutional monarchies that use a parliamentary system. Prime Ministers aren’t directly elected by the people.)
Freemanstates that “tyranny has been replaced with an image of pastoral care, ensuring that today will be like tomorrow, protecting us from political machinations and…extremes of any kind.” She links a distrust of elected officials and desire for continuity with epic fantasy’s focus on “rightful kings.” Writers use kings precisely because they’re traditional, and therefore meaningful. Of course, the common image of a rightful king preserving the collective peace amongst his people is a historical judo-flip unsupported by an even cursory empirical observation but, nevertheless, rightful kings prance around and disseminate compassionate justice in epic fantasies with more regularity than they ever did in history and this has led critics to deride the genre as escapist because it’s not “real.”
But labelling the epic fantasy genre as unserious also stems from the 19th century rise of the modernist tradition that undervalues story and prioritizes style. Traditionally, epic fantasy is told conservatively and is rarely experimental, omitting surprising shifts in time or point of view. This ordered narrative prioritizes story-telling by giving readers access to familiar non-experimental style, which consequently allows them to suspend skepticism (or to even believe, as Tolkien states in his lecture On Fairy Stories) without awkward mental breaks that would shatter the belief of the secondary world. In a much quoted passage, E.M Forster articulates the modernist position on storytelling, calling its relationship to the novel as “the backbone—or may I say tapeworm, for its beginnings and end are arbitrary. It is immensely old—goes back to Neolithic times, perhaps to Paleolithic. Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge the shape of his skull.”
The fantastic’s historical link to oral folk ballads and storytelling is fairly obvious, but this modernist disdain for its oral roots reveals Forster’s elitism: if it’s not difficult to read, then it’s not worth the reader’s time. This position, while also being classicist, neglects oral storytelling’s influence on knowledge. (I wonder about Forster’s position on university lectures.) This elitism hasn’t disappeared from modern publishing. In his famous 2001 essay titled The Reader’s Manifesto,B.R. Meyers writes that fast-paced stories written in un-affected prose may be deemed “an excellent read” or a “page-turner,” but “never literature with a capital L.”
The modernist backlash comes on the heels of the Victorian period’s Arthurian resurgence, a shift created by popular writers like Walter Scott, Alfred Tennyson, and William Morris. Tolkien was especially keen on Morris’ romances, stating that “other stories have only scenery; his have geography.” We have Morris to thank (and not sarcastically!) for the creation of Tolkien’s maps, revolutionary at the time of their publication and now staples in nearly every epic fantasy novel. It bears noting that even during their lifetimes, authors like Walter Scott were accused of prettifying history and creating a market for nostalgia. Mark Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as a reaction to Scott’s writing. Twain writes:
Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.
I hear protests in the background. “But what about Ursula K Le Guin? What about the Hugo Awards, whose organizers have been keen to diversify the fantasy genre?” That’s exactly it—there’s nothing innate about epic fantasy that requires its marriage to conservative philosophy. (And even Mieville doesn’t believe Tolkien’s influence has been totally negative.)In fact, fantasy is uniquely positioned to play with radical ideas.
Radical, of course, is not the same thing as realistic. In reaction, or perhaps in retaliation, to critics who accuse fantasy of being unrealistic, a sub-genre of fantasy called “grimdark” has emerged featuring grittier and darker storylines. Joe Abercombie, arguably the posterboy of grimdark fantasy, writes “[p]ortraying your fantasy world in a way that’s like our world? That’s only honesty.” Even fantasy that is not officially “grimdark” bears traces of the shift from shiny and clean to gritty and dirty. However, writing recently on the movie Lincoln, Aaron Bady ushers in a glorious takedown of those who equate grittiness with reality.
First and foremost, it uses a realist aesthetic to make it seem like compromising cynicism is realistic. Form becomes content: it shows us the world as it “really” is by adding in the grit and grain and grime that demonstrate that the image has not been airbrushed, cleaned up, or glossed over, and this artificial lack of artifice signifies as reality…They don’t mean “accuracy,” because that’s not something most people could judge; they mean un-glamorized, un-romanticized, dark…
But, of course, we’re not. We’re just seeing a movie whose claim to objective accuracy is no less artificial than the filters by which an instagram takes on the nostalgic glow of a past that was never as overexposed and warm as it has become in retrospect. And when we take “gritty” for “realism,” another kind of “realism” gets quietly implied and imposed: the capitalist realism by which ideals become impossible and the only way things can get done is through compromise and strategic surrender. Anti-romanticism is all the more ideological because it pretends to have no ideology, to be the “plain truth” that demonstrates the falsity of romantic visions.
Whether a story is romantic or gritty is hardly a measure of reality or progress—Game of Thrones is very conservative despite its grittiness, after all. In either case, I’m not sure when novelists started conflating “realistic” with “relevant” or “truthful.” Employing a realistic aesthetic is not something fantasy should necessarily aspire to be, nor does a realistic aesthetic make a novel meaningful. Regardless of literary tradition, most writers are dedicated to sincerely lying. Particularly useful to this discussion is Le Guin’s introduction to TheLeft Hand of Darkness where she argues that writers “go about it [telling the truth] in a peculiar and devious way…and telling about these fictions in detail and at length…and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That’s the truth!” Generic literary novels also play with the truth, and arguments that literary novels are “realistic,” as though they are not bound by ideological constraints and a particular worldview, are fairly humorous. Epic fantasy is a massive meaningful lie/truth.
In Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Rosemary Jackson describes fantasy as a “literature of desire” which works to undermine cultural constraints, as a subversive manifestation of the forbidden and taboo, and as an act of imagination that undermines the world. Jackson, of course, also believes that, of all things, TheLord of the Rings is a failed fantasy because it’s sentimental and nostalgic and would rather define the book as a faery romance. However, putting aside the obsession with trying to define epic fantasy (for some academics will insist that there are differences between “high” and “epic” fantasy, while others will tell you that there’s no difference between fantasy and science fiction—drowning in a quagmire is not on my bucket list), Jackson rightfully points out the awesome potential of fantasy to play with the unacceptable.
Tolkien, for his part, argued that fantasy recognizes reality, but didn’t need to be confined by it. “For creative fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it.” Even in conservative-minded fantasies, the opportunity to subvert expectations exists. That’s why, to return to our intrepid NYT reviewer, homogenizing the medieval period as entirely regressive and unconcerned with moral questions is unhelpful and inaccurate.
Chronology is not an indicator of progress. The term medieval is pejorative, often used as a synonym for unenlightened (for what came afterwards?) and anti-intellectual, even though the period’s philosophical contributions still affect us today. If we want to talk about “realistic” warfare, then how can we ignore Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine’s contributions to Just War Theory? Today, we see so-called history used as a slight of hand to give books a carte blanche against criticism. “That’s just how it was back then,” a period defined as anything pre-1950s if judged by fan conversations on the interwebz. Unfortunately, these excuses homogenize history and ignore its radical and not-so-radical thinkers who would protest at, say, the harshness of contemporary life. Who could forget Thomas More’s Utopia, the Renaissance book that birthed the utopian and dystopian novel, subgenres dedicated to undermining the status-quo but, according to the it’s-only-entertainment brigade, born in a period with allegedly unquestionable moral absolutes that cannot be addressed in entertainment. More’s Utopia bends, challenges, and re-imagines the realities of his day more honestly than many fictions claiming objectivity. While most wouldn’t classify Utopia as an epic fantasy work, the point still applies: many imitations of historical time periods aren’t realistic even when they claim to be, but even if they were, what does that have to do with meaning? Literature must do more than imitate.
These subversions also occur in the Arthurian canon, the prototypical conservative epic fantasy. When BBC’s Merlin hired Angel Coulby, a mixed-race actor, to play Guinevere, the fan reaction was divided by those who argued that a black Guinevere couldn’t exist in the medieval period, that her presence was anachronistic, and those who believed that the mere act of casting Coulby was revolutionary. It’s saddening that a medieval text is potentially more progressive than some modern fans who shout down calls for diverse representation. Two Moorish knights were members of the Round Table and, lest we forget, the Green Knight was actually green skinned in early versions of the tale. But here again, we have an erroneous view of the medieval period as disconnected from the rest of the world. Here again we see people use the term “reality” to claim that an idea is objective when it’s actually ideological.
Despite its conservative nature and the fact that it happened “back in the day,” the Arthurian cannon isn’t silent on gender roles either. In 1911, Silence was discovered in England, a 13th century epic poem that forms part of the Arthurian canon and was originally written in French. The main protagonist is Silence, a girl who is raised as a boy due to King Eben’s declaration that women cannot inherit property. Nature and Nurture are personified in the poem, and take turns debating whether gender is either innate or socialized. Can Silence successfully become a man? Though Silence contains a number of problematic elements, the fact that epic fantasy was discussing gender in the 13th century should be enough evidence to dispel the myth that epic fantasy is escapist and unconcerned with the human condition simply because it does not follow our world’s physical laws.
Furthermore, despite commercial tendencies to sideline characters of colour and systemic authorial failures to incorporate people of colour in their work, Gregory Rutledge,writing specifically on African-American literature but also on themes that can be extended to other minority groups, states that the fantastic tradition is perfectly situated to discussing themes of otherness. “Otherness and the otherworld phenomenon of both fantasy and futurist fiction is something with which many persons of African descent may identify. Relegated early to the position of the exotic Other, Africans and their descendants have been marked as primitive for centuries.”
He goes on to relay that while Samuel Delaney could be considered the first self-described African-American speculative fiction author (Delaney eschews the term “fantasy”—but we’re not going there), elements of fantasy nevertheless manifest themselves in African-American literature before Delaney’s debut and even make an appearance in Frederick Douglass’ autobiography. After Douglass was whipped for the first time, he received a root from a fellow slave to evoke spirits to ward off further whippings. Though Douglass unequivocally states that this act was superstitious nonsense, he also admits that no one whipped him ever again. Here we have an example of the fantastic being evoked in discussions of physical freedom, maybe ambivalently by Douglass but with certainty by the fellow slave who offered him the root. Escapist? To paraphrase Terry Prachett,jailers hate escapism.
Even the most formulaic epic fantasy novel plays with the author’s desire, and it is therefore chained by human emotion to the so-called real world–and so it becomes an acceptable target of social criticism or praise. Criticisms targeting epic fantasy’s relevance to the human condition are uncharitable and as the genre gains more traction on television networks, new and old fans are deflecting criticisms of their most entertaining shows by borrowing the old elitist line that fantasy is irrelevant and thus immune from rigorous analysis. We’ve been rather unfair to a genre that can shape reality to its will. Creators do not escape from reality, but bend it to suit a particular idea or agenda and that, for me anyway, has always been the lure of epic fantasy.
*I do not use “ideology” as an insult. Everyone operates through ideology, on both left and right.
About the Author: Sarah is still waiting for her six-figure advance. In the meantime, she acts as a guest lecturer at Chernivtsi National University (that’s in Ukraine) in Canadian Politics. She’ll soon return to Canada –where winter is ALWAYS coming— to begin her PhD at McMaster University. You can follow her on twitter @sarahshoker.
