Last week I had a piece at Salon where I talked about fascism and the aestheticization of politics in Dead Poets Society. I’d originally intended to talk about Inglorious Basterds as well…but I ran out of space. So I thought I’d try to do it here.
Just to recap: the aestheticization of the political is a phrase coined by Walter Benjamin to describe one of the characteristics of fascism. Quoting trusty Wikipedia, “In this theory, life and the affairs of living are conceived of as innately artistic, and related to as such politically. Politics are in turn viewed as artistic, and structured like an art form which reciprocates the artistic conception of life being seen as art.” So fascism treats political issues as the occasion for pageantry ; differences in power or goals are all subsumed into symbolic unities — like the Nazi arm band or the mass meeting — or symbolic marginalization — like the scapegoating of Jews and blacks.
Inglorious Basterds is, like all of Quentin Tarantino’s films, so kinetic and pulpy that you don’t necessarily think of it as particularly thoughtful, about fascism or anything else. In fact, though, Tarantino seems almost to have made the movie specifically to illustrate Benjamin’s argument. The Nazi’s in Basterds are obsessed with image and aestheticization. The first scenes of Martin Wutke’s ridiciulously mugging Hitler, for example, are set against a backdrop of an artist working on a large, hyperbolically noble wall painting of the dictator. More, the Nazis in the film are presented as being obsessed with Nazis in film. The plot centers on a screening of a re-enactment of a German war triumph in which the hero, Private Zoller, plays himself. At the direction of propaganda minister Goebbels, Zoller the hero becomes Zoller the icon — a politicized propaganda image of himself. That image is so important that Hitler himself comes to the screening, giggling happily (like Tarantino himself?) as screen Zoller shoots dozens of men. Hitler compliments Goebbels enthusiastically on the screen carnage, at which Goebbels almost breaks down in tears — a propagandist who believes in his own imagined Fuhrer.
You could say that the aestheticization of politics dooms the Nazi’s in the film; they’re so obsessed with the propaganda image they’re creating that all of the Nazi brass decide to attend the opening of Zoller’s film, exposing themselves to not one, but several murderous plots. The image of Nazi victory turns into the reality of Nazi defeat — Zoller himself is shot by a French Jewish plotter even as his film self (played by his real self) kills enemy soldier after enemy soldier onscreen. And we get to see Hitler riddled with bullets by Jewish-American soldiers, doomed by his love of (his own) image.
Of course, Hitler wasn’t really killed by a Jewish-American soldier in a movie theater. That’s just a filmed fantasy of victory — a Western mirror image of the Zoller film. Hitler sits himself down to see an iconic, aestheticized encapsulation of his political prejudices, and we do exactly the same thing. Tarantino positions us, watching the Nazis die, in the same place as the Nazis watching their enemies die.
If the Nazis aestheticize the political, in other words, then so does Tarantino, and so, in the same way, do we watching Tarantino’s film. Inglorious Basterds is one suspense tour de force after another, with larger than life characters pirouetting virtuosically through breathtaking set pieces, punctuated with knowing flash-backs, ironic voice overs, and compulsive references to films, films, films, from spaghetti westerns to Triumph of the Will. The violence, the plotting, the revenge narrative and the sheer spectacle are so overwhelming and delightful that the occasional nos to political content is actually jarring. When Jew-Hunter Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) makes an offhand remark about how he can “think like a Jew,” and compares Jews to rats, it seems gauche, unnecessary. He’s just supposed to order that family shot in a blaze of choreographed violence; linking the bloodbath to some sort of ideological meaning seems wrong.
The implication here is that, in important ways, Western democracy isn’t all that much different than fascism. The politics of both are couched in aestheticized symbols and mass ideology as spectacle. Brad Pitt’s murderous American guerilla Aldo Raine operates on much the same principles as his Nazi enemies; just as they see the Jews as a species, so he sees them as subhuman, marked. As he says, the idea that a Nazi soldier might go home, take off his uniform, and return to civilian life is wrong and inconceivable. A Nazi is always a Nazi, and so Aldo carves a swastika onto the foreheads of his prisoners, to make sure that the categorical difference he sees, the clear division of the races, will remain symbolically visible — political demarkations given aesthetic form. (It’s worth noting too that Aldo is nicknamed the “Apache” for his habit of taking scalps. Tarantino may well be aware aware that the American Indian genocide was a direct source of inspiration for Hitler’s Holocaust.)
The last image of the film is Aldo and an associate looking out of the screen, supposedly at the swastika Aldo has just carved in Landa’s head. “I think this just might be my masterpiece,” Aldo says. It’s a self-reference; Aldo is a stand-in for Tarantino, who completes his film about Nazis at the same time as Aldo completes his Nazi symbol. But Aldo’s self-satisfied smirk is also (self-)deceptive. The Nazi here is not going to remain a Nazi; as soon as the film ends, in fact, Landa will go back to being Christoph Waltz, who (thankfully) has no swastika carved into his skull. Aldo’s dream of Nazis who are forever Nazi, like Tarantino’s dream of Hitler killed in a movie theater — they’re both just aesthetic fictions. Politics as symbol ultimately fails.
It’s true that part of the giddy rush of Inglorious Basterds is the sense that art can be politics; that we can make Jews take their revenge on Hitler just by representing it as truth. But part of the film’s power is also, contradictorily, the refusal of aestheticization; the insistent artificiality and theatricality remind you that the politics here are aesthetics, and so never allow the first to be subsumed by the second. Aldo can’t really reach out of the film and draw the swastika on our head. The symbol he wants to be totalizing isn’t — which means, maybe, that these bloody fantasies don’t have to control us forever. The real hope of Basterds isn’t that the Nazis will get theirs, but that, maybe, we can take off that uniform, and leave the theater.
In my last post, I wrote about simultaneous talk in comics, exploring the way that speech balloons can be positioned in a panel to convey a sense of overlapping talk. This post continues the series on the possibilities of simultaneous discourse. However, this one asks how visual and verbal cues might tell us something about the way readers are supposed to imagine hearing the production of both speech and song in the same panel.
The first example is drawn from Full Color, a graphic novel by Mark Haven Britt. I have taught this book a couple of times, and it is a beautifully designed comic that tells a powerful story. The main character is Boom and her best friend is David. In Figure 1, the two are walking in a park while David sings.
Figure 1.
The balloon that contains David’s song is partially obscured visually by Boom’s speech balloon. In this case, I think the example is relatively straightforward. If we follow the principle that overlapping balloons indicate overlapping discourse, then Boom’s directive (’Sing something else’) takes place during the same time that David sings.
Sometimes, the relationship between song and speech in the same panel is less clear. Two examples from Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles will help illustrate a range of possibilities. Both Figure 2 and Figure 3 come from ’Say You Want a Revolution.’ In Figure 2, we see Dane McGowan (aka Jack Frost) sitting on a sidewalk, in pretty bad shape. In the panel on the left, old Tom O’Bedlam walks by, talking in his enigmatic style. In the panel on the right, Dane/Jack’s question is rendered in a speech balloon that is separate from the others. In fact, none of the balloons even touches in this panel.
Figure 2. Dane/Jack asks about Tom.
For this post, the central question about this image is the relationship between speech and song. Is the reader expected to hear Tom’s song first, followed by (a short) silence, then followed by Dane/Jack’s turn? Or is the reader expected to hear Tom’s song take up enough time in the panel that Dane/Jack’s turn takes place simultaneously. A third possibility, of course, is that Tom’s song lasts long enough to overlap both speakers’ turns.
After some time passes, Jack and Tom become relatively stable compatriots, if not friends. In Figure 3, they are shown walking together, and Jack is trying to learn something from Tom.
Figure 3. Tom and Jack talk.
Tom speaks first and then sings, presumably with little or no silence between the end of his spoken words and the beginning of his song. In a separate speech balloon, Jack takes his own turn.
If we follow the principle that separate balloons indicate a complete separation of turns, then at no point in these two examples from The Invisibles is there overlapping discourse. However, my sense is that in some cases at least, we are encouraged to imagine the more expansive nature of song and that it is not only possible but quite likely that speakers can produce regular conversational turns that overlap the lyrics.
How do you hear music and speech in the same panel? What examples are similar to or different from those presented in this post? What other examples of song and speech have you seen mixed in the same panel? How do you imagine we should hear them? As separate? As overlapping? As complementary? As competing?
That’s what Alan Moore told a recent interviewer. “I don’t think the superhero stands for anything good,” he said. “They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine-to-13-year-old audience.” But since all they do nowadays is entertain 30-60-year-old “emotionally subnormal” men, Moore considers superheroes “abominations” and their continuing dominance “culturally catastrophic.”
This from a self-professed anarchist who considers the shooting of government leaders a “lovely thought.” Little wonder his first superhero was a terrorist.
Moore and artist David Lloyd started V for Vendetta in 1981 for England’s since defunct Warrior magazine. I started reading it when the series moved to DC in 1988. I was 22, Moore’s age when he first conceived a story about “a freakish terrorist” who “waged war upon a Totalitarian State.” But it was Lloyd who transformed Moore’s freak into “a resurrected Guy Fawkes, complete with one of those paper mâché masks in a cape and conical hat.”
Their plan was to create “something uniquely British,” and, sure enough, the Fawkes reference meant absolutely nothing to this Pittsburgh-born college senior. When I’d read The Handmaid’s Tale the year before, I though Margaret Atwood was forecasting an original future: “when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress . . . The entire government, gone like that.” But Fawkes beat her by almost four centuries.
I didn’t read up on the Gunpowder Plot till I was a student teacher prepping Macbeth for a class of tenth graders. Shakespeare staged his tragedy of a regicidal anti-hero after Catholic terrorists tried to blow-up King James during the 1605 opening of Parliament. They’d rented a storage space under the House of Lords and crammed in three dozen barrels of gunpowder. Fawkes was arrested before he could light the fuse, tortured into betraying his dozen co-conspirators, tried, hanged, and his body displayed in pieces as a warning to sympathizers. He was still in prison when London lit bonfires in celebration of the King’s survival, and Parliament later declared the anniversary an official holiday, complete with fireworks and newspaper-stuffed “guys” set ablaze.
But hatred is a funny thing. Somewhere along the line the point of all those celebrations got hazy. Guy Fawkes Night lost its official standing in the 19th century—around when penny dreadful writers were converting England’s most abominable traitor into a romantic hero, a conspiracy Lloyd happily joined. “We shouldn’t burn the chap every Nov. 5,” he told Moore, “but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!”
I want to say the American equivalent would be championing John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald, but Fawkes’ rehabilitation might be possible only because his assassinations failed. Benedict Arnold could be closer—except no one remembers what treason he was planning (and even if you do, surrendering West Point to the British just doesn’t have the same audacious charm).
So Lloyd wanted to “give Guy Fawkes the image he’s deserved”—but I’m not sure Moore was fully committed to the plot. Despite his anarchist rhetoric, he doesn’t “believe that a violent revolution is ever going to work,” and he doesn’t hide his freakish terrorist’s violence under POW! and BAM! bubbles either. It was Lloyd who banned the sound effects (along with thought balloons—probably the most important moment in Moore’s development as a writer), but Moore’s dialogue complicates the violence Lloyd renders otherwise bloodless:
“I’ve seen worse, Dominic, physically speaking. Like I say, it’s the mental side that bothers me . . . his attitude to killing. Think about it. He killed them ruthlessly, efficiently, and with a minimum of fuss. Whatever their faults, those were two human beings . . . and he slaughtered them like cattle!”
The terrorist also enters quoting Macbeth, the monstrous anti-hero Shakespeare’s audiences (including King James for whom it was commissioned) would have linked to Fawkes. Moore’s Chapter One title, “The Villain,” is a bit of a clue too. V goes on to murder and maim his way through some thirty more chapters, but the part that troubled me most at the time was the psychological torture he inflicts on Evey. Yes, he rescues the damsel from a back alley rape in standard Batman fashion, but then he dupes her into believing she’s been imprisoned by the fascist government, shaves her head, starves and waterboards her, all in the name of . . . what exactly? By the end Evey is a good little Robin, taking on her mentor’s mission, but there’s more than a whiff of Stockholm syndrome between the panels.
“The central question is,” Moore says, “is this guy right? Or is he mad? I didn’t want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements.”
Which, by the way, is a pretty good example of using a superhero to actively expand an audience’s imagination.
Meanwhile, Guy Fawkes keeps adventuring. The “hacktivist” network Anonymous adopted Lloyd’s Fawkes mask for their 2008 Scientology protest—which they then carried over to Occupy Wall Street and, most recently, a worldwide Million Mask March held on Guy Fawkes Day to protest government austerity programs. The group’s anti-corporate message, however, gets a bit hazy once you know Time Warner owns the copyright on the mask (via DC I assume) which are manufactured in South American sweatshops and earn the company a killing on Amazon.
To say the announcement that Disney is working on a new, live action film adaptation of their most revered villain, Maleficent, the wicked fairy godmother from Sleeping Beauty sent shockwaves through the internet would be an enormous understatement. Reactions ranged from excited to ecstatic, with virtually everybody (at least within the range of cartoon enthusiasts, feminist, and feminist cartoon enthusiasts I spend much of my time with) thrilled at the idea of one of Disney’s most beloved creatures of wickedness getting the chance to tell her full story. But even as I shared in the excitement, I couldn’t help to thinking back to another story that had given a similarly ghoulish green witch a chance to tell her tale – Wicked, the book musical about how the Wicked Witch of the West got as wicked as she is. And after that, I remembered the existence of two pieces of media that explored the origins of famous heroines, namely Nintendo’s Metroid: Other M and Square Enix’s 2013 remake of the Tomb Raider series. Through all these works, we see two specific themes: the subject matter of a popular and critically acclaimed female subject, who has succeeded whether through the force of her character or her execution, and the need to redress this character, to explore who she is and how she became the person we know her as. And perhaps instinctively, this realization gave me a queasy feeling. Sure, it’s great to get character backstories, but why are we seeing all these female characters, characters that never needed an in depth explanation for who they were, being given backstories to justify their characters when justification was never necessary? Is it just an attempt to flesh out characters that may have only ever been seen as villains, or is there a more salient urge here, to strip female heroes and villains alike of their mystery and autonomy and make them explain themselves to us? From this perspective, it seems necessary to ask what it is that the new Malificient film does; does it validate her, giving us an idea of why she is who she is, or does it undo her, removing the excess villainy and mystery that made her at once so captivating and inspiring to viewers?
Didn’t she play Lara Croft too? Or am I just losing it…
Like a male hero or villain, there are myriad reasons a female hero or villain may succeed, or fail, in their given function. But unlike most male characters, female characters are also caught up in the complex politics of representation and sexualization, and must be interrogated with pointed questions to determine whether they break down sexist stereotypes or uphold them. Upholding the institutions of sexism is done in ways that range from outfits to motivations; if the heroine or villainess wears the same three loose pieces of cloth everywhere she goes, she’s demeaning eye candy for men, and if her motivations are for romance, wealth, or eternal beauty, she’s a damsel, a conniving harpy, or any one of the literal hundreds of pre-formed molds made for female characters of all shapes and DnD alignments. To escape this is no easy task, for it requires simultaneously the recognition of the female character’s specific social position while also being clear to point out that her gender changes nothing about her basic human motives, objectives and desires. In this sense, characters like Maleficent and Samus Aran of the Metroid game succeed; their motivations do not rest in anything directly coded as feminine, but simply in who they are as human beings (or in Maleficent’s case, fairies). And while Elphaba and Lara Croft no doubt fulfill sexist functions (in the case of the former, being a vindictive hag and in the latter, being eye candy for 13 year olds with a PlayStation) their characters seem to exist and have motives for action outside of them. From craving treasure to craving vengeance, acting out of senses of duty, honor, wickedness and for the thrill of it, the motivations of these women are not wholly contingent on their gender; anyone in Elphaba’s position would want to avenge their sister, and the tropes of bold and brash treasure hunter like Lara Croft is as common as the adventure genre itself. And more importantly, the motivations of these characters don’t really need to be qualified; we have seen enough villains and heroes with them to not so much bat an eye at them. Does this drive to qualify the motivations of female characters represent a drive to strip them of their character nuances, as if we as viewers have trouble believing that they, as female characters, are capable of doing the things they do without qualifying it?
Is it really necessary to know how this became this?
With Maleficent in particular, this question is troubling. More than any of the previously outlined characters, Maleficent triumphs not because she is a character so much as she is a symbol, an awe-inspiring avatar of wickedness and malevolence in semi-human form. This is what, in the already impressive pantheon of comic, tragic and wicked villains of the Disney canon, makes her stand out as above and beyond the rest. The average Disney villain may have myriad motivations and reasons for being evil, be they jealousy, gluttony, old grudges or simple dislike of the protagonist. But Maleficent is above such petty mortal concerns. It is true that she is slighted in not being invited to Princess Aurora’s Christening, but this seems little more than pretext for her to unleash her evils upon the kingdom. And were it not for the meddling of the “good” fairies, she would have succeeded; by the films halfway point, she has the prince in chains, the princess in eternal sleep, and the kingdom completely plunged in darkness. Further, she never relies on the powers of her minions to get things done: for the most part, it is her who does the plotting, the trapping, and most of all the fighting, and she does it damn well. By the film’s final act, she has become evil itself, manifesting as an enormous black dragon capable of leveling entire kingdoms, before good triumphs and she is finally slain once and for all. Even as she loses, she stands out in a way no villain has before or since. Maleficent is a force of nature, an awe inspiring manifestation of villainy in its purest, most captivating form, and it is in the very force of her evil and power that she has emerged as the perennial, classic villain of the Disney mythos.
According to the Wikipedia page for the new Maleficent film, our favorite evil fairy is being recast as a defender of nature and wildlife from the encroaching forces of man. Is this how far the mighty have fallen? The dark lady Maleficent, a militant Greenpeace activist? Forgive me if I don’t sound too enthused. In some cases, fleshing out the ideas of female villains and heroes gives them an extra bit of dimension they previously lacked; with Wicked especially, we got to see an arresting and ultimately convincing portrait of the Wicked Witch, with her origins as dreamy idealist and the way the corruption of the world she lived in made her something far worse. But this recent spate of female backstories too often seems to ask questions that don’t need to be asked, namely why do these characters, characters we already know and care about, act the way they do? For Maleficent this is a pointless line of inquiry. Maleficent has never operated on the basis of everyday logic and passions, for if she did she wouldn’t be a fire breathing sorceress living in a rickety castle in the darkest, creepiest corner of the Earth. What makes Maleficent a gripping character is not who she is, but what she represents. She is evil incarnate, angry, spiteful, cunning and all-encompassing evil, and the fact that she happens to manifest this in a female form seems to make little difference. But in creating a new backstory for her, in the same vein that other classic female characters have had done for them, we see an underlying anxiety not on the part of the viewers, but on that of the producers who both want to make a buck on and feed into the ever-more pervasive idea that classic female characters have to justify their very existences as classic characters.
So, I ultimately pose this question; is a new Maleficent film really necessary? Do we have to create a backstory for a character who’s more a force of nature than anything, and deconstruct everything she represents to a world where powerful female symbols are already rare to nonexistent? In undoing Maleficent and other female characters like her, are we selling them short, and telling them that we don’t believe that they can be gripping, powerful and meaningful on their own terms?
My answer to this is yes. Rather than revisiting classic female characters, it seems a much better use of the time and energy of writers and artists everywhere to build off of them, to learn from their mistakes and appreciate their impact, and create new, dynamic characters that through their actions destroy expectations of gender and all related institutions. Rather than undoing Maleficent, we should champion her cause, and learn from the things she has taught us about character designing and building. If we do not do this, moving forward will only become more difficult, and the mistakes of the past will just keep repeating themselves.
This August 2014, Disney is releasing a major feature film based on a comic published by its Marvel subsidiary, Guardians of the Galaxy. The spacefaring supergroup is a hodgepodge of characters coming from all over Marvel’s last five decades, and from many different artists and writers.
As these last are often denied proper credit, below we present an illustrated list of the main creators involved.
The Guardians
Groot was created by Jack Kirby, with Stan Lee (script) and Dick Ayers (inks) in Tales to Astonish 13.
cover art by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko
Star Lord was created by Steve Englehart (script) and Steve Gan (art) in Marvel Preview 4.
cover art by Bob Larkin
Rocket Raccoon was created by Bill Mantlo (script) and Keith Giffen (pencils) with Rick Bryant (inks) in Marvel Preview 7.
art by Giffen and Bryant
Drax the Destroyer was created by Jim Starlin (pencils, concept) with Mike Friedrich (dialogue) and Mike Esposito (inks) in Iron Man 55.
cover by Jim Starlin and Joe Sinnott
Gamora was created by Jim Starlin in Strange Tales 180.
art by Jim Starlin and Steve Leialoha
Yondu was created by Arnold Drake (script), Gene Colan (pencils) and John Tartaglione (inks) in Marvel Super-Heroes 18.
cover by Gene Colan. Yondu is the archer character on the far right.
Other Characters
Ronan the Accuser was created by Jack Kirby, with Stan Lee (script) and Joe Sinnott (inks) in Fantastic Four 65.
Cover by Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott
The Collector was created by Stan Lee (script) and Don Heck (pencils) in The Avengers 28.
Pencils by Don Heck
Rhomann Dey was created by Marv Wolfman (script) with John Buscema (pencils) and Joe Sinnott (inks) in Nova 1.
Left: John Reilly, who plays Rhomann Dey in the film; right , art by John Buscema and Joe Sinnott.
Nebula was created by Roger Stern (script) and John Buscema (pencils), with Tom Palmer (inks) in Avengers 257.
Cover art by Al Milgrom
Korath the Pursuer was created by Mark Gruenwald (script) and Greg Capullo (art) in Quasar 32.
There you have it, though other characters and concepts by Marvel-paid creators doubtless also figure in the film (which, from what I’ve seen, will be a very enjoyable romp.)
It would be good and ethical were the corporation behind it to reward these creators with some cash. But, given Marvel and Disney’s traditional attitudes of gratitude, I’m not holding my breath…
We did most overrated ban a couple weeks back, so figured I’d try the flip side.
This one’s trickier for me than overrated…but I think I might go with Sly and the Family Stone. They are much admired, but they tend to be sort of an afterthought in terms of great sixties boomer bands, when I think they’re actually way more innovative/important/influential than the Rolling Stones, or Dylan, even Hendrix. Even bands like Funkadelic or Outkast, who owe a huge debt to Sly, tend to get more props.
Other picks…um…I think the Bangles are great, which is not a widely held opinion, I know. I think Destiny’s Child is brilliant and important, which again isn’t a consensus opinion.
What do you folks thinks? What’s the most underrated band/musician?
Roy T. Cook on transforming into hypersexual superheroines.
Chris Gavaler on the Confederate superheroes of America.
Utilitarians Everywhere
I was on HuffPost Live talking about Michael B. Jordan’s casting as Johnny Storm. Other guests ere Conseula Francis, Julian Chambliss, and W. Kamau Bell.
