Monthly Archives: September 2014

Was Spider-Woman Harmed in the Making of this Cover?

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SpiderWomanSo everyone is no doubt aware of the Milo Manara Spider-Woman variant cover art controversy that occurred a couple of weeks ago. Marvel’s commission of the cover, and its subsequent reaction to the backlash, was sadly typical of a mainstream comics industry that seems to want to embrace its large and growing female readership yet seems utterly incompetent when it comes to actually doing so.

Now, I don’t want to talk about Manara’s Spider-Woman cover art for any of the standard and by now familiar reasons. I don’t mean to suggest that the issues relating to the depiction of females in comics raised by the incident are not worth attending to – quite the contrary. But one public comment regarding the incident got me thinking about a different issue.

On September 2, Kelly Sue DeConnick – the current writer of Captain Marvel – made the following statement in an interview when asked about her take on the cover:

“The thing I think to bear in mind is Jess is not a real person – her feelings are not hurt by that cover.” (full video interview here)

Now, this is certainly true.

ManaraBut we shouldn’t forget certain claims are objectively (even if only fictionally) true of a fictional character (e.g. Jessica is a superhero) and other claims are objectively (again, even if only fictionally) false of fictional characters (e.g. Jessica lives on the moon), regardless of the fact that the character is question doesn’t actually exist. In particular, the production and publication of Manara’s cover now makes it fictionally the case that Jessica (at least once) poised herself atop a building, in a body-paint version of her costume, ‘presenting’ herself (in the biological sense of the term) to anyone in the city who might want a look. Regardless of how we might want to re-construe or reinterpret the art, this is what it in fact depicts.

Of course, as DeConnick notes, Jessica’s feelings aren’t hurt by this – not even fictionally. She isn’t fictionally aware that an artist decided that she would expose herself this way. On the other hand, she now just is the sort of (fictional) character that – perhaps in a single moment of questionable judgment – is willing to engage in some rather extreme exhibitionistic behavior. In short, the incident depicted on the cover is now part of how we understand what sort of person Jessica is.

Given this, we can meaningfully ask: Did the Manara cover (fictionally) harm Spider-Woman? And I think the answer here is uncontroversially “yes”. Whatever Jessica’s motivations for engaging in the behavior depicted in Manara’s art, this contribution to Spider-Woman’s narrative seems to be a negative contribution to her character – a representation of vice, not virtue.

The more important question to ask, however, is perhaps this: Independently of the other kinds of harm undeniably caused by the cover (and well-covered elsewhere), should Manara feel bad for producing this image because it (fictionally) harms Spider-Woman (or should Marvel feel bad for commissioning the image, or should we feel bad for consuming it)? Have we (i.e. Marvel, or Manara, or readers, or some combination of the three) done something morally wrong by adding this incident to the story of Jessica’s life? In short, should we care that we have done something objectively (albeit fictionally) harmful to a fictional character? Is there any sense in which we have moral responsibilities to fictional characters at all?

Of course, characters are harmed via depicting them doing non-virtuous things (making them non-virtuous characters) all the time – we call them villains or antagonists, and we need them for at least some sorts of story. But here the fictional harm done to Spider-Woman was not done in the service of any identifiable narrative needs. It was done for no reason at all, except presumably titillation. So unlike the case of villains, there is no story-related reason to alter Spider-Woman’s character in this negative manner.

So, was Spider-Woman harmed in the making of this cover?

Note: I have simplified a number of issues in the above in order to facilitate my main question:

  1.  The narrative content of cover art does not always straightforwardly depict events that we are meant to take to have actually occurred in the narrative contained within the comic – cover art can play all sorts of other commercial or aesthetic roles in addition to straightforward storytelling (see my previous post here).
  2.  I have assumed that unsolicited exhibitionism is, all else being equal, morally bad (since, for example, it might harm those exposed to it against their wishes).

If one is unwilling to grant me the simplification in 1, or refuses to grant 2 for the sake of argument (since the questions I am trying to raise is a larger one about the moral properties of fiction), then feel free to imagine a relevantly similar depiction of a until-now (mostly) heroic fictional character engaging in morally unacceptable sexual behavior for no reason other than, perhaps, the sexual gratification of the reader, and where that incident is depicted in the main body of the narrative.

 

Revelations of a (Ghost)writer

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My life is full of ghosts – those of my grandfather, father, and uncle, all of whom wanted to be writers. My grandfather sailed from Ireland and became a Boston shoe salesman instead. My father was a stockbroker in New York City. My uncle, however, was a copyright lawyer who became a well-known writer of young adult and children’s books. John Donovan also became the Children’s Book Council president, “a non-profit trade organization dedicated to encouraging the literacy and the use and enjoyment of children’s books.”

Throughout my childhood, John would send books. I breathed them in like air – adventure stories, science, nature books, biographies. I would smell the books, rest my head on them, open their pages with awe, escape the real world into theirs.

When my father was dying, I stole the manuscript of the only novel he’d ever written. It was belly-up rotten. Huh? He had three Ivy League degrees. Didn’t matter; he had no talent. What he did have, and what shocked me, was a barely veiled starry-eyed love for a Malaysian woman he’d met while selling car tires there before he met and married my mother.

To understand why that was so surprising, it must be understood that my father was the type of Bostonian who begged its cliché: conservative, unemotional, inexpressive. In short, uptight.

My uncle, on the other hand, loved books, theater, dance, film, writing. Once he told me that he had fallen in love only fifty times. In short, he thrived.

While my father expressed no emotion, my uncle emoted often. Was there a tie between expression and talent? The biggest complaint my father had about me was that I was too emotional.

Was I? In third grade, I read the dictionary for fun. I wrote my first book – of jokes – in fourth grade. Throughout childhood and high school I wrote and directed plays, bribing siblings and pals to perform them at the grown-up cocktail parties. I started writing picturebooks when I was in my teens. I received triple A+’s on my English assignments, which praised my imagination but implored me not to write “this way” in college, to instead follow the rules.

Off to college I went, led by my emotions. I wrote as much as I could, exactly the way I wanted to. By graduation, I had become a big fish in a little pond. I had published poetry. I learned how little that mattered the instant I arrived in the big pond known as Manhattan. Flapping around like a fish far from water, I finally landed work in a small advertising agency. Then a bigger one. I wrote copy. And copy. And copy.

During that time, my father fell ill and died. My sister was diagnosed with a fatal illness. After her young life ended, I quit the copywriting job that paid my bills while it bankrupted my spirit. I left Manhattan for Montauk, the far end of Long Island, and dove into the artist’s life.

Er…the starving artist’s life. It was winter, I knew nobody, there was no work to be found. After a year writing it, and the next year trying to sell it, I sold my first young adult book. It didn’t make me rich, but I got legs out of it – (mostly) positive criticism, attention in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times, workshop gigs at writing conferences, public readings.

I joined a local writing class. I couldn’t help it, my pen would lift as if possessed, and I would edit people’s stuff. When fellow scribblers began offering to pay me for that, I started an editing business.

While I wrote my second novel, I became a ghostwriter. I worked with doctors, lawyers, Indian Chiefs. That’s a fib – about the Indian Chiefs, but it’s true to say that psychoanalysts, teachers, furniture makers, all wanted to be writers. So did ophthalmologists, dentists, bankers. Let’s not forget the entomologists, painters, and mechanics.

Finishing my third novel, I started a writing workshop. Writing is lonely; I longed to be around other scribes who were grappling with issues that can inhibit the creative process: Is this book any good? Should I go to law school? Are 26 rejections too many? The calls started coming in – some the kind I was used to, but increasingly, developing into something else.

As it turned out, a lot of contractors on Long Island’s East End wanted to be writers. They wanted to tell their tales of leaving places like Manhattan for places like Montauk, working at the homes of the doctors and lawyers and Indian Chiefs who had left places like New York City and bought houses on the East End so that they had somewhere to write their books.

The contractors wanted to write stories about the same clients who were now calling me with woeful tales about how their contractors were simply not returning their calls inquiring when that kitchen redesign, living room expansion, or guest house addition would finally be finished. Who could say? The contractors were busy talking to me.

My father’s words rose up like ghosts: Are we all really writers, or are we all just too emotional?

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Stacey Donovan’s website is donovanedits.com

Rock Is Dead

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I hate to be the one to burst Noah Berlatsky’s bubble but Gene Simmons is right: rock is dead. But it’s not dead for the reasons Simmons thinks it is. In the original Esquire interview, Simmons bemoans the changes in the record industry and scolds the entitled fans who ruined the support system that used to exist for rock bands. What he overlooks is the record industry greed that got us there.

In the late 1990s-early 2000s, the record industry was taken to court for price-fixing and to jack up the price of compact discs. They lost. To a lot of music fans, that was 2-3 hours of their burger flipping that went to pay for corporate’s hookers and blow, rather than to the musicians they loved and thought they were supporting. Artists like the Goo Goo Dolls had to embark on endless tours to pay back their record companies “support system.” Or they could take the TLC route and just file bankruptcy. Add to this, record companies themselves are no longer record companies: buyouts and mergers have turned record companies into just another arm of a corporate revenue stream. What little attempt these companies ever made at producing any semblance of “authentic art” ended long ago.

The most obvious sign of this lack of authenticity is the obsession with signing adorable morons before they’ve finished high school. It makes for more malleable performers. Thanks to Autotune, it doesn’t even matter that they can carry a tune. In this musical climate, nothing interesting is going to happen in the mainstream. Also, a singer or singing group singing to pre-recorded music is cheaper for a venue to book than a full band of people that like eating, and have to take time to set up and break down their gear. That cost consciousness has also led to the rise of the DJ. Not only is paying one or two people less expensive than a band, but it’s also easier to book them for several appearances at a venue. If anything has killed rock music (people playing instruments in bands), then it’s because EDM and dumb pop music are simply more cost effective to make and sell.
This isn’t the first time music has seen such a transition. After World War II, bop quartets started to push out full swing bands consisting of around a dozen people because smaller clubs couldn’t afford the bigger acts. More intimately minded artists like Miles Davis flourished in that atmosphere, while the bigger bands either pared down, like Benny Goodman, or ceased touring for a while, like Duke Ellington.

But what of the proverbial bedroom artists? People who still write songs and play an instrument? Do they even exist anymore? As Berlatsky points out, YouTube tells us they do. I suppose the best of them can hopefully sign to a genuinely independent label and flourish that way. But I suspect that many of these artists will mostly exist in a vacuum. It’s hard to say, because we’re in such a new place with this type of self-promotion.

What I do wonder, though, is how good these people can ever hope to get. I have two reasons for asking this: the first is that a generation of kids who have been given more anti-psychotic drugs than music lessons. The impetus to be interesting has been drugged and counseled out of them. If Bob Dylan was a kid now, he’d probably be given Ritalin instead of a guitar. It seems impossible to demand that this generation give us authentic musicians when it’s normal to deny them the privilege of being their authentic selves.

This line of questioning extends to the audience too. How can a generation who have been drugged into submission ever learn to appreciate an artist who calls out the bullshit in the world? Because that is the spirit of not just rock ‘n roll, but of great art. I mean, it’s not the only thing, but it can be a substantially more interesting starting point being another sparkly, dancing kid on Nickelodeon. And this is probably what scares me more than anything about the death of rock ‘n roll: that we’ve reached a point, culturally, where there’s no room for honesty or rebellion. So much of what we consume, not just in music, but in movies and television, has little room for anything that hasn’t been already designed and pre-approved by a committee.

Rock ‘n roll has had a good 50 year run or so, and by the time Gene Simmons’ kids are grandparents, it will be like jazz is to our generation. It will still exist in some pockets of the music world, among serious music fans taking themselves very seriously, but it will continue to move farther and farther out of the mainstream. And hip-hop will be on the chopping block very soon.

Captain America: Half-Truths

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I was looking forward to reading Truth: Red, White, and Black following the smattering of positive notices the comic has received on HU of late. Noah’s recent article certainly gave me the impression that this was a comic which would transcend its roots in the superhero genre. The words “difficult”, “bitter”, and “depressing” are certainly words to embrace when encountering a Captain America comic.

I’ll not stint in my praise of the parts which do work. I like the naturalness of Robert Morales’ period dialogue and the shorthand used to delineate 3-4 characters in the space of a sparse 22 pages in the first issue. I like that Faith Bradley takes to wearing a burqa just to make a point. The idea that the first Black Captain America should be sent to prison the moment he steps foot on American soil is not only sound (linking it with the events of the Red Summer of 1919 mentioned earlier in the book) but resonates with reality.

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I like that Baker has a way with faces and makes the characters distinct even if they are almost all dispensed with in the course of 4 issues. His devotion to caricature (he is a humorist at heart), on the other hand, lends little weight to proceedings which are deadly serious—the violence is anaemic, the action flat, the misery imperceptible, and the double page splash homage to Simon and Kirby’s original Cap utterly out of place (or at the very least executed with little irony). I like the idea that when Isaiah tries to save some white women about to be sent to the gas chambers, they react to him with a fury as if asked to couple with a dog. It’s a troublesome passage of course since it implicates Holocaust victims in their own brand of racism.

One big problem for me, however, was that the comic wasn’t depressing enough. If the super soldier experiments are meant as a distant reflection of the Tuskegee syphilis study, then the comic doesn’t quite grapple with the true nature of tertiary syphilis and, in particular, the effects of neurosyphilis. The latter condition is described quite bluntly in Alphonse Daudet’s autobiographical In the Land of Pain and the effects are nothing short of a total breakdown of the human body, oftentimes a frightening dementia. Not the blood spattered walls which we see in one instance when a soldier is given an overdose of the super soldier serum but years of irredeemable and unsuspecting torture.

A nod to this lies in one of the test subject’s post-treatment skull deformation as well as Isaiah Bradley’s ultimate fate, but it barely registers in the context of a form wedded to the Hulk and the Leader. Yet even these moments are quickly discarded in favor of action and adventure—there is simply no time for the horror to deepen. The great lie underlying this tenuous reference to human experimentation is that no one has ever become stronger due to a syphilis infection—which is exactly what happens to a handful of test subjects. Not only is the condition potentially lethal in the long term but it has destructive medical and psychological consequences for the families of the afflicted as well as the community at large. To lessen the moral depravity of this historical touchstone in favor of saccharine hope seems almost an abnegation of responsibility.

The reasons for the strange disconnect between purpose and final product are perhaps easy to understand. No doubt editorial dictates and the limits of the Captain America brand came swiftly into play. But there remains the secondary motive of this enterprise. Reviewers have naturally focused on the “worthy” parts of Truth but in so doing they fail to highlight that it is in no small part an attempt to insert the African American experience into the lily white world of Simon and Kirby; an updating of entrenched myths and propaganda resulting in a nostalgic reinterpretation of familiar tropes (confrontation with Hitler anyone?). As such it partakes deeply of the black and white morality of the original comics— its easy virtue and comfortable dispensation of guilt.

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It’s telling that Merrit (drug dealer, arsonist, murderer, and kidnapper), one of the most egregious villains and racists in the entire piece, is also a Nazi sympathizer. The other unrepentant racist of the comic (Colonel Walker Price) is a murderous eugenicists with his hands on the very strings of racial and genetic purity.  Is racism only for villains? Why not rather the very foundations of American society; an edifice so large as to be almost irresistible. There are small hints of this throughout the text of course, but the desire for closure and the sweet apportioning of justice overwhelms a more meaningful and truthful thesis. While there is every reason to believe that racism against African Americans has improved haltingly over the decades, I would be more guarded in my optimism if our attentions are turned to people living in the Middle East and Latin America. In the real world, Captain America wouldn’t be one of the enlightened heroes of the tale, but one of the torturers and perpetrators. Even Steve Darnall and Alex Ross had the temerity to recast Uncle Sam (the superhero) as a paranoid schizophrenic in their own comic recounting America’s woes.

And what of the final fate of these villains? Well, we all know what happend to Hitler and Goebbels. That leaves Merrit who sits scowling in jail presumably imprisoned for life and Price who is threatened with exposure at a stockholder’s meeting by Captain America. And what of real life eugenicists such as Harry H. Laughlin, Charles Davenport, and Harry J. Haiselden—death by natural causes one and all, certainly not the judicially satisfying conclusion of public disgrace. The organizations which funded their work still abound in good health; their followers retiring to the safe havens of rebranding and renaming.

In the final analysis, Truth is still meant to be an uplifting story of tainted patriotism. As social history and activism by the backdoor Truth is commendable but it’s almost as if the authors were afraid to make too much of a fuss. Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years A Slave has no such qualms and is an orgy of violence, despair, and depression—a film which I have no intention of ever watching again. I have no intention of ever reading Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s Truth again but, in this instance, for all the wrong reasons.

Militant Homosexual Dress

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Militant homosexual dress: made for the Portland, Oregon Dyke March, summer 2005, bias cut, floor length, one shoulder, camouflage print dress (held up with a bra and extra elastic from left armpit, around the back to right shoulder replacing the missing bra strap). Mixed media (printed cotton canvas, safety pins, green bra, extra elastic).

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Dyke marches are about lesbian visibility, about showing that we actually exist (and there are enough of us to stop traffic), that we vary greatly, and that we’re a community. But dyke marches don’t actually seem to vary that much. Even in Chicago, they are mostly white, and every one I have been to has been mostly young; they are often not so much about community as cliquey-ness. That is, there is a group of organizers and a lot of their friends and the rest are on the periphery. It seems that most of the non-white lesbians show up for the main event, Pride, rather than the small, day-before side show that is the dyke march. Part of that is that pride parades have an older organizational strategy (developed over many years to accommodate increasingly diverse notions of queerness) where in order to insure that people from various communities show up, they invite representatives from those communities to be on the organizational committee. Dyke marches seem to rely on the organizational structure of new media. Namely, put an idea out there on the internet and it will spread on its own (though it is a distinct possibility that the information IS spreading to everyone the organizers have envisioned it spreading to already).

Overall verdict from the dyke march: this dress didn’t work. It’s unclear whether it just didn’t read, was too femmy, not punk rock enough, etc. The net effect was no one talked to us the whole afternoon, which felt odd. It’s highly anomalous for me to walk around wearing something I’ve made and not receive comments from strangers — in any city, on any day, let alone when marching alongside folks, when people usually want to talk. At the Portland Dyke March, the connected dykes in dresses wore cocktail dresses and combat boots, something I’ve worn since — yes — some of them were in baby shoes.

One day in Chicago, on the #55 through the south side (I was on my way to Noah’s house!) I sat behind a pair of U of C babydykes, who were talking in code about one of them going on testostorone (as an early stage of a f to m gender transition) — and they were probably using needles that a friend of mine supplied. Yet there was no nod in my direction, as would have been subculturally …. had they recognized me as anything other than het (or perhaps, other than femme). The person who did talk to me was an older African-American gentleman wearing a very nice fedora who complimented me on my hat (a grey fur-felt trilby). We all miss and catch opportunities to create minor, temporary super-communities via such conversational practices for using clothing (and other corporeal media – hair, piercings, etc.) to simultaneously acknowledge and yet work across difference.

Dyke marches bill themselves as a new lesbian consciousness, a deliberate attempt to get away from Michigan Women’s Music Festival style, folk rock scenes which (in addition to bad taste in music) purposefully excluded/exclude transgendered lesbians. This transformation is laudable (and I’m often both on its side and included by it). What’s going on is not a case of people simply wanting to hang out with their friends: it’s something broader, a political vision. Yet the actual effect is to represent a gay sub-utopia that (unlike hip-hop, for example) doesn’t acknowledge its basis in specific social circles.

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This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007. A map of the Gay Utopia is here.

Utilitarian Review 9/13/14

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Comics vs. Fashion editorials.

Kim O’Connor with a brief take on Bianca Bangarelli’s brief comic “Fish”.

Conseula Francis and Qiana Whitted on the disappointing ending to the story of the black Captain America in Truth.

Kim O’Connor on R. Crumb’s unpleasant influence on comics criticism.

Ng Suat Tong on crying at the skating drama “Ice Castles.”

Alex Buchet on Sherlock Holmes and the women.

Adrielle Mitchell on science comics and page layout.

Chris Gavaler on Pride and Prejudice and Superman.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic:

— I tell Gene Simmons that rock isn’t dead.

—I interviewed Beverly Tatum, the president of Spelman, about race and education.

—I review the documentary “Take Me To the River” and explain why Britney pops up in a film about Memphis soul.

At Pacific Standard I talk about Mike Brown, “no angel”, Harriet Beecher Stowe and stereotypes of black men.

At Splice Today I talk about:

— Air Supply, the Beach Boys, and the virtues of musical inauthenticity.

— how I could been a thespian.

At the Reader I have a short review of rapper Lizzie, who is great.

The Gone With the Wind study guide I worked on for Shmoop is online.
 
Other Links

Can’t remember if I posted this before, but I really like this piece by Alice Bolin on Miranda Lambert and Beyonce.

Dee Lockett on FKA Twigs.

Amanda Hess on Taylor Swift.

And Fantagraphics is going to publish Fukitor, if folks want to talk about that.
 

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Zombie Assimilation

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How do you turn a zombie story into literary fiction? Make it really boring. At least, that’s Colson Whitehead’s solution in Zone One, and it has a certain, simple brilliance to it, as well as a comic flair. All the zombie-standard beats are there — the gross-out cannibal gore, the sudden bloody shocks, the piles of dead, the foolish hopes bloodily dismembered — but all slowed down and anesthetized with self-consciously arty lit fic prose and meandering stream-of-consciousness flash backs and flash backs within flash backs. What if Henry James had been a pulp writer? the book asks, and then proceeds to spend gobs and gobs of paragraphs on a split second zombie attack, the teeth reaching for the throat with the leisurely upper-crust nonchalance of a Bostonian meaningfully twitching his well-groomed facial hair. Apocalypse takes on the breakneck rhythms of afternoon tea.

I am a fan of horror films and I love Henry James, and watching the two thunked together is pretty enjoyable…for a while. At some point, though, you start to feel that the contrast between style and substance is more a gimmick than a necessity; a mash-up that never quite transcends its initial, “wouldn’t it be funny if..?” joke. Henry James’ novels are slow and byzantine because he sees the world as slow and byzantine; his characters long for and drown in artifice. The best zombie horror is a vision of humans as shambling meat monsters, comic, horrible, visible to the bone. Whitehead tries to merge the two…but they end up undermining each other. The horror in James’ world (like “The Beast in the Jungle”) is that nothing happens, a nothing that is seriously undermined when you’ve got gouts of blood gouting, even if only in slow motion. Similarly, if visceral viscera is what you want, detours into lit-fic’s grab bag of ironized nostaligia (here is a memory of parents having oral sex; here is a memory of a family restaurant) doesn’t take you there. The two modes don’t build on one another or clash in inventive ways; they just take the edge off each other. Instead of one thing or another, you’re left with a mediocre middle.

You could argue that that’s thematic I suppose; mediocrity is an important theme in the novel. The main character — only known by the nickname Mark Spitz — is defined as a kind of avatar of average; he mystical power of mundanity allowed him to slide through school without either failure or excellence, attaining B’s whether he studied or not, and then going on to nondescript jobs calling for his ideal lack of talent. His averageness stood him in good stead in the apocalypse as well.

He was a mediocre man. He had led a medicore life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me.

It’s a cute conceit — though, maybe again a bit too cute. Why exactly are we supposed to see a zombie apocalypse as a triumph of the mediocre, again? Maybe if these zombies were all, every one, the stragglers — infected people who just stand and stare vacantly, pursuing some sort of former moment in their lives — flying a kite, flipping a burger. But the hungry skels, or skeletons, aren’t mediocre; they’re ravening and awful and nightmarish and maybe ridiculous, but not bland unless you toss an awful lot of lit fic tropes at them, and even then not enough. Nor is the skill set of the surviving humans especially mediocre; at least, a talent for killing and surviving seems like it’s still a kind of excellence. Mark Spitz says he’s mediocre, but Whitehead doesn’t sell it. Instead, Spitz doesn’t seem so much average as especially talented at adaptation; he’s good at fitting in. He’s not a master of mediocrity, but of assimilation — as you’d expect, perhaps, from a black man named Mark Spitz.

Spitz’s blackness barely registers through the book; his race is only explicitly revealed towards the end, when he makes a kind of joke about his name and the fact that black people supposedly aren’t able to swim. The reticence here seems especially significant since the modern zombie iteration began with a black protagonist in Night of the Living Dead. Romero’s film plays with the divide between black and white and human and monster; the zombies become in many ways a ravening white horde, while, at the end of the film, the law and order forces cleaning up the dead casually shoot the good guy because they think he’s a zombie, and/or because he’s black. Romero’s apocalypse is bleak/funny/horrible (like Octavia Butler’s) in part because the end of the world actually doesn’t change anything; divisions of gender, of race, of class, still persist. Even at the end of everything, old hates continue to matter. Zombies don’t change us because zombies are us; even in death, people suck.

Whitehead, though, explicitly rejects that vision. For him, and for Mark Spitz, the zombie apocalypse is a new era. Everyone you meet in the book, of whatever class, seems to be pulling together, fighting the good fight; some are incompetent, some are weak, but to the extent that there’s stupid cruelty or violence of humans against humans, it’s all off to the side and bracketed as a kind of inevitable effect of trauma, not to be dwelt on or looked at closely. Even that old staple, lust, barely puts in an appearance. Instead,

There was a single Us now, reviling a single Them. Would the old bigotries be reborn as well, when they cleared out this Zone, and the next,and so on, and they were packed together again tight and suffocating on top of each other?

Spitz goes on to think that yes, old prejudices would be revived if civilization were to get up and running again. But (spoiler!) the whole point of the end of the book is that civilization is not revived; every human effort to return to normality is doomed to failure. The dead take back everything, and in their number “Every race, color, and creed was represented.” The world is not going back to normal, and as long as it doesn’t, equality wins.

Glen Duncan, in a New York Timesreview that is deftly lobotomized by its own condescension, seems to be under the impression that the zombie genre has no literary merit, and that Whitehead’s contribution is to bring the virtues of thematic depth to an otherwise crap pulp form. I’d argue, though, that Whitehead’s evasion of suspense and serious-writer-prose serve to obscure a poignant, but still unsatisfying glibness. Romero’s zombie stories trap you in the binary between self and other; you’re always trying to not be the monster and not being the monster makes you the monster, “the monster” here being, not just zombies, but blacks, whites, men, women — all the familiar, bleak faultlines of identity. Zone One, on the other hand, seems to be a zombie story for Obama’s post-racial America — a dream that at the end of all things, at least, at last, non-white folks will slip into the sea of the dead on equal terms. Henry James and George Romero both, I think, have a bleaker vision, in which, even after the apocalypse, the teeth of caste are not so easy to unlock.