Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Liberal Creationist Idiocy

Posted on by

This post first appeared on Splice Today. Illustration from threadbombing.com.
______________

Right-wing heartland Republicans may believe in it, but it’s the left that truly loves creationism. Political outrage is fine, but everyone has to acknowledge at least to some small extent that sentient humans can differ on how often we should drop bombs on Afghanistan or when and whether women should have access to abortion. But creationism? That’s an argument about facts, not morals. It’s the ultimate proof that all those Red State yahoos are not just cruel, heartless bastards, but are congenitally, intentionally and hopelessly stupid. If the right lives to accuse their enemies of immorality, the left lives to accuse theirs of idiocy—and nothing screams “idiot” like looking at a Tyrannosaurus and trying to figure out how it could’ve fit on the ark.

Liberal attacks on creationists have, therefore, a unique note of barely restrained glee and purified contempt. Katha Pollitt’s recent essay in The Nation is an apt example of the genre. Riffing off a recent poll showing that 46 percent of Americans are Creationists, she vaults enthusiastically to the conclusion that almost half of her fellow citizens are actively and dangerously mentally ill.

“… rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Think what the world would have to be like for evolution to be false. Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it.”

The vindictiveness in that last sentence is especially nice. Obviously, if you don’t have a degree from an elite institution, you must be a fool. Certainly, you shouldn’t dare question the scientists. After all, the best research suggests that only 10 to 20 percent of them have been involved in or witnessed research fraud. What’s not to trust?

For what it’s worth, I think evolution is true; I believe in it as much as I believe in the Internet or in the existence of Katha Pollitt. I did my MA thesis in part on Darwin, and I’ve read a good deal of evolutionary theory for a layperson. I agree with Pollitt that creationism is incoherent and illogical. The earth is really old; dinosaurs existed long before people did; I’m related to apes, and have the hair growing on my ears to prove it.

However, I don’t think you have to be a fool to believe the contrary. Really, all you have to be is human. Humans, of whatever creed or politics, believe lots of things that have no particular scientific basis. Some people believe in ghosts. Some people—even some left-wing people—believe vaccines cause autism. Some people, again, some of them left-wingers, believe John F. Kennedy’s assassination was part of a vast conspiracy. Some people believe that Kennedy was a good President. Some people believe that economists can forecast the economy.

All of these beliefs have more practical negative consequences than a belief in creationism. In fact, the only real effect of creationism, as far as I can see, is to interfere with the teaching of evolution in some secondary schools. And given how lousy U.S. high schools are, this is probably a boon for science. As a former educator, I can tell you that the best way to get students to know nothing about a topic is to teach them about it. If you want to kill creationism as a viable public ideology, just make it a nationwide curricular requirement. “Adam was married to (A) Eve (B) Steve (C) a dinosaur (D) a platypus.” I’m sure given just a little time and the usual level of resource allocation, our educational system can insure that less than 46 percent of students will pick A.

Pollitt mentions the possibility that people just say that they are creationists for cultural reasons, rather than because they’ve studied, or even thought about, the science. But she doesn’t mention her own cultural interests or predilections. She claims she’s pointing out the dangers of the ideology, but it’s not like her article includes any scientific evidence that creationism is damaging. All she’s really got is theory, innuendo, and a few pitiful quotes from troubled scientists who mumble that disbelief in the scientific method is “very troubling.” In response to which I’d just point out that many scientists think the scientific method is horseshit. Again, science education in the U.S. is terrible, like all other kinds of education. There’s a discussion to be had about that, but it has little if anything to do with creationism.

Pollitt’s article, in other words, is basically dishonest. She says she’s talking about creationism to alert us all to the harm it does. But really it seems like she’s saying creationism causes harm in order to give her an excuse to talk about it. The poll isn’t a wake-up call. It’s just another way to sneer at people she doesn’t like for the horrible sin of being different—more religious, less educated—than she is.

I wish my fellow citizens would vote for single-payer healthcare; I wish they’d get rid of right-to-work laws; I wish they’d embrace legal marijuana and stop supporting wars. But creationism? I’m sorry, but if we woke up tomorrow and everyone suddenly believed in evolution, the world wouldn’t be one jot better than it is today—except maybe we’d be spared the self-congratulatory liberal concern-trolling on the subject.

Raymond Chandler’s Misogyny

Posted on by

I’ve been having a debate with Charles Reece and Mike Hunter over the misogyny, or lack thereof, in Raymond Chandler’s work. I thought I’d highlight one of my comments here for those who are interested:

I’m not using misogyny casually or dismissively. [The Big Sleep] is powered by disgust, and disgust and corruption are insistently associated with femininity. The most powerful image of the book is the mad Sternwood daughter, a vision of sexualized, feminized chaos from which the male soldiers recoil.

Again, the argument that men are killed and men are bad seems to really pretty much completely miss the point. Masculinity is absolutely an incredibly important issue in the novel — who is a man, who isn’t, what honorable men are like, how men keep themselves pure. You and Mike seem to have this idea that there you figure out misogyny by looking at the relative fates of the men and women in the book. But that’s silliness. The issue is that femininity is a corrupting influence — which affects men too. As Coates says, masculinity is built on a rejection of weakness which is nonetheless central to masculinity. Even the male body becomes feminized, because all bodies are feminized (so that, for example, the old man’s decadence, with all the hothouse flowers, is thematically linked to the way he’s living with his two united daughters…even old age becomes feminine.)

Misogyny is absolutely an ideology/passion which destroys men, and indeed promotes hatred of men (whether homosexuals, or the elderly, or anyone who doesn’t measure up to being a man, which is everyone.) One of the great things about Chandler’s novel is the way it demonstrates this so clearly and with such passion. It’s uncomfortable and probably evil, but the way it works through the permutations, and the vividness of its loathing for women and ultimately for itself, is fascinating and I think valuable. I like the Thin Man quite a bit, strong female character and lack of misogyny and all, but it doesn’t have anything like that insight or passion.

I think in part the issue is that you and Mike are only seeing misogyny as applying to female bodies? Misogyny is very frequently directed at female bodies…but it’s also, and very much, directed at femininity, which can be associated with female bodies, but which is also a trope which can be seen everywhere, in female bodies, male bodies, or decadence generally. The Big Sleep is actually a perfect example of how this works; the misogyny pervades the entire book, creating a world of corruption, decadence, perversion, and disorder, within which honorable men struggle for cleanness and honor and masculinity.

 

This has gotten me thinking a little bit too about why feminism is important for men. Not sure where or if I’ll write that up, but I think it’s worth thinking about — and I think Chandler is a useful way of getting at it.

Voices form the Archive: Tucker Stone on 100 Bullets

Posted on by

Way back when I wrote a post about my disappointment with 100 Bullets. There was a small internet brouhaha. Tucker Stone pitched in with some thoughts on the series in general and the Dave Johnson cover I criticized in particular. Here’s what he said.

You know something? I don’t really like that drawing of Megan on the cover. But I do like the red boxes. They look like something out of Mannix, or a movie poster of the Rat Pack, and considering that I read a good portion of the crew of 100 as a mix of Rat Pack hard men as well as being indebted to the overall weirdness of the Mannix backstory, I think it works within the confines of what the story is. I know you probably saw the cover to the first issue, which I always thought looked like some combination of a Conan movie poster, or the National Lampoon’s Family Vacation poster, where it’s basically a pyramid with Graves ugly mug at the top. Or if you want something more up your alley, it’s looks like a cheap 70’s road flick. Mean guys! Hot ladies shooting stuff! Fuzzy soft focus painting!

Another part of your argument I like–that it’s not good enough that something look better then Ryan Benjamin’s work on Batman & The Outsiders, it should look good independently on its own, and there’s definitely some merit to that idea. At the same time, there’s a limit somewhere in that for me, because it’s easy enough to say “Hey, is this pulp noir is good as Rififi?” and then say “of course not”, but for christsakes, I don’t just want to keep watching Rififi every day anytime I want some pulp noir. Some people might be slow readers or not care, but fuck it: i’ve read all of Jim Thompson’s books, even the terrible ones, and I’ve read as many EC crime comics as I can find, and you know what? I still want some more pulp noir. I want some more that isn’t like something I’ve seen before, and 100 Bullets fills that gap. Hell, some of the complaints I see leveled at the book–like Johanna Draper Carlson’s recent comment about Azzarello’s “love of the metaphor tortured beyond its weight to bear.”–that’s part of what makes the book a fun piece of entertainment. That it does go to these weird dialog extremes, these points where you can’t help but say “god, that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense.” Although I don’t think 100 Bullets (really, anything in Azzarello’s catalog) goes a far as his goofy Deathblow series, a comic I’m an unashamed fan of, I think it definitely does more to expand and experiment with that standard “pulp noir” language then anything else I’ve seen recently. There’s plenty of films that take the appearance, and the structure, of pulp noir, but when it comes time to put words in people’s mouths, it’s either the exactly the same as Double Indemnity or they dump the entire conceit of a false language entirely and everybody talks like–well, like any standard cops and robbers movie. 100 Bullets doesn’t. It doesn’t sound like Jim Thompson, like Ed Brubaker’s Criminal, none of that stuff. That doesn’t make it “The Greatest Comic Book Ever Made,” it doesn’t make it “The Most Mature Tale of Guns and Shit”, it just makes it fucking pulp noir, and it makes for pulp noir that isn’t exactly the same as the stories it’s in love with.

In regards to Risso–you know, I’m not really sure there’s anything to be said about that. A lot of people have said “risso gets better” and that the change in coloring makes the book stronger, and that’s all true, but really: if you didn’t like Risso before, you’re not going to like Risso later. You know what though? Thats. Fucking. Great. The idea that we’re all supposed to get off on the same comic book art is just–it’s fucking tragic and stupid. The idea that we’re all even supposed to RESPECT the same comic art is just as bad.

Private Dick in the Hole

Posted on by

In a recent post on Philip Marlowe, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that Chandler’s misogyny is (too) intimately tied to his vulnerability, or fear therof. Coates points to the way that Marlowe turns Carmen Sternwood out of his bed while sneering out lines like “It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.” Marlowe’s imperviousness to feminine wiles is connected both to his manliness and to his contempt for femininity.

Coates goes on to say this:

I think to understand misogyny one has to grapple with the conflict between male mythology and male biology. There is something deeply scary about the first time a young male experiences ans erection. All the excitement and hunger and throbbing that people is there. But with that comes a deep, physical longing. Whether or not that longing shall be satiated is not totally up to the male.

Erection is not a choice. It happens to men whether they like it or not. It happens to young boys in the morning whether they have dreamed about sex or not. It happens to them in the movies, in gym class, at breakfast, during sixth period Algebra. It happens in the presence of humans who they find attractive, and it happens in the presence of humans whom they claim are not attractive at all. It is provoked by memory, by perfume, by song, by laughter and by absolutely nothing at all. Erection is not merely sexual desire, but the physical manifestation of that desire.

Men hate women, therefore, because men are supposed to be in control, and their plumbing prevents that control.

I think this is perhaps a little too pat; biology-as-truth is, after all, its own mythology, and one that can (and is) also often put to misogynist ends. But putting that argument aside for the moment, I think Coates is in general correct that manliness is defined by control, and that that control is often structured in terms of control-over-biology, or the body, which is then itself always feminine, or threatening to drag one down into the feminine. Manliness is cleanliness is control is unbodiedness, so that the only real dick is the dick that is secure and private.

If Philip Marlowe read Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit, you have to think that he would, therefore, be horrified not by its violence or its sadism, but by its messy embodiment — and, therefore, by its unmanliness.
 

 
Ryan’s work is, of course, generally thought of as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of frat boy masculinity. Prison Pit is a hyberbolic, endless series of incredibly gruesome, pointless, testosterone-fueled battles with muscles and bodily fluids spurting copiously in every direction. It is as male as male can be.

And yet…while Prison Pit is certainly built out of male genre tropes, its vision of masculinity and of masculine bodies is — well, not one that Raymond Chandler would call his own, anyway. That image above, for example, shows our protagonist as his disturbingly phallic left arm oozes up and off and devours his head. Far from being a private dick, that’s a very public and very perverse act of masturbation — and one that is hardly redolent of bodily control.

This sequence, while vivid, isn’t anomalous. Bodies in Prison Pit are always gloriously messy, both in the sense of excreting-bodily-fluids-and-coming-apart-in-hideous-ways and in the sense that they are gratuitously indeterminately gendered. Thus, the three-eyed monster named Indigestible Scrotum sports not only his(?) titular spiky scrotum, but also what appears to be a vagina dentata (or whatever you’d call that.)
 

 
As this suggests, in Prison Pit, sexual organs are less markers of gender than potential offensive weaponry, whether you’re hurling monstrous abortions from your stomach cunt:
 

 
Or blasting monstrous sperm from your sperm-shooter
 

 
You could argue that turning sex to violence like this is just another manifestation of a denial of vulnerability, I guess…but, I mean, look at those images. Do those creatures look invulnerable? Or do they look like they’re insides and outsides are always already on the verge of switching places?
 

 
This is, perhaps, Marlowe’s hyperbolic anxiety come to life; sex as body-rot and degeneration; desire as a quick, brutal slide into chaos.

It’s telling, I think, that the one actual act of sex in the first four volumes is a multi-level rape. The protagonist has his body taken over by the slurge — that repulsive creature attached where his left arm used to be. The slurg-controlled body is then kidnapped by another (male? genderless? neuter?) antagonist, who fits him (it?) with a mind-control computer helmet and cyborg penis.
 

 
The mind-raped protagonist is then commanded to rape the Ladydactyl, a kind of monstrous feminine flying Pterodactyl.
 

 
The robot-on-atavistic-horror intercourse produces a giant sky cancer which tears the Ladydactyl apart. The protagonist finally regains his own brain, and declares, “That fucking sucked.” Which seems like a reasonable reaction. Rape here isn’t a way for man to exercise power over women. Rather for Ryan everybody, everywhere, is a sack of more or less constantly violated meat, to whom gender is epoxied (literally, in this sequence) as a means of more fully realizing the work of degradation.

In Prison Pit, Marlowe’s signal virtues of honor and continence are impossible. And, as a result, Marlowe’s signal failings — fear of bodies, fear of losing control, misogyny, homophobia — rise up and vomit bloody feces on themselves. Whether this underlines Chandler’s ethics or refutes them is perhaps an open question. But in any case, it’s enjoyable to imagine Philip Marlowe dropped into Ryan’s world, his private dick torn out by the roots to expose, quite publicly, the raw, red, gaping, and ambiguously gendered wound.

Love and Wildness

Posted on by

 
This first appeared on Splice Today.
___________________

One of the most painful sequences in Wu Tsang’s documentary Wildness occurs at what, in other contexts, might be considered Tsang’s moment of greatest success.   The film is about Tsang’s connection with The Silver Platter, a bar that has catered to immigrant Hispanic MTF trans women for decades.  Tsang and several of his hipster queer art friends fall in love with the bar, and start to host a dance-party/performance series on Tuesday’s called “Wildness”.  The weekly event takes off, garnering press and citywide attention for the bar.   This culminated in a selection for “Best Tranny Bar” by the LA Weekly, in which journalist Sam Slovick crammed every invidious stereotype of trans women he could come up with into a couple of paragraphs.  He presented the bar’s patrons as sexually aggressive down-and-out streetwalkers, and the bar as a seamy site of titillation for jaded mainstream straights.

Tsang had tried to block the story even before he knew what was in it.  When it appeared, the “Wildness” crowd was horrified, and their protest campaign led the writer to a heartfelt apology.

But despite this unexpectedly positive resolution, the incident reverberates uneasily through Tsang’s film.  Slovick’s sexualized transexuals are a vicious stereotype…but, as stereotypes, they are also an echo of the way that Tsang treats the bar’s longtime patrons in his own film.  Tsang gives The Silver Platter its own narrative speaking voice in the documentary, which, he has said is intended to emphasize the story’s fictionality and subjectivity.  Perhaps it does that. But the way in which The Silver Platter speaks declaratively and omnisciently in Spanish (“How can I explain my legacy?  I’m a beacon guiding my young”) tends to make the bar, not a fiction, but a kind of totemic truth. Slovick’s debased sexualized animals are not so much negated as mirrored in Tsang’s image of noble, magical, Hispanic trannies, providing a young acolyte access to authentic traditions and spirituality.

Tsang and his friends are aware of these problems, and they work honorably to try to mitigate them.  For example, they establish a free legal clinic next to the bar for trans people. But even this effort ends up ambiguously compromised.  After one of the Silver Platter’s owners unexpectedly dies, the bar’s title is contested, and Tsang involves the legal clinic in the resulting dispute.  In doing so, he alienates the family that had long run the Silver Platter.  He ruefully admits, “I fucked up” — a scene of self-criticism that recalls Sam Slovick’s similarly bitter apology.  Wildness itself shuts down, and as Tsang and the organizers move on to other projects, the clinic folds. Later, Tsang patches things up with the owners, and they ask him to come back…but the Wildness crew declines.  Tsang says vaguely that the moment has passed, which appears to mean in part that the art school kids have all moved on to better gigs.

It’s certainly easy to see this as a story of exploitation: middle-class art school kids batten on a marginalized community, use said marginalized community as a launching pad for their own interests and careers, and then move on.  But things are a bit more complicated than that, I think.  In the first place, as I’ve mentioned, Tsang and many of his friends are themselves queer.  Tsang himself in interviews has said he identifies as “transfeminine” and “transguy.”  The bar’s longstanding commitment to helping, promoting, and embracing, trans people is, then, also a commitment to him.  The community is his community — which is in part because he’s made it his, but also because it has made him its.

In a telling scene, one of Tsang’s Wildness co-organizers acknowledges the danger that Wildness might threaten the safety of  the Silver Platter’s regular customers, but argues that it would be condescending to see himself as protecting a community that is welcoming them “with open arms.”  “Who am I supposed to protect them from?” he asks.  “Am I supposed to be protecting them from myself?”

The answer, of course, is yes…and no.  The queer hipsters do put The Silver Platter at risk in various ways, and they are surely obligated to be aware of that and try to minimize it as they can.  But, at the same time, relationships are about making yourself vulnerable.  It might be more useful to think of the link between Wildness and the Silver Platter not as exploitation or initiation, but as bittersweet romance.  Not always safe, not always entirely equal, not always even happy, but touched, like the film, with exhilaration and with love.

This Is Your Brain on Dystopia

Posted on by

This first appeared in The Comics Journal.
________________

Biomega #1; Tsutomo Nihei; Viz; 220 pp., $12.99; B&W, Softcover; ISBN: 1-4215-3184-4 & Ikigami #4; Motoro Mase; Viz; 240 pp., $12,99; B&W, Softcover; ISBN: 978-1421526812

Futurist apocalyptic dystopic manga! Guns! Out-of-control state power! Evil vaccinations! Morally torn government functionaries! Artificial humans! Intelligent bears! Homicidal schoolteachers! Doesn’t that get the blood pumping?!

Maybe?

Biomega #1 — There’s a guy on a motorcycle and he works for a giant industrial conglomerate, which is good because they can make artificial humans just like him to fight the zombie apocalypse put in place by the evil government agency. You could read nutty John Bircher politics into that if you wanted, but luckily the aforementioned zombie virus has actually settled in and eaten this manga’s brain, so if there was an evil John Bircher about, he/she is now dribbling brain bits out of his dislocated jaw, making a huge-disgusting mess on the inside of his white hood, thank you very much — and ew. Hey, shoot him in the face why don’t you? That’s what we’re here to see. Also — we’ve got a zombie orbiting earth! That’s a new twist, huh? Look at the pretty apocalyptic art showing nothing of any particular consequence. I especially appreciate the sexy zombie ass-crack on the back cover, because apparently part of having your brain eaten when you’re a zombie and a hot woman is that you cease being able to pull your underwear up all the way.
 

 
Ikigami #4 — So that was nonsense John Bircher paranoia; this is serious John Bircher paranoia. The future is not artificial humans killing zombies; it’s the evil government engaged in a vaccination conspiracy, so that one out of every 999 citizens die when they’re 25. Or is it that one out of every 25 citizens die when they’re 999? Anyway, they get 24-hours notice that they’re going to fall over so they can seize the day like Robin Williams … and hey, by coincidence, one of the guys who kicks it in this volume is a conscientious schoolteacher. For a moment there I thought we were going to get a moral about how educators suck and should all be killed, which I would support — but no, the teacher remains compassionate and caring even when he turns into a homicidal loony, and the double-twist ironic moral is that I really do believe that children are our future, teach them well, and let them lead the way. Let them show all the beauty they possess inside, already. Then the next one who gets it is a young mother whose husband cares too much about cars. But he gives up the car when he realizes his wife is going to die. It’s all about learning life-lessons while looking at soulful adequately drawn cartoony close-ups. Eventually I suppose the government functionary who tells people they are going to die will question the morality of his actions, thereby receiving a higher and higher percentage of the book’s aforementioned soulful close-ups. This is good, because soulful close-ups help you grow as a person.
 

 
I learned so much from these manga. Things like, “don’t trust the government.” “Melodrama must have recognizable characters, but straight action is drawn better.” And, most importantly, “The Japanese, too, are capable of derivative, fifth-drawer, dystopic science-fiction.” It really is a small world, after all.

Utilitarian Review 12/1/12

Posted on by

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Ng Suat Tong on Tony Millionaire, love, and monkeys.

A electronica dance pop downloadable mix.

Jacob Canfield tries to find a motion comic that does not suck.

Kailyn Kent reviews Bart Beaty’s book, Comics vs. Art.

Jason Dittmer responds to my review of his book on Captain America and nationalist superheroes.

Me on Alun Llewellyn’s sci-fi classic The Strange Invaders, and why dystopias are always utopias.

RM Rhodes on Iain M. Banks and the problems with genre.

Charles Hatfield on why Maus is not glib (Voices from the Archive.)

Vom Marlowe puts together some links to Youtube videos showing artists inking.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

Slate kindly let me plug Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit #4.

At Splice I talk about Nate Silver and the morality of prediction.
 
Other Links

John Horgan on teaching evolution to creationist students.

Choice Joyce compares pro-life groups to anti-prostitution feminists.

Amanda Hess argues that porn stars aren’t any more likely to have been abused as children than other women (that is, they are fairly likely to have been abused.)

Alyssa Rosenberg on why James Gunn shouldn’t be involved in bringing Marvel’s Captain Marvel to film.

David Brothers on why he writes about race and comics.
 
This Week’s Reading

I reread the four volumes of Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit, read C.L. Moore’s Vintage Season, and started Auden’s Selected Poems. Also read a preview of David Wojnarowicz/James Romberger/Marguerite Van Cook’s “7 Miles Per Second,” which is great. And reading John Christopher’s “The Possessors,” which is also pretty fantastic.