Fuzacky electronica mix. Download 4 here.
1. No Burden — Co la
2. Ballibat — Taragana Pyjarama
3. 4 — Aphex Twin
4. And They All Look Broken Hearted — Four Tet
5. Matthew Unburdened — Clark
6. Beep Street — Squarepusher
7. Max on a Stroll — Kettel
8. Tattoo — Venetian Snares
9. Headspin — Plaid
10. Hang Up Season — Andrew Coleman
11. Brace Yourself Jason — µ-ziq
12. Quiet Now —Daedelus
13. Minor Detour — Daedelus
Sarah Horrocks had a great comment about sci-fi and horror in comics (and out. It’s reprinted below.
I’m miscommunicating if I’m putting across that I don’t think sci-fi genre work is as good as anything else.
I’m still reading Dune on the first go through, but there are lines in this book so magical that they are already amongst my favorite. Game of Thrones is an exceptional work. Prophet blows my mind every month. I obviously feel pretty passionate about Druillet’s work. I love Giger and Beksinski’s sci-fi/horror paintings.
And I say all of this as someone whose background in education IS the study of literature.
I think what upsets people about sci-fi is that they feel it’s “merely” escapism, and they’ve been taught to view anything remotely escapist as a pejorative. But it is these fantastic other worlds that most bend and expand your mind, and allow you to change expectations and ideas when you end the work and come back to reality. Sci-fi as a genre is a world shaper. We probably wouldn’t be having this conversation on this thing the internet without science-fiction and it’s mind altering qualities. Sci-fi is good drugs.
And Druillet and Moebius are for me masters of it. I find their works hugely inspirational, and full of ideas that are even today fresh and interesting. Even just technically what they were able to pull off was virtuoso work. There are certain mechanics within western comic art that they absolutely are the gold standard for.
Corben is I feel something of a different beast entirely. I see Corben more in the horror mold–though that’s shaped because most of the Corben I’ve read, and continue to read is horror. And I think horror operates with a completely different set of rules from any other genre but porn. I think great horror is not plot based at all, but rather about generating a particular mind state within the reader–like the example I always use is in the film Texas Chainsaw massacre–the original–there’s this section where he’s chasing the girl through the woods with his chainsaw, and the night is blue, and there’s almost an impossible amount of branches that keep getting in the girl’s way–and leatherface is always like just inches behind her no matter how fast she runs–and the forest actually morphs within this scene and elongates from how we had previously seen it in the film. Suddenly it changes into this seemingly neverending labryinth. She stars running across the screen in directions and at distances that should get her out of the forest–but don’t. In terms of realism it is a failure. But what the work is engaging with is that creepy dream logic that infuses all of the best nightmares.
Most horror work in film and comics of the last 20 years have been failures because they do not understand that this element is what makes horror work. The plot and the realism is what detracts you from the sublime horror moment where art melds with dream. Similar to the moment porn melds with fantasy.
Horror, particularly in comics I think, should be less interested in plot and story compared to any other genre of comics–and be interested in creating these nightmare images and scenarios that come off of the page. More horror comics creators need to be surrealist pornographers.
This got off track. But horror is I feel an instance where adherence to plot and characterization rules that work in other genres produces spectacular failures of horror. The only thing you are left with in a horror work whose focus are those elements is a gore-fest, and trying to out-shock the last person. But true horror is not just gore, or shock–it’s much more subversive than that. And so horror is a huge indictment as a genre of this particular approach.
For me an excellent work of true horror did come out in comics this year, and it was done by Richard Corben. It was called Ragemoor. I remember reading the opening pages of that book and that section where the castle history is being explained–gave me chills like a comic hadn’t in a long long time. I think Corben has always had the chops to do great horror, and sometimes he has–but when he has failed it has been because of writing which is overly concerned with itself. Which is why it is hard to explain to people Corben’s place in comics history–because he truly is one of the greats–but he has very few works that are masterworks–and if you don’t get Corben art, and can’t focus in on what he’s doing visually on the page–you won’t understand.
Druillet and Moebius are different in that I think both of them the writing is in concert with the art–probably because they are handling both functions.
A version of this appeared in The Chicago Reader way back when.
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Jennifer’s Body is a basic rape-revenge narrative. Towards the beginning of the film, stuck-up high-school hottie Jennifer (Megan Fox) is brutalized. Subsequently, she wreaks hideous vengeance on men in general, and, eventually, on the perpetrators in particular. Action, reaction, gallons of blood. It’s not clever, but it has a crude, inevitable elegance. It works.
Or at least, it works in classic examples of the genre like I Spit on Your Grave or Ms. 45. Jennifer’s Body, though, isn’t satisfied with the formula. Writer Diablo Cody (Juno) and director Karyn Kusama want something a little smarter, a little more hip. They add some sparkling dialogue: in what is sure to become a classic line, Jennifer is described as “actually evil, not high school evil.” They include some wicked satire too; most notably Adam Brody’s gleefully oleaginous performance as an indie-rocker who earnestly explains how tough it is for bands these days just before butchering Jennifer as an offering to Satan.
So far so good. But the filmmakers also tinker in more fundamental and, unfortunately, less successful ways. The visceral rush of the rape-revenge narrative is distanced, complicated, and ultimately squandered. They take the rape itself, and they make it not quite a rape, but rather a virgin sacrifice gone horribly awry. They make Jennifer not just a woman wronged, but a possessed demon, who kills not for retribution, but for food. They take the revenge, and they push it back all the way into the credits, presented in a series of still frames, and performed by the wrong person. And then they add a series of twists and turns, quasi-homages lifted from a melange of horror/exploitation gone by. Demon Jennifer turns evil like the guy in Christine and vomits like Linda Blair in the Exorcist. She stalks the prom like Carrie, and gets a point-of-view shaky camera shot courtesy of a thousand slasher films. The movie even takes a bizarrely unmotivated detour into women-in-prison films, of all things.
The most ambitious change, however, is the introduction of female bonding. The classic rape-revenge films drew their energy, in large part, from a celebration of, and anxiety about, the castrating power of second-wave feminism. Women, these movies averred, had been wronged, and those women were going to rise up and cut your dick off (literally, in the case of I Spit on Your Grave.) Movies like Ms. 45 even made a sustained critique of patriarchy, linking workplace harassment, rape, and the general marginalization of women into a single crime — punishable by death.
But while rape-revenge films make much of feminism, they don’t, generally, make anything of sisterhood. In both I Spit… and Ms. 45, the women are notably isolated. They tell nobody about their suffering or their plans for revenge, because they have no one to tell. The point of the films, indeed, is the spectacle of an isolated, lone, helpless, weak individual turning the tables on the patriarchy. In short, for all their feminist gestures, the movies are for men; they’re about how men interact with women, rather than about how women interact with each other.
Jennifer’s Body is different. The central relationship of the film is not between Jennifer and her male oppressors/victims, but rather between Jennifer and her BFF, Anita, or “Needy” (Amanda Seyfried). Jennifer and Needy have been friends since nursery school, and they’ve remained friends even though Jennifer has blossomed into Megan Fox, one of the two or three sexiest women in the world, while Needy is merely run-of-the-mill jaw-droppingly gorgeous; i.e., a geek by Hollywood standards. In classic popular kid/geek stereotype, Jennifer is the dominant shallow demanding one, dragging Needy away from her boyfriend and out to bars, shooting down guys, and running around after indie rockers who are best left alone. Needy is the sensitive, smart, cautious one, always careful not to upstage her friend, and…well, you know the drill. Over the course of the movie, Needy realizes that she and Jennifer have grown apart, and that the best friend she once loved is now a shallow, jealous bitch, not to meniton a demon from the pits of hell who wants to eat Chip (Johnny Simmons), Needy’s sweet, long-suffering boyfriend.
The combination of rape-revenge with fraught female friendship isn’t, in itself, a terrible idea. Under the direction of more talented or thoughtful filmmakers, you could see it working out as the kind of feminist metaphor that Cody and Kusama seem, rather desperately, to be groping for. Jennifer’s victimization by, and subsequent embrace of, sexualized, partriarchal violence (“my dick is bigger than his” she says of one soon-to-be victim) could work as the wedge that drives her and Needy apart. Rape and the revenge it spawns could be set against or contrasted with sisterhood.
The problem is that, for this to work, the film would have to, at some point, sympathize with Jennifer. You’d have to understand why Needy loved her in the first place; you’d have to see the two of them interacting in a way which made sense of their friendship. This never happens. Jennifer is a bitch before she’s violated, and she’s a bitch after she’s violated. Her transformation into a succubus is a fulfillment of her character, not a negation of it — it seems, in short, to be what she deserves, both for her shallowness and for her sexual precociousness. When the two protagonists have their showdown at the film’s end, Needy tells Jennifer that she was never a good friend…and that seems to more or less be the case. Partially this may be Megan Fox’s acting limitations, but there’s never a moment where she does anything for Needy, or even seems to have straightforward affection for her. What did Needy ever see in her?
The movie does suggest an answer; one that is not at all, as it were, straightforward. The first time we see Jennifer and Needy, they’re sharing a meaningful glance and a flirtatious wave that causes a student sitting nearby to suggest aloud that they’re gay. The relationship’s temperature only rises after Jennifer is demonified; there are several suggestive scenes, and one smoking hot encounter on Needy’s bed with tongue and all. When Needy pulls away in disgust, Jennifer slyly mentions that the two used to “play boyfriend/girlfriend” at slumber parties.
That scene has been much publicized. But for all the brou-ha-ha, the film never seems to consider the possibility of Jennifer and Needy as an actual couple. Rather, the lesbianism is played for titillation, for shock value, and for laughs. Needy’s love for Jennifer is shown as a dangerous fascination that must be discarded. Cliff, the boyfriend is the sympathetic one; he’s obviously where Needy should end up, and part of Jennifer’s evilness is that she makes that impossible. When Jennifer does, in a way, possess Needy at the film’s end, it’s seen more as debasement than empowerment; a loss of self and of possibilities. In the typical rape-revenge, patriarchy is the evil to be overcome. Here, as the first line of the movie states, “hell is a teenaged girl” — or, more precisely, the friendships between teenaged girls. Cody claims that that’s somehow feminist, but I must confess, I don’t see it.
Matthew Brady’s done a couple of short film reviews today in comments. I like them both, so thought I’d highlight them here:
First, on Hellraiser. (Halloween appropriate!)
Aaron: I like your take on both Hellraiser films (well, the first two, anyway; I don’t think I’ve seen any of the others, except maybe one of the sequels, called Hellraiser: Generations, I think, that I watched years ago on cable. It was all right). The first one was definitely more effective, but they both had their moments, especially in the way they sexualized their horror, making people with their skin flayed off alluringly sensual and lingering on the viscous parts of the exposed bodies. The most effective scene in the sequel was probably the bit in which one of the rooms in hell had beds that kept sliding out of holes in the wall, with female bodies writhing erotically under sheets (which sort of resembled body bags) on the beds, but covered with blood, making for a gross necrophiliac combination. Both films suffer from becoming action spectacles in their climaxes, which cheapens the unknowable horror of hell, making it a threat that can be solved by manipulating a demonic Rubik’s cube or just outrunning the waves of evil. That sort of thing is probably necessary, but if you’re going to sell hell as an inescapable realm of suffering (although I guess there are several people who do escape, so maybe that’s not the case?), the movie should end with everyone meeting a horrible end as a true nightmare of what is to come for everyone after they die (or are dragged into a nether dimension after delving into supernatural affairs in which man should not meddle). That’s not really what these movies are about, since they kind of squeeze themselves into a Hollywood slasher formula, but that’s what I would prefer, even if it’s easier said than done.
And then on Cloud Atlas.
I saw the movie last night, and it was pretty enjoyable, although, as you said, the message is ultimately pretty shallow. I haven’t read the book, but it seems like the stories might have been improved by being intercut throughout, rather than presented discretely. Or maybe they just seem to work better when we only see a few minutes of them at a time, and the clever callbacks and references can be highlighted and underlined by jumping directly between them. Plus, the motif of reincarnation and recurring tropes can be highlighted by casting the same actors in multiple roles in each story (Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant are always bad guys, Halle Berry and Jim Sturgess are always good, Jim Broadbent and Tom Hanks go back and forth). Ultimately, I don’t know how well it worked, or if it was really that good of a movie, but it was certainly an experience. I liked it for the most part, with my favorite aspect probably being how hammy Tom Hanks was in every role except one, and that guy died five minutes after he was introduced. I guess I recommend it?
This first appeared on Comixology.
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As NBC gears up for its new Wonder Woman series, the internet is abuzz with one burning question. What dastardly villain mugged our heroine with a casino? And does Adrianne Palicki get combat pay if that bustier ruptures and her cleavage assaults her noggin?
Okay, so those are two questions.
To be fair, NBC has also released pics of an updated (or possibly additional) costume, which isn’t quite as tragically latexy. Here are some action shots:
She looks so darned serious there…and brave! Looking at her face alone, you’d never realize the extent to which her boobs pose a danger to herself and others.
Oh for the days of Lynda Carter!
We miss your shapeless grandma-bottom bathing suit with the hint of camel-toe, Lynda!
Live-action super-hero costumes are often awful (I’m looking at you Styrofoam-muscle Batman), but Wonder Woman seems to bring out the worst in what I suppose, for the sake of brevity, we must call “fashion-designers.” What, in short, the-hell-is-wrong-with-these-people? Why, lord, why?
I actually have a theory. It’s all the fault of William Marston and Harry Peter.
For those not in the know, Marston was the creator of Wonder Woman. Harry Peter was the original artist on the series — hired by Marston himself. And their version of Wonder Woman looked like this:
Yes, that’s Wonder Woman with her hands tied behind her leaping backwards to attack a saber-tooth tiger. Which is fairly bad ass.
But the thing to focus on is what isn’t here. Specifically, there is not a whole lot of cleavage visible. Instead, Peter’s supple line dwells lovingly on those back muscles…and on WW’s super-butch shoulders. This was typical: even when the chest is visible in Peter’s drawings, he tends to focus interest on other areas:
Marston and Peter, in other words, put WW in that skimpy bustier so that they could look at her shoulders flexing, not so they could look down her front. Part of the problem with later iterations of Wonder Woman’s costume, then, has been a simple confusion of erotic focus. The costume wasn’t really designed for large amounts of cleavage. When you put a large amount of cleavage in there to propitiate our breast-obsessed culture, the results tend to be more silly than heroic.
Even putting aside the breasts, though, there would still be problems. Wonder Woman’s costume just was never imagined with real people in mind. You could argue that this was true for super-hero comics in general; drawings are different than living, breathing bodies, and Kirby clearly wasn’t thinking too hard about how an actor would look in Thing-face. But with Peter’s Wonder Woman…well, look at this, for example.
That doesn’t look like a drawing of a real woman. It looks like a stiff, posed picture of a doll.
And I think that really was the point. The rigidity and unreality of the drawings is not a bug; it’s a feature. Girls who read those early WW comics were encouraged to see themselves not just as the characters, but manipulating the characters, moving them about like toys. This is part of the pleasure of a sequence like the below, where Wonder Woman’s body is first duplicated (like a reproducible doll) and then inhabited by her friend, Etta Candy.
Etta and WW are both tied up in the picture above too, of course. Marston and Peter were obsessed with bondage. In their stories, WW often gets tied up every three panels or so. For Marston, this was linked to his odd ideas about feminism and submission; he believed women were superior to men because they were more comfortable with submission. Men, he felt, needed to learn submission from women. Wonder Woman was part of his effort to teach boys and girls the joys of “loving submission” to a wise matriarch.
So Marston was kind of a kook. But he was a kook whose kookiness dovetailed nicely with the interests of his audience. Sharon Marcus, in her book Between Women, noted that dominance and submission have long been an important part of literature for children, and particularly for girls. In the Victorian era, in particular, there were many books which featured “Fantasies of girls punishing dolls, and being punished by them appeared regularly in fiction for young readers.”
Whether Marston and Peter were deliberately referencing this type of story is unclear…but what is clear is that their comics worked with a similar dynamic. The frozen postures of the figures and the bondage themes are of a piece.
So, for example, the above picture shows the outcome of an Amazon game in which some women dress as deer so that their Amazon sisters can catch them, truss them up, put them on plates, and pretend to eat them. There’s certainly kink here…but it’s not especially focused on a stereotypical male appreciation of scantily-clad, realistically depicted female flesh. Rather, it’s embedded in a narrative of dominance, submission, and play. The kinky frisson is tied (as it were) to the artificiality of the doll-like poses.
Since Marston and Peter, lots of Wonder Woman artists have tried to rework the costume…to turn it into something that appeals to the typical erotics of older guys rather than to the B&D doll-playing interests of Marston and (Marcus suggests) young girls. As a result you get images like this, by, (I believe) Mike Deodato.
Wonder Woman’s costume was meant to be sexy. But it was meant to be sexy in a particular way and for particular kinks. Those kinks don’t map particularly well onto current mainstream interests or tastes. Efforts to make WW cater to those mainstream interests and tastes tend to be, at best, self-parodic. So if NBC’s costume looks ridiculous (and it does) it’s because they’re trying to squeeze a Playboy fantasy into a costume that was never meant to hold it.
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All posts in the series on post-Marston iterations of Wonder Woman are here.
This originally ran on Splice Today.
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“It’s important to know when you’re beaten, yes?” Lilly Collins sneers at Julia Roberts at the end of Tarsem Singh’s Mirror, Mirror. In theory, Collins is playing Snow White and Roberts the Evil Queen, but it’s hard not to read the line as the triumphant coup de grace of the next young thing celebrating the departure of the past-it has-been. Roberts, wrinkled and decrepit, duly retreats into her cloak, admits regretfully that “it was Snow White’s story all along” and disappears. Meanwhile, Snow White gets to perform a Bollywoodesque dance of triumph.
The victory is decisive, but Pyrrhic. As Elizabeth Greenwood points out in an excellent review at the Atlantic, “In any Snow White, the Queen is the real reason we watch.” Collins’ Snow is granted girl power spunkiness and several scenes of swashbuckling swordplay, but that can’t really obscure the fact that she’s a dull goody-goody nonentity—a very pretty face signifying the same bland goodness that a very pretty face always signifies.
Julia Roberts as the evil queen, on the other hand, has outgrown both the goodness and the blandness, and she seems sincerely, exuberantly relieved. No more does she have to simper and smile and charm as the plot whisks her efficiently towards some repulsive doofus like Richard Gere. Instead, she gets to leer at the bare chest of a young if doltish Prince, Armie Hammer (“so hairy” she absent-mindedly rhapsodizes). She indulges in rampant and elaborate bitchiness (commanding her long-suffering aged servant to imitate Snow White’s whining complaints). She behaves like a woman mature enough to really enjoy her own unpleasantness. When she is riding off to marry the Prince (her fifth wedding), she breaks into that amazing Julia Roberts smile, and muses, “No matter how many times I do this, I always get excited at my wedding day.” The apparently genuine delight in cynical artificiality virtually rewrites her whole oeuvre: how many times, after all, has Roberts been married onscreen (and off?) Suddenly, we can see her not as a chit moved about by the nauseatingly saccharine repetition of rom-coms, but as the manipulator of that repetition. Which makes her, not nauseatingly saccharine, but self-aware—and funny.
Now, aging isn’t all good. Mirror, Mirror shows the evil queen desperately trying to hold onto her youth, whether by using the magic of her mirror, spreading bird poop on her face, or cinching herself into her dress with the aid of an elaborate mechanical crank. But even these efforts are transformed by Roberts’ performance into occasions for barely contained malevolent joy. When, after much tightening, groaning, and muscle power, she finally gets into her undergarments, she declares, “Ha! I knew I was the same size!” All the effort to imitate youth comes across as more satisfying, in its way, than youth itself. The evil queen appreciates her own beauty more than Snow White appreciates hers. After all, Snow White doesn’t have to work at it.
In her review, Greenwood points out that, though there are more roles for older actresses in Hollywood than there used to be, “the role of the young love interest still earns more for an actress in dollars and red-carpet caché.” When Snow White hands the poisoned apple back to the Queen at the film’s close and cruelly quips, “Age before beauty,” it’s a sneeringly sarcastic inversion of Hollywood’s pecking order.
Yet at the same time the film shows quite clearly that, in some sense, age really does come before beauty. If Julia Roberts has ever had a better role, I sure haven’t seen it. Freed from the responsibility of marrying the boring Prince and living happily ever after, she is finally able to embrace her comedy, anger, self-indulgence, and intelligence. I’d say that the evil queen was the role Roberts was born to play, except that it would be more accurate to say it was the role she got old to play. In this context, Snow White’s final outburst of uncharacteristic vindictiveness has an almost wistful edge to it. In telling the evil queen off, she manages, for just a second, to be as interesting and enjoyable a character as her step-mother. Perhaps, if Collins is lucky and stays around Hollywood, in 20 or 30 years she can get a part as rewarding as the evil queen. Till then, she has a lot of dreary sweet young things ahead of her. As Roberts must know, with some regret and some triumph, beauty comes before age.
On HU
Me on some unexpected facts about penises.
Me on Pretty Woman and hating Richard Gere rather than Julia Roberts.
Me on pulp and genius in Joe Sacco, and on whether that’s a good reason for comics journalism.
Richard Cook and I liveblog the last Presidential debate, and are depressed.
Jacob Canfield on the lazy criticism directed at Johnny Ryan and Benjamin Marra.
Ethan on the advantages of comics journalism.
Kailyn Kent on the unconvincing gimmickry of Chris Ware’s Building Stories.
Me on Clark Kent becoming a blogger and the virtues of mainstream comics pandering.
Sarah Horrocks on Druillet’s Salaambo.
Me on the different sizes of the Stepford Wives.
Vom Marlowe on Worsted, a webcomic about knitting.
Me on how atheists can be sexist assholes too.
Utilitarians Everywhere
Bunch of pieces at Splice:
On undecided voters maybe not mattering.
On NPR being useless on the election.
On Marty Robbins and nice cowboys who shoot you.
On Richard Moudock, power, and rape.
Other Links
Craig Fischer on Building Stories.
Emma Woolley on being constantly harassed as a teen girl.
Mary Williams on the war on 12-year-old girls.
This Week’s Reading
Finished Henry James’ The Golden Bowl, started Ronald Firbank’s “Vainglory”, and am rereading Phillip Pullman’s Grimm Fairy Tales for a review.
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Below is a puggle, which is apparently what you call a baby echidna. Cute!
