Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

American Torture

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Eli Roth’s Hostel movies are notoriously violent and gory. They’re supposed to have inaugurated a new, updated version of horror cinema — torture porn, which is supposedly more explicit, more stomach-churning, and more sadistic than anything that came before.

So I was…not exactly startled, but maybe mildly disappointed/pleased to discover that the new boss is the same as the old boss. The Hostel films aren’t exponentially worse than any other horror film I’ve seen. They’re just basic slashers, with medieval torture devices as killing gimmicks. Effectively graphic, sure, but not moreso than Freddy’s macabre dreamscape liquefying, or even really than Jason’s trusty weapons, blunt or edged.

That’s not to say that Hostel has no new tricks up its bloody apron. On the contrary. Slashers are generally built around an axis of violence/revenge. You have some horrible all-powerful Thing, which systematically tortures and murders in an apotheosis of satisfying sadism. And then, in the second half, the poles are switched, hunter becomes hunted, and that big bad Thing is remorselessly brutalized. That’s why it makes sense to think of rape/revenge films as slashers; it’s the same basic dynamic, just with rape instead of murder (and/or, alternately, slashers can be seen as rape/revenge films with the murder substituting — often not especially subtly — for rape.)

As the rape/revenge comparison makes clear, slashers often get their energy from gender animosity. Everybody in slashers is being punished for something, but one of the most common acts which elicits punishment is sexual activity. This goes for guys too, but, of course, the audience and the male gaze being what they are, there’s generally a lot more interest in seeing the girl’s bare all…and then to have them punished either hypocritically for provoking desire, or more straightforwardly for not satisfying it. And after the punishing, you switch in the final half and identify with the female/victimized punished, who now gets to dismember the killer/rapist, so the audience can both revel in her sadistic accomplishment and enjoy the masochistic thrill of castration.

Gender isn’t the only lever that works here; slashers often instead (or also) use class animosity to power their fantasies of alternating sadism/masochism. So in The Hills Have Eyes, we watch the deformed feral reprobates battle the city folk. And, of course, the city folk get punished for being city folk, and the reprobates get punished for being reprobates, and the studio audience gets to hate/love both and revel in their pain/brutality.

Eli Roth is I’m sure perfectly aware of all these dynamics (I’d bet he’s read Carol Clover Men, Women, and Chainsaw just like I have.) And in Hostel, he very cleverly tweaks them. Rather than fitting the murder/revenge onto the primary binary man/woman, or rich/poor, he changes it up,and fits it onto the division American/foreigner — or perhaps more accurately, Westerner/Easterner. The movie insightfully realizes that the most loathsome, vile, and worthless people on the planet are American frat boys on tour…and it gleefully sets out to torture them to death. But it also and simultaneously taps into the all-American nightmare of the decadent Europe/East with its forbidden pleasures and unspeakable corruption. In short, Hostel is like a Henry James novel with severed fingers, screaming, and nudity.

The nudity and the sex is quite important, not just for its prurient value, but thematically. As I said, slashers usually revel in the animosities of gender…but they usually do it by making the women the victims (first…and then later the victimizer.) Roth, though, shuffles the roles. It’s the American backpackers (and their Scandinavian friend) who are presented first as sexual aggressors. For them, Europe — and especially that Hostel in Slovakia — is a pornutopia — a place to pull out their money and their balls and go to town (or, alternately, in the case of sensitive guy Josh, a place to whine on a shoulder about his lost love, and then pull out money, balls, etc.) The Westerners’ casual sense of entitlement — their belief that, yeah, Europe is basically a hole to stick their bits in — is both their downfall and what makes them deserve their downfall. Probably the best scene in the film is when backpacker Paxton (Jay Hernandez) staggers away from the eviscerated Josh to confront Natalya (Barbara Nedeljakova), one of those available girls, who, he now realizes, had set them up to begin with. “You bitch!” he screams at her, to which she responds, with great gusto, “I get a lot of money for you, and that makes you MY bitch.”

That’s the slasher in a nutshell; I’m your bitch, then you’re mine. The Americans rule the world and use their money to turn everyone into meat in their entertainment abattoir — but that makes them basically as dumb as their stupid trimmed foreskins, and this one woman, at least, has reversed both the entertainment and the abattoir on behalf of the whole damn world. Now, at last, for exorbitant prices, the shady middlemen will arrange for you to fuck those Americans up, down, and sideways, just as they’ve always, through those middlemen, done to you.

But inevitably those corrupt Europeans can’t get let off that easy. Paxton manages to escape, aided (more symbolically than diegetically) by the cross-cultural juju imparted by his knowledge of German. And it’s there, unfortunately, that the movie starts to be too clever for its own good — or maybe Roth’s cleverness just failed him. Either way, Roth’s set-up is so elaborate — what with the entire village involved in the conspiracy and wealthy out-of-towners coming in from all over Europe to get a literal piece of the other — that by the time we get to the end of the thing, it’s hard to figure out where the revenge fits in. Thus the director has to put his hand, and then a couple of feet on the scales of justice to make everything work out. And so, while fleeing, Paxton just so happens to see Natasha and her deceitful friend wander out in front of his car so he can run them over. Then, a little later, he coincidentally ends up in the same train as the creepy Dutch businessman who murdered his friend.

In a really satisfying (or bleak, same difference) revenge narrative, like “I Spit on My Graves” or “Straw Dogs,” or “Death Proof”, or even “Friday the 13th IV”, the violence/reverse violence is remorseless pendulum; the axe goes forward, the axe goes back, as sure as the world turning round its bloody sun. With Hostel, though, you can see the implement of destruction fall to the wayside, so that the director has to go pick it up, paint some gore on there, and hand it back to the befuddled protagonist. You never really believe that Paxton is a cold killer; he hasn’t found his inner resources, and/or lost his soul. He just happened to be the guy picked to be standing at the end, and the guy standing at the end has to take revenge. The plot and the genre conventions just never quite manage to reconcile themselves to each other.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the dynamics of globalization can be fit only uncomfortably on the slasher binaries. Men/women, upper class/lower class — those are old, old hatreds, graceful in their cthonic simplicity. Capitalism, though, is multipolar and diffuse. It isn’t here or there, but everywhere; there is no one bad guy, like Jason or Freddy, but a technology of pleasure which distributes sadism and desire to everyone and no one. Roth takes great pains to allow Paxton to kill the individuals who tormented him and his friends, but the supposed catharsis dissipates into clumsy anti-climax. The sexy girls may have suckered Paxton; the Dutch businessman may have murdered his friend, but the real enemy isn’t either sexy girls or businessman. The real enemy is the system that uses money to transform people into things — a system of such overwhelming power, with its tendrils in so many aspects of society (the hostel, the village, the police…the world?) that there’s never even a question of confronting it. The capitalism in Hostel corrodes it’s belief in its own rape/revenge empowerment fantasy — and without that faith in its genre, the end of the film comes across more adrift than driven.

Which is, perhaps, why Roth made an almost unheard of choice for an exploitation sequel, and substantially changed his formula. Oh, sure, the Hostel is still there, and the basic set up — the Slovakia setting, the torture, etc. etc., is all in place, and the victims are still three backpackers. In this case, though, the backpackers are women — which instantly rearranges many of the tensions of the last film. The three protagonists here are going to enjoy a spa, not to screw native girls. From an early scene where they’re menaced by creepy assholes on the way to Slovakia, they’re always presented as vulnerable and endangered, not as exploiters.

Moreover, Hostel II is at least as interested in the logistics of its torture auction, and in the torture-purchasers, as it is in the victims. Stuart and Todd, who buy the chance to torture our heroines, are a lot like the vacuous American fratboys in the first film — only these guys are far enough along in their careers that they can purchase more expensive meat.

By spending so much time showing us the mechanics of doom, Hostel II cheerfully chucks most of its suspense; we know what’s going to happen already, after all. The first film began as a callow road comedy and slid slowly towards horror; the second, though, teeters on farce from beginning to end. If the emblematic moment in the first movie is the scene where Natasha reveals to Paxton whose bitch is whose, the quintessential scene in the second film probably occurs when poor awkward Lorna (Heather Matarazzo) is strung up naked in the air over a bath ringed with candles. The hulking Eastern European guards go about with a bored efficiency positioning Lorna just right, lighting all those wicks, and then, with businesslike nonchalance, exiting stage right. Shortly thereafter, a woman comes in, strips naked, lies in the bath, and begins chopping at Lorna with a scythe so that she can bathe in her blood. The combination of banality and hyperbolic decadence isn’t even especially suspenseful; instead, it comes across more as a knowing, gleeful snicker. You want tits and torture brought directly to the comfort of your boring home? No problem; just wait a second while we hit the lights, put everything in place, and then saunter off camera….

Most of the torture scenes are like that; more Three Stooges than Hannibal Lecter. While menacing his victim, Todd accidentally unplugs his chain saw…then on a second try slips and accidentally cuts her face in half before he meant to, leading him to give up on the project altogether (since he refuses to finish the kill, violating his contract, the guards shrug and turn the dogs on him.)

Even the climactic Final Girl escape is a deliberate anti-climax. She triumphs not through smarts or strength (though she does exhibit both of those) but rather through sheer force of capital. Beth (Lauren German) is, as it turns out, really, really rich, and she simply extricates herself by dumping a ton of money in the lap of Sasha (Milan Kažko), the businessman in charge. In this case, the phallus of potency and power isn’t a gun or a knife; it’s cash, as Beth demonstrates decisively when, just before striding out of her cell, she snips off her tormenters balls — prompting all the scruffy guards to flinch as one.

That’s a pretty entertaining finish, and perhaps the film should have just ended there. Once again, though, Roth has to choose between being true to his capitalist vision and fulfilling his slasher tropes…and he chooses the second. Beth gets inducted into the evil fellowship of lucre, up to and including having to get the secret sign of the bloodhound tattooed on her butt. She’s an initate…and the first thing she does with her newfound status is to go out into the town and kills with her own hands willowy two-faced Axelle (Vera Jordanova) — the frenemy who tricked her into coming to the hostel in the first place.

That’s how slashers are supposed to resolve — with an eye for an eye. But in this context it just seems kind of dumb. I mean, why bother? Beth doesn’t become powerful by killing Axelle; she’s already — and even from the beginning — more powerful than anyone in the film. She can, as one of her friends says, buy the entire town, hostel and all. It wasn’t that, like most Final Girls, she was first weak and then found something within her that could be strong. On the contrary, though we didn’t know it, she always was the biggest one in the room tougher than Jason, more all-powerful than Freddy.

This isn’t, then, about Beth learning to be strong. Nor is it about Beth fighting off her killer and thereby becoming a killer herself. On the contrary, the issue is not her soul but her bank account. Personal, individual revenge in this context seems quaint. After all, if she wanted to, Beth could have just paid Sasha to take Axelle into the dungeon, and watched as some random penny-ante punter cut her to pieces. Hell, she could have paid the guards to do the same to Sasha; why not? She’s got the money.

Roth seems determined to ignore this insight. Like that weird Dutch businessman in the first film who eats salad with his trembling hands because he wants to feel “that connection with something that died for you,” Roth is wedded to that old-fashioned Old Testament slasher morality, where you take a life for a life, person to person. But sympathetic as he is to genre tradition, Roth’s films end up being about newer gods — gods that are only more fearsome because they never get their hands dirty.

Voices From the Archive: Matt Thorn on Bianca and Other Moto Hagio Stories

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Matt Thorn, the translator and editor of Moto Hagio’s Drunken Dream from Fantagraphics, commented on a number of my posts about that volume. I thought I’d reprint one of his discussions here.

Wow! I just found this today. Sorry to come so late to the party. I’ll respond to your reviews the same way you did to the stories, i.e., as I read them.

I don’t want to argue the merits of the works, because if you don’t like something, you don’t like it, and no amount of exegesis can change that.

But just some factual clarifications. 1977 is the *copyright* date of the first stories, not the year they were published. “Bianca” was published in 1970, when Hagio was 21, but was actually written/drawn a year or two earlier. “Girl on Porch with Puppy” was published in 1971, when Hagio was 22, but this one, too, was actually created a year or two earlier. “Autumn Journey” was also published in 1971.

And now for some cultural/historical background. This was a time, both in Japan and throughout most of the developed world, when youth culture was pretty melodramatic and more than a little self-indulgent. Things that seem clichéd and embarrassing today were seen as “real, man,” and the kids could “grok” it, you dig? Just think about “Easy Rider.” It is worshipped by Baby Boomers as anthem of their generation, but most young people watching it today would probably think, “What the hell are these people doing and why the hell should I care? And what’s with the random redneck drive-by shooting ending?” The Baby Boomer response is, “You had to be there.” Ditto for these stories. Perhaps I should have written a brief introduction to each story in order to provide this sort of context, but it never occurred to me, probably because I’m too close to the work.

As a social scientist (of sorts), this context is interesting to me, and it is a matter of historical fact that these stories were considered to be groundbreaking and fresh in the world of shoujo manga, and were extremely influential. If you’re going to measure them against something, it would be more fair to measure them against 1) other shoujo manga of the day, or 2) English-language romance comics of the same period, keeping in mind that the target audience here was considered to be girls aged 8 to about 15.

On a personal level, I chose these stories not only because Hagio aficionados consider them representative or her work at the time (they are), but because, 1) “Bianca” is just damned pretty to look at, and showcases her technical skills as a young illustrator (if not storyteller), 2) “Girl on Porch with Puppy” captures the kind of quirky, Twilight Zone, sci-fi/fantasy element that was influenced by such male artists as Shinji Nagashima, but which was practically taboo in shoujo manga of the day, and 3) “Autumn Journey” embodies the vaguely-European adolescent boy romance that was influenced by European cinema of the day, and which Hagio went on to develop in more sophisticated ways, in works like “The Heart of Thomas.”

In short, I wanted to represent her whole career, not just collect a bunch of first-rate stories that modern anglophone readers today can easily appreciate. If I had wanted to do that, I would have selected very different stories, and there would probably be none from the first few years of her professional career.

But, hey, at least nobody dies in “Autumn Journey.”

The End of Hate

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We’ve come to the end of our massive 5th anniversary festival of hate. An index of articles by author is here. We also have a handy index listing all the hated things themselves here.
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A couple days ago, Jones (One of the Jones Boys), put up a post logically proving that it is impossible to have a worst comic ever. He argues that there are so many different ways for a comic to be bad that it is impossible to rate or weigh them. Or, as he puts it:

What I claim is that the ways a comic can be bad are irreducibly plural and literally incommensurable — there is no way to put all these different ways together so that you end up with a single dimension of badness (which, if you recall, is what we need in order to declare something the X-est Y, in this case the worst comic of all time).

I agree that this is a good argument for why there is no worst comic ever. The one flaw is that it uses the term “worst comic ever” in a way in which no one actually uses the term “worst comic ever.”

The point being…it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone participating in this roundtable, or anyone reading this roundtable, really believed when they picked a comic to discuss or read about that that comic was, in an objective or even in a subjective sense, the worst comic ever. Aesthetics isn’t math, and no one (except maybe Jones, in some of his more fey philosophical moods) thinks of it as math. When we talk about the “worst comic ever” we’re not actually talking about quantifying comics linearly. At most, I’d say, the ranking is a metaphor — and understood as such by virtually everyone who ranks any aesthetic object. Even in something like the HU Best Comics Poll, which was based on counting survey results, the organizer of the endeavor, Robert Stanley Martin point out that the ranking is “an interpretation”, not an algorithm — and that the list is therefore a conversation, not a solution.

Again, Jones focuses on the fact that there is no one — nor even two, nor ten, nor ten thousand — way(s) to evaluate comics. He presents this as evidence of the futility of naming the worst comic ever. But on the contrary, I think the impossibility and messiness of the task is precisely the reason that best of (and sometimes worst of) questions are fascinating — and illuminating. In choosing a best or worst, and in defending our choices, we reveal — and not just to others — what matters in art, and why. Of course those revelations are themselves often confused, vacillating, contradictory and vague — but that merely makes them a reflection of the aesthetics with which they’re engaged. Rather than thinking about ranking (or should we say criticism?) as a debased and innately functionless branch of logic, perhaps we could think of it as a genre itself — as useless, as frustrating, as stupid, as partial and as sublime as any other aesthetic effort to represent the world.
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If the worst comic ever is a genre, one can perhaps ignore its possibility, and instead think about its tropes. In that context, and on the basis of this roundtable, I think subdee is dead on when she says, “Though there are exceptions, it seems to me that very often, to hate something you also have to love it.”

In life, real antipathy often has to wait upon love spurned — and that’s often the case in criticism as well. Thus, Bert Stabler writes about his early love and recent disillusionment with Chris Ware, while Jason Michelitch talks about his early love and recent disillusionment with Matt Wagner. Derik Badman and Richard Cook, on the other hand, write about realizing that that first shiny nostalgic love wasn’t so lovable after all. In other cases — for example, Ng Suat Tong, Susan Kirtley, Vom Marlowe, Matthias Wivel — love hovers in the background as a popular or critical imperative, transforming alienation or indifference into a more weaponized dislike.

Selecting the worst comic ever, then, seems to depend not only, as Jones argues, on all the myriad ways in which comics can be bad, but on all the myriad ways in which they can be good — and even more, perhaps, on the ways that it’s difficult to pull the two apart. The purpose or end of hate is love — and so, while this roundtable may be coming to a close, we can all rest easy knowing that as long as we love comics, there will be no end to hate.

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Early on in the roundtable I mentioned that I didn’t think that hate was all that popular. Which just goes to show what I know. This last five weeks has seen far more traffic than we’ve ever gotten outside of the crazy couple months when the Victorian Wire post went viral. Perhaps the world really does love hate…but I suspect instead that the success is due to the genius, time, and care which all our contributors donated to help us celebrate our anniversary. Thanks so much to all those who posted, to those who commented, and to our readers as well. It’s been a great roundtable and a lovely five years.
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The cover is from Fantastic Four #21 by Jack Kirby (who, of course, is hated here.)

Hot For Teacher

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This first appeared at Splice Today.
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Student-teacher relations have been a source of sexual fantasy at least since the time of Socrates.  Across history, the young and the nubile meet the powerful and experienced in the fevered imaginations of both, as well as in a kajillion bad porn scripts.

Probably the most famous modern iteration of the archetype is Van Halen’s 1984 hit song “Hot for Teacher” and its accompanying music video. The latter infamously featured a teacher stripping to her underthings atop a desk and gyrating in front of a group of wildly cheering middle-school students.
 

 
Sex and kids is a sure-fire recipe for controversy, and inevitably the “Hot for Teacher” video inspired protest and condemnation from the usual quarters.  Looking back on it from a couple decades on, though, what’s most notable about it is its resolute unsexiness.  Part of that can perhaps be chalked up to changing styles and perhaps personal preference— the thin-as-a-rail, teased-out eighties models who play the part of eye candy seem more like weirdly dated manikins than like actual fetish objects.  When the camera lingers hungrily on the back of teacher’s skirt, the main impression you’re left with is, “Jeez; that woman has no ass.”

But there’s more to the lack of heat than just changing fashion.  Indeed, considering the subject matter, gyrating female bodies are really on camera for a remarkably limited period of time.  Instead, we get a lot of the Van Halen band doing a consciously campy Vegas dance routine beneath a glowing disco ball and numerous shots of Waldo, a bespectacled Clark Kent of a kid paralyzed with nerdiness.  And, of course, plenty of footage of Van Halen partying.  With kids.

The truth is that the video isn’t really about lusting after the teacher at all. Instead, it’s about lusting after a childhood in which you lusted after the teacher.  The whole short film is focused on adults imagining how cool they could have been in high school if they had known then what they know now — and, simultaneously, on kids imagining themselves as being adults. The Van Halen band members are portrayed both by the real Van Halen and by a group of kids dressed like the adults.  The video unabashedly blends both identities, with the adults sitting right beside their younger selves in class and the kids lip-syncing the lines in the voices of their grown-up doppelgangers.  The hot teacher is just an accessory; a convenient stand-in for the real passions, which are between male adults and their younger iterations.  The adults want the rebelliousness and goofy energy of youth; the kids want the sexual opportunities and confidence of grown-ups.  And both achieve their dream not by sleeping with the teacher, but by rocking out.

Unlike Van Halen, when Ke$ha’s sings about intergenerational sex she really sounds like she wants to have sex with someone other than herself.  Van Halen never even bothered to name the teacher they were hot for; Ke$ha does so right in the title of her 2010 bonus track “Mr. Watson.”  The song is addressed specifically to the object of affection, rather than, as with Van Halen, to a generalized audience of like-minded horn-dogs.  “Oh boy I just can’t wait for history class/ It’s my favorite hour of the day,” Ke$ha coos at the song’s opening.  She’s got the giddy, giggly energy of a high school crush — a far cry from David Lee Roth’s entirely impersonal concupiscence (“I wonder what the teacher is going to look like this year?”)

As this suggests, Ke$ha is much less coy about pretending to be an actual student than the Van Halen guys.  For Halen, the whole point of the song was the frisson between then and now. Ke$ha, on the other hand, comes on as if her wriggling butt is actually in one of those plastic chairs.  Instead of Eddie Van Halen’s swaggeringly virtuoso guitar solo, “Mr. Watson” is all bouncy bubble-gum choruses, chirrupy girl-group harmonies, and Ke$sha’s producer-sweetened, mewling vocals.

Part of the reason that Ke$ha’s song seems less distanced is perhaps that she’s playing an older student — someone of at least high school age. Or at least, I really hope that’s what she’s doing, because the song is significantly more explicit than Van Halen ever dared to be.  “I can’t put my finger on what’s so sexy/or why I want you in my bed/ (or on your desk)/is it your power or authority/or for the thrill of being bad?”   If Van Halen’s version of teacher-sex basically involved having the hot authority figure available as an opportunity for male bonding, Ke$sha’s version is a lot more direct in its desire to seize the rod of puissance. (“I want to get my hands in your khaki pants…mrow!”)

At first glance, Ke$sha’s song seems to serve equally as male or female fantasy (as she says, “I know it’s a fantasy of yours/ you know it’s a fantasy of mine!”)  And certainly, the kittenish yet sexually aggressive school girl complete with Catholic uniform is a male porn staple.  Still, the song vigorously objectifies Mr. Watson in a way that doesn’t necessarily cater to male tastes.  That khaki pants line, or Ke$ha declaring “Up on the chalkboard I just love your ass/ when you write notes it’s just shake, shake, shake” — you get the somewhat uncomfortable sense that she’s making fun of the guy.
 

 
And indeed, though he is named, and gets a specific ass and pants to call his own, at bottom (as it were) it’s not clear that Mr. Watson is any more real than Van Halen’s gyrating eighties manikins.  Ke$sha is explicitly lusting after and somewhat more subtly mocking a stereotype or an icon, not a person.  The excitement of the fantasy is, as she says, the ability to be girlish and innocent while simultaneously seizing sexual power.  The switch in gender and genre changes the exact mechanics, but the point isn’t that far removed from Van Halen’s.   Lusting after a fantasy teacher is a way to make the student more confident, more sexy, and more real.

“Teacher”, a 2009 single by weirdo indie art duo Ina Unt Ina takes a very different approach.  In the first place, it’s not a fantasy.  And, in the second place, it’s not heterosexual.

Two weeks to sixteen
leaning against the wall
kissing boys
but my eyes, my eyes are following you.

Why do I stare?
Why do I care?
Why do I stare?
Why do I care?

Teacher, teacher sexy creature.
I want to die and I don’t know why.

The music here is sparse electropop. The synth hook references girl groups, but without Ke$ha’s anthemic horniness.  Instead, the harmonies here are wistful and the cadences don’t really resolve. Instead the song drifts. The catchy melodies wash up against one another and the song at various points seems to almost stop before picking itself up and moving on again, as if it’s unsure when or where to end.

The point is fairly obvious; from a lesbian perspective, high school sexuality is less about seizing power and more about confusion, questioning, and a swooning loss of self.  Van Halen and Ke$ha know what they’re after, but Ina Unt Ina doesn’t even know why they’re after what they’re after.  “Early morning, on the roof, I’m secretly looking down/ watching you move, watching your hands, I’m secretly looking down.”   The distance between student and teacher which is so exhilaratingly easy to bridge for David Lee Roth or Ke$ha here becomes unbridgeable. Desire doesn’t pull Ina Unt Ina near; instead it pushes them out and up and away. The song finishes with the singers chanting “don’t know how to get close to you/don’t know how to get close to you.”  Desire is never consummated, and if the singers know themselves somewhat better at the end of the song than they did at the beginning, that knowledge only leads to more, and more poignant, uncertainty.

Again, this is obviously, and intentionally, a song about being gay.  Yet of these three songs, “Teacher” is easily the closest to my own experience of heterosexual high school crushes. Said crushes were not, as far as I remember, particularly empowering and/or triumphantly lascivious.  Instead, they were, for the most part, confusing and destabilizing.

Of course, Van Halen and Ke$ha aren’t going for realism.  They’re going for dreams of invulnerability; a kind of super-hero version of hyperbolic heterosexuality.  I get the appeal— both “Hot for Teacher” and “Mr. Watson” are great songs.  But I think we all learned in school that love is queerer than that.

Index of Hated Things

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Charles Addams

Anything you can’t find on the rest of the list, probably

Peter Arno

Nate Atkinson

Autobiographical comics (all of them).

George Booth

Batgirl/Stephanie Brown Women in Refrigerators Story Arc

Betty and Veronica

Buffy: Season Eight

Roz Chast

Frank Cho, Liberty Meadows

The Collection of Sean Michael Robinson

Ctrl-Alt-Dlt.

Dragonlance #3.

Kazuke Ebine, Mahatma Gandhi

EC Comics in general.

EC War Comics in particular.

Will Eisner, The Spirit.

Gardner Fox/Carmine Infantino: Adam Strange/Justice League Team-Up

Neil Gaiman, Sandman

Neil Gaiman in general

Edward Gorey

Fletcher Hanks.

Jamie Hewlett, Tank Girl

Helen Hokinson

Geoff Johns, Blackest Night

Kim Dong Hwa’s Color Trilogy

Jack Kirby

Rich Koslowski, Three Fingers

Regis Loisel, Peter Pan

Jason Lutes

Milo Manara, Fatal Rendezvous

Robert Mankoff

Benjamin Marra, Gangster Rap Posse

Alan Moore/Brian Bolland, Killing Joke.

Alan Moore/David Lloyd, V for Vendetta

Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons, Watchmen

Thomas Nast

New Yorker Cartoons

Tsugumi Ohba/Takeshi Obata, Bakuman

Denny O’Neill/Neal Adams, Green Lantern/Green Arrow

Natsume Ono.

Alex Ross and Mark Waid, Kingdom Come

Johnny Ryan

Dave Sim and Gerhard, Cerebus

David Small, Stitches

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Spirou et Fantasio a New York

J. Michael Straczynzki, Midnight Nation

J. Michael Stracyznski in general

Osama Tezuka.

Craig Thompson, Goodbye Chunky Rice

Craig Thompson, Habibi

Matt Wagner, Batman/Grendel II

Western Civilization

Judd Winick, Pedro and Me

X-Men: Onslaught

Ai Yazawa, Nana #22

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Click here for the post author index.

 

Utilitarian Review 12/6/12

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HU News

James Romberger’s awesome collaboration with Wallace Stevens from HU’s illustrated Wallace Stevens roundtable was selected as a notable comic of the year in this year’s Best American Comics anthology. Regular contributor Derik Badman also was selected for his comic Badman’s Cave. Congratulations to both of them!
 
On HU

Subdee on how she would love Bakuman except for that one thing.

Conseula Francis on why she hates Watchmen.

Vom Marlowe on the misguided craft of Alex Ross.

Melinda Beasi on why she hates the Kim Dong Hwa’s Color Trilogy.

Sean Michael Robinson on hating the collection, not the collector.

Matthias Wivel on the New Yorker’s legacy of mediocre cartoons.

Jones, One of the Jones Boys explains why there can’t be a worst comic ever — and points out many comics that are nonetheless quite bad.

By popular demand (more or less) we have an ongoing thread on whether Cerebus is the worst comic ever.

Me on Nana #22 and the worst comic being the one that doesn’t exist.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice I talk about Chris Connelly and nostalgia for cassettes.

At Splice I make fun of the Economist’s vapid knee-jerk bipartisanship.

At Splice, I urge panicking Obama supporters to chill the fuck out.
 
Other Links

Martyn Pedlar on Theo Ellsworth’s The Understanding Monster.

This Week’s Reading

Lilli Carre’s Nine Ways to Disappear, which wasn’t bad, but a little disappointing; Jeffrey Brown’s Darth Vader and Son, which wasn’t great, but more enjoyable than I expected; Philip Core’s Camp: the Lie That Tells the Truth, which is amazing; Aubrey Beardsley’s “Under the Hill”, and started Kate Soper’s “Humanism and Anti-Humanism”.
 

Nana #22

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The last issue of Ai Yazawa’s Nana in English is volume #21. The series stopped publishing in 2010, when Yazawa contracted an unknown illness. She hasn’t been able to work since.

Nana could not have picked a worse moment to come to an abrupt end. In Volume #20, Ren, the lead guitarist of Trapnest and the boyfriend of Nana Osaki, dies in a car crash. Volume #21 is an extended, painful depiction of grief, in all its overwhelming, banal detail. At this point in the series, after hundreds and hundreds of pages, we know all of Yazawa’s characters intimately, and their every characteristic and uncharacteristic action as they learn of their loss takes on an almost unbearable weight.
 

 
For example, it seems like the most natural thing in the world for a husband to grab his wife’s hand for support — except that distant, assholish, controlling Takumi hardly ever reaches out to anyone for anything. Nana Komatsu (or Hachi) knows her husband shouldn’t be behaving like this; she looks down at her hand as if she’s afraid it’s going to fall off. Ironically, soon after this, when Takumi views Ren’s body, he sees that the only part of Ren not badly damaged in the accident were his hands, which, a guitarist to the end, he protected during the crash. Ren’s fingers, carefully preserved, hold nothing, while Takumi and Hachi’s, unnaturally, hold, and are held by, his death. It’s not just that there’s space where there should be presence, but that there’s presence where there should be space. Ren can’t hold anything except those he leaves behind.

In another sequence, Yasu, Ren’s childhood friend who has an intense long term platonic relationship with Nana, goes to tell her that Ren has died. She’s a rockstar in her own right, and is on tour. Yasu has to fly out to get her and then they drive all night to get back home to see Ren’s body. When they come out of the car, Yasu carries Nana, who is draped over him helplessly. Yasu’s girlfriend, Myu, takes one look at them and flees:
 

 
Whereas Takumi’s reaction resonates because it’s not normal, Myu’s is touching because it is. Like Yasu, she’s level-headed and thoughtful. For him, that means being there for Nana when no one else will or can. For her, it means knowing when to get herself out of the way.

The scene that most affected me, though, occurs a couple pages earlier, when Nana’s car pulls up. Earlier in the series, Nana and Ren’s relationship became a gigantic tabloid news story; in fact, Ren’s car crash was caused in part because he was fleeing the papparazzi. Naturally, then, there’s a scrum of reporters waiting for Nana when she arrives, ready to ask her about Ren’s death. Hachi, Nana’s former roommate and one of her closest friends, intervenes:
 

 
Again, the sequence gets its power because we’ve known Hachi so long. She’s a strikingly hapless and needy airhead. She spends the series desperately glomming onto a series of men (and arguably women too) in an effort to get somebody else to provide the backbone and rational decision making functions that she so spectacularly lacks.

And yet, while Hachi is exasperating, she’s also very sympathetic…and this sequence helps to get at why. Over the course of the manga, Hachi develops a huge, somewhat ridiculous hero-worshipping crush on rock-star Nana. This seems like it should be another sign of Hachi’s puppyish infantilism — the nickname “Hachi” is in fact a dog’s name given to her by Nana. But instead of cementing her helplessness, Hachi’s clinging to Nana blurs into a kind of mothering, with Nana, estranged from her own mother, turning increasingly, semi-secretly, and desperately to her friend.

And so, in this sequence, when the worst ha happened, Hachi does what mothers often do, and sacrifices herself for her baby. It reminds me a little of my mother-in-law, who, like Hachi, is in many ways, infuriatingly flighty, and who, like Hachi, married too young. Yet, when my father-in-law (that man she married) was dying of brain cancer, she fed him and cleaned him and struggled tirelessly with a series of indifferent doctors and hospitals to get him the best possible care. Watching her was more than a little awe-inspiring.

Hachi here is awe-inspiring too…but there’s also something heart-breakingly futile about her attempted bargain with the reporters. Nobody takes her up on her interview offer…and indeed, Nana is swept out of the car too quickly for anyone to really get at her, it seems like. Hachi’s sacrifice ends up being superfluous; the story wouldn’t be changed at all without those two pages. Her love and her strength don’t really matter…just like, for all my mother-in-law’s efforts and care, her husband died just the same.

Life is filled with such blind alleys, of course, where the narratives sputter and stall and then go on; where the storyteller seems to have abandoned her work. Genre fiction, on the other hand, always know where it’s going — what’s the point of genre after all if you don’t have a blueprint? Nana, certainly, is as insistently artificial as any soap opera melodrama, packed with tell-tale and impossible coincidences. On the micro level, the two protagonists have the same name; on the macro level, everybody in the manga either becomes a rock star or marries one. That’s the inevitable teleology of fiction, not the stuttering uncertainty of fact.

Yet Nana‘s extended discursive format, and the way Yazawa privileges the characters and their emotions over the steady churn of events, often give the series a feeling of being weirdly aimless and fragile. In Nana #9, for example, Yazawa includes a short story purportedly about Naoki, Trapnest’s drummer. It starts with him dying his hair daringly blond, and then proclaiming to his parents, “It’s the real me, maman!”

That could be the start of a tale about discovering one’s true inner rebel rock star. But instead, Yazawa goes in the opposite direction; Naoki narrates, but what he narrates is almost entirely about other characters — or more precisely, about his misinterpretations of the other characters. He thinks Takumi and Yasu are gangsters, he misinterprets Takumi’s relationship with Reira (the Trapnest singer); he fails to recognize Yasu when the later changes his hair. The story isn’t about Naoki finding his real self, instead, it’s about how he fails to discover everyone else’s.

Finally, towards the end of the piece, we learn that there is a center to Naoki’s life — his relationship with his hometown sweetheart, Haruko.

Or, then again…
 

 
Haruko may be real, or she may not; her drawn image is either the the core of Naoki, or a meaningless surface. Moreoever, the meditation on truth and lies in the pages above is contrasted, not with pictures of Naoki, but with pictures of Nana and Ren. Haruko isn’t real, Naoki isn’t real…and of course, Nana and Ren aren’t real either. They’re just a dream. In the context of a serialized soap opera, this meta moment, where the headlong narrative collapses into itself, is unsettlingly disorienting. These people we know as friends are just visual illusions; line drawings on the top of nothing. The effect is not so much to knock us out of this story, as to knock us out of any story, including our own. Instead of images arranging themselves into a sequence, they seem to hang still, unorganized bits and pieces that refuse to make a whole. Genre falls apart, as ungraspable as life, or as death.

There’s a similar effect in the latter part of the series, when Yazawa begins to let us see glimpses into the future of her characters. But these futures are less a terminus, giving finality and shape to the whole, than a way to extend and double the narrative’s irresolution. Nana-to-come has run away and is living incognito…but perhaps she’ll return. Takumi-to-come and Hachi-to-come are estranged. But that’s not the end of their relationship. It’s simply another stage in it, as subject to change and vacillation as the past. There is no happily ever after, not because there isn’t a happily, but because there’s no ever. The characters keep falling out of the genre narrative, or else the genre narrative falls from around them, like snow dissolving. “After your death, the future we all hoped for was wiped clean,” future Hachi says to the long- passed Ren. “I still can’t imagine my future. I can’t begin again unless Nana is with me.” But while she’s saying that, the future goes on; her daughter plays with Yasu, the waves go in and out, the snow comes down. The plot is gone, but she’s still there, lamenting the fact that death is an end, and also lamenting the fact that it’s not.

Those are the last pages in Nana #21. The series hangs there still, waiting for Yazawa to come back, or never to come back, just as Hachi is waiting for Nana. We’re stuck with grief and a future that won’t tell us what it means. Maybe that’s why sometimes the worst comic book is the one that was never written — the page that you can’t turn, and can’t stop turning.
 
 
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