Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Utilitarian Review 6/16/12

Posted on by

News

I’m going to be moderating a panel on queer anthologies at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) tomorrow. Here are the details.

3:30pm – 4:30pm, 8th Floor Auditorium

Queer Communities, Queer Anthologies

with Annie Murphy, Justin Hall, and Robert Kirby
moderated by Noah Berlatsky
sponsored by Little Heart, a Comic Anthology for Marriage Equality

A sense of aesthetic community is perhaps one of the most essential and undefinable aspects of assembling an anthology. Similarly, defining a queer community can be both incredibly tricky and unconditionally inspiring. The editors of three powerhouse LGBTIQ comics anthologies discuss the overlap and feedback between grouping and identity and what forms of community queer comics can build.

If you’re in Chicago, come see us! And check out the rest of CAKE programming too; it looks pretty awesome.
 
On HU

Featured Archive post: Bill Randall on Tatsumi covers here and in Japan.

I explain why the Watchmen movie sucks.

I ask Do you have a right to piracy?

Jones, One of the Jones Boys, argues ethics and aesthetics in Before Watchmen.

Ng Suat Tong on the original art of Howard Chaykin’s Time².

Cheryl Lynn Eaton on comics’ marketing confusion at Book Expo America.

Travis Reynolds on panels, closure, and blood in the gutters (part of our comics criticism 101 series.

I talk about gaze theory and Being John Malkovitch.

 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I explain why reading doesn’t necessarily set women free. (An essay which has attracted some really unpleasant sexist trolling in comments for some reason.)

At Splice I talk about Kelly Hogan’s mediocre new album.

Also at Splice, I talk about the Melvin’s awesome new album.

Jeet Heer quotes me in his piece on gay superheroes.

 
Other Links

Andrew Hickey with a very convincing negative review of Darwyn Cooke’s Minutemen.

Why evolution vs. creation doesn’t really matter much.

Aaron Kashtan on some problems with Hillary Chute’s Graphic Women.

Alyssa Rosenberg on rape in Tomb Raider.
 

The Master and John Malkovich

Posted on by

Being John Malkovich is an almost certainly intentional, not to mention deliberately parodic, riff on film theory. As I am not the first to point out, the movie gleefully presents the viewer with mirror images, women who want the phallus, explicit sadistic fantasies of control, identification with the gaze, identification through the gaze, and a chimpanzee with a traumatic backstory —all couched in an absurdist narrative. At one point we even get a tour through John Malkovich’s subconscious which begins (of course) with a primal scene as young John watches his parents do that thing that Freudian parents do.

It’s pretty clear that writer Charlie Kaufmann and director Spike Jonze are both referencing and undermining Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory. On the one hand, Craig Schwartz, the protagonist, is the protoypical sadistic viewer — he is a puppeteer by profession, and he explains at some length how he loves to get inside other people, to enter their skin and feel what they feel. This speech is made by Craig to Maxine, a woman with whom he is sexually obsessed — and soon thereafter he makes a puppet of her to play with, so the fetishistic content is not exactly subtle. Craig wants to enter others as a way of fucking others; empathy and identification are for him a means of sadistic control.

At the same time, the film messes with Mulvey’s formulation, in which the male viewer is supposed to be the subject of the gaze and a female character is supposed to be the object. For instance, the person Craig inhabits and controls is not a woman, but a man, John Malkovich. In the movie’s main absurdist conceit, Craig finds a secret, moist tunnel in his office which literally leads into Malkovich’s consciousness. This not only feminizes Malkovich (the tunnel is literally referred to as Malkovich’s “cunt” at one point) but it also feminizes Craig. In the first place, he’s engaged in male-male sex too; Maxine calls him a “fag.” And furthermore, towards the end of the film he essentially experiences a full-body castration, giving up his own life and self in order to inhabit and become Malkovich.

The film also critiques/parodies Mulvey by handing the male gaze over to a woman. Craig’s wife, Lottie, also uses the tunnel into Malkovich’s head — and she finds the experience both exciting and sexually stimulating. Indeed, after entering Malkovich while he’s taking a shower, desire and identification flip, and she decides she wants to be a man. Later, she goes into Malkovich again, and rides along as he receives a sexually charged phone call from Max…with whom both Lottie and in consequence Malkovich instantly fall in lust. The sadistic male gaze, therefore, becomes a sadistic female gaze, giving women access to the phallus and (not coincidentally) to objectification of other women.

The point is further driven home (if that’s the right metaphor) by the fact that Max reciprocates Lottie’s affections — but only when Lottie is in Malkovich. Malkovich is the phallus himself, but he cannot have the phallus — just as is supposed to be the case for women in Lacan. Actual women, on the other hand, can hold the phallus and wield it for their own pleasure — the only caveat being that to hold the phallus they have to hold the phallus. Masculinity and mastery, contradictorily, seem to inhere, not in men, but in women. Even paternity becomes a female prerogative — Max becomes pregnant when Lottie is in Malkovich, not when Craig is. Lesbians, it seems, are better men than men are.

The film, then, in some ways seems to deliberately mock masculinity — or at least, Mulvey’s formulation of masculinity. In other ways, though, its position is less clear. In particular, it seems significant that Malkovich’s castration is in many ways actually a kind of apotheosis. Malkovich is, after all, famous for being other people. The film, then, becomes an extended allegory of his talent; Malkovich is everyone, and everyone is Malkovich. The very funny scene in which Malkovich goes through the passageway into his own head and ends up in a restaurant where he is literally all the people in the room, whether women, dwarfs, waiters or patrons, definitely ridicules his persona. But it also elevates that persona into existential dilemma. Similarly, Malkovich’s vituoso performance as Craig inhabiting John Malkovich becomes the ultimate version of disappearing into a role. No costume, no props, and yet he is magically (and convincingly) doing a quadruple-layered acting feat, playing John Cusack playing Craig playing John Malkovich playing John Malkovich. This is in part about Lacanian misrecognition, where even your self is someone other than your self. But it’s also about method acting. To not be who you are may be a traumatic crisis of selfhood, but it’s also, as an actor, the mark of mastery. The more castrated Malkovich is, the more his phallus grows.

The same is true of Craig. Early on we see Craig performing a puppet show of Abelard and Heloise. Abelard was, famously, castrated. In the puppet show, however, his incapacity is supplemented, or superseded, by Heloise’s insistent sexuality — the puppet humps the wall between her cell and Abelard’s. The blatant display, performed by Craig on a street corner, is so convincing it prompts an irate father to hit him in the face. Craig is castrated like Abelard…but like Malkovich, his belittlement becomes the sign of his mastery. And that mastery is routed through the inhabitation of female desire.

Which raises the question…is the lesbian relationship in the film a rebuke to male fantasies of possession? Or is it an embodiment of them? At one point, Craig enters Malkovich when Maxine thinks Lottie is inside; as a result he weirdly gets to have lesbian sex — a not at all uncommon male fantasy. At the film’s conclusion, Craig is presented as trapped in the consciousness of Lottie and Maxine’s child, staring out impotently forever at the two women he can never have. Again, though, the masochism is perhaps just a little too convenient. Are we really supposed to believe he is not getting off on this fantasy of being inside a woman — and, more, inside the sexual relationship of two women? Who is pulling whose strings, exactly?

In one of his puppet plays, Craig’s doll (made in his own image) looks up deliberately, as if seeing the man who controls him. Being John Malkovich, too, with its absurdist, self-referential plot constantly reminds the viewer of its status as fiction — and of its status as tour-de-force. Writer Charlie Kaufman’s script is as auteurish as Malkovich’s performance, and in the same way. When Malkovich and Kaufman erase and feminize themselves, it is only so that they can be all-the-more controllingly present, all-the-more wielders of the phallus. Masochistic lesbophilia seems, from this perspective not so much an upending of patriarchy as it is a means of creating a more all-encompassing phallic order. Perhaps that’s why there is, running through the film, an air of smug, over-determined self-congratulation. Despite its cleverness, and its deliberate eschewal of traditional storytelling, it still comes across as surprisingly conventional Hollywood narrative cinema, less problematic for Mulvey’s theories than any B-movie slasher.
______________
 
As a brief addendum, I just saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which painfully confirms my sense that Kaufman’s absurdist trickery conceals all-too-typical masculine self-pity and predictable Hollywood idiocy. The film’s heroine/love object Clementine claims several times that she’s not just a cipher for male desire and dreams, but again alas the fact that she’s a self conscious magic pixie dream girl doesn’t make her less of a magic pixie dream girl — quite the contrary, in fact. Maybe if there were some vague effort to balance the amount of time we had in our drab hero Joel’s head with the amount of time in bouncy, unpredictable Clementine’s I’d believe that the film saw her as her own person. But virtually all her screen time occurs either when she’s with Joel or when she’s not even herself, but is instead (and significantly) a mental projection inside his head. And, of course, we’ve got not one, but two romances in which Hollywood-hot younger actresses turn down attractive men their own age in order to aggressively seduce significantly older, character-actor-homely men. The PKD meditation on memory and self looks a lot like a feint to distract from the puerile, self-serving wish-fulfillment.

Is there any similar quirky, high-concept, mainstream American film that is told primarily from the point of view of a woman? There may well be. Chalie Kaufman sure isn’t going to write it, though.

 

Do You Have a Right to Piracy?

Posted on by

Over the last week, a couple of twitterers I follow expressed the opinion that fans don’t have a right to the art they want. Alyssa Rosenberg said “You don’t have a right to HBO.” i.e., that you can’t just steal content because HBO won’t stream it on the internet. And Dan Kanemitsu, in reference to people creating unlicensed manga translations for the Kindle, said that “Having material available quickly & cheaply is not a right.”.

I understand where Alyssa and Dan are coming from, but I think the language of rights here is misleading. In this context, I think it’s worth remembering why we have copyright in the first place. According to the Constitution, copyright is established “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

In other words, the purpose of copyright is not to protect creators. It’s to encourage artistic creation.

One of the main ways it encourages artistic creation, of course, is by giving creators exclusive rights to their creations, so they are encouraged to create them. But it also gives society rights by limiting the extent of creator control. In other words, public domain and fair use and access to art are not just a gift; they’re central to how copyright is supposed to work.

Or let’s put this another way. Think about the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique”. The Dust Brothers jacked a lot of samples for that album, most of which they didn’t clear. Did they have the right to do that? Weren’t they just being entitled jerks, thinking they could just walk off with other people’s beats?

Of course, you could argue that having access to HBO or manga isn’t like having access to beats. After all, who’s going to make art out of HBO or manga?

The answer is that lots of people might. A video artist might want to use HBO clips in her piece; a writer might want to read a manga translation to inspire fan fiction. For that matter, reviewers or academics might want to write critical pieces about them. If critical writing is creative (and it is) then how philosophically are such writings different from Paul’s Boutique?

The issue here isn’t that all people have the right to steal any art they want. Rather, the point is, again, that the language of “rights” is a poor way to think about society’s investment in the availability of art.

I think it might be more useful to think of copyright in terms of competing interests. Society has an interest in protecting individual creator monopolies in copyright. It also has an interest in allowing other people access to those creations.

We try to balance those interests in various ways. Currently, we do it by having really restrictive copyright laws foisted on us by our corporate overlords…and rampant and easy piracy made available by the internets. This is not an ideal system in any sense and for many reasons. But would it really be improved if consumers all at once and instantly accepted that they had no right to art, and ceased their infernal piracy? If by “would it be improved?” you mean “would it encourage more creativity?” — then, no, I don’t think that the end of piracy, mash-ups, fan fiction, and more restricted access to art would give us a better, or for that matter a more moral, creative landscape.

I want artists to get compensated for their work. But I wish we could find a way to do that which recognized that society has an interest in making art available to everybody — not least because that “everybody” includes creators.
 

Superficial

Posted on by

This first ran in the Chicago Reader a ways back.
____________________

Superpowers create more problems than they solve, and we’d probably be better off without them. That’s at least one message of the 80s comic book Watchmen—especially if we understand that writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons were thinking about geopolitical superpowers as much as masked guys in tights. The original 12-issue series, published in 1986 and ’87, takes place in an alternate universe where superheroes walk the U.S. of A. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have been killed by a vigilante called the Comedian, and as a result Richard Nixon is serving out his fifth term as president. Thanks to the superhero Dr. Manhattan, who can transmute elements, grow 50 feet high, and wander around buck naked (after all, who’s going to stop him?), the U.S. has won the Vietnam war and holds a decisive advantage over the Soviet Union. America is the world’s undisputed dominant power—which, to the two British creators, seems like a decidedly mixed blessing.

Of course, the cold war ended for real four years after the series concluded. We now know, more or less, what a world dominated by the U.S. looks like. Yet even after two decades, Watchmen doesn’t seem quaint or outdated; on the contrary, it seems more prescient with each passing year. In the comic, American dominance leads to paranoia. At home, fear of masked vigilantes has fueled McCarthyite rioting and forced most superheroes into retirement. Overseas, a cornered USSR walks the world up to the edge of nuclear holocaust.

The story focuses on six superheroes, one of whom—the Comedian—has been murdered. These characters are hardly laudatory examples of unfettered American power. For the most part they don’t like each other, and they certainly don’t work together. The Comedian was an amoral thug who reveled in his own brutality. Rorschach is a neofascist, homophobic nutcase who uses black-and-white morality to justify his extreme violence. Dr. Manhattan is so powerful that he’s become detached from humanity, alternating terror and beneficence with a chillingly casual disinterest. The wealthy philanthropist Adrian Veidt, aka superhero Ozymandias, is a liberal one-worlder whose compassion is so aggressive it’s indistinguishable from ruthlessness: his crazed plot to save the world involves killing half the people in New York City. For him and all the other heroes, saving the world is less about helping others than about indulging their own messianic delusions, sexual hang-ups, and self-aggrandizement. As the U.S. has demonstrated for the past eight years or so, when you add moral grandstanding to great power you get not great responsibility but a huge fucking mess.

Given the continuing relevance of Watchmen, I had some hope that the movie adaptation would serve as a corrective to the supposedly tough-minded but in fact mushily sentimental The Dark Knight. Alas, Watchmen the movie is itself nothing but sentiment. The pointed message of the comic is buried under a ritualized nostalgia for the source material. Director Zack Snyder tiptoes through the story with a deadening reverence, faithfully reproducing this bit of dialogue from Moore (“The superman is real—and he is American!”) or that bit of imagery from Gibbons (the Comedian crashing backward through a window amid a spray of shattered glass) but never pausing to develop a vision of his own. The result is oddly hollow and disjointed; the actors move like sleepwalkers from one overdetermined tableau to another.

One of the most telling characters is Rorschach. In the comic he’s repulsive and ludicrous—a tiny man with lifts in his shoes, he suffers from major sexual problems, and his disguise is a street person whose placard reads “The end is nigh.” The backstory makes him both more likable and less admirable; the moment in the comic when he threatens his landlady is uncomfortable, but the next panel, where he spares her because of her child, who reminds him of himself as a boy, is extremely poignant. Snyder alludes to some of this—we glimpse Rorschach in civvies, wandering around with his sign—but it never coheres. Viewers new to the story might not even realize this nutty doomsayer is the vigilante’s alter ego. All we’re left with is another cool-as-shit dark hero, kicking ass in glossy martial-arts sequences, doing the dirty work of justice.

Certainly Moore thought his vigilantes were cool as shit, but he was also ambivalent about their morals and the implications of their might. By contrast, Snyder issues a few bland caveats, but his veneration of the source material ultimately bleeds over into thoughtless justification of the heroes. This accounts for the main plot change. In the comic, Ozymandias unites the world by destroying New York City and making the catastrophe look like an alien invasion. But in the movie, Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) unites the world by fingering Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) as the one who destroyed several American cities. The horrific spectacle of New York under attack—which, obviously, now has an eerie resonance—is rather cravenly skirted. And as in The Dark Knight, a superhero scapegoats himself to unite a sinful humanity. The super-Christ exists, and he’s American!

Snyder tips the story to validate the superheroes in other ways too. Moore was careful to include a number of civilians in the comic, most prominently a cranky white news vendor and a young black comics reader. In the movie, these two characters die in each other’s arms as they did on the page, but that’s the first and the last you see of them. They’re cannon fodder for the special effects, not characters you care about. As a result Watchmen focuses on the choices and sacrifices of the superpowered—the superman’s burden, if you will—rather than what those choices mean for everybody else.

Toward the end of the story, the philanthropist Veidt claims he’s made himself feel the death of everyone he’s murdered while trying to build a new utopia. In the comic, Moore forces the reader to experience these deaths and wonder if they’re justified by the possibility of world peace. When you take that question seriously, others come up as well. What makes Veidt so certain the human race is going to destroy itself? What right does he have to play God? Veidt sneers at Rorschach for his “schoolboy heroics,” but in the comic there isn’t much daylight between Rorschach’s fascist vigilante justice and Veidt’s evangelistic UN peacemaking. Both impulses fuel our heroic American fantasies, at home and abroad. As long as that holds true, Watchmen can’t be a simple exercise in 80s nostalgia, no matter how hard Zack Snyder tries to turn it into one.

Utilitarian Review 6/8/12

Posted on by

News

Did I mention that Jones One of the Jones Boys has joined us as a contributing writer? He has!
 
On HU

Our Featured Archive post this week was my massive interview with Johnny Ryan.

I talk about Katana, superheroine without cheesecake.

Alex Buchet on Prometheus and Ridley Scott’s fever dreams.

I argue that Before Watchmen is a shitty idea because of labor practices, not copyright.

Isaac Butler explains why Prometheus is no good. (Lots of spoilers.)

Domingos Isabelinho on M.S. Bastian, Isabelle L., and Lego concentration camps.

Ben Saunders in praise of Bendis and Ultimate Spider-Man.

Ryan Melcher on color in Heath and Murray’s “Hearts and Minds.” This post is a response to an assignment by Phillip Troutman. We’ll have more papers from his class over the next few weeks.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Splice I write about men in Pretty Woman.
 
Other Links

Robert Stanley Martin on The Shark King.

52…eh.

Comic book publishers and desperate marketing gambits.

Dominic Umile on the Green River Killer.

 

Isaac Butler on A Good Prometheus, SPOILED

Posted on by

Yesterday I goaded Isaac Butler into writing a SPOILER-FILLED review of Prometheus in comments. I’m going to put it here, because I feel strongly that it is the mission of HU to SPOIL all of everyone’s art forever. So, you know, you’ve been warned. (And if you want a non-spoilery review, check out Alex Buchet’s from yesterday.

Okay, here’s Isaac Butler. Spoilers ho.

Aw screw it, I can’t sleep.

Okay, this is going to be ALL SPOILERS.

Keeping in mind that on a visual and directorial level, I was quite taken with the film, I think that it really doesn’t work on a screenplay level. The screenplay suffers from many problems, but the four biggest are that it’s predictable, that it sinks under the weight of demands outside of telling of a story, that it crams too much content in for its running length and that it ultimately doesn’t makes sense logically.

I don’t care whether Earth being seeded is plausible or not. On almost all things, I’ll grant them their basic premise, and I actually thought that, were the film longer (or a mini-series) this would provoke some interesting religious and philosophical inquiry, the way Battlestar Galactica sometimes was capable of as it pitted genocidal monotheistic robots again polytheistic somewhat more sympathetic humans.

And I know that Alex acknowledges above that there are logical problems etc. with the film, so this is less any kind of counterargument to this post than simply an explanation of why the screenplay-level problems sank the film for this particular viewer. This was one of those instances where I enjoyed the ride but almost immediately afterward, the film fell apart.

Anyway… Let’s start with the logical problems. The biggest one is the film’s premise. The premise of the film is that the aliens who seeded Earth left behind a map to lead us to them. But the twist at the end is that Noomi Rapace et al did not discover their homeworld, but rather discovered essentially a moon-sized Trinity site, a place where they designed and developed extermination weapons that were meant to wipe out all mankind.

So why– back when they liked us– did they leave us a map to their weapons testing facility? I say “back when they liked us” because the film makes it clear the downed alien spacecraft were going to fly to Earth to deliver their payload of spongy penis and vagina monsters. So they didn’t need us to come there to exterminate us. They were going to come to us.

So why does the map go there? The film doesn’t even bother with attempting an answer, it just kind of hopes that you don’t realize that happened. At the end, Noomi and Michael Fassbender’s Head set a course for wherever the aliens came from, so we have it double-confirmed at the end that this planet isn’t their home world. This one particularly rankles me because it’s fixable with like two lines of dialogue “Why did the map lead up to the testing site?” “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”

That’s the biggest of the film’s story-level problems, but it’s not the only one. Logan Marshall Green’s character chooses a horrific, painful death via flamethrower when we already know the air on the planet’s surface is toxic due to high carbon dioxide levels and would like deliver a much less painful death in under two minutes. The medi-bay that Noomi Rapace uses to remove the alien from her body is configured for a man even though it’s in a woman’s cabin. (This actually turns out to likely be bungled foreshadowing as to Guy Pearce’s presence on the ship. Bungled because we already know that he’s on the ship as we’ve seen Michael Fassbender communing with a hidden person in cybersleep and Guy Pearce’s Mr. Weyland is the only other character in the entire film and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together. )

Then there’s the characters who don’t behave the way people actually behave. Noomi Rapace’s lack of ever telling anyone “Oh hey, this expedition we’re taking right now is being lead by a robot who is probably not on our side, given that whole trying to force me into hypersleep with an alien fetus monster inside of me.”

Next are the extra-screenplay demands. The film is both a sequel and, clearly, an anchor-film for a new franchise within the Alien Universe. As the third act happens, the film gets taken over by these demands. In particular, there’s a total fan service moment when the chair-gun-thing finally appears and this– rather than anything having to do with character or story– is treated as the emotional climax of the film. The entire staging of the final major action sequence is done so that the ship will be in the right position to be investigated by Sigorney Weaver et al to investigate it in a few years. At the same time, all human and android presence in the ship or on the planet has to be eliminated as well. At the same time, no summer blockbuster can be self-contained unless you’re Christopher Nolan and so it has to have an open ending.

But one of the major problems with the screenplay is simply that it’s got too much content for its running time. I’m all with Alex Buchet on finding the thematic content of the film really interesting. But there just isn’t enough time to explore it, develop character, set up the scares and the action and move the plot along. As a result, everything gets short-changed.

The final problem is the film’s predictability. This is partially not the writers’ fault. After all, the trailer gives away that an enemy spaceship eventually takes off out of the ruin. But there isn’t a single story beat that you can’t figure out from about five minutes into the film. I found myself relieved when Michael Fassbender was going to put Noomi Rapace into cold storage because I thought for a moment they were going to pull a “Psycho” and take out the headlining actor partway through the film. It turned out this wasn’t the case.

I love Ridley Scott, I really do. Alien and Blade Runner are two of my favorite movies and while Gladiator is a totally ridiculous and campy swords and sandals epic… well… so are all the other swords and sandals epics. I’ve enjoyed his minor efforts like Matchstick Men, his competent hackwork like American Gangster and I think The Duelists and even Legend are pretty aces. And the work he does here is admirable. The terrifying segments really are terrifying. There’s some really interesting integration of visual design and theme. Michael Fassbender is wonderful.

But sadly the screenplay just doesn’t work beyond getting you from point A to point B. Compared to Hampton Fancher’s Blade Runner screenplay or Dan O’Bannon’s Alien screenplay it’s just junk. A far better version of this movie was made a few years ago. It was called “Sunshine,” and Danny Boyle directed it and it bombed hard in the States.

Okay, this was a bit rambly but as I said it’s two in the morning over here and I’ve taken some Tylenol PM. Cheers all…

Rorschach, Superstar

Posted on by

A bit back, Sean Michael Robinson talked about a production of the Diary of Anne Frank that interpolated the music of the Carpenters. Sean noted that the production was wonderful, moving, inventive…and also illegal.

Anne Frank’s words, however, and the translation of her words on which we were relying for much of our text, were a different matter, as was the authorized play (Diary of Anne Frank), which provided much of the rest of the text. All of these elements are still under copyright, and will continue to be so for several years. (In fact, copyright in the theater is more restrictive than in almost any other field. You can, after all, read a book or listen to an album any way that you wish once you’ve purchased a copy–but to publicly perform a play one must conform to a dizzying array of limitations set out by the author or the author’s agents–usually, that every word of the play will be performed, i.e. no cuts or insertions without permission, and that the appearance, gender and even staging etc will honor the stated intentions of the author regarding the script and contract.)

Sean’s prescription — with which I agree, is that we need to rethink our insanely restrictive copyright laws in order to make it possible for people to reimagine older works, and create new ones, without having their asses sued off.

This does bring up a rather uncomfortable issue for me, though. Mainly…if I think that art is built out of other art, and that the copyright laws should reflect that, then what exactly is the deal with my recent article on Slate, where I discuss my deep disgust with DC’s Before Watchmen? After all, as Jones pointed out with his usual logician’s obsessiveness, Alan Moore has ripped off everybody from C.C. Beck to H.G. Wells, and probably other people whose names begin with A, X, Y, and Z as well. If I think high school kids should be able to mash up Anne Frank and the Carpenters, and I think that Alan Moore should be able to mash up Dorothy and Wendy and Alice (which is probably not the best word choice there, but onward), then what exactly is the problem with having DC put out a new! Watchmen! prequel! — or for that matter, a Watchmen toaster? Isn’t there some moral inconsistency here?

Possibly. But let me try to think through the differences.

— First, it’s useful to remember the purpose of copyright. According to our Constitution, the purpose is not to protect creators. The purpose is to encourage art. Copyright is supposed to give creators a monopoly on their own works so that they will have a financial incentive to create those works in the first place. If as soon as you write something, everybody else can publish it under their name, then you’re going to limit the people who will write to hobbyists who don’t need the money. (Not that there’s anything wrong with hobbyists, he says as he writes for free on his blog. The point is just that ideally you want to encourage other kinds of writing as well.)

However. Giving someone an infinite monopoly on their work also limits creation. It makes it hard to comment on older works, or to remix them, or to use them as inspiration for newer works. That’s why copyright is limited; so that works will eventually enter the public domain where they can be used by other artists with no strings attached to make things like League of Extraordinary Gentleman…or what have you.

The point is that there’s no particular contradiction between arguing that, on the one hand, Alan Moore is being screwed, or that, on the other hand, basing a work on Bram Stoker — or even on C.C. Beck — is okay. I’m personally in favor of a copyright of about 50 years from date of publication — which would mean Watchmen would still be under copyright, but that a lot of works Moore has lifted from would not be. A fifty year copyright would also put Anne Frank out of copyright…though not the Carpenters.

— Second, even when works are under copyright, I think there needs to be a vigorous fair use provision. Such provisions can include, for example, flat fees for using music (like the Carpenters) without giving the creator veto power over how or where that music is used (which, yes, would mean that idiotic republican presidential candidates could use Bruce Springsteen’s songs if they wanted even if the Boss objected. I think that’s a reasonable price to pay for a vigorous public domain, personally.) I also think that in situations where there is no profit, as in Harry Potter fan fiction, for example, most bets should be off.

Soooo…again, how is all of this different than DC publishing Before Watchmen…or than Marvel using Jack Kirby’s characters (which are certainly on the verge of my 50 year timetable) without paying him?

Which brings us to my last point.

—The issue with DC and Marvel is not that they are creating new work using somebody else’s characters. As I’ve suggested, artists do such things all the time; it’s a big part of how art is made. Without it, we wouldn’t have Shakespeare, much less Alan Moore.

So the issue with DC and Marvel isn’t use of the characters. The issue is, specifically, lousy business practices. Moore and Kirby never got to exploit the copyright for the characters they created; instead, Marvel and DC used crappy contacts, evil industry practices, and disproportions of power to gain the benefits of the law for themselves. So it’s not that Marvel and DC shouldn’t use those characters. It’s that they shouldn’t be able to reap a monopoly windfall for using those characters based on dubious business practices.

And, in a bitter but by no means isolated irony, the excessively insane draconian provisions of our copyright law mean that the creators are actually much more extensively screwed than they would be if copyright were reasonable. If copyright were only 50 years, Marvel would be in the process of losing its rights to its properties one by one — which would mean that anybody could make a Spider-Man movie or an Iron Man movie, which would make Marvel essentially worthless, which would mean it would go out of business — which wouldn’t benefit the Kirby family financially, of course. Still, you’d think his ghost would at least get a kick out of it.

In any case, the point is: the creators working on Before Watchmen are not despicable because they are using someone else’s art to make art, because that’s what all artists do. They’re despicable because they are knowingly helping DC exploit a monopoly that was obtained by fucking over the people who created it — and because one of those fucked over creators has verbally erected the equivalent of a picket line. Hughes, Straczynski, Cooke, et. al. are not thieves. They’re scabs. I hope that’s a comfort to them.