Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Seeing and Being Seen

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In the March Harper’s Bazaar, there was a spread by Chinese artist Liu Bolin. Bolin usually paints himself to blend into backgrounds, making a “powerful commentary on the individual and society,” as the Harper’s blurb says.

However, for the Harper’s spread, Liu painted, not himself, but other people. Specifically, he painted designers standing against their clothes and fabrics.


Angela Misoni, by Liu Bolin

In this context, the vanishing figures become less about the way individuals are overwhelmed by society, and more about the fashion industries obsession with visibility and identity. Fashion is a world in which you look obsessively, fetishistically, at (generally coded) straight female models, and in which you don’t look — as obsessively? as fetishistically? at (not all, but disproportionately gay and male) designers.


Alber Elbaz by Liu Bolin

The guy painted above, for example, is Alber Elbaz. Bolin shows him fading into his own dresses, while mannequin’s cavort visibly around him. The Women here are seen, but what’s seen isn’t really them — or maybe it’s truer to say that all they are is what is seen; they’re defined by surface. Elbaz, on the other hand, is no surface; his truth is the dresses, but you can’t see him there. Fashion, then, is a collaboration between those defined by appearance and those whose appearance is erased. Bolin’s pictures make that tension and its frisson more clear — the way in which fashion is both hiding in plain sight and appearing though unseen. The designers insist that they enjoy being behind the scenes (“All I try to do is be invisible,” says Elbaz), but they clearly are having fun, too, taking center stage in their own work for once. The point, perhaps, isn’t so much to hide or to be seen as it is to have some control over the look that defines you — as desired, as other, as absent. Or as Elbez says, “I think it’s a choice: to make clothes to make women visible or to be a star and to always be visible. I always preferred to be on the other side of the street and disappear.”


Jean Paul Gaultier by Liu Bolin

Looking at this series made me think again about Ken Parille’s recent piece over at tcj.com. Ken argues that the fully-costumed male body in comic books is a sign of repressed same-sex desire. Or as Ken says:

One explanation for the male cover-up—as for all cover-ups—is that there’s something to hide. Just as the mandatory Burka expresses fears about female bodies and male desire, the superhero costume reflects similar sexual anxieties. We often think of the mainstream superhero comic as a “power fantasy” without acknowledging its sexual dimension: it’s an erotic power fantasy. Perhaps some readers would be willing to admit that heroic tales are fantasies: “I would like to have the super power a superman has.” They might be less inclined to admit that these stories are heterosexual male domination fantasies: “I would like to have the power to control hot females” (yet to admit this would be to acknowledge that these comics’ chivalric code is a sham). Most readers would find it far too scary to recognize that these comics may be homoerotic fantasies: “Watching male bodies in close contact in the male-centric DCMV turns me on.” The hidden body is an unconscious emblem of forbidden same-sex desire.

I don’t have any doubt that idealized, fetishized male superhero bodies are objects of same-sex male desire. But…is it really the case that the more covered male body is less open to same-sex desire? Surely the full-body latex look is itself thoroughly fetishized? Would the Liefield drawing before really be any more sexualized if it had a boob window?

I wonder if the full-body coverage for (most) superheroes, then, might have less to do with disavowing a homosocial investment which couldn’t really be much more obvious anyway, and more to do with seeing and being seen.

Or, to put it another way, the issue is not that men are resisting desiring men, but rather that the kind of men that men imagine themselves desiring in comics are men who are covered. Why, after all, do supeheroes wear costumes in the first place? They wear them, as Elbaz says, to be invisible — or to be someone else. Bruce Wayne doesn’t want to be Bruce Wayne, the wounded child. He wants to be someone bigger, more powerful, more mysterious — a sexy-cool daddy behind what Ken aptly calls the “bat-burka.”

It’s interesting in this context to note that the few male superheroes that do show a lot of skin tend not to really be wearing costumes. Prince Namor, for example, isn’t really a supehero; he’s not dressed up to fight crime and/or hide from his childhood trauma. Similarly, the hypersexualized, phallicly-named Hulk comes busting out of his clothes whether he will or no. These characters are not deploying the power and mastery of clothes; they are not diegetically wearing a hood to control how they look. The characters were never playing with seeing and being seen to begin with; therefore, they might as well let it all hang out (for the delight, presumably, of readers of all genders.)

Fashion and costumes isn’t just about who is sexy and who is not; it’s about who is seen and how and in what way. Superhero men are sexualized — but unlike superhero women, they are sexualized in ways which figures them as covered lookers rather than as exposed lookees. I don’t think that’s because comic-book readers are afraid to own their sexual fantasies; rather, I think it’s a sign of what their sexual fantasies are and how they work. Visibility and invisibility are not just symptoms of desire; they are aspects of desire itself.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Hinkley Had a Vision

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In the spirit of our Jaime roundtable, a punk rock mix. Download Hinkley Had a Vision.
 
1. Capybara — Shonen Knife
2. Another Genius Idea From Our Government — Erase Errata
3. Marmoset — Rapeman
4. Human Fly — The Cramps
5. Down on the Street — The Stooges
6. Tight Black Plants — The Plasmatics
7. Neanderthal Dike — Tribe 8
8. Hate Breeders — The Misfits
9. It’s Halloween — The Shaggs
10. Radio G. String — Bow Wow Wow
11. Pretty Vacant — Sex Pistols
12. New Breed — Pussy Galore
13. Hinkley Had a Vision — The Crucifucks
14. Institutionalized — Suicidal Tendencies
15. Life Sentence — Dead Kennedys
16. Screaming at a Wall — Minor Threat
17. Who Am I — D.R.I.
18. Radiation Sickness — Repulsion
19. White Riot — The Clash
20. The KKK Took My Baby Away — Ramones
21. Too Bad on Your Birthday — Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
22. Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing — Minutemen
23. Thank You — Swans
24. Hot Topic — Le Tigre

Utilitarian Review 3/24/12

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On HU

In our Featured Archive post this week, Caroline Small explained why Jaime Hernandez is (unfortunately) not like a soap opera.

I reviewed albums by two punk rock girl bands: Shonen Knife and Forever.

I reviewed a book about rock and the apocalypse and argued that rock realy is the devil’s music.

Most of this week was devoted to our ongoing Jaime Hernandez roundtable. This week we had posts by Marc Sobel, Derik Badman, James Romberger, and Richard Cook. You can see an index for the whole ongoing roundtable here.

And finally Monika Bartyzel explained why Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Xander Harris is a sexist ass.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today, I talk about trying and failing to vote for Romney in Illinois.
 
Other Links

Eli Zaretsky on Obama and the limits of reason.

A nice post on Chet Baker.

On defiling Corto Maltese.

Robert Stanley Martin and Tom Spurgeon talk about Watchmen, canons, and Calvin and Hobbes here and again here. As a bonus, Tom explains in some detail why he despises HU in general and me in particular.
 

Rock The Apocalypse

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A version of this ran on Madeloud.
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The central thesis of David Janssen and Edward Whitelock’s book Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music is sound — there is a lot of American popular music that deals with the end times. Unfortunately, the vast majority of apocalyptic music at this point in history falls under the rubric of “metal”, a genre in which Janssen and Whitelock have no interest. Instead, the two of them are standard issue rock critics, which means that their canon is comprised of the usual holy trinity: roots rock, punk, and a couple random token black guys.

What this all means is that the Jukebox in the book’s title is probably more important than the Apocalypse. Rock’s canon, and its criticism have never really gotten out of the sixties and fifties — for Greil Marcus and all his bastard heirs, the real music still comes on 45s, or at least sounds like it wants to. For all their claims to revolution and/or apocalypse, roots rock and its criticism are both very much nostalgia exercises, compulsively referring back to…well, to their roots, in blues, country, and whatever other authentic volk music is handy.

The contradiction here is that those volk musics were, in fact, obsessed with future Armageddon, as Jannsen and Whitelock clearly demonstrate in the early, and best, part of the book. From bluegrass duo the Louvin Brothers harmonizing about retribution for sins, to the Spirit of Memphis Quartet calling the Lord on an atomic telephone, to rockabilly bombshell Wanda Jackson comparing herself to the annihilation of Hiroshima in “Fujiyama Mama”, American music demonstrated a communal fascination with Armageddon.

That “communal” bit is key. Individuals die all the time, but civilization goes on — except in the apocalyptic vision, where everybody dies, all at once, and the community itself is destroyed. Apocalypse, then, is in some ways an ultimate vision of togetherness and group identity. Whitelock and Janssen express some surprise that “Fujiyama Mama” was a bigger hit in Japan than in America — but of course it was. The song is talking about Japan, after all. Why wouldn’t the Japanese community embrace it?

Apocalypse, then, serves as a kind of social glue, a common ideology. In bluegrass, the saints will be separated from the sinners; in metal, abject nothingness, variously defined, will consume the world. Organized around apocalypse, both of these forms put a high premium on adherence to strict formal structures — dedication to a shared communal aesthetic vision. As Jello Biafra noted, no high school gym; teacher ever had as much success in getting kids to dress alike as metal does. Everybody dies together, so everybody lives together. Nobody stands out.

And in rock? Well, that’s the rub, isn’t it. There is no shared vision in the kind of critically acclaimed rock that Whitelock and Janssen are discussing. On the contrary, the whole point of the genius rockstar is a hyper-cultivated, hyper-marketed, endlessly fetishized individuality. The artists that Janssen and Whitehead have chosen to analyze are deliberately unalike — they use apocalypse in different, individualized ways. For Leonard Cohen, the apocalypse is a metaphor for his divorce; for Green Day it’s a metaphor for adolescence; for Devo, it’s a metaphor, contradictorily, for deindividuation and conformity. Regular folks may all go out the same when the fire comes, but each genius has a different end.

Whatever there other eccentricities, though, the daring individualists that Whitelock and Janssen love do share one trait in common: ambivalence. They’re all complex…or, if you prefer (and in the case of Michael Stipe, literally) inarticulate. Apocalyptic songs tend to celebrate the great simplification of the end — God will set your fields on fire, the traditional bluegrass lyrics insist; trying is not enough, roars Khanate. There’s not a whole lot of wiggle room there. But for Whitelock and Janssen, the apocalypse is yet another excuse to validate, not self-obliterating finality, but self-absorbed complexity. Dylan may insist that you have to serve somebody, but his burnt-out Beat poet doggerel mush ensures that, from song to song, it’s almost impossible to tell who — or, as the authors rhapsodize, Dylan’s audience keeps “bumping into mirrors on all sides.” Arthur Lee enjoys “playing with cacophony,” multi-tracking his voice singing different lyrics simultaneously in order to create a sense of “unreliability” and ambiguity. Devo both embraced and satirized pop success. R.E.M., through the power of refusing to enunciate, both did and did not make sense. They’re all having their Armageddon and maintaining their ironic distance from it too.

Which is to say that, as I read through this book, I started to suspect that for most of these performers, and, indeed, for the authors, the apocalypse was not so much a matter of belief as of self-dramatization. Like Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction, what the apocalyptic rhetoric means is less important than the fact that it is “some cold-blooded shit.” It’s a way of demonstrating rootsy bona-fides, much like boasting about your sexual prowess, or bragging about shooting your woman. The apocalypse is turned from a negation of self into a validation of it. The vision of a (supposedly) more authentic community is reified as part of some individual genius’ ambivalent contradictions. The go-to figure here is, of course, Harry Smith, whose “social music” volume of the Anthology of American Folk Music collected examples of 20s and 30s performers like Blind Willie Johnson warning of the coming end.

For critics like Janssen and Whitelock, however, those warnings become not literal calls to clean up your act, but secret subcultural testaments to Smith’s genius. They rhapsodize about Smith’s “sequencing” and about his decision to give no information about the race of the musicians he is appropriating — eclipsing their communal identity with his own liberal, proto-hippie, idealistic individualism. Smith’s final message, according to the authors, is “This is an imperfect world we have created, let us not uncreate it.” They limn this as apocalyptic — but surely it’s precisely the opposite. Celebrating imperfection, claiming that “we” have made the world — that’s not eschatological. It’s humanist.

At the end of the book, the authors more or less admit that humanism is where their sympathies lie. Working off of feminist writers like Lee Quinby, they highlight the cruelty and exclusionary nature of apocalyptic thinking, and praise Sleater Kinney for, refusing to “do ‘no future’ punk.”

It’s fair enough to point out apocalypse’s downside, certainly…but humanism has its problems as well. Specifically, to put your faith in the human (or in your rockstar heroes) is the definition of worshipping idols (and, indeed, the authors point out that poor John Coltrane has had a Christian church established in his name.) The human isn’t divine; to pretend that it is, you have to steal mojo from somewhere — a communal past, say — and then pretend that that theft is an act of generosity or continuity, betraying the faith you claim to espouse. A personal apocalypse isn’t an apocalypse at all; it’s blasphemy. If rock is the devil’s music, as Janssen and Whitelock ambivalently claim, it is not because it embraces apocalypse, but because it doesn’t.

Punk Rock Girls

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Since we’re doing a Jaime roundtable, I thought I’d break out some old punk reviews for the intermission. This Shonen Knife first appeared on Madeloud, the Forever review I think was pubished in Bitch Magazine.
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Shonen Knife, Free Time

I haven’t heard any of Shonen Knife’s albums since 1998’s sublimely silly Happy Hour. Honestly, I wasn’t even aware that they were still a going concern. So when I picked up their latest, I was excited, but a little nervous as well. They’ve replaced their founding bassist, they’re a decade past their heydey — Lollipops and Fish Eyes forbid, but…is it possible that they suck now? Could their cuteness have curdled?

I needn’t have worried. Shonen Knife’s formula has stayed the same: Ramonesesque three-chord songs backing adorably dada lyrics about food, animals, or any other topic as long as it is treated as if it were a food or an animal. It’s simple, it’s unpretentious, and — even if the indie scene has moved on to other things — it works every bit as well in 2010 as it did in the 90s. The most characteristic outing here is undoubtedly “Capybara,” an insanely catchy tune about…well, you know. “South American animal/always biting grass….roly-poly body shape/swimming very well.” Sing it in a winsome female voice with a Japanese accent, shifting into a Beatles-y psych chorus to announce “Sleeping, biting, all the time/Sleeping, snoring, all the night” — it’s so comforting. In fact, the only way it could possibly be improved is with a techno version sung in Japanese — which is thoughtfully included as a bonus track.

“Comforting” pretty much defines Shonen Knife’s whole aesthetic. Greil Marcus and a million sad aging morons may point to the Clash and mumble incoherently about fighting the power, but in Japan they know that punk is music to shake your toddler to. “Rock N Roll Cake” isn’t about keeping the faith — it’s a recipe for woolgathering. (“Rock cake/ I want to sleep inside it…Roll cake/I can have funny dreams.”)

Even a song like “Economic Crisis” is not a call to arms but a cheerful ditty. And “Perfect Freedom” isn’t about the allure of Dionysiac abandon, but is instead a thoughtful, cautionary note from your mildly dotty aunt. “An…archy in the UK/it might be a mistake.”

“Love Song” though, is my absolute favorite. The band nods to girl group garage with a tune that adds some sway to the rock as they sing about how they don’t really like love songs, but everyone likes to listen to them. “Maybe I have a strange mind,” they muse, and then, in half parody, half capitulation, they start trotting out the clichés. “I want you, ooooo/ I need you, oooo/ such phrases/embarrass me.” The completely disarming sincerity of the distanced disavowal sung in those little girl voices just about breaks my heart. There are another six albums that Shonen Knife released over the last 12 years, and I’m thinking I’m going to have to go back and get them all.
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Forever, Forever

According to their press materials, Forever was conceived in a van. While travelling as part of Me and My Arrow, Shenna Corbridge (vocals), Jen Nigg (bass and vocals), and Joel Lopez (drums) got the opportunity to go on another tour instantly. Their bass player didn’t want to…so the remaining three just picked up a fourth (guitarist Jael Navas), formed a new band and went anyway.

Forever certainly sounds like it’s the brainchild of a bunch of folks who want the road to go on…well, forever. The music is enthusiastic, unpretentious, professional pop-punk that hits all the genre expectations — fast (but not too fast) tempos; catchy, familiar hooks; raw (but not too raw) production; vocals with a tinge (though just a tinge) of cowpunk swing.

Live, I bet they’re fabulous; enthusiastic, as happy to play in front of 2 people as in front of 300, in love with the true-believers thrashing away in the audience. On record, though, it’s hard to see the point. Not that there’s anything wrong with Forever, just as there was nothing wrong with the first million bands that sounded exactly like them. The only real variation on the 15-minute record is “Who’s Haunting Me?” which picks up speed enough to verge on hardcore. It’s hardly earth-shattering, but when you’ve been in the van this long, any change in scenery is worth pointing out.

Listen To If: You’re a Very, Very Old Punk or a Very, Very New One
Listen To While: Jogging Short Distances
 

Utilitarian Review 3/17/12

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On HU

Our featured archive post this week was Franklin Einspruch’s illustrated version of Wallace Steve’s poem “Of Mere Being.

Albert Stabler on the metal vs. punk, Arriver’s Tsushima, and Russian military disasters.

Nate Atkinson on how he kept Moebius in his living room.

Matthias Wivel on death in Moebius’ last works.

And we finished the week up with the beginning of our Jaime Hernandez Roundtable. Deb Aoki talked about her experience as a Jaime-loving punk rocker in Hawaii; I talked about nostalgia in Jaime’s work; and Jones, One of the Jones Boys explained how you should like Jaime because he said so. The index to all post is here.

The roundtable will continue through all of next week with contributions by regular Utilitarians and guests.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic, I reviewed Nicholas Cage’s dreadful new movie Seeking Justice, and talked about revenge narratives.

At Splice I sneered at Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher.
 
Other Links

Matthias Wivel on the Hermetic Garage.

If you buy Before Watchmen, Alan Moore hates you, God bless him.

Ken Parille on why male supeheroes don’t show any skin.

Smart Bitches make fun of the nipples in romance novels.
 

When You And I Were Young, Maggie

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Jaime Hernandez’s “Browntown” has been lauded by everyone from Tom Spurgeon to Jeet Heer, the later of whom states that it is “arguably one of the best comics stories ever”.

It’s a bit of a let-down, then, to actually read the thing and discover a decent but by no means revelatory, piece of program fiction. All the hallmarks are there: the precocious child narrator as guarantor of authenticity; the ethnic milieu as guarantor of authenticity; the sordidness as guarantor of authenticity and the trauma as guarantor of authenticity. Poignant ironies fall upon the narrative with a sodden regularity, till the only landscape that can be seen is the wet, heavy drifts of meaning.

For what it is, “Browntown” isn’t terrible. Jaime’s precocious child narrator is endearing

his ethnic milieu is surprisingly uninsistent and unforced; his traumas are doled out with a disarming lightness — as when Calvin’s years of abuse are limned in the space between panels:

But still; there’s nothing particularly brilliant here, either in the use of language, or in the drawing, or in the use of the comics medium. In this sequence, for example, Jaime uses a series of verbal and visual clichés to present the end of an affair.

“Nothing, I guess I’m just selfish,” she says, as the stylized tears pour down. The camera moves closer, and then we’ve got a shot/reverse/shot. Entirely competent story-telling, sure. Masterpiece by one of the genre’s greatest creators? For goodness’ sake, why?
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I read a fair bit of the Locas stories for this post — Death of Speedy, The Education of Hopey Glass, The Love Bunglers, bits and pieces of other stories, including Wig Wam Bam. I haven’t exactly grown more fond of Jaime’s work, but I think I have a better sense of what I’m supposed to like about it.

Which would be nostalgia. The difference between “Browntown” and an anonymous short story in a lit magazine isn’t Jaime’s skill, or his handling of plot or theme or character — none of which, as far as I can tell, rise above the pedestrian. Rather, “Browntown” is different not because of what’s in it, but because of what’s outside it: the years and years of investment in the characters, by both the author and his readers. Here, for example:

You see Maggie from a distance, and then in close up. It’s not an especially interesting or involving visual sequence…except that this is the first time in the story that Maggie appears as an adolescent, thirteen years old and post-puberty. For those who have followed Jaime’s work (or even just read the first installment of the Love Bunglers that precedes this piece in Love and Rockets 3), that face is finally, recognizably, the Maggie we know (or one of the Maggies we know). As a result, there’s a charge there of recognition and delight. It’s analogous, perhaps, to Lacan’s description of the mirror stage:

This event can take place… from the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial…he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image….

We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification , in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image – whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago.

This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.

As always, Lacan is a fair piece from being comprehensible here…but in general outline, the point is that the child sees its image in the mirror — an image which is whole and coherent. The child identifies itself with this image, and so jubilantly experiences, or sees itself, as coherent and whole.

In her book Reading Lacan, Jane Gallop points out that the jubilation and excitement of the mirror stage is based upon temporal dislocation:

…in the mirror stage, the infant who has not yet mastered the upright posture and who is supported by either another person or some prosthetic device will, upon seeing herself in the mirror, “jubilantly assume” the upright position. She thus finds in the mirror image “already there,” a mastery that she will actually learn only later. The jubilation, the enthusiasm, is tied to the temporal dialectic by which she appears already to be what she will only later become.

Thus, there is a rush of pleasure in seeing the woman Maggie in the adolescent Maggie; the future image charges the past.

But the mirror stage is not just about recognizing the future in the present. It’s also about creating the past. Gallop explains that before the mirror stage, the self is incoherent; an unintegrated blob of body parts and non-specific polymorphous pleasures. But, Gallop continues, this is an illusion; the self cannot be an unintegrated blob before the mirror stage, because it is the mirror stage that creates the self. Thus:

The mirror stage would seem to come after “the body in bits and pieces” and organize them into unified image. But actually, that violently unorganized image only comes after the mirror stage so as to represent what came before.

The mirror stage, then, provides an image not just of the future, but of the past. The subject “assumes an image” not just of what she will be, but of what she was; the coherent image of the self is not just an aspiration, but a history. When Lacan says:

This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form…

the specular image that is assumed is precisely the infans stage, and the I that is precipitated is precisely the primordial form. The jubilation is not just in seeing a future coherent self, but in seeing a past self that is coherent with both the present and future.

Or to put it another way, the attraction of nostalgia is not the idealization of the past, but simply the idea of the past — and of the future. It’s the romance of self-identity. Hence, nostalgia in the Locas stories isn’t a function of actual time (a reader who has in truth read for decades) so much as it is a projection of imagined history. How many times has Jaime drawn Maggie (or Perla, or Margaret, or…)? All of those images are a part of a self, snapshots of a connected chain of bodies linked from infancy to middle-age to (presumably) death. As Frank Santoro says in his piece about the Love Bunglers:

Something extraordinary happened when I read his stories in the new issue of Love and Rockets: New Stories no. 4. What happened was that I recalled the memory of reading “Death of Speedy” – when it was first published in 1988 – when I read the new issue now in 2011. Jaime directly references the story (with only two panels) in a beautiful two page spread in the new issue. So what happened was twenty three years of my own life folded together into one moment. Twenty three years in the life of Maggie and Ray folded together. The memory loop short circuited me. I put the book down and wept.

The power of the Locas stories, what makes them special, is not any one story, or instant, or image, but the knowledge of the whole — not in the sense that each part contributes to a greater thematic unity, but in the sense that simply knowing there’s a whole is itself a delight. You can read the Locas stories and know Maggie, not as you know a friend but as an infant knows that image in the mirror — as aspiration, as self, as miracle.
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And, of course, as illusion. The reflection in the mirror, the coherent past and present I, is a misrecognition — it’s not a true self. Jaime’s use of Maggie as nostalgic trope, then, functions as a deceptive, perpetuated childishness; a naïve acceptance of the image as the real. Consider Tom Spurgeon’s take on “The Death of Speedy”:

Hernandez’s evocation of that fragile period between school and adulthood, that extended moment where every single lustful entanglement, unwise friendship, afternoon spent drinking outside, nighttime spent cruising are acts of life-affirming rebellion, is as lovely and generous and kind as anything ever depicted in the comics form.

That could almost be a description of “American Graffitti”, another much-lauded right-of-passage cultural artifact noted for its compelling, yearning encapsulation of time. I would agree that this is a major characteristic of Jaime’s work…but whereas for Tom that’s the reason Jaime’s a favorite creator, for me it’s the reason that he isn’t. Hopey’s nightmare hippie girl schtick; the shapeless but coincidence-laden narratives; the sex, the violence, the rock and roll — it all seems at times to blur into that single repeated punk rock mantra, “That was so real, man. That was so real, man. That was….”

But while I don’t necessarily need to read any more of Jaime’s work ever, I do think that there are times when the nostalgia in his stories becomes not just a symptom but a theme. For example, looking again at that image of the suddenly post-pubescent Maggie from “Browntown”.

As I said, this is a moment of recognition. But whose recognition? The panel is from the perspective of Calvin, who is both Maggie’s little brother and the sexual victim of the boy Maggie is talking up. While readers see suddenly the grown-up Maggie they know and love, Calvin is seeing, perhaps for the first time, a grown-up Maggie who he does not know, and who he fears and resents as a potential sexual rival. The reader’s image of Maggie — the shock of her newfound adulthood — lets us see her, to some extent, as Calvin sees her (and, indeed, allows Jaime to subtly tell us how Calvin sees her). At the same time, looking through Calvin’s eyes inflects and darkens Maggie’s new adulthood; the overlapping perspectives capture not just the excitement of growing up, but its dangers and sadness as well. The mirror image is also a primal scene, the discovery of self also a loss of innocence. What Gallop says of Lacan might also be said of Jaime:

When Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge, they anticipate mastery. But what they actually gain is a horrified recognition of their nakeness. This resembles the movement by which the infant, having assumed by anticipation a totalized, mastered body, then retroactively perceives his inadequacy (his “nakedness”). Lacan [or Jaime?] has written another version of the tragedy of Adam and Eve.

Another example of the way nostalgia is thematized is in the ghost scenes in “The Death of Speedy.”

On the one hand, this, like the entirety of the derivative “West-Side Story” plot, is fairly standard issue melodrama. But in the context of Jaime’s oeuvre, there’s something (eerily?) fitting about Speedy’s disappearance into a darkened silhouette, a kind of icon of himself. Speedy’s a projection, a specter given meaning only by his past. But that’s not just true for Speedy — it’s true for everyone in the Locas stories, who appear and then disappear and then reappear further up or down the timeline. A ghost is a kind of distillation of nostalgia, a memory that walks. At moments like this in Jaime’s work, the compulsive authenticity claims become almost transparent, as everyone and everything turns into its own after-image. We cannot see the present without seeing the past and the future, which means that we don’t ever see anything but an illusion, an image of coherence.

This is perhaps one way to read the conclusion of The Love Bunglers. Many people have read it as a happy ending for Maggie and Ray; the final triumph of romance after many trials. Thus, Dan Nadel:

In the end we flash forward some unspecified amount of years: Ray survives and he and Maggie are in love and Jaime signs the last panel with a heart.

And maybe Dan’s right. But it’s also certainly the case that that ending is only reflection; it’s what we want to see in the mirror.

Two Maggies side-by-side look in two mirrors at two Maggies. We see doubles doubled, the Maggies we love seeing the Maggies we love. This is the way cartooning works; one image calls forth another and another, the characters become themselves through sequence and repetition. As Dan Nadel says, “It just works. They’re real.”

But at the same time as it solidifies Maggie, the doubling of the mirror stage also disincorporates her. The second Maggie in the mirror…doesn’t she look younger than the first? Is time passing, or is the mirror image just an image — the future Maggie that present Maggie needs to see in order to make the past Maggie cohere? If the happy-ending Maggie looking in the mirror is just a dream to retroactively solidify the grieving Maggie, perhaps the grieving Maggie looking in the mirror is herself a dream, an image to confirm the tragedy. And so it goes; Calvin’s unlikely assault is an image there to give weight and shape to his childhood trauma; Maggie kisses Viv and is rejected by her to give weight and shape to their past — or and simultaneously the past gives weight to the future, and on and on, image on image, through the never-ending jubilant shocks of misrecognition.
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Jaime’s oeuvre, I think, can be seen as a mirrored engine; turn the crank and nostalgia is infinitely reflected. It’s an impressive delivery system. As with the Siegel/Shuster Superman, or the Twilight books, I can see the appeal, even if, for me, there’s something more than a little off-putting about the efficiency of the mechanism.

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The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.