Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

My People

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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All through my childhood, my family told me I mumbled. And, as kids will, I believed them — and went on believing them well after I had left home. In fact, I don’t think I fully realized how I had been deceived until well into adulthood. I must have been 28, I think; my parents had come into Chicago to visit and we were having dinner in a restaurant with my cousin and my wife-to-be. My cousin showed up late, bearing a relatively spectacular bit of news —my grandmother had caught her eye on a car door and was in the hospital. My mom sat up straighter in her chair, lifted her chin, and, with that east-coast Jewish nasal edge that sounds like a jackhammer pulled across a blackboard, bellowed out, “Holy Fuck!”

As the restaurant plunged into shocked silence and my eardrums reverberated, I experienced a kind of epiphany. It wasn’t that I mumbled, I suddenly realized. It was that my parents were, officially, the Loudest People on Earth.

They’re not really, of course. Or, rather, it’s not just them, but rather the Ashkenazi in general. I had ample opportunity to realize this in the run-up to a recent concert at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music . While eating dinner, my wife and I learned, oh, just heaps, thanks, about the two lovely couples at the next table: married for forty years and with relatives in Florida and at odds over whether it was really fair to say that Maury had had nothing to do with his kids, or whether that statement just couldn’t be allowed to stand. And all the while I knew as sure as my boy’s my bubeleh that they were going to the same damn concert we were.

And what was that concert, you ask? Klezmer, perhaps? In John Zorn’s wet dreams, maybe. I’m talking about performers like Odetta, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie — collectors of songs, purveyors of social justice, and bearers of banjo-fulls of mitzvahs all around.

So, yeah, we were going to the Old Town School of Folk Music for an evening of folk revival nostalgia — and, at least for me, the nostalgia was almost crippling. The nervous, semi-professional opening announcement; the raffle; the jovial, inevitably bewhiskered volunteers with nametags; it was like I had wandered through a hole in my head into some sort of archetypal JCC. Or back to my Jewish summer camp, where the cantors (that’s “song leaders” for you gentiles) played the songs of Joni Mitchell and all knew Harry Chapin personally.

At the Old Town School, opening act Caroline Herring explained that she hailed from Mississippi; nor did she appear to have a particularly large nose. But I bet she knew Harry Chapin too, and that he recognized her as a Semite-sister of the soul. My wife — whose family is from Appalachia and whose patience for precious, breathy folk tunes is, shall we say, spotty — watched Ms. Herring with a mounting horror that exploded quietly but magnificently during an earnestly pedantic desecration of “Long Black Veil.” And, yes, I do know where my wife’s coming from. But how — I ask you, how? — could I turn up the nose of my forefathers at a woman who name-dropped the Kingston Trio and (with a proud little giggle) Nirvana, before launching into a slow, heartfelt version of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors”. Or who talked at length about a book titled Black Culture and Black Consciousness by a Jew from Brooklyn named Larry Levine? Or who declaimed “I’m a white girl from a segregated town/and I’m looking for some answers” to a crowd entirely hushed except for that one person walking by behind us talking about their grandson’s Bar Mitzvah? Yes, yes, yes, and also oy, it was amateurish and self-involved and yes, again, it is in truly, truly poor taste to mention your yearning desire to be black for the fifth time in the set. But…it’s my amateurishness, isn’t it? It’s my self-involvement and, God help me, my desire to be black. Is it really so wrong?

My wife assures me that it is.

In any case, Herring finally left and the main act came on — Chris Smither. Smither is not Jewish either, I don’t think, but his dad is a university professor, which is pretty much the next best thing. Also, he sang a cutesy, blasphemous rag about evolution — red meat for this crowd, obviously.

The thing about Chris Smither, though, is that, while he is a 100% bona fide, folk revival fossil down to his witty self-deprecating patter (“I love this place. I feel like I’m such an artist”) and the easy liberal jeremiads (“the trickle down will float you up…surprise, surprise, it ain’t so”) he’s also, actually — well, good. His blues-derived guitar playing is a wonder, whether swinging through a dirty Lightning Hopkins rave-up like “Surprise, Surprise” or using a lighter, Mississippi John Hurt-style flow as on “Time Stood Still.” His voice is hoarse, and his mumbled phrasing is remarkably evocative, like Tom Waits with half the booze and twice the brains. Everything, down to the incidental aspects of his set — the way he uses both feet to create barely audible (though mic’ed) percussive rhythms, or the effortless speed with which he downtunes between songs —is done so professionally, and with such unpretentious nonchalance, that it attains soulfulness almost by default. His performance of “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” which closed the night, was near definitive — a slow, almost-dirge where every drawn-out, supposedly carefree line dripped with bittersweet longing. Even my wife liked him. In fact, she bristled a bit when I informed her that he was, indisputably, and despite his many good qualities, clearly of the folk revival. (“I guess I did hear about him on NPR,” she finally admitted reluctantly.)

None of which is to say that Smither escapes the problems endemic to his brethren, necessarily. His humor is witty, but doesn’t have much real bite, and — despite the occasional “Sittin’ On Top of the World” — he rarely tries for emotions much more complicated than self-mockery or diffuse melancholy. When he sings a come on, he sounds amused rather than dangerous; when he ruefully declares that many “perfectly good songwriters become parents and then spend the rest of their lives churning out maudlin crap about their children,” it’s as a prelude to a maudlin and fairly crappy song about his daughter.

But, you know, not all art has to be about being edgy and shocking the bourgeoisie. Sometimes, as Carl Wilson has noted, it can be about community, even if that community is kind of, well, bourgeois. My parents would love Chris Smither : his easy liberalism, his easy humor, his deft mastery of someone else’s quintessentially American folk idiom. And they’d be right to love him, because he’s great. The concert was easy and welcoming and gentle. Great children’s music, in other words, much like the first tapes of Arlo and Johnny Cash and the Kingston Trio I ever listened to on an old cassette deck in the back seat of our station wagon, the songs sometimes drowned out by my mom and dad bickering loudly in front.

Fecund Snails

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This piece first ran on Comixology. I thought I’d reprint it here for Halloween.
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The most fertile source of horror is reproduction itself. From Alien to The Thing to Shivers to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, ominously splitting eggs and terrifyingly gravid wombs are constantly birthing nightmare, nausea, and unidentifiable glop.

Junji Ito’s Uzumaki uses preganancy as a theme in a number of its stories — most obviously in the two parter “Mosquitoes” and “Umbiliical Cord” where near-term women suck the blood of the living to satiate their unnatural fetuses. Still, the series’ most disturbing chapter is probably “The Snail” — a story which is equally, if more elliptically, obsessed with reproduction.

“The Snail” is the story of Katayama, a boy who oddly only shows up to school when it is raining, and even then only shows up late. Over time, Katayama moves slower and slower and gets damper and damper, and his fellow students notice that a spiral mark has formed on his back. Spirals are always really bad news in Uzumaki (which in English means “spiral”) and soon enough Katayama is crawing painfully and wetly down the evolutionary scale.

So…all of that is no doubt unpleasant, but where’s the sex-and-pregnancy I promised you? Well, here’s Katayama’s first entrance into the classroom:

His appearance here is certainly supposed to be repulsive…but part of why it’s unsettling is that it’s not-all-that-subtly sexual. Katayama’s most prominent feature is his large, full-lipped disturbingly suggestive mouth. And, of course, he’s covered in a nameless fluid, that seems significantly more viscous than rainwater. In addition, the way the scene is blocked, with the startled classroom faces slack in anticipation as Katayama comes through the narrow door, has the frozen claustrophobic intimacy of a primal scene.

Katayama, in short, is fetishized. And as is often the case in media, being fetishized is only a prelude to being violated:

Katayama is not literally raped — the other boys merely strip him of his clothes in public. But the imagery is clear enough — especially since Ito takes care to draw Katayama as doughy and shapeless. If you looked at these pages out of context, it wouldn’t be clear whether Katayama was supposed to be a boy or a girl. His humiliation and his appearance both emphasize his feminization; he becomes unmanned before he becomes unhuman. And, in fact, it’s precisely at this moment of violation that his transformation takes it’s next step, and he develops a spiral on his back. Over time the spiral turns into a tumescence; a kind of inverted pregnancy. And then, inevitably, we get to see even more of Katayama naked.

It’s at this point that the gender implications go from sort-of-subtle to hard-to-miss. Katayama’s parents are called to come take him home, but (in classic coming-out-scene mode) they refuse to recognize him as their son. The school decides to put the ever-less-human Katayama into a cage. The only sign of who he once was are those same giant lips (shown chomping away on some leaves)…and his relationship with Tsumura, the boy who stripped him in the quasi-rape earlier in the comic. Tsumura still loves to torment our ichorous hero, assiduously poking at him with a sharp stick through the holes in the cage fence while chortling, “He’s not human anymore!”

As it turns out, using a substitute phallus to toy with a giant snail has some unfortunate repercussions. Tsumura is soon drinking too much water and moving very slowly and then…well….

Tsumura is put in the cage with Katayama. The two get along quite well; in fact, they mate.

This is one of the most viscerally disturbing scenes in the book. In part it’s the details; leaving Tsumura his hair and teeth as the last vestiges of his humanity is a brilliantly vile move. Mostly, though, I think the scene’s power comes from the way it grabs homophobia with both hands and squeezes it till it oozes a slick, gelatinous mass. It’s not an original insight to point out the homoerotic implications of schoolboy antagonism, but there can’t be many fantasies of queer consummation that are quite this squickily perverse.

I said that this was a fantasy — and so it is. Ito obviously finds the snails and their male-male love disgusting…but at the same time, he also seems to feel a fascinated attraction. There’s a weird tenderness in the rapprochement between the two boy-snails, as they rest face to face with their phallic eyes intertwining.

In later chapters, this appeal turns significantly darker, as more people (always men or boys) turn into snails, and some townspeople (also always men) develop a decidedly sexual taste for (raw) snail flesh.

Ito seems to be suggesting that all men secretly want to — that the only thing preventing constant man-on-snail coupling are a few thin taboos which will warp and dissolve like cardboard before the smallest liquid spray of desire. This is, of course, the fever-dream behind the most alarmist kinds of homophobia; the terror, not so much that gays are recruiting, as that, with just a little prompting, men will embrace any excuse to abandon heterosexuality, and with it humanity. From a Freudian standpoint, you can see it as the combined fascination with and horror of the father; a desire for the power of the phallus which must be carefully regulated through totem and taboo if we are not to all slide into cannibalism and anarchy.

In this context, it is interesting that the final expression of horror at male reproduction is uttered, not by the girls who are the putative narrators, but by the teacher/father-figure, Mr. Yokota. After the two snails escape, the teacher and some students find a cache of eggs. Seeing them, Mr. Yokota declares that “the boys are no longer remotely human” — and his immediate impulse is to kill them and their offspring. The vision of unnatural male reproduction is too much to bear; the only healthy reaction to male-male affection is violence: Tsumura was right when he beat Kituyama, and wrong when he loved him. So, when confronted with the result of that love, Mr. Yokota does the correct thing: he shouts, “It’s disgusting, unnatural! These creatures mustn’t breed!” and he throws himself into an orgy of destruction — ultimately leaving himself exhausted and damp with a puddle on the ground in front of him.

The irony, of course, is that the snails don’t need eggs to breed. They only need loathing, or lust, or the fact that the two are indistinguishable. The final shock panel, shows Mr. Yokota turned into a snail-man, his body covered with what looks like damp eggs. There is no doubt that he deserves his fate; his snailing is clearly the karmic payback for his intolerance. But, at the same time, intolerance is what the father is there for; without arbitrary rules to keep us upright, we’d all be crawling on our bellies. Ito, like many horror creators, desires to fuck up the father even as he’s moralistically and hyperbolically nauseated by the implications. Id and superego circle each other, not-men crawling from the bellies of not-men in a slow and fecund spiral.

The Long Peace and the Guillotine

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A slightly edited version of this ran on Splice Today.
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Towards the end of Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, he asks “whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded.” “The answer”, he concludes, “is yes.”

Pinker condemns his (and our) forbearers for two reasons First, he shows that the rates of violent death throughout the world have been declining for almost as long as there are records. Hunter-gatherer tribes with no state system has higher rates of homicide than ancient empires; ancient empires had higher rates of violent death than did 18th and 19th century Western societies, and so forth. Second, Pinker argues that the decline in violence has been the result of enlightenment — in its technical sense. The ascension of Western Enlightenment values like democracy, free trade and human rights have civilized the formerly barbaric, religion-haunted, blood-soaked planet. Locke and Voltaire and Darwin said “beat your swords into abacuses,” and that is precisely what the world has done.

Pinker’s thesis is both optimistic and polemical. It suggests that the human species has made massive progress, and that that progress is attributable to Western Enlightenment ideology. Among the aspects of that ideology that Pinker praises are:large states (the Leviathan) which monopolize violence and thereby reduce interpersonal murde; democracy, which statistically appears to make states less prone to violence; free speech and broad education, since literacy and the distribution of books increases the ability to see other’s perspectives (and since the availability of books seems to correlate with the widespread decrease in violence); and the expansion of women’s rights, since women are overall less violent than men, and their influence tends to stabilize and civilize. Most importantly, Pinker praises scientific thinking itself, which Pinker credits with giving individuals a non-parochial perspective, allowing them to break free of the blinkered Prisoner’s Dilemma and see that peace is best for all.

The spectacle of a Western author and scientist triumphantly proclaiming the virtues of the West, books, and science is not especially surprising — though I was a bit taken aback when Pinker, a prosletyzing evolutionary psychologist, proudly proclaimed that one of the causes of the decrease in violence might be the spread of the ideas of evolutionary psychology.

But however clear Pinker’s biases may be, and however skeptical one may be of the thesis that we are the best people in all of history (and I am quite skeptical), Better Angels is an imposing, not to mention mammoth, brief. With 700 pages and graph after graph moving inevitably down and to the right over time, he shows, at the least, that by many measures violence per capita in our society is at world-historical lows. The claims that ours is an age of terrorism, or that Americans are less safe than they have ever been, is, patently, bunk.

Some of Pinker’s other assertions are more questionable. Here are a few.

—Pinker’s absolutely right that gay rights have improved enormously since 1950. But that ignores the fact that many the 1950s in the West was a particularly horrible time and place to be gay. Gay people were certainly worse off in the mid-20th century West than they were in Ancient Athens, or even in early 19th century England.

—His insistence that animal rights have been constantly improving since the Middle Ages seems somewhat contradicted by the rise of vivisection and animal testing. Even if, as he contends, people treated animals horribly in the 14th century, and even if, as he claims, vivisection has declined over the 20th century, science still tortures animals at rates that would impress (if not particularly horrify) our morally retarded ancestors. And this is without even discussing humanity’s role in our current ongoing planetwide species mass extinction event.

—Weapons have improved over time. This suggests that weapons, and war, have become more violent over time. Pinker responds to this by explaining that swords and arrows were plenty deadly — which rather begs the question. Nobody denies that arrows are deadly. But machine guns are a lot more deadly than that, and nuclear weapons are more deadly again. If you read John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, which discusses Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, you are impressed first by how utterly, hideously horrible Agincourt was — and then by how much exponentially worse Waterloo was — and finally by how monumentally, unbelievably terrible the Somme was. Pinker spends a lot of time discussing the deadly effects of low tech weapons and medieval torture devices, but he spends little to no time talking about the much, much more deadly effects of our current arsenal. His silence on these matters speaks for itself.

One of the biggest question marks in Pinker’s book, though, is his handling of the first part of the twentieth century — the lovely years from World War I in 1914 through Mao’s famine in 1964, with the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, and several neighboring atrocities thrown in. If you’re trying to prove that the world has been becoming more peaceable, that’s an awful lot of relatively fresh bodies to sweep under the carpet.

But Pinker goes for it. He first attempts to make World War I and World War II vanish into statistical noise mostly by adjusting them for world population. At 55 million, World War II is overall the largest catastrophe in the history of the world. However, if you adjust for world population, it is only the 9th largest. The biggest would instead be the An Lushan revolt in 8th century China, which Pinker says killed 36 million people over 8 years; a number which would work out to 429 million dead proportionally in the 20th century. Other conflagrations which beat WW II proportionally are the Mongol Conquests (40 million raw, adjusted to 278 million by population) the fall of the Ming Dynasty (25 million raw, adjusted to 112 by population) and the annihilation of the American Indian (20 million raw, adjusted to 92 million by population.)

It’s certainly worth remembering that people have done hideous things to each other for a long time. Even if no one is really sure that the An Lushan rebellion killed quite 36 million people, there’s no doubt that a staggering number of people died. Even if the Fall of Rome lasted over three centuries as opposed to the 6 years of World War II, 8 million dead is still a ton of dead people, as are the 40 million killed over the century of the Mongol Conquests. The recent past was by no means the first era of murder on a massive scale.

Still, one might argue that geeking out on statistical weighted tallies of dead is more than a little obscene. And one would be right. Human beings aren’t just numbers. Every dead person matters. Pinker insists again and again that the romantic ideology of the Nazis had nothing to do with enlightenment modernity and its march towards clear eyed utility, but he is least convincing on this point when he starts to fiddle with his death tolls in order to make his graphs look pretty. Counting World War I, World War II, Mao’s famine, Stalin’s purges, the Russian Civil War, and the Chinese Civil War, 142 million people died through atrocity in the first part of the twentieth century. That’s twice as many people as lived in the entire Roman Empire, and probably 10 times as many as lived in the entire world before the agricultural revolution. Does that make the number less obscene? More? What exactly does even asking the question accomplish? People look back on the early twentieth century as one of unique horror not because they’re naïve, or foolish, or because they’re not as scientifically astute as Steven Pinker. They look back on it as a period of unique horror because it was a period of unique horror.

For all his tables and weighted numbers, Pinker is honest enough to admit as much. He argues, however, that the unique horribleness is not a function of modernity, but an aberrant blip caused by the insanity of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. “Tens of millions of deaths ultimately depended on the decisions of just three individuals,” he insists. He adds that without the assassin who shot Archduke Ferdinand, there would have been no World War I. The early twentieth century, therefore, tells us nothing about violence in general, except that bad luck sucks.

The problem with this is that bad luck is universal. Insane assholes have existed forever. Genghis Khan (who Pinker discusses) for example, was a blight on the face of the earh Christopher Columbus’ genocide of the Arawak peoples ranks him as one of the monsters of history.

Both Genghis and Columbis killed and tortured lots of people. But they didn’t kill and torture anything like the number of people Hitler or Mao or Stalin did, for the simple reason that state apparatus and technology had not developed sufficiently to allow them to do so. As Tyler Cowen argues , the increase of state power, damps down individual violence, but it can vastly increase state violence as well. Thus, slavery has always been a bad thing, but it took centralized European states to create the rationalized, large-scale African slave trade that even Pinker calls “among the most brutal chapters in human history.” Cowen suggests, therefore, that “one way of describing the observed trend [in violence over time] is ‘less frequent violent outbursts, but more deadlier outbursts when they come.’”

Which brings us to nuclear weapons. Pinker argues forcefully that nuclear weapons need never be used, and that our ever-growing conflict-aversion may help keep them in their silos forever. One data point he uses here is the Cuban Missile Crisis. According to Pinker

Though the pursuit of national prestige may have precipitated the crisis, once Khruschev and Kennedy were in it, they reflected on their mutual need to save face and set that up as a problem for the two of them to solve.

That’s certainly a comforting way to think about it. However, in most accounts I’ve read, the resolution was achieved less through mutual face-saving, and more through Khruschev unilaterally deciding that he didn’t want to destroy the earth. This wasn’t, in other words, an example of an ultra-civilized meeting of minds; it was, instead, the usual pissing match, which one monkey ended by baring his throat.

This interpretation seems to better fit the facts, inasmuch as Khruschev’s face wasn’t saved; he had to back down and remove his missiles from Cuba. Kennedy’s quid pro quo — removing missiles from Turkey — was done in secret so that the President wouldn’t be punished at the polls for “weakness”. Gary Wills in Bomb Power concluded that Kennedy “risked nuclear war” rather than lose public standing. I’m able to type this today not because two world leaders behaved in a civilized and dignified fashion, but because Khruschev was not as much of an insane asshole as Kennedy. And he was not as much of an insane asshole, arguably, because he didn’t have to worry about an electorate. So much for the peaceful influence of democracy

The thing that is most troublesome about Pinker’s book, though, isn’t so much the occasional fissure in the argument as the tone. The suggestion that your grandparents and mine were moral fools is not exactly typical, but it’s not isolated either — and it’s not confined to the past. John Gray points out that Pinker tends to label certain peripheral groups (Muslims, for example, or hippies, who he blames for the rise in murder rates in the 1960s) as less civilized. Therefore, violence is associated with these groups because they are backwards or not sufficiently rational, rather than a function of power disparities or politics. As Gray says:

A sceptical reader might wonder whether the outbreak of peace in developed countries and endemic conflict in less fortunate lands might not be somehow connected. Was the immense violence that ravaged southeast Asia after 1945 a result of immemorial backwardness in the region?

Pinker’s disavowal of the effects of politics is consistent with his vision of rational enlightenment, which he sees as specifically outside of power relationships or communities. Science and reason, he argues, allow for “an Olympian, superrational vantage point — the perspective of eternity, the view from nowhere.” For someone who claims to find so little of worth in God-talk, that’s some oddly theological language there interlaced with the self-vaunting. Or does it not count as theological if your divine ideal is human? And on what grounds, then, do you so entirely disavow the enlightenment’s relationship to Marx?

None of this upends Pinker’s thesis, of course. But it does suggest that some caution might be in order. We should acknowledge, and celebrate, the reduction of violence in the world where and when it occurs. And we should acknowledge the part modernity has played in that, and in many other advances. But Pinker himself notes that elevated self-esteem — perhaps we could say hubris? — is one of the many factors that can lead people to violence. There are others of course, such as a faith that one has discovered the ultimate true path that will lead the world to peace. Or, for that matter, a faith in the transformative power of evolutionary progress, sometimes known as eugenics, from which some bad things have flowed in this, our modernity.

Pinker likes to see himself as a contrarion, but reason, science, progress, and self-regard are hardly anathema in our world’s wonkish corridors of power. Since one of the gifts of the enlightenment is a questioning of orthodoxies, it seems only reasonable to question the orthodoxy of enlightenment as well. Among other things, we might consider the possibility that there is something morally retarded in believing that we are the most morally advanced individuals to ever walk the earth. Perhaps we could also think of peace less as an algorithm and more as a gift, for which we make ourselves continually worthy through humility and contrition. Acknowledging our successes is certainly part of that, but so is admitting to our failures. Modernity is both our long peace and the guillotine. I don’t think that downplaying the second will extend the first.

Utilitarian Review 10/28/11

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On HU

Our Featured Archive post this week was Domingos Isabelinho on the mother/daughter art of Dominique Goblet and Nikita Fossoul.

Most of this week was devoted to our roundtable on the Drifting Classroom, with contributions by Jason Thompson, Shaenon Garrity, Sean Michael Robinson, Richard Cook, Joe McCulloch,and me.

We also had a dialogue about Jaime Hernandez, soap operas and Quentin Tarantino, which starts with this post by Caroline Small, wends its way through a massive number of comments, and continues with this post by Katherine Wirick.
 
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

I talked about Bjork and Life on Earth at Splice Today.

I discuss In Time and capitalist dreams at the Atlantic.
 
 
Other Links

Franklin Einspruch on excellence in art.

Chris Mautner on DC’s 52/

TCJ has an intersting looking habibi roundtable.

Eric Berlatsky (aka “my brother”) talks about his anthology of Alan Moore interviews.

And here’s the horror Manga Movable Feast archive post, which our Drifting Classroom roundtabl
 
 

Katherine Wirick on Soap Operas, Violence, and Quentin Tarantino

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We’ve been having a ridiculously extended discussion about soap operas, Quentin Tarantino, violence and other subjects at this thread. I really enjoyed this comment by Katherine Wirick, so thought I would give it it’s own post.

I grew up watching ALL MY CHILDREN, ONE LIFE TO LIVE and GENERAL HOSPITAL with my mother. Three hours a day, five days a week, every week.

So I speak from experience when I say that TV soap operas are violent. Spousal abuse, child abuse, murder, rape… I’m pretty sure I learned what rape *was* from a soap opera. They depict those acts of violence less graphically than Tarantino does, but they’re limited by network content restrictions. The part violence plays in soap opera narratives, however, is just as base and exploitative as any Tarantino film could be argued to be: it’s there to titillate you. It’s there to sell ad time. It’s there to make you tune in tomorrow.

In RESERVOIR DOGS, a man is shot in the gut and spends most of the next ninety minutes writhing and screaming in pain. I am a pacifist, and I have been a victim of violence, and I find the extended agony of Mr. Orange more palatable and more morally acceptable than any of the multiple rapes and countless murders I saw in a decade of soap opera viewership. If violence is going to be entertainment, as it presently is in both male- and female-coded genres, I’d rather have the act and its consequences onscreen in all their ugliness than have them sanitized for “general audiences.” (In a different genre but along the same lines, I was far more offended by the clean, kid-friendly warfare in PRINCE CASPIAN than I was by anything in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.) In real life there is no editor to cut mercifully away from the extremity of your pain.

Soap operas, it’s also worth remembering, have a history of turning rapists into romantic heroes. (Two examples come immediately to mind: Luke on GH and on OLTL. There may be more.) These shows do not stand firmly on the moral, humanistic, life-affirming side of any binary question about violence.

Part of the reason I’m posting here is that I wanted to be a female voice in Tarantino’s defense, since, as far as I can tell, there haven’t yet been any. I’ve always been drawn to genres that commonly employ graphic violence (cop shows, war movies, adventure stories and so on). These genres are culturally coded male, and they are privileged over genres that are coded female, but their appeal is certainly not exclusively male; I don’t think it’s even *primarily* male.

The talk about Tarantino as an exponent of some fraudulent “realism” is a bit baffling to me; in my perception, each successive film since RESERVOIR DOGS has been *less* realistic, more mannered, more self-conscious, more stylized. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS never once allowed me to forget that what I was watching was a construct. I have mixed feelings about that. The fundamental draw of RESERVOIR DOGS, for me–the draw his films have lost since PULP FICTION (although I haven’t seen JACKIE BROWN or DEATH PROOF)–was an *emotional* realism. That movie is a love story. I engaged with it on that level, and it rewarded me.

And what the hey; I’ll reprint this comment from Katherine too, in conversation with Caroline Small.

Caro: “And I think we’ve gotten so absorbed in the violence questions we’ve lost sight of the realism one.”

Well, for my part, I’ve lost sight of what you mean, specifically, when you say “realism,” or argue against it. (See above re: my attention span.) For me, when realism is as mannered as INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS or KILL BILL it entirely ceases to be realism. I’d describe Tarantino’s recent work as, well, cinematic mannerism, as distant from my perception of “the real” as the Madonna with the Long Neck.

Caro: “I know that it’s because the Tarantino thread is happening on the soap opera post, but you (and others) have sort of implied that I’m saying that soap operas aren’t violent, and I’m not.”

I apologize for misconstruing your argument. But–as I perceive it, and my perception may be incorrect–you’ve been taking a moral stand against the representation of violence as entertainment (your distinction about *graphic* violence was lost on me until your most recent comment), identifying it as a feature of male-coded genres, and praising female-coded genres such as soaps in the same thread. Therefore, I made the assumption that you would argue that female-gendered genres do not rely on violence to provide entertainment.

Caro: “The “rapist love interest” is a feature of both soaps and romance, but there isn’t a lot of it after the ’70s and ’80s.”

Todd raped Marty on OLTL in the early ’90s, and was redeemed later in the decade. I wasn’t around for Luke and Laura, but I was around for Todd. To be fair, there was controversy–the actor who played Todd actually quit in protest–but, still, the fact that they did it at all…

They had their pleasures, but I don’t really miss those shows. Neither does my mother, who cut down on her soap-watching after she started working part-time, and finally dropped AMC about five years ago. Our TV-mediated mother-daughter bonding experiences are focused on PROJECT RUNWAY and SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE now. Looking back, I’m grateful that she’s a feminist, and could provide a feminist critique of what we were watching when it was needed (which it frequently was).

Caro: “It’s not my experience that the violence in soaps (or fanfiction) was particularly entertainment, certainly not in any voyeuristic or indulgent sense.”

Oh, my. How much fanfiction have you read? I’ve seen violence (more graphic and much more sexualized than Tarantino’s, and portrayed in greater detail) used as entertainment in fanfiction over and over and *over.* It’s one of the most common tropes. Yes, most of the time there’s some kind of narrative purpose for the violence–it’s usually a device to break down one character so that another can rebuild him–but the violence quite often happens onscreen, and quite often happens in graphic, sensuous, loving detail. When the brakes come off, as they do on the internet, there’s an awful lot of blood and torture in my gender’s collective imagination.

Caro: “they examine it obliquely through conversation and narration, they don’t present it directly through graphic representation.”

This *is* mostly true of soaps, but, like I said, one of the things fanfiction does, regularly, is present violence directly through graphic representation.

Back to soaps: is the portrayal of a rape or a murder on a soap entertainment, in a “voyeuristic or indulgent sense”? You’re right that, because soaps don’t present graphic violence (for whatever reason), their approach to violence is more about “motivations and structures,” more about the telling and retelling of an event. And yet: that event is still present. It’s there. Its specter looms over the narrative; the specter of a corpse, the specter of an abused body. And those specters provide a frisson for the audience. Violent plotlines on soaps–especially the frequent serial-killer stories–were heavily advertised, which leads me to suspect that they were a reliable ratings boost. I don’t really find that any more acceptable, despite the lack of onscreen blood, than the directly presented violence that drives the plot of RESERVOIR DOGS. Of course, I respect that your response is different.

For contrast: the last Cronenberg I saw was VIDEODROME (I had to watch it for a class; I wasn’t previously familiar with Cronenberg’s work), and I had a very difficult time with the early scene where the woman is tortured–so much so that, later in the film, I found myself thinking, “Yeah, people who would watch *that* for pleasure do kind of deserve to die,” and then being a little shocked that I’d had that thought. As always, the answers to all these questions are powerfully subjective.

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Update: This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.

The Drifting Roundtable: I Believe The Children Are the Future

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This is part of a roundtable on The Drifting Classroom, and also part of the October 2011 Horror Manga Movable Feast.

My apologies for the dicey quality of the scans.
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“School is a totalizing [pre]occupation in Japan,” writes anthropologist Anne Allison in her 1996 monograph Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan.

Allison’s subtitle doesn’t mention either children or schools, but in some ways that only emphasizes her point. For Allison, the school in Japan in the 70s, 80s, and 90s was totalizing not just for students, but for society as a whole; you didn’t have to point to it specifically, because it was everywhere. In postwar Japan, Allison argues, “adult careers depend almost entirely on the schools children attend, which in turn depend almost entirely on the passing of entrance exams at the stage of high school and college.” The result is, according to Norma Field, a “disappearance of childhood in contemporary Japan.”

For Field (whom Allison quotes), the disappearance of childhood refers specifically to the manner in which children are saddled with the (literal) burdens of adulthood — the way that, as Allison says, children are forced to “pick up early the connection between their success as students in the routines of study and their future success as adults in the networks of work and social status.” Rather than adults being responsible for children, kids are, in this scenario, made to be responsible for adults.

Allison, however, complicates this relatively straightforward point. Reading through the book, it becomes clear that if childhood in Japan has disappeared, it is not just because children have been forced to become adults, but because adults determinedly cling to childhood — particularly, Allison argues, to the (often sexualized) ideal of intimacy with their mothers. Following the work of Japanese psychoanalyst Heisaku Kosawa, Allison suggests that the Oedipus complex does not adequately describe socialization in Japan. Instead, Kosawa proposed a complex based on an Indian myth known as the Tale of Ajase. In the story, Ajase and his mother, Idaike, both attempt to kill each other, fail, and then forgive each other. According to Allison, the differences between Oedipal and Ajase models are:

(1)the role played by the oedipal mother is primarily passive…whereas the role of Ajasean mother is active, not limited to or even focused upon (sexual) desire, and pivotal to the plot. (2) The father’s role is central in the oedipal model, and patricide leads to the boy’s inability to assume manhood. In the Ajasean myth, by contrast, the father barely figures at all and has no primary role in the son’s development to manhood. (3) The oedipal model is based on a clear-cut set of rules that operate on the threat of violence…. The Ajasean model is organized more along the lines of interpersonal relations that depend on mutual forgiveness and empathy. (4) In order to achieve manhood, the oedipal boy must accept the exclusiveness of his parents’ sexual bond and separate from both to establish himself as an individual, whereas the Ajasean boy needs to remain bonded with his parents, particularly his mother, but with the newly mature attitude of mutual respect.

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You don’t have to read far into Kazuo Umezo’s 1970s horror manga Drifting Classroom to find the Ajase complex. In fact,the opening sequence of the manga is a pitched battle between the protagonist, Sho, and his mother. His mom wants Sho to be more responsible about his schoolwork. Sho wants to stay focused on childish things. The most telling sequence, perhaps, is this one.

That’s castration fear, no doubt — but it’s a castration fear centered on the mother, not the father. And, moreover, it’s a fear not of being unmanned, but of being forced to become a man at knifepoint. Sho’s mom has thrown out his old, banged up marbles. She’s cutting away his childhood and,simultaneously, his intimate relationship with her. He reacts less like an angry son and more like a spurned lover…as indeed, does she.

Sho races off to school. He insists he’ll never return; his mom tells him never to come back. And they both get their wish. His school building, with Sho and all his classmates inside it, vanishes into a post-apocalyptic future, never to be seen again. The teachers quickly go insane and murder each other, and the sixth-graders, with Sho leading them, are left to take on the adult responsibility of caring for the little ones and preventing civilization from sliding into the abyss.

The link to Allison’s analysis of childhood in Japan couldn’t be much clearer. What you learn in school determines your future prospects; so what Sho and his classmates learned in school determines their fate in the future.

Indeed, often the post-apocalypse seems designed as a kind of corporate team-building exercise — a series of arbitrary hoops providing for sequential infantilizing achievements. The students face difficulty after difficulty; find water, choose a leader, jump over deadly ravine, overcome personal differences, learn to remove an appendix, kill deadly mutant starfish. The adult future, like the childhood past, is an eternity of adrenalin-fueled testing.

In part, this is definitely meant to be a nightmare vision — even, perhaps, a critique. As Otomo (one of the sixth-graders) shouts late in the series, “They all did this! Our parents and our friends! They gobbled up everything and left nothing for the future.”

The complaint is couched in ecological terms, but the imagery suggests other meanings. Otomo’s eyes are sunken and his mouth gapes like a death’s head; he looks prematurely aged. Behind him the school fence looms like a cage. It’s not just the world that has been exploited and used; it’s the kids themselves. Trapped and harnessed, their childhood is the price for Japan’s post-war economic miracle; it’s their labor that overcomes the apocalypse.

Umezu’s revulsion at what Japan does to its children powers the manga’s most viscerally disturbing episode. After eating mutant mushrooms, many of the children begin changing. First they start worshiping a hideous idol.

Then they change physically. In perhaps the books most chilling line, one girl who is making the change tells her classmate, “You were my best friend. But in our world there’s no such thing as friends.”

Tenderness and intimacy are replaced by a staring eye; the Panopticon banishes love. Umezu later reveals that the mutant creatures are literally humanity’s children; abandoned twisted abortions. Cast out of the family, they have neither love nor loyalty; even language has become, as they say, only a ritual. They communicate instantly in a kind of hive mind,and when they find that one of their fellows has hidden something from them, they fall upon it and kill it instantly. The children/mutants turning into these creatures stand bent over in rows in a perfection/parody of regimented good behavior. The monsters are, in short, an apotheosis of biopower — shaped to meet the exigencies of their society, self-watching, self-regulating. One of them even boasts that they are superior to humans because they learn more quickly. They are the children of the future; the ideal nightmare progeny of Japan, the test-takers who made themselves over as the test required, and then crawled out to conquer the world.

The mutants are certainly one vision of Japanese children, but they’re not the only one. If some of the kids worship their one-eyed watcher, others worship a less terrifying authority — mother.

When I say “worship”, I mean literally worship; the kids set up a bust of Sho’s mother as an idol to remind them of home and watch over them. And she does a fairly good job; at various points in the manga, Sho calls to his mother for help, and back in the past, she hears him and figures out ways to get him the aid he needs. Once, she secretes a knife in a hotel wall so that, in the distant future, Sho can find it and use it to kill a murderer. In another incident, she hides antibiotics in the body of a dead baseball player. Sho finds the guy’s mummified remains and is able to stop an outbreak of the plague among the school kids.

Sho’s reconciliation with his mom recalls the Ajase myth; the tension between mother and son is resolved by guilt (Sho’s mom feels really, really bad that the last thing she said to him was that he should never come home), grief, and reconciliation.

It also, and not coincidentally, echoes the idealized Japanese relationship between a mother and a student. In Japan in second half of the twentieth century, Allison says, men were largely absent from home, working long hours, engaging in de-facto-required after-work socializing, and commuting extended distances — sometimes up to three hours one way. With the husbands out of the picture, mothers were expected to stay home and devote themselves to their children’s (especially their sons’) education. It was up to mothers to fit boys to become the next generation of (productive) workers and (absent) fathers.

Allison argues that mothers did this in two ways. First, they enforced and extended the behavioral regime of school — insisting, for example, that children had to maintain a school-like schedule even over the summer, and pressuring them to work hard at their studies, as Sho’s mom does at the beginning of the manga. At the same time, though, Allison said, women also “offer the child a measure of emotional security and intimacy with which to survive these demands.” This can take the form, Allison says, of “treats, indulgences, and creative pleasures.” Thus, at the conclusion of the manga, Sho receives from his mother what is essentially the world’s biggest care package, an orbiting satellite filled with gifts, a mother’s love sent forward in time to make the future bearable for her man-child.

Mother’s love, then, makes schoolwork not just work, but pleasure. Turning one’s life into school isn’t (or isn’t just) an early separation from the mother (as in the first fight scene between Sho and his mom.) It’s also a profound union with the mother. When Sho is in the school in the future, he is separated from his mom, but his bond with her is, at the same time, more perfect, more blissful, more full, than it has ever been. He holds her affections now more than ever. His father (like Ajase’s father) is completely superfluous.

In her book, Allison talks at length about the prevalence of mother/son incest urban legends in Japan. These always take the same form; a son, studying for his exam, is distracted by sexual thoughts. His mother, to help him focus, decides to begin an affair with him. Both mother and son enjoy the affair immensely — and the boy does well on his exams. These stories, Allison says, proliferated especially in the late-1970s, not long after Drifting Classroom was published. Given that, the scenes in the book which feature Sho’s mom and Sho’s classmate, Shinichi, conspiring together secretly in a hotel room take on a very suggestive air. Sho’s mom is helping Sho succeed at school by disguising herself and then going off to form an (intimate) bond in a hotel room with Shinichi, Sho’s double. School and sex and mother and the future are all wound together in a productive cathexis of anxiety and pleasure.

On the one hand, then, Drifting Classroom rejects Japan’s totalizing preoccupation with school. It condemns the society which makes of its children little adults, laying waste to the present the better to build a wasted future. But the flip side of the cleansing nightmare is a less pristine daydream. The terror, the grief, the piles of dead children, each more imaginatively mangled than the least — this is not the price of pleasure, but the pleasure itself. The forced adulthood and the hardship are the path to, and therefore inseparable from, the intimate love of mother.

In the last pages of the manga, Sho’s mother looks through the window and declares, “We have to work for a brighter future…a future where our boy is so brave…and where he’ll grow up strong and survive….not here, but somewhere in the future.” As she says this she sees her son and his friends running amidst the stars, through heaven. In some sense, it’s a happy ending, a tribute to the power of a mother’s love to illumine even the most terrible future. But it has a darker edge as well. For surely the manga shows that, in Japan as in the U.S., when we erase our children’s present the better to love their future, school — and not just school — will be horror.

Utilitarian Review 10/21/11

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On HU
In this week’s Featured Archive post I discussed manga, Twilight, Alain Badiou and the pros and cons of globalization.

Ng Suat Tong on Eric Khoo’s film on Tatsumi.

I provide a death metal download mix.

Robert Stanley Martin on Godard’s contempt.

I review Lilli Carré’s adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Fir Tree.

James Romberger on Neal Adams and Ultraviolence.

I talk Termite art and the Assault on Precinct 13.

I wish that tcj.com wouldn’t worship Jaime Hernandez.

Susan Kirtley contemplates moving her comics.

Kailyn Kent discusses melodrama, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Habibi.
 
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I have a really long review of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, about the worldwide decrease in violence.
 
 
Other Links

Tucker Stone does his thing.

Charles Hatfield on the decade in independent comics.

Tucker Stone reads The Economist.

Matt Seneca interviews one of HU’s most mysterious contributors.