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Cloud Hackery

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Cloud Atlas
By David Mitchell

I approach contemporary science fiction with a certain wariness. Many of my friends are sci-fi/fantasy fans, and they are only too happy to recommend books. Invariably, whenever I read one of these books I’m left wondering, “Why did I waste my life reading that?” I’m not interested in reading another techno-military thriller, or a 20-volume “epic,” or a tedious story about a robot who contemplates the meaning of love. But after hearing multiple people praise Cloud Atlas, curiosity got the better of me. I’m glad to say that it wasn’t any where near as bad as I feared. I still didn’t like it , but I don’t feel like I’ve wasted hours of my life reading it. So that’s progress.

Cloud Atlas consists of six stories arranged in chronological order through the first half of the book, then the first five stories are revisited and concluded in reverse-chronological order in the second half. The stories are:

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing – circa 1850, a diary written by an American traveler who spends time on the Chatham Islands before sailing for home. Much of the story describes the impact of Western colonialism on Pacific islanders, particularly the Moriori, who were nearly destroyed by a combination of Maori invaders and European diseases. Ewing is a relatively decent man, but he unthinkingly embraces the prejudices of his era until he meets a Moriori stowaway named Autua. Ewing saves Autua’s life, and the latter returns the favor by saving Ewing from the villainous Dr. Goose who planned to rob and murder Ewing.

Letters from Zedelghem – a series of letters written in 1931 by Robert Frobisher, an aspiring composer who flees his debts in England and moves to rural Belgium. There, he finds a position as the understudy to a famous but ailing composer. Robert is a bit of a rake, and seems poised to exploit the composer and his lusty wife for all they are worth. But his fortunes turn for the worse after a falling out with his employer.

Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery – a crime story set in 1975 California. Luisa Rey is a journalist working for a trashy tabloid who stumbles upon a major scandal involving a dangerous nuclear power plant and a murdered whistle-blower.

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish – a contemporary comedy about an aging publisher who flees his troubles and inadvertently ends up in a retirement community. The community is run like a prison and the aging residents are treated little better than criminals. Most of the story details Cavendish’s escape attempts.

An Orison of Sonmi-451 –  a dystopian sci-fi drama set sometime after a global nuclear war. Korea escaped destruction, but it is now ruled by a totalitarian-capitalist regime that relies on artificially-grown slave labor. Sonmi is one such slave, but she experiences an “ascension,” becoming fully self-aware and joining a rebellion. Sonmi is later captured and narrates the story to her interrogators prior to her execution (the orison is a recording device).

Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After – a memoir by Zachry, a Hawaiian tribesman who lived in a primitive farming community long after a nuclear war wiped out most of humanity. Zachry assists Meronym, one of the last remnants of a technologically advanced society, in gathering useful information. Zachry is eventually saved by Meronym after his village is wiped out by a more violent tribe.

The stories are interconnected in several ways. All the lead characters except Zachry possess the same comet-shaped birth mark, and Mitchell has acknowledged that they are a single reincarnated soul* (Meronym is the last reincarnation). Each story also acknowledges the existence of the chronologically earlier story. Frobisher reads Ewing’s journal, Luisa reads Frobisher’s letters, Cavendish reads a book starring Luisa, Sonmi reads a book about Cavendish, and Zachry encounters the orison that recorded Sonmi’s confession.

And there are themes common to all six stories, particularly the universality of violence, conquest, and exploitation. Ewing is a witness to Maori and European imperialism, and he is personally the victim of deception and violence. Frobisher is exploited by his employer. Luisa is nearly murdered by the corrupt owners of the nuclear plant. Cavendish is cruelly treated by the “caretakers” at the retirement community. Sonmi is enslaved, manipulated, and finally executed by an oppressive state. And Zachry’s entire world is destroyed by a predatory tribe. But Mitchell also acknowledges a gentler humanity that can triumph over our baser instincts. Autua saves Ewing, just as Meronym saves Zachry several centuries later.

For Mitchell, the triumph of good over evil is dependent on story-telling. This is particularly evident in Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After.  As they lynchpin story, it binds the chronological narrative to the motifs that reoccur in the other five stories. It largely succeeds in highlighting Mitchell’s themes about human predation versus the “ascension” of the human spirit. Much of the story involves Zachry and Meronym fighting or evading the barbaric Kona tribe. Also, while Zachry’s tribe is more peaceful, he himself repeatedly struggles with violent impulses. At one point, Zachry actually has a conversation with the Devil (Old Georgie) and barely resists the temptation to murder Meronym. And Zachry’s tale suggests the moral value of story-telling. Zachry is the only survivor of a brutal attack on his tribe, and he eventually re-settles with Meronym’s people, who record his memories. His spiritual struggles and moral triumph serve as a inspiration to the surviving humans.

This theme re-emerges at the end of the second half of the Adam Ewing story (which is also the end of the entire novel). Ewing narrowly escapes murder at the hands of a (white) doctor who embraces a nihilistic, predatory philosophy. Ewing is saved by Autua, a dark-skinned ex-slave. These events cause Ewing to rethink his entire worldview, and he decides to become an abolitionist. In his words, “If we believe humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share the world … such a world will come to pass.”

So there are plenty of ideas bouncing around the book, and its division into six stories allows Mitchell to explore those ideas in six different genres. In each story, Mitchell demonstrates basic skill as a genre writer, whether he’s writing faux-memoir, mystery, or science fiction. In theory, Cloud Atlas should be an exciting and challenging book. In practice, the book fails to live up to its pretensions, largely because Mitchell’s ideas are not as profound as he seems to think they are. To summarize the main points of the book: if people choose to be good, then the world will be a better place. And story-telling is an effective way to convey moral lessons. The obvious response to these points is “No shit!” People have been well aware of these insights for at least the past two thousand years.

A more interesting observation might involve asking why people continue to do immoral things despite the countless stories intended to teach a moral lesson. If Cloud Atlas is any indication, Mitchell’s answer would be that humans are naturally predatory (they have an inner Old Georgie) and so there will always be at least some people who are violent, cruel, and selfish. That’s partly true, but it elides the fact that many violent, cruel, and selfish people nevertheless consider themselves moral, and they may even behave with kindness in a different context (for example, in the treatment of their own family). A sophisticated view of morality would have to look beyond a simplistic predator/victim relationship.

I don’t see much moral complexity in Cloud Atlas. The “good guys” are always likable, POV characters. They may be flawed, but their flaws are surmountable or at least forgivable. Ewing starts off as a racist, but he has an epiphany and embraces racial egalitarianism. Luisa Rey pursues journalistic truth and saves lives. Sonmi achieves greater self-awareness and defies a totalitarian state. Zachry resists temptation. Even the self-absorbed Frobisher isn’t that bad a guy, and he ends up being rather sympathetic in his final days.

The “bad guys,” on the other hand, are a uniformly reprehensible lot with no redeeming qualities. Dr. Goose is a psychopathic murderer. The businessmen in Half-Lives are almost comically villainous. The “caretakers” encountered by Cavendish are petty tyrants. And of course there is an oppressive state and the violent Kona tribe in the last two stories. Because Mitchell leans toward a simplistic, good vs. evil dichotomy, he can’t offer deeper insights about human morality. And without these insights the stories can only be described as forgettable genre works.

For example, Half Lives was a crime thriller, so Mitchell could draw ideas from an enormous collection of works. But while Mitchell replicates the basic formula and rhythm of a crime thriller, he doesn’t create a particularly compelling or memorable story. It’s an “airport novel” with a few liberal biases: corporations are evil, nuclear power is bad, journalists are noble heroes, etc., etc. All that righteousness becomes rather tedious, and it weighs down what would otherwise be a decent plot. Nor does it help that Luisa Rey is a dull heroine who stumbles through her own narrative while side characters perform all the heavy lifting.

An Orison of Sonmi-451 had far greater potential, as it borrows concepts from Huxley, Orwell, and the other great writers of dystopian fiction. In one sense, it’s an extremely derivative story, and Mitchell openly acknowledged his inspirations (primarily Brave New World and 1984). Being derivative doesn’t necessarily have to be a mark against it, as writers are constantly stealing ideas from each other. But Mitchell only steals the surface of ideas, and he adds nothing new to the genre. Huxley was interested in the relationship between eugenics and class (mostly because he belonged to a a family of eugenicists), while Orwell was interested in propaganda, particularly the manipulation of language. Mitchell touches a little on eugenics and propaganda, but he does little more than regurgitate older ideas. He’s far more interested in writing a story about a heroic slave who triumphs over her oppressors, even from beyond the grave. Though she was executed, the novel suggests that Sonmi’s confession become public knowledge and inspire a slave rebellion. She even comes to be worshiped as a goddess in Zachry’s time. It’s so predictably uplifting I wanted to puke.  I’m not suggesting that the triumph of good over evil is objectionable per se, but it seems absurd to take the ideas of dystopian futurists and tack on a happy ending straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Though the happy ending approach may explain why Cloud Atlas will soon be in a theater near you.

_________

*BBC audio interview

Beneath the Hacks

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Somehow, I have a collection of some of Geoff Jones’ work on the Teen Titans sitting on my shelf. It’s called “The Future Is Now”, and includes Teen Titans 15-23 from 2005, according to the copyright page. Honestly, I don’t know how it got here. I didn’t buy it; I know my wife didn’t buy it. Maybe somebody who thinks comics are still for kids gave it to us for the boy? I don’t know; I’m stumped.

In any case, Matt Brady’s epic Johns takedown from September, and some of the defenses of Johns which resulted, made me wonder if I should check him out (especially since, for whatever mysterious reason, I can do so for free.) In particular, I have to admit that I find this sequence from (I think?) some Blackest Night bit really hilarious.
 

 
Zombie mothers vomiting rage bile on their zombie offspring — that’s solid, goofy entertainment. I’d read a whole book of that for free.

Alas, “Teen Titans: The Future Is Now”, does not include any rage-bile vomiting, nor any zombie babies. Still, the first couple pages are kind of enjoyable. Superboy (who is a clone of Superman with telekinetic powers) is going on his first date with Wonder Girl (a new one named Cassie Sandmark, not Donna Troy — just in case anyone cares.) Anyway, she shows up late because, as she said, she wasn’t sure which skirt to wear, he tells her she looks amazing, they flirt and talk about taking it slow, and then Superboy (who isn’t totally in control of his powers yet, I guess) accidentally uses his X-ray vision and sees through his clothes, which he obviously finds super-embarrassing, albeit not entirely unpleasurable.
 

 
Not that this is great comics or anything, but it’s competent, low-key, teen superdrama in the tradition of Chris Claremont and Marv Wolfman. The art by Mike McKone and Mario Alquiza isn’t especially notable either, but it is at least marginally competent in conveying spatial relationships and expressions. Superboy covering his face with his hand is cute, for example. I could read a whole trade of this without too much pain or suffering.

Unfortunately, I don’t get a full trade of Claremont-Wolfmanesque teen super soap opera. I only get about four pages. Then Superboy is pulled into a dimensional vortex and Superboy from the future appears, and then there’s a crossover in the 31st century with the Legion of Superheroes, and then we’re back in the near future meeting the Teen Titans’ future selves who have all gone to the bad, along with a raft of other future-selves of guest stars…and then there’s a crossover with what I guess is the Identity Crisis event, which involves Dr. Light and Green Arrow and again about 50 gajillion guest heroes.

Luckily, I’ve been wasting my life reading DC comics for 30 years plus, so I know who all the guest heroes are, more or less. I know who the Terminator is, even though no one bothers to tell me; I know what the Flash treadmill is, even though it’s really not explained especially well. I even know why Captain Marvel Jr. can be defeated by a video-recording that shows him saying “Captain Marvel.” And if that last sentence made no sense to you, consider yourself fucking lucky.

So, yes, I can figure out what’s going on. But why exactly do I want to spend several hundred pages watching Johns move toys from my childhood from one side of the page to the other and then back again? I’d much rather find out more about Superboy and Cassie Sandmark. They seemed like smart and maybe interesting kids. But whether they are or not, I’ll never know. Johns is so busy throwing the entire DC universe at his readers that we never get to learn much about the characters who the book is ostensibly about. Honestly, I had to look at the opening credits page of the book when I was done to even figure out who’s supposed to be in this version of the Teen Titans. The team virtually never even fights as a team, much less slows down long enough to engage in even perfunctory character development. Cassie and Superboy’s romance is barely mentioned again; instead, the big subplot/emotional touchstone is Robin dealing with the death of his father — a death which appears to come out of nowhere, presumably because it was part of some crossover in some other title.

In a spirited defense of Geoff Johns, Matt Seneca argued that Johns sincerely believed in hope and bravery, and was “creating a fictional universe with no relation to ours whatsoever but using it to address the most basic (or hell, base, i’ll say it, who cares) human emotional concerns.” Maybe I’m reading the wrong Geoff Johns comic, but I have to say that there’s precious little of hope, or bravery, or of human emotional concern, base or otherwise, in these pages. Mostly there’s just a commitment to continuity porn so intense that even the most rudimentary genre pleasures are drowned in a backwash of extraneous bullshit.

Maybe Johns could tell a decent story if he had an issue or two to himself without some half-baked company-wide storyline to incorporate. But since it’s pretty clear from his career that he lives for those company-wide storylines, I’m not inclined to cut him much slack. As it is, I picked this up hoping to get a nostalgic recreation of the mediocre genre pulp of my youth. “Nearly as good as the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans” — that doesn’t seem like it should be such a difficult hurdle. And yet there’s Johns, flopping about in the dust, the bottom-feeder burrowing beneath the hacks in the turgid swill of the mainstream.

Devilman

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So that hatefest, pretty amazing right? Fun, fun. Let’s palette-cleanse the hate with some love.

I wish there were more pulp manga criticism in the English-speaking world, maybe I’m greedy. The enthusiasm is there, but the western fanbase for manga is its own separate animal, intersecting very selectively with the western comics fanbase as a whole. Comics, around these parts, is already a medium encumbered with a lot of self-loathing baggage (“This comic has proven itself a worthy piece of literature because it bears only a passing resemblance to a comic book, having evolved to the Higher Art™ of being comparable to paintings or novels, because me hate comics”) and manga receives the same treatment, if not worse, due to having to pass the same threshold of judgement twice. Manga considered worthy of fair dissection is generally the stuff considered the seminal work of the fundamental, albeit tirelessly namedropped, Tezuka, Tatsumi, Tezuka, Koike, Tezuka, Tezuka, and so forth.

This leaves pulp manga in a curious place. We aren’t talking about it enough. (Not that there’s ever ‘enough’ for me)

Which is odd, because you wouldn’t know it. Especially considering the sheer volume of how many comic book artists across the board, young ones in particular, grew up with genre manga. The influence manifests itself in the stylistic quirks and narrative framing many modern cartoonists employ in their own work. For so many western readers, manga provided an enormous range of reading material, filling in the gaps where shops full of superhero comics left wanting. Readers who grew up with stuff like Berserk and Dorohedoro are eager to unearth foundational genre manga that isn’t only Tezuka, and resonates with them in a familiar way. People who spent their pimplier years eating up Utena and Sailor Moon are tickled to find the studly women in Rose of Versailles, people into dense scifi will dig the romantic Matsumoto space operas, and no-good briny punks like me get into Devilman.

A resurging interest in Devilman-creator Go Nagai’s work yields these fabulous re-paneled versions of the Devilman page in which Ryo recalls the loss of his father. The artists who produced these are as follows: Rachel Morris, Tara S., more can be seen here

The 1972 horror manga Devilman is arguably Go Nagai’s most iconic series and most iconic character. It generally doesn’t receive as much recognition here as Nagai’s super robots, and though I could talk super robot all day, many of those comics have not aged especially well. Devilman’s influence on other comics and animation is sprawling in ways that can’t be covered in one article written by one dick-for-brains Rory D. It has affected abstraction in manga ever since its initial run, and has been reprinted several times, given countless bizarre spinoffs, an upsetting PSX game, all that good stuff. The entire series has never been formally licensed in America, only a few issues having been published in the states under Glenn Danzig’s comics joint, and the Kodansha bilingual volumes are a little harder to procure. The only easily accessible finished translations are fan-translations found online, which may be a turn-off to purists and may be totally desirable to people with a special kind of appreciation for those 90s Mangavideo dubs where everybody says ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ like a million times.

We are introduced to Akira Fudo, a meek high school student with no apparent desire to impress others via manufactured aggression, the way his peers do. Within the first few pages he and his platonic lady friend Miki are threatened by three mincing goons. Akira is helpless to stop them until his childhood friend Ryo Asuka shows up, goes ham, and scares the goons off with a rifle. It’s at this point we’re given a microcosm of the Akira’s entire character arc: Akira describes himself as a pacifist, chiding Miki when she threatens these same dudes with a knife, and yet he’s drawn immediately to Ryo’s overt display of intimidation, and follows him without question, leaving Miki behind to stand around and gawk. When we reach the spooky Satan mansion-slash-hedonistic teen orgy nightclub, Ryo explains that because Akira is pure of heart, he can command satanic powers and bloody up bad guys, all while conveniently retaining his humanity. This is the payoff. This is what young boy readers look forward to seeing, to open the box of curiosity, and wield that sort of power without consequence.

Alright, full disclosure: I am a big stupid meathead. I love violent comics unapologetically, I love satanic metal and Fulci movies, and I probably spraypainted a wiener onto a wall once. I like a lot of things I would otherwise totally harp on if I were to actually sit down and talk about them. I do not think even the most schmaltzy, unyielding violent comics will turn anybody into an amoral weirdo on their own. However, I still explore the subject of violence in fiction and the contention therein regularly, it’s unavoidable, as my own work is so heavily influenced by splatter horror. Because the most vocal opponents to violence in fiction are often the most sanctimonious and ignorant, those of us who are really into that sort of thing hand-wave many opportunities to explore our relationship with violence in artwork and in storytelling.
 

 
Nagai’s artwork contorts everything, from human beings to the tokusatsu-Bosch-stylized demons, into elongated grotesqueries. The facial expressions are distorted the point of resembling no easily recognizable human emotion, and yet they’re intensely descriptive of the emotive quality in each panel. The gore and dismemberment are not depicted with the same indulgence or attention to detail you may find in many of the comics Devilman would go on to influence. Instead, it plays around with the abstraction of violence, Nagai’s expressionistic viscera is so divorced from reality that it doesn’t feel like a voyeuristic journey through the reader’s expectations of fantasy violence. Not unlike the bellicose swaths in Goya’s Black Paintings, the quality of Nagai’s linework brings out the genuine horror in Devilman’s more emotionally charged sequences of brutality. Even in the safely removed fantasy world, there is a palpable disgust for violence in the visual language of the world itself, more than something like Gantz which wallows in fetishized, baroque torture porn. Not to set a false dichotomy since there are plenty of things I enjoy that are saturated with the latter, but the question to consider: Do we read horror comics to consider the idea of violence, or do we do it to to see violence?

To say brutality is a common thematic element in all of these comics would be an understatement warranting a captain-obvious side-eye. We read contemporaries like Berserk and Hellsing and Blame to see a bunch of faceless dudes and demons get straight murdered. The fetishization of violence is an engendered trope in pulp manga, as it is in all comics (and all things) presenting violence as a selling point. When Devilman first ran, it was so controversially gory that Nagai would sometimes go on vacation to places where no one could find him and still be greeted by mobs of angry mothers upon landing at the airport. It’s long since passed the point of taboo; in order for violence to be interesting, it needs hierarchy and purpose. Hierarchy and purpose delivers through to the end, on the simple premise that Akira retaining his humanity opens the channels of cruelty moreso than if he were one of the expendable crony demons.
 

 
Miki is repeatedly endangered as a vehicle for Akira’s development. Out of all the possible scenarios in which Miki could be left vulnerable to be attacked by demons, electing to have her attacked while she’s bathing evokes the familiar gender trouble present in many forms of pulp horror. This is one area where Devilman falls flat on its face. I think there is something to be said of the way Akira’s descent into hard-hearted depersonalization affects the way he treats Miki, but it’s muddied by the fact that she barely registers as a character. The objectification of a woman as a symbol of peace would warrant its own separate article. The ‘monster of the week’ format doesn’t feel like an aimless excuse to peddle more monsters, each monster Akira fights whittles his grasp on his passive nature and other ‘desirable’ human traits a little more. In a particularly gruesome story, Akira blames himself for the death of a young child, and a turtle demon taunts him and feeds off of his wrathful despair as a result, leaving him worsened by the time he’s killed the creature.

In many power fantasies, goring up objectively evil something-or-others without consequence to serve a greater good is something often unquestioned. A cyber-cop shoots a cyber-demon point blank in the face and we move on to the next one. But when Akira is possessed of Devilman qualities, even when not transformed, he becomes crass, emotionally distant, and aggressive. In order to transform, he must lose all reason, giving full reign of his mind to the side of him that was always a senseless destroyer, rather than this side of him being something summoned in the sabbath amidst all the hippie-stabbing. Returning to the first act of the story, when Ryo launches into that long, slow-brewing exposition about the demons, he’s essentially giving Akira an elaborate justification for setting free his id.
 

 
The final arc spirals into meandering chaos in which humans callously torture and dissect captured devilmen, nuclear weapons flatten most of the known world, and the identity of Ryo Asuka is revealed. The ending is notoriously ambiguous. No one is rewarded for what has transpired. It’s a counterpoint to the power fantasies in shonen manga that is enjoyable through to the end. Devilman incorporates fun, playful tokusatsu aesthetics against a morally dense cautionary tale.

Anyway, damn, I love Berserk too, I wanna talk about Berserk. ’till next time?

Not Best, Mostly American, Comics Non-Criticism

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Hate fest is over, but hate is ever new. So I thought I’d reprint this review of Ben Schwartz’s Best American Comics Criticism which I posted at tcj.com a while back. The piece was part of a roundtable: you can see all the other pieces at the following links:

Opening contributions from Ng Suat Tong, Noah Berlatsky, Caroline Small, Jeet Heer, Brian Doherty and BACC editor Ben Schwartz; responses from Caroline Small, Ng Suat Tong, Jeet Heer, Noah Berlatsky and Ben Schwartz.

My review is below.
_____________________________

Ben Schwartz begins his introduction to Best American Comics Criticism with an anecdote: one day at a mall he heard two young girls arguing about what to call graphic novels. For Schwartz, this was a “definitive moment.” Comics used to be for nebbishy, perpetually pubescent, socially stunted man-boys — but that’s all over. Superheroes are dead, replaced by the teeming offspring of anthropomorphic Holocaust victims. Nowadays everybody from New York Times editors to real live tweens are enamored of the sequential lit. From a niche product for mouth-breathing microcephalics, comics have become our nation’s primary containment vessel for deep meaningfulness. Open them and feel your world expand.

But while comics may have generously embraced tween mall rats, the same cannot exactly be said for The Best American Comics Criticism. Schwartz’s keyboard lauds the heterogeneous appeal of comics, but his heart is still in some back alley, cheeto-smelling direct market basement, lost in a rapturous fugue of insular clusterfuckery. You’d think that if you were editing a tome focusing on comics criticism over the last 10 years, and if you further began your tome by genuflecting towards tween girls as icons of authenticity, you might possibly feel it incumbent upon you to include some passing mention of the 1,200 pound frilly panda in the room. Not Schwartz though; if he’s ever heard the word “shojo,” he’s damned if he’s going to let on. The only manga-ka who defiles these pristine pages is alt-lit analog Yoshihiro Tatsumi — and he only makes the cut because he was interviewed by that validator of all things lit-comic, Gary Groth.

The almost complete omission of manga (and the complete omission of online comics) isn’t an accident. Schwartz deliberately set out to produce a work which would appeal only to his own tediously over-represented demographic which would focus on the triumph of lit comics over the years 2000-2008.

Now, you might think that it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to title your book Best American Comics Criticism and then, deliberately collect a sampling of essays related to one particular strand of comics that happens to interest you and your in-group. You might think that in these circumstances your title seems, not like a description of the contents, but rather like a transparent marketing ploy. You might think that craven, and I would agree with you.

It’s only once you get over the fact that the book’s cover is a lie, though, that you can really start to appreciate the purity of the work’s cloistered lameness. Yes, only one female critic (Sarah Boxer) is included. Yes, Schwartz compulsively returns to the same writers again and again — three essays by Donald Phelps, two pieces by Dan Nadel, two by Jonathan Lethem, two by Dan Clowes. And yes there are not one, not two, but three interviews by Gary Groth, the book’s erstwhile publisher. But the most audacious moment of collegial nepotism is a pedestrian essay about Harold Gray by — Ben Schwartz himself! Even better, if you read the acknowledgements you learn that Schwartz wanted to include another of his own essays, but was prevented by rights conflicts. Really, it’s kind of a wonder he didn’t just put together a book of his own writings and slap that Best American title on it. After all, he’s the editor. If he thinks Ben Schwartz writes the best criticism in explored space, who’s to gainsay him? (It’s possible that Schwartz wanted to include the other essay instead of the piece he used… which means that he printed his second best as one of the top essays of the decade. If that hadn’t worked, would he have gone to his third best? His tenth? His grocery lists?)

To be fair, I’ve actually quite liked some of Schwartz’s writing over the years. A piece by him about Paris Hilton which ran in the Chicago Reader is one of my favorite things to ever run in that publication — I still remember its concluding paragraph clearly seven years later. And while using multiple essays by a handful of writers seems like a gratuitously ingrown way to structure a best-of book, if the results were provocative and enjoyable, I wouldn’t kick.

Unfortunately, the results here are… well, they’re really boring, mainly. Part of the problem is, again, the insular air of self-satisfaction. The worst in this regard is probably the Will Eisner/Frank Miller interview excerpt, in which the participants both pat themselves on the back so vigorously that they seem to be in some sort of contest to see whose arm will fracture first. In terms of abject sycophancy, though, the David Hajdu interview with Marjane Satrapi is close behind. “Like her work, Satrapi’s apartment is a mosaic of Middle Eastern and Western, high and low — a willful testament to cultural and aesthetic heterogeneity.” What is this, Marie Claire? Compared to such celebrity puff-piece drivel, the merely grating mutual admiration on display in the Jonathan Lethem/Dan Clowes interview seems positively tolerable. Sure, Lethem actually claims that what he and Clowes are doing is somehow “dangerous” while they’re both sitting on a podium in front of a herd of maddened, man-eating elephants — or are those rapturously respectful undergrads? Either way at least he doesn’t opine that Clowes’ bow tie is a sartorial sign of nostalgic doubling. You take what you can get.

When the book isn’t oozing complacency, though, it’s giving off an even worse miasma — anxiety. As any alt comics confession will tell you, the clubby smirks of the knowledgeable hobbyist hide a desperate desire to be accepted. The book is one long grovel, as if Schwartz hopes to win fame, fortune, and mainstream acceptance through sheer power of toadying. This is most visible in the egregious reliance on “name” authors. Ephemeral book introductions by John Updike, Dan Clowes and Jonathan Lethem all read like exactly what they are — celebrity endorsements. Alan Moore’s disjointed interview transcription about Steve Ditko is interesting but slight, while Seth’s essay on John Stanley seems padded out with an overdetermined breezy musing that is, I guess, supposed to be redolent of whimsical genius. “I’m sure when [Stanley] wrote these disposable comic books he could never have dreamed that, half a century later, grown adults would still be looking at them. It’s an odd world.” Or maybe it’s a clichéd world. So hard to tell the difference.

Schwartz pulls out a host of other gimmicks too — a fascimile of the court decision giving Siegel and Schuster back their rights in Superman; an Amazon comments thread about Joe Matt; a meta-cartoon by Nate Gruenwald, comprised of annotations upon a fictitious old school cartoonists “classic” strips. The first seems needless, the second is blandly predictable; the last actually has a lovely expressionist/modernist feel, though I think it probably lost a good deal in being excerpted. All of them, though, seem to come from the same place of nervous desperation. “I know no one here really wants to read criticism,” Schwartz seems to be saying. “So, um… here! Look! Bunnies!”

Schwartz does seem to prefer bunnies to criticism — perhaps because he has only the vaguest idea of what criticism is, or of why anyone would be interested in it. Specifically, for a critic and a supposed connoisseur of criticism, he seems to have a marked aversion to anything that might be considered an idea. Most of the pieces in the book say little or less than little. John Hodgman’s essays, for example, tells us that Jack Kirby thought of his Fourth World series as a long completed work… and now folks like Brian K. Vaughn also think of their series as long completed work, and ain’t that something? Rick Moody says Epileptic shows “this relatively new form can be as graceful as its august literary forbearers.” R. C. Harvey assures us that Fun Home is “Serious literature for mature readers for whom sex is only part of adulthood;” Jeet Heer insists that “Whatever he might have drawn from his personal memories, the emotions that Frank King explored are universal;” Donald Phelps emits his usual fog of avuncular gush; Paul Gravett bounces up and down in the backseat while chattering on about how “lots of people, writers, artists, editors and readers, are in this for the long haul, for however long it takes for the graphic novel to achieve its possibilities.” This is knee-jerk boosterism, platitudinous bunk intended to sell me crap, not to make me think. For Schwartz, it seems, the best criticism is marketing copy. Maybe he should edit an anthology of beer commercials.

There are some enjoyable pieces. In his review of comics commemorating 9/11, R. Fiore sounds like the ignorant blowhard at the end of the bar (Terrorism doesn’t work, Robert? Really? The KKK will be surprised to hear that Jim Crow never happened then.) But at least he has some personality and something to say, no matter how asinine. Sarah Boxer’s essay about race in Krazy Kat has moments of interpretive élan. Ken Parille’s dissection of Dan Clowes’ David Boring is so passionate about its obsession that it’s fascinating reading even for someone who, like me, really hates David Boring. And Dan Nadel’s evisceration of the Masters of Comics art exhibit is perhaps the strongest piece in the volume, not least because it hits so painfully close to home. “So, if the curators really want comics to be examined as a serious medium, the first step is not to establish a bullshit canon, but rather to be serious — avoid silly stunt-casting, attempt to provide rudimentary information, and for heavens sake, try not to commission an exhibited artist’s wife to write about another exhibited artist. Y’know, act like real, grown-up curators! Good luck.” Schwartz, man — that had to have left a mark.

But a few pleasant oases don’t make it worthwhile to cross the wasteland. The irony is that, in the end, this book proves exactly the opposite of what Schwartz intended. Best American Comics Criticism doesn’t give us comics as an engaged, vibrant medium, connected to ideas and to the broader world. Instead, Schwartz’s comicdom is a cramped little shanty, from which, every so often, a tiny face sticks out to lick the nearest boot or shout in a quavering voice, “I am somebody!” before diving back into the hovel. If you believe this volume, comics between 2000 and 2008 went precisely nowhere. They’re still as boring, still as self-involved, and still as desperate for approval as they ever were. I don’t actually believe that Best American Comics Criticism is an accurate reflection of the best in comics or in writing about comics. But if it is, we all need to give the fuck up.
 

American Torture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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