Category Archives: Roundtables

Morpheus Strip: Impressions of Sandman #1-20

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[Being a cursory reexamination of The Sandman #1-20 by a non-devotee]

The last time I read the first few issues of The Sandman was sometime in the late 80s as the individual issues were being serialized. I suppose it must say something about my appreciation for the comic that it was one of the few mainstream continuing series which I collected from beginning to end. While my interest in the series waxed and waned even as I was collecting the issues, it was these initial episodes which have stuck with me most over time. My general lack of interest in The Sandman is probably best demonstrated by the fact that I had completely forgotten that Morpheus had died towards the close of Gaiman’s tale until Noah brought it up in his roundtable entry. So little did this series mean to me at that point in time (I say this only in retrospect).

When Noah suggested this roundtable discussion last week, I decided to follow his lead and simply reread some issues of The Sandman to reassess my feelings towards the book. The consistent refrain in recent years is that The Sandman as a whole doesn’t hold up. This would suggest that The Sandman represented some high watermark at the time among the comics “cognoscenti” but I don’t remember it ever actually achieving such adulation among readers with a restricted diet of men in tights. I could be mistaken of course. Its reputation among the comics agnostic was and is immense, a fact which was perpetually enshrined by Gaiman’s honoring with the World Fantasy Award in 1991 for his tale with Charles Vess in The Sandman #19 (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”)

The most surprising thing about my current reappraisal of The Sandman is how little my impression of these initials issues has changed. I’ve been impressed by the extensive planning involved from the very first issues, now confirmed by a review of Gaiman’s initial Sandman proposal at the back of The Absolute Sandman Vol. 1. He has a good feel for the material and has the right ear for the kind of dialogue required by his characters. These comics are clearly the receptacle into which Gaiman poured a multitude of his ideas. His script for the aforementioned Shakespearean story is precise and well planned, meeting its equal in his collaborator, Charles Vess. We see in these early issues the foundations for the various complexities among The Endless later in the series. The bricks from which Gaiman’s constructs The Sandman fall into place methodically and with great facility throughout these 20 issues. On the other hand, these perceived “virtues” would appear to be among Noah’s chief irritants with regards the series.

Of course, with the passage of time and some personal growth and development in taste, certain ideas have begun to appear more musty. Dr. Destiny’s path of violence and humiliation through The Sandman # 6 (“24 Hours”) no longer seems as viciously violent as it once seemed. “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” from The Sandman # 18 now appears much more simplistic and derivative. The damage frequently wrought to Gaiman’s ideas by Mike Dringenberg, Sam Keith and Colleen Doran is even more evident to my eyes than it was before.

Is Gaiman’s depiction of love as leaden and functional as Noah suggests? It’s entirely possible. Yet it must be said that it has never occurred to me to ask for anything more from Gaiman’s series if only because the comic never seemed to be more than a simple yet appealing entertainment. Perhaps this explains why the seemingly inexplicable nature of Nuala’s love for Morpheus and the reasons Noah posits for this seem more than sufficient in my eyes; these seemingly simplistic justifications being the very fabric of fairy tales and myths. Gaiman gifts are for plot and narrative (enlivened by a thorough immersion in his subject matter). Whenever he strays into the realm of heartfelt emotion, he almost always falls flat on his face. The Sandman has never moved me in the way it appears to have moved much of its audience.

Noah’s passion for The Sandman comes through in his piece. He wants more from it even when there is only so much to squeeze from this fruit. Even when he seems to be criticizing Gaiman’s pretentious depictions of repression, what comes through seems more like bitter disappointment with a beauteous love now tarnished. Yet even these grievances seem well worth exploring and reading if only because of the passion I detect beneath them. Similarly, Tom Crippen’s Sandman retrospective (“My Gaiman Decade”) in The Comics Journal #273 is worth reading precisely because he feels so deeply for the work. It reads like a love letter (tinged with regrets) to a high school sweetheart 10 years on.

For me, Morpheus and his sister, Death, have always remained cyphers and plot devices meant to push forward the narrative and communicate simple homilies – characters for which I have never felt any real warmth or affection. What I see in The Sandman is an intricate fireside story informed by fantasies both old and new. There are modern trappings scattered around the series but the overwhelming feeling is that of myth making and all the richness and sparseness this entails. In much the same vein, I remember the Death mini-series more for Chris Bachalo’s depictions of Death than any semblance of characterization. My memory of it after all these years is that it was rather poor reading. It’s a different matter when it comes to Jaime Hernandez’s depiction of Maggie and Hopey in his most recent comics. Maggie’s crushing depression and sense of loss is palpable when she revisits her old haunts in Ghost of Hoppers. Jaime’s chosen path seems almost like an oppressive hand on his characters lives. The situations in Jaime’s stories are meant to advance his characters while the reverse, more often than not, appears to be the case in Gaiman’s comic.

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These were never books of immense complexity but simply reasonably well told and plotted comics (two elements in short supply in mainstream comics both then and now) served fitfully and to varying effect by a few of the most respected artists in the field (McKean, Vess, Talbot, Craig Russell and Zulli). It’s still a good deal better than 90% of what you get on primetime television. And that’s the key to its success – accessibility mixed with a not insubstantial helping of intelligence and imagination to tickle the nerves of an audience used to much blander food. The richness in its textural references seem mostly skin deep (at least in these early issues). These reference are rarely integral to a clear understanding of the plot nor are they particularly useful as passageways to even greater insights. Evidently, Gaiman understood his audience well.

When I reread Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun every 5-10 years or so, I still find new things to marvel at and more mysteries to uncover. The series remains a continued source of pleasure for me whenever I find the time to revisit it. With The Sandman, I see an old friend who hasn’t changed much since I last met him over a decade ago – still amusing and entertaining in parts but a little shelf worn (though not drastically so). I remember much about him and of his personality even though he’s faded a bit with time. To spend a few hours in his company isn’t particularly painful.

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Notes:

(1) I recently had the chance to read an article by Matthias Wivel at The Metabunker about Gaiman’s work across all mediums with particular reference to Coraline. Wivel appears to have read most of Gaiman’s works including most if not all of his novels. He is of the opinion that the comics represent Gaiman at the height of his artistry. This would include parts of The Sandman I imagine but also his other works such as Mr. Punch, Signal to Noise and Violent Cases. I wonder if he’s right.

(2) Perhaps it would be of some interest to collectors and admirers of original art that some of the most famous pages and covers from the series can be found on Comics Art Fans (CAF). The cover to The Sandman #1 recently surfaced on CAF and is owned by a prominent art dealer who is also an avid collector.

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Update by Noah: As fascist blog overlord promoting gratuitous synergy, I feel it incumbent to add that my initial post in this roundtable on Sandman is here.

Morpheus Strip: Dream Lovers

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This is the first in a roundtable on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. Suat, Tom, Vom Marlowe, and Kinukitty will be along later in the week with their takes on the series as well. (Update: And you can now read the complete roundtable)
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I loved Sandman back when it came out in the late 80s/early 90s, and I’ve probably read the whole thing through at least a couple of times. However, it’s been a while…partially out of nervousness. I strongly suspected that the epic wouldn’t hold up on rereading.

And…yeah. It doesn’t exactly hold up. I reread the entirety of “Fables and Reflections” and skimmed through a couple of the other books (“A Game of You” and “The Kindly Ones” especially, I think.) Part of it is the art, which bounces around inconsistently and is often just not especially good. There are undoubtedly some very nice walk-ons — Bryan Talbot’s creepy take on the giant, cadaverous Persephone was memorable, and, as Suat recently pointed out, the P. Craig Russell “Ramadan” story is pretty spectacular. But then you’ve got atrocious efforts by folks like Kent Williams.

No wonder he looks startled; he appears to be improbably made out of rock. Maybe he’s related to the Thing?

Aside from the inconsistencies in the art, though, the real problem is that my former enthusiasm for Gaiman’s writing has dimmed a lot. I can still appreciate his cleverness and the care of construction…but after a while, both of those virtues are pushed so enthusiastically and unilaterally that they start to feel oppressive. After a while you start to almost want to plead — please, somebody, anybody, could you just once say something that doesn’t come back a panel, or a page, or several issues down the road with an ironically profound or profoundly ironic twist? Could we have a story end without a smug little O’Henry meets dumbed-down Borges twist? Could everybody just for a fucking second stop talking?

The thing that crystallized my irritation with the series was Nuala. She was a fairy with a glamor that made her appear as a beautiful woman, but in actuality she was kind of a dumpy elvish little thing. The fairy gave her as a gift to Dream for some reason or other (maybe to try to get him to give them the key to hell? I can’t remember exactly.) Anyway, she fell in unrequited love with dream, and ends up nervously and apologetically causing his downfall. She’s a sad, sweet character. I liked her.

But as I was sort of skimming over her story again it occurred to me that, while her unrequited love is certainly poignant, it’s also weirdly unmotivated. That is, we certainly do feel her pain and sadness to some extent…but we never really get much of a sense of her love. What about him appeals to her? Does she think he’s beautiful? Is it his (on again off again) kindness to her? His power? There don’t have to be individual or even clear answers to these questions, obviously, but they’re never even asked, much less answered. For Gaiman, Nuala’s love is an almost magical fact; it drops onto her and possesses her, and that’s all we ever really need to know about it.

And that’s how love functions throughout the story. Gaiman almost never, that I can remember, actually bothers to show love as a functional, or even dysfunctional, relationship between two people. Instead, it’s just another plot device, a story element to push the action…or, more accurately, the words. In “A Game of You” the cuckoo casts a love spell by talking; in “Brief Lives” Desire does more or less the same thing.

That seems to be how Gaiman sees love; a verbal whammy that comes out of nowhere to make a clever point or set up a clever scene, rather than as an actual relationship which is maybe worth exploring in its own right. Destruction accuses Orpheus of loving the idea of Eurydice more than the actual person…but is that really Orpheus’ failing? Or is it Gaiman’s? Certainly, Gaiman never shows the couple in a tender moment — Eurydice gets more time with a Satyr in the narrative than she does with her supposed love. And the big love affair of the book, between Dream and Thessally, occurs almost entirely off-screen..ostensibly because doing it that way is clever and surprising, but maybe actually because Gaiman has no idea how to deal with an actual love affair and is scared shitless to try. Certainly, the hints of the romance we get sound deeply unconvincing — when they’re in love they walk about idyllically among the bowers prattling sweet nothings, making some of Dream’s attendants uncomfortable; when theyr’e out of love it rains a lot because Dream is throwing a tantrum. Gaiman is clear that these are cliches, and he’s making fun of them because they’re cliches…but that doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t seem able to deal with love in anything but cliches.

There’s actually an analogy here with another, more recent tween phenomena: Twilight. In both, there’s a lot of darkness and angst, which gives an exciting frisson of danger even as it distracts from the things that an actual adolescent might really find dangerous or threatening. In Twilight, the danger of vampires and blood and werewolves and melodrama all stands in for, and obscures, the looming, oncoming reality of adult relationships and sexuality. In Sandman, similarly, the pretension and the cleverness and the angsty melodrama seems, at some points, like a magician’s trick; the left hand is bobbing and weaving and throwing out fireworks so that you don’t notice (except with a kind of unacknowledged satisfaction perhaps) that there’s not much at stake in the right.

Though that all sounds kind of harsh, I’m actually not against this kind of tween repression categorically; in the Twilight series ( which I’ve mentioned liking before) I think the sustained effort to avoid looking at the obvious ends up energizing the series; it’s both winning and squicky, a kind of pop sublime. In Sandman I’m not sure it works so well. On the one hand, Gaiman is in some sense obviously a better writer than Stephanie Meyer. Though, as I said, the cleverness is irritating, it is, nonetheless, often actually clever, and he does manage to come up with some genuinely creepy twists (the treacherous stuffed toys in “A Game of You”) as well as some moving ones (Nuala’s story for example, as I mentioned above.) Meyer is not as bad as she’s sometimes claimed to be, but I doubt she could have pulled off either of those things.

On the other hand…Sandman is way more pretentious than Twilight…and the distance between the pretensions and the delivery is sometimes painful. For instance, there’s this panel:

Ah, those harem maidens…so exotic! So poetic! So unaccountably possessed of the sweaty metaphorical unease of a randy 13-year old trying to look impressively sophisticated!

It’s significant too, I think, that the so-thoughtfully entreated king declines the request. In Twilight, the heroine and hero eventually do, in fact, after much deferral (and marriage) have sex. This is in itself problematic; the whole tension of the series rests on the balance between safety and desire which is more or less vitiated when everybody gets what they desire and ends up safe. Gaiman is more canny; Dream, elaborately and with much fanfare, refuses to alter the structure of the series. Rather than change he decides to kill himself. Gaiman makes the “change” in question specifically about responsibility; Dream is not willing to give up his duties as ruler of dream, and so his only way out is death. But one has to wonder — is it really his (quite amorphous) duties that are at stake? Or is it something else? His ex-lover and Nuala more or less engineer his final downfall, his realm is torn apart by the furies, a rampaging feminine archetype — and the way they taunt him at the end is borderline sensual. “We are destroying the dreaming. Can you not feel it?” “Yes I can.” But then interrupts the foreplay, and Dream scurries off into oblivion, leaving one more fraught relationship we don’t get to really explore. Like a cadaverous Peter Pan, he never grows up, never has to stay with Wendy, and never gets out of the dream.

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Update: Suat’s post is now up.

Update: Vom Marlowe and Tom weigh in.

Update: And Kinukitty finishes up.

Female Creators Roundtable: Ariel Schrag, Like Who?

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Both longtime blog readers are probably aware that I’m a big fan of Ariel Schrag’s work in general and of her most recent book, Likewise in particular. One of the things I find most interesting about Schrag is how different her work is from male comics creators like Jeff Brown or David Heatley. Specifically, for folks like Brown and Heatley, autobio comics are generally a way to say “me me me me me me me” for thirty to a hundred pages or whatever; the narrative tends to be obsessively focused on their own past, their own psychology, their own ambitions (sexual and professional.) Other characters drift through to one extent or another, but they tend to be there mostly as props, important only insofar as they have something to give to the main character or something to deny him.

As I said, Schrag’s work is very different; she’s obsessed with relationships. There are a lot of characters in her books, but they all have weight and personality. Schrag’s girlfriend, Sally, for example, comes across as both incredibly cruel and entirely justified in her occasional interest and frequently brutal disinterest in Ariel. Sally is often mean, but on the other hand, Schrag gives you enough of her perspective and enough of her actual words that you can see where she’s coming from in her ambivalence about the narrator. With male autobio writing, in other words, you inevitably get a Bildungsroman, where everything relates to the the main characters’ self-actualization. In Schrag, you get romance, where everything relates to relationships between people.

What’s interesting about Likewise is that it seems, in part, like it’s Schrag’s attempt to do what the male creators are doing — to have her own psyche fill up more and more space; to gain control of her painful relationship with Sally by walling herself off in her own pscyhe the way that male autobio creators do as a matter of course. Schrag mentioned in several interviews that her main inspirations for Likewise were James Joyce and Joe Matt — two men, obviously. When I interviewed her and asked her what was attractive about those writers, she said “I guess I related to the obsessive thinking about women that they both had, and maybe related to their work more than I would to a straight woman writer.”

Obsessive thinking like that is often seen as out of control, of course — but I think in a literary context, it can also be a way to turn another person into a figment; it’s a move for control and dominance. You’re turning the other person not into themselves, but into a puppet who performs actions for you over and over again. One of the key literary characteristics of sadism, most theorists seem to agree, is repetition.

Likewise does start out in this obsessive, typically male literary mode. The first part of the book is told in Joycean stream-of-consciousness. The artwork actually represents this, literally, as having a depersonalizing effect on others; many characters around Schrag are drawn featureless, as if she’s so wrapped up in her own head that she can’t see them — or as if they’re part of her dream, and only become clear when she focuses on them.

But while Schrag begins (sort of) in male, she isn’t able to sustain it. In our interview, Schrag described the narrative shift like this:

And then Part 2 starts and you begin with the stream of consciousness, and then it cuts into this tape-recorded version, and it basically goes and then it will cut into a journal written version, and as the stories continue in Part 2, you get stream of consciousness switching with present day styles.

Towards the end of Part 2 the tape recording and handwriting take over the present day reality…and soon the only time you see Ariel in present day reality is when she’s thinking about writing the new book…you get the sense of how much the new book has taken over her mind.

In Part 3 the present day steam of consciousness has totally gone, and you start getting even things that you wouldn’t want to record. Like blank spaces on the tape, or blank pages in the journal…sort of the downside of a story being told only through what’s recorded, you get this warped and biased view

And that continues through Part 3 and then it’s not until the very end, and she’s finally done with it, that the very last page returns to the stream of consciousness reality.

In our discussion, Schrag saw this change as being about art hijacking life: her book taking over the rest of her existence. To me, though, it seems like it can also be read as being about an inability to escape from the outside world, and from her relationships. Stream of consciousness is in her head, but the tape recording and the journal and the writing are outside; they’re objective rather than subjective. Instead of being in control or primary, Ariel goes back to being one voice among others.

The one scene where this seemed most clear to me was in a sequence where Ariel and her boy friend (and sometime boyfriend) Zally go to a strip club. Zally has been to the club before; he got a lap dance and came, as guys do. Ariel is hoping to achieve a similar climax, but it’s not to be. Instead, she ends up being fascinated by the surface of one of the dancer’s faces (literally — the woman has a skin condition), and then by how the women feel about the men (they are not especially enthusiastic about the men, Ariel learns while she’s in the bathroom with them) and finally during the dance itself about what parts go where and what she’s supposed to be doing exactly and on and on and on. The upshot is that Ariel doesn’t get it done in the dance, and has to go beat off companionably with Zally in the bathroom. The whole scene is actually transcribed (I presume verbatim) from the tape-recorded after-analysis which Ariel and Zally recorded on their way home together, and so it comes off as an anecdote; something that is being shared and understood between friends as part of a mutual experience. Zally’s reactions (amused concern that Ariel’s hopes are going to be dashed; icky sexual request to watch Ariel’s lapdance; an general ambivalent investment throughout) are important parts of the story. In fact, in some ways, you could see the whole episode as about Ariel’s relationship with Zally — her competitor, sometimes fuck-buddy, and sometime collaborator — and about how her loyalties and interest are divided between him and the (possibly gay?) stripper who dances for her. This is, in other words, a long, long way from James Joyce’s confessions about his own pursuit of sexworkers in “Portrait of an Artist,” where the prostitutes are little more than scented shadows occupying some guilty corner of the narrator’s skull. For Schrag, getting off isn’t about getting off, but about how she feels about others and how others feel about her.

Schrag is often tormented throughout the book by her inability to shake her butchness, and by the fact that people keep mistaking her for a boy. At the same time, at moments like those in the strip club, she seems to be trying to process experiences like a boy, only to be foiled by a female way of looking at the world. The struggle between the different narrative techniques seems to also be a struggle to find a way to have it both ways — to have the sense of internal privacy and self importance, that male writers often take for granted, while at the same time continuing to respect her relationships with others. Schrag’s struggling with and against autobiography, and as a result Likewise doesn’t read like anything else I can think of, either in that genre or outside it.

Gluey Tart on Women in Comics

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This is part of a roundtable on women creators. Please read the previous entries, if you haven’t already – there’s lots of good stuff, as always.

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This is a roundtable on women creators in general, but I originally thought it was just about women creators in comics – which seemed like an odd topic. Don’t you think? And indeed that wasn’t quite the topic, but this is a blog that is kind of sort of about comics, so what the hell. And you do see this sort of thing, not infrequently. You know what I mean: “Huh. Women comics creators. Let us discuss their relevance!” It made me realize that I live in a bubble. Because I find it bizarre that people would focus on comics by women as a specific subgenre, as people do in the West. I read comics – shojo and yaoi manga – all the time, lots and lots of them, almost all by women. It’s unusual for me to read comics by men. So the situation with American mainstream comics strikes me as a weird aberration.

There certainly aren’t a lot of women working on mainstream American titles, though, and I have to wonder why. It isn’t that women can’t do it (proof below), or even that women are inherently disinterested in mainstream comics; something’s keeping them out. There have been lively discussions about that topic on this very blog – here is a recent one, and here is more of a classic.

When I thought about women creators in comics (in the West), the first name that came to mind was Jill Thompson. Apparently I was right on the money with that, since her Web site says she is “the most well-known female comic book artist working in the comics industry today.” She has done art for a lot of mainstream titles, including some of my favorites, Sandman and The Invisibles. These are girl-friendly mainstream titles, of course, especially Sandman. She’s also illustrated even more mainstream ones (more tights and capes, fewer girls) – Batman and Spiderman and Wonder Woman. (Do I know which series? No. I find the myriad divisions of Batman and Spiderman and Wonder Woman and the like incredibly confusing, and frankly, I can barely get out of bed and get to work every morning, much less keep track of superheroes. Ignore ’em all and let God sort ’em out, I say.) (I do know who’s DC and who’s Marvel, if that makes anyone feel any better. Although I frequently say Superman when I mean Spiderman, much to the irritation of my son and husband. I do know the difference, I just apparently don’t – care.) (And the names Superman and Spiderman are treated differently, now that I think of it. Like Kmart and Wal-Mart. One has a hyphen and a capital letter in the middle, and one doesn’t. I know this because I am an editor and people get it wrong all the time. Or people used to, when people were writing about Kmart. My easy way of remembering it is that Kmart has nothing and Wal-Mart has everything.) (I don’t actually have any other pointless interjections at this point; I just wanted to throw in another parenthetical comment to show I could do it.) I’ve seen a certain amount of Thompson’s work on those titles, and I don’t especially like any of it. It fits in with the rest of mainstream comics artwork, which is what it’s supposed to do.

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Look at this panel, which I chose at random from The Invisibles because I had it at hand. And, huh. What the hell is going on here? This is not exactly the stuff, artistically. Which is pretty much what I always think when I look at mainstream American comics. (This is personal, but I don’t mind sharing it with you: I don’t understand why superhero comics readers are content with art that isn’t that great. The art is at least fifty percent of what’s going on. It should be really good, or why not just read words?)

The thing is, I actually come not to bury Jill Thompson but to praise her. I’m not crazy about her mainstream comic art, but I don’t really like any mainstream American comic art. She’s done some wonderful work, though. Her Scary Godmother books are some of my favorites. They’re actually children’s books and not technically comics. Well, they sort of hang out at the intersection between comics and picture books. The art is wonderful, stylish, and fun. (The storytelling is also very good.) You get the feeling Thompson got to do what she wanted to do here, like she finally got to slip her leash and run.

scary godmother

I wouldn’t know the first panel was drawn by a woman. I’d assume it was done by a man because most of those kinds of comics are. I would definitely assume the second panel was drawn by a woman. That’s because the first one conforms to the expected mainstream American comics look, and the second one is a cute Goth for girls thing. I am a fan of some, but not all, cute Goth for girls things (as in most areas of human endeavor, some are well done and some are lacking). I am also aware that this genre lives in a ghetto, segregated from the other titles in the comics store.

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Scary Godmother is a series of four hard-bound books, published in the late ’90s, plus a couple of comic book series and a one-shot or two. It has a distinctive style and is done in watercolors, which is clearly the way for Thompson to go. I say that because her next two projects, Death: At Death’s Door and Dead Boy Detectives, are drawn in a manga-cized version of her Scary Godmother style, but in black and white, and they don’t do much for me.

Those books were followed by Beasts of Burden, which you can read online right here. This title was written by Evan Dorkin and illustrated by Thompson, in a return to watercolors. The art is nice, and (separately, in my opinion), she won an Eisner award for it. (She won one for Scary Godmother, too.) Thompson also has a new series of children’s books about a character called Magic Trixie, and it’s very much in line with Scary Godmother, thematically and artistically. Also painted. The art is lovely.

So, there are a couple of points here. Point the first: Jill Thompson has done some really good stuff, and you might want to hook yourself up with it. Point the second: There aren’t many women creators in mainstream American comics, and the best-known one – who is capable of great things – hasn’t done anything close to her best work in this field. One is tempted to draw conclusions. It suggests, I think, that mainstream comics, with its emphasis on continuity of the visual style rather than on the artistic strengths of the individual creators, doesn’t attract female artists because it doesn’t play to their strengths. Or any artist’s strengths, from the looks of it. I can see why an outsider might shy away from joining this club.

Female Creators Roundtable: Jenji Kohan and Weeds

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Cerusee and Noah posted, now me.

I’ve been watching Weeds in dvd and just finished season 3. If you don’t know, it’s a comedy/soap opera/crime show about a young widow in a rich suburb who decides to support her kids by selling pot. For the most part I like it. The cast is good and the stories move along, and I like seeing what’s up with suburban life now that people my age have teenagers.

But I’m talking about the series here because of a discussion we had last year about the Bechdel Test, which is this: Think of a movie that shows two women talking to each other about anything that isn’t a man. The point of the test, as I see it, is this: there aren’t a whole lot of such movies. The test acquaints us with a movies ground rule we may not have noticed.

My reflex explanation for the the missing scenes of two-women-just-being-women is that movies get made by men, so it’s chiefly men’s view of things that gets shown. Weeds is a tv show whose writer/executive producer, meaning the person who gets to decide what kind of show it’s going to be, is a woman. And there are a lot of scenes between women talking about all sorts of things. It’s not remarkable at all. So I guess the ground rules have been jerked around a little.
If I had to do a ratio of male to female screentime, I’d guess it was 47/53. The difference is pretty narrow. But the key characters are women and they are more or less in charge of the people around them. The heroine, Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker), bosses her family and drug operation. Her best friend/enemy, Celia (Elizabeth Perkins), is a monstrous bitch and tyrant who gets ousted by husband and daughter. (Perkins does an amazing job. It’s the greatest bitch performance since Bette Davis in All About Eve; better, really, because it’s a lot more varied and detailed.) Nancy’s chief business connection is Heylia (Tonye Patano), who runs a drug operation from her kitchen.
The white guys do a lot of frisking about. There’s an aging frat boy, a Peter Pan, a nebbish, and Nancy’s whiney lameass son. The attitude toward the frat boy (Kevin Nealon) and the Peter Pan (Justin Kirk) is a bit like laddism in Britain, or at least my impression of it. The idea is that men always act like kids, and that is their charm but also why women get to win all the arguments. There’s a black male lead (Romany Malco) who becomes Nancy’s lover, and he’s intelligent, responsible, and competent, but he’s usually getting batted around by circumstances and on the defensive with Nancy or Heylia.  
But Weeds doesn’t go so far as putting a woman in charge of the action. What’s being in charge: minimum, you don’t look like an idiot; even better if you get to make the key smart decisions, tell people what to do, use violence successfully. Nancy gets scenes like that, but they don’t set the tone for her, or at least so far. Nancy is in over her head trying to be a pot dealer; the implication is that she is learning, and is on her way to becoming a rather cold, tough character, but for now she’s usually on the ropes. 
So, without white males on top, it looks like Weeds’ race-sex-ethnicity pecking order is a bit  disheveled. No character has a lock, no group does. The whites dominate the show’s suburban side, the blacks dominate the show’s drug-business side. Heylia gives Nancy a lot of the ignorant-white-girl stuff, the kind of thing you get in a lot of black-white TV scenes, but here with a lot more such scenes. Also, the black characters talk to each other; their side of things gets told. (I don’t know if the version presented of “their side” is authentic or not; it’s mainly about white people.)
At the bottom of the status heap is a skinny Asian man (Maulik Pancholy) who’s there to be a boob and butt and then to get feminized. The black man has sex with Nancy; if the skinny Asian guy looks at her, it’s considered a joke — he’s a pencilneck with a crush. Then it turns out he’s gay. He’s allowed one dignified moment, his statement of his gayness, and then he becomes the latest slender Asian guy on a tv comedy show to be treated like a simpy imitation girl. (It’s quite a pattern: the slender assistant in 30 Rock, the slender assistant in Entourage, and now this guy.)  
When I talk about the show being decentered, having a disheveled pecking order, I want to acknowledge that this side of things may strike me especially hard just because my group, white guys, is not in charge. Anyway, what hits me about the show is just how everyone is scrambling not to sink down the ranks. Nobody has secure footing. There are alliances, shifting rankings, etc. groups get represented by strings of different characters with varying statuses, and individual statuses also bob back and forth over time. (And one of the groups represented is white guys. All of a sudden the white guys in a show are not just individuals, they’re representatives of a group and you look at them to see how white guys come off. For me that’s a switch.)
It’s like watching people’s heads bobbing up and down in a tank. You see who gets pulled down, who gets to keep her mouth in the air. The new race line-up: whites and blacks on top together, the whites’ position more secure but the blacks getting some plums; other races are locked out. supporting players at best, otherwise walk-ons and butts. And women get to talk to each other about business and friendship and all the rest of it. 

Female Creators Roundtable: Jane Austen and yes, eventually, some damned zombies.

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I’ve been on a big Timothy Hutton kick lately, so naturally I had to go watch Ordinary People, the famous 1980 film for which a young Hutton won an Oscar. Hutton, Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, Judd Hirsch, etc; they’re all fantastic. Actually, Hirsch doesn’t really rock my world–I think I’ve seen better psychiatrists on screen before–but the rest of them are such deeply felt performances that I couldn’t even bring myself to scoff at the emotional tribulations and petty problems of wealthy American suburbanites. You’re rich! You have no material wants! And okay, you’re in a life-destroying emotional hell caused by severe trauma. That actually is a real problem.

If I’d read the original novel by Judith Guest, instead of watching the film version directed by Robert Redford, I could have stopped there for my contribution to the women creators roundtable, but I didn’t, so I have to go another direction. What’s sort of been on my mind is the extraordinary subtlety of Ordinary People: it’s brimming with delicate, minute observations of the interactions of people, the better to show how fragile they are, how broken the Jarrett family is. In the middle of the film, there’s a perfectly awful conversation between Moore and Hutton’s characters, a scene in which the mother and son, who have practically no relationship at all, try to reminisce; in just a few seconds, it goes horribly sour and becomes apparent that these people, who have lived in the same house for years, do not have emotionally compatible memories of the past. They can’t connect.

The delicacy of the filmmaking reminded me of the experience of reading Jane Austen novels. In popular culture, at least, Austen’s works are mainly considered in terms of their romantic appeal–and I will say now that as I love subtle, understated passion in fiction, I think Pride and Prejudice is among the most totally awesome romances I’ve ever read–but there is also the manners part of her comedies of manners.

Once, when I was enthusing about the Regency Romance queen Georgette Heyer to a fellow bookseller, I said that she was all the fun of Jane Austen, but purely fluffy. He, an aspiring horror writer, replied that he thought Jane Austen was fluffy. If you’re oriented towards Kafka-esque horror, I guess that makes sense, but if you read Austen in the right mood, she can make your skin crawl without needing any addition of fucking zombies. (I’ve been predicting for years that the next natural step after the publishing boom of sexy vampire romance porn and werewolf romance porn was zombie romance porn, but this wasn’t quite was I was expecting.)

Actually, one of the biggest differences between Heyer and Austen, aside from the fact that the former was a twentieth century writer who ruled the romance genre spawned by the nineteenth century novels written by the latter, is that Heyer likes everybody. Her books feature plenty of dumb, petty characters who screw up life for her heroes, but she treats them gently. Heyer’s work is happy, and in her romances, which are deeply pleasurable fantasies, she chuckles at human foibles and leaves it at that. Austen is more cutting, less forgiving of fault, and the constraints of social expectations bind her characters more tightly. Her novels are not narratives of rebellion, nor anthropological studies, but observations of the way people live and feel within the existing frameworks of a society. Possibly I’m just reinventing the English Lit 101 wheel here, but man, that’s huge; that’s why we still read Austen. Somewhere between the psychological freakout of The Yellow Wallpaper and the extraterrestrial thrashing ooze of Lovecraft, there is the horror of going down to have breakfast with family members who think more about flossing their teeth than about your inner emotional life. (Parts of Ordinary People remind me of parts of Persuasion. You may get out alive; you may even get out sane, but you cannot get out of these scenarios without personal damage.) In terms of their literary worth, creeping insanity and New England towns that worship tentacled alien gods certainly have their merits, but most people probably deal more with the minor and major horrors of human dealings than with those first two things.

Austen doesn’t just reflect social mores in her books; she offers harsh judgement on people and behaviors, albeit discreetly voiced. It requires relatively close reading to get all that, as her prose is both precise in meaning and complex in structure. That’s part of the modern-day fun in reading these books, of course. Elizabeth and Darcy wouldn’t be half so romantic if they communicated in simpler language; it’s all about the delicacy and the intricacy of their conversations and abbreviated meetings, right up until their restrained-but-heartfelt mutual agreement of affection in the finale. I haven’t read all of Austen’s novels, but the same restraint ruled in Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, so I think it is kind of her thing. Encounters with nineteenth-century gothic romance have made it clear to me that the emotional restraint is definitely an Austen-specific thing, too, not a period feature.

…

My sister makes fun of the Keira Knightley movie version of Pride and Prejudice for being so emotionally naked; personally, I liked it because it had big, smelly-looking pigs running around in the yard and there was a lot of mud. What it lacked in mannered restraint, it made up for with literal earthiness; I thought that was kind of neat. There have already been like five billion screen adaptations of that book, most of which didn’t have goddamned Colin Firth; at least the Knightley version had some sort of unique concept in that it substituted minutely observed detail of the physical reality of middle-class country life in Regency England for the novel’s minutely observed detail of the social interactions of the middle class in Regency England, which played to the strengths of the adapting medium and still left a lot of space for unsaid feeing. It’s a film; can you blame them for wanting to make it atmospheric? And I suddenly realize I’ve come round full circle and am again talking about a movie with Donald Sutherland in it.

Speaking of questionable adaptations, though, anybody see that hideous recent Marvel comics version of Pride and Prejudice? I wish they’d beaten Grahame-Smith to the zombie pastiche thing, at least, since putting zombies into everything is I think Marvel’s main sales strategy these days.

Super Edward (Female Creators Roundtable)

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This is the first post in a roundtable on female creators here at HU. Tom, Miriam, and Cerusee will have posts up on this topic as the week goes on.
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As threatened, I did in fact see the Twilight movie this weekend. It was actually a good bit better than I thought it would be. I Admittedly, all the actual suspense and vampire stuff is incredibly clichéd – the good vampires vs. the bad vampires; the oh-so-painful need to keep from sucking human blood…the darkness! The tragedy! It’s Buffy light, which is saying something. Even the effects are mediocre and half-assed for the most part. Still, there were good parts. I’m not especially in to the pale slight goth-looking thing myself, but I have it on good authority that if you are, Kristin Stewart is something special. Moreover, her acting was quite good — she manages to come across as both painfully awkward and definitively intelligent, which is not all that easy to pull off. Indeed, the cast as a whole is a lot less cringe-inducing than you might expect. Partially I think it’s the director, Catherine Hardwicke (who also did the very decent Tank Girl movie) who seems to have a real talent for awkward high school interactions. The moment where one of Bella’s friends is asking her to the prom, and she’s so fixated on staring at Edward that she doesn’t even hear him is pretty priceless. Meeting the families was quite funny too…the vampire clan is both cute and freakish, and Edward’s exasperation with them is about exactly what you’d expect from a regular 17 year old dealing with a regularly weird family. I wished more than once that Stephanie Meyer had just written a teen high school drama without all the fantasy crap.

Though, of course, it probably wouldn’t have been popular enough to get made into a movie in that case. The movie seems almost scientifically designed to appeal to the tween-girl hindbrain. Several commenters over at this Robot 6 roundtable noted that the relationship dynamic between Edward and Bella is extremely creepy – and, yep, that’s the case. He’s a complete romanticized stalker, breaking into her house every day for weeks to stare at her sleeping, constantly talking about how his love for her compels him to hurt her. When he first sees her, he stares and stares and stares and is utterly creepy.

So right; encouraging teen girls to romanticize their stalkers — bad. Except that…the whole point of the story, what’s exciting about it, is that Edward will never hurt her. In fact, he won’t even have sex with her. He’ll barely kiss her. There’s a scene where he shows up in her bedroom, and he makes her hold still so he can kiss her…and things start to get hot and heavy, and he leaps away from her, bashing into the wall of her room. Then they spend the night talking, until she falls asleep in his arms. Her mom asks her “are you being safe?” at one point and the irony is that she isn’t, of course — Edward’s anything but safe! But the bigger irony is that she’s being super, ultra, duper safe. No condoms needed here. You might as well say that the story is fetishizing virginity as that they’re fetishizing stalking. Indeed, the whole point seems to be that they’re fetishizing both. The appeal is that you have all the darkness and danger and sex and lust you want, all the magic irresistible power of female sexuality – and its all utterly defanged. You can be dangerous and cool and sexy and stay completely safe and untouched.

What’s funny about the Twilight/San Diego Con flap, in fact, is that, if Twilight belongs anywhere, it’s at a comic convention. It’s the perfect female power dream complement to the male power dream inaugurated by Siegel and Shuster, and still running Superman is a fantasy for boys about having secret power and being invulnerable. Twilight is a dream for girls about having a secret lover who will keep you invulnerable. They’re both utterly transparent and infantile and clueless; Superman wears his underwear on the outside and that’s supposed to be tough and glamorous? Edward drives a Volvo and plays baseball and that’s supposed to be dark and cool? But that cluelessness is also a kind of innocence, and a charm. I don’t necessarily want to read the Twilight books, and lord knows I don’t ever need to read another Superman comic. You could argue that either vision is damaging or dangerous, as you could argue that any fantasy is unhealthy and unrealistic, I guess. But I don’t know. I was a kid, and, for that matter, a tween. I can see the appeal.

Update: Cerusee posts on Ordinary People, Jane Austen, and Zombies.