The Coming Post-Racial Genocide

Posted on February 26, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

X-Men: Days of Future Past proves Bryan Singer’s genius as a director. You wouldn’t think that racial genocide could be boring, but Singer manages to make it so. Partially he does it through the standard repertoire of tedium; lax dialogue; a convoluted plot that goes nowhere in particular before flopping over and giving up; a style that leaves even moderately talented actors like Hugh Jackman and Jennifer Lawrence adrift and disconnected from any recognizable plot arc or emotion. The narrative calls for Jackman’s Wolverine to be mellow lest he zap out of the past into the future; he responds by alternating between bland-face and stressed-face throughout the film; you can hear the audible click as Singer asks him to switch them.

The central failure of the movie, though, is that it systematically tries to erase the thing it should be about. The storyline is about a future in which the X-Men are hunted down and killed by an inimical human race. It’s a movie about genocide. And yet, the mechanics of genocide figure nowhere in the film. Not a single person expresses hatred or prejudice towards mutants; even the evil scientist Trask, who builds the killer Sentinels, seems to have no particular dislike of mutants; instead he seems to see them as a convenient bonding moment for humanity; a way to unite the human species against a common foe. Trask is Ozymandias and he has no more ill-feeling towards the X-Men than Ozymandias had towards his giant squid. The closest anyone in the movie comes to an expression of racialized disgust at mutants is a nurse who comments to a disguised Mystique that having blue skin might make you feel bad about your appearance. Hardly the stuff of Nazi propaganda, there.

Just in case you missed the point that the genocide is really nothing personal, the script goes out of its way, over and over, to let you know that there were lots of good humans who fought with the mutants against the killer Sentinels. Also, to let said regular humans were thought to to be likely to have mutant kids. This then is a mutant genocide in which humans neither hate mutants nor really single them out for harm. And yet, it’s not like the film is especially squeamish in other matters; Wolverine murders several people in casual cold blood. Video game body count death tolls are fine, apparently, just as long as no one really means anything by it.

Over the course of the film you get to see Sentinels murder various X-Men multiple times. Each murder is then erased by mucking about in the past, so you get the visceral rush of seeing folks dismembered without having to worry overly about the consequences. That seems to be the movie’s whole purpose; to enjoy genocide unmixed with any historical or ideological resonance — to turn the Holocaust into an inoffensive special effects extravaganza. In the future, the movie promises, the past won’t matter, and superpowers will reign down death divorced from animus, or even really from brain functioning. Drones will watch drones blow up without hate, or apology. Or interest.

That Time When Heavy Metal Went Quarterly

Posted on February 25, 2015 by RM Rhodes

When subscribers received their copy of the December 1985 Heavy Metal in the mail, they were greeted with a letter from publisher Leonard Mogel, printed on the paper mailing wrapper, informing them that with the next issue, Heavy Metal would be moving from a monthly publication schedule to a quarterly schedule. The reason provided was simple: readers were unhappy with the fact that the stories in the monthly version of Heavy Metal continued from one month to another. Quarterly publication allowed the magazine to increase the page count from 96 to 116 pages, add perfect binding and to publish complete stories in each issue. Oh, and the cover price went from $2.50 to $3.95 (the equivalent of jumping from $5.40 to $8.53, adjusting for inflation).

Having read every issue of Heavy Metal through 1986, I’m not entirely convinced that “the audience wants complete stories” was the whole reason for the shift in publication frequency. Looking at the individual magazines that were published in the years before the shift, it’s easy to spot how a combination of cost-cutting measures and behind-the-scenes change in staff might have also contributed. Having said that, “readers want complete stories” was convenient and easy to explain and a lot more audience-friendly than “we’ve had some staff issues.”

And boy, did they have staff issues in 1984 and 1985. But in order to explain the full impact of those staff issues, we have to go all the way back to the January 1978 issue of Heavy Metal, when John Workman became the magazine’s second Art Director. In that January issue, Workman was co-credited as Art Director with Harry Blumfield, who had been working in the position since the first issue. In February, Blumfield was gone and Workman was in.

Workman’s influence was not obvious at first, but over the course of the next two years, he built up the quality of the production. When editors Sean Kelly and Valerie Marchant were replaced by Ted White in 1980, Workman survived the transition. He also survived when Ted White left at the end of 1980 and was arguably one of the mainstays holding the staff together during the transition. Throughout this period, Workman’s name lingered near the middle of the credits on the masthead, never getting higher than fourth. This is significant, because I believe where the individual ranked on the masthead was indicative of where they fit into the staff hierarchy; whether or not this is true, it seems clear that members of the staff at the time believed it to be true.

In fact, Leonard Mogel’s name appears at the top of the masthead throughout most of 1981, reflecting a more active involvement in the day-to-day activities at the time. Julie Simmons-Lynch is credited as the editor, but it was obvious that she didn’t have the same kind of hands-on relationship with the production as Kelly/Marchant or White. They needed someone to pitch in and take care of operations.

Accordingly, in the March 1981 issue, a new name appeared on the masthead – Brad Balfour, Contributing Editor. His editorial efforts were largely forgettable, but Balfour was a terrible interviewer and badly botched an interview with Richard Corben which ran in June, July and August of that year. This series precipitated an angry full-page letter from Corben, who demanded that the letter be printed in full, with no edits. This letter appeared in the September 1981 issue, the same issue that was dedicated to the Heavy Metal movie that was released on August 7^th of that year. It was not the best use of editorial synergy and was largely reflective of the state of the magazine in 1981.

In addition to the movie, which brought in hordes of new readers, the other major event of 1981 was the release of an entire special issue, dedicated entirely to Moebius. This Moebius special featured (among other things) an introduction by Federico Fellini and the first few chapters of The Incal, a serial written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and drawn by Moebius. Workman and his team did a lot of the heavy lifting for this issue and Workman was given top billing in the masthead. Perhaps coincidentally, Mogel’s name was no longer on the masthead for the December 1981 issue of Heavy Metal and Workman’s name was second, right underneath Simmons-Lynch and above Contributing Editor Balfour. Workman’s name remained in this position on the masthead until he left in 1984.

Workman’s contribution to the magazine was everywhere and, thus, only truly obvious after he left. He contributed a lot to the look and feel of the individual issues, producing spot-art and the occasional one-page story when it was necessary to fill a gap. Although he was never credited as an editor, he was the Art Director in a publication dedicated to art and the magazine was better off having an Art Director in such a prominent role in the leadership.

The February 1982 masthead had some major changes. In addition to Brad Balfour becoming an Associate Editor, there were some new names, most notably Lou Stathis as Contributing Editor and Steven Maloff as Editorial Assistant. Since October 1981, Stathis had been working on Dossier – the spiritual heir to the columns that White had added when he was the editor in 1980. In this incarnation, Dossier was focused largely on music, with healthy digressions on movies, books and video games. There were far more writers than White had in 1980 and the topics bounced all over the place.

February 1982 masthead

Balfour was the first real editor of Dossier, but Stathis took over when he was promoted to Associate Editor in May 1982. As for Balfour, he was credited with “Special Projects” and disappeared from the masthead entirely in October 1982. Maloff was promoted to Contributing Editor in July 1982 and not a lot else changed in Heavy Metal leadership for the next two years.

Dossier November 1983

I would argue that this incarnation of Heavy Metal, with Workman, Stathis and Maloff, was one of the best periods of Heavy Metal, full stop. When Stathis wasn’t busy picking fights on the letters page (sample response: “Yeah, but I’ll bet your dick has to hunt and peck when it types.”), he was turning Dossier into a powerhouse review section that also ran interviews with all kinds of creative types, from Jerry Lewis to Jack Davis and everyone in between.

For his part, Workman was busy turning Heavy Metal’s visual content into something legendary. In addition to long-running series like Rock Opera by Ron Kierkegaard, The Bus by Paul Kirchner, Tex Arcana by John Findley, and I’m Age by Jeffery Jones, Workman also put together a series called June 2050. This featured one-page vaguely science fictional stories by various comics luminaries including Dick Giordano, Chris Browne, Drew Friedman, Rick Veitch, Bill Dubay, Len Wein, Todd Klein, Rick Geary, Howard Cruse and Pepe Moreno.

It’s not clear where Steven Maloff’s influence can be seen during this period.

In 1982, Heavy Metal released a second special issue, their first Best Of. In 1983, they decided that they had enough material to produce a 13^th issue, which was branded Even Heavier Metal. Both of these were masterminded by Workman and it’s interesting to note that neither Stathis or Maloff were credited in Even Heavier Metal (I don’t have Best Of #1) – presumably because there was only comics and art-related material on offer. This changed in 1984, when Son of Heavy Metal was released. Here, Maloff was credited as Associate Editor, the only masthead that shows him with this particular title (he was promoted to Managing Editor in July 1984).

1984 was not a particularly good year for Heavy Metal, production-wise. In January, Bird Dust, a story by Caza was reprinted (a first, for a magazine with so much content that it felt compelled to print 13^th issues three years running) – it had originally been printed in the November 1977 issue, two issues before Workman began. In April, the cover price went up to $2.50, the first price hike since February of 1980. The next month, in June, 16 of the 96 pages of the magazine changed from the usual glossy paper to newsprint; this was ameliorated somewhat by printing Dossier and Tex Arcana, a black and white feature, on the lower-quality paper. Coming so close upon the heels of the cover price hike, the lowered paper quality hints strongly at money problems.

And then John Workman left the magazine. The October 1984 issue was clearly laid out by Workman, although his name does not appear in the masthead and neither does his staff. It’s not entirely clear if the departure was planned or unplanned, but there is a clue in the masthead. Steven Maloff, who had been credited as Managing Editor since July 1984, was temporarily demoted back to Contributing Editor in this masthead, which is almost hidden on the credits page. It’s very subtle, but it’s absolutely a message of some kind in Maloff’s direction.

October 1984 editorial

November 1984 editorial

Indeed, the very next month, Maloff’s name was now above Stathis in the masthead, where Workman’s name resided since 1981. There was clearly some kind of power struggle and Workman lost. The magazine was not better off without Workman – the production quality of the magazine dropped significantly in that single month and never really recovered. It was Balfour all over again, only this time they didn’t have a movie bringing in new readers or John Workman providing support.

There is no better indication of how bad things got, production-wise, than the 13^th issue from 1985 – Bride of Heavy Metal. Workman was long gone by the time this came out and the little details that Workman put into the special issues he produced are not here. And instead of providing distinct credits, the whole issue was “Compiled by the Staff of Heavy Metal magazine,” which is as vague as it gets.

As bad as 1984 was, 1985 was worse. My copy of the February 1985 issue has a major printing error – the registration lines from the red ink don’t quite line up in one of the signatures, an issue that hadn’t been seen in years. In April, Maloff took over editing Dossier from Stathis. In May, the paper quality dropped again, including four bright white pages that were a step up from newsprint, but a step down from the normal glossy paper and tended to let the art from the other side of the page bleed through. In June, the whole magazine had switched to this new paper stock, replacing both the newsprint and the glossy paper. And, in July, Stathis was completely off the masthead. Maloff was now in charge of the magazine, for better or for worse.

One of the lesser ideas that Maloff introduced in July 1985 was a full page of trivia questions called Trivial Metal. In that issue, the answers were not provided and it was run as a contest – readers were encouraged to send in answers with a chance of winning a sweet satin-like jacket with the Heavy Metal logo printed on the back. The contest aspect of Trivial Metal didn’t last long and, by the next issue, the answers were printed upside down on the same page as the questions. This continued for another issue and, in October, the feature was not there. In November, neither was Maloff.

Trivia June 1985

His position was not filled, exactly. Michela Nonis had been promoted to Production Manager in April 1985 and, absent Maloff, became the default bigwig. It’s difficult to tell if going quarterly was her idea or not, but it was certainly a decision rapidly made. The September 1985 issue has a subscription ad that features a good deal for a three year subscription, which pretty clearly indicates that the staff thought they were going to be publishing a monthly magazine for the foreseeable future. There were no subscription ads in October and, in November, the last installment of Dossier published seven interviews – clearing out the backlog of interviews that they had stocked up over time.

The subscription ads and editorials in the December 1985 issue leaned very heavily on the idea that readers had been clamoring for complete stories in every issue for years and the change in format was completely not a last-minute decision by a staff that had run out of ideas for ways to cut costs. This was clearly propaganda, but propaganda that was easier to promulgate than explaining how they’d lost their star Art Director in a power struggle over whose name got to be on the masthead of the 13^th issue a year earlier.

December 1985 editorial

December 1985 subscription

October 1984 subscription

I’m convinced that the loss of John Workman led directly to the transition of Heavy Metal from a monthly magazine to a quarterly magazine. True, each of the new issues contained only complete stories, but that was not necessarily a good thing. In January 1983, at the height of the Workman/Stathis years, the magazine boasted fifteen features, not including Dossier. Five of them were short – half-page or single-page comics, but the range and quality of the material was extensive. The first issue of the new format boasted seven full-length features. One featured short, episodic stories and the other offered novellas that were promised to be stand-alone (ie, no sequels).

In addition, there was a certain frisson that came from reading several serialized comics right on top of one another, anthologies being sort of the entertainment equivalent of eating a multi-layer cake or club sandwich. There were a lot of weird, conflicting flavors, true, but the experience was richer for it. Reading two (or more) serials at the same time over the course of several periodical installments creates an associative memory between the two (or more) stories, an effect that can only be achieved through sequential episodic serialization. Complete, non-sequential stories offer a pale echo of the same experience, but cannot (by definition) offer the experience of following a serial across multiple installments.

Publishing quarterly didn’t last. After three years, Heavy Metal changed their publication schedule again in 1989, moving to bimonthly and eventually being sold to Kevin Eastman in 1992. In nearly nine years as a monthly magazine, over a third of all Heavy Metal issues to date were published between 1977 and 1985. It was a strong brand that spawned a movie, innumerable branded clothing options and a number of imitators (the so-called ground level anthologies, most notably Epic Illustrated, which coincidentally folded in 1986). It was a mainstay on the magazine rack, month in and month out. Dropping the frequency of publication really limited its visibility in a big way.

In my opinion, the biggest loss was Dossier, which didn’t fit the new format. The Dossier section turned readers on to any number of great bands, songs, albums, movies, authors and other entertainment options they might not have otherwise been exposed to. Dossier had the potential to become a monthly guide to cool, weird stuff for a certain kind of reader with access to a decent record store. Lou Stathis was a contrary proto-goth with a severe aversion to dickheads, but he had great taste in music.

In 1986, as the publication frequency changed, there was an attempt to spin Dossier off into a weekly newsletter called Heavy Metal Report. I can find no information about this spinoff online (and my father, who I inherited my collection from, was clearly not interested because he had no copies). The loss of this review section remade Heavy Metal into more of a pure comics magazine, significantly disconnected from contemporary pop culture.

At SPX, Joe McCulloch reminded me that the stories published in the quarterly years were actually pretty good. A Corto Maltese story by Hugo Pratt, the introduction of Druuna by Eleuteri Serpieri, an old Moebius story and a new Enki Bilal story were all printed in the first year. In fact, one of the few things that survived both the departure of John Workman and the switch from monthly to quarterly was the overall quality of the comics stories. Not every story was a winner, but when they were good, they were very, very good. Moving forward, there were just fewer of them, complete in every issue.

The First Superhero Story

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Action Comics No. 1 was the Big Bang of the Golden Age of Comics, the start point for superhero history. Unless you count the actual Big Bang, which was about fourteen billion years earlier. Or, if you favor a different species of evidence, more like six thousand. Genesis 1:2 opens with a black hole: “the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep,” followed by God’s “Let there be light,” the Biblical Big Bang.

Milton doesn’t give an exact date in Paradise Lost, but he says God created Earth just after booting Satan out of heaven:

There is a place
(If ancient and prophetic fame in Heav’n
Err not) another World, the happy seat
Of some new Race call’d Man, about this time
To be created like to us, though less
In power and excellence, but favour’d more
Of him who rules above;

That’s Beelzebub, one of Satan’s lieutenants, talking. He thinks attacking Earth is a better military strategy that storming Heaven. When Satan flaps across the void to check out God’s latest creation, Milton likens it to the wonder of looking upon “some renown’d Metropolis / With glistering Spires and Pinnacles adorn’d.”

Paradise Lost is basically a superhero comic book, with long slug fests between Lucifer’s League of Fallen Angels and Archangel Michael’s Mighty Avengers. My father remembers hearing the tale from the nuns in his school. He emailed me about that recently:

“Have you ever commented in your writings on what I consider the archetypal superhero plot, one that has its origin in the Bible? I’m referring to the story of archangel Michael being called on to save heaven from being taken over by Lucifer by having a violent confrontation with Lucifer and vanquishing him. This story is so embedded in the western religious psyche that to this day Catholics still pray to St. Michael to ‘defend us in battle’ with Lucifer.”

It’s not the sort of question you might expect from a retired research chemist, but my father only entered the field because he had his brother’s textbooks after his brother became a priest instead. My father’s colleagues were all theoretical physicists, but he preferred working alone in his lab. He said his job was playing Twenty Questions with God. Every day he had time for one: Does it have something to do with . . .

“The reason I think the Michael/Lucifer story is of critical importance is that it injected into the human psyche the concept of the need of an ubermensch (not a collective effort) to defeat evil and save the people. Ever since people are continually looking for such a person, most of the time to their eventual detriment when they believe they have found one. I believe this powerful subconscious longing in the western world for a superhero to save us from evil originated from the Michael/Lucifer story.”

“That’s pretty good, Dad. I hadn’t thought of Michael as the original superhero. I may have to flagrantly steal your insight.”

“I would be delighted if you chose to. An interesting part of the Michael/Lucifer myth is that it is not spelled out in any detail in the Bible. There is only a brief snippet about Michael slaying dragons in Revelation and that’s it – nothing about a great battle between Michael and Lucifer. In the long version, as I learned from the nuns, Lucifer is portrayed as the greatest and most brilliant of the angels. In his great pride, he decides to challenge God as the ruler of heaven. So God dispatches Michael to battle Lucifer, which he does, defeats him and sends him down to the lower regions. (Why an all-powerful God didn’t take on the job himself was never explained.) This long version came down through the centuries strictly through oral tradition. The fact that it has been retold countless times for probably over two thousand years demonstrates, I believe, its powerful grip on the human imagination.”

When I looked up Revelations 12, I couldn’t help imagining how Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko would illustrate the passages. The New Testament author even divides his script into panels. You just need some caption boxes:

[7] And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, [8] And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. [9] And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

I’d assign Rev. 20 to Neal Adams or Bill Sienkiewicz:

[1] And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. [2] And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, [3] And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.

Daniel 12:1 makes Michael sounds like a superhero too: “At that time, Michael, the great heavenly prince, the grand defender and guardian of your people, will arise.” Thewarriorprince.us, a website devoted to him, says his “prime duty is to guard and defend the people of God collectively, and those who invoke him individually, from Satan and his demons, as well as their wiles and attacks.” And, according to Milton, those chains he uses on Satan are adamantine, basically Wolverine’s claws. No wonder God made him team leader:

Go Michael of Celestial Armies Prince,
And thou in Military prowess next
Gabriel, lead forth to Battel these my Sons
Invincible, lead forth my armed Saints
By Thousands and by Millions rang’d for fight;
Equal in number to that Godless crew
Rebellious, them with Fire and hostile Arms
Fearless assault, and to the brow of Heav’n
Pursuing drive them out from God and bliss,
Into thir place of punishment, the Gulf
Of Tartarus, which ready opens wide
His fiery Chaos to receave thir fall.

What The Bachelor Says About Hysteria and Feminine Subjectivity

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Tom Syverson

Over the last few weeks, Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum has held a series of lectures on the historical context of hysteria and the often bizarre treatment of hysterical patients. In her first talk, Asti Hustvedt, author of Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris, described in fascinating detail the transformation that hysteria underwent as a result of the work of revolutionary neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.

Charcot’s innovation was in re-characterizing hysteria from an intrinsically feminine form of madness to a neurological disorder like any other, capable of affecting both men and women alike. His research at the famed Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in the late 1800’s was dedicated to studying and popularizing this new approach. Though they didn’t last long, his ideas about hysteria changed the way we thought about the human mind and gender, laying significant basis for the Freudian revolution just a few decades later.

Obviously sensing he was onto something, Charcot became known for putting on public events in which his hysterical patients would literally “perform” their symptoms for spectators. Charcot would personally select patients with the “best” symptoms to present, inducing the outrageous and shocking behavior through hypnotism and other quasi-occult practices. In this way, suffering from severe hysteria became a twisted form of celebrity.

The other night, with Hustvedt’s discussion fresh in my head, a provocative thought occurred to me. Charcot died in 1893, but his popularization of hysterical femininity as celebrity is still with us today. Inducing and performing hysterical symptoms form the basis of much of what we call “reality TV.” Nowhere is this more apparent than on ABC’s The Bachelor.

Put another way: Chris Harrison is the cultural reincarnation of Jean-Martin Charcot, and the Bachelor Mansion bears a striking similarity to the Salpêtrière, transported from nineteenth-century France to modern-day Los Angeles.

Let me explain.

Throughout this discussion, “hysterical” should not be construed in its common, disrespectful sense as simply an “out of control” woman. I’m sensitive to the fact that the concept of hysteria has been historically misinterpreted, abused, and put to obviously chauvinist ends.

s used here, “hysterical” is no insult. I am not attacking or judging the women on The Bachelor, and I also do not want to oversimplify them as people. My analysis represents simply one view of one aspect of their individual personalities.

I am using the term “hysteria” in its strictly psychoanalytic sense. Hysteria has been described in various ways by differing schools of psychoanalysis, but each of them seem to associate it with gender identity and the need for love.

Freud founded psychoanalysis based on his study and treatment of hysterical women, initially linking it to repulsion over childhood sexual experiences or fantasies. But over the years, Freud’s conception has been significantly refined.

For example, Hendrika Freud (no relation) describes the hysteric’s situation as this: I want to be loved, and how can I be loved? Slavoj Žižek formulates the hysterical question as a crisis of sexual-symbolic identity: What is it about me that causes you to say I am a woman? Darian Leader remarks that while men resent women’s bodies for not “speaking” to them, “hysterics are in general women whose bodies do in fact speak.” Christopher Bollas says that the hysteric lacks “an unconscious sense of maternal desire for the child’s sexual body –especially the genitals.” Melanie Klein links the feminine propensity for hysteria with jealous aggression and guilt that young girls often feel toward the maternal body.

But more specifically for our purposes, consider the view of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his disciples. According to translator and practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink, “the hysteric seeks to divine the Other’s desire and to become the particular object that, when missing, makes the Other desire…the [hysterical] subject constitutes herself, not in relation to the erotic object she herself has ‘lost’, but as the object the Other is missing.”

In other words, in the clinical Lacanian sense a hysteric is someone who cancels out a portion of her subjectivity in an attempt to become the object-cause of desire for some Other –in our case, the Bachelor.

Fink uses feminine designations purposefully. The history of psychoanalysis confirms that the historical association between hysteria and femininity is no mere anachronism or prejudice, but says something deeper about the relationship between culture and mind. Freud struggled for his entire life to divorce the two, but as noted by Juliet Mitchell in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, in the end he found himself back where he started: either something about hysteria was inherently feminine, or something about femininity was inherently hysterical.

In her book Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria, Mitchell says, “every context which describes hysteria links it to gender –but not, of course, always in the same way. Historically, the various ways in which gender differences and hysteria are seen to interact should tell us something both about gender…and about hysteria.”

Thus, the paradox that so agonized Freud is at least partially resolved if we focus on Lacan’s hysterical structure. According to this view, the historical and structural link between hysteria and femininity is simply a result of the extent to which women have been asked to become objects of male libidinal desire across cultures and throughout time.

With this view in mind, let’s go back to our conception of The Bachelor as a modern version of Charcot and the hysterical performances of the Salpêtrière. It is not enough to merely remark that it is fun or interesting to see women acting hysterical on TV. The question, of course, is why are they acting that way?

The Bachelor’s formula is as simple as it is effective: anoint a Bachelor, round up a number of single women and put them in a situation in which they’re asked to “win” the Bachelor’s heart. Ask them to dedicate themselves fully to attracting an idealized Other, to transform their identities into the object-cause of desire for that Other –in other words, adopt precisely the Lacanian structure of hysteria.

If we follow Lacan, adopting the object-cause means canceling out at least some, and perhaps too much, subjectivity in the process. Bollas offers a similar view from the point of view of object relations theory, arguing that “the hysteric’s ailment, then, is to suspend the self’s idiom in order to fulfill the primary object’s desire…the hysteric’s primary object will be the object-in-waiting that the hysteric must find in order to be recast as the other’s object of desire.” As the show aptly demonstrates, adopting this psychic posture can have disastrous consequences for one’s emotional health.

Thus, it’s no surprise that the institution of The Bachelor cultivates a smorgasbord of hysterical behavior in its contestant-victims: extreme jealousy, decentered identity, over-attachment to a functional stranger, histrionic behavior, and a lot, a whole lot of crying.

On this most recent season, no contestant modeled this account more consistently than Ashley I. Variously referred to as “the Kardashian” or “the virgin,” Ashley has displayed far and away the most frantic, bizarre, and irrational behavior of the season. She identifies closely with Disney princesses; she puts on ostentatious evening attire to sulk by herself and eat corn on the cob; she looks daggers at the other girls and adopts an annihilative stance; she runs away from the Bachelor in shame only to immediately reverse direction in desperation; each moment a prelude to tears. At her most passionately hysterical she becomes emotionally disintegrated, radically oscillating between sobs and bursts of dark laughter.

As indicated by her nickname, Ashley has never had sex and never had a long-term relationship. This fact, not altogether completely uncommon or extraordinary, seems to dominate the entirety of her personality.

But what is the value of Ashley’s virginity, and who values it? When Mackenzie hears about it early on, she expresses jealousy at the perceived advantage it gives Ashley. Virginity is frequently treated not as an aspect of Ashley’s personality so much as an object of libidinal exchange. We rarely hear what virginity means to Ashley. Instead, we hear Ashley worrying and speculating about what her virginity means to the Bachelor. (Compare Becca, also a virgin and the complete opposite of Ashley on this point.)

What I’m proposing here is that a major part of Ashley’s self is alienated in the Bachelor’s desire. Her sense of desire is one step removed from her, because it only accrues to her once filtered through the Bachelor’s desire.

Lacking the subjectivity necessary to own her own desire and instead devoted entirely to inhabiting the object-cause of the Bachelor’s desire, Ashley’s whole personality seems to be on the verge of collapse. That kind of dramatic tension is what makes Ashley and other Bachelor alumnae so compelling to watch. Love her or hate her, Ashley is a striking example of what happens when you structure too much of your personality around being the thing you think the other wants. All of us can relate to that.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t Ashley but Kelsey who actually experienced a collapse on a recent episode. Faced with the imminent possibility of being sent home, Kelsey forcefully confronted the Bachelor with an intimate story of personal loss. This was supposed to be her ace in the hole, a last-ditch gambit designed to ensure her desirability for at least a few more weeks.

But it didn’t work. Something told her that the Bachelor still wanted to send her home.

Ostensibly freaking out that he’s about to send a widow packing, the Bachelor panicked and canceled the night’s cocktail party in favor of standing outside on the balcony and staring into the bleak, abyssal night sky. Kelsey, suddenly overcome by anxiety, began rambling profusely to the other girls. Suddenly, she disappeared to a secluded corner of the mansion and was soon found lying on the floor, whimpering and writhing in anguish, in need of medical attention.

Some of the other women accused Kelsey of “faking” the attack, but that interpretation makes so little sense strategically that I am forced to assume the opposite. Whatever label you’d like to use, it appeared to me that Kelsey was experiencing extreme psychic pain at the moment.

Kelsey’s breakdown was about the hysteric’s relationship to rejection. Fink notes, “the hysteric constitutes herself as the object that makes the Other desire, since as long as the Other desires, her position as object is assured: a space is guaranteed for her within the Other.”

But what if the Other stops desiring? What if the Bachelor still wants to send you home? Psychically, the result is catastrophic: you disappear. As Žižek once put it, because “she is nothing but ‘the symptom of man,’ her power of fascination masks the void of her nonexistence, so that when she is finally rejected, her whole ontological consistency is dissolved.”

In other words, consider our understanding that becoming an object-cause of desire for the man involves a certain annulment of feminine subjectivity. Thus, when rejection approached and Kelsey’s feminine “mask” was pulled back to reveal the canceled subjectivity beneath, she suffered absolute existential devastation.

The “symptoms” (if the reader will permit me that word) suffered by Ashley and Kelsey may seem tame compared to the convulsions, somnambulism, and practically supernatural abilities of Charcot’s classical hysterics. But consider that some psychoanalysts and commentators have proposed that hysteria still exists today in concealed or muted form.

As Elaine Showalter discusses in her book Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media, things like chronic fatigue and multiple personality disorder may have roots similar to those of hysteria. Only fifteen years ago, Bollas called for a reassessment of hysteria in the psychotherapeutic community based on his view that hysterical patients are frequently misdiagnosed as borderline personalities.

But more broadly, hysterical behavior may be found anywhere a person –a woman, usually –is somehow motivated or forced to become the object-cause of desire for someone else.

Today, it’s easy and typical to think of hysteria as either a historical curiosity of the pre-Freudian and early Freudian world, or a chauvinist label applied to women considered “difficult” by patriarchal society. But as psychoanalysis and The Bachelor tell us, hysterical femininity is still with us –and it will be until normative concepts of femininity radically change, until feminine identity is allowed and encouraged to take up the position of sexual subject.

For more like this check out syvology.com and follow Tom on Twitter – @syvology

Static Vs. The Race Hustlers

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Last week I wrote a short post about Static Shock in which I argued that the book was mediocre genre product, but that at least it was mediocre genre product that made a gesture at diversity. Better non-racist mediocrity than racist mediocrity, I argued.

I still think that’s more or less the case…but is Static really not racist? It does have a black hero, definitely — but then, there are the black villains.

In particular, there’s Holocaust, the evil mastermind behind the first arc. Holocaust is a gangster, but he’s not just a gangster. He’s a gangster with a racial grievance. He tells Static that the hero is insufficiently appreciated. He adds that those on top in the world got there by “luck” — and not just luck, but privilege. “It’s connections. Who you know. Who your daddy knows. It’s birthright.”

But Holocaust, again, is the bad guy. His critique is part of his evilnness. The equality he wants is the opportunity to get cut in on the business of the Mafia; his vision of social justice is equality in the criminal underworld. He’s essentially a right-wing caricature of civil rights advocates; Al Sharpton as brutish, deceitful thug. When Holocaust starts to kill people, Static sees him for what he is, and abandons his evil advisor to return to his superheroic independent battle for law and order. The possibility that law and order might itself be part of a structural inequity is carefully kicked to the curb, revealed to be the seductive philosophy of an untrustworthy supervillain.

You couldn’t ask for a much clearer illustration of J. Lamb’s argument that the superhero genre is at its core anti-black, and that it therefore co-opts efforts at token diversity. The genre default is for law and order. Law and order, in the world outside superhero comics, is inextricable from America’s prison industrial complex and the conflation of black resistance struggles with black criminality. Static, a black hero, is defined as a “hero” only when he aligns himself with the white supremacist vision that sees structural critique as a cynical ruse.

I think it is possible for superhero comics to push back against that vision of heroism to some degree. Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol does in some ways, for example. But Static is hampered by its indifferent quality; it’s not interested, willing, or able to rethink or challenge basic genre pleasures or narratives. Notwithstanding a patina of diversity, it seems like a superhero comic really does need to be better than mediocre if it’s going to provide a meaningful challenge to super-racism.

J. Lamb on Why Superhero Diversity Isn’t Enough

Posted on February 21, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

J. Lamb left this comment on my post about Static Shock and diversity in mediocre genre product; I thought I’d highlight it here.
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“C’mon Noah, just drop the empty rhetoric and empty assertions about “quality” and simply concede my initial point: any conceivable writer writing a black superhero comic character is going to be told by a concerned person that they are doing it wrong.” – Pallas

I disagree with this assertion.

People are, as always, encouraged to write comics and other pop culture material that can be judged on its own merits. The difficulty I sketch above involves my assertion that writing a non-White superhero protagonist necessitates some interaction with/ consideration of the notion that the superhero concept itself is racialized. We’re talking about a genre developed when Jim Crow segregation provided the unchallenged public policy state and local American governments applied to Black citizens. We’re talking about a genre developed when successful navigation of American race politics for Black people likely meant that they or someone they know would endure domestic terrorism imposed by fellow citizens and unchallenged in the courts. Why must we believe that a literary genre developed during this time has not racial component, when practically all other American popular culture of the era does?

For me, it’s completely immaterial that the Milestone creators respected the superhero concept enough to offer Black superheroes; McDuffie et al. and their contributions should not be defied by present day observers. Icon’s an alien posing as Black Republican who adopts Superman’s public interaction (demigod savior/ crimefighter) to assist lower income Black Americans whose choices he often disdains. Where the books reflect on respectability politics and reduced economic opportunities for the Black underclass, the material works (at least in the issues I’ve read.)

But when Icon cannot envision better conflict resolution solutions outside of punching the living daylights out of metahumans he doesn’t like — when Icon reverts to the moral position of a stereotypical superhero — the material’s innovation dies, and you’re left with run-of-the-mill 90’s superhero fights. That’s less interesting, and done better elsewhere.

It’s not about who characters like Rocket, Icon, and Static represent, or who the intended audience for their comics may have been (Moore wrote Watchmen for adolescent boys, too.) The question for any comic creator interested in developing a character of color should be “How does this character define their connection with this particular identity, and why should it matter to me?”

A serious attempt at answering this would prevent characters who are tangentially (insert minority status here) from standing in for meaningful diversity in panel, and would force comic narratives to stop ignoring meaningful diversity in favor of an inker’s burnt sienna hues alone. I’ve yet to find a superhero comic that accomplishes this feat effectively; just because the Milestone folk tried does not mean they succeeded.

So of course creators and their work will be evaluated, sometimes harshly. I recognize that for many, my position is heresy. But since Milestone, we’ve seen material like Captain America: Truth and Ms. Marvel and others. Gene Yang’s writing Superman soon, and David Walker will take on Cyborg. Plenty of comic creators will attempt to prove the superhero concept compatible with meaningful identity politics, and I wish them well. But too often the desire to see oneself in panel and on screen, the hope that at some point a person can stride into a comic book shop or turn on the CW and find a person of color in the gaudy lycra and skintight spandex of the superhero with neon strobes flashing from their fingertips overrides all other considerations among progressive comic fans. I oppose this.

Pallas, it’s completely fair to pan any comic for not being “super complex society changing treatise” serious about race. I should not have to assume that the characters of color I read about are only paint job Black. If so, then the audience for superhero diversity has all the ethical standing as the audience for an Al Jolson blackface revue, and I’m not paying $3.99 US for burnt cork comics.

Sam Zabel or How the pen became mightier than the penis

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Ng Suat Tong

Sam Zabel is suffering from a terminal case of writer’s block. He also thinks, not without reason, that he is a talentless hack churning out inferior versions of late Golden Age superhero comics to the strangely obliging masses. If only he was as accepting of his lot as the other hacks who have prospered mightily at the offices of Marvel and DC; if only he was able to earn a living doing comics like Pickle, one time home of that classic of alternative comics, Hicksville.

The panacea to this obstruction, that pill for renewed creativity (as in Hicksville), is other comics. The “magic pen” of the title is merely an excuse to explore and retread (selectively) the history of comics—from the innocent sexism of the non-superhero golden age to the somewhat more sexually liberated climes of an all-female pirate comic (a kind of Paradise Island with eye patches and peg legs). Mayhem, fight scenes, and assorted lessons on creativity are all offered up with a sense of harmless fun and deference to easy readability.

The conceit here is that a number of comics of differing vintages and genres have been drawn with a magic pen. These comics if given the breath of life draw the reader into them, allowing them to inhabit their fantasy worlds. Zabel finds just such a comic in a used book shop, unattended and unloved but seemingly placed there for the singular purpose of reinvigorating his person and artistry. By tale’s end, we are gently apprised—as with all fantasies about the creation of art—that all pens are magic and we need only put them to paper to concoct these “inhabitable” worlds.

Horrocks seems as eager as Scott McCloud once was to syncretize and reconcile the comics form with the long history of art itself. In one of the final scenes in the book, the protagonists of his tale are brought back to the “the beginning”; to the first pen, a finger dipped in red ochre doodling on a cave wall and hand stencils produced by spitting pigments on to an outstretched hand—all this as it once was in places like Cueva de El Castillo and Chauvet cave.

Horrocks affection for the comics form is well known but Sam Zabel also reveals his boundless passion for the naked female body. The first world that Zabel gets sucked into is that of a comic called, The King of Mars —a kind of third-rate Barsoom where the inhabitants are expecting a god king-creator. As such, they quickly latch on to Zabel as the most likely suspect. The women here are all green and sex-starved. To some this will seem unexpected and liberating, to others almost interminable in its execution. And while opinions can differ, there is something to be said for the idea that “less is more.”

But this too might be part of Horrock’s divine plan, that jumble of suffocating nakedness being a metaphor for the excess that extinguishes creativity. A pity then that the nudity here is so unalluring, so lacking in temptation and passion. Seldom have so many naked women been deployed in the service of a comic so thoroughly unerotic.

All of this is a function of Horrock’s far greater gifts as a writer than as an artist. In Horrock’s survey of the exquisite prurience of pre-Code comics, his almost unvarying line and its distinct lack of sensuality is a very great handicap. At one point in the comic, Horrocks does appear to be attempting a different style…

…which gives the reader some hope that a Jungle Girl will appear with all the skill of the illustrators of old (or at least the crudely rushed pen work of the early Sheena) but this is not to be. Horrocks doesn’t have the ability to emulate the line of an Alex Raymond or even an Iger Studio artist. Nor is this the kind of bravura display of cartooning where one might expect to find “normal” characters inhabiting the worlds of a Fletcher Hanks; which means that any sense of mystery or delight in the archaic remnants of a different age rest solely in the minds of the reader. While Horrocks attempts to emulate the compositions and use of negative space of rough drawn horror manga classics, Miki (Zabel’s Japanese school girl guide through the “magic pen” comics) is never quite convincing; she will never look like that cross between Sailor Moon, Doraemon and Astro Boy which she is supposed to be.

The fantasy worlds of the comics Zabel is drawn into are as flat and unexciting as the dumpster truck he finds himself in when ejected from those worlds. If an “eyeball” seems like an interesting mode of interplanetary transportation, its actual deployment on the page leaves something to be desired. One need only compare the fertile world building creativity found in the likes of the reinvented Prophet comic or Farel Dalrymple’s Wrenchies to notice the lamentable gap in accomplishment.

While Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen works on a certain level as a reassuring tale of a mid-life crisis expunged, it also creates a simplistic notions of right and wrong fantasies, or at least divisions between fantasies which are generally safe and those which are dangerous.

In this schemata, the John Carter-Buck Rogers-Flash Gordon fantasies of old are of the generally harmless variety while the hentai worshiping otakus are not to be trusted—and are perhaps even to be blasted into a reformed Jungle Girl comic to get their asses whipped. It is an easy formulation since it conforms to popular taste and morality in such matters. It is the hentai otaku who hides his wares on a subway train and not the fan reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. I suspect that most people would much rather be caught reading A Princess of Mars on the train then the tentacle rape fantasies of Hokusai and Kuniyoshi.

At one point in the comics, Horrocks presents one of the foundations of his comic, that…

“even a comic book can shape the real world, contributing to the culture, encouraging attitudes and assumptions…”

Not for Horrocks then are notions that we are all predestined products of familial and genetic destiny. How art actually shapes culture and attitudes is, however, altogether less certain and barely broached in the pages of the comic; all we can gather on this issue from Horrocks is incidental and second hand. Suffice to say that the villain of the tale is a cartoonist who has tipped pages of his deranged rape (?) fantasies into several more sedate and juvenile manga. He is, in other words, a sociopathic sexual deviant the likes of which we see every other week on American primetime TV.

Which leads one to wonder which ideas have the greatest influence—the sexual fantasies of a marginalized group of readers or the vastly more popular works of the golden age of pulp; the embarrassing sexual fetishes of a select few or the John Carter stories of the 21^st century —like this one, which makes plain the colonial template upon which the Martian fantasies were based.

Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen could be described as a post-modern, vaguely autobiographical meta-comic, but it also remains safely conventional —I suspect more by accident than through any concerted planning. Thus the exoticization of manga—the short skirts, school girl uniforms, panty shots, and general deviance – is less the result of xenophobia then of simply reaching for the easiest examples at hand. The effortless rehabilitation of the sexist Kiwi cartoonist of the early twentieth century is contrasted with the irredeemable villainy of the hentai reader and fantasist simply because every story needs an explosive climax and a moral. Horrocks challenge to this easy equation is that Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is a veritable hentai comic in itself, a phallic object with a PG-13 label—innumerable pairs of naked breasts are on display but only one dick-sucking scene as far as I can tell.

It seems that a sizable number of white male confessionals of this modern age tend to lead back to Portnoy’s Complaint—that “disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” The impotency of Philip Roth’s protagonist is replaced by Zabel’s writer’s block. We can add to this the defiant sexuality often of an embarrassing nature (if one considers fantasies about fucking several Orion slave girls at once to be embarrassing) and other assorted masturbatory revelations. There are no prostitutes in the comic but cradle snatching is elevated to its preeminent place in our great sequential art form. All this mixed in with a few snippets on the artistic impulse and various ethical considerations.

The main difference would appear to be that where Portnoy remains self-pityingly pathetic, Zabel finally gets to reunite with his family. Where “Portnoy” gets to write a famous novel, Zabel/Horrocks finally has a new long form comic after years of silence. After all, isn’t this the way all pulp fantasies end—happily ever after?

_______

Further Reading

From an interview at Paste Magainze:

“The central question, in a way, is asked out loud by Sam halfway through: “Do we bear a moral responsibility for our fantasies?” The book sets out to have a conversation about that question.”

“I’m totally fascinated by wish fulfillment fantasies: how they work; their strange familiar contours; the weird mix of yearning, pleasure, embarrassment and shame we feel about them; what happens when they become “property” — a franchise or brand. Obviously, that’s a big part of the history and landscape of comics, but I think it’s also an underrated element in so-called “literary fiction” and “serious” art.The Magic Pen gave me an opportunity to unpack some of my own ambivalence about wish-fulfillment fantasies, but it also helped me find my way back to their power and joy.”

“The big shift for me was to stop giving myself such a hard time about my work. I had spent years feeling very uncomfortable with my drawing, because it was so clumsy and inept. I tried to draw like other people; the first issue of Atlas (Drawn & Quarterly, 2001) is full of my attempts to draw like Edmond Baudoin, Blutch, Tibor Gergely and other artists I admire. But it’s kind of a mess. The reality is, I can’t draw like other people, I can only draw like me. Luckily, no one else can draw exactly the way I do, either.”

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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