Bloody Conventions

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I’ve avoided reading We3 for years, in part because I find depictions of violence against animals upsetting, and I was afraid I’d find it painful to read.

As it turns out, though, I needn’t have worried. We3 does have some heart-tugging moments for animal-lovers — but they’re safely buried and distanced by the towering pile of bone-headed standard-issue action movie tropes. There’s the hard-assed military assholes, the scientist-with-a-conscience, the bum with a heart of gold and an anti-fascist streak…and of course the cannon-fodder. Lots and lots of cannon fodder. We3 clearly wants to be about the cruelty of animal testing and, relatedly, about the evils of violence — themes which Morrison covered, with some subtlety and grace, back in his classic run on Animal Man. In We3, though, he and Frank Quitely gets distracted by the pro-forma need to check the body-count boxes.
 

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The plot is just the standard rogue supersoldiers fight their evil handlers. The only innovation is that the supersoldiers are dogs and cats and bunnies. That does change the dynamic marginally; you get more sentiment and less testosterone. But the basic conventions are still in place, which means that the comic is still mostly about an escalating series of violent confrontations more or less for their own sake. It’s hard to really take much of a coherent stand against violence and cruelty when so much of your genre commitments and emotional energy are going into showing how cool your deadly bio-engineered cyborg killer cat is. To underline the idiocy of the whole thing, Morrison has us walked through the entire comic by various military observers acting as a greek chorus/audience stand-in to tell us how horrifying/awesome it is to be watching all of this violence/pathos. You can see him and Frank Quitely sitting down together and saying, “Wait! what if the plot isn’t quite thoroughly predictable enough?! What if the Superguy fans experience a seizure when they can’t hear the grinding of the narrative gears?! Better through in some boring dudes explicating; that always works.”

The point here isn’t that convention is always and everywhere bad. Rather, the point is that conventions have their own logic and inertia, and if you want to say something different with them, you need to think about it fairly carefully.

Antonio Prohias’ Spy vs. Spy comics, for example, are every bit as conventional as We3, both in the sense that they use established tropes (the zany animated slapstick violence of Warner Bros. and Tom and Jerry), and in the sense that they’re almost ritualized — to the point where in the collection Missions of Madness, Prohias is careful to alternate between black spy victory and white spy victory in an iron and ludicrous display of even-handedness. Moreover, Spy vs. Spy, like We3, is, at least to some extent, trying to say something about violence with these tropes — in this case, specifically about the Cold War.

Obviously, a lot of the fun of Spy vs. Spy is watching the hyperbolic and inventive methods of sneakiness and destruction…the black spy’s extended (and ultimately tragic) training as a dog to infiltrate white headquarters, or the white spy’s extended efforts to dig into black HQ…only to end up (through improbable mechanisms of earth removal) back in his own vault. But the very elaborateness and silliness of the conventions, and their predictable repetition, functions as a (light-hearted) parody. Prohias’ spies are not cool and sexy and competent and victorious, like James Bond. Rather, they’re ludicrous, each committing huge amounts of ingenuity, cleverness, malice, and resources to a never-ending orgy of spite. Spy vs. Spy is certainly committed to its genre pleasures and slapstick, but those genre pleasures don’t contradict its (lightly held, but visible) thematic content. Reading We3, you feel like someone tried to stuff a nature documentary into Robocop and didn’t bother to work out how to make the joints fit. Spy vs. Spy, on the other hand, is never anything less than immaculately constructed.
 

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We3 doesn’t seem to realize its themes and conventions don’t fit; Spy vs. Spy gets the two to sync. That leaves one other option when dealing with genre and violence, which is to try to deliberately push against your tropes. Which is, I think, what happens in Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs.

Martyr’s is an extremely controversial film. Charles Reece expresses something of a critical consensus when he refers to it as “really depressing shit.”

And yet, why is Martyr’s so depressing…or, for that matter, why is it shit? Many fewer people die in Martyr’s than in We3; there are fewer acts of violence than in Spy vs. Spy. Even the film’s horrific finale — in which the main character is flayed alive — is hardly new (I first saw it in an Alan Moore Swamp Thing comic, myself.) So why have so many reviewers reacted as if this is something especially shocking or especially depressing?

I think the reason is that Laugier is very smart about how he deploys violence, and about how he deploys genre tropes. Violence, even in horror, generally functions in very specific ways. Often, for example, violence in horror exists in the context of revenge; it builds and builds and then there is a cathartic reversal by the hero or final girl.

Laugier goes out of his way to frustrate those expectations. The film is in some sense a rape/revenge; it starts with a young girl, Lucie, who is tortured; she escapes and some years later seeks vengeance on her abusers.

But Laughier does not allow us to feel the usual satisfying meaty thump of violence perpetrated and repaid. We don’t see any of the torture to Lucie; the film starts after she escapes. As a result, we don’t know who did what to her…and when she tracks down the people who she says are the perpetrators, we don’t know whether to believe her. As a result, we don’t get the rush of revenge. Instead, we see our putative protagonist perform a cold-blooded, motiveless murder of a normal middle-class family, including their high-school age kids.

We do find out later that the mother and father (though not their children) were the abusers…but by that time the emotional moment is lost. We don’t get to feel the revenge. On the contrary, no sooner have we realized that they deserved it, than we swing back over to the rape. Lucie has already killed herself, but Anna, her friend, is captured and thrown into a dungeon, taking her former companion’s place. There she is tortured by an ordinary looking couple who look much like the couple Lucie killed. Thus, instead of rape/revenge, we get the revenge with no rape, and the rape with no revenge. Violence is not regulated by justice or narrative convention; it just exists as trauma with no resolution.
 

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I wouldn’t say that Martyrs is a perfect film, or a work of genius, or anything like that. Anna’s torture is done in the name of making a martyr of her; the torturers believe suffering will give her secret knowledge. And, as Charles point out, they end up being right — Anna does attain some sort of transcendence, a resolution which seems to justify the cruelty. And then there’s the inevitable final, stupid plot twist, when the only person who hears Anna explain her secret knowledge goes off into the bathroom and shoots herself. So no one will ever know what Anna saw, get it? Presumably this is supposed to be clever, but really it mostly feels like the filmmakers steered themselves into a narrative dead end and didn’t know how to get out.

Still, I think Charles is a bit harsh when he says that the film is meaninglessly monotonous, that it is not transgressive, and that the only thing it has to offer is to make the viewer wonder “can I endure this? can I justify my willingness to endure this?” Or, to put it another way, I think making people ask those questions is interesting and perhaps worthwhile in itself. It’s not easy to make violence onscreen feel unpleasant; it’s not easy to make people react to it like there’s something wrong with it. Even Charles’ demand that the film’s violence provide transgression — doesn’t that structurally put him on the side of the torturers (and arguably ultimately the filmmakers), who want trauma to create meaning?

Charles especially dislikes the handling of the high-school kids who are killed by Lucie. He argues that they are presented as innocent, because their lifestyle is never linked to their parents’ actions. Anna’s torture is mundane enough and monotonous enough to recall real atrocities, and conjure up real political torture — basically, a guy just walks up to her and starts hitting her. But the evocation of third-world regimes, or even of America’s torture regimen, no matter how skillfully referenced, falls flat since it is is not brought home to the bourgeois naifs who live atop the abattoir.

Again, though, I think the disconnection, which seems deliberate, is in some ways a strength of the film, rather than a weakness. Violence isn’t rationalized or conventionally justified in Martyrs — except by the bad guys, who are pretty clearly insane. In a more standard slasher like Hostel, everyone is guilty,and everyone is punished. In Martyrs, though, you don’t get the satisfaction of seeing everyone get theirs, because scrambling the genre tropes makes the brutality unintelligible. The conventions that are supposed to allow us to make sense of the trauma don’t function in Martyrs — which makes it clear how much we want violence to speak in a voice we can understand.

The Recursive Mind

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“From a scientific viewpoint, the only real contender for the seat of the mind, or even the soul, is the brain,” says Michael C. Corballis in his new book The Recursive Mind: The origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization.

Corballis is an evolutionary biologist, and, as he mentions repeatedly, an atheist. So when he says that the brain is the “only real contender” for the soul what he actually appears to mean is that there is no real contention at all. You don’t need to assume outside forces to explain human beings. You just need to look at the holy atavistic trinity of evolutionary psyche—primitive cultures, great apes, and autistics. Using the deviations of chimps, rain-forest dwellers, and Rain Man, science can triangulate normality through entirely material means. There is no need to postulate a soul, or God, or transcendence, or miracles.

The refusal of miracles is particularly important for Corballis, and it leads him to some surprising places. Specifically, it causes him to reject the idea that what makes humans into humans is language. Other writers, like Noam Chomsky, have argued that Homo sapiens became the Homo sapiens we know and (more or less) love when they learned to talk.

Chomsky believes the ability to understand language is innate, and that that ability has to precede the use of language itself. This creates a difficulty, though. Joe Hominid, in Chomsky’s view, would have gained no advantage just because deep in his skull he was suddenly able to talk to Jane Hominid. Eventually, of course, the Hominids would learn to converse and this would help them collaborate in the hunting and tracking of mammoths and/or tubers. Until they actually had language, though, the ability to speak would have done nothing for them.

Since, in Chomsky’s view, there was a lag between ability for language and actual language, natural selection is taken out of the picture. Instead, Chomsky suggests that the ability to use language was a bolt from the developmental blue. Or, in Corballis’ paraphrase, it was the result of, “some single and singular event causing a rewiring, perhaps a fortuitous mutation, in the brain.” Corballis notes drily that Chomsky’s “account, although not driven by religious doctrine, does smack of the miraculous.”

Corballis’ goal, then, is to get rid of the miracle. And he decides that the best way to do this is by unseating language as the key to humanity. For Corballis, In the beginning was the Word, should be replaced by, In the beginning was recursion.

Recursive thinking, for Corballis, is the ability to think about thinking. He identifies several recursive processes as characteristic of human beings. First, he points to mental time travel—the ability to imagine past events within current consciousness. This is the basis both of memory and of fiction, which for Corballis is a kind of memory of the future. Corballis also singles out theory of mind—the ability to imagine the state of mind of others (and therefore to imagine them imagining your state of mind and you imagining their state of mind imagining your state of mind imagining their state of mind, and so on.) Corballis argues that theory of mind allows for the development of language. In order to talk to somebody, you have to have a sense that there is a somebody, a consciousness, out there to talk to. Recursion allows humans to share each other thoughts, and it is the sharing of thoughts which allows for language, rather than language which allows for the sharing of thoughts.

It’s an intriguing thesis, and to defend it, Corballis comes up with—well, with not much, at least as far as I can tell. He shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that songbird patterns can be explained without assuming that songbirds have recursive thinking. He demonstrates that primates other than humans appear to have only a rudimentary theory of mind—though it’s hard to tell exactly how rudimentary, since their language is rudimentary too, so we can’t ask them. He notes that those with certain kinds of autism seem to have trouble with recursive thinking and with language. He puts great emphasis on the so-called mirror neurons in monkeys, which appear to be activated when the monkey sees another monkey acting in the same way as the monkey, and also seem to have something to do with language. So the mirror-neurons may link recursion and language—unless, of course, you turn to Corballis’ notes, where he admits that many researchers think the whole mirror-neuron/language connection is a load of monkey pooh.

John Horgan, writing in The Undiscovered Mind, suggested that Corballis’ difficulty in shoring up his theories is not his fault. Rather, it’s endemic to his discipline.

Evolutionary psychology is in many respects a strangely inconsequential exercise, especially given the evangelical fervor with which it is touted by its adherents. Evolutionists can take any set of psychological and social data and show how they can be explained in Darwinian terms. But they cannot perform experiments that will establish that their view is right and the alternative view is wrong—or vice versa.

The specific problem in Corballis’ book is that he cannot experimentally separate recursion and language. How does he know that language didn’t allow us to engage in recursive thinking rather than the other way around? His efforts to nail down this point—by, for example, referring to a remote tribe which some people think may have non-recursive language, or by pointing to autistic people who have difficulty with some kinds of recursive thought but can still learn language—are inconclusive. In fact, after reading this book, I’ve come away impressed not with how much evolutionary psychologists know, but how little. One sheepish note buried in the back of the book even admits that primatologists aren’t sure whether gorillas incessantly vocalize or hardly vocalize at all. If we can’t tell how often gorillas howl, how are we supposed to figure out how human speech is related to human consciousness?

It’s not that Corballis doesn’t have any good ideas. His argument that language developed first as gestures rather than speech, for example, seems both clever and perfectly plausible. And seeing recursion as the essential human trait is entirely reasonable… and even (perhaps despite Corballis’ best efforts) has theological precedent. Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, argued that what made humans human was their capacity for “self-transcendence.” Human beings can look at themselves looking at themselves; they know they’re going to live and that (less cheerily) they’re going to die. “Man’s melancholy over the prospect of death is the proof of his partial transcendence over the natural process which ends in death,” Niebuhr writes in his essay “Humour and Faith.” Recursion, our ability to see ourselves being ourselves, is, for Niebuhr, both our triumph and our tragedy.

Corballis doesn’t see it as a triumph or a tragedy, though. Nor does he phrase recursion in terms of self-transcendence. That sort of theological language is…well, too theological. Instead, Corballis prefers to discuss material things; why humans stood upright, where the Neanderthals went, how different languages indicate tense. All of which is certainly interesting, but misses the main point.

That point being that humans actually are fairly miraculous. I actually find Corballis’ argument for gradual change under evolutionary pressure more convincing than Chomsky’s theory of sudden mutation. And yet, Chomsky’s bolt from the blue is a metaphoric truth, even if it isn’t a factual one. Humans are really, really different than our closest relatives—more different than can be accounted for on the basis of evolution or genes. There’s a rupture there that defies fully material explanation.

Which is where language, followed or preceded by recursion, comes in. Language is both social, existing between individuals, and private, existing within the core of our identities. “I think therefore I am” is a piece of language. If it can’t be said, it doesn’t exist, and then where are we?

Perhaps even more importantly, language is a material thing; it’s a technology. But it’s also inseparable from ourselves. We create it and it creates us, recursively. Language retools us. We were apes—we still are apes—but we’re apes that are constantly remaking ourselves in the image of words such as “human being.” Evolutionary psychologists can natter on (as Corballis does) about how women are biologically programmed to be nurturers and men are biologically programmed for science. But the more they natter, the more they show that the nattering is what matters, not the programming. What our ancestors did is a lot less important than what they said.

And if the saying is the thing, it’s possible that Corballis is looking for the soul in the wrong place. Perhaps it’s not in the brain, after all. Maybe it’s where the Bible says it is—in that non-space between and within us known as the Word.
 

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Schlock Blues

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This first ran at Splice Today.
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Bonnie Raitt’s always had a bit of pop in her roots. Her 1971 self-titled debut included appearances by stone blues royalty A.C. Reed and Junior Wells covering contemporary pop tunes like Stephen Stills’ “Bluebird” and the Marvelettes “Danger Heartbreak Dead Ahead.” Two decades later, she was still at it. The title track of Nick of Time put Raitt’s earthy/sexy blues-pop voice over eighties drum machine and keyboards. With Don Was producing, the result is an authentic schlock charge that tore up AM radio. Blues becomes sentimental pap, sentimental pap becomes blues, and both of them are deployed in the interest of lyrics about getting older, watching your parents age, and listening to your friends tell you about their marriage falling apart. It’s middle-of-the-road music for boring middle-aged people — and as a precociously boring and precociously middle-aged twentysomething, I found it irresistible.
 

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Raitt’s next album 1991’s Luck of the Draw was even more successful with the same formula — some blues licks, that smooth, real voice, smarmy easy listening tunes delivered like they were roots truth and roots truth delivered like it was smarmy easy listening. “Something To Talk About,” opens with a ridiculous giant crappy thudding drum and a background chorus that sounds like its had its collective brains scooped out with a mellon-baller, all juxtaposed with Raitt’s growling guitar and that drawled “darlin'” which never fails to make me need to sit down and fan myself. It’s both gee whiz corny and smolderingly sexy — a come hither anthem for middle America.

In short, Raitt’s appeal lies not in being “real,” and not in being gratuitously ersatz, like Madonna or Bowie or even the Carpenters. Rather, when she’s on, she’s on because she’s a little bit authentic, a little bit pop— solidly middle-of-the-road. At her best, she sounds both tough and clueless; both knowing and approachable, as on the aching schmaltz heartbreak of Luck of the Draw’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”

Alas, the roots/pop balancing act is inherently unstable; step wrong one way and you’re recording pallid blues; step wrong the other way and you’re putting out unlistenable pap. Raitt’s done both of those things. Her second album, Give It Up, is much lauded as a triumph of authentic blues rock, but can also be seen as an exercise in irrelevance. If I wanted to listen to a tasteful, competent album, I’d go for Billie Holiday or Van Morrison or someone else with talent, you know?

Slipstream, Raitt’s latest release, tips over in the other direction. There’s still the blooze, of course, but even that seems pro-forma at this point in her career — just another hollow gimmick like the keyboards and the drums and the vocal chorus. The reggae-lite of “Right Down the Line” is one of those vapid, peppy tunes that makes you leap for the radio off-switch — a could-have-been earthier “Shiny Happy People,” if Raitt had the hitmaking power of yore. “Marriage Made in Hollywood,” figures Raitt as bland scold, mildly deriding our celebrity culture with all the satiric bite of a toothless, shapeless crooning bivalve. Whoever decided that Raitt would make a good social commenter needs a swift kick in the reality programming.

Still, there are moments of adequacy. Raitt’s voice sounds a little older, a little more strained, but her phrasing can still hold your attention. When she sings “I would be crazy if I took you back,” on “Standing in the Doorway Crying,” you can feel the desire and the resignation. The opening lines of “God Only Knows” (“Darkness settles on the ground/leaves the day stumbling blind,”) deliver a bleak, charge…before the tune degenerates into Billy Joel-esque earnest piano confessional.

But so it goes. Raitt was never a great artist, or even, arguably, a very good one. Still, she managed to parley her aesthetic incoherence, her bad taste, and that marvelous voice into some of my favorite pop ever. I doubt she’ll ever make another bearable album. I’m just grateful, and a little surprised, that she ever made any.

Utilitarian Review 7/27/13

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Alyssa Herlocher
Scrotal Mountains
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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Matthias Wivel on the sacred in Chester Brown’s Paying For It.

Voices from the Archive: Kurt Busiek on copyright extension and comics.

Me on trying to choose whether to vote for racists or imperialists.

Patrick Carland on Aku No Hana and the politics of decadence.

Jog on cultural tourism and Only God Forgives.

Andrea Tang on the Yellow Peril in recent cinema.

Vom Marlowe on the weirdness of Black Butler.

Me on meaning and no meaning in John Porcellino’s Raindrops.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Wired I argue that we don’t need no stinking Wonder Woman movie.

At the Reader I wrote about a great show at Woman Made gallery focusing on the aesthetics of porn.

At the Atlantic I wrote about censorship and porn on the Kindle.

At Splice I write about:

—Obamacare for traditionalist.

—Venus Santiago’s lactation stories and porn for women who work.

 
Other Links

Jes on engaging with music made by abusive men.

What Do You Mean, Raindrops?

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I like the cat. It’s barely there; just a single line dividing inside and outside. And then it’s bound by the bottom of the panel, so the something inside and the nothing outside seem equally arbitrary. The tail is a separate thing; it could be a raindrop sliding down the surface of the panel. The cat’s eyes and nose could be raindrops too. The lit lit lit is the sound of the cat tail raindrop hitting the panel, and the sound of the eye and nose raindrop hitting the cat. One lit for each, the sound of rain dripping.

The window in the corner could just as easily be a painting, or a drawing. In fact, it is a drawing. Is that the delusion? Or the bare substance? The raindrops in the window, or the picture, are not raindrops. But they aren’t empty either. Ideas, not clinging, but falling…at least in theory.

I think the comics almost makes more sense if you rearrange the panels, or drop some of the panels. The monk’s questions and answers don’t really seem to add anything; it’s less a socratic dialogue than a monologue with more or less distracting interjections. The fact that there’s a pretense of communication almost makes the thing more hermetic. If Ching-Ch’ing doesn’t have an interlocutor, then some of the contradictory statements seem less like things you have to parse, more like he’s vacillating inside his own head. Instead of setting his own conduct up in opposition to that of ordinary people, you could read him, without the monk, as saying that he, too, is an ordinary person, on the brink of falling into delusion about himself. In fact, treating the rain as a metaphor could be seen as a step into delusion. The rain is not people upside down falling into delusion about themselves. The rain is the rain. But the bare substance is hard to express. It turns into deluded people, or into the word “lit” (like “literature”?) or into the picture of a picture of rain. To express the bare substance, all you’ve got is representation.

The title design, with the little raindrops on either side, is pretty clearly twee. Maybe it’s the title Ching Ch’ing is referring to when he says that ordinary people pursue outside objects; the title is outside the comic, labeling it, and providing the one real drawing of rain (if you don’t count the cat’s tale as a raindrop, and count the window as a picture.) The unnecessary fillip of design, and of such an unassumingly finicky design. The little “lits”, the cat, the bald-headed monk tilting his head just so, and the world in which equal line weight and lack of shading means that bodies and backgrounds fail to become each other only through the delicacy of reader and creator’s mutual forbearance — all of these seem to try to find profundity through ostentatious smallness. You wonder if the bare truth of Zen is a tea cosy.

In the first panel, the sound outside is the sound outside might be seen, not as the sound outside the room (wherever that is) but rather as the sound outside the speech bubble itself. But the speech bubble has a sound inside itself too — or at least as much of one as the sound outside. If Ching Ch’ing is seen as a shape, then the sounds — his speech, the lit lit — are all outside him. Pursuing outside objects could be the words running outside the self, chasing those lit lits.

Or perhaps what’s outside is us, looking down, upside down over the page, falling into delusions, or on the brink of doing so, by trying to avoid falling into delusion by reading about avoiding falling into delusion.

In the little additional text at the bottom, Porecellino says you and I discuss how people cling to words and ideas when the Old Monk drops by. That makes the monk the rain, falling from outside to inside. But which monk is this? Is it Ching Ch’ing? Or is it the monk talking to Ching Ching? I think it’s probably supposed to be the first, but I kind of like the idea of the straight man monk showing up, maybe with the cat, and all of us standing around confused together. No rain.

One Hell of a Butler: Black Butler anime

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A couple of years ago, I tried the Black Butler manga, but it didn’t move me. I’d forgotten all about it until a friend recommended the anime to me.

I was stuck at home on doctor’s orders the other day–a day I had planned to be spending in my glorious summertime garden. I was too grumpy to be in the mood for my usual cozy mysteries. Stuck inside on one of summer’s most perfect days? I wanted a little bite with my mindless entertainment. So I gave Black Butler another whirl.

At first, I was both frustrated and bored with what appeared to be a pretty traditional story.  Young scion of wealthy aristocratic family has a tragic past.  His whole family, mom and dad and even the family dog, died in a great big house fire several years ago.  This leaves young Ciel Phantomgrave to be the Phantomgrave at a terribly young age–they don’t say exactly how old, but young enough to wear short-shorts and garters and lace and carry a whip.  You know, as you do.

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He even has a bad eye covered by an eyepatch.  Can you get more stock anime?  I felt like I was watching a remake of Godchild/Count Cain, except with bizarre plucky comic relief provided by the other servants in the house (a lecherous maid, a cook, another male servant who often looks like a doll).  Ciel, the frilly lace and shorts-wearing scion, had a bit of Count Cain’s caustic wit, so I sighed and continued to watch.

During the first episode, we discover that Ciel makes some kind of terrible bargain while suspended in air and surrounded by feathers, wearing nothing but a sheet.  You know, as you do.

The bargain appears to involve his Butler, Sebastian.

That’s also quite similar to the Count Cain/Godchild plot (where Cain is paired with his butler Riff).  But, unlike Riff, Sebastian is actually shown butling.  Which was strange and kind of funny, if you don’t mind broad humor involving knives, forks, and broken dishes.  The regular household staff is both earnest and incompetent.  When Ciel has a guest for dinner, the staff manages to screw up the cleaning, cooking, and gardening to such an extent that Sebastian has to step in.

Thus the plucky comic relief when Sebastian serves their foreign guest donuri bowl (actually rare meat Sebastian rescued from the charred mess the cool make) and shows off a traditional rock garden (really gravel raked over the mess the help made of the front lawn).  I was starting to think that perhaps Black Butler was a lighter, sillier version of the Count Cain genre.

I kept thinking that right up to the point where they break the guest’s leg and baked him in the kitchen oven.

Yeah, really.  They bake the guy in the oven.  (The guest is a business associate who has been embezzling funds from the young Ciel, but jeez.)  You do see the guest crawling away, smoking and charred and still with the busted leg, so I guess there’s a shred of plausible deniability of the fatalness of baking someone in an oven, but I don’t care.  They baked the guy in a damn oven!

Naturally, I clicked the ‘Play next episode’ on Netflix.

I wasn’t too surprised when the story focused on a well-meaning but clumsy butler who worked for Ciel’s aunt.  The story had some slap-stick comic relief that was similar to the burnt dinner gag.

What I didn’t expect is that the plucky comic relief clumsy butler turns out to be a villain in a later episode.  So does the damn aunt!

Not just any villain, either.  Ciel, Earl Phantomhive, is called the Queen’s Guard Dog, and the role of the Phantomhives through history is to take care of pesky problems for the Queen.  Often employing morally dubious means to do so.

Since this is a goth Victoriana historical, the Queen’s Guard Dog is summoned to London to deal with a man who is slaughtering prostitutes in Whitechapel.  I sort of expected Jack the Ripper to show up as a villain.

I didn’t expect the storyline to include the gruesome (but true) detail about Jack removing the victims’ internal organs.  In Black Butler’s world, this is explicitly the women’s uteruses.

Not quite what I expected from a tween horror anime, I gotta admit.

Because cognitive dissonance is what Black Butler is all about, we get a very sweet series of scenes where Ciel crossdresses as a young fashionable lady to lure out the killer.  Sebastian, the eponymous Black Butler, is disguised as Ciel’s tutor.  While at a society party, the two must dance together in order to avoid Ciel’s fiance from figuring out what is going on.  It’s comedic and a little silly, there’s lots of ruffles and lace, and general foolishness.

And then of course, it’s revealed that the earl they’ve suspected of being Jack is actually running some kind of underground slave / body part auction.  As an old Weiss Kreuz fan, I totally saw that coming.  That wasn’t too dissonant, since Sebastian uses his mad butling skillz to rescue his damsel in distress.  As it were.

No, my mind went ‘wait, say again’ when the next night arrives and we discover the real identity of Jack to be Ciel’s aunt and her clumsy butler, who is armed with a magic chainsaw.

Why is Ciel’s aunt killing prostitutes in Whitechapel and stealing their uteruses?  Because she lost her unborn baby and her husband in a tragic carriage accident.  To save her, the doctors had to remove her uterus.  She also appears to have been in love with her sister’s husband.  And possibly her sister.  But anyway.  So the aunt is a Victorian-era gynecologist, and it turns out that performing abortions on prostitutes drives her the rest of the way around the bend.  She must punish the women who got the abortions (and killed the babies she so desperately wanted) by taking their uteruses.

By why, you may be asking, is she doing this with a clumsy butler wielding a MAGIC CHAINSAW.  The clumsy butler is some kind of grim Reaper, and if he saws your heart out he gets to see your life as if it was a movie.  With little film-strips and everything.  (Gave me flashbacks to elementary school–remember having to turn film-strips?  Man, those were the days.)

Things get pretty handwavy at this point, and it’s possible my brain was going ‘whirr-click Victorian magic chainsaw whirr-click mad abortionist whirr-click whirr-click’, so I’m not all that clear on the details, but near as I could tell, the reaper-butler dude just likes killing people and watching snuff films.  He’s supposedly a divine being from heaven (although why heaven is into snuff-films remains unclear.)  Apparently, Sebastian, Ciel’s butler, is a butler from, yes, you guessed it, Hell.  This makes them natural enemies.

(Although I was sort of confused about this, because wouldn’t a Hell demon be pro-mad abortionist and snuff film?  Wouldn’t a heaven dude be anti?  But I decided pondering this too much would be interrogating the text from the wrong perspective, so I settled in to enjoy the nice long butler-on-butler fight.  With additional magic chainsaws. )

Sebastian kicks butt in the end, but all the butling fun and games ends when some party-pooper from Heaven shows up with some kind of weird telescoping graphite-and-steel scythe and puts an end to the festivities.  Heaven-dude hauls off the reaper-butler before Sebastian can force him to reveal the killer of Ciel’s parents, servants, and the family dog.

By the time this episode is over, the viewer knows that Ciel and Sebastian have an infernal bargain.  Sebastian is magically bound to Ciel–Sebastian must protect him, serve him, obey him, and, stay with him until the Very End.  In exchange, Sebastian gets to eat Ciel’s soul.  Ciel seems to kind of be looking forward to having his soul eaten, by the way, as if it were sort of the ultimate engagement ring in a magical marriage.  I guess the original bargain was shown in that first scene where Ciel’s lying around in a sheet and surrounded by floating white chicken feathers.   There’s also mystical light, a hand tattoo, an eye patch, and a Significant Trickle of Blood on a hand that has a black-nail manicure.

The whole show is a deuced odd mix of extremely over-the-top melodramaz (nothing says classy like black nail polish manicures, I always say), sort of funny slapstick, and genuinely creepy horror (baking people in ovens, mad abortionists).  I really cannot recommend it on the merits of art, originality, or coherence, but I have to admit that it has a surprising amount of charm and the kind of relentless character development old soaps used to have.  You keep watching because you really can’t believe they just did that.

By the way, the manga is still going strong, and my research indicates that a live-action version is currently underway.

Return of the Yellow Peril

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The Yellow Peril is an old frienemy of ours. We officially made its acquaintance for the first time at the end of the nineteenth century, when the catchy comic book villain-esque name was coined as a popular term for underpaid Chinese laborers in the United States, playing on the fear that an influx of Asian immigrants would destroy Western civilization and values. The phrase came back swinging roughly half a century later, during World War II. This time, of course, the Yellow Peril was Japanese. The basic story remained the same, though, painting people of color – specifically those of Asian descent – as an inscrutable and exotic threat to the “true” America, otherwise known as white America. And stories, as we know, have consequences. Fear of the Yellow Peril fueled the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which placed some of the heaviest bans on free immigration in U.S. history. That same brand of fear inspired the internment of more than 100,000 Americans in 1942 – for the great and terrible crime of being born with Japanese ancestry.
 

mongolian

Phil May, The Mongolian Octopus

 

Fast forward to the twenty-first century. November 2012 saw the release of action-adventure blockbuster Red Dawn, the thrilling tale of evil North Korean terrorists invading an American town, where they’re fought off by a bunch of white kids. Barely four months later, in March 2013, the theaters treated us to Olympus Has Fallen, the thrilling tale of evil North Korean terrorists invading the White House, where they’re fought off by the white President and his white Secret Service buddy.

Now, this narrative premise – although a bit tired and recycled by now – isn’t inherently a bad one. The Korean War, a distant memory for most Americans, is technically still alive and well on the Korean penninsula. The past year has seen some alarmingly aggressive rhetoric from Pyongyang, culminating in its third nuclear test in February 2013, along with threats of military action against both its South Korean neighbor and the United States. The art of storytelling – whether on paper, stage, or the silver screen – makes an excellent vehicle for examining the nuances and complexities of real life tensions, and the current North Korean government definitely serves up plenty of fodder for discussion.

The trouble is, movies like Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen aren’t interested in nuances or complexities. They just want to rehash the tale of the Yellow Peril for a modern audience, and North Korea makes a convenient vehicle. A secretive totalitarian state with nominal Communist sensibilities and nuclear ambitions? It’s practically a Hollywood wet dream. Never mind that even fueled by its pervasively militaristic culture, North Korea’s standing army remains both under-trained and under-equipped. Never mind that the North Korean governments’s infamous human rights abuses – ranging from slave labor to public executions – have been overwhelmingly directed toward actual North Korean people, not foreign enemies. Never mind that North Korea can barely afford to feed itself, and in fact relies heavily on aid from the U.S., South Korea, Japan, and a plethora of other foreign nations, just to stave off starvation. North Korea is far from the friendliest kid on the international block, but the vast majority of victims on the receiving end of North Korea-related atrocities aren’t American, or even South Korean. They’re North Korean.

You wouldn’t know any of that, from watching either of these movies. The North Korean antagonists are monstrously powerful, utterly unrepentent, and have somehow magically gained the resources overnight to go from starving and insular to suddenly, invading Washington, D.C. with top-of-the-line weapons tech. You’d think that – having apparently unearthed the goose that lays the golden egg – their first order of business would be to fix that pesky yet rampant malnourishment problem, but Hollywood logic will be Hollywood logic.

Now, Hollywood has never exactly been a beacon of accuracy. We go to the movies for entertainment, and if entertainment means larger-than-life fight sequences and gun fu, so be it. But there’s a difference between handwaving the laws of physics and promoting white nativism and race-based fearmongering. These are the facts: the main heroes of both Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen are white, and the villains are people of color. The heroes are played, respectively, by Chris Hemsworth and Gerard Butler. The villains are played, respectively, by Will Yun Lee and Rick Yune.

Here’s the thing. Chris Hemsworth is Australian. Gerard Butler is Scottish. Meanwhile, Will Yun Lee and Rick Yune? Both born and bred Americans. In a movie that’s all about patrotism and standing up for the United States, we’ve got the hometown heroes played by foreigners and the villainous invaders played by Americans. That in itself might not be so bad – after all, stepping into someone else’s shoes is what actors are paid to do, and Butler and Hemsworth wouldn’t be the first to play outside their nationalities – except that the lines are drawn so very starkly. Asian-Americans don’t exist in the world of these movies. No, Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen teach us that real American heroes are white, even when they spend the whole movie awkwardly trying to conceal non-American accents. On the other hand, if you’re Asian, you’re obviously some inscrutable foreign Other, concerned with nothing but tearing down the good old USA. At best, you might be a really sneaky evil Asian guy pretending to be a nice Asian ally – a la Rick Yune the North Korean terrorist posing as a South Korean diplomat – but by the end of the film, you’ll inevitably show your true colors as a scary anti-American evil-doer of supervillainous proportions.

Ironically, the recent release that arguably best deconstructs the problems with the whole “beware the non-Caucasian” narrative is a fellow member of the action-adventure genre – and initially looked like it had all the trappings of yet another Yellow Peril film. Iron Man 3 hit theaters in May 2013, a couple months after Olympus Has Fallen, and featured the villain known as – you guessed it – the Mandarin. Here we go again, we thought. We all saw the previews of half-Indian Ben Kingsley in the samurai topknot and the ambiguously foreign-looking robe, playing the ambiguously brown terrorist. We braced ourselves. What else were we supposed to expect?

Except, it turns out, the Mandarin is a sham. The Mandarin persona is quite literally the creation of Aldrich Killian, the true antagonist of the piece: a white guy who invents a fictional, scary brown villain – complete with a hodgepodge set of “Oriental” iconography and props – so that Killian himself can profit from the ensuing public panic. It’s a deliciously meta-filled plot twist straight out of Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism, published in 1979, in which the Palestinian-American scholar wrote, “The imaginative examination of all things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world arose.” In short, says Said, the idea of the “Orient” – that unfathomable, exotic Other – is nothing but a fanciful product of Western imagination.

The Mandarin of Iron Man 3 is the Orient personified. Like the cartoonish North Korean villains of Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen, he’s an elusive fiction who inspires fear and panic, but to no productive end. Similarly, in the wake of Dawn and Olympus, we saw such gems on Twitter as, “I now hate all Chinese, Japanses, Asian, Korean people. Thanks” and “Just saw Olympus has fallen. I wanna go buy a gun and kill every fucking Asian.” Those tweets are just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds – maybe more – comments just like them, all spouting the same antipathy toward anyone who might trace their heritage to the other side of the Pacific. Spelling and grammar issues aside, these reactions point to a disturbing trend of xenophobia, jingoism, and ultimately, ignorance-fueled racism.
That’s not patriotism. That’s hate. We may be more than fifty years past Japanese-American internment, and more than a century past the Chinese Exclusion Act, but we obviously haven’t moved past the myth of the Yellow Peril. Korean-American actor John Cho, of Harold and Kumar and Star Trek fame, has remarked, “It’s very difficult to find an original thinker in terms of casting when you’re talking about race at all. And really, although more egregious versions of Asians have fallen by the wayside and become unfashionable, new Asian stereotypes [continue to] pop up.”

Given the political climate on today’s world stage, a North Korea-centric film isn’t necessarily a bad idea. A thoughtful, well-written, and well-performed North Korea movie – rather than fueling ignorance, which fuels fear – has the potential to enlighten and educate the American public on a real and pertinent topic. Such a film could, moreover, easily contain a place for Asian-American heroes, shelving that damaging, long-overused “white man versus the man of color” trope, in favor of something fresher, bolder, and ultimately, a far more interesting tale to tell.

We need stories that speak to a broader American identity, reminding us that we are a nation of immigrants, that so many of us began as the poor, the tired, the huddled masses, before finding our way home to American shores. We need stories that remind us that the “true” America isn’t just white; it’s white and brown and black and yellow and red and a technicolor mix of everything in between, a country full of hyphen identities and roots stretching far across the globe. It’s a legacy of diversity that infuses our cultural traditions with richer flavors, and offers us the gift of variety. And in today’s world, where globalization pushes the borders of disparate cultures closer and closer together, we – with our varied roots, our many languages and entwined histories – are uniquely placed to communicate across those borders. We are in a position not merely to tolerate that which is different, but to understand it. We are in a position to offer empathy instead of fear. That’s not something that deserves our scorn and resentment. That’s something that deserves our pride.