I Am Tonto

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

If you’re wondering why Johnny Depp has a dead bird on his head in the new Lone Ranger, look at Kirby Sattler’s “I Am Crow.” The painting is to Tonto as Keith Richards is to Captain Jack Sparrow. It also has as much to do with Native America as the Rolling Stones have with the 1700s Caribbean.

According to Sattler’s website, his “paintings are interpretations based upon the nomadic tribes of the 19th century American Plains.”If you think that means the model for or at least the subject matter of “I Am Crow” is a Crow Indian, think again. “I,” explains Sattler, “purposely do not denote a specific tribal affiliation to my paintings, allowing the personal sensibilities and knowledge of the viewer to create their own stories.”(Mr. Depp’s personal sensibilities, for instance, tell him the dead bird on his head likes peanuts.) Sattler’s website also notes that the sixty-three-year-old painter is of “non-native blood” and that he’s neither a “historian” or “ethnologist.” And yet his “distinctive style of realism” avoids being “presumptuous” by giving his work “an authentic appearance” but “without the constraints of having to adhere to historical accuracy.”

That makes Sattler a perfect source for Johnny Depp’s equally imperfect Indian fantasy. The actor may have a Cherokee or possibly Creek grandmother (how else to explain those cheek bones?), and he told Rolling Stone that hopes his portrayal of Tonto will “maybe give some hope to kids on the reservations.” His first Indian character was named “Nobody” in Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 Dead Man (a film I really really tried to like), which prompted Depp to direct himself in The Brave two years later. The film wasn’t released in the U.S., not even on video, so I’ll have to trust the IMBd summary:

“An unemployed alcoholic Native American Indian lives on a trailer park with his wife and two children. Convinced that he has nothing to offer this world, he agrees to be tortured to death by a gang of rednecks in return for $50,000.”

If you replace “gang of rednecks” with “American pop culture,” that’s a decent allegory for Tonto.

Depp’s performance is also based on Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto in the 50s TV show. He was born Harold Smith on a Canadian Mohawk reservation, but for some reason went with “Silverheels” when he moved to Hollywood. His performance in turn was based on John Todd, who voiced Tonto in the 30s radio show. Todd was 77 and the last original cast member when the show went off the air in 1954. He was also Irish, but was happy enough to play dress-up for publicity shots. The network replaced him for public appearances, and briefly on air too, but, the story goes, the college-educated Native actor refused to read Tonto’s ungrammatical lines, so Todd got the job back.

Tonto was originally Potawatomi, so he and his Michigan tribe (the program aired from Detroit) were a bit lost in the Southwest. Someone changed it to Apache, but Camp Camp Kee Mo Sah Bee, the summer camp the director visited as a kid, is a better designation. Tonto means “stupid” or “silly” in Spanish, but that might be coincidence. The writer just needed someone for the Long Ranger to talk to.

The same creative team gave the Green Hornet a chauffeur for the same reason. The Lone Ranger may look like someone grabbed a superhero, slapped a cowboy hat on his head, and dropped him in a Western, but the lines of influence run the other direction. The Lone Ranger premiered in 1933, five years before Superman hit newsstands. It was a hit, so when the radio station demanded another show like it, they just updated the formula. The 1936 Green Hornet is an urban Lone Ranger. His horse “Silver” morphed into the limo “Black Beauty.” His Indian sidekick transformed into an oriental sidekick (Kato’s ethnic designations make less sense than Tonto’s). The Hornet’s even a blood relative. His alter ego, Britt Reid, is the Lone Ranger’s great nephew. Britt’s father, the Ranger’s nephew, is Dan. John Todd voiced him too. The Shakespearean actor dropped Tonto’s broken English to record the elderly Mr. Reid into the same microphone.

But now the superhero influence really is reversed. Seth Rogen’s Green Hornet beat Armie Hammer’s Lone Ranger to theaters by two years, both fueled by the killing Marvel and Warner Brothers are making on their assorted Avengers and Justice Leaguers. Even Kirby Sattler’s interest in “the Indian” has more to do more with pop culture than “Indigenous Peoples of the Earth.” The crow Johnny plopped on his head is, according to Sattler, a source of power:

“Any object- a stone, a plait of sweet grass, a part of an animal, the wing of a bird- could contain the essence of the metaphysical qualities identified to the objects and desired by the Native American. This acquisition of ‘Medicine’, or spiritual power, . . . provided the conduit to the unseen forces of the universe which predominated their lives. . . when combined with the proper ritual or prayer there would be a transference of identity. . . .More than just aesthetic adornment, it was an outward manifestation of their identity.”

And that, Kirby, is what we folks of non-native blood call a superhero:

Any object—a lantern, a ring, a bat, even an initial—contains the symbolic essence of the superpowers identified with the object and desired by the alter ego. Once acquired, unseen forces of the multiverse predominate the lives of the wearer. When combined with the proper ritual or prayer (“Shazam!”), there is a transference of identity (“Hulk smash!”). More than adornment, the superhero’s costume is an outward manifestation of his identity.

I could quote some juicy bits from Michael Chabon’s “Secret Skin: an essay in unitard theory,” but you get the idea.

None of this is to say The Lone Ranger is a stupid movie. It’s more entertainingly silly than the black and white reruns I watched as a kid. I also attended “Indian Guides,” in which fathers and sons of my Pittsburgh suburb assembled plastic tomahawks and heard legends of “Falling Rock,” the mysterious brave whom yellow road signs warned drivers to beware. So my “personal sensibilities and knowledge” of things Indian is right up there with Sattler and Depp. (My novel School for Tricksters is about two fakes pretending to be Indians too, but we’re talking Lone Ranger right now.)

I do give director Gore Verbinski credit for framing the tale as a 1933 Wild West exhibit, a style of realism even less constrained than Mr. Sattler’s. Tonto, “A Noble Savage in His Natural Habitat,” is a magically talking mannequin. That almost but not quite makes up for the self-annihilating Comanche (Tonto’s latest tribe) who aid Manifest Destiny by declaring themselves ghosts and charging into the spray of Gatling guns. (Can you feel the hope surging through those reservation kids?) Tonto at least gets an upgrade from racially laconic sidekick to racially madcap mentor. He and Grasshopper Ranger romp across a cinematic West that owes less to John Ford than Wile E. Coyote. You’ll be amazed by how many CGI-ed train stunts Verbinski can cram into two and a half hours (longer if your theater’s projector overheats as ours did).

Verbinski also includes several werewolf-esque bunny rabbits, so there’s far far more whimsy in Lone Ranger than in the masked mayhem Warner Brothers or even Marvel Entertainment have been putting out. Superheroes are naturally Goofy Creatures best exhibited in a Habitat of Whimsy, so I applaud the Verbinki bunnies (they have fangs!). I would just tweak the latest Tonto by revealing him for what he’s always been. A deranged white guy pretending to be an Indian. Surely Gore and Johnny could mine some comic silver from that premise.

Crotch Dance

Posted on July 7, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder:Voice starts with a beauty pageant — specifically, the Llaverac Clan Conformation Competition, as the text box/announcer tells us. The announcer goes on to explain that the girls are being judged to see if they fit the physical specifications of the Llaverac clan. The candidate being inspected (Jin St. John, we’re told) gets up close to the judges, thrusting her crotch in the face of one elderly woman, which is apparently in accord with contest traditions. Then, suddenly, a bulge appears in her panties. The elderly female judge recoils, and the announcer snickers, “I guess that’s why they call them ball gowns.”

Obviously, Jin has a penis — or, you know, maybe not quite so obviously. I read the first volume of Finder a while back, and so had at least a vague memory that Llavarec gender isn’t always quite what it looks like, but still, I have to admit that I was not at first exactly sure what I was looking at in those images above. McNeil does provide some additional clues in the next pages for the slow of mind…which, as one of the slow of mind who sort of but maybe not quite got the dick joke, I appreciated.

Again, my confusion around the dick is a sign that I’m a little dense. But it’s also, I think, thematized by the comic. The Finder series is broadly cyberpunk, and one of the characteristics of cyberpunk is disorientation — a far future setting where social realities, and even physical characteristics, are so different from ours that it’s difficult to get your bearings. McNeil provides some notes at the back which help a bit…but even those end up often emphasizing the extent to which the world on view here is a mystery. “Can’t remember for the life of me which clan the dude in the suite represents,” is a not atypical author’s note — suggesting that even McNeil herself is not the master of, but rather a bemused tourist within, the world she has created.

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick argues that realist fiction is built around the manipulation of knowledge and lack of knowledge to create a kind of unspoken blackmail. The writer writes as if she knows everything in the world she has created, and the reader then pretends that she follows along, and knows everything as well. The reward for acquiescing to the author’s mastery is a sense of mastery for oneself — to acknowledge knowledge is to be the knower. There’s a complicity; a doubled pretense of knowingness.Sedgwick links this to the lines of force and knowledge around the closet, where what you know (i.e., who is gay) and what you don’t know (i.e., who is gay) become a matter of threat, mastery, power, and self-definition.

McNeil’s diffident stance towards her own work in her notes (emphasized again in a recent Facebook comment where she says ” I really had no idea what I was doing as a writer when I first began [Finder]”) seems like a rejection of Sedgwick’s formulation — a refusal of the pact of knowingness between writer and reader. And I think it is a rejection to some degree…though maybe, also, an investigation, or elaboration. Finder:Voice, in this reading, is deliberately about knowledge, about narrative, about the closet, and about the way people negotiate all those things, or try to.

The book’s protagonist, Rachel, is a Llaverac (and how do you pronounce that, anyway?) entered in the beauty pageant/conformation contest. Despite the fact that her father is not a Llaverac, she seems to be doing well, and seems like she has a chance to win, or at least make the cut to be accepted into Llaverac clan, with resulting honor, wealth, power, and the opportunity to share those things with her family. Before the final competition, though, she is robbed, and loses her hereditary clan ring — which means she’ll be disqualified unless she can get it back. The bulk of the story is devoted to her search for Jaegar, Rachel’s mother’s boyfriend, on whom Rachel has a longstanding crush, and who is an expert at finding lost items.

In his essay about Finder:Voice, Richard Cook points out that Jaeger functions in the Finder series in general as a hyperbolic lodestone of masculine competence and cool. The search for him, then, is in part a search for the penis or phallus. Rachel wants him in no small part because she wants to be him. She sees herself as incompetent; or as she puts it “I am weak, there is something basically unable in me.” Jaegar represents for Rachel not only her knight in shining armor, but her wish to become that knight. Part of her wants the ball gown — but part of wanting the ball gown is the hope that wearing it will mean she gets balls.

Wanting the phallus seems, at least, fairly uncomplicated — who doesn’t want power? And yet, the bulk of Voice is dedicated to demonstrating that balls are elusive, and that even when you find them it’s not always exactly clear what you have, or how to use it. In fact, you could almost see the book as a series of more or less false or confusing revelations about genitals. There’s Jin’s suddenly visible penis at the book’s beginning, of course. Then Rachel’s mom Emma tells her that her non-Llaverac dad is not her real dad; instead she’s the daughter of a Llaverac, Lord Rodzhina.

Rachel tries to get help from Rodzhina, but he refuses her because he thinks she’s incompetent (no balls.) Then, Rachel tries to get her sister Lynn to help her find the lost ring; when Lynne refuses, Rachel tells everyone who will listen that Lynn has a penis — only to have them laugh at her, because, yeah, they already knew that.

Finally at the end of the book, Rachel is allowed into the competition after she blackmails Rodzhina by threatening to reveal that he is not a man at all (which means, tangentially, that he is not her father.) He’s often helped get girls through the competition by claiming they were his illegitimate children — but he hasn’t actually fathered any children since he’s a woman, and having this made public would therefore cause him embarrassment and difficulties.

Rachel repeatedly fails, then, when she tries to manipulate knowledge about the penis. She only succeeds when she has knowledge about where the penis isn’t. This is mirrored in her search for the-penis-that-is-Jaegar; it’s only when she gives up on finding him that she manages to make progress.

Said progress involves stumbling into a drunken orgy with a bunch of Ascians (a marginalized ethnic group, to which Jaegar belongs) and having them hand over an alternate ring — not hers, but someone else’s. She succeeds, then, by basically losing all knowledge of everything, even (especially?) her body — she blacks out, and doesn’t even seem to be entirely sure whether she had sex or not (at the end of the comic she’s wondering worriedly what she’ll do if she misses her next period.)

So…I don’t think Rachel’s choices are exactly supposed to be normative. This isn’t necessarily a celebration of zen and the art of being fucked senseless (and/or dickless). Rather, it seems like it’s a meditation on the way that gender and knowledge wrap around each other — and on the way that following those wrappings around is a big part of what it means to grow up, or to survive growing up. Rachel succeeds in the beauty pageant — succeeds at becoming a woman — by using tactics traditionally associated with women. These include (as Richard Cook says), gossip, and (as Richard doesn’t quite say) trading on her body in order to gain allies and power and knowledge. (At the end of the book she says, ‘all my life i wanted to be able to do things, fix things, make things happen, without feeling like a conniving whore” — but of course her victory at the end, which gives her power and the ability to do things and fix things, arguably comes about because she’s been a very accomplished conniving whore.) Yet Rachel also succeeds, again, by recognizing where the penis isn’t — and by figuring out that the people who claim to have power over her are as phallusless as she is. And, in turn, understanding that maybe means she’s not so phallusless; she gets to put her finger through that ring, after all.

Lord Rod (which is an interesting name) gives Rachel a speech about fake books, and about how a truly accurate, undetectable fake can be more valuable than the real thing. Judith Butler, in her discussions of gender, says something similar — there is no original of gender, she contends, so copies of gender which show their copiedness, like drag, are more valuable, or truer than the “real” thing.

Rod is himself in doubled drag — a woman who looks like a woman disguised as a man who looks like a woman. And what about Rachel? Is she a woman pretending to be a woman? Is she faking having a phallus or faking not having one? And is she more valuable as a fake or as the real thing? If there’s an answer here, it seems like it’s neither that the phallus is truth nor that the phallus is false nor that there is no phallus, but some indeterminate, situational amalgam of all those things. Do we know Rod has no penis? Do we know Rachel has none? Only because McNeil tells us so. Drawings are what we say they are; their gender is made of knowledge, not bodies. Like ours, maybe, though it’s hard to know for sure. Once the story starts and the future turns to past, how can you tell the dancer from the dance?

Peter Sattler on Clowes Agonistes

Posted on July 7, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Peter Sattler wrote a great comment about Dan Clowes’ Wilson and the oppressive weight of comics. So I thought I’d reprint it below.

I had never thought much about linking gender and comics per se in Clowes’ work, but you make a strong case, especially for Velvet Glove.

Over the years, I have only presented a few papers that touch on Clowes, usually in the context of broader claims. But I tend to agree with you that his work goes out of its way to thematize the artist’s and/or the story’s struggle against comics themselves – against a form that, as Clowes presents it, seems unable to encompass interior states, unable to escape its own theatricality and artificiality, unable to circumvent its own closed system of beginnings and endings, set-ups and punch-lines. Clowes dramatizes his contest with these limits, transforming that contest into the content of his graphic novels.

Take Wilson, for example. The sense of connection, of understanding, of interiority, of history that the Clowes’ characters – mainly, Wilson – repeatedly say that they want are always thwarted by the protagonist’s unwillingness to stop talking, by his demand that other people – especially women – shut up. It would be easy to see this as a feature of Clowes’ misanthropic creation: a man too horrifically self-involved to see his own villainy. But on the page itself, this solipsism is most visibly as a series of qualities endemic to comics: the obscuring and endless series of word balloons; the need to keep talking, running an externalized and insuperable inner monologue; the infantilizing and ironizing iconography; the truncated and isolating nature of the comics page itself (and few long-form cartoonists seems as wedded to the idea of comics as a collection of discrete pages as Clowes).

Indeed, it is the rigid nature of the page – imposing its own unavoidable sense of beginnings and endings – that most circumscribes Wilson’s exploration of human connection and meaning. At least in this volume, no matter what one says or sees, the ultimate reality is that any particular page must come to an end, must toss the reader back outside the work, and must, to some extent, deflate anything that might count as narrative. No matter what one encounters in the middle of the strip, it must always end when the page and its panels run out. For Wilson, this means ending with a joke. But in Clowes’ world, the deflationary punch-line and the structure of the Sunday funnies are just shorthand for the fragmented, one-page-at-a-time and one-damn-page-after-another nature of comics overall.

In Wilson, it is comics that keeps you talking, and it is comics – at least as Clowes represents them – that shuts you up. The form of comics lends its stamp to the structures of your thought (“Insert ass-rape joke here”) and to, it seems, how Clowes can represent — or not represent — thinking. (At last year’s conference at the University of Chicago, Clowes told the audience that he now tends to experience his own life in one-page segments.) I’m not trying to say that Clowes hates comics, of course; he clearly loves them. But as much as anything, he seems to be infatuated with the conflict that he has with the medium – with its history (or you argue, Noah) and with its historically inflected structure.

The most common last-panel punch-lines in Wilson involve excrement, and three different times those joke involves shit that is boxed and mailed. Perhaps that is the ultimately stand in for what comics can give you. That final delivery always comes, promising a special message. But it always comes out as dog poop.

Debaser

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Albert Stabler

My dear friend Chris, who loves the Pixies, mentioned their new song “Bagboy” to me. The song is a cryptic quiet-loud hiss-shout anthem in their classic style, but the video overwhelms it somewhat for me, as it features a young white boy trashing a house with colorful items (Froot Loops, balloons, liquids, sundry mists and sprays)– a house that, at the very end, is revealed to (presumably) belong to an African-American woman who is tied up in the bedroom (foreshadowed by a photo early in the video). Perhaps a potent metaphor for post-multicultural something. Perhaps an unproblematized depiction of a hate crime. Perhaps a strange reference to the mad Negress of Jane Eyre– who knows?

Anyhow, here’s a digest of my conversation with Chris, but I’m paraphrasing his devil’s advocate parts, as he felt a tad reticent.

So, for openers, I feel irritated by the video’s attempt at being controversial. I mean, Family Guy annoys me, but I still watch it. The Seth MacFarlane edginess is usually part of some narrative. When a character pukes on a copy of The Feminine Mystique, it seems like a somewhat harmless boneheaded provocation that might get kids to read Betty Friedan. When he makes a joke about how quiet restaurants were during Jim Crow, it’s really not offensive to me, even if it might irritate someone older who lived through Jim Crow.

But in Chicago, where I live, there’s a long history of police torturing black people– we live in a country with lots of black people in jail. There’s also a long history of housing discrimination against blacks. You could use that to make an edgy joke, like Chris Ware did when he advertised prisons as “Large Negro Storage Boxes.” But the video did it in a way that was basically “Birth of a Nation” with a soundtrack; my vibe was that “terrorism against middle-class black people is awesome!” I disagree.

On the other hand, I’m told that one member of the video production team is black, and it could certainly be read as an indictment of white entitlement and hatred, or just an Obama-era version of A Clockwork Orange. Or the white kid could be read as a trailer-trash shithead a la Gummo (which then raises the specter of class war). Maybe, in the class war frame of mind, it doesn’t matter that she’s black, but only that she’s a homeowner. Maybe he’s just an evil kid.

Well fine… I would read it differently if it was a black band, or a band with one black member, or a band with any significant black fan base. But the Pixies are predominantly white people (excepting Filipino-American guitarist Joey Santiago) predominantly addressing white people, and their message (in general) is about how mutilation is fun and how blaming “redneckers for getting pissed at stupid stuff” is stupid. Drop out of college and tell women about how you fear losing your penis to a diseased whore. Which is cool- they’re a great rock band with decent angry-white-male anti-intellectual intellectual lyrics.

But to me there’s no question that the kid was the protagonist, and he was victorious. It takes some serious rationalizing to make him a villain (even though that may have been the intention). And, just to touch on the lyrics– they would seem fairly opaque without the video as context, but now I can’t help but read “She had some manners and beauty but you look like a bug,” accompanied by the sneering insistence to “polish your speech” and “cover your teeth” as patrician advice on proper racial assimilation that not even Bill Cosby would utter.

After reading a draft of the above, Noah pointed out quite astutely that the departure from the band of bassist Kim Deal, known for having a strong woman-positive voice in her other musical projects, does coincide neatly with a video that is not only depicting violence against blacks, but violence against women. It seems doubtful that a country act, a rapper, or a metal band would get a pass for making their misogyny visually explicit, but the fact that an “alternative” act apparently can should certainly provide food for thought.

So yes, “racist” and “sexist” does account for perhaps a majority of, well, all recorded music. Non-recorded as well maybe. There is an entire musical subgenre known as “murder ballads,” this subgenre forming one element of the blues, noted target of wholesale white appropriation, etc. It just might be fun for at least a moment to consider the ways in which the quasi-elite pop culture pantheon, seemingly a sparkling realm of gender- and race-blind self-made genius, have some connection, however tenuous and refracted, to the ongoing worldwide disenfranchisement and exploitation of a teeming underclass.

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Update (by Noah): One of the video’s creators replies in comments; please scroll down to see his response.

Utilitarian Review 7/6/13

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post Anja Flower on queerness and the uses of yaoi.

Nicolas Labarre reviews Blood Feast in 5 panels.

Me on W.W. Denslow’s beginning chapter illustrations for the Wizard of Oz.

Me on gender and comics in Dan Clowes’ Wilson and Like a Velvet Glove.

Ng Suat Tong on Graham Chaffee’s Good Dog.

James Romberger on gender and film in Godard’s Contempt.

Chuck Berry for the 4th of July.

Chris Gavaler on World War Z, stay at home dads, and Muslim zombies.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I write about changes in fatherhood and the rising number of single dads at the Atlantic.

I wrote about confronting trafficking without arguing that all prostitutes are trafficked at the Goodmen Project.

At Splice Today I wrote about

People’s coverage of a transgender girl and the bedrock reality of gender.

Chicago Public Radio’s awful, eugenics-like marketing campaign.

Other Links

Kim Thompson on being an elitist comics critic.

On the Baffler’s new editor.

Abigail Rine on how he’s not sleeping through the night yet.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on manhood among the ruins.

Genevieve Valentine on harassment at cons and other places.

Amy Julia Becker on reading and disability.

Mary McCarthy on Internet trolls.

Stay-at-Home Dad vs. Muslim Zombies

Posted on July 5, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

According to World War Z, two things can trigger a zombie apocalypse: 1) stay-at-home dads, and 2) kindness to Muslims. It is nice, however, to see an American blockbuster starring Brad Pitt as that most un-American of creatures, a U.N. Investigator.

My book club recently spun off a zombie club of college professors, two in Economics and one in English, me (a Philosopher may be joining us soon too). I presented a conference paper on The Walking Dead last winter, but my knowledge base is dwarfed by the guy who makes guac on movie nights. So far we’ve only watched The Night of the Living Dead. We’d schedule Dawn of the Dead (the remake for some reason), but postponed when a wife (also an Economics professor) got called to Abu Dhabi on a family emergency.

George Romero, director zero in the genre contagion, gave his ghouls a clear cause: radiation from a returning Venus space probe. Brad spends most of WWZ’s 116 minutes and $190 million dollars searching for clues. Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman doesn’t care. But in terms of theme and discourse, the answer is always scene one.

Every zombie story (and, arguably, every story of every genre) begins with something rotten in the state of Denmark. It takes less than ten minutes (including the insufferably slow credits sequence) for that creepy old man to lurch at Barbra in the cemetery, but Night of the Living Dead has already provided a horde of apocalypse-triggering conflicts spawning across issues of religion, nation, capitalism, and family:

Johnnie’s stopped going to church and jokes about being damned. Romero shoots the American flag flapping backwards from a veteran’s grave. Is the exploitive funeral industry stealing the wreath off the grave and selling it back to them every year? The family unit is shattered in multiple directions: parents vs. children, brother vs. sister, grandparent vs. grandson. The kids discuss digging up the only vaguely remembered dad so they don’t have to drive hours out of town on their mother’s orders. Time itself is upturned. The first line of the film is a complaint about daylight savings.

World War Z is simpler. The pre-zombie preamble is an ode to the domesticated male. Brad Pitt is the perfect stay-at-home dad. His blissfully happy daughters joke that all he does since quitting his job is make breakfast, but his pancakes are better than Michael Keaton’s in Mr. Mom. Brad doesn’t mind scolding everyone to put their dishes in the sink, but in thematic terms, this is an apocalyptic inversion of stability. His bread-winning wife doesn’t even help with the plates.

When things heat up during the morning commute (Brad is chauffeuring everyone to school and work), his wife takes the wheel while he assumes the traditionally maternal duty of calming and comforting the asthmatically panicked daughter. If you were hoping for a 21^st century vision of shared gender roles, the formal plot doesn’t start till the wife is safely tucked away with the children. Her only job now is being a mom. Dad, meanwhile, reveals the secret depth of his professional prowess, including the power to call rescue helicopters down from the sky. In fact, he may be the only man left with a shot at saving the world. Sure, he only takes the job to safeguard his family, but at that moment the world has already been righted. Zombie plague restores domestic order.

Kirkman plays a similar game in Walking Dead. The comic book is a paean to traditional gender—though kudos to the TV team for trying to shake that up a bit. The zombie ur-heroine Barbra is significantly worse, a knock-off of Hitchcock’s Melanie in The Birds. When the going gets tough, the gals collapse into semi-catatonic dementia. Fortunately, Barbra retreats to a farmhouse first, which Ben (he wasn’t black until Duane Jones showed up for the casting call) boards up. This is where economic theory comes in. How do external threats alter group behavior? Which is the more profitable strategy: staying mobile or hunkering down?

World War Z is explicit about both. Director Marc Forster literally spells it out in subtitles: “Movement is life.” Not that those very nice but ultimately very stupid Spanish parents listen to Brad. And look who gets eaten in the next scene. Meanwhile, Israel boards up their whole country. But they also let in Muslim refugees, figuring a grateful live Muslim is better than an angry dead Muslim. Cooperation skyrockets as Israeli soldiers nod and smile and even hand over the PA system for group singing. I’ve never seen an airport customs line half as chummy.

But as every zombie fan knows, hunkering never works for long. Images of Middle East peace last two, maybe three minutes. Romero boarded up the Monroeville Mall (about two miles from my childhood home) for his first sequel, Dawn of the Dead, but its collapse is nothing to the geysers of Palestinian zombies flooding into the last nation on Earth. CGI turns Romero’s lurching latex-painted extras into blood cells gushing through urban arteries. Israel dies from its own kindness—a political allegory a lot of right wingers can probably live with.

That’s where Romero would have left things, with Brad ascending from the Tel Aviv airport into the ambiguous but not particularly hopeful unknown. WWZ is a 1950s scifi. When Don Siegel tried to end Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a chillingly open-ended “They’re coming!”Hollywood sent him back to the editing booth to tack on their contractual, world-is-saved last scene. Forster uses the same one. It turns out zombies dissolve in water! Or something like that. Which is also why at its surprisingly non-gory heart, WWZ isn’t a zombie movie.

Yes, these zombies are sprinters. And, no, they don’t eat the flesh off our bones—just a quick nibble and it’s welcome to the team. But their real genre faux paus is their willingness to bow to the deus ex machina of the human spirit. That’s the formula and American self-image Romero so thoroughly gutted in 1968. In Night of the Living Dead, the center doesn’t hold. Daughter eats mother, brother eats sister, and a posse of deputized rednecks gun down the last rugged individual. In fact, there never was a center. Government, family, God, those are just boards we nail around ourselves while waiting for oblivion to splinter through.

Not true of WWZ. Sure, the American experiment fails (our cops are just more lawless looters), but the world government holds. Instead of retreating to upstate Maine to wait out the vampire plague of I Am Legend (Romero’s literary influence), Brad’s patriarchal family reunites in Nova Scotia. Yeah, that’s right. Canada and the U.N. save humanity. Talk about a horror story!

Don’t Tell Tchaikovsky The News

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today way back when. It seemed like a nice piece to run for the 4th. Who’s America if not Chuck Berry?
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Blues and folk musicians soldier on forever, keeping the tradition alive. Rock musicians soldier on forever, turning into lumbering saurian parodies of themselves. Somewhere in the middle are rock and rollers, whose latter-day work is neither exactly respected nor exactly despised. Rather, for the most part, it’s just ignored.

Which is why it’s so weird to realize that, unlike Elvis or Buddy Holly or Johnny Cash or Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry is still alive and still touring. He hasn’t recorded a studio album in more than 30 years, and hasn’t even had a live album in 8, but at 84 years old and counting, he still goes out there playing the same half-century old hits. Not a tradition or a parody, he’s no longer got a mass audience, exactly, but he’s still what he always was: Chuck Berry, performer.

It’s maybe fitting, then, that Berry’s last great artistic effort wasn’t a hit but a personal testament. His 1987 autobiography was, according to the man himself, “raw in form, rare in feat, but real in fact. No ghost but no guilt or gimmicks, just me,” and you can hear the truth in the rock of the phrase and the roll of the alliteration. Berry says he’s only read six hardbacks in his life, and that the dozens of paperbacks he’s paged through were “only for the stimulation”. Yet his love of language comes through on every page. Open at random and you find:

“Opportunity and temptation were anywhere you let them be. New ideas, ideals, and eye dolls were there to be held.”

“We were ‘short hairs and busted’ […] and were told if we wantd to kick back our ‘dime,’ we’d have to keep our mind off the streets, our hands off ‘ourselves,’ drink plenty of cool water, and walk slow.”

“Nine handsome young southern gentlemen were lined beneath the wing of the DC 3, elegantly welcoming me to Mississippi. I felt like the stately son of Stonewall Jackson, but it lasted only four minutes.”

There’s no doubt about it; that’s the same man whose lyrics included motorvatin’, coffee-colored cadillacs, and bobby soxers wiggling like whimsical fish.

While the voice is unmistakably Berry’s, though, it wouldn’t be quite right to say that the lack of a ghostwriter makes the book more honest. Even in the 3 minute medium of rock and roll songs, Berry’s quick wit tended to undercut a surface directness with a sly ambiguity. Those bobby soxers wiggling like whimsical fish — is Berry admiring them? Making fun of them? Lusting after them? The brown-eyed handsome man doesn’t just have brown eyes, surely; and why did Marie’s mom tear up that happy home in Memphis, TN anyway? Performers like Little Richard or Bo Diddley had lyrics which were exuberantly clever, but Berry was perhaps unique among the early rock and rollers in how he used words to dance around what he had to say. In the autobiography he notes that he rarely used songs to express love…but the broader truth is that, unlike almost all his peers, he rarely used songs to express any direct emotion. In a music pitched in some sense at kids, he always maintained a very adult distance.

The adultness and the distance are both fully visible in the autobiography. Berry can be remarkably frank; the book sometimes reads like a meticulous chronicle of every time he ever had an erection. Fellatio, cunnilingus, lesbianism, and condom use all make an appearance with just enough dissemblance to keep the book from out and out porn. He also talks openly about his fascination with white woman, discussing his obsession as a young boy with a white nurse and noting, “My mother’s nurse had a profound effect on the state of my fantasies and settled into the nature of my libido. I’ll tell you more later.”

And he does tell more later…sort of. There are numerous stories of sexual encounters with white women, from millionaires to hippies to prostitutes to French reporters. But how his philandering affected his relationship with his long suffering wife, or even his own emotional life, is skimmed over. His most important relationship with a white woman, his longtime association with his secretary Francine, is given a separate chapter which seems designed to hint at everything and confirm nothing. Berry actually includes a large section written by Francine, in which she praises him in phrases that sure sound like the endearments of a lover. But Berry never admits to sleeping with her, and certainly never lets slip what his wife thought about her husband and his devoted secretary jetting off to tropical vacations together while she stayed home to mind the kids. Nor do we learn how his relationships with either his wife or his secretary was affected by his abortive sexual dalliance with a 14-year old — a dalliance which he insists was never consummated, but which nonetheless landed him in prison on dubious-but-not-nearly-dubious-enough charges under the Mann act.

So it goes with most of the major themes of the book. Racism shadows his childhood, his relationships with white women, and his performing career, but it’s place in his psyche is more alluded to (as a source of fear or triumph or irritation) than elucidated. His consuming obsession with money is evident throughout, culminating in tax fraud committed, he says, because he wanted to get his bank balance to $1 million — but the closest he gets to actually explaining his attitude to his fortune are a few pithy, clearly misleading phrases about how he would play even if there were no profit in it. As for his songwriting, as Robert Christgau notes in an old review of the autobiography: “you get a funny feeling from this book: either music comes so naturally to the man that he gives it nary a thought, or he just plain gives it nary a thought.” (http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bkrev/berry-87.php)

It’s possible Berry doesn’t think about music — or possible, anyway, that he hasn’t thought about it in a long time. His style was set fairly early on, and while he mentions the Beatles and the Stones and some others, it’s clear he admires them, to the extent he does, for their fame and professional accomplishments, not because he cares a lick for their music. It’s the performers he heard in his youth — Muddy Waters to Nat King Cole — that he’s passionate about. If he was inspired by any musician after 1960 or so, you sure can’t tell it from this book.

Indeed, and as is the case for many celebrity bios, the material here about his childhood is the most vivid and the most powerful, from his joyful memories of squabbling over the piano with his siblings, to the queasy discussion of being forced to kiss the feet of a white woman on a golf course, to the even queasier account of a disastrous road trip turned hapless crime spree which landed him in juvenile detention on a ten year sentence. In this early section, you can see the connections between libido, race, music, ambition, and language which created a performer eager and able to conquer the world.

In adulthood, those connections get blurry — rubbed out, finessed, erased. A ghost writer might have gotten Berry to tell more, or at least to more directly refuse to talk about the stuff he doesn’t want to talk about. But if there’s not necessarily an honesty in the telling, there’s at least an honesty in the obfuscation. Berry’s about what he won’t tell you as much as about what he will. So when he goes out on stage and repeats the lyrics he wrote decades ago, you have to feel it’s not because he’s slacking off, but because he figures he already said what he had to say.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon