Can’t Watch the Watchmen

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I won’t see the Watchmen movie, though I value the book and don’t mind when the film factory injects a treasured classic with silicon[e]. I even think it’s a plus when I’ve never heard of a single actor in it, save Billy Crudup, who’s replaced early by a computer chip.

Mostly, it’s that I can’t endure the coloring.

In the comic, John Higgins’ colors seemed nasty, lurid, like touching them would infect you with a superbug they’ve only got two antibiotics for and one doesn’t work. My enduring image of it is whole pages of flat magenta or yellow with minor shifts in value. It matched the rotten story and the paper stock. If newsprint seemed to smear color, even absorb it, Baxter(?) paper made it brighter. It’s surely one of the great works of coloring in mainstream comics.

If nothing else, it put me off baked beans for years.

Yet in the movie (trailers), everything’s slick and cool. Its visual sheen has been honed in recent cycle of superhero movies; I guess X-Men was the first, where costumes gave way to hard plastic muscles on bodysuits. Regardless of what they do for the body, they catch the light just so, like a luxury sedan.

Much of the blame should go to the colorist. Even critics who talk about cinematography and lighting, and the rare ones who know the gaffer’s dark art, never talk about coloring (or color grading, as it’s known). The job’s like making a print in a darkroom with expensive hardware.

Stu Maschwitz, a sharp technical mind who until recently ran the VFX house The Orphanage, has a couple of posts on his blog about how color grading can affect a film:

  • Color Makes the Movie, with raw and graded frame grabs from Transporter 2
  • Save Our Skins, about the recent trend in movies to maintain an even flesh color through all kinds of light

So, just from what I’ve seen in trailers & clips, the cold sheen of the images could have been avoided. The recent superhero movies Maschwitz have done, like The Spirit, at least have arresting visuals. Watchmen looks like Turtle Wax.

Nana #15

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Just read through the 15th volume of Ai Yazawa’s Nana, and yes, I am still in love with the series. A few more or less random thoughts…some of which I may have said before, but what the hell:

1. One of the things I like most about the series is the way that it manages to be a soap opera and use lots of soap opera cliches — and yet, the way the series uses them is never, or rarely cliched. For example, volume 14 ended with Nana being confronted by a picture of Ren, her finacé hugging another woman (Reira). We know that nothing happened between Ren and Reira, but Nana doens’t..so, totally predictable set-up, right? Nana should go ballistic and be horribly upset and betrayed and there should be all this drama because of miscommunication. Except that isn’t what happens at all; Nana immediately realizes that the picture isn’t all that incriminating and that Ren wouldn’t cheat on her. She is upset, and there is some drama with Ren, but it’s more about the fissures that already exist in their relationship than it is with the photograph per se…and, in any case, their reconciliation occurs fairly quickly.

Basically, the point is that Yazawa seems to trust her characters to be interesting on their own terms. She certainly provides plenty of drama, but she never sacrifices her protagonists to the exigencies of plot. Nana doesn’t become stupid just because the story would be more conventionally exciting if she did. It’s pretty much the opposite of the way that Brian K. Vaughn proceeded in Y; The Last Man, in which the integrity of the characters is gleefully chucked over every available cliff-hanger.

2. I love the way that Yazawa let’s the focus of the story drift from character to character over the course of the story. Nana and Hachi are always more or less the most important characters. But as their lives alter and evolve, the most important supporting characters change a lot. In this volume, I was just noticing how central Takumi (Hachi’s fiance) has become, while Nobu (her former flame) has been pushed off to the sidelines. Meanwhile, Jun, Hachi’s friend, and a central character early on, has a walk-on appearance, and though it’s a very brief scene, you can feel the weight of their past — there’s a close-up where you can see Jun realize that Hachi has become a much stronger and more mature person — and seeing it through Jun’s eyes allows the reader (for whom the transformation has been more gradual) to recognize it too.

Again, the point here is Yazawa’s faith in her work and in her readers. She trusts that even if she drops characters or adds characters, the reader will stay with her. And, perhaps more importantly, she trusts that the story can change gradually and organically, without exclamation points. It’s just incredibly mature and confident story-telling.

3. On another note: this isn’t exactly a criticism, but…today I was talking to a friend who has toured with an act which started small, and then got quite big. And one of the big problems he encountered was with money. That is, when you start out small, nobody thinks much about how you’re going to split the dough, because there is none. But when you suddenly get big, the money becomes a huge issue — one that can sew a lot of bitterness, wreck friendships, and just generally create a lot of drama.

Nana is, of course, about two bands that make it big. And it’s a soap opera, so it thrives on drama. But…there’s virtually never any drama about money. The characters don’t argue about money. There’s no discussion of how they’ll split their takes. There’s an acknowledgment that they are earning money, certainly, but there’s never fighting about it. It’s weird.

A while back I talked about the odd way Nana deals with the band’s drug use and publicity. Most of that strangeness had to do with cultural differences, I think; Japanese bands have to be a lot more careful of their public image, especially around issues like drug use. It seems unlikely that cultural difference explains the problem here, though; I mean, I doubt that Japanese rock stars never quibble over money. Probably Yazawa just doesn’t think that money troubles are romantic or interesting — and possibly she thinks such mundane concerns are beneath her characters, who are all fairly self-consciously presented as artists. I don’t know…anyone out there have any insights? It doesn’t really bother me per se…it just seems odd.

Really Bad Sentence

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From Lesbian Images by Jane Rule, published 1975. The book says that Jill Johnston, a loudmouth flibbertigibbet with the Village Voice, refuses to quit being a loudmouth flibbertigibbet:

Instead she seems to collects insults and labels to wear them around her neck like all the other decorations she wears over her comically aggressive costume and then stick that neck out once again, not only to contradict other people’s visions of reality, but her own vision of six months or two years ago.

Yeah, stick that neck out and … Oh well. The sentence is a spasm of klunk, a rare combination of two flaws normally found apart: clod-hopping heaviness and disoriented dizziness.
Wikipedia says Jane Rule, author of Lesbian Images, was inducted into the Order of Canada two years ago. Incredibly, I saw a movie based on one of her novels, saw it way back in 1986. Today I find out that the movie, called Desert Hearts, was based on a book by a woman who became a Canadian knight (or dame) and wrote at least one sentence that sounds a lot like somebody on cough syrup trying to turn an epigram after falling a long way down the stairs.
Bonus facts: Jane Rule was born in New Jersey, and her novel, published in 1964, is entitled Desert of the Heart.

And here’ s the Jill Johnston Wikipedia entry.

YKK Reaction

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During our roundtable on YKK, TCJ‘s Dirk Deppey took exception to the uncoordinated lukewarm feelings we have for the book. Fair enough, but I still disagree with this:

“So I fail to see how a reasonable person can describe Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou as reactionary.”

If I want to be precise, I should’ve said “So I didn’t see anthing resembling reactionary sentiments in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.” You never know — some argument here could change my mind, I suppose.

Both quotes are his, from this comments thread. I introduced the term, then wondered if it was accurate. Dirk defined it in that same thread as “an attempt to roll back some aspect of recent political or cultural change to which the author has objections.”

That’s what YKK is. Here are two reasons, three points:

1.The Park

Google Maps satellite image of the area around Minato Mirai 21, the building complex shown in the art from my first post. On the left, a shot of a part of metro Tokyo that runs uninterrupted to Yokohama. (It’s 30 minutes on the Japan Rail Yokosuka line from Tokyo Station to Yokohama Station.) Click to enlarge; the “A” is the building. Play with it in Google Earth for a while and see how many Manhattans you can fit in metro Tokyo.

In the scene, Ashinano puts Alpha on a picturesque hill by the tallest Minato Mirai building. I’ve been to Yokohama a couple of times, and the two crummy parks I know would be underwater. She might be at the park on top of the International Port Terminal, but it’s mostly twisted metal and boardwalk. Maybe the boards composted.

So there’s no green space in reality but YKK shows some. So what?

There used to be green space, but Japan’s government-mandated construction policies erased it. They have a one-party democracy whose main voting block is the construction industry. In fact, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is so intertwined with builders that they call it “the construction state” (????), and a main policy platform in the post-Bubble years (90s to now) has been construction subsidy. Thousands of small towns rely on construction of needless roads and monuments for jobs, and fiscal policy ensures that houses don’t gain value as they age. This ensures that the construction state can step in, tear down the “old” houses like Legos, and throw up new ones in a couple of weeks. (A friend of mine bought a plot of land in order to restore the 200-year old farmhouse on it; he had to negotiate hard for the seller not to tear down the house, because the land was worth less with the house on it. Even then the seller thought he was nuts.)

Everyone I’ve talked to about it, from friends to acquaintances, just throw up their hands. There are moments when community groups have blocked a few of the most ridiculous construction projects, but not very many.

(Lately, the Democratic Party of Japan has made some inroads and there’s talk the LDP’s days are numbered. DPJ’s head is an old LDP bruiser, and they both seem to be owned by the guy who runs the Yomiuri newspaper, or whoever owns him. I’ll believe change when I see it– because PM Aso’s stimulus package will be full of construction projects.)

Given this reality, when I see a work of fantasy hit “Reset” to avoid dealing with the present reality– and all works of speculative fantasy deal at heart with their present reality– I call that reactionary, “an attempt to roll back some aspect of recent political or cultural change to which the author has objections.” New Engineering deals with the construction state in an imaginative, ironic way; YKK pretends it never happened.

2. Shopping Street

In YKK vol. 1, the only shopping trip takes Alpha to an old-fashioned shopping street. The stores are like the ones currently dying in all cities and many towns, mom-and-pops where the owners know you by name. It’s like the street markets found throughout Asia, embattled by Western models of efficiency and scale.

The American-style supermarket has taken off in Japan, putting pressure on small family operations, like the two excellent hole-in-the-wall sushi bars shuttered in a one-year span in the town where I lived. Both owners cited the fact that supermarket sushi was just too cheap to compete with. In fact, they survived longer than should have been expected, and you can still buy Panasonic goods in downtown shops as big as a closet. This is a political issue, as the mom-and-pops have enjoyed protections that drive foreign economists nuts. If all that matters is the numbers, they make no sense, but identity and webs of relationships matter here. This is especially true in agriculture, as Japan has fought liberalization of the rice trade for years, even though farmers have a median age in the 900s. As far as I can tell, the core’s Japanese identity. Rice is life is Japan, and our rice tastes different than Thai rice or California rice. I guess eating that stuff throws local identity too much into question, even though coffee shops like Alpha’s probably serve 30 kinds of bread.

While I support a farm subsidy for a variety of reasons, the ag policy’s meaningless unless it addresses wholesale rural depopulation. Some manga, like Iou Kuroda’s Nasu, toy with the idea in a playful, satisfying way. Ashinano hits reset again, rolling back the last 60 years with a convenient apocalypse that kills all the economists but not the supply lines to coffee-growing lands, all while turning tarmac into healthy loam.

Maybe everybody’s dying off with great poignancy and there’s a spaceship towards the end– I’ll find out now that I’ve committed to read later volumes– but under normal circumstances I wouldn’t get that far for all the corn being served up in the first one. Comfy old-fashioned shopping streets and wizened leathery farmers with huge crops of watermelons and no drinking problems. I know it’s a gentle vision, any sins surely vestal, and it does remind me of Miyzazaki’s works, the best compliment I can pay. His works, however, are defiantly pastoral, always furiously engaged with the present. In his script for Whisper of the Heart, the unbelievably romantic ending, an eye-roller for the jaded among us, came as a riposte to what he saw as the failure of the younger generations to commit to much of anything. YKK‘s shares more with unending pop waves of uncomplicated nostaglia, most recently for the 1950s as shown in works like the manga/movie Always: Sunset on Third Street. When you can make the “good old days” the poverty & destruction of the postwar, that’s some doing.

3.

“Reactionary” here I think is more cultural than political, though it’s a reaction against a political reality. And while it mirrors the tendency I see in left-wing Western environmentalists like Derrick Jensen and the Peak Oil cheerleaders, who seem to pray to Ma Nature every night that Western industrialism collapses because then we’ll all surely go back to the ecovillage, and the conservatism of those on the Western Right who pretend Real America lives in dying small towns though half the world lives in cities, while it mirrors those, I think trying to connect the “reactionary” I’ve argued for in YKK to any kind of Western political “reactionary” is a stretch to say the least. Not as much of a stretch as Amity Shales’ creative writing project in WaPo, but a stretch nonetheless.

So I’d say I used the right word with too much brevity, and let the associations it carried get away from my original point. I still have the reasoned view that YKK‘s picture of the world is reactionary, while admitting that someone without knowledge of what I outlined above or the same care for it I have will likely take another view.

To close, I’m reminded of the movie Amélie, which I liked well enough and which was universally praised in the French press on its release. Then Serge Kaganski chewed out Amélie’s throat in Libération, and Frédéric Bonnaud summed up the controversy that followed in Film Comment:

the so-called poetry that trickles through Amélie depends on a profoundly reactionary impulse – the reinstatement of a cliché snapshot image of France in order to reaffirm its enduring value.

Switch France & Japan: while YKK is not like Amélie in scale– there’s no tsunami of fois gras and Renoirs– it is in kind.

That’s it.

***

Footnote books in English for further reading, if like me you find this kind of thing interesting:

Alex Kerr, Dogs & Demons. A breezy rant, it’s not great, and FOTB Westerners discover it and overquote it when they’re frustrated that Japan doesn’t flatter their expectations. It’s a poorly-written, or at least translated, book. Kerr wrote it in Japanese, which might explain why the research is so thin. He relies almost entirely on Japanese newspaper sources, which do little investigative journalism and are ruled by press clubs that restrict access to information. I picked up the book hoping for research on par with Robert Jackall’s Moral Mazes. It’s more like a 200-page blog screed with lots of links to nothing but Yahoo News. Still, it’s the English book that will give you some idea of what I’m talking about.

Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence. This is academic version I was looking for.

Or you can just go to The Economist and do a search for “LDP” and “construction.” You’ll get 81 articles, an afternoon’s reading and a sick feeling in your stomach.

Nietzsche-Keane

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This is a bit collegiate, but … The Nietzsche Family Circus. A random Nietzsche quote is made the caption of a random Bil Keane cartoon; just hit refresh and you get a new one. Didn’t really make me laugh, but one appreciates the thought. 


UPDATE:  And then this one did make me laugh.


 

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, 
a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

That kid in the background with the hat. Mom’s going to buy them a fifth and they can get trashed and do amateur theatrics in the backyard.

And this one. It seems too good to be true:




If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

And finally:


A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.


Impulsive Prediction

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UPDATE: The AFL-CIO had already confirmed the offer.
UPDATE 2:  Bad news for my prediction, though not good news for the GOP.
***

Political Animal links to a Greg Sargent bit. Supposedly, the AFL-CIO has told Arlen Specter they’ll back him in his next election if he votes for the Employee Free Choice Act. The idea is that he may jump parties and become a Democrat. My reflex judgment is, yes, he’ll change parties. I saw Bill O’Reilly on the Daily Show in November, and he was saying that basically his outlook was anarchist. These days you can go on national tv and say you’re an anarchist, and that’s better than saying you’re a Republican. And Specter has always struck me as somebody who jumps as survival dictates.

Here’s a clever piece of distancing, by Tom Wolfe in early 2006 (if I remember). He was asked about being a conservative. Wolfe said people know him for what he’s against, they don’t look on him as being in favor of anyone in particular. As I translated it: he wanted to say that, yes, he was still against limousine liberals, but he was not necessarily in favor of Republicans or conservatives. If that was the idea, I think it was a dodge but clever.  “Being against” really is a big part of Wolfe’s outlook, especially being against flossy, pretentious, trend-following would-be elite fops — damn liberals. On the other hand, come on, his beliefs are conservative and so are his loyalties; that’s why his latest book is on sale at Human Events Book Service, along with Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg.