Interpreting Oz

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Ken Derry

1. Behind the Curtain

I don’t remember exactly when or how it was that I first learned that L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz series of books, had called for the murder of all Native American people. But I do remember the information both shocked me and, in some ways, did not shock me at all. I had been doing research into colonialism and Indigenous history for a little while – mostly focusing on Canada, but including the rest of the Americas as well – and had become sadly used to encountering horrifying material.

Baum is not circumspect in his opinions about Indians, which he expressed just twice in editorials written for The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer . In the December 20, 1890, edition he declared: “The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.” Just over a week later, on December 29, the U.S. Calvary killed hundreds of Sioux at Wounded Knee. In direct response to the massacre, on January 3 Baum wrote: “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”

Among folks doing Indigenous studies Baum’s editorials are well known, so there never seemed much reason for me to write about them. At least that was the case until a friend of mine, Michael Ostling, invited me and three others to participate in a panel using The Wizard of Oz as a jumping off point to talk about issues related to the academic study of religion. That may seem like an odd idea, but it was based to some extent on two key points: 1) “religion” is a notoriously slippery term, and as a result it’s possible to link it to just about anything; 2) the machinations of the Wizard have been previously used by scholars as a metaphor for some aspects of religious activity. Russell McCutcheon, for instance, states:

In attempting to manufacture an unassailable safe haven for the storage of social charters and “worlds,” mythmakers, tellers and performers draw on a complex network of disguised assumptions, depending on their listeners not to ask certain sorts of questions, not to speak out of turn, to listen respectfully, applaud when prompted, and, in those famous lines from The Wizard of Oz, to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” (207)

The curtain metaphor applies very differently however to work by Sam Gill on a particular Indigenous ritual, the rite of passage ceremony for young Wiradjuri males in eastern Australia. In this ritual the older men at first fool the boys into thinking that a powerful spirit being is present among them, but then actually reveal their own trickery – much like if the Wizard himself had pulled aside the curtain, rather than Toto. In this way (according to Gill) the men induce in the boys “a disenchantment with a naive view of reality, that is, with the view that things are what they appear to be” (81). In other words the ritual helps to foster an understanding of religion, and life, that is complex and nuanced, that moves beyond the theatrics of smoke and thunder.

Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/232498399487979240/

All of which is to say that in many ways the stage had been set for some time now for a more detailed consideration of The Wizard of Oz and how scholars think about religion. In the end, the five of us presented our different takes on at the 2012 annual meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Religion. Four of us subsequently published versions of our papers in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture in 2014, the 75^th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz.

My own contribution to the panel centered on Baum’s editorials. Aside from studying Indigenous traditions, I have long been interested in conversations about religion and violence. One pattern in these conversations – the ones held both by academics and by regular humans – is that people tend to come to them having already decided what they think. Very simply: if you believe that religion is essentially “good” then you likely will make the case that “real” religion is not inherently violent (and so religion can be used as a kind of Ozian smokescreen to cover up the underlying motives of violence, but is never the “real” cause); and if you believe that religion is essentially “bad” then you likely are convinced, à la Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, that it is in fact wholly responsible for a great deal of violence and suffering, and that the world would be much better off without it (religion in this view is the smokescreen, presenting itself as good and true and obscuring its underlying evil heart).

And so I wondered: did attitudes about Baum similarly impact scholars’ views of his work (or vice versa)? More specifically, were there connections between academic treatments of his genocide editorials and interpretations of both the first book in the Oz series, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and its 1939 movie adaptation? I wasn’t surprised to find that the answer seemed to be “yes.” (But while I was not surprised, I was [and am] still cautious: given that I’m looking at the ways in which people’s views of reality are shaped by their assumptions, it makes me itchy when my own assumptions appear to be borne out by the data I uncover.)

I am incredibly, unbelievably fortunate to have access to the University of Toronto library system, which seems to contain just about every book and article ever published on anything, ever. Which made it possible for me to read pretty much everything ever written on Baum, his work, and The Wizard of Oz. The first thing I noticed is that most scholars who write about this stuff do not mention Baum’s genocide editorials at all. The ones who do consistently fall into one of three categories:

The majority see Baum’s work as very positive in various ways, and excuse the editorials (“he didn’t really mean them”; “you have to consider the context”; etc.).
A few see Baum’s work as very negative in various ways, and accept the editorials more or less at face value (basically: “he was a genocidal racist”).
A tiny minority see Baum and his work, including the editorials, as complicated and open to various, possibly contradictory, interpretations.

Anyone who’s interested can read the full account of my discoveries in excruciating detail in my article. Here, I thought I would just summarize some of the key ideas.

2. Baum is Good / Baum is Bad

The reasoning here is circular: Baum was a good guy, therefore the editorials clearly don’t show us who he “really” was, whereas his books reveal his innate positive qualities. There are three main points that scholars who like Baum and who also mention the genocide editorials tend to make about the initial Oz stories – both the 1899 book and the 1939 film:

The stories are feminist: Dorothy is the hero/savior/protagonist. The most powerful characters in both Oz and Kansas are women (the good and wicked witches, Auntie Em, and Mrs. Gulch).
The stories are anti-imperialist: The Wizard is revealed as both fraud and monster, sending a young girl and her friends on a suicide mission in order to protect his power. The more explicitly evil tyrants, the wicked witches, are destroyed and their people liberated.
The stories celebrate diversity: Many different types of beings co-exist peacefully in Oz, a situation symbolized by the team of living scarecrow, mechanical man, anthropomorphic lion, human girl, and small dog. The only real inter-species problems are caused by the evil tyrants (e.g., the flying monkeys attack others because they are controlled by the witch).

These same three topics appear in the more negative readings of Baum, his first Oz book, and that book’s most famous movie adaptation:

The stories are anti-feminist: The most powerful women in Oz who are in conflict with male authority (the Wizard) are the witches of the east and west, characterized as evil and deserving of assassination. Dorothy does not defeat these witches using her skills or intelligence, but by accident (using a house and a bucket of water). And the ending of the film makes it clear that the girl’s true “place” is at “home” – where she is now more than happy to do her domestic chores.
The stories are pro-imperialist: The Wizard, in the end, is shown as kindly and avuncular; everyone seems to quickly forget that he tried to send Dorothy et al. to their deaths (!). Dorothy for her part is a helpful invader/colonist, who receives thanks and praise from the native inhabitants for her interference in their world (unlike the United States’ 2003 experience in Iraq, Dorothy is in fact greeted as a liberator upon her arrival in Oz).
The stories are segregationist: Oz is (mostly) peaceful because its constituent “races” are kept separate from one another, each community in its own place (like Munchkinland). The diverse team of Dorothy and her new friends is the exception that proves the rule.

One of the more interesting examples of how assumptions about Baum impact interpretation of the Oz stories involves the poppy field. Batting for the pro-Baum side, Evan Schwartz in Finding Oz refers to the fact that, after WWI, poppy fields came to represent war victims: “The red color was said to come from the blood of the slain, serving as an emblem of commemoration” (190). Schwartz combines this perspective – which emerged of course after the original publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – with his belief that Baum in fact disapproved of the genocide of Native Americans, and concludes that the poppy field in Oz “can be read as a powerful symbol of Frank’s – and America’s – sadness over the destruction of native cultures” (190).

Thomas St. John sees things differently. In the unambiguously titled “Indian-Hating in ‘The Wizard of Oz’”, St. John argues that various symbolic elements of the story reveal Baum’s generally racist perspective, and his particular desire to help bring about “the extermination of the American Indian.” The poppies in this reading are not about the war dead, but dangerous narcotics, associated with Native Americans through an impressively convoluted, if not entirely coherent, line of reasoning: “The Deadly Poppy Field is the innocent child’s first sight of opium, that anodyne of choice for pain in the nineteenth century, sold in patent medicines, in the Wizard Oil, at the travelling Indian medicine shows. Baum’s deadly poppies are the poison opium, causing sleep and the fatal dream.”

3. It’s Complicated

Essentially, folks who take the third approach to Baum and the Oz stories recognize that there are merits to many different interpretations, that whether or not Baum really meant what he wrote in those editorials his Oz stories are nevertheless ambiguous and complex, and lend themselves to a host of (often contradictory) understandings. Dorothy performs selfless, heroic acts and wants to go back to the farm. The Wizard is both murderously duplicitous and genuinely helpful. Oz is both diverse and segregated. The Witch of the West is both villain and victim.

Source: http://www.juxtapost.com/site/permlink/d8a43760-91e6-11e1-a833-533dd5490f0e/post/wizard_of_oz_is_a_pretty_messed_up_story_honestly_/

Katherine Fowkes is one of the few commenters who not only recognizes the inherent impossibility of arriving at a definitive reading of The Wizard of Oz, but regards this impossibility as a selling point. In The Fantasy Film she suggests that “the popularity and staying power of Wizard and other classic films may lie precisely in their myth-like ability to juggle conflicting ideas and impulses, thereby providing the possibility of various and sometimes opposite interpretations” (61). Her point here reminds me of Chris Gavaler’s discussion of Cinderella and the “minimally counterintuitive superheroes,” the key idea being that stories and characters are often particularly memorable because they occupy the “sweet spot” of the “weird-but-not-too weird.” That seems an apt description of many tales from both Baum and the Bible.

Fowkes’ take on The Wizard of Oz also reminds me of one of Paul Ricoeur’s central ideas about interpretation, namely that texts comprised of metaphors and symbols lend themselves, by their nature, to various understandings. We must “resist,” he says, “the temptation to believe that each text has its own correct interpretation, its own static, hidden meaning,” and instead recognize that “reading is, first and foremost, a struggle with the text” (494-5). The point is not that a given text can mean anything – interpretations must still be based on reason and evidence. There is virtually no evidence that Baum’s poppy fields, for instance, symbolize either his sadness over the treatment of Native Americans, or his desire to see them wiped from the face of the earth. But there is reason to think that his Oz stories have several things to say about gender, imperialism, and diversity – even if those things don’t always agree with one another.

For me, this is where the real (and really simple) connection to religion comes in: however you define it, “religion” is waaaay more complicated than The Wizard of Oz (!), and religious stories are not just myth-like but involve actual myths. It therefore seems entirely sensible to imagine that religions are also open to a host of reasonable yet divergent interpretations. This is of course a HUGE topic on its own, and one that I’m not going to go into here. I really just want to suggest that recognizing actual complexity – in stories, religion, people – can help us avoid shallow, one-sided, and possibly harmful interpretations based on simplistic, and simplifying, assumptions. Again, it’s a ridiculously simple idea, but one that I think too often gets lost in all the shouting about what things “really” mean.

Works Cited

Fowkes, Katherine A. The Fantasy Film. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Gill, Sam D. Beyond the “Primitive”: The Religions of Nonliterate Peoples. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1982.

McCutcheon, Russell T. “Myth.” Guide to the Study of Religion. Ed. Russell T. McCutcheon and Willi Braun. Cassell: New York, 2000. 190-208.

Ricoeur, Paul. “World of the Text, World of the Reader.” A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Ed. Mario Valdés. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. 491-497.

Schwartz, Evan I. Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

St. John, Thomas. “Indian-Hating in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’” CounterPunch 26-28 June. 2004.

Utilitarian Review 7/4/15

Posted on July 4, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Our complete Joss Whedon roundtable.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sales dates of comics from June-August 1943, including Wonder Woman, Carl Barks, Plastic Man, and more.

Me on the fact that Joss Whedon doesn’t exist.

Phillip Smith on Indonesian comics’ representation of the May 1998 riots.

Kristian Williams compares Mad Max and Fury Road.

Me on how gay marriage changes marriage for everyone.

Chris Gavaler on Thomas Jefferson, the 4th of July, and zombies.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Playboy

— I wrote about The Wind Done Gone and why removing Confederate symbols matters.

—I argued that sex can be radical (or at least political)

At Vice I wrote about Terminator: Genysis and being colonized by robots.

At Splice Today I wrote about why David Brooks is confused about Robert E. Lee.

Other Links

Arthur Chu on Dollhouse as Whedon’s self-parody (inspired by our Whedon roundtable.)

Nix with an open letter to Meghan Murphy from the other side of feminism. (Nix says some kind things about me in the piece.)

Thomas Jefferson: Schizophrenic Zombie-Fighter

Posted on July 3, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I’m shocked to report that spending July 4^th in Bath means no Fourth of July fireworks. For some reason England doesn’t seem to celebrate the holiday. So this year I’ll have to settle for all-American superhero analysis instead:

The Declaration of Independence is, according to Noam Chomsky, the first American superhero text. A student asked the world-renown linguist and political commentator about the onslaught of zombies in American theaters and TVs, and he explained that in American pop lit, we’re always “about to face destruction from some terrible, awesome enemy, and at the last moment we’re saved by a superhero.”

John Lawrence and Robert Jewett call it The Myth of the American Superhero: “Spiderman and Superman contend against criminals and spies just as the Lone Ranger puts down threats by greedy frontier gangs. Thus paradise is depicted as repeatedly under siege, its citizens pressed down by alien forces too powerful for democratic institutions to quell.”

“So you go back to the early years,” Chomsky explains, “the terrible enemy was the Indians,” those flesh-devouring monsters Thomas Jefferson called “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

They include those folks who mercilessly rescued the first boatload of pilgrims from starvation. Also please ignore the fact that Jefferson’s fellow founders signed a treaty with some zombie hordes that would have made the Delaware tribe the fourteenth state of the new Union. Like the vast majority of U.S. treaties, things didn’t work out as stated.

“It turns out,” says Noam, “this enemy, this horrible enemy that’s going to destroy us, is someone we’re oppressing.” He explains the reversal as “a recognition — at some level of the psyche — that if you’ve got your boot on somebody’s neck, there’s something wrong, and that the people you’re oppressing may rise up and defend themselves, and then you’re in trouble.”

So Jefferson put the focus on the supervillainous King George instead: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” The list of offenses includes plundering, ravaging, and completing “the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”And for a final outrage, George also “excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers,” those aforementioned, George-like savages.

Since its founding document, America has defined itself as a champion of the oppressed—even when it’s been busy oppressing the oppressed. I grew up in Pittsburgh, home of the first recorded act of germ warfare. When two chiefs visited Fort Pitt in 1763 to offer its besieged inhabitants safe retreat from Indian territory, the British commander declined but presented them with a gift of smallpox-infected blankets, hoping they would “have the desired effect.” Next Rev. John “Fighting Parson” Elder was rousing hordes of merciless vigilantes to ride to the rescue and attack Indians living among settlers. “These poor defenseless creatures,” wrote Ben Franklin, “were immediately fired upon, stabbed, and hatcheted to Death!” When the Pennsylvania governor posted rewards, no one turned in the murderers because, Rev. Elder explained, “the men in private life are virtuous and respectable; not cruel, but mild and merciful.”
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America is schizophrenic. We were founded on alter egos. And yet Francis Parkman, while chronicling Pontiac’s so-called Conspiracy, declares the Indian to be full of “contradiction”: “A wild love of liberty, an utter intolerance of control, lie at the basis of his character, and fire his whole existence. Yet, in spite of this haughty independence, he is a devout hero-worshipper; and high achievement in war or policy touches a chord to which his nature never fails to respond. He looks up with admiring reverence to the sages and heroes of his tribe.”

That same liberty-loving hero-worship infuses the schizophrenic character of our American supermen. Of course we adore alter egos. Robert Bird’s proto-Batman, Nick of the Woods, isn’t the only frontiersman suffering from multiple personalities: the Quaker-by-day doesn’t seem to know he’s also an Indian-killing demon-by-night. I prefer Doc Savage and the contorted narrative tricks his writer Lester Dent has to play to avoid the obvious. The character is named after a real-life Colonel Savage, “a hero of the Spanish-American War,” in which the U.S. seized Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from Spain. In his 1932 debut, Doc Savage travels through Central America to find “the Valley of the Vanished” where no “outside races have intermarried” with “the high class of Mayan” believed extinct since Spanish colonization. Though a Mayan princess, apparently attracted by Savage’s racially ambiguous bronze skin, would love to intermarry, he returns to New York with a gift of gold from “the treasure trove of ancient Maya” to finance his do-gooding missions.

It’s a peculiarly American take on colonization, where the colonized are not only willingly plundered but must remain hidden in a static preserve unrelated to any of those actual Indians openly impoverished within the borders of the contemporary U.S. John Carlos Rowe calls it our “contradictory self-conceptions”: “Americans’ interpretations of themselves as people are shaped by a powerful imperial desire and a profound anti-colonial temper.”

That duality also accounts for America’s “paranoid streak.” “The United States is an unusually frightened country,” says Chomsky. “And in such circumstances, people concoct either for escape or maybe out of relief, fears that terrible things happen.” Chomsky’s list of later zombified fears include revolting slaves and “Hispanic narco-traffickers.” If his classroom Skype interview hadn’t lurched to the next question, I think he would have added the hordes of Muslims currently clawing at the gate of America wilderness fort.

Osama bin Laden’s “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” bears an uncomfortable resemblance to “The Declaration of Independence.” Bin Laden wrote two fatwas before 9/11, both roughly the length of our founding text. He lists “crimes and sins committed by the Americans,” calling them “facts that are known to everyone.” Jefferson lets his “Facts be submitted to a candid world,” detailing England’s “abuses and usurpations.” Like King George’s “establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” America is “plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors.” Both declare the “duty” and “honor” of the oppressed to fight for “justice,” evoking Allah and “Nature’s God” in support: “Our Lord, rescue us . . . and raise for us from thee one who will help!”

Gay Marriage for Straight People

Posted on July 2, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This was first published on Splice Today. I thought it seemed like an opportune moment to repost.
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A couple of days before North Carolina voted for officially sanctioned homophobia and Barack Obama voted against it, Maggie Gallagher recorded a video making the case that gay people marrying each other are a deadly threat to the institution of marriage.

I realize that many people disagree with me, but if you ask me why am I involved in this, it’s because the framing ideas of marriage are the most important and the most powerful thing about it, and you cannot get to same-sex marriage without denorming and changing and really transforming the basis of marriage in the public square. And I think it’s really frankly going to lead to a marriage that is weaker and weaker and less and less coherent… I think it is the end of the project of trying to revive marriage as a public institution.

For Gallagher, then, gay marriage threatens the “framing ideas of marriage.” She doesn’t quite say what those ideas are, but presumably they have something to do with marriage as a bond between one man and one woman, husband and wife, and (ideally) father and mother.

Folks like Andrew Sullivan (on whose blog Gallagher’s video appears) generally counter these arguments by arguing that, in fact, the “framing ideas of marriage” are not one man, one woman, and certainly not the rearing of children. Rather, marriage, they argue, is about love, not gender roles. From this perspective, gays and lesbians getting married doesn’t hurt the core principals of marriage. On the contrary, it solidifies them. That’s why, for Sullivan, gay marriage is a conservative movement. It simply includes gay people as equals in one of the organizing institutions of our society—an institution designed expressly to integrate individual love and relationships into society. Thus, for Sullivan, marriage is a way for gay people to learn from, and become like—the same as—straight people.

Here, for example, is Sullivan in 2008, reflecting on his own marriage.

The wedding occurred last August in Massachusetts in front of a small group of family and close friends. And in that group, I suddenly realized, it was the heterosexuals who knew what to do, who guided the gay couple and our friends into the rituals and rites of family. Ours was not, we realized, a different institution, after all, and we were not different kinds of people. In the doing of it, it was the same as my sister’s wedding and we were the same as my sister and brother-in-law. The strange, bewildering emotions of the moment, the cake and reception, the distracted children and weeping mothers, the morning’s butterflies and the night’s drunkenness: this was not a gay marriage; it was a marriage.

In a lot of ways, then, Sullivan and Gallagher, while diametrically opposed in their conclusions, are working from very similar presumptions. Both of them think that marriage, as it is, has fundamental principles, and both of them think that it is important to preserve these principles. Or, to put it another way, both of them think marriage is swell, and that it should keep on keeping on.

I like marriage too. I’ve been married 12 years, as a matter of fact. Marrying my wife was probably the single best decision I’ve made in my life; the only real competition is the decision we made to have our son. Moreover, as it happens, just a few weeks ago I got one of those online ordinations and was, as the theists says, blessed to preside over the wedding of two of my dearest friends. So… marriage. I’m for it.

I think, though, that it’s worth recognizing that, wonderful as marriage can be, it also has some serious downsides. If marriage can be the best thing in the world, then it can also be the worst. If you doubt it, I suggest you read Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman’s 1981 book Father-Daughter Incest—undoubtedly one of the most depressing tomes I’ve ever read.

Herman and Hirschman reveal marriage as an institution not of love, but of dominance, cruelty, violence, and, above all, of rape. Moreover, they argue that rape is not an accidental, perverted result of traditional marriage—rather, it is the logical culmination. Through their work with incest victims, the authors conclude that father-daughter rape occurs most often not in perverse or abnormal marriages, but rather in hyper-normal ones.

Specifically, incest is most likely in families where the father takes the traditional role of a dominant, authoritative (not to mention authoritarian) patriarch. Incestuous fathers are generally competent workers, good providers, and respected in the community. Mothers in these families, on the other hand, are almost caricatures of feminine disempowerment. They often don’t work outside the home, and may be ill, depressed or exhausted; in large part because their husbands abuse them physically and emotionally.

According to Herman and Hirschman, the emphasis on traditional sex roles within marriage—a strong father little involved in child-rearing, a weak mother unable to effectively protect those in her care—leaves children vulnerable to rape. The father sees the daughter as essentially a perk of patriarchal power—patriarchal power the mother cannot effectively counter. The authors conclude, “As long as mothers and children are subordinated to the rule of fathers, such abuses will continue.” They add that this is a tragedy not just for children and mothers, but for fathers as well, who “As long as [they] retain their authoritarian role… cannot take part in the tasks or the rewards of parenthood.”

Of course, most marriages do not have much to do with the caricatured gender roles that Herman and Hirschman identify as typical of incestuous families. But still… those caricatured gender roles do have something to do with marriage. They are one distorted image of marriage’s essence—of marriage designed not as an outgrowth of love, but as an outgrowth of patriarchy and rigorously codified gender roles. Many radical queer activists have opposed gay marriage for just this reason. For them, marriage is, at its core, oppressive and inequitable.

I think they’re wrong—marriage isn’t inequitable at its core. But Sullivan and Gallagher are wrong, too, when they claim that the essence of marriage is beneficent. The truth is that marriage doesn’t have an essence, any more than it has a core. Certainly, marriage is an institution, but institutions aren’t immutable. They shape us, but we shape them, too. Marriage has been, and can still be, a way to oppress women, to enforce particular gender roles, and even to abuse and torture children. It has also been, and can still be, a way to link family and community in love.

Gallagher is correct when she suggests that gay marriage will change the institution of marriage. Marriage has, in the past, been about one man/one woman, just as Gallagher says; it’s been an assertion that gender and gender roles are as important as, or even more important than, what you feel in your heart.

Gay marriage is a final, absolute refutation of that logic. If two men can get married, or two women, then marriage must really be not about power, but about love. Gay marriage, then, is radical in the best sense, in that it offers equality and hope not just to gay people, but to children, women, and men of every orientation—even to Gallagher, resist it as she will. Gay marriage is not just about straight people accepting gays into our institutions. It’s about gay people teaching us what those institutions mean. The gay community has given straight people a lot over the years, but surely gay marriage is one of the greatest gifts it has offered us. Despite North Carolina, despite Maggie Gallagher, I still believe, as I believe in my marriage, that we will, someday, humble ourselves enough to be worthy of it.

Apocalypse, Dystopia, Revolution: Fury Road’s New Future

Posted on July 1, 2015 by Kristian Williams

The end of the world is not what it used to be. Fury Road is not Mad Max.

Fury Road is a fast, loud, spectacular, fight-scene, car-chase, big-explosion action film; but, though it seems strange to say, the original Mad Max was, in its way, a slow and even a quiet movie. While Fury Road is relentless in applying its high-volume, high-velocity, high-violence formula, with barely a pause between frenzied battles, Mad Max lingered in long, still moments, alternately banal and desolate. For a film that was in large part about fast driving and senseless mayhem, Mad Max really took its time, and it was the strained sense of anticipation, rather than stunning moments of explosive action, that supplied its sickening, despondent effect.

The climactic final scene, in which Max chains his enemy to a truck and rigs it to explode, then leaves him a hacksaw and the advice that “it will take you ten minutes to hack through” the handcuffs, but “you can hack through your ankle in five” — turns exactly on this sense of time, and the fear of what is coming rather than the image of what is happening. Here, as with the death of Max’s family, the most horrific violence does not even appear on the screen. What we imagine is worse than what we actually see.

Recall, too, the most stressful moment in the series: the long, agonizing scene in which Max, mostly crippled, lies in the road, arm outstretched, reaching, reaching for his gun, while in the background a motorcycle approaches, bearing down on him, full throttle. I have seen that minute of film a dozen times, probably, and I always find myself hoping, rather desperately, that this time, he will reach the gun, or roll away at the last second, or just pull back his arm. Of course he doesn’t. And, if we were really paying attention, we would know even at the first viewing that he won’t.

Fury Road is more optimistic. It tells the story of a group of women escaping sexual slavery, aided by Max — who is escaping slavery himself — then returning to the water-rich fortress where they were held, killing the warlord, and triggering an uprising. The film ends at the moment of their victory, and the promise at the end — or the hope, rather — is that civilization might be rebuilt on a more humane and egalitarian basis, that human beings might be redeemed.

It’s a long way from the apocalyptic finish of the first film — Max driving into the wasteland, becoming at last one of the barbarians he has spent the movie fighting. Mad Max shows us a slow apocalypse. The end comes not as a matter of nuclear war or biblical cataclysm, with a creeping nihilism tha overtakes everything, including eventually the hero himself. The film shows us what it is like as civilization fails — not merely its institutions, but its values and norms. The stumbling pace and grainy visuals, the marked lack of polish in every regard, all contribute to its hopeless mood, its disconcerting atmosphere, and its lasting, haunting quality.

It is for these same reasons, I think, that Mad Max still speaks to us. Human extinction has only been a real possibility for about half a century. For most of that time, the acknowledged threat was nuclear war. Now it is the destruction of the natural environment. Our apocalypse is slower, and it is therefore harder to conceptualize even as we begin to feel its effects. It is harder to face, and harder to fight. Armageddon, it turns out, will not come as a final battle with mushroom clouds on the horizon and cities reduced to dust, but as a slow rise in global temperatures, the acidification of the oceans, and wildfires, draught, refugee crises — in other words, the nightly news. It is not a question of a few men doing something to end the world, but of all of us doing nothing to save it.

“Who killed the world?” one of the escaping concubines demands. The answer is that we did. Or more to the point: We are — right now, every day.

The future Fury Road presents is a judgement on the present — but also a warning and a challenge. It makes our choices very clear. As the slave-brides learn, at first to their sorrow, escape is impossible for the simple, terrifying reason that there is nowhere to escape to. The promised green utopia is a poisoned wasteland plagued with crows. The only hope for freedom, then, is not escape but rebellion.

The feminism of the message has been much remarked on. But the system the warrior women overthrow is not only patriarchal. It is a political economy in which those who control the resources needed for life, water especially, use that control to enslave some people and reduce others to sordid destitution. It is a military death cult dependent on adolescent skinhead “War Boys” eagerly sacrificing their lives for the glory of battle. And it is a personal dictatorship, with the ruler feared and obeyed almost like a god.

The women — is it too much to call them Furies? — succeed in killing the tyrant. Yet it is far from certain what will come next — and it is uncertain, most of all, for Max. Every film in the series has ended with Max outside of civilization. At the end of the first film, he renounces the old world, its laws and morals, and drives into the desert alone. In Fury Road, it seems, he renounces the new world as well. As the women — once captives, now liberators — ascend into the Citadel of power, Max again turns away. He disappears into the crowd without a word.

1998 in Indonesian Comics

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Philip Smith

‘And through the breach did march into the streets,
Where, meeting the rest, ‘Kill, kill’ they cried.
Frighted with this confused noise, I rose,
And, looking from a turret, might behold
Young infants swimming in their parent’s blood,
Headless carcasses piled up in heaps,
Virgins, half-dead, dragg’d by their golden hair,
And with main force flung on a ring of pikes,
Old men with swords thrust through their aged sides,
Kneeing for mercy to a Greekish lad,
Who, with steel pole-axes dash’d out their brains’
(Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage 2.1.189-200)

1998 is a significant year in Indonesia’s political history. After a 32 year rule characterised by economic prosperity and an authoritarian regime, the Asian financial crisis had weakened the rule of then-President Suharto. In May 1998 riots broke out in several Indonesian cities. The estimated death toll from the days that followed varies wildly. Jemma Purdey, perhaps one of the most reliable sources, suggests that around 1,000 people died, many of them beaten, shot, or burned alive. Women were raped and then thrown out of windows, shops were looted and then burned to the ground with their owner’s still inside. Calls to the police went unanswered. For some time the army stood by without intervening. Colleagues of mine who were in Jakarta at the time saw people stripped naked and left by the side of the road on the way to the airport. One described the bizarre scene of soldiers breaking away from a gunfight in order to ask her and the other expatriates she was with to pose for a photograph. People stayed in their homes and listened to screams and gunfire on the streets outside.

For many of the perpetrators of violence in 1998 the riots offered a fresh opportunity to target Chinese Indonesians. Historically, Chinese Indonesians acted as middle-men between the native Indonesian population and the Dutch. Both during and after Dutch rule they have been subject to periodic outbursts of wide-scale violence including not only massacres but mass-expulsions from Indonesian cities. During the decades under Suharto many Chinese Indonesians were killed under the guise of wiping out communist activity. During the 1998 riots, in many cases the violence toward Chinese Indonesians was misplaced – it was those Chinese Indonesians who were least wealthy who were most vulnerable to attacks. Chinese Indonesians were not the only victims of violence during the riots, but they were certainly singled out as targets.

On May 21 1998 Suharto was removed from power. The era which has followed has been characterised by a movement from dictatorship to democracy, with greater recognition of Indonesia’s multi-racial and multi-religious status. While these changes have largely been beneficial for Indonesia as a whole they have also, as several commentators have argued, been accompanied by an unwillingness to examine what took place during the May riots. This is true in a legal sense – attempts to bring suspects to court were unsuccessful, and those rape victims who did come forward have failed to have their rapists identified or convicted. It is also true in a cultural sense. As Abidin Kusno persuasively demonstrates, the building of the Glodok Plaza Mall at the site of one of the major massacres is emblematic of the cultural work which took place after the riots; it prioritises progress over commemoration in the hope that the spectacle of the new will distract people from the violence of the past. Despite its pervasiveness in Indonesian consciousness, literary and artistic responses to what went on seem, surprisingly, to be few and far between. I have written elsewhere on the work of artist FX Harsono, but in what follows I want to look at some of the comic books created in the aftermath of the violence.

In Tita Larasati’s comic Bloemen Blij, Plukken Wij which appears in the volume Liquid City: Volume 3, the protagonist learns that she has Chinese Indonesian ancestors. The riots, in contrast to the predominantly green and yellow pastel panels elsewhere in the comic, are represented as a blood-red band cutting across one page.

This image, I feel, comes close to representing what 1998 meant, or has come to mean, for Chinese Indonesian communities. Buildings are burning, busses are being pushed over, bodies are lying in the street. Each figure is captured in just a few lines. The image focuses less on the individual acts of violence than the scale of the event. Indonesia is ablaze.

Muhammad Mice Misrad (Mice Cartoon)’s Indonesia 1998 offers a very different vision of what occurred. It is a collection of single-page comics drawn between 1998 and 1999. The collection was published last year. They document the conditions which led up to the May riots, most significantly the crippling effects of inflation during the late 1990s. One series of panels shows people trying to buy basic necessities only to discover that prices have increased dramatically in just a few days. The author reports that publishers are closing down, he attempts to buy paper to document the problems himself, only to discover that paper, too, has rocketed in price. He is only able to draw because his brother can steal paper for him from his workplace. In the panel below he tightens his belt while a child warns ‘Don’t pull to hard, sir, or you’ll sever it! Belts are expensive now too!’

The May riots are, in this context, presented as the inevitable result of a starved and impoverished population trying to feed themselves. In comparison to the several pages describing the economic conditions which anticipated the violence, the riots themselves occupy just one page. In the image below one looter is excited to have stolen a gift for his mother, who then scolds him for bringing illegally-acquired goods into her home. Another family is excited at having acquired a two-month supply of Indomie instant noodles. One remarks, ironically, how lucky they are in such a crisis. In the final panel a woman, presumably a maid for a Chinese Indonesian household talks to a friend on the phone – her boss has fled the country and so the domestic staff (Muchilis – most likely the family’s driver) is watching soccer on television. The absent family’s portrait, characterised by round cheeks and squinty eyes, hangs on the wall.

What strikes me about these images is the absence of any reference to the acts of murder and sexual assault which sit at the heart of Chinese Indonesian and other victims’ accounts of 1998. The goofy characters and cartoon violence belie the very real bloodshed which occurred. The Chinese Indonesian family we see in the picture, we are assured, have left town.

Mice Cartoon’s comics are cheeky, iconoclastic, and witty. This charm, in this case, disguises the wilful marginalisation of the victim’s experience. This is far from trivial – the unwillingness to recognise the suffering of Chinese Indonesians and other victims in Indonesian discourse after 1998 is a necessary prerequisite to the lack of public recognition of what occurred. Chinese Indonesians are rich, popular discourse seems to declare. They can take it.

One image from the comic which I find captivating is the visualisation of the new era of free speech. A government minister tentatively removes the padlock which has closed the mouth of Indonesia’s press, revealing a sharp-toothed monster ready to bite into politicians.

I find the image less interesting for the way in which it attests to the status of the modern Indonesian press – it simplifies a movement away from the prohibition of the Suharto era to modern Indonesia. In reality, as the wildly varying 2014 election result announcements demonstrated, Indonesia’s press continues to be controlled by those in power (even if that power is now primarily financial rather than political). The internet is censored and Indonesia currently boasts an unimpressive rank of 138 out of 180 countries in the Press Freedom Index. What I find captivating about the image is its representation of violence unleashed. This gleeful creature with a giant mouth and razor-sharp teeth, set to chew all in its path, I think, approximates what 1998 must have looked like for those who lived during and after the violence.

There Is No Joss Whedon

Posted on June 29, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Is that a person there?

Dollhouse could perhaps be seen as Joss Whedon’s most personal statement in that it’s about the absence of personality—or more precisely, about personality as almost-absent, but never fully destroyed, trace. In Dollhouse, Echo (the impressively unresponsive Eliza Dushku) is a shell, robbed of its original self, Caroline. Through the first season (all I could bare to watch) Caroline is mostly gone; we only see flashback glimpses of her as Echo is filled with various other personalities — a dominatrix, an outdoorswoman, a perfect girlfriend, another perfect girlfriend. The first season ends with a future vision of a world in which individual brains are erasable, plunging the world into dystopic chaos. Everyone is a replaceable cog. This provokes dramatic visible terror on the one hand, and the usual genre comforts on the other, as the main plot focuses on a group of entirely forgettable actors being picked off one by one in the usual manner of the post-apocalypse, complete with predictable tricky unpredictable betrayal and surprise reversal at the end.

Whedon famously had only sporadic control over Dollhouse; the network messed with and compromised his vision. But does that mean that Dollhouse isn’t Whedon? Or does that make it instead all the more Whedonesque? Reading through our lengthy Whedon roundtable, what’s most striking is how utterly generic, in every sense, Whedon’s output seems to be. Tim Jones identifies Whedon’s cardinal virtue/sin as cleverness—but the iconic line of dialogue he uses to illustrate that cleverness probably wasn’t Whedon’s at all, but a Robert Downey Jr. ad lib. Philippe Leblanc points out Whedon’s obsession with military conspiracies…but that’s an obsession he shares with every other media property ever (“Orphan Black” comes immediately to mind, as just one example.) Lisa Levy praises Whedon’s embrace of non-conformity, and Megan Purdy criticizes his unthinking racism. But enthusiasm for non-conformity and thoughtless racism are hardly unusual in pop-culture generally. Perhaps most tellingly, Ana Cabral Martins singles out Whedon’s ability to keep all the moving parts of the Avengers films moving. Whedon, Martins suggests, is most Whedon when he’s smoothly assembling corporate product. He’s the Mussolini of pop culture, making the nerd content run on time.

Again, whedon, like most people in television and film, always works in collaborative contexts. If there’s not one, distinct, Whedon vision, it’s probably in part because Whedon’s almost never working by himself to begin with. My single favorite Whedon project may be the last-season episode of Angel in which our hero is changed into a muppet—and how much did Whedon even contribute to that? He has a writer credit, but who knows what that does or doesn’t mean. Similarly, episode 3 of Dollhouse, in which a suicidal pop star is cured of depression by being told to suck it up, is one of the single worst episodes of television I’ve ever seen. But again, is that Whedon’s fault? Maybe he would have made an only moderately crappy episode if he’d had creative control. Who knows?

But Whedon’s selflessness goes beyond the usual difficulties of attribution in collaborative work, I think. David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Quentin Tarantino, even Jenji Kohan all seem to have distinctive interests, themes, visual styles, rhythms. Does Whedon? As I said, I don’t think the roundtable has unearthed any. Whedon likes strong female heroes, sticking it to the man, and playing with geek toys. These are not individual interests. Instead, they put him smack center in the mainstream. He’s into the same things everyone else is into. His success isn’t because he has an individual vision, but because he doesn’t—or more generously, perhaps, it’s because his individual vision is everybody’s individual vision. He sees what everyone sees, and everyone loves it.

That’s not to say I hate Whedon; I’m part of everyone, after all, I enjoy strong female heroes, clever dialogue, and Hulk smashing, at least intermittently. In fact, hating Whedon, or loving Whedon, seems largely beside the point. What’s there to hate or love, anyway? You might as well loathe the dolls in the Dollhouse, in all their interchangeable vacuity. There’s nothing there to hate or love. I’m forced to admit that Joss Whedon does exist, but even so, it seems odd that anyone bothered to take the time to invent him.
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This concludes our Joss Whedon roundtable…I think! Unless someone else sneaks in at the end. But it’s probably over. Click on the link to see all our posts! Thanks to everyone for contributing, commenting, and reading.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon