Is Secretary an exploitation movie? On the one hand, its content and marketing are built around fetishized kinkiness; specifically masochism. A young woman (Maggie Gillenhall) takes a job as a secretary and then spirals into an S&M relationship with her boss (James Spader.) When she commits a typo he spanks her; he also exercises dictatorial control over her eating, personal tics, and dress. He even saddles her like a horse at one point. And we do see Gillenhall naked, in a scene that feels pretty thoroughly gratuitous.

But of course it’s not exploitation. Its contemporary for one thing; no drive in audience. Furthermore, Gyllenhall’s agonizingly awkward relationship with…well, everyone, is explored in way more detail than you’d get in an exploitation movie. Really, this is a chick flick, about getting your man, much more than it is about sex for its own sake. It’s relationship porn, not porn porn.

The movie’s commitment to a happy ending is actually, its greatest weakness…and also the thing that absolutely distinguishes it from exploitation films. Exploitation films can be very, very bad: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is one of my current most hated movies, I think. But when they’re bad, they tend to be bad all through; you rarely see an exploitation film spend it’s first three-quarters putting together a thoughtful, coherent world, and then chucking it in the last half-hour in a panicked search for a sufficiently dramatic/happy ending. If an exploitation movie is going to be bad, it tends to start in right from the get-go on the sucking. It doesn’t save it up for the last reel. Conversely, when exploitation movies are good at the beginning, they tend to follow their logic through with a certain remorselessness. If it’s a rape-revenge movie, you end with revenge; if it’s a women in prison film, you end with everyone breaking out and then (often) getting killed. If it’s a sex comedy, you end with everyone pairing up.

Part of this is that exploitation movies are shorter (an hour and a half, rather than 2) so there’s less room to muck things up. But part of it is about genre, I think. Exploitation films are wedded to genre, which tends to integrate the end with the rest of the piece; every move is already handed down from time immemorial. There’s no getting part way out the door and suddenly realizing your shirt clashes with your tie and you’re not wearing any pants.

In Secretary, on the other hand, the scriptwriters (following a Mary Gaitskill story) have an idiosyncratic story: a repressed young girl with a deeply unhappy family life stumbles upon another equally emotionally crippled individual, and hijinks ensue. She gets something from him, but he’s pretty clearly a horrible, horrible prospect for a long term relationship — he’s so detached from his own emotional life that he seems only dimly aware of what he’s doing with Gyllenhall, or of why he’s doing it. This seems more or less true to Gaitskill’s story (from what I’ve been able to glean of it), in which the two protagonists do not end up living happily ever after because, well, the guy, whatever his attractions, happens to be a total prick.

But the movie can’t handle it. The closest genre conventions are those of romance, and, so regardless of logic or consistency, the movie seizes upon them with a death-grip. The story, which starts out as about Gyllenhall’s emotional and sexual troubles, undergoes a hideous spasm, and turns into a story about The Girl Saving Her Man with Love. At first the S&M is presented as a way for Gyllenhall to control and manage her panic, isolation, and repression — it’s a sexual kink, and she indulges in it for herself, not for Spader. At the end, though, she’s putting her suffering on public display in a test of endurance to show Spader and the world that she’s worthy of him — and/or to break through his insecurities and neurosis with the power of her love. It’s Pretty Woman with dog collars, basically.

What’s especially striking is that this is an independent movie marketed for its edge; at least in theory, it’s not Hollywood. So why not just admit that these characters are never, ever going to have a relationship together — that, in fact, pairing Gyllenhall with Spader is about the meanest fate you could imagine for her, not because he’s a sadist (which is what she wants) and not because he’s completely unsympathetic (which he isn’t) but because he’s a fool and a jerk (which is what nobody wants)? Every woman doesn’t find true love, and every man sure as hell doesn’t deserve to be saved. Who exactly would be hurt by a downbeat or ambiguous conclusion?

Other than the investors, I mean. I don’t know; perhaps in the end the commercial imperatives are so crass and so naked that maybe it really is exploitation after all.

I didn’t read or see any of the DC Minx titles, and I’m not the target demographic (young girls.) But it did seem to me when the titles came out that there should have been a market for them, what with the success of shojo and all. It even seemed like kind of a no brainer. And yet still…I wasn’t exactly surprised to hear they’d tanked. Reading through some of the blogosphere comment (helpfully linked to by Dirk, the most plausible/revealing explanation I found was spoken by Christopher Butcher, who said:

Put as politely and delicately as possible, to the best of my knowledge the vast majority of editorial staff, publishing staff, and creative staff, had little to no experience producing material for a Young Adult audience. I honestly don’t know what made them think that they could, actually. Everyone I’ve talked to in Children’s and Teen publishing has pointed out similar problems with the line, and all of it belies a real lack of understanding of how YA publishing works.

Combine this with Dirk’s point from a couple days ago (basically that DC spent too much money too fast on the series) and you have something of a conundrum. What, exactly was DC spending money on? And why wasn’t it on content?

Basically, it seems to me that there’s little to no excuse for a serious publisher with serious resources to go into a major venture without investing pretty heavily in creative people who know what the hell they’re doing. Yes, creating YA fiction may be difficult, as Christopher Butcher notes…but that’s why you hire people with a track record, yes? It looks like there were a few YA novelists in the mix, but Butcher says “the vast majority of editorial staff, publishing staff, and creative staff, had little to no experience producing material for a Young Adult audience.” Especially on the creative end (and given the quality problems many people have mentioned) that seems like malfeasance, doesn’t it?

Butcher also talks about how all the comics publishers are looking for the next big thing after shojo. Maybe I’m missing something, but…why does there have to be anything after shojo? Couldn’t shojo be what’s after shojo? And then, after that, more shojo? It’s not like there’s a lack of material, or quality, or enthusiasm.

So…I know zip about publishing, but if I were going to fail in a publishing gambit to reach out to teen girls, and I was DC comics, here’s what I might do. I’d start by getting in touch with Neil Gaiman, and begging him on my knees to consider either producing new material, or allowing us to adapt his novels. I’d do the same with Joss Whedon (though, of course, Buffy’s already optioned). I’d look around hard for people who drew in manga style; in fact, I’d let it be known that I was offering better contracts than Tokyopop for people with new manga-style series to pitch (not exactly a high bar). I’d sure as hell invest in goth, since that’s the only indigenous American genre that young girls give a damn about, as far as I can tell. I’d possibly even try to co-opt an ongoing venture like Courtney Crumrin if I could, and I’d look to pick off some Slave Labor artists too. I’d go out looking for other high profile adaptations; has Madeline L’Engle’s work been turned into comics, for example? Any of Judy Blume’s books? What about Patricia Wrede’s extremely good (and somewhat lower profile) Enchanted Forest series? In short, if I was going to waste my money, I’d want to waste it on series, creators, and styles with a successful track record.

Again, I didn’t read Minx, but when I heard the plot of the Plain Janes (vaguely rebellious alternagirls commit tepid pranks to show their independence), I thought, who the hell is going to buy this? What are they thinking? This line is doomed.

It seems to me that if the big two are ever going to reach out to new markets, they need to admit in a kind of catastrophic way that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, and then go and hire someone who does. And the chances of that happening are roughly the same as having a bunch of YA novels fly out of my butt.

So has anyone else seen this? It’s a magazine anthology reprinting recent (and some not so recent) Spider-man (and some not Spider-man) stories from various Marvel books. It seems aimed at kids, and it seems to be distributed through book stores. They seem to be on number 2, and there’s some fairly prominent advertising placement on the cover of the MarvelKids.com website.

Marketing wise, this seems like a really good idea; a clever way to break out of the direct market in a format that would be appealing for younger audiences (who are often more likely to be in book stores than comics stores) and for booksellers (Borders, at least, stocks a lot more magazines than comics.) It’s a little pricy (7 bucks) but there are a lot of stories included (5, all told) and a bunch of extras. It seems like a really good way to go.

Content wise, it was overall better than I expected. There was an old 80s Marvel Team-Up featuring the Thing and Sandman from the period just after Sandy and Hydroman merged. It was very low-key; Sandman was completely freaked out and just had a beer with the Thing and talked about how his life sucked. I’m kind of a sucker for super-hero comics that go out of their way to have nothing particularly super happen, I’ve go to admit.

Of the new stuff…there’s a story from Marvel Adventures Spider-Man, which is I guess the all-ages title, where Peter’s very young (he looks about 13, though I think he’s supposed to be a little older than that.) It’s a reprise of the Lee/Ditko Sinister Six storyline, though I don’t think it quite holds up to the original — the art certainly isn’t as good, and Peter’s angst has been dialed way down — which makes the whole thing a lot less interesting. Also, I’ve got to say — why not just reprint the original story? They really are for kids; my son likes them, and I remember liking them a lot when I was 7 or 8. Putting everyone in modern clothes…I just don’t see the point, exactly.

In general, it’s amazing to me how frequently not only the characters in super-heroes are reused, but how whole plotlines keep getting recycled. This is, I think, how work-for-hire really benefits the big two. You might get paid for a reprint of your title, but you don’t necessarily get paid, or even acknowledged, when your storyline gets endlessly repeated (often in other media, re: Tim Sale’s comics and the Batman movies).

Ultimately, though, I wonder if this is self-defeating. A magazine like, for all ages, in books stores, seems like a perfect place to try out some new concepts with new creators — to try for a new hit, in other words. There are in fact new super-hero concepts that do very well — Ben 10, for example. But they don’t come out of DC and Marvel, and the reason is that DC and Marvel aren’t really trying. Maybe it doesn’t matter — maybe you can just glide on the characters you’ve got forever. But it seems like, you’ve got this brand, you’ve got all these creative people working for you…why not see if you can come up with something new, something that might open up new markets and/or be financially beneficial? But, hey, what do I know….

On the plus side again, there was a reprint of a Spider-Man/Fantastic Four story (Silver Age) that I really liked quite a bit. The author is Jeff Parker, who has a nice way with low-key character interactions and dialogue. I’m thinking of getting the series…what say you Bryan? Tucker? Worthwhile, or should I pass?

Saw John Carpenter’s The Fog, which is one of those movies which becomes more and more mediocre the more you think about it. It certainly wasn’t horrible; the special effects with the fog flowing about were kind of nifty, and there were certainly suspenseful, slasher film moments. And lord knows it was better than Prince of Darkness. But that’s a pretty low bar.

The Fog is set in the small California fishing village of Antonio Bay. Over the course of the movie, we discover that the six founders of Antonio Bay murdered the members of a leper colony by luring their ship to its doom; they then recovered the gold of the leper’s wealthy leader and used it to build the town. Now, a hundred years later, the lepers have risen from the dead. Trailing fog and dressed, rather improbably, as ninja-pirates, they return to wreak revenge on those who did them wrong.

The Fog, in other words, is treading all over Stephen King territory, mining the buried evil beneath the calm surface of small-town life. The problem is that Carpenter isn’t willing to follow the logic through. Yes, the founders of Antonio Bay did a horrible thing. But none of the present members of the community are treated as anything but the salt-of-the-earth. The worst vice anyone seems to indulge in is drink, and this is treated as a venial sin — the notion, for example, that a pilot drinking while guiding his boat might be a bad idea is dismissed out of hand. In Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, the vampire embraces the town because it’s already a den of sin — adultery, jealousy, greed, despair, cruelty, mistrust. In The Fog, there’s none of that. Tom Atkins cheerfully declares to Jamie Lee Curtis that he is “weird,” but in fact he, and everyone else in the town, is placidly, boringly normal. The town’s celebration of it’s 100th year anniversary is carried out with deadpan earnestness; you keep waiting for there to be a satiric bite of some sort, but it never happens. The creatures of the Fog are bad, the townspeople are good. Any blurring of the boundaries happened long ago, and isn’t relevant today.

In the town-banning-unproblematically-together-against-evil meme, Carpenter seems to be taking his cues from Howard Hawks, one of his idols. (There’s even a direct reference to the famous moment in Hawks’ “The Thing” where one character gets on the radio and urges listeners to “keep watching the skies!” for alien invaders. In this case, Adrienne Barbeaux gets on the radio and tells her listeners to stay alert for the fog.) The problem is that, though he may love Hawks, it’s not clear that Carpenter actually shares his thematic preoccupations. Hawks actually, and apparently sincerely, disliked weirdos; pointy-headed intellectuals pissed him off — he believed in manly men banding together in harmony to fight the forces of evil. It’s hard to imagine Hawks suggesting that a group of good townspeople casually murdered a group of lepers.

In short, Carpenter doesn’t seem to have quite figured out what he wants to do. Is the fog a manifestation of the townspeople’s evil? Or is it an outside invader against which the townspeople band together, showing their spirit and essential goodness? Carpenter doesn’t know, and doesn’t even seem to have thought about it. As a result, the movie lacks both the bitter pathos of Stephen King’s best moments, where ordinary people embrace evil and destroy themselves. And it lacks the confidence of Hawks’ certainty of the line between good and evil. Instead, you’ve got a bunch of “weird” ordinary people who we’re supposed to admire and worry about, but who lack any of the depth that would make that possible. The fog the covers the town is neither exterior evil nor interior failing; it’s just Carpenter’s trickery, trying to conceal the fact that he doesn’t know what this movie is about, and doesn’t want to know.

As I noted earlier this week, I checked in on the DC universe over the weekend. It looked like Barry Allen (that’s the most famous version of the Flash, for you non-fanboys) was still dead…but, as my brother informed me in the comments on that post, he’s actually been recently resurrected.

I can’t really get worked up one way or another about this. It’s not like Barry Allen ever really had a stable personality to begin with; like any super-hero, he went through numberless iterations. If I remember correctly, his only distinguishing trait in his first issue was that he was always late (which is ironic, because then he gained super-speed! Get it?) In the classic Silver Age issues from the 60s, he picked up a pretty goofy rogues gallery (Mirror Master! Boomerang!) and a penchant for bizarre bodily transformation — growing immensely fat, having his head swell to fifteen times normal size, etc. Somewhere in there he got married, which was unusual, and then his wife got killed, so he had a tragic backstory. Then he got killed off in Crisis and was retroactively made into a hero’s hero — the best of us all, etc. etc. Now that he’s back I understand that he was a brutal vigilante for three issues before getting a Grant Morrison dadaesque revamp where, after briefly studying with an Indian guru, he proceeded to have tantric sex with everyone in the world at super-speed, bringing about a universe-wide bachanal and disco dance until the Justice League atomized him with Captain Puritan’s deadly Continence Ray. Party poopers.

Okay, so maybe that didn’t exactly happen. The point is that seeing the Flash’s return as some sort of desecration is pointless; what’s there to desecrate, anyway? With a couple of minor exceptions (Green Arrow’s mild irascibility; Elongated Man’s mild goofiness) they were all interchangeable, with personality quirks that varied as with the needs of the story. “Barry Allen” as a continuous, coherent fiction never existed anyway; the Flash stories with Wally West could as well have been done with Barry Allen, really.

This is part of the reason why I’m very skeptical of the “let’s go back to the time when comics were fun!” school of thought (propounded, for example, in this message board response to Tom Crippen’s essay on Marvel’s Civil War). In the first place, a lot of those silver age, goofy DC comics were pretty well unreadable. But in the second, a lot of what made those stories what they were was an overwhelming and aggressive aphasia. Characters and plots existed in a kind of eternally stupid present; a repetitious formula made all the more vacuous by the constant sops thrown to continuity (Batman and Superman referring to each other as “old chum” for example; or the JLA narrating to Snapper Carr their “first adventure ever!”

It is possible to recapture that; the Batman animated series, for example, is simple goofiness for kids — and pretty entertaining at that. But comics fans aren’t kids; what they want is not the dumb stories of their youth, but a tribute to those stories, which makes them coherent enough to function as objects of nostalgia. That’s the trick in Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, for example; the impending death of the hero gives the goofy silver-age tropes a reason for being that they never had in the original.

That may make Morrison’s version better than the originals, depending on how you look at it. But it isn’t any *truer* to the originals than the “people are actually getting killed now” pseudo-adultificiation that Tom identifies in Marvel’s Civil War. Calculated nostalgia or calculated maturity; both are ways of reacting to a comic-book audience which has gotten older while remaining obsessed with a bunch of characters from their youth — characters who weren’t, even, so much characters as icons with random appelations attached. Barry Allen wasn’t ever anything but a name. You can’t kill that, or resurrect it. The real question is, why you’d want to bother pretending to do either.

UPDATE: Just a note that the blog has been (relatively) hopping this week; besides some of the posts mentioned above, I’ve got a post on the rock and roll manga soap-opera Nana and new Hooded blogger Tom Crippen has a tussle with Tom Spurgeon over the relative merits of Pat Oliphant.