ARRRGH!

Posted on December 2, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

How is it I can look at the poster for the recent Somali pirate film Fishing Without Nets and register “Jolly Roger,” even though the two crossed guns look almost nothing like a pirate flag?

Superhero emblems are the same, altering every line and curve of their evolving designs, while somehow remaining recognizable:

I remember how confused I was the first time I saw the crew of Captain Blood hoist their flag and it wasn’t the standard skull-and-crossbones but instead a jawless skull and two crossed but living arms with a sword in each fist. Sure, it’s close, but imagine if Joe Shuster did Superman’s “S” in calligraphy. Or Batman swapped his chest emblem for a diagram of an actual bat.

I was probably seven at the time and so didn’t know the Captain was Errol Flynn in his breakout role. I didn’t know the 1935 film was a remake of the 1924 Captain Blood. Fans grumbled about Andrew Garfield replacing Tobey Maguire’s too-recent Spider-Man, or Sony rebooting Fantastic Four after a mere decade. But that’s been standard Hollywood practice since the teens. When Flynn traded in his pirate hat for Robin Hood tights, they were still warm from Douglass Fairbanks who’d torn them off Robert Grazer who’d yanked them from Percy Stow.

Hollywood is a roving pirate ship. They plundered Captain Blood from Rafael Sabatini’s 1922 novel. A decade had passed and swashbucklers were back with the box office booty Treasure Island shoveled in. They dug Blood up for name recognition—always safer to parrot than invent. Russell Thorndike jumped aboard too. He conscripted his own 1915 Scarecrow (vicar by day, masked smuggler by night) and sent him sailing into his piratical backstory. Doctor Syn on the High Seas floated five more book sequels, plus a 1937 film and a Disney mini-series I somehow never saw.

I also haven’t seen Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips yet, but the inspired-by-real-events tale of low sea piracy adds to my bewilderment at the genre. I blinked in disbelief as my family and I rolled through Disney World’s Pirates of the Caribbean, where jolly animatronic pirates endlessly chase buxom animatronic women in acts of slapstick rape. If we can romanticize 17th century pirates into heroic outlaws, will 23^rd century Hollywood do the same for terrorists?

Any yet that Jolly Roger—probably a corruption of the French “joli rouge,” a warning that your attackers will kill you whether surrender or not—is a symbol of fun. I used to wave it as I sat in the stands of Three Rivers Stadium cheering the Pittsburgh Pirates.

It doesn’t help that the KKK’s Black Legion added skulls and bones to their robes as they terrorized the port of Detroit in the mid-30s.

They wanted to be superheroes, same as any vigilante. Herman Landon’s 1921 gentleman thief dubbed himself the Benevolent Picaroon (that’s Spanish for pirate), and Charles W. Tyler’s Blue Jean Billy Race launched her modern pirate career in 1918, both harbored in Street and Smith’s Detective Story Magazine. Even Batman demanded a turn on the high seas. Chuck Dixon and Enrique Alcatena rebooted him as Captain Leatherwing in a 1994 Elseworlds. The pairing seems playfully discordant, but Wayne and Blood were already the same character type. Ask them to fill out the following questionnaire:

1. Do you have a penis?

2. Is it white?

3. Are you highly respected?

4. Ever been horribly wronged?

5. What’s your catchy alias?

6. How comfortable are you working outside the law?

7. Got a nifty disguise?

8. What’s your signature emblem?

9. Can you supervise one or more loyal sidekicks?

10. Are you really all about the greater good?

11. Do you love thwarting that pesky government official always bugging you?

12. Are you into girls?

If that list isn’t familiar, it should be. It’s the original superhero formula:

A (1) white (2) man of (3) high status is (4) wronged and so assumes an (5) alias as a (6) noble criminal with a (7) disguise and (8) emblem, and, with one or more (9) assistants, fights for the (10) greater good while thwarting a (11) law enforcement antagonist and courting a (12) female love interest.

Batman answers yes to all twelve plot points—if you count Commissioner Gordon, who Bruce was clearly hoodwinking in his first episode. Bruce’s forgotten fiancé, Julie, vanished along with writer Gardner Fox, but she was there in 1939 too. The rest is easy: Mr. Wayne is very wealthy and very white, was terribly wronged with the murder of his parents, goes vigilant in a bat-emblazoned leotard, while dodging police bullets and warring on criminals. Oh, and he picks up an underage sidekick and overage butler too.

Batman didn’t invent the formula. He plundered it from an ocean of predecessors. Lots of rich, pissed-off white guys like to play dress-up, while stomping on bad guys, flicking off the government, and man-handling the ladies. Look at Captain Blood. That’s just the name a noble physician assumes after he’s unjustly convicted of treason and sold into slavery. He has a crew of not-quite-as-noble escaped convicts for assistants as he flaps his Jolly Roger like a cape. That naval commander in Jamaica is always hounding him, but the commander’s daughter is smitten anyway. And of course when the citizens of Port Royal are left undefended, it’s Blood who rushes to their rescue.

Blood and Batman served aboard the 1930s Mystery Men, an overflowing ship of masked do-gooders captained by the Shadow with his pirate flag of a laugh, the original MWAHAHAHA. The 20s roared with a dozen more, all high scorers on the 12-point pirate scale. The 1914 Gray Seal is only missing Bruce’s murdered parents. The equally motiveless Zorro scores another eleven. Go back another decade and the Scarlet Pimpernel is righting the wrongs of the French Revolution, while Spring-Heeled Jack carves his “S” on his enemies’ foreheads. Personally, I prefer signature letters on the hero’s unitard.

There’s just one ingredient missing: Superpowers. Bruce is very down-to-earth in the godlike company of Superman. Blood and his shipmates are all flesh-and-blood too. But Superman is just an extension of question nine. He absorbs his assistants, giving himself the strength of countless men. A superhero a one-man man-o-war. The Hulk’s high status comes in the form of Dr. Banner’s intelligence, but otherwise he’s a formula white guy wronged by a gamma bomb and the Cold War that detonated it. With the help of his teen confidante, Rick Jones, he eludes the U.S. military while dating the General’s daughter and committing violent acts of do-goodery. If he had an “H”-emblazon cape, he’d score a twelve.

Spider-Man wronged himself but loses a point for unrespectable nerdiness. Convert status to mutant giftedness, and you have an armada of X-Men. Even the convention-sinking Alan Moore is onboard with his wonder woman Promethea. Sure, her assistants are dead versions of herself, and her pesky law enforcement officer is Christianity, but she’s an eleven, which goes to twelve if you count her male incarnation.

Captain Blood’s formula flag is still sailing.

Superman and Atticus Finch

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Donovan Grant

This scene from Superman vol.2 #81 takes place near the end of the “Reign of the Supermen” storyline, which was the final third of the “Death and Return of Superman” saga from 1993. In it, the real Superman has returned and convinces Lois Lane of his identity by quoting the last thing he said to her before rushing off to his death at the hands of the villain Doomsday. First, though, he references his favorite film. While this serves as a piece of trivia for the character, it also reaffirms the intrinsic nature of Superman, and what he values most as a “Champion of the Oppressed”.

Superman’s status as a defender of the little people was immediately established in his first appearance in Actions Comics #1. The opening scene has Superman using his extraordinary powers to save a woman wrongly convicted of murder, and to put the real killer behind bars.

At every moment of opposition, Superman refuses to let anything stand in his way and barrels through the likes of an armed butler and steel doors in order to set things right, spouting one-liners like “It was your idea!” after meeting the butler’s dare to knock down a steel wall.

This adventure, the first of three in the title’s premiere issue, serves as the perfect debut for the Siegel and Shuster Superman. Righter of wrongs, defender of democracy, this Superman fought everything from drunk drivers to the Ku Klux Klan to Adolf Hitler himself, in one form or another. It’s interesting to me that the very first superhero, the one whom all others would take inspiration from, was in his origins almost totally divorced from the confines of the superhero genre as it’s come to be known. Bring up a costumed crime fighter to an average person who doesn’t read comics, and they’ll imagine someone in a goofy suit with powers stopping a bank robber with an equally goofy suit and powers, with a silly name to go along with it. Hardly ever does a comic hero’s adventures address social injustice, and when they do it’s always presented ostentatiously. In this context, Superman’s roots as a fighter for social justice have been obscured, though not lost entirely.

One story that focused on Superman pursuing social justice is the best episode of the 1996 Superman animated series. “The Late Mr. Kent”. In this story, Clark Kent is presumed dead after a car bomb goes off while he’s in the process of clearing a wrongly convicted man days before his execution.

While this episode is rightly lauded for its taut direction, film noir atmosphere and insight into the mind of Clark Kent as opposed to Superman (to reference an age-old debate), one thing that never gets brought up is the racial themes that are implicitly addressed. The man, Earnest Walker, is a low-level thief who has been on death row for five years for murdering a woman and is now scheduled for the gas chamber. He claims to the interviewing reporter, Clark Kent, that he’s never hurt anyone in his life, and found the victim’s necklace outside his door and fenced it, concluding that he was framed. Right away Clark senses a calm heartbeat and figures he’s telling the truth. When Clark begins to investigate, everyone from the police detective to Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen maintain Walker’s guilt. Later when Clark researches Walker’s alibi of eating pizza at home, he learns that this went uninspected by his public defender.

Clark finds Walker’s alibi on the Pizza Delivery company’s record disk and drives to the governor’s mansion, at which point his car explodes. With a witness seeing his car fly into the ocean, the dilemma of exposing his identity to save Walker’s life comes into play. After flying by his adoptive parents’ home and secretly attending his own funeral as Superman, Clark decides to explain the situation to the governor, secret identity be damned.

Of course that doesn’t happen, and the revelation of who’s behind the conspiracy soon arrives. At the end of the episode however, Superman is too late to stop the governor from attending Walker’s execution, so he bursts through the chamber and sucks the gas out into the sky where it disperses. The attending crowd is initially horrified at Superman’s sudden act of random destruction.

This takes the Siegel and Shuster story one step further, proving Superman wrong when he said that only the governor could save the condemned woman. This Superman doesn’t loudly boast threats or crack jokes at his opponent’s expense. He maintains a quiet resolve. Earlier in the episode he admits to himself that he wanted the exoneration of Walker to be a victory for Clark Kent and not Superman, yet he came to his decision to reveal his identity on his own.

In this, Superman is Atticus Finch in animated form. Nowhere do we see any sort of vaudeville comedy act with the Clark Kent persona differentiating the Superman persona. Like Miss Maudie says of Atticus, Superman is the “same in his house as he is on the streets”. The same quiet dignity that is often ascribed to Atticus can be found in Clark’s patient inquiries to Detective Bowman and the Pizza worker. He seeks justice to the best of his ability, first through his job as a reporter, then as Superman with the knowledge that his double life will come to an end should he further pursue Walker’s freedom. Whereas Atticus at his best failed to win Tom Robinson his freedom and ultimately save his life, Superman at his best brought the slain woman’s killer to justice and cleared Walker’s name.

Ultimately the episode ends with nowhere near as substantial a statement on race as To Kill a Mockingbird did. As I said before, virtually no one has commented online or on the series DVDs about the fairly visible comment on wrongful arrests and executions. To have it addressed in a Superman cartoon couldn’t have been a complete accident however. Although I highly doubt it was done as a roundabout way to tie in to the reference of Superman’s favorite film in the comics at the time, the social justice angle of the episode is too explicit to ignore. While the character would see a return to his roots as a “Champion of the Oppressed” in the pages of Action Comics vol.2 written by Grant Morrison, I like the more measured approach taken here. It feels more resonant and important to have Superman saving wrongly convicted black guys rather than kicking rich businessmen into street lamps. It teaches us, however obliquely, to oppose racial bias and always try to help the less fortunate. It’s a way to have us learn from Superman’s example, in the same way that Atticus Finch had us, and Superman, learn from his example.

Quick, Robin! To the Bat Serial!

Posted on November 30, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

The Adam West Batman TV series is always fairly self-referential, but it goes above and beyond in its meta-metaness in the episodes Death in Slow Motion/The Riddler’s False Notion. The episodes are built around the Riddler’s convoluted, incoherent, but nonetheless fiendish plot to film Batman and Robin in a silent movie.

The main motive here is obviously to give the insanely (in various senses) talented Frank Gorshin a chance to do a dead on Charlie Chaplin imitation. But beyond that, the episodes are one long homage to the show’s own constant homages. The height of this is the obligatory Bat cliffhanger, a trope cribbed from the silent melodramas, which here is deliberately parodied with a trope from the silent melodramas, as Robin is strapped to a conveyor belt and threatened with a circular saw as the Riddler (with fake mustache) laughs maniacally. Batman rescues the Boy Wonder — only to discover that it’s not Robin on that belt, but a dummy. The fake imitation of a fake imitation of a fake trope has been faked. Holy curses, holy foiled, holy again.

In part it seems like Batman comic book fans have been wary of the show precisely because it situates superhero comics not in the relatively sober tradition of gritty pulp noir, but in the (often comic) tradition of serial melodrama. Yet, as this episode is well aware, that melodramatic tradition is in some ways actually more high-brow, or more accepted as high-brow, than those supposedly more validating pulp sources. The Riddler’s manic re-enactment of the mechanisms of slapstick — from pies in the face to free-for-all brawls — is a deliberate effort to show the links between venerated old comedy and new Bat-comedy. Our heroes having a giant book dropped on their heads — that’s “art”, and what’s more art than art in quotes? Batman and Robin perform in the last silent film ever made; an ersatz masterpiece of ersatzness, precious for its imitation genius, its great hijacked tradition of lack of verisimilitude.

Handsome, Clean-Cut, and Groovy

Posted on November 29, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

“Handsome, clean-cut, and groovy” is how the nefarious villainness Nefertiti (Ziva Rodann) describes Batman when she sees him (significantly) on the television. This sparks the ire of the evil King Tut — but if he’d only watched previous bat-episodes, you’d think he’d be resigned. The henchwomen are always falling for Batman’s brand of paunchy, be-tighted goodness and/or grooviness; there’s just something about a cape that makes the bat-fans swoon.

Batman isn’t only an object of desire on the 60s television show; he’s actually the only object of desire. The show includes gratuitously scantily clad lovelies, especially in the first King Tut episode, with its gleeful harem tropes and Nefertiti herself chewing anachronistically but enthusiastically on a phallic hot dog.

But the lovelies are never identified within the dialogue as objects of erotic interest; Batman and Robin are impervious to their charms, and (in Nefertiti’s case) appear to forget about her altogether after she’s tragically driven insane by pebble torture and engages in a beguiling bat dance. The only clue that anyone notices she’s hot is the voice over of the second episode, which refers to her as a “dish”. This is the case with virtually all the other leading ladies as well; Julie Newmar as Catwoman wears a skin-tight, jaw-dropping outfit, but no one’s jaw drops; the Moth, one of Riddler’s associates, wears a skin-tight, eye-raising outfit, but no one’s eyes are raised. The only sex object which is acknowledged as a sex object is the Batman himself. In this show, it’s women, not men, who visibly lust.

Batman is often described as “camp.” Camp can mean various things, but it’s often connected to queerness, gay themes, or the closet. In this case, the show is certainly reversing, or inverting, the expected economy of desire. You could say that the female concupiscence directed at Batman is a humorous stand-in for the male gaze that viewers are encouraged to cast at Nefertiti and her sisters. But you could just as easily say that the male gaze is the concealed deception which hides the obvious truth — which is that the show presents Adam West, for both male and female viewers, as the central erotic point of interest, from Bat bulge to Orientalized sensuous Bat dance. Superheroes are sexy, Adam West tells you; groove on it, Bat fans, surreptitiously or otherwise.

Utilitarian Review 11/29/14

Posted on November 29, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Conseula Francis on teaching the Boondocks.

Peter Sattler on Jill Lepore’s Wonder Woman.

Me on how Adam West is the cruellest Batman of them all.

Kim O’Connor on John Porcellino’s Hospital Suite.

Kate Polak on Pride of Baghdad and teaching the invasion of Iraq.

Chris Gavaler on Taylor Swift and the Zombie apocalypse.

A brief thanksgiving post on football, Lucy, and failure.

Me on why mainstream magazines cover game of thrones.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Chronicle of Higher Ed I wrote about being scooped by Jill Lepore.

At Pacific Standard I wrote about the history of highbrow vs. lowbrow.

On Newstalk I chatted about why we need more spoilers.

At Splice Today I wrote about

— Ursula K. Le Guin and why fantasy isn’t necessarily anti-capitalist.

—the crappy Ferguson New Yorker cover.

At the Chicago Reader I wrote briefly about the blues rock band Trampled Under Foot.

Other Links

Jordannah Elizabeth with a liberating love mixtape.

538 on the statistical rarity of not getting a grand jury indictment.

Why Mainstream Magazines Cover Game of Thrones

Posted on November 28, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today.
_______

Recently Dylan Matthews at Vox pointed out that not many people actually watch Game of Thrones, or Mad Men, or any of the most-critically-important-shows-on-television (TM). Instead, people watch NCIS, or Big Bang Theory, or, occasionally, reruns of Big Bang Theory or NCIS. One Sunday, in fact, a new Mad Men episode got fewer viewers than 8 different Law & Order SVU reruns.

So the question is, why do mainstream sites (like The Atlantic, or Salon, or Slate) cover certain shows obsessively while other, more popular shows, are ignored?

At first this may seem like a question that needs no particular answer. Critical enthusiasms and popularity are often at odds with each other. Critics loathed The Other Woman, but it did fine with the public; everybody it seems hates Justin Bieber except for all those millions of people who don’t. Critical darlings and popular favorites often don’t align; why should they here?

The thing is, though, that mainstream publications are in the business of getting clicks — and, as such, they actually do tend to often cover what is popular. The Atlantic writes about Beyoncé, and Star Wars, and Harry Potter and, Miley Cyrus. As far as films and music and YA novels go, the mainstream is right there with the unwashed, and/or washed hordes. But with television there’s a disconnect. How come?

I can’t answer that question specifically — but I think in general the choices people make about what is important in art have less to do with some sort of absolute critical/popular divide than they do with genre.

Folks usually think of genre as a convenient way to divide up art or literature, but the truth is that genre is a lot more than a categorization system. In fact, as Carl Freedman points out in his book Critical Theory and Science-Fiction, genre isn’t really a subset of art at all. Rather, art is a subset of genre. Hemingway’s novels are literature; Hemingway’s laundry lists are not. A judgment about what something is as genre precedes, and enables, the judgment of whether something is art — or, indeed, whether something is worth talking about at all.

The distinctions between NCIS and Breaking Bad may not look like a genre divide — both are dramas. But genres can actually be formed or coalesce in lots of different ways. The shows that get talked about tend to come from certain networks (HBO, Netflix) and have certain broad characteristics— as Kailyn Kent says, the Golden Age of Television could easily be called “The Golden Age of Gritty Shows About Conflicted Sociopaths.” The genre of television-worth-talking-about may not be specifically defined, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be used as a heuristic to decide what’s worth covering and what is a laundry list.

When you’re looking for it, you can see that genre distinctions actually affect coverage in lots of ways. It’s true that Harry Potter is extremely, awesomely popular — but Nora Roberts is extremely, awesomely popular too, selling twenty-seven books a minute according to a rare mainstream profile in The New Yorker. But you don’t see coverage of the latest Nora Roberts novels excitedly discussed at all the big websites. In part, perhaps, that’s because Nora Roberts novels don’t often get made into films — but that seems like it just begs the question, why don’t these incredibly popular novels get made into films?

There’s nothing innately wrong with using genre as a filter. In the first place, it’s unavoidable. Given the massive glut of culture sliding endlessly past our computer monitors, consumers and journalists alike need some way to sort through it. Genre’s a convenient rule-of-thumb; it tells you what might be of interest and what will make your eyes glaze over. In many cases, genre provides, not just a filter, but a community of like-minded folks, and even a self-description and an identity. To keep up with Mad Men or Orange Is the New Black is to be a particular kind of person, accepted into a certain kind of community and certain kinds of discussions. It’s a fandom. Genre shapes art, but it shapes people too.

The one danger of genre and of fandom is insularity. Again, genre sets the bounds not just of what you like, but of what you see as noteworthy or speakable. In that context, it can be easy to forget that other art, or other communities, exist. That can mean, as Vox suggests, that you start to think everyone is watching Mad Men rather than Big Bang Theory.

It can also dovetail, or reproduce other, less pleasant social divisions, though. Genres aren’t always as starkly linked to marginalized identities as the hillbilly/race records division was in the 1920s. But still, race, gender, and class, are often bound up in genre marketing and consumption, which means that ignoring certain genres in favor of others can have political and social implications. The fact that mainstream publications have so little interest in romance novels seems like it has something to do with the way that women, and femininity, are excluded from critical discussions in favor of more male-or-masculine-friendly genres, including YA novels in which the women heroes at least get to kill people. Along the same lines, it’s not exactly an accident that mainstream best music lists always seem to rate white rock (generally by guys) ahead of soul music or hip hop.

None of which is to say that folks shouldn’t like what they like, or shouldn’t pay attention to what they want to pay attention to. But it’s worth thinking about the way that what we like, and what we pay attention to, is often decided before we’ve really made a conscious choice about it. We like to think of art as opening possibilities. But it’s perhaps just as true to say that art, as genre, can often close us down, and make us narrower.

I’m Going to Lie Here for the Rest of the Day

Posted on November 27, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

I think this is the first Charlie Brown/Lucy football strip. Later it becomes about Lucy’s cruelty and Charlie Brown’s sad sack hopefulness, but this one is just about the little kid misunderstanding. it’s Lucy who’s trying her best and failing — though, of course, Charlie Brown’s still the one who ends up flat on his back.

We’re taking the day off today. Not sure what posting will be like through the weekend, though probably there will be something or other up. Enjoy the day off if you’ve got it, and don’t let the five year old hold your football.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon