Empty Shells

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

A little while back, Anja Flower wrote about gender identity in Ghost in the Shell. At the conclusion of zir essay, Anja argues that Ghost in the Shell, in its multiple marketing iterations and incoherence, can be read as undermining the idea of an essential gender.

Even laboring under the assumption that Motoko Kusanagi is bound by an underlying essence, we must admit that this binding essence is fictional – that in fact “Essential Motoko” is a construct we amalgamate out of images and ideas accumulated from consuming the Ghost in the Shell franchise in its various forms. Abandoning this idea, we are free to focus on the Major as she in fact is: a series of images and text snippets juxtaposed. Seen this way, gender can be read into just about everything: into the whole book, into whole characters to be sure, but also into scenes, pages, panel sequences, environments, color/tone palettes and individual colors/tones, outfits and items of clothing, poses, facial expressions, speed lines, patterns and symbols, inking techniques, even single lines. The changes in gendered expression from line to line, color to color, face to face, panel to panel are often tiny, but they are important because they provide an entirely different image of gender in comics. This image is not one of an immutable essence limited to characters and rarely or never changing, but as an everpresent jumble of tiny shards of signification, only semi-coherent at best and only even pushed into appearing as constant (if fluid) by the reader’s ability to imagine the gaps in information between panels – the device of “closure” described in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Gender overgrows in every direction, abundant shards of it popping up wherever the particular reader’s subjectivity allows it; it is subjective, certainly, and also cumulative and temporal, agglutinating and morphing as the reader reads and re-reads, consumes new additions to the franchise, looks at new pieces of fan art, comes to greater understanding of plot points, digests criticism. Each of these experiences provides an abundance of these shards of gendering for the reader to plug into their gender-concept of the entire franchise, the individual story or character, the individual page. The reader is selective in doing this, and the shards from which they select appear different as the reader acquires different sets of eyes.

I hadn’t ever read Ghost in the Shell, but Anja’s essay intrigured me. My wife happened to have bought the manga, so I thought I’d read it and see what I thought.

And what I thought was…well, to be honest, I kind of felt weird thinking anything about it. Here’s an example of why.

And here’s another:

Or here’s one more:

Just looking at those panels, you might conclude that they were utterly anonymous genre fodder. The crusty but tough team leader fulminating hard-assedly; the ultra-competent fighter grieving through bluster hard-assedly; the sexy-tough couple bantering sexily but hard-assedly. You might think that there is nothing going on in this manga that you haven’t seen before; that character, plot, and atmosphere are little more than a half-hearted scrambling of tediously familiar topes.

You might think that. And you would, in fact, be right. Ghost in the Shell is, from beginning to end, an uninspired, barely stirred sludge of half-digested clichés. The plot is complicated, twisting, and aggressively irrelevant, bearing the characters along in a rush of technobabble from one uninvolving violent set-piece to another. The hyper-competent Major Motoko Kusanagi is a medical miracle, managing to fight, wise-crack, switch brains, and flash cheesecake without ever acquiring even the hint of a discernible idiosyncratic personality. When the mysterious, artificially generated Puppeteer merges with Kusanagi’s consciousness at the end of the volume, you wonder how on earth anyone is supposed to tell the difference. I guess Puppeteer/Kusanagi makes more speeches than Kusanagi alone did? That’s something I guess.

Kusanagi/Puppeteer — Still talking tough, still saying nothing.

The thing is, the fact that Ghost in the Shell is kind of lousy doesn’t necessarily undermine the points Anja makes. In fact, it’s lameness can in some ways be seen as thematic. The book, as Anja notes, is about the fracturing and fluidity of human identity; the characters are a mix of human, robot, cyborg, and combinations thereof. The page below from the manga (reprinted by Anja) lays out the theme — how can you tell whether you’re human or not? What does it mean to be human, anyway?

“what if all that’s left of the real you is a couple of lonely brain cells, huh?” Kusanagi asks.

The irony is that there aren’t even a couple of lonely brain cells here. No brain activity at all appears to have been expended on creating these characters. They speak and interact, but they have no real history or personality; they’re just sci-fi cyberpunk cyphers, mechanically running through their tropes. They wonder whether they’re real in the most artificial manner possible. Are they pasteboard cliches dreaming that they’re robots, or robots dreaming that they’re pasteboard cliches?

Genre’s inherent emptiness can often be an excellent way to look at the way the world doesn’t work. This happens in Gantz, where the incoherence of the genre elements fits into a supposedly cynical, but arguably terrified nihilism. It happens in Moto Hagio’s story A Drunken Dream, where the standard narrative warps and fractures before an underlying trauma.

For Anja, I think something analogous happens with Ghost in the Shell. The fact that Kusanagi is a blank slate emphasizes the narrative’s half-denied intimations of open identities. The book claims that inside every body, of whatever sort, there is a ghost or essence. But despite this, Kusanagi is, for practical purposes, no one — the Puppeteer takes over an empty puppet. The self is not a fixed core nailed to a single gender; it’s a series of shards that come together in this way and that. For Anja, that lack of essence is (at least potentially) freeing.

For me, though — I mostly find the implications of Ghost in the Shell depressing. I don’t have anything in principle against fluid identities…but in Ghost in the Shell, those fluid identities seem to be not so much liberating as claustrophobic. You can be anyone you want…as long as the person you want to be is a stereotypical tough-talking government agent, scrambling blandly through some bone-headed plot. To give up your essence in this context doesn’t open up infinite possibilities. It just makes you generic. Abandoning your self doesn’t let you escape social conventions and expectations; on the contrary, it means you have no choice but to embody them.

Liturgy of Blut

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today. I’ve been talking about black metal and Christianity in comments recently, so I thought I’d reprint it.
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“The images of art,” theologian Caroline Pickstock asserts, “offer us visions of the good, new possibilities of human self-realization that lie, as it were, just out of sight.” Pickstock, writing in the collection Paul’s New Moment, is thinking here specifically of liturgical art. But the ease with which she generalizes suggests strongly that — safely ensconced in the swaddling ivory of Cambridge — she has not heard a lot of black metal. Because, I have to say, when I listen to 777-Sect(s), the latest album from French avant-black-metallers Blut Aus Nord, I am not exactly seeing new possibilities of human self-realization lying just out of site. Unless new possibilities of human realization lying just out of site include charred corpses being pulled across jagged metal by slowly decaying ungulates.

Obviously, black metal, is not into “visions of the good”. If there’s any liturgy here, it’s the Black Mass. 777-Sect(s) is a single, 6 part suite of bleak, dissonant hammering. The music staggers and lurches between black metal fury and despairing trudge, veering back and forth as the quasi-industrial drumming lands repetitive robotic blows on its oozing cranium. The album never reaches the pure pagan fury of old-school Scandinavia, but it doesn’t descend into pleasant tripped-out trance the way the contemporary American scene sometimes does. Instead, Blud Aus Nord draaaaagggggssss, all minor scraping and abject failure — the hapless, despised hero crawling out of the pit only to be pulled back again and again by the inexorable, shapeless talon. At the very beginning of the album, in fact, the rough distant screaming/vomiting almost sounds like you can hear our hero being devoured by the stinking maelstrom.

So…black metal is not uplifting. No one is surpised. Though philosopher Slavoj Zizek, also writing in Paul’s New Moment, does actually find something liturgical in the horror movies for which 777-Sect(s) seems to want to serve as a soundtrack. According to Zizek:

the good guys think they’ve destroyed the possessing alien, but some slimy residue of the alien is left lying around. Then comes the standard shot, where the camera slowly approaches the residue, and what we thought was just a bit of squashed alien starts to move and organize itself. We leave the film with the alien organizing itself. This is the divine element. I think horror movies are the negative theology of today…. It is as if the good guys in such horror movies are like Roman soldiers: they thought they had destroyed everything in Chirst, but that little bit of alien residue remained and started to organize itself into the community of believers.

In this reading, you could see the way 777-Sect(s) is pinned between anger and dissolution as a long struggle for becoming, an effort to pull together its bloody gobbets into a shambolic whole, the better to parasitically feed upon the body of the state/hegemony/pop music. Blut aus Nord will possess Britney as the spirit of Christ will possess the world. The apocalypse will come when Rihanna’s head turns around and she starts spitting metal bile.

I love Zizek’s unkillable Terminator as unkillable Christ analogy…but I have to admit that if you think about it too long, it starts to seem a little unsatifying. Reading Jason or Freddy back from the dead as the miraculously risen community of believers — I don’t know. It seems a little too cheery, doesn’t it? Is The Thing really more enjoyable if you read it as It’s a Wonderful Life? Is Blut Aus Nord really just Perotin for the 2010s?

The thing Zizek seems to be missing here is the Thingness. As an atheist, he’s eager to metaphorically transubstantiate that risen body into a supposedly materialist, but actually more foofily non-present spirit of lovingness and community. Which is clever, but doesn’t really map onto Blut Aus Nord. Blut Aus Nord does not do lovingness and community. The physical bodies of these musicians excrete, not spiritual bliss, but ropy tendrils of hate.

Which brings us back to Caroline Pickstock:

…liturgy fulfills the purposes of art as imaging according to the modern Russian filmmaker and photographer Andrei Tarkovsky. The image should displace the original because the original thereby becomes more itself, if what a created thing and especially the human creature is, is after all “image,” the image of God. So when in the course of liturgy we are transformed into a wholly signifying — because worshiping — body, we are at that moment closest to our fulfillment as human beings.

Art as liturgy does not provide a metaphor of the dead God becoming the human community. Instead it shows the body as created thing; self as manufactured cyborg, which rises only because its putrefying husk is dragged upwards by an insistent and alien power. Art shows us ourselves as the image of God. And in this case that image is the brutalized Christ on the Cross — God as dead body as Thing. Blut Aus Nord figures us as struggling, debased monstrosities: a kind of human self-realization that even Caroline Pickstock would have to admit is eminently Christian.

Brave New World

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

This was supposed to run at Comixology as my monthly column, but given their partnership with DC, they felt it was too mean-spirited. So I’m running it here instead.
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As everyone knows (and by “everyone” I mean “the 12 people who still read DC comics and the 350 or so who still comment about said comics on blogs,”) DC released a map of their alternate reality Flashpoint universe last month. Here it is:

Part of the map is dedicated to the kind of fanboy-tease insider “surprises” that always suggests someone’s mother’s basement and dim, sad, lurching figures dressed only in sweatpants and stale cheetos. Oooh…Project S! In Metropolis! What oh what could that mean! And a time anomaly in Central City huh? Chuckle, wooo! What won’t they think of next! And Green Arrow has a whole island from which he can resist the Man! Fight the fight, Ollie! I bet you got just the one arm, same as you did in Dark Knight!

So, yes, it’s the sort of tired property-scrambling that makes you want to dash your brains out against the nearest wall in the vague hope that your carefully horded nerd-knowledge will dribble out with your cranial fluid and that, while you’re lying there in the hospital with a feeding tube down your throat and man-diapers on your shitter, you at least will no longer have the embarrassment of knowing about Flash’s cosmic treadmill, and/or about the necessary impurities in Dan DiDio’s ethical system.

But hey, that’s comics. You interact with DC, you expect to be humiliated and to crave for death. You’re going to ask comics fans to get angry at something like that, you might as well ask them to stop stabbing themselves in the eye with the blunt end of a compass. I mean, if they could find the sharp end, they would have done it years ago, right?

But! This map is not satisfied to just be another example of shitty superhero comics ephemera! This map has dreams, baby. This map wants to climb out of that basement; it wants to emerge into the light of the great American continent, blink twice, and retch up its vile id like a glorious fountain of rancid Atlantean fish-heads.

It’s fascinating, really. What is buried there, deep in the collective doddering hindbrain of the swollen fanboys who call themselves (in delightful self-parody) the “creative minds” at DC? Look! Over here! They have vague memories that some Nazis ended up in South America, and someone told them that Brazil is in South America…and so they put the two together! Isn’t that cute? And they know that Tibet is mysterious, so they’ve made it the home of the Secret Seven! Get it? Secret! And…Asia! It’s out there somewhere, like the truth, but less differentiated. Surely it has a capital. Probably called something clever like, oh I don’t know — “Asian Capital?”

And then there’s Africa which, as you will observe, is “ape-controlled”. If you are in the know, you of course realize instantly that “ape-controlled” means that Gorilla Grodd, the giant psychic ape, has conquered the entire darn continent. It can’t have been too difficult for him, since Grodd has effectively been the only inhabitant of Africa in the DC universe for the past 30 or 40 years. Which is why, if you’re a DC comics fan, it’s natural to think “ape” whenever you think “Africa,” the same way you think “pneumatic ta-tas” whenever you think “woman.” How can you say that’s offensive? They don’t mean anything by it. And if they did, well, it’s only comics. If racism was good enough for Winsor McCay and Herge, why shouldn’t it be good enough for DC? (This is in no way meant to imply that anyone in charge at DC has heard of McCay or Herge.)

All of which ignores the main point, which is that there are zombies in Alaska. Zombies are hip and happening and cool, and, of course, in Alaska they will be even cooler — sub-zero even. It’s comforting to know that DC is paying attention as the world changes around them. Zombies. That’s progress.

Shorter Utilitarian Review 6/11/11

Posted on June 11, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

I’m out of town at the moment, so this is going to be briefer than usual.

I have two articles at Splice Today this week, one on the Republican presidential field and one on the comic book Priest.

And that’s it for the moment, till I return and my internet connection gets faster!

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Surfin’ and Drivin’

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

Little bit country, little bit bleached-out pop. Download Surfin’ and Drivin’ here.

The playlist is below.

1. Still With You — Caroline Peyton
2. Sweet Dreams of You — Emmylou Harris
3. Smoke Along the Track — Dwight Yoakum
4. When Being Who You Are Is Not Enough — Patty Loveless (and Emmylou)
5. Tumbling Dice — Linda Ronstadt
6. Surfin’ and Drivin’ — Walter Egan
7. Rock’n Me — Steve Miller Band
8. Trying to Get Over You — Danni Leigh
9. All the Words — Bridges
10. Tracks of My Tears — Linda Ronstadt
11. Complicated Girl — Bangles
12. Got a Hold on Me — Christine McVie
13. Rainbows — Dennis Wilson
14. This Whole World — Beach Boys
15. Trouble — Lindsey Buckingham
16. Second Hand News — Fleetwood Mac
17. Black Rose — Waylon Jennings
18. Do It Again — Steely Dan

Wonk vs. Pol

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

This was first published on Splice Today.
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Al Gore is a wonk—for a politician. But politicians aren’t real wonks. They’re doughy, be-suited wonk wannabes; plodding poseurs with pasteboard and tinsel craniums. When politician wonks go to the think tank locker rooms, the real wonks snicker and tape “Kick Me!” to the backs of their slide rules.

The documentary Cool It is the revenge of the real wonk—specifically of Bjorn Lomborg, author, statistician, environmentalist and native of Denmark, where they take their wonks seriously. Lomborg’s controversial thesis in Cool It (first floated in his 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist) is, essentially, that Gore and his ilk are full of hooey. Global warming will not cause the apocalypse in the foreseeable future, and the effort to frighten people into lowering carbon emissions is disingenuous and misguided.

Lomborg doesn’t deny that global warming is occurring and that it is a serious long-term problem. Instead, he notes that doomsday scenarios (20 ft. sea level rise! Devastating hurricanes once a week!) are overblown, and that the efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gases through legislative caps are ineffectual. Instead, he argues we should funnel the massive amounts of money it would take to lower temperatures by a fraction of a degree over the course of a century into more productive ventures. He suggests, for example, developing renewable energy resources and fighting poverty, malaria, and other scourges in the developing world.

Cool It has more ambitions than merely setting the record straight on global warming, though. One of the talking heads that Cool It drops on the unsuspecting viewer notes with the slightly condescending chuckle of the large-brained that Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was a “great piece of propaganda.” No doubt it was. So is this. Cool It uses, in fact, many of the same hagiographic tactics as its more famous predecessor. We see Bjorn biking healthily through Denmark, chatting earnestly with impoverished children in third world nations, and puncturing bloviating politicians with his rapier wit. We get porn-movie close-ups of his book as voiceovers speak sternly of its controversial and brave counter-intuitiveness. The movie even trots out Lomborg’s Alzheimer-afflicted mother for a few scenes—because nothing adds depth to a wonk’s character like a little family tragedy.

Bjorn may be a bouncing boy genius, but he’s not the only one. The movie has enough reverence for contrarians to spread its shining pixie dust all across the wonkosphere, breathlessly rushing from a plan to cool the world’s cities by painting them white to a plan to cool the earth by spraying particulate matter into the stratosphere by balloon to a plan to turn algae into fuel, and on and on. Economists will tell us what to invest in and researchers teleologically deliver the goods. “The solution is us!” one scientist proclaims. And by “us” he doesn’t mean you and me, child. He means the wonks.

The wonks always think the solution is them, of course. Leave it to wonks and they’ll reason and invent and statistic until our problems are all solved. Of course, one could argue that many of our problems were caused by wonks in the first place. World Bank economists are not generally hailed as saviors in the developing world; the technological miracle of massive irrigation projects has in many places intensified water crises; the massive population boom enabled by modernization in Africa pushed humans into forested areas where, it seems likely, they came in contact with the simian-born HIV virus. Advances can have unintended consequences. But so what? As one cantankerous bearded fellow notes, you may not trust the wonks, but you don’t have a better solution do you? Unless you do, he sneers, “Don’t stop me!”

As it happens, I don’t have any particular desire to stop Angry Bearded Guy. I agree with the film that politicians are largely useless. To the best I’ve been able to determine from doing a moderate amount of research on the topic over the years, global warming really is not an imminent millenarian threat. Lomborg’s suggestions—stop scaring people; stop calling for useless individual actions like replacing light bulbs, invest money wisely—all seem reasonable.

But I wish we could agree to those solutions without engaging in rampant wonkolatry. Because the fact is, wonks are as stupid, as duplicitous, and as self-impressed as the rest of us—a fact this movie inadvertently demonstrates quite clearly. The end isn’t nigh, but neither should we necessarily put our faith in the convenient development of timely techno miracles. And you know what you call a wonk who wants your trust? A politician.