Tag Archives: Noah

Boredom on Infinite Earths

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This one ran on the now-defunct Bridge Magazine website, was reprinted at Eaten By Ducks, and is reprinted for those readers who missed it the first times round.

“The cliques of artists and writers consist for the most part of a racket selling amusement to people who at all costs must be prevented from thinking themselves vulgar, and a conspiracy to call it not amusement but art.”
— R. G. Colingwood

Since the passing of Charles Schulz in 2000, comicbook scripter Alan Moore has been the greatest English-language writer in the world.

I believe this statement is true, but it’s also somewhat beside the point. “Reputation,” as Moore points out in the recently reissued Writing for Comics, “is a trap that will turn you into a lifeless marble bust of yourself before you’re even dead.” This has probably been the case since the first sycophant shoved his nose in the unsuspecting (but alas, unprotesting) posterior orifice of the first artist and ruined the second cave painting. Things can, however, always get worse, and so they have. Time was when “arts and entertainment” weren’t mutually exclusive categories; when genre fiction was just, well, fiction; when acknowledged literary giants like G. K. Chesterton and Jack London could write nonsense verse and children’s literature; when poetry read less like this:

The shadowy cave we live in extends far out
Over the world. Plato said that. Even Amundsen
And all his dogs couldn’t find the end of it.
(From “Norwegian Grandson,” Robert Bly, 2003)

And more like this:

“Were all my body larded o’er
With darts of love, so thick
That you might find in every pore
A well-stuck standing prick,
Whilst yet my eyes alone were free,
My heart would never doubt,
In amorous rage and ecstasy,
To wish those eyes, to wish those eyes fucked out.”
(From “Mock Song,” Earl of Rochester, 1680)

These days, though, turning into a lifeless marble bust is not merely the result of a literary reputation, but its guarantor. How else explain the astonishing lionization of Ernest Hemingway, a man whose main achievement was to take the adventure out of boy’s adventure stories? Or the enthusiasm for Joyce Carol Oates, Queen of the Really Dull Gothic Romance? Or for Robert Hass, who, I understand, feels deeply? Or for John Ashberry, who, I understand, doesn’t? Or…well, you get the idea. Like the Kantian who knows he’s moral only because he’s miserable, we can identify a masterpiece of prose or poetry solely by its stolid dullness. It’s little wonder, then, that the most talented writers working today —Posdnuos of de la Soul, Judith Martin of “Miss Manners”, David Wilson of the Museum of Jurassic Technology— have chosen to seek fame and fortune outside the confines of literary fiction.

Which brings us back to Alan Moore and the much-maligned medium of comics. Moore is a hugely popular and respected figure, but it is still a little strange to hear him warn of the dangers of reputation, and even more so to hear him inveigh against “Reputation’s immortal big brother, Posterity.” Posterity? For comics creators? Comics may be inexplicably accepted as art in benighted locales like Japan, but in the U.S.A. comics have been viewed by most commentators as colorful cud for the barely literate. Maus-creator Art Spiegelman has stated that he used to be so embarrassed to be seen reading comics that he would hide them in copies of Playboy.

Dangling reputation in front of a cartoonist, in other words, is a bit like waving red meat in front of a starving Chihuahua. And as the professional arbiters of respect have begun to toss one or two scraps towards comics creators, the latter have responded with a frantic and joyful yapping, cheerfully urinating all over their predecessors in order to mark out the fragrant boundaries of their new literary reputations. Chris Ware, for example, has been hailed as a genius for sensitively suggesting that people who read superhero comics are intellectual, emotional, and sexual cripples. Similarly, in his 1991 New Comics Anthology, Bob Callahan sneered, “Prior to this point in history, comic strips were created by often exceptionally talented men and women as a way of entertaining nitwits and kids.” Self-respecting artists, apparently, aim their products only at the crème-de-la-crème: the wise, the thoughtful, and perhaps the occasional literature professor. If Shakespeare wrote for the uneducated rabble and Mark Twain wasted his days on books for boys — well, what of it? That was a long time ago, and we’d know what to do with them if they tried that sort of thing around here. You don’t catch Cormac McCarthy attempting to amuse high-school dropouts, do you? Does Mark Strand write children’s verse? No and no — the literati are for the literati, and as for the rest, let them eat Stephen King. In the meantime, the comics medium, after 60-odd years of over-muscled goombahs and talking cats, is finally ready to bore the pants off innumerable school-children. Dan Clowes, like John Updike, really understand the Souls of Women. Joe Sacco, like Susan Sontag, has visited Serbia. Sincere meaningfulness is in the air, progenitors are being slain, and lavish praise from Harold Bloom cannot be far behind.

Of course, the New Comics gang doesn’t think that it is trampling on the best traditions of the medium. On the contrary, it claims to be upholding comics history; to be pointing out, amidst acres and acres of market-soiled virtue, the few unblemished hymens of artistic vision. Art Spiegelman has been particularly good at this sort of thing, publicly and fulsomely lauding the genius of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad, and — in a massively over-designed coffee-table book— Jack Cole’s Plastic Man.

What Spiegelman doesn’t seem to have quite realized is that his own shockingly conventional musings (“Maybe everyone has to feel guilty. Everyone! Forever!”) and clumsy co-option of comics history (The Holocaust…but with mice! It’s high art! It’s low art! Genius!) bear no resemblance to the work of his purported heroes. Indeed, the pulp crap Spiegelman despises — the issue of Flash in which our hero’s head grows to the size of a watermelon, for example, or the man-eating Christmas elves with ears for armpits in Eric Powell’s The Goon — are much more in ye olde tradition than anything Spiegelman has done. The thing about Herriman or Kurtzman or Cole is that, basically, they’re a blast. Hyper-active plots, surreal transformations, energy, surprise, a pursuit of the preposterous which never feels like slumming, a deliberate flirtation with self-parody, and endless, endless creativity: these guys, whatever their process, always made it look easy — they had the elan of trapeze artists, effortlessly spectacular and light as air. Does any of that describe Maus? No. Bowed under the burden of his press clippings, solemnly staggering from Holocaust to September 11 like some high-concept ambulance chaser, Spiegelman wants you to see him sweat. How else would you know that he’s a serious auteur? And so we’re treated to scenes of the Cartoonist at Work: panel after panel in which he suggests that his ambivalence about celebrity is somehow made more poignant by Auschwitz, or vice versa.

The arbiters of culture would, like Spiegelman, have us believe that canonization is the highest goal to which an artist can aspire. They fail to see — or, perhaps, see all too clearly — that when an artist enters the canon, he or she ceases to be an artist, and becomes instead a promotional device whereby the elites sell themselves to themselves. Da Vinci, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce — they don’t have audiences anymore, they have worshippers. Once, maybe, they had some ambition to entertain and enlighten their fellows, but now their most revered message is the totemic power of their names, repeated over and over, like television advertisements in a dead language. Indeed, the deadness of the language becomes the point. It is the canonical work’s very inaccessibility and irrelevance which gives it its fetishistic power, and so the initiates dedicate themselves to creating mysteries where none exist. Sacred passwords such as “artistic integrity,” and “enduring human concerns” identify believer to believer, and they smile as they gather in their faculty lounges and gourmet coffee emporiums, confident that their incantations will hold off the sea of drooling peasants which might otherwise engulf them. And for bonus points, why not complain about how oppressed you are by the philistinism of the people who bind your books, clean up your spilled cappuccino, and wipe your fucking ass?

If when you hear “art” you think “lifestyle accessory”, you would have liked the Comix Chicago exhibit at the Hyde Park Arts Center in September 2003. Though the ostensible theme of this show was “Comics About Chicago,” a more accurate description might be “Comics In A Really Important Art Gallery.” No super-heroes here, no sir. Also, no flights of fancy, enthusiasm, childishness, or any idea that would raise the hackles of a tenured radical. Many of the traits that have historically made comics great are incongruously in place, but they’re all viewed through a kind of inverse funhouse mirror, which makes the bizarre and outrageous appear mercilessly bland. So Dan Clowes dabbles in a surrealism stripped of drive and panache. David Heatley borrows Winsor McCay’s idea of dream comics, tosses out the magical juxtapositions and improbable adventure, and gives us Curator, a careerist fantasy in which Heatley pictures himself as a feted art star. Jessica Abel takes the addictive narrative melodrama of Stan Lee, adds a heaping glob of earnestness, and ends up sounding like a bad high school literary magazine. (One of her characters actually says, “I love this record. It makes me ache. It feels like the future.”) And Archer Prewitt makes slapstick okay for the bourgeois by replacing imagination and general goofiness with a smug sneer that says, “We’re all superior to these hi-jinks, aren’t we?” At least Prewitt’s characters, like those of his predecessors, still speak in the bastard Negro dialect of the blackface minstrel. Thank God that, in this age of political correctness, it’s still okay for white art school graduates to laugh at po’ black folks.

You’d think that, even if the writing were a wash, an art gallery would pick comics with a certain level of visual interest. You’d be wrong, though; the art, like the text, is frankly pedestrian. The best drawing in the show is little more than competent; nor does anyone represented here have the flair for cartooning that translates into a recognizable and distinctive style. Forget about Dr. Seuss — we’re not even up to Gary Larson’s standards here. The collage which adorns the reverse side of the show’s promotional poster is, in this regard, particularly damning. Someone chose panels from each artist and mixed them together in a loosely sequential arrangement, presumably to highlight the diversity of skills on display. Instead, all the pieces just melts into one big, drab blur, the artists undifferentiated from one another by either subject matter or talent. In the show itself, there are a couple of pleasant moments; Dan Clowes’ “Nature Boy,” has a nice, filmic movement, and the colors and composition of Deadpan #1 by David Heatley (an acquaintance of mine) are lovely. Even if you throw in a couple of cute cat drawings by Ivan Brunetti, though, that’s pretty slim pickings, especially when balanced against Erik Wenzel, who seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that taking multiple photographs of the same boring cartoon is…what? Vaguely amusing? A half-hearted David Letterman routine?

The big, fat exception to all of this is, of course, Chris Ware. Everybody says Ware is the greatest comic artist of his generation, and it’s pretty hard to argue — his hand-lettered calligraphy alone is reason enough to come out to Comix Chicago. It’s Ware’s compositions, though, that are really sui generis. Nobody but nobody thinks about page layout the way that Chris Ware thinks about page layout. Most artists — especially American artists of recent vintage — tend to design comics pages sequentially; whether you’re reading R. Crumb or Stan Lee, you start more or less at the top left, end more or less at the bottom right, and walk away with a narrative. Chris Ware does this too, sometimes, but he’s just as likely to organize the page around a single drawing of a giant house or machine, or as a gameboard, or as an interlocking series of smaller and larger strips oriented in various directions. The result is breathtaking, especially on something like the Jimmy Corrigan book jacket, where the details spiral down into infinitesimal complexity, arrows point every which way, and you can spend hours just trying to figure out which way is up. And, as if that weren’t enough, Ware also happens to be a fantastic writer, with a style somewhere between Beckett, Schulz, and the language of ’50s marketing. In the “Whitney Prevaricator,” for example, the great men of Western art wander through Ware’s tiny panels like heavily sedated office workers searching for the right cubicle. I think my favorite moment is when an eager Renaissance man-in-training starts spouting lines out of True Romance: “That Goethe, he’s a famous humanist! I’ve got to do something to impress him!”

Which only makes it more depressing to view the aesthetic atrocity that is “Ruin Your Life: Draw Cartoons.” You might think that with television reality shows our society had pretty much sunk as low as it was possible to sink in terms of dishonesty, pandering, and sham self-revelation. But no; Chris Ware has dragged his massive talent to cultural bottom, and he has begun to dig. Everything that’s delightful about the “Whitney Prevaricator” — most noticeably the sense of social realities which makes satire possible — has here gone horribly awry. The “Prevaricator” mocks the anguish of artists as being idiotic and overblown. “Ruin Your Life,” on the other hand, is devoted to the proposition that life is just really, really hard for alternative comics creators in general, and for Chris Ware in particular.
Now, you might think that things were going all right for Ware professionally. He’s been in the Whitney Biennial. He recently became the first comic artist to win a major British literary award. He’s been positively reviewed in People, for Christ’s sake, and he gets to make his living as a cartoonist rather than as, say, a coal miner. But as a college-educated white boy with skills, Ware knows that he is just not getting his due until all of us awaken each morning and genuflect towards his drafting board. And so he feels sorry for himself. Working in comics, apparently, will doom you to “decades of grinding isolation, solipsism and utter social disregard.” (Silly me; I thought that was working at McDonalds — or being unemployed.) Comics are also “inextricably linked to adolescence and puerile power fantasies,” and “If anyone finds you the least bit attractive, you are not a cartoonist.” Comics artists waste their youth in grinding toil, chained to a “reviled pictographic language” which is nevertheless much more demanding and unforgiving than the mere written word . (If only Kafka had known how easy he had it— maybe he would actually have finished one of his novels!)

Of course, like Ware, the intellectual art-viewers who file past his work know the pain of being under-appreciated; the loneliness that comes from sitting almost, but not quite, at the top of the heap; the struggle that results when all your needs are met and you realize that you’re still mildly disturbed by the hideous rending noises as your domestic servants are tortured outside your studio. If you listen carefully in the gallery, you can almost hear the forlorn souls of the privileged crying, “We find you attractive, Chris!” as they make his self-pity their own. And if they don’t get enough there, they can always walk across the room and absorb Ivan Brunetti’s “Cartooning Will Destroy You,” in which Brunetti moans that “no one even gives a shit about comics,” and wonders if instead of cartooning it would be more moral for him to be “mopping the AIDS ward at a county hospital.” Perhaps he’s hoping for sympathy from the terminally ill. After all, “It’s a lonely business, sitting day in and day out alone…writing and drawing books that have little hope of reaching an audience beyond other comics artists….” Quick, who wrote that, Brunetti or Ware? Okay, you caught me; it’s actually from an essay in the promotional booklet. Comics have, at long last, reached that marketing nirvana where art and puff piece are one.

The irony is that alternative comics are supposed to be more personal, or at minimum more idiosyncratic, than their mainstream brethren. Yet Ware and Brunetti, who focus on themselves obsessively, have written comics which are thematically indistinguishable. Meanwhile, in Alan Moore’s Tom Strong, the title hero discovers an alternate timeline in which he is black and in which, perhaps as a result, everybody on earth is happier. The role of race in the story is complicated by the fact that the white Tom Strong has a black wife and daughter (regular characters in the series) and, of course, by comics’ disgraceful history of caricaturing and ignoring minorities. The impact is somewhere between that of Chester Himes’ detective fiction and the Fu Manchu novels: a straightforward adventure story given a queasy resonance by social and political implications which are suggested but never quite worked out. The story isn’t great, necessarily, and it isn’t Moore’s best. But it’s individual and it’s thoughtful, which is more than can be said for the maudlin navel gazing of Jeff Brown — or, wait, I mean Ivan Brunetti.

I’m not saying that all mainstream titles are necessarily better than alternative ones: for the record, they’re not. But I am saying that dismissing qualities supposedly associated with mainstream super-hero comics —popularity, silliness, a desire to entertain — is the surest way to take a young, adventurous medium bursting with potential and transform it into an ossified piece of crap. Art may be about communication, it may be about truth, and it may be about beauty, but it sure as hell is not about impressing a grant committee. If you’re not willing to look ridiculous, be an accountant or something. An artist who wants to be taken seriously is an artist who needs a swift kick in the pants. And if comics aren’t respected by everyone in the academy or in the hip hang-outs — well, frankly, good. As Alan Moore notes, “The only thing that might seriously endanger either your talent or your relationship with your talent is if you suddenly found yourself fashionable.”

Happiness is an Unhappy Hipster

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This was originally printed in The Comics Journal, later at Eaten By Ducks, and I’m reprinting it here again in case Theresa, Tucker, or either of my other regular readers happened to miss it.

Charles Schulz was not a fan of underground comics. He thought they were vulgar and boring. “What was strange about them,” he said in an interview with Gary Groth, “was they pretended to be so different and they all turned out to be the same…. What’s so great about that?”

Schulz was referring to an earlier generation of alternative comics, of course. The horny ’60s shock-jocks Schulz despised have long since given way to legions of sensitive new-age artistes selling a very different brand of self-indulgence. And while older underground icons like Harvey Pekar may have sneered at Schulz’s simplicity, the new generation worships him. Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, for example, is a macrocephalic, self-loathing, perennial loser trapped in a boxy wasteland. Dan Clowes’ mix of suburban surrealism and static non-event would be hard to imagine without Schulz’s example. So would Ivan Brunetti’s long sequences of nearly identical panels filled with neurotic blather. And so it goes. Like one of Al Jafee’s Mad Magazine fold-in covers, the barren landscapes of today’s alternative comics need only to be tweaked or rumpled, and suddenly you’re staring at the same darn enormous head.

Schulz’s influence may be pervasive, but it remains uneasy. Gary Trudeau can gush that Peanuts was the “first Beat strip,” but the fact remains that as a counterculture icon, Charles Schulz lacks something, and I don’t just mean a goatee. Bad enough that his work eschews any reference to sex, politics, or graphic violence — the holy trinity of alternative media. That might be forgivable, or, indeed, inspirational (hey, man, wouldn’t it be great to write a comic like Peanuts, but where all the characters have *sexual* hang-ups?). But Schulz’s real sin was that everybody liked Peanuts. And when I say everybody, I’m not talking merely about the working-class, or the ethnically diverse, or the other underprivileged groups that we all love to ostentatiously respect. No, I’m talking about the terminally square: the Republicans, the church-goers, the optimists, and the actuaries. I’m talking about Schulz’s longtime friends Cathy Guisewite and Mort Walker, creators of two of the hokiest comic strips ever unleashed on the unwashed herd.

Peanuts’ universal appeal and studied inoffensiveness made it possible for Snoopy to sell lunch boxes, T-shirts, space flight and life-insurance, and for Schulz to create a multi-media marketing empire. But it had its downside as well. In our society, high art is high art because it entertains the elite; low art is low art because it entertains the rabble. The rabble loved Schulz, which left aesthetes with a problem. Peanuts was indisputably great, but could something be great if nobody disputed it? To appreciate Charles Schulz was to make oneself indistinguishable from the football-obsessed, L.L. Bean-attired, homophobic hordes of Middle America. It was, in other words, a hipster’s worst nightmare. Something had to be done.

Luckily, there are tried-and-true strategies for dealing with a crisis of this sort. As Arnold Bennett stated a century ago, “Even when a first-class author has enjoyed immense success during his lifetime, the majority have never appreciated him so sincerely as they have appreciated second-rate men. He has always been reinforced by the ardour of the passionate few.” The masses may like a genius, but they never like him in the right way. That is left to the graduates of small liberal arts colleges, who, with their deeper understanding, love Shakespeare for the profound philosophy, not for the gratuitous gore; Mark Twain for the deep humanity, not for the slapstick.

What, then, do most newspaper readers like about Peanuts? Not too difficult a question: it makes them laugh. Schulz wasn’t embarrassed about this; in fact, he pointed out on numerous occasions that it was the main goal of his work. “Cartooning is, after all, drawing funny pictures,” he wrote in 1975’s Peanuts Jubilee, “something a cartoonist should never forget.” Very well, then; if Joe Average loved Peanuts because of its joy, Joe Above-Average would love it because of its despair. The chosen few understood that Schulz was not a genial neighborhood druggist, but a Jeff Tweedyesque mope rocker; they read the strip not to laugh, but to indulge in an orgy of white, suburban, middle-class self-pity. Or as wunderkind designer Chip Kidd claims, Peanuts was “For all of us who ate our school lunches alone, and didn’t have any hope of sitting anywhere near the little red-haired girl and never got any valentines and struck out every single time we were shoved to the plate for Little League….”

And yet. If Schulz was writing for the alienated and the emotionally deep, why did those tortured souls make such a consistent hash when they tried to pay him tribute? Take Kidd’s The Art of Charles M. Schulz, for example. Along with sketches and strips reproduced at every conceivable size, Kidd also included pictures of tschotskes —dolls, magazine covers, promotional materials, and so forth, all bunged together through the miracle of the latest in page-layout software. As Kidd points out, Schulz’s aesthetic was one of minimalism. Why, then, is this celebration of him so cluttered?

If Kidd’s take on Peanuts is mystifyingly wrong-headed, Jeff Brown’s is infuriating. Chris Ware actually compared Jeff Brown to Schulz in a recent issue of Comic Art; both, he argued, were artists who eschewed realism in order to create a world that was “more heartfelt and real.” I don’t doubt that Brown’s description of his own deep sincerity is “real,” at least to him; unfortunately, that does not make it more endearing. In a piece from Kramer’s Ergot Four called “Don’t Look Them In the Eye,” for example, Brown draws himself at work in a Peanuts-like moment, jumping every time the phone rings because he thinks it might be his girlfriend. But, of course, it never is. Also, she won’t have enough sex with him. How poignant.

Brown’s work, in fact, is a perfect example of how alternative comics types have take from Schulz one or two stylistic tics while systematically abandoning everything that made Peanuts worth reading. Even a cursory comparison of Jeff Brown’s artwork and Schulz’s demonstrates the enormous gulf between the two. Schulz’s drawings are deliberately simplified; especially in his classic 50s and 60s work, he chooses one or two details carefully to set a scene. What he does choose to draw is rendered idiosyncratically but distinctively — Schroeder’s piano, for instance. And despite the simplicity of the drawing, some of his effects can take your breath away. In the strip I’m looking at right now, Linus and Charlie Brown dissolve into a driving rainstorm, the perspective slowly pulling away from them, until each stands alone, almost completely obscured by the thicket of varied pen strokes. Schulz was charmingly pleased with his ability to create such effects; as he wrote in 1999s Peanuts: A Golden Celebration, “Rain is fun to draw. I pride myself on being able to make nice strokes with the point of a pen….”

Needless to say, this sort of grace is way beyond Jeff Brown. In one scene, Brown is lying in bed with his girlfriend. Crosshatch lines are everywhere; on the walls, on their bodies, on the bed, all running in different directions. We shift from close-up to mid-distance shot to close-up and back to mid-distance, all for no apparent reason. There’s no progression or unity, and the sloppiness is not so much engaging as it is profoundly half-assed. Brown has taken Schulz’s iconic, non-representational style, but left out the reserve and discretion which makes it work. This is brought home most clearly in the middle of “Don’t Look Them In the Eye,” when Brown, more or less at random, includes a blob-like drawing of Snoopy’s friend Woodstock. The best that can be said of this attempt is that Brown’s version, like Schulz’s, looks nothing like a bird.

After the dismal art, the most noticeable thing about Jeff Brown’ work is that every panel features — Jeff Brown. No surprise there; if the super-hero is the fetish of the mainstream, the self is the fetish of the art comic. Perhaps the autobiographical vogue is some sort of overreaction to the shared worlds, house styles, and character ownership of DC and Marvel. Or perhaps it’s simply a solipsistic failure of imagination. In any case, there is little doubt that many in the alternative comics field have difficulty distinguishing between the phrases “personal vision” and “narcissism.”

Unfortunately, as it happens, many of the deities worshipped by the alternative comics crowd — Jack Cole, Winsor McCay, George Herriman, etc., etc. — simply didn’t write confessional narratives (it’s been argued that some of Jack Cole’s work was semi-autobiographical. This is simply too silly to argue about.) Charles Schulz, though, was a different matter. Charlie Brown had, after all, the same first name as his creator; his father, like Schulz’s, was a barber. Schulz even admitted that Charlie Brown’s unrequited affection for the little red-haired girl had its basis in Schulz’s own romantic rejection at the hands of a red-headed woman named Donna Mae Johnson.

Commentators eager to establish Schulz’s high-art credentials have been quick to pick up on these hints. In his Afterword to the first volume of the Complete Peanuts, for example, David Michaelis compares Schulz to Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and — oddly enough — Henry James. The heart of the essay, though, is the insistence that Peanuts was based on Schulz’s own “lifelong sense of alienation, insecurity, and inferiority.” In a recent Chicago Reader article, Ben Schwartz makes pretty much the same point. Both Schwartz and Michaelis dwell lovingly on the most painful aspects of Schulz’s biography — his troubles in school, his mother’s early death, his wartime service. Schulz is great, in other words, because he has suffered: because of who he is as much as because of what he did.

Schulz is credited, then, with using the comic strip to reveal his own tortured soul. In the fifties, when Peanuts started, the triumphant flourishing of psychic wounds was as common as Bildungsromans in literary fiction. On the funnies page, though, it was a novelty. No more; if it’s whining, insular self-reference you want, art comics are now the go-to genre. Cartoonists today routinely write entire strips devoted to the great suffering one experiences as a cartoonist. When Dan Clowes did a cover for the Comics Journal a while back, he filled it with ruminations on how hard it was to create a cover for the Comics Journal. In Maus, Art Spiegelman wrote about how hard it was to write Maus. Ivan Brunetti and Chris Ware have both written comics about the terrible, existential pain of writing comics. And both Brunetti and Ware have justified them with the same quote from none other than Charles Schulz: “Cartooning will destroy you. It will break your heart.”

As those words indicate, Schulz did have something of a chip on his shoulder about the low status of comics writers. He also felt that writing the strip year after year, and coming up with ideas day after day, made cartooning “very demanding.” For the most part, though, he kept his problems in perspective. “Every profession and every type of work has its difficulties,” he noted, and added, “I don’t want anyone to think that what I do is that much work..” Whatever his frustrations, therefore, the strip never descended to bathetic self-dramatization. Charlie Brown whined about sports, or camp, or his dog, or the little red-haired girl. But he never whined about the spiritual trauma of being a rich and famous cartoonist.

And why should he? Charlie Brown was never a stand-in for Charles Schulz. Indeed, in A Golden Celebration, Schulz argues that Charlie Brown is the least realistic of the Peanuts cast. “He’s certainly the only character who’s all one thing,” Schulz points out. “He’s a caricature.” Obviously, Charlie Brown’s hyperbolic suffering is an aspect of Schulz’s psyche. But so are Schroeder’s virtuosity, and Sally’s indignation, and Linus’ spirituality, and Snoopy’s preposterously fertile imagination. So is Lucy, who comes, Schulz says, “from that part of me that’s capable of saying mean and sarcastic things….” Sure, Schulz is the kid who always misses the football. But he’s also the kid who always pulls it away.

So, yes, Charlie Brown was important to Peanuts. But he didn’t define the strip and he didn’t define Schulz. This can be a painful realization for those who value earnestness in their art. Critic Christopher Caldwell, for example, wrote an essay for the New York Press in which he took a bold stand against Snoopy’s happy dance and complained that in its later years Peanuts had moved from “heartbreaking” to “sentimentalism.” It’s an interesting thesis, but one that ignores an important point: Schulz always mixed a fair bit of sweet with his bitter. One Sunday strip in the 60s, for example, showed us a crabby Lucy wandering around the house and bitching. “Count your blessings,” Linus advises, which only prompts another tirade. “What do I have to be thankful for?” she demands. “Well for one thing,” Linus replies, “You have a little brother who loves you….” Lucy pauses for a panel…and then clutches Linus and breaks into tears. “Every now and then I say the right thing,” Linus muses as he hugs her back.

I doubt Caldwell or his ilk would like that strip very much I doubt they’d like the series in the 90s where Charlie Brown gets a girlfriend either. Or the utterly bizarre Sunday comic where the punchline is Snoopy looking at a golf ball in a water trap and thinking, “That doesn’t look like Moses.” Or the one which consists entirely of Sally discussing how her eye patch will cure her amblyopia (there is no discernable punchline.). Or the one where Charlie Brown explains to a deeply grateful Linus that the cure for disillusionment is a chocolate cream and a friendly pat on the back. These strips aren’t grim; they aren’t existential. Presumably, they aren’t true to Peanuts tragic essence. But the essence of the strip was never Schulz’s sadness. It was his professionalism, his inventiveness, and, above all, his sense of humor. After all, any idiot can tell you that life sucks. When they do, though, I wish they wouldn’t pretend they got the insight from poor ol’ Charlie Brown.

In The Shadow of No Talent

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This originally ran in The Comics Journal a ways back. I reprinted it at my old group blog Eaten By Ducks, but I thought it’d be nice to have it here in case I had a reader or two who hadn’t seen it.

For me, as for millions of Americans, September 11, 2001 was no big deal. Nobody I knew was hurt, and the security restrictions caused me, at most minor inconvenience. There was a great deal of earnest discussion with acquaintances, much of it designed to demonstrate our supposed closeness to the attacks — this relative of a friend saw people jumping from the Trade Center, that friend of a relative worked in the Pentagon, and so on and so forth. All in all, the general mood seemed to be a not unpleasant compound of earnest sympathy and barely sublimated ghoulishness, as if the whole nation had slowed down on the highway to witness a particularly violent car crash.

Now, three years later, with the Presidential election looming, we’re all getting the chance to wallow in those emotions yet again. Pundits and politicians are falling over each other to remind us what it was like, really, on that day when America’s constantly regenerating hymen burst for, like, the twentieth time. Yes, there have been many more deadly disasters than the 9/11 attacks: for instance, the Iranian earthquakes last December (remember the Iranian earthquake last December?) But September 11 is nonetheless the most tragic tragedy of our times because it was more traumatic than any other…or maybe because it was more symbolic than any other…or maybe because it was on TV more than any other….or maybe because it was intentionally directed at wealthy white people…or maybe just because it was, dammit; what are you, some kind of Islamic extremist/commie?

The latest cultural artifact to go rummaging for meaning and runaway sales amidst the charred bones of the World Trade Center is cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s “In the Shadow of No Towers.” Spiegelman knows first-hand about the profitability of tragedy — his most famous book, Maus, was based on his father’s experiences in the Holocaust, and was an unexpected and enormous commercial success. That was twenty years ago, however. In the intervening time, Spiegelman has edited some anthologies, written a mediocre children’s book, drawn some New Yorker covers, and generally rested on his reputation as the man who made art comics a (potentially) mass market genre. “In the Shadow of No Towers,” then, is the man’s triumphant return both to the full length comic-book form and to the sustained interpretation of world-historical calamity. Released on September 7, it is well-poised to piggy-back on the inevitable hype surrounding the anniversary and the election. The publishers clearly hope that, like Maus, this will be not just a comic, but a media event — the high art doppelganger of Fahrenheit 9/11.

“In the Shadow of No Towers” has at least one built-in advantage over Michael Moore’s film — where Moore is merely a Midwestern interloper, Spiegelman lives blocks away from Ground Zero; he saw the second tower fall. If anyone could muster some sincere emotion about the events of September 11, therefore, you’d think it would be him. Certainly, “In the Shadow of No Towers” goes out of its way to suggest that its author has insights denied to the rest of us. Spiegelman seems to view himself as an Old Testament prophet, ignored and belittled as he bellows about the apocalypse. “Don’t they know the world is ending?” he asks in one comic; in another he laments that, “I insist the sky is falling, they roll their eyes and tell me it’s only my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” In his introduction he marvels that when he went to a small town in Indiana, the people there were “at least as worked up over a frat house’s zoning violations as with threats from raghead terrorists.’” (Good thing Spiegelman hasn’t gone to the Sudan — I bet he would have found the indifference there to New York’s plight even more provoking.)

Yet, for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, Spiegelman’s take on 9/11 is oddly uninvolving. Not that he hasn’t tried for catharsis. On the contrary, “In the Shadow of No Towers” is so eager in its pursuit of the aesthetic coup de grace that it becomes monotonous, like listening to a symphony composed entirely of crescendos. The format is itself a grand gesture: the comic is a series of ten broadsheet-sized pages reproduced on high quality cardboard, each packed with different drawing styles, strips running in different directions, panels dropped on top of other panels, stylistic changes, references to other comics, and heavy-handed allegory. The second page, for example, includes a series featuring Spiegelman chained to an American bald eagle, a picture of Spiegelman at his drawing board menaced by Osama Bin-Laden and an incredibly lame caricature of George Bush, a sequence about Spiegelman growing a beard and then shaving it off, a sequence about Spiegelman and his wife panicking in the first moments after the planes hit, and a final soliloquoy about the architectural limitations of the World Trade Center. Spiegelman (who claims that “issues of self-representation have left me slack-jawed”) represents himself variously as a cartoonish man, as a more realistic man, as one of the Katzenjammer kids from Rudolph Dirks’ vintage strip, and as a rodent. The last is apparently an effort to forcibly remind the reader of Spiegelman’s glory days — there’s no reason for it within the context of this project, but it’s how he drew himself throughout Maus

Convoluted, crowded designs can be used to convey turmoil, confusion, and despair, as they are, for example, in Hieronymous Bosch’s paintings. Spiegelman seems to be trying for a similar effect, without much success. In large part, his problem is simply that he doesn’t have the skills necessary to pull off his mighty effects. Virtually every aspect of the book is an aesthetic nonentity. Spiegelman’s thick pen lines, which were occasionally charming in Maus, deaden the grab-bag of styles he attempts here. His color palette swings back and forth from garish to drab almost at random. The layouts are cluttered, and rely, almost desperately, on over-obvious gimmickry to promote a sense of unity — on the final page, for example, the panels are organized into two columns; a lone airplane and some unconvincing flames in the background let us know that these are supposed to represent the towers of the World Trade Center. Worst of all, his borrowings from other cartoonists seem perversely bone-headed. In one sequence, for example, he references the Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, a strip by Gustave Verbeck which Spiegelman discusses in an afterward. Verbeck designed his comics so that, when you turned them over, each panel became a completely different picture. Spiegelman’s imitation, on the other hand, simply places two different images atop one another in each panel, the upper drawing oriented up, the bottom down. It’s a half-hearted effort, as if Spiegelman wants to get the credit for Verbeck’s deftness and ingenuity without putting in any of the work.

But even if Spiegelman were endowed with the combined visual imagination of Verbeck, Bosch, and Da Vinci , “In the Shadow of No Towers” would still be a failure. To write a good book — even a good comic-book — it’s important to have something to say. Spiegelman doesn’t. In Maus, Spiegelman managed to finesse this problem of content by cannibalizing his father’s experiences and storytelling flair. Here, though, Art’s on his own, and his struggles to fill up ten measly pages are frankly embarrassing. The central narrative, to the extent that there is one, involves Spiegelman’s reactions on the day itself. His daughter attended a school right next to the Trade Center, and Spiegelman and his wife rush to her. The three are reunited. End of episode.

This might form the subject of an amusing, low-key ‘zine by some happy-go-lucky slacker, but it hardly has the epic interpretive sweep we’ve come to expect from the great Art Spiegelman, an artist who claims portentously that “disaster is my muse.” Even Spiegelman seems to realize that, in this instance, the familial approach wasn’t quite working; according to the introduction, he scotched several more pages focusing on the tribulations of his daugter and son. Instead, Spiegelman resorts to padding. Huge panels are devoted to illustrating clichés (“waiting for the other shoe to drop” and “sticking your head in the sand.”) One entire broadsheet is devoted to his triumph in a battle of wits with a deranged homeless woman. Another half a page is devoted to his triumph in a battle of wits with a television interviewer. And then there are lots and lots of pictures of Spiegelman himself, bitching about the President, New York’s post 9/11air quality, and the fact that he draws so slowly that some Iraqis and G.I.’s will be killed before they can see his finished work — surely one of the most solipsisitic reasons for opposing the war on record. Spiegelman is also very upset by New York’s ban on smoking in bars.

Even with all these distractions, however, Spiegelman couldn’t quite grind out a book’s worth of material. Almost the second half of “In the Shadow of No Towers” is devoted to reprints of early full-page strips from the dawn of the medium. Spiegelman justifies this addition by explaining that, in the aftermath of the attacks, old comic-strips soothed his spirit. Poetry and music were too sublime and, he implies, hoity-toity to help him. Comics, on the other hand, were “vital, unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the 20th century.”

It’s nice to see the old comics, and Spiegelman’s historical essay discussing them is by far the most informative and entertaining prose in the book. Nonetheless, his effort to incorporate this work into his own project is misleading. Spiegelman asks us to believe that since comics weren’t intended to last, they’re a good metaphor for the transient nature of everything, including big, honking office buildings. But who’s to say that these old artists thought their work would disappear? Winsor McCay and George Herriman were certainly less pretentious than Art Spiegelman, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they believed their names would be utterly forgotten.

Even sillier is Spiegelman’s decision to pick old comics that, in his eyes, presciently comment on the events of 9/11. For instance, the Winsor McCay strip he reprints shows one character, grown to giant size, rampaging through New York, knocking buildings over like toy blocks. In one of Frederick Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan comics, an irate camel knocks its clueless rider into, as Spiegelman exclaims, “a tower of acrobats!” A “Bringing Up Father” strip deals with the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Spiegelman says that each strip seems “like a political cartoon that could have been drawn within the past year or so…” But, in fact, none of them do. Most of these strips have no political content whatsoever. Those that do are set firmly in their own time periods, as is a Hogan’s Alley strip commenting on a then-controversial boundary dispute between Britain and Venezuela. In fact, it is the strips irrelevance that has earned them their place in the book. Spiegelman says (unoriginally enough) that the World Trade Center towers were “icons of a more innocent age,” and that seems to be how he views these comics as well. Now, with our greater wisdom, we can go back and see how such simple images foreshadowed a world of dread and terror. But back then, they were simple folk, who knew not what they did.

This is nonsense. The early twentieth century was no more innocent than the early twenty-first; in fact, the period from 1890 to 1920 was in many respects a low point in the United States’ moral history. Race relations — characterized by Jim Crow, lynchings, and a resurgent Klu Klux Klan —were, arguably, worse than they were under slavery. Unsurprisingly given the climate of the time, the comics Spiegelman has selected are full of disgraceful caricatures — what Spiegelman refers to fondly as “the gleeful racism of the day.” Even if you were white, though, it wasn’t a great time to be alive in America. Woodrow Wilson, elected in 1914, used the threat and eventually the actuality of war to restrict civil liberties on a scale that would give John Ashcroft wet dreams — as just one example, Robert Goldstein served ten years in prison for making a movie about the Revolutionary War because he had portrayed our World War I allies, the British, in a bad light.

You’d never know it from Spiegelman’s book, but some of the most eloquent protests against the injustice of the time were made by cartoonists. Artists like Robert Minor, Boardman Robinson, and Art Young are largely forgotten today, perhaps in part because they were socialists. Yet, their work is as meaningful now as it ever was — and no half-baked reinterpretation is required. One of Minor’s drawings, for example, shows an enormously muscled man with no head. He towers silently over an army medical officer, who rubs his hands in glee and enthuses, “At last a perfect soldier!” The contrast with Spiegelman’s work couldn’t be more stark. Minor’s picture is bare, almost frozen — the background is hardly sketched, so that all the viewer’s attention is focused on the recruit’s masterfully shaded torso, awaiting the order for violence. Equally arresting is a picture by Art Young of the Idiot Giant War, in which a blind, obese monster with a pronounced overbite muches casually on a bowl of human beings as if they were popcorn.

That cartoon can be found in Art Young’s Inferno, a brilliant description of some of the latest developments in Hell, circa 1934. The book is witty, wise, and chock full of illustrations which suggest Dr. Seuss in a really, really foul mood. Needless to say, it’s also long out of print. You’d think the comics intelligentsia might want to remember inspirational cartoonists like these, many of whom actually faced federal prosecution because of their work. But perhaps Spiegelman’s afraid that he’d look bad — after all, no one’s threatened to put him in jail, though I guess the New Yorker didn’t want to print some of these pages — awww.. No, it’s safer overall to pretend that our real troubles began on September 11, and cavort in safe, lucrative nostalgia. After all, weren’t things ever so much better when Clinton was in office and we were slowly starving the Iraqis rather than just shooting them outright? Weren’t we all happier when we were paying Osama to kill Russians? Wasn’t the world better off when the U.S. was run by competent imperialists like Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan, rather than by the bumbling imperialists we have now? Feh. Or, as Art Young put it seventy years ago, “There are two major political parties in the section called the United States of Hell. Accurately defined, they are rival groups of office seekers and are voted for with the same kind of concern with which Hellions follow the races. As for logic, the difference between them is the difference between Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber, and both are loathsome and corrupt.”

Update:For those interested in more about Art Young, here’s an essay I wrote about him; here’s a sprinkling of images, and here’s the motherload.

Update 2: I just realized that it’s the anniversary of 9/11. That was totally unintentional on my part. Duh.

Transporter, More than Meets the Eye….

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I saw “The Transporter” recently, an action-adventure kung fu, things-blow up kind of movie — one of the best examples of the genre I’ve seen actually. The direction by Hong Kong cinema’s Corey Yuen is very slick and the plotting quick and smart; it effortlessly achieves the kind of seamless Eurosophistication which James Bond movies try for and achieve only very rarely. The fight scenes had an almost Jackie Chan level of inventiveness — my favorite was a fight in oil ooze, with everybody slipping and sliding around; our hero, Frank (a very hot Jason Statham) achieves victory by breaking the foot holds off a bicycle and donning them so he can stand while nobody else can. There was also a great scene where the protagonist doffs his shirt in order to wrap his enemies up in it: perhaps the best excuse for getting bare abs on screen I’ve witnessed. In fact, one of the most entertaining parts of the movie is Statham’s demeanor during the fight sequences; he’s always looking around carefully before he bursts into action, so you can almost see the wheels turning in his head as he tries to figure out how he’s going to take out *these* fifteen guys. It makes him seem both dangerous and vulnerable — and really lets you see how much you lose when you saddle your lead with a mask throughout most of the film (on which more in a moment.)

Transporter is also to be lauded for its resolute refusal to cater to action narrative cliches. Despite a couple of feints (a box of photographs, dark references to the past) the film never saddles Frank with a Tragic Backstory; there’s no wife whose express purpose is to be killed to provide our hero with motivation, no unreconciled father figure to add a stupid and easy poignancy. This seems to be the main reason the movie was critically panned — most reviewers whined about the lack of story. I, on the contrary, was almost absurdly grateful. Among other things, the decision to avoid bathetic self-righteous vengeance gave the movie a chance to actually give Frank something akin to characterization — he’s businesslike, fussy bachelor, adverse to mess in a neurotic and endearing way. Not an unfamiliar type, but well-played, and fun to see layered on top of the super-competent martial arts hero schtick.

I also quite liked the female lead, Lai Kei (Shu Qui.) She’s neither a fetishized action heroine nor a wet mop; she doesn’t know karate, but instead gets by on gumption, smarts, computer skills, and the occasional outright falsehood. She totally plays Frank, but retains our sympathy, and certainly isn’t punished for it (as she would be in a James Bond movie). Often in action movies you’re left wondering why (beyond the obvious physical appeal) the two leads would want anything to do with each other, but here the characters are both charismatic and charming; you can totally see why they’d be attracted to each other. And yes, Lai does have an unreconciled father; but the movie is content to just treat him as a big jerk, rather than as, for example, a sexual abuser.

The dialogue is also suprisingly snappy and clever; a discussion of Proust’s qualifications to be a police inspector had me laughing out loud, and the first sex scene between the protagonists (in which Frank seems positively exasperated) is both romantic and extremely funny. The whole movie is just a gem; a criminally underrated classic.

In contrast — I also saw Batman Begins recently, or as much of it as I could stomach. Ugly, whiny, dumb, with some quite decent actors wasted on a wretched script, the whole thing blighted by Liam Neeson’s tiresome and remorseless self-regard. Also, as my wife pointed out, putting ninjas in Tibet is clueless enough to actually border on racism — “Well, gee, it’s all Asia isn’t it? Hyuk hyuk!” The self-actualizing mumbo-jumbo (overcome your fear by dressing as a bat! That makes sense!) is really just embarrassing for everyone. There was a decent movie in there struggling to breathe free (featuring, perhaps, a lot more screentime for the very creepy Scarecrow) but it got buried under stupid New Age philosophy, the exigencies of a monumentally idiotic plot (Asian justice cult dedicated to the mercy killings of civilizations — I mean come on. What ever happened to good old-fashioned world domination? Isn’t that a good enough motivation anymore?), and the inevitable Tragic Backstory. It really makes you appreciate Heath Ledger even more; that he could turn Dark Knight into a decent movie rather than a repetition of this fiasco is an impressive testament to his talent.

Women in Cages and Terminal Island

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Of the women-in-prison films I’ve seen, I think Women in Cages is, at least on the surface, the least feminist. The main characters are all motivated and manipulated pretty much throughout by men, and the sisterhood which comes at the climax of most of these movies is here thoroughly undercut by paranoia and backstabbing. The main character (Jefferies, I think is her name) is rail-roaded into prison for a crime her boyfriend committed (and she’s completely innocent, not to mention naive, unlike the protagonist in Caged Heat.) And she doesn’t free herself; instead, she has to be rescued by the good guy.

On the other hand, Terminal Island is easily the most feminist film in the genre. Directed by Stephanie Rothman, one of the few female exploitation directors, its set in a near future, when California ships its murderers to an island to save on prison costs. The criminal community thus established is violently hierarchical, with a white man at the top, a black stooge to enforce discipline, and women as slaves/prostitutes who get systematically raped on a schedule. A group of rebels (led by a couple of black men) offer a more communal social model; they free the women, and together overthrow the overlord and establish an egalitarian, back-to-nature society in which all men and women are equal. End of parable.

In fact, both of these movies are quite good in their ways. “Terminal Island” has remarkably steady acting for the genre; Rothman seems to get the best out of everyone. Bobby, the evil white dictator, is a fun part, and the actor conveys his essential looniness and instability without going totally overboard and chewing the scenery. The second in command is good too; you can see him asking himself over and over why he’s listening to this nutcase, without ever quite having the courage or brains to dump him. The women are good too; a political radical shows everyone how to make bombs, but doesn’t ever resort to the kind of speechifying you expect from that stereotypical character; the new arrival to the island (a black woman) is very believably attracted to two of the rebels, and their rivalry over her is handled mostly off-screen, and without too much fuss. All in all, it’s remarkably thoughtful and deftly handled. The version I saw (the only one extant on DVD, I think) had profanity and nudity removed, but even so, you can tell that this movie’s heart wasn’t in the exploitation bits; it’s a remarkably restrained effort.

“Women in Cages” is, on the other hand, deeply seedy, with Pam Grier as Alabama, an over-the-top lesbian matron who enjoys whipping and torturing prisoners. But though it’s not exactly what you’d call subtle, it isn’t exactly dumb either. The chip on Alabama’s shoulders, it turns out, has to do with her miserable life in segregated America (the movie’s set in the Phillippines). Her relationship with one inmate, Theresa, is abusive but not loveless; certainly, we sympathize with the resourceful and caring, if doomed, Theresa as much as with anyone in the movie.

One thing I’ve been thinking about with these movies is whether, or why, a movie gets perceived as feminist. Several reviewers have called Terminal Island feminist (most notably Robin Wood), for reasons I’ve indicated, and I very much doubt anyone’s said that about Women in Cages (for reasons I’ve also pointed out.) But I’m not really sure that the first is actually any more radical than the second. Yes, Terminal Island shows a much more positive outcome, and pushes equality hard. But it seems to me that there’s more to feminism than just utopianism. The part of feminist critiques that I’ve found most engaging and inspirational myself tend to be the *critiques* — the stuff about how power works and how society is organized. Terminal Island is able to posit a utopia because it reduces that stuff to schematics; the society is pretty basic, and the big difference between the bad guys and the good guys is basically just that the good guys are decent people, while the bad guys are lunatic nutters.

In *Women in Cages*, on the other hand, women are oppressed and manipulated in ways that are more complex and more difficult to overcome. Roberta Collins (an actor who shows up in *all* these movies, it seems like! Every time you go into a cell in the Phillipines, there’s Roberta Collins! Where was I? Oh yeah….) Roberta Collins’ character spends the entire movie trying to kill Jeffries because she’s been promised a fix and a release if she prevents her from testifying against her drug-lord boyfriend; all Collins gets for her considerable trouble is betrayal and misery. Juanita Brown (who’s also in all these things) tries to help Jeffries — but, again, only out of self-interest, since *she’s* been promised she’ll be released if Jeffries does testify. As for Jeffries herself, her best moment in the movie comes at the end; she’s broken out of prison, only to be led by Collins’ character to a floating brothel, where Jeffries’ ex-boyfriend forces her to whore herself. But…the cavalry arrives! The good-guy law enforcer shows up disguised as a sailor, and closets himself with her under the pretext of being a customer. He says earnestly, “Remember me?” to which she replies (more or less), “Oh, yeah, baby, we had a great time. We’ll do it again right now.” It’s a chilling line, since it shows that she’s not only being repeatedly raped, but is forced to pretend to like it, and even connive in it (something which never happens in Terminal Island, where everyone, men and women, know that the rape is rape). The good-guy does manage to remind her who he really is, and that he’s there to rescue her — at which point she, understandably, starts to weep, partially in relief, partially, perhaps, in humiliation. The movie then quickly veers off at a tangent, as good-guy reveals himself to be a super-martial-arts expert and kicks the bad guys’ ass. Throughout this sequence, Jeffries looks on more-or-less nonplussed, as if something’s gone bizarrely wrong, and she’s wandered into the wrong movie. She does manage to escape, and all is well — but the last frame of the movie isn’t of her, but of Roberta Collins’ character, who is still on the ship and, indeed, still being raped. Even the wish-fulfillment good guy doesn’t really care about women, it seems; he just wants to catch the drug-lord; the plight of the women on the ship isn’t really his concern.

That’s certainly a bleak and not-particularly-uplifting message. But I don’t know that it’s less insightful, or less feminist, than Terminal Island. In fact, the movies seem to work well together, one showing a feminist ideal, and one reminding you why getting there is a long, depressing slog.

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I found an interesting interview with Rothman. I definitely want to see more of her films — though Netflix doesn’t have the Student Nurses, goddarnit….

Mondo Keyhole

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Well, I finally found a bad Jack Hill movie. Mondo Keyhole, codirected with John Lamb in 1966, is dreadful enough that I barely managed to sit through the whole thing. It’s about an exec at a porn company who, in his spare time, rapes lots of women in slow motion. Occasionally he refuses to have sex with his wife, also very, very slowly. And every so often a skull appears and waves back and forth while a disembodied voice natters on pompously about reality and fantasy and dark human drives. Then at the end there’s an orgy with a guy in a dracula mask talking about hell in a bad transyvania accent, and we learn that the punishment for rape is S&M play with two bosomy and scantily clad women. I think it was the moralizing/intellectualizing that really got me — most of Hill’s movies are unabashed about their lurid exploitation elements, and so are able to just happily and unapologetically heap other good stuff (interesting characters, snappy dialogue, whatever) on top of the sex and violence — pretty much the best of all worlds as far as I’m concerned. Mondo Keyhole, though, seems trapped in its own oleaginous moralizing and winking, tongue-in-cheek self expiation. It’s so busy congratulating itself for arting up its thoroughly sleazy violence and sex that it forgets to give us a plot. Or characters. Or entertainment.

Ah, well, so it goes. Even when your as good as Jack Hill, they can’t all be gems, I guess.

Manly Men, Girly Girls

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Pit Stop is probably Jack Hill’s most serious film; in interviews and commentary he often refers to it as his “art film.” It is a racing movie, and has a lot of racing footage (especially of figure 8 races, which Hill thought of as a particularly insane piece of Americana.) But other than that, it’s not very exploitive at all — there’s not a whole lot of gratuitous sex or nudity, for example, and the violence is also pretty minimal. It’s sober and dark, and it seems to be Hill’s favorites of his own work.

It’s not necessarily mine. Hill wanted the film to be about a driver who wins the big race, but loses his soul. The problem is that the driver in question, Rick, never seems to have had much of a soul to begin with. Right from the beginning of the movie, he’s a prickly, emotionally inaccessible ass, driven by ambition and ego. He does become marginally more remote as the movie goes on, but there’s never a moment where we see him being, say, generous, or loving, or funny (the closest is after a race when he gets drunk and tries to convince his love interest to sleep with him.) So the movie doesn’t end up being about a moral choice or a moral failure — it just ends up being about this guy who’s a dick. And since he’s never really likable, I, at least, was never was that invested in him, or in the picture.

Which isn’t to dismiss the movie altogether. As I said, it’s very well made — outside of Spider-Baby, it probably has the best ensemble acting of any of Hill’s movies I’ve seen. The actor who plays Rick mostly stands around looking soulful and repressed, but he does a good job of that; Beverly Washburn as a pixieish hippie chick named Jolene is believably vulnerable and sexy. Sid Haig as a rival racer named Hawk is (as usual) spectacular — he starts out completely over-the-top, happy-go-lucky and nuts, but over the course of the movie we get to see that this overlay is mostly schtick, and that underneath it is an insecure but intelligent man, who badly wants to win but isn’t always sure about the price.

The movie’s also interesting in that it is the only Hill movie I’ve seen so far which is definitively a male genre picture. A car chase movie is largely meant for guys, and — as is the case with male genres — Rick’s most intense relationships in the movie are with his men: first, an intense rivalry with Hawk, then a rivalry with an older, more experienced racer named Ed, and finally, and foremost, with an untrustworthy father-figure promoter played with dry, business-like malice by Brian Donleavy. As the movie progresses, in fact, it becomes clear that Rick’s damnation is specifically linked to his inability to form attachments with women; with an emotional sterility sprining from his intense focus on men. Rick first appears to become interested in Jolene because she is hanging around with Hawk, and seems to be her girl; later he sleeps with Ed’s frustrated wife. Rick at one point accuses Jolene of only wanting him because he’s a winner, but in fact it seems to be Rick who wants a winner — or, more accurately, Rick wants women who are attached to his current rival/crush-object. At the end of the movie, Rick wins the big race by forcing Ed to crash — inadvertently killing him. In the final scene in the hospital, Rick emotionally detaches himself from both Jolene and Ed’s wife, refusing to comfort either. Instead, he leaves with father-figure Donleavy to prepare for the next race, choosing the fraught, repressed world of masculine bonding over a more straight-forwardly loving relationship. In other words, Hill has made a picture in which the conventions of the male genre are themselves the tragedy.

In contrast, one of Hill’s least acclaimed efforts — The Swinging Cheerleaders — may be my absolute favorite of his movies. Cheerleaders seems like it, too, should be a guy movie; an Animal House, frat house romp, with lots of T&A and fart jokes. In fact, though, though there is a certain amount of T&A, this is really a chick flick. The main character is a college feminist named Katewho goes undercover as a cheerleader to write a stinging exposé of the exploitation the pom-pom girls experience. Instead, she falls for Buck, the star quarterback — and, perhaps more importantly, for the cheerleaders themselves, with whom she quickly becomes close friends. The story, in any case, focuses much more on the girls than the guys, and there’s very little pure male bonding. The two main football players are total sweethearts; the quarterback explicitly turns down a chance to participate in a gang bang, and the receiver is head-over-heels (and no wonder) for the absolutely glowing Rainbeaux Smith…so much so that he waits for a good long time before pressuring her for sex. (Admittedly, avoiding gang-bangs and waiting a short while for sex is a pretty low bar — but for a picture like this (and, alas, often outside of fiction as well) that’s like practically branding the letters SNAG into your forehead.)

In his book At a Theater or A Drive in Near You, Randall Clark claims that Swinging Cheerleaders is a conservative film, and that opinion seems echoed in various other places I’ve looked. I don’t buy it, though. Yes, it’s true that the campus radical is a bad guy. But he’s a bad guy mostly because he’s a sexist, who’s jealous of Kate’s career and of her other friends. To point out that the counterculture was sexist isn’t conservative. It’s not liberal either. It’s just true, and has been discussed by lots of feminists, from Andrea Dworkin on down. Moreover, this equation (bad guys = sexist) is true throughout the film; the good guys (like the football players) treat the women with respect and love; the bad guys (like the alumni association president who hits his daughter, or the lascivious coach) don’t. And the morally ambiguous treat women…somewhere in the middle. The math professor who helps rig the football games but eventually sees the light, for example, is having an affair with his student — one of the cheerleaders. He does seem to care for her, but the age gap is kind of icky, and, of course, he’s cheating on his wife. The wife herself gets to tell her side of the story, in an amazing scene which seems to have strolled in from one of Hill’s blaxploitation features. The cheerleader eventually breaks up with the professor, partly it seems, because she got the wife’s point, and partly because she realizes he’s kind of creepy — a decision and a characterization that he rather ruefully accepts.

I think people also tend to see the movie as conservative because Kate doesn’t follow through on her cheerleader expose, and she even eventually strongly condemns her own project. But, again, she basically condemns it because she starts to perceive it as anti-feminist; it’s not very sisterly to write an article in which you condemn your friends as brainless victims of false-consciousness. Again, this isn’t exactly an unfeminist insight; third-wave feminism is ready to defend sex-workers these days on similar grounds, much less cheerleaders. And it isn’t like Kate abandons her writing or her feminism; on the contrary, towards the end of the movie we see her getting ready to write an expose about the gambling ring. Nor is her relationship with Buck subservient in any way; in fact, when he’s in trouble, he calls her for help, and, at the climax, she organizes the posse which rescues him.

One of the movie’s most striking scenes, and one which I think may also be misinterpreted, involves Rainbeaux Smith’s character and the campus radical. Smith has been having trouble losing her virginity with her football boyfriend — she just can’t quite go through with it. Kate helpfully suggests that she should just fuck some random guy to take the pressure off — guys, Kate points out, use girls like that all the time. So Smith decides to screw the first guy who offers, and that turns out to be the campus radical. So they do the deed and afterwards Smith declares that she wants to try everything (“let’s do something you’ve never done before” I think she says). The radical looks a bit harried as Smith bounces around the couch. But he gamely gets the phone, calls a friend, and asks said friend to call together a bunch of guys to “gang bang a cheerleader.” Smith looks on with winsome, slightly nervous eagerness…and in the next scene we see her being carried into her apartment by her football boyfriend, bruised and apparently completely out of it. Her boyfriend, to defend her honor, goes and beats up the campus radical. End of parable.

So what’s happened here? When I first saw it, I thought Smith had been gang-raped, and that the movie was treating it with shocking casualness — Kate and the other cheerleaders eagerly quiz her about her experience in a girly “you have to tell us!” which seems entirely inappropriate. But viewing it a second time, and hearing Hill’s commentary, I don’t think that’s what happened at all. Smith isn’t tied down when the radical calls his buddies; she hears what he says, and she’s not restrained. When her friends quiz her later, she tells them, “I don’t think I can possibly talk about it,” but her tone is both shy and over-dramatic, and a minute later she seems about to tell all. I don’t think there’s any way to read it except that she was into the gang bang, agreed to the gang bang, enjoyed the gang bang, and then just kind of let her boyfriend think she didn’t.

On the one hand, this could be seen as really problematic — the whole, “she really wanted to be raped” thing. But usually in that narrative the girl pretends she was raped to get back at the guy, or to get the guy; its vengeance or spite or whatever. Here, though, Smith’s character doesn’t care about the guy at all; she’s just using him for sexual experience, basically, and as a good story to tell her friends. She’s acting the way guys do, and moreover, she’s getting away with it — she gets to be the bad girl while keeping both her reputation and the (good) guy. And even the radical doesn’t come off too badly; he just gets knocked around a little, and then he’s back spreading mischief, with, presumably, some happy memories to offset the cuts and bruises.

Cheerleaders is about female bonding just as Pit Stop is about male bonding. The difference, though is that in Cheerleaders, female bonding makes the women stronger — by supporting each other, they’re more able to enter into good relationships with men, while, in Pit Stop, the bonding between men makes loving women impossible. Part of the trouble for men is, it seems to me, homosexual panic — the specter of gayness turns love between men into violence and emotional frigidity. There are lesbian overtones in Cheerleaders of course — one scene in which Kate and another cheerleader encourage a topless and enormously breasted Rainbeaux Smith (who was pregnant at the time) to go braless for her upcoming date certainly seems suggestive, at least. But lesbianism just isn’t as threatening, for a whole host of reasons — sisterhood, even when it borders on the physical, simply doesn’t call into question ones femininity the way male bonding does. Though even male bonding isn’t always a disaster — in fact, the two star football players in Cheerleaders actually seem to like and support each other without a whole lot of fuss. Maybe men can love each other as long as they’re participating in team sports? In any case, Cheerleaders really does seem like one of the more hopeful, happier takes on gender relations I’ve seen on the screen