News
Next week we’ve got an exciting blog crossover event happening…and at the end of October, beginning of November we’ve got not one but two roundtables. So keep your internet pointed here, true believers!
On HU
This weeks’ Featured Archive post discusses the Amish battle against the superheroes.
We started the week out with Erica Friedman on Yamazaki Mari’s cross-cultural public bath manga Thermae Romae.
I talked about men, feminism, Die Hard and Y: The Last Man.
I discussed my mild disappointment with Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon’s Metamorpho.
I have a brief piece on Perotin, Juliana Barwick, and solipsistic oneness.
Sean Michael Robinson talks about the fallout of becoming an internet meme.
Ian Scott explains why Dave Sim’s Judenhass is a mess.
A free pop crap download mix for your listening pleasure.
And Nadim Damluji provides a survey of contemporary Arab comics.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Splice Today I review Steven Glain’s State vs. Defense and wonder why American’s are such craven cowards.
I review the botched genre product of Colombiana.
And I discuss Amen Dunes’ latest album Through Donkey Jaws, and discuss the deadend pop avant garde legacy of the Beatles.
Other Links
Forbidden Planet on the HU best comics poll.
Alyssa Rosenberg on superheroes and marriage.
Heidi needs to switch to Green Lantern websites.
Michael Fiffe talks about indie creators and superhero work at the Factual Opinion.
The Atlantic looks at the legacy of Thelma and Louise.
At Comixology, Tucker Stone talks about the DC relaunch.
Hi, Noah; was looking forward to reading “Americans are such craven cowards,” but the link is kaput…
Aw crap. Sorry Mike. It’s fixed now.
We’re like a big fat cat with hairballs and a lot of shit dingles stuck to our butt, torturing a mouse before we kill it. e seem to be having fun and on some level we do enjoy the mouse’s suffering but in fact all of that batting and throwing the tiny cute little mousey around is about our fear—while we throw our weight about, we might get hurt ourselves, we must avoid the mouse’s sharp little teeth.
I meant, that’s why we’re such cowards.
Yeah…it’s hard to say what the deal is exactly. It’s hard not to think we’re just decadent from all the luxury — though of course plenty of people in the US don’t live in luxury.
I wish we’d stop it though. It’s depressing and embarrassing, not to mention evil.
That was a horrible look back at Thelma and Louise. I found it almost as thrilling as reading the 100,001 article on Maus. Generic hagiography, cookie cutter hand-wringing, and quite lacking in any new insights. I wonder if this says more about the movie than the writer.
Yeah; I sort of put it up there because I think the article sucks for perhaps some interesting reasons.
I think the writer is bad, but I think the movie definitely has serious problems as well. It’s kind of working off older exploitation rape-revenge films, but it’s just infinitely less brave and insightful than something like Ms. 45 or I Spit on Your Grave. It’s afraid to just hate men, for one thing…and it’s unwilling to let it’s female protagonists win, either by going out in a blaze of glory or by actually being the last ones standing at the end.
Actually…you know, Ridley Scott’s Alien is a much more interesting/disturbing/uncompromising feminist statement in a lot of ways….
So you think that Scott’s Alien is better than Cameron’s Aliens as a “feminist statement”. Contrary to your stated problems with Thelma and Louise, I think Alien works better in that light because it is more subtle. Aliens seems like wish fulfillment, and is thus more easily dismissed.
Anyway, I think Vanity Fair beats all these “male” created (or semi-created) feminist statements flat. Quite unintentionally as well.
You mean Vanity Fair the book? Vanity Fair the book is pretty great, but it’s not really exploitive in the same way I don’t think…unless you see Becky Sharpe as a kind of feminist exploitation statement…which doesn’t work badly. I still like I Spit on Your Grave more, though, I think.
I like both Alien and Aliens. Alien sort of openly mocks male machismo, though…and it definitely plays on male fears of being feminized and raped. It may be too much to call it a feminist statement, but it’s definitely interested in castrating men.
I haven’t seen Aliens in a longer time…I should watch it again. Certainly rather do that than watch Thelma and Louise again….
It’s funny (actually, not) that Cameron’s Aliens and Terminator films had strong, motivated female characters, then he reversed positions and made the odious True Lies which had Jamie Lee Curtis screaming like a stuck pig throughout the entire film, pathetic, useless and unwatchable.
I actually tried to watch True Lies recently and failed. “Unwatchable” is right.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Aw crap. Sorry Mike. [The link to “Americans are such craven cowards” is] fixed now.
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Thanks! Though — talk about wanting instant gratification! — I went ahead and Google’d the article up yesterday, read, enjoyed, but had to leave for work before commenting.
Pretty much agree with its observations, though I’d quibble that up until 9/11, we’d be more likely to “spend our lives in desperate fear for our measly, worthless property“; afraid all those unwashed masses Out There would be wanting some of our Stuff.
The attitude as that expressed in those Ditko Objectivist cartoons: the heroic, independent striver and achiever bedeviled by those grasping, greedy, lazy hordes: “It’s not fair he should have so much! We deserve to get some!”
(Or, rendered in a more abstract fashion: http://images.tcj.com/2011/04/DitkoAbsorb.jpg )
About America’s cowardice — and hence, willingness to accept anything, no matter how evil, that is marketed as Making Us Safe — plenty of “credit” goes to Christianity, which depicts the few Chosen as surrounded by and beleaguered by Evil; Fox News and other right-wing propagandists, and he rest of the corporate “liberal” media, which respectively create, then propagate fearmongering lies. Thus leading to idiocies like seniors being more afraid of Obama’s fictional “death panels” than the lack of health insurance, which actually kills tens of thousands of Americans each year.
But, couldn’t express the disgust better than Tim Kreider, in the statements accompanying his archived cartoons at http://www.thepaincomics.com/ :
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July 13, 2005 – “Fear Tower”
They unveiled a new design for the Freedom Tower last week, this one redesigned with concessions to security concerns. If anything, it is even less inspiring than the original lopsided postmodern mediocrity proposed. And it really does have a fortress-like Brutalist concrete base. (I find it embarrassing even to write the words “Freedom Tower.” Who named this building–a ten-year-old? George Bush and his cohort have so utterly debased the world “freedom,” as to render it worse than meaningless; as with the American flag, they’ve pissed on it to mark it as their turf, and turned it into the exclusive property of jingoistic, warmongering shitheads. Whenever I hear them use the word “freedom” now, I mentally substitute the word “oil,” and suddenly the sentence is translated into perfect sense: “Oil is on the march,” “The terrorists hate our oil,” “Our heroic troops have paid the ultimate price for oil,” “Oil isn’t free,” etc.) As an aficionado of extremely tall buildings (Empire State Building: always #1 in my heart!), I have nothing but contempt for a pretender that’s a stubby seventy stories but tries to steal the mantle of Tallest Building on Earth with a hollow, uninhabited superstructure and a spire. Like, fuck you, Freedom Tower! It’s a building that is, in effect, cringing. Like the Bush administration, it is both arrogant and craven, with its head hunched down between its shoulders but waving a flag at the top of a very long pole…
The Fear Tower seems to me, I’m sorry to say, to be the perfect symbol for what America has become in the last four years: the most cowardly nation on Earth. I was truly impressed by the way Londonders have behaved in the wake of the last round of terrorist attacks; they just got back on the buses and subways and went back to work the next day. They did not shut down the city for weeks or close their borders or round up a bunch of Arabs at random and indefinitely “detain” them without charges. New Yorkers were just as brave and defiant after 9/11; it was the rest of the country, the mean-drunk soccer moms and blubbering NASCAR dads back in suburbia, who saw it all happen on T.V. and crapped their pants with fear, imagining the barbarian hordes storming their gated communities, and begged their big powerful daddy in Washington to please take away our civil liberties and clamored for us to go to war against somebody, anybody. So more Homeland Security funding per capita goes to the trembling yokels of Wyoming, of which no terrorist has ever heard, than to the residents of New York City…
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February 1, 2006 – “‘Murica”
…I learned that a slim majority of American polled supports the government’s illegal wiretapping program so long as they’re eavesdropping on Americans they consider “suspicious.” I cannot begin to express my contempt for anyone willing to give up any of their civil liberties in exchange for some illusory security. If they could give up theirs without me also having to give up mine, I’d say fine, go right ahead, you frightened little babies. Unfortunately their craven acquiescence means I have to lose my birthright as an American citizen, too, so instead I must say, over my dead body, you filthy traitors. You may only ever use your constitutional rights during hunting season, but I use mine every week, and unlike you slaves I’m willing to fight to keep mine. Remember Patrick Henry? Give me liberty or give me death. He wasn’t fucking kidding. Nowadays it’s more like, “Oh, please take my liberty, take it, just please don’t let me die!” The fear of death (code word: security) has now become the central value in American society. Those cowards who are willing to give up their civil liberties–the freedoms for which our founding fathers pledges their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor–don’t deserve to call themselves Americans…
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James says:
It’s funny (actually, not) that Cameron’s Aliens and Terminator films had strong, motivated female characters, then he reversed positions and made the odious True Lies which had Jamie Lee Curtis screaming like a stuck pig throughout the entire film, pathetic, useless and unwatchable.
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Can’t help wondering if Cameron was using “True Lies” to work out “issues.” In the 1989 “The Abyss,” the hero was resisting his wife’s wish to divorce, even rescuing a wedding ring flung into a toilet. Cameron was wed to Gale Anne Hurd from 1985 to 1989; their marriage fizzling out as the movie was being made.
…And he was married to Kathryn Bigelow from 1989 to 1991; the 1994 “True Lies,” with its batch of noxious sexual-power fantasy sequences, made in the interval until his 1997 marriage to Linda Hamilton, which itself was quite the fiasco, as detailed at http://www.edivorcepapers.com/divorce-settlement/linda-hamilton-divorce-settlement.html .
With the notable exception of “True Lies,” though, Cameron’s women are frequently admirable, strong heroines. Just look at “Avatar”:
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Let’s start with Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine. Grace is the person who created the way to communicate with the Na’vi. She has dedicated her life to trying to gain the Na’vi’s trust and from what I can tell she is the one who created the technology for the Avatars.
Zoe Saldana—who we never see as a human—plays Neytiri the daughter of the leaders of the Na’vi. She is charged with showing the ropes to soldier, Jake Sully and is a kick ass warrior on her own. She is one of the few who has tamed a mangoose (did I get that right?) and is clearly a leader among her people.
Michelle Rodriguez plays a kick ass (I know I repeated that description but it is appropriate) helicopter pilot who questions authority and will not shoot and kill just because she is told. She sees the bigger picture and is willing to die for it.
And I can’t forget CCH Pounder as the queen Moat, Neytiri’s mother who becomes the leader after the death of her husband…
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http://blogs.indiewire.com/womenandhollywood/archives/the_women_of_avatar/
It’s pretty much completely opposed to Christianity’s core beliefs to worry about one’s own personal safety. Christ explicitly tells you not to resist evil, and obviously let himself be tortured to death.
Of course, many American Christians have also convinced themselves that torture is okay, which again seems about as unChristian an idea as you can hold…. (Though many Christians like Andrew Sullivan have also been strongly anti-torture, of course….)
I pretty much hate male-driven action films with wives and children involved in any way other than as possible targets. But wasn’t True Lies a critique of the stand-by-your-man, stay at home moms, suggesting that they should be more active agents, more equal, in their relationship? That was Curtis’ character arc the way I remember it.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith wasn’t bad.
I didn’t see all of True Lies so don’t know that I can really speak to the character arc. My main takeaway was that the film was obsessed with having Schwartzenegger voyeuristically control Curtis. It was just really unpleasant; it was clearly supposed to be funny, but instead it was creepy and icky.