Yearly Archives: 2012

The Most Popular Movie Column in the Entire World #1 – Nobody Likes Bollywood

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Six miles away from my office is a theater that plays Bollywood movies simultaneously with their Indian release. This is one of them.

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Student of the Year
Directed by Karan Johar, 2012

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WHAT CAN WE GUESS THE FILM IS ABOUT FROM THE UNSUBTITLED TRAILER?

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Through the intercession of those occasional bursts of English common to Hindi-language films, the monoglot can discern that St. Teresa’s High School is India’s premiere academic institution. Thus grounded, the ensuing barrage of flailing bodies and flashing lights reveals two suspiciously adult-looking male students who are clearly in love, though the rigors of the recently-opened Student of the Year Competition (also in English) will cruelly rip them apart. Obviously this is all a metaphor for the sociopathy engendered by globalized capitalism in an emerging market, thereby revealing Karan Johar as a stealth Marxist – perhaps the stealthiest in history, judging from all those brand names. Also, there’s a girl and a burning tree.

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WHAT IS THE HISTORY BEHIND THIS PICTURE?

In the beginning, i.e 1989, there was an auteur by the name of Sooraj R. Barjatya who, at the age of 24, with the might of a production company established by his grandfather behind him, directed a film titled Maine Pyar Kiya. Tracking the rich boy/poor girl romance of its protagonists through multiple societal and familial tribulations, the film was hardly the first of its kind — a similarly goopy (if more mechanical) hit titled Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak had debuted just one year prior — but it nonetheless struck a chord with a public tired of the generic excess that marked the Bollywood of the ’80s. Barjatya was young, and driven by a religious-minded zeal for wholesome entertainment steeped in traditional family values; his art was stylized and idealized, but intently focused on interpersonal dynamics.

He returned in 1994 with his magnum opus, Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, a 200-minute, 14-song gargantuan sprawl of earthy romantic devotion that sparked a veritable revolution in Indian theatergoing – buffeted by the advent of home video, the movie house found unexpected salvation as a public venue for family togetherness. Box office receipts were fucking ridiculous.

Among the scores of industry personnel whose lids were flipped was Aditya Chopra, scion of Yash Raj Films, a production company that had left an indelible mark on Bollywood through the pastel romances of founder Yash Chopra. Emboldened by Barjatya’s success, the young Chopra, also aged 24, released his directorial debut in 1995: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, a savory bowl of cosmopolitan mush so popular that one particular Mumbai theater continued to run daily showings well into the 21st century. Yet while Barjatya’s films remained devoutly focused on Indian concerns, Chopra’s twist was to incorporate the non-resident Indian (“NRI”) experience into the action, positioning the Yash Raj brand as a global platform for homemade entertainment, aimed at monied Indian nostalgists and curious fellow travelers worldwide.

Most critical to our narrative, however, is DDLJ’s neophyte co-writer, assistant director, bit part actor and associate costume designer: Karan Johar, a Chopra friend and yet another heir to a movie studio, Yash Johar’s Dharma Productions. Johar had also became close with the film’s lead performer, Shahrukh Khan (“SRK”), a Delhi-based theater and television actor who rocketed to Mumbai movie mega-stardom over the course of the early ‘90s. Leapfrogging off of Chopra’s success, Johar teamed with SRK for his own directorial debut in 1998, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, which dressed the NRI-minded focus of Chopra’s film in every designer label its comparatively wizened 26-year old director could yank free from the London racks. It was a supreme work of dissolvable ultra-kitsch, foregrounding the artifice of its love story so severely it bordered on auto-critique, though it did command some real drama too: that of Karan Johar, who in his youth turned up his nose at the tackiness of Bollywood, and — to strike an ill-fitting protestant note — was born again on the set of DDLJ. Through a conglomeration of costume, he would isolate the ridiculousness of what he was doing, and then love it anyway.

Yet if Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was flagrantly trendy, it was also unwaveringly conservative; for SRK to truly understand his love for tomboy heroine Kajol Mukherjee — herself returning from the earlier Chopra film — she must renounce her taste in sherbert-hued overalls and dress like a proper goddamned lady. In this way, the audience is soothed – assured that the global tastes of the young will not trammel the value of tradition. Such is the key to mass appeal.

Popular as they were, these films were not always well-received by aesthetes, or devotees of more action-oriented fighting/dancing/joking/romancing Bollywood masala. “Candyfloss” became the slur of choice for Johar’s cinema, connoting banality for those who wished for a more sophisticated Bollywood, and effeminacy for those content with a more strapping brand of fantasy. Having been teased over his effete mannerisms since childhood, the latter criticisms appear to have washed off Johar, though he did seem to respond to the former, as his later films tackled notions of familial estrangement (Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham…, 2001) and sexual infidelity (Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, 2006), if always in a distinctly soapy idiom. This evolution reached its peak with the 2010 release of My Name Is Khan, a glossy tragicomedy of well-to-do Muslim angst in post-9/11 America; by this time SRK was co-producing via his own company, Red Chillies Entertainment, always with an eye toward expanding his global brand. The film wound up making most of its money outside a domestic Indian market which treated it coolly.

Indeed, if you study the Indian box office of today’s Bollywood, we have rather come back to the old days of macho masala, with hulking superstars like Salman Khan — ironically, also the male lead in those Sooraj R. Barjatya pictures from years ago — winking and flexing their way through remakes of formula product out of the Telugu-language industry down south. Johar knows this, as one of his most successful recent productions was a 2012 remake of Agneepath, originally a 1990 potboiler his father took a bath on in the wake of the very wave of ‘family’ cinema that would revive Dharma Productions.

In this way, Student of the Year, so flashy and simplistic, can be seen as both a throwback to the glory days of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, as well as its director’s throwing down of the gauntlet at the feet of the neo-masala wave – a new spin of candyfloss for a history that seems determined to repeat itself.

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WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE THE INTERVAL?

WAIT, WAIT – WHAT’S AN INTERVAL?

Good question! An “interval” is what is typically called an “intermission” in the North American parlance. Most Indian popular films have an interval, at which time the movie stops and snack vendors roam the aisles like at a sporting event (or, if you happen to be watching these things digitally beamed into a North American megaplex, you immediately visit Twitter). Ideally, some sort of thrilling cliffhanger or punchy bit of dialogue will occur just before the interval, so as to maintain the audience’s energy – in the South industry (i.e. Telugu, Tamil-language productions) this is called the Interval Bang. Critics therefore cannot resist gauging the efficacy of the film both pre- and post-interval.

Mind you, this description is premised on the operating procedures of your classic Indian single-screen theater, of which there are more than 10,000 nationwide. There are also a smaller number of multiplexes, which may or may not function in the same manner. Nor will all single-screen theaters play the same releases – an additional stereotype brands the local single-screen as a haven for “mass” films, i.e. movies that appeal to the general working public. The urban multiplex, in contrast, allegedly supports “class” films, which seek to appeal to a more superficially sophisticated, young, wealthy-ish clientele.

To combine “mass” and “class” is to know the highest success in Hindi pop cinema, and Karan Johar — himself a nearly perfect-bred “class” viewer — has done just that at times, although the comparatively weak domestic returns on My Name Is Khan have been attributed to a remote subject matter with little applicability to the immediate desires of the filmgoing public.

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OKAY, THANKS. SO, WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE THE INTERVAL?

Why, several immediate desires are duly met.

I should probably mention at this point that Bollywood — which, by the popular Western understanding, encompasses basically the whole of Indian cinema, though I will only use it to designate products of the Hindi-language industry based in the former Bombay — is probably the least reputable of the major world cinemas among English-reliant cinephiles. Talk to a film buff in my neck of the internet, and nine out of ten will instantly dismiss the stuff as garbage, fluff and nonsense, commercial imbecilities farted to life by career hacks who wouldn’t last a minute in the big show of Real Movies. Frequently, reactions become emotional. Bollywood is ’embarrassing.’ Just look at those clowns hopping around – why can’t you watch South Korean crime movies? Hell, even a Korean television drama would be preferable; this shit’s as cringe-worthy as anime, and at least anime has decent violence sometimes.

I’ve watched anime since I was 14, so I’d heard it all before. I’d heard the newer complaints about manga too: that it’s comics for little girls, or gay men. Some of that connotation seeps into the omnibus complaints about Bollywood. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of crap in Hindi film — or that it doesn’t have devotees who swear everything was better in the ’70s — but I do suspect the sheer enormity of the scene, Japanese comics and Indian movies alike, supports a tendency to speak broadly and intimidates even open-minded commentators from delving deeper.

It is true, however, that contemporary Bollywood films have a way of idealizing the male body to an extent that’s unique to world cinema. But then, the notion of masala, a term borrowed from blends of spices used in cooking, after all, demands that something for everyone be included. Songs in crime dramas! Slapstick in tragedies! Dudes leaping twenty feet into the air in social satire! Unlike Japanese comics, which arrived at its women-friendly reputation by sharply dividing itself into semi-discreet zones of demographic appeal, Indian popular cinema of the Hindi/Tamil/Telugu variety often just tries to be as audience-inclusive as possible in any given situation, which results in both a novel ‘exotic’ surface (songs in crime dramas) as well as the occasional crossing of cultural taboos, i.e. thou-shalt-not-linger-on-a-guy’s-abs-in-a-movie-that’s-not-specifically-for-girls.

Thus, Student of the Year introduces one of its male leads with a shimmering close-up of his glistening six-pack as he strums a guitar. This is Varun Dhawan, one of the film’s three debutante stars; SRK’s Red Chillies may still be co-producing, but now Johar is focused on breaking new talent. All of them are first presented to us by revealing close-ups of body parts; heroine Alia Bhatt‘s teeny feet totter in a tall pair of designer shoes, rich yet vulnerable, while the other male lead, Sidharth Malhotra, is first seen from behind, his broad back stretching out a fine leather jacket. Importantly, he is the only one of the stars not affiliated with one of Bollywood’s dynastic film families; Dhawan and Bhatt are both children of prolific directors. He’s a rebel, you see.

Moreover, in-story, Malhotra is attending St. Teresa’s on scholarship, while the other two — characterized immediately as the sort of longtime couple that can’t recall what they like in each other anymore — are simply rich as fuck. Both Dhawan and Malhotra served as assistant directors on My Name Is Khan, so it’s not difficult to imagine story writer Johar — assisted by screenwriter Rensil D’Silva and dialogue writer Niranjan Iyengar — concocting his scenario from the ‘school’ of filmmaking that is a set full of young people, one of them maybe connected, another maybe not. There’s even a ‘director’ of sorts presiding over St. Teresa’s scrum: Rishi Kapoor, old-time star of the massive ’73 inter-class teen romance landmark Bobby, playing a tremendously camp dean of students prone to stroking hidden magazine covers of perennial Bollywood hunk John Abraham and sexually harassing a handsome Coach, who himself is the catalyst for Malhotra & Dhawan to stop hating each other and fall in loBECOME GOOD FRIENDS.

All of this is depicted in long flashbacks as various supporting characters mill about in a hospital where the Dean lays dying, alone and unloved – regretful of the relationships he smashed for his fondness of conflict! This mild criticism of competitive education is ripped straight out of the highest grossing film in Bollywood history, 2009’s 3 Idiots — an ‘inspirational comedy’ most notable for a scene where the film’s cast of engineering students revives a dead baby by chanting the movie’s catchphrase — and can easily be disregarded. The meat is in the evolving relationship of the male leads, and, to a *much* lesser extent, their relationship with poor Bhatt, who seems doomed on a conceptual level – the main guys are proper Bollywood hunks in their mid-’20s, while Bhatt is a young 19. In other words, she actually looks like a high school girl, which doesn’t at all fit Johar’s artifice, glamming her up to an absurd degree so that she seems frequently ill at ease in front of the camera.

Another issue: Dhawan is the only one of the three that can actually dance. Normally this isn’t too much a problem, as you can ‘fake’ Bollywood dancing through clever editing — and, obviously, nobody is really singing, there’s professionals for that (and albums to release with those professionals’ bankable names — but if one member of the main cast actually is better at dancing than everyone else, he or she inevitably begins to hog the song sequences. Distracting as this is, though, it still sort of fits the plot, since Dhawan’s rich boy character, alas, only wishes his Cruel Businessman Father would respect his love for music, though the wicked man secretly prefers foe-turned-friend Malhotra, who’s got an eye for finance. EVEN WORSE, Bhatt and Malhotra start to pretend they *like-like* each other as a scheme to get Dhawan to pay more attention to the comprehensively neglected lass, but OMG, then Malhotra starts to really fall in love with her!!!!

All of this climaxes in (the controversial) Radha, a supremely goofy wedding dance and probably the peppiest of music duo Vishal–Shekhar’s compositions for a soundtrack so overstuffed there’s sub-songs that bridge longer songs together.

Still, watch that video above, and see how Johar (and one or more of the film’s four choreographers) communicates the entire drama between Dhawan (in gold), Malhotra & Bhatt, even on mute, largely through motion and exaggerated, silent cinema-worthy body language. Johar then depicts the ceremony itself — the lead cast are guests — as a wordless flourish of images accompanied by a tinkling piano score, until an agonized Malhotra joins hands with Bhatt, only for her to slowly pull herself away, and then – the orchestra swells.

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WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE INTERVAL?

Shit gets real.

Seriously though, much of the second half of the film is concerned with the Student of the Year Competition, divided into four parts: (1) standardized test; (2) treasure hunt; (3) dance competition; (4) triathlon. Malhotra is keen to win, having pinned his financial future on the access to a top college the prize will net. Dhawan, meanwhile, wants to prove his worth to his Bad Dad — relations deteriorate to the point where he’s booted out of the house and must fend for himself economically — while also taking down Malhotra, whom he caught smooching the increasingly irrelevant Bhatt, to booming percussion on the soundtrack. Nobody steals his lover, goddamn it Alia.

But wait.

I’m making an awful lot of gay jokes here, surely more than is welcome on an enlightened web portal such as this. The thing is, Johar is making the same jokes, and honestly… I’m not sure either of us are really joking. More than once, Malhotra quips that it seems the emotionally needier Dhawan is about to kiss him. All the while, Dhawan neglects his ostensible girlfriend, Bhatt, only reacting when she flirts with Malhotra. As the film wore on, I began to wonder if Johar was playing a quiet game, subtly contrasting the shrill, quintessentially filmi gay stereotype of the Dean against something of greater emotional verisimilitude.

It’s difficult to talk about homosexuality in Bollywood. Part of the traditional, cliche appeal of foreign cinema to English-dominant North Americans is its departure from domestic morality, but mainline Indian movies share the NA movie dichotomy — violence is okay for display, while sex is best hidden — at a much lower intensity. Top of the line Bollywood movies often won’t progress beyond lip-kissing onscreen, and dramatic depictions of gay relationships are rare.

Redolent of this uncertainty is a movie Johar produced in 2008: Dostana, starring Abhishek Bachchan and the aforementioned John Abraham as a pair of men who pretend to be gay to secure a nice living arrangement in proximity to a woman they both pursue. Neither gets the girl in the end, and it’s hinted that a genuine attraction has developed between the two. The truth, however, remains as private as Johar’s own personal life, though rumors always, always swirl: about him and SRK, about him and Sidharth Malhotra. How does one score a leading man role in this town without connections, after all?

In Student of the Year, Johar is more willing to let go of things. Toward the end of the film, the Dean — the Director — is castigated by a fat, nerdy student for the ten million or so obvious logical shortcomings of the Student of the Year scheme; as in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Johar underlines the artificiality of his construct, but now the older director shows the Dean become sad and withdrawn. He never maintains a real relationship with a man. As he dies, his movie’s cast around him, he stares into the eyes of the Coach, the object of his lust, uncomprehending of his true desires, and all he can whisper is “that’s life,” as if he’d thrown a party as a cry for help.

By this time we’ve found out who won the competition: it was Dhawan, but only because Malhotra held back at the last minute, to disgust Dhawan’s father and thereby prove himself the more calculating player. Then he marries Bhatt and becomes a zillionaire tycoon, while Dhawan apparently throws the prestige of his prize away and becomes a famous (presumably shirtless) rock star. Like 3 Idiots, the message boils down to ‘follow your dreams, but try and select dreams that will get you a middle-class life, because being poor is pretty loathsome.’

Yet some things are not filled in for Dhawan. He is not apparently married, nor does he have any girlfriend. He claims to have bedded 100 women, although this is immediately shown to be a lie. He and Malhotra confront one another immediately, but quickly resume friendly relations. It’s a happy Bollywood ending, competition fermented into a woozy nostalgia, but also tinged with mystery, unspoken secrets hovering as the two grown men return to St. Teresa’s, and loosen their clothes as they prepare to revisit their final race for real, gazing into each other’s eyes, alone, as the frame freezes, and the color fades, and the director’s name appears onscreen before a final fade to black.

The idea could be that the future remains in the hands of “Our New Generation” – but know, dear audience, that we are not there yet.

Voices From the Archive: Kinukitty on Improving This Blog By 17.6%

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During out Wire roundtable way back when, Kinukitty had some depressing thoughts on the use of statistical methods in government. Thought I’d reprint it since we’re doing our democracy thing today.

I was delighted when the Wire opened with that CompStat meeting. I don’t know if many people understand the tyranny of the stat programs. Many governments and government agencies wrestle with some kind of performance measurement system, and they tend to work pretty much as you described – there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Performance measurement isn’t hopeless, exactly. There are some (probably not a lot) of governments using it right and getting good results. It takes someone special, though, to turn an organization around and create true accountability (which does not include firing people because you don’t like their stats). Especially in an enormous bureaucracy like a government. And then there are the elected officials. But as long as some organizations are doing something good with stats, it seems best not to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Because I don’t know if there are a lot of alternatives. I don’t see NGOs as helping very much. Too many obstacles, including the fact that stats can be altered just by the choices of what is measured, and how. And news coverage? I don’t think the problem there is that news outlets are only interested in sensationalizing stories to sell copies, advertising, etc. Well, it’s not the only problem. A lot of reporters and editors just don’t understand what they’re publishing, and the more sophisticated or complicated the issue is, the less likely they are to really get it. The current hysteria about state and local government pensions is a good example. Yes, they have an incentive to report that the sky is falling, since people are more likely to be interested in that than the sky not falling, but they also don’t understand the issue well enough to challenge any lies, misrepresentations, or mistakes their sources feed them. I’m not actually completely down on journalism — I more or less believe in the fourth estate thing. We’d be screwed without it. But there are problems.

Which leaves me in a Wire frame of mind, too. I appreciate it, though. I think it’s kind of important to make people understand that the problems are complicated.

 

Sing Me a Cartoon

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Enrico Caruso (1873–1921) was one of the most celebrated opera tenors in history. He was also a deft and witty caricaturist — not least of himself, as shown below:

Caruso was prolific and generous with his cartoons, often including them in letters to his fans. They show a wide variety of line styles, from delicate to bold.

 

Many of them depict him in costume for one of his roles. Below, Caruso as Lieutenant Pinkerton in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, which he sang in 1906:

As Federico Loewe in Franchetti‘s Germania:

As Don José in Bizet‘s Carmen:

 

He also caricatured other luminaries of the music world. Giuseppe Verdi:

The Mexican tenor José Mojica:

The conductor Arturo Toscanini, an important figure in Caruso’s life; it was in his 1900 production of Puccini’s La Boheme at the Scala in Milan that Caruso achieved stardom:

The soprano Amelita Galli-Curci, who co-starred with Caruso in Rigoletto:


The composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, who was the director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House when Caruso was engaged there; this portrait was drawn for The Musical Courier magazine.

The composer Leoncavallo, author of I Pagliacci:

Caruso in the role of the clown Canio in I Pagliacci; Caruso’s recording of the opera’s song Vesti la Giubba (“On with the Motley”) was the first record to sell over a million copies:

A recording of Vesti la giubba may be found here.

Below is a rare group drawing, depicting the rehearsal for Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West (“The Girl of the Golden West”), for which Caruso created the role of Dick Johnson in 1910:

Click on image to enlarge

Caruso didn’t confine himself to music-realated subjects; here is his rendering of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, with whom he was acquainted:

Roosevelt served the superstitious Caruso as a good-luck charm on a day of disaster.

In 1906, Caruso was performing Carmen in San Francisco when the great earthquake and fire destroyed the city. Caruso was found walking the streets, disoriented and weeping, clutching a signed photograph of the President to his chest. He ran into the actor John Barrymore, fresh from a brothel, who persuaded the tenor to sing to calm the panicked crowds.

Caruso’s talent for caricature extended to sculpture, as seen in this bust of himself as a ‘laughing Buddha’, which he presented to Toscanini:

He was not above using his fame to swing lucrative endorsement deals, as we can see from the following advertisement for Pianola– illustrated by the singer:

But he also donated his talents for good causes: below, Caruso mans a quick-sketch booth for charity, drawing Mrs Albert Gallatin.

He published several books of his caricatures and cartoons; this one dates from 1914. I like the cover drawing below best of all his self-portraits:

These ‘transformation’ drawings show a delightful playfulness:

Enrico Caruso’s cartoons all evince a spirit of light mockery without a hint of meanness; seeing them, I can believe that the great tenor would have made excellent company!

Frankenstein Babymen

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“From the very first, children are at one in thinking that babies must be born through the bowel; they must make their appearance like lumps of faeces.” That’s Freud from his Introductory Lectures. I found the quote in an essay by John Rieder called ” Frankenstein’s Dream Patriarchal Fantasy and the Fecal Child in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its Adaptations”. Like the title says, Rieder’s essay argues that the Frankenstein monster can be seen as a fecal child — literally, a piece of crap. Mary Shelley’s book is an elaboration and/or a critique of a patriarchal fantasy in which men dispense with women, creating fragrant, mottled life from their own blessedly demonic bowels.

Frankenstein doesn’t much like his shit baby — but that’s just another sign that he’s a weirdo. Most kids — boys and girls — like their poop. Or as Rieder explains:

When Jehovah looks at his handiwork he sees that it is good, and Freud tells us that children at the stage of development in question are far from feeling disgust at their own feces. On the contrary, they take pleasure in manipulating them and are apt to express pride and affection for these “children.”

Rieder goes on to suggest that it is normal for adults to express disgust at fecal creation — but is that really the case? Fecal children — those Frankenstein monsters — are, after all, readily analogized to that other marvel of sterile birth, artistic production. If Frankenstein’s monster is his poop, it is also his art — and who among us of whatever gender has not glowed proudly at our own glorious, smelly glob of suchness? Who has not grabbed friends and relations alike, hauled them to the glowing receptacle, lifted the lid and declaimed with pride, “Look what came out of me!”

If you are looking for gratuitously giddy anal celebration, you cannot possibly do more gratuitous nor more giddy than the amazing Axe Cop adventure, “The Ultimate Battle,” reprinted in the first Axe Cop trade. Axe Cop is a web comic phenomena drawn by artist Ethan Nicolle and written by his (then) 5-year-old brother, Malachai (or Micah.) Like most kids, Micah is a lot less chary of indulging his fecal obsessions than his adult peers, and “The Ultimate Battle” could not be much more frank in its fascination with what comes out of our bottoms. One of the comics best set-pieces involves Babyman (and yes, that’s a grown man dressed in a baby outfit), who flies by passing gas, chasing a duck which shoots exploding eggs out of its rear.
 

 
Later, Babyman and a young similarly dressed ally (Babyman Jr.?) chase a giant monster made of sentient candy who excretes tiny cars which grow into big cars and then when people try to drive away with them they explode. And, finally, a whole team of Babymen chase a giant egg with feet which poops out phones that ring and then people answer them and…well, you can probably figure out what happens next.
 

 
But if you think grown men dressed as babies dodging exploding poop is some bizarre Oedipal scatology…well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The climax of the story involves the evil Dr. Doo Doo, a giant sentient piece of poop with a gaping mouth and a monocle. When he shouts “Poooooooh!” Micah says, “instantly everyone in London has an accident in their pants.”
 

 
The turds they poop turn into evil human-sized turds armed with swords, each of which quickly murders its progenitor, setting the stage for an ultimate battle between superheroes, ninja moon warriors, and good-guy zombies on the one hand and evil sentient poop on the other.

Obviously, an ultimate battle between superheroes, ninjas, zombies and poop stands on its own merits. But the diabolically summoned/involuntarily produced sentient turds which kill their father-mothers and take their places also works as a nice analog for Micah’s own precocious, volcanically natural artifice, which revels in conquering/befouling the world all the more joyously because he’s not even trying. Even Dr. Doo Doo’s poop command seems to mirror the collaboration between the brothers Ethan. Micah, says, “pooh!” and Ethan miraculously creates pooh by the buttload.

Not everything in Axe Cop is pooh-based — but everything does have that magical sense of being hauled out of the creators’ asses. People in Micah’s world are constantly transforming and morphing from good to bad or from dinosaurs to dragons or from unicorns to dinosaurs to dragons to cops or from weird hybrid thingees to other weird hybrid thingees. This trope reaches a quintessence of preposterousness in a sequence where Lobster Man (who we learn later used to be part dog) rubs his face in zombie blood so he can turn into a zombie. Then he gets his companions to dump good zombie potion on him so that he can go undercover with the zombies and eat his evil zombie sister’s dog brain.
 

 
In a world where creation is as easy as pooping, it makes sense that each self should excrete a new self like the phoenix springing newborn from its own bowels. Reality is a mushy mass to be formed and reformed, sculpted, smeared and flung in a gloriously manipulable mass.
 

 
Which is why the artist that Micah reminds me most of is Johnny Ryan. Where Axe Cop’s drawing is cartoony and clean, though, Ryan (as the above image shows) embraces the messiness of his scatological obsessions, As I said in an earlier post:

In Prison Pit each body is a busted toilet whose stagnant water births some mangled abortion dragging its placenta over the edge of the porcelain to flop wetly on the cold tiles. Tentacles erupt from vaginas, vomit spews from sentient arms, and dripping things that should not be tear open their mothers in an orgy of violent polymorphous ichor. Black blood drips like ink off the mechanical penis of Ryan’s protagonist and then pools in scratchy pen lines, half-formed half-assed nightmares drawn on the back of a middle-schooler’s history notebook.

 

Aligning Johnny Ryan and Micah Nicolle complicates them both, I think. If Ryan is like Nicolle, then he’s not just a simple shock jock” — and if Nicolle is like Ryan, then he’s not, perhaps, quite as innocent as we like to imagine 5-year-olds as being. Frankenstein building that monster — like Mary Shelley writing that book — is both an exuberant wallowing in the glorious Godhead and an ugly stain upon the divine prerogative. If the creation of art makes us human, then we are our own foul progeny — monster Babymen sculpting monster Babymen, like diapered Frankensteins.

Spider-Dove

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This first appeared on Comixology
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Spider-Man’s origin story, as most everybody knows, hinges on a moment of moral turpitude. In Amazing Fantasy #15 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, nerdy, put upon Peter Parker, having been bitten by that pesky radioactive spider, gains (dum ta da!) super powers, and starts a successful career as a professional wrestler. Basking in his newfound fame and bucks, Peter (in Spidey costume) is standing in some random corridor when he sees some random schmo fleeing from a cop. Cop yells to Peter to stop schmo, but Peter refuses ; schmo gets onto high-speed elevator and escapes.

The cop chews Peter out, “All you hadda do was trip him”! Peter, though, is unrepentant: “Sorry, Pal! That’s your job! I’m through being pushed around!” Peter walks off and then on the next page his uncle is murdered! And two pages later, Peter learns that the guy who shot his uncle is the same guy he allowed to escape! Oh, the irony! Peter has learned too late that “with great power there must also come — great responsibility!”

Anyway, back to that moment of moral turpitude. What exactly is Peter’s failure here? The cop says that Peter should have tripped the guy or stopped him somehow. He even threatens to arrest Peter for failing to help. But… arrest him for what? Do citizens really have a legal obligation to throw themselves in the way of fleeing criminals? Do cops even really want citizens to throw themselves in the way of fleeing criminals?

On the contrary, if you’re a cop chasing a perp, the last thing you want is for some civilian in goofy red tights to get in the way. What if the perp has a concealed weapon (and in this case, we know that the villain did have a gun by the next page)? What if the civilian tackles the perp and then gets shot? What if the civilian tackles the perp and somebody else gets shot? At the very, very least, from a police perspective, that’s an exponential increase in paperwork.

Of course, we know that Spidey could have taken down the baddy without anyone getting killed or even hurt. We know this in part because he’s got super powers. Mostly though, we know it because — Duh! — he’s a super-hero, or even just a hero. Heroes like Spider-man or Batman or Dirty Harry leap into action and save people. That’s what they do. And if they didn’t do that, there wouldn’t be much of a story, would there?

Indeed, Spiderman’s real sin here is not against morality or society, but against the tropes that keep the genre afloat. Super-heroes have to act. They’ve got to fight crime. If they don’t, you don’ t have a narrative. Super-heroes have “great responsibility,” but it’s always the responsibility to do something. You could conceivably have an origin story in which Wombat-Man decked a baddy, the gun went off, Cousin Joe got shot, and the hero decided “With great power comes great responsibility!” And so Wombat-Man decides never to mess with crime again, and instead uses his phenomenal digging powers solely to aid with infrastructure projects! Again, you could have such an origin – but what you’d end up with would not exactly be a super-hero comic.

In real life, of course, and as this suggests, the responsible, way to use your “great power” might conceivably in many circumstances be to sit on your ass and do nothing in particular. Certainly, if George W. Bush had done that in 2003, America and Iraq would both be a good bit better off today.

What I’m talking about here is essentially pacifism. Pacifism is about as massively discredited as a major philosophy can be. Pacifism is appeasement, or it’s treason, or, (more kindly) it’s a nice idea but not really practicable. You can’t just sit by and watch that guy escape, Spidey! Hit him! He’s got weapons of mass destruction!

I can’t say that I’m a pacifist myself, exactly. But I think that people can be way too quick to dismiss it, essentially because reality is rigged just like that Spidey origin story. For whatever reason, probably having to do with our reptile hind-brains and/or a steady consumption of revenge narratives, the negative consequences of inaction tend to seem to us infinitely more insupportable than the negative consequences of action. If we step aside and something bad happens, we say, “Oh no! I should have done more!” On the other hand, if you wade in and things get completely fucked up, you often feel like, “Well, at least I tried. And think how bad it would have been if we’d done nothing!”

Which brings me to Amazing Spider-Man #184, published way back there in September 1978. My friendly neighborhood Internet tells me this was written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Ross Andru. I must have read this when I was 8 or so; and I don’t think I even liked it all that much at the time. But I’ve remembered it all this time, in part because it is, rather bizarrely, one of the only super-hero comics I’ve ever seen that makes any effort to address either pacifism or the anti-pacifist assumptions at the core of super-hero comics. (The alternate-world Amish Superman in The Nail does not count. We will not speak of him again.)
 

 
Anyway, I haven’t seen ASM#184 in probably twenty years, but if memory (and a Web capsule summary) serves, the plot was a Bruce Lee rip off. Phil Chang is an awesome martial arts master, but he’s taken a vow of non-violence. Inevitably the evil Chinese gang wants him to join them. Their leader is the White Dragon, who is not only a martial artist extraordinaire, but also wears a white (natch) costume with a Chinese dragon style mask that looks staggeringly impractical, even by super-hero costume standards. Despite said mask, though, the Dragon is fully able to beat the tar out of the non-resisting Chang, and so he does – until Spidey comes to the rescue. Thank God someone is willing to fight, huh kiddies?!

That’s what you’d think the message would be anyway. In fact, though, Marv Wolfman’s script is surprisingly subtle. One exchange in particular has really stuck with me. I can’t quote exactly, alas, but to paraphrase, it went something like this:

Spidey: What in tarnation are you doing, anyway? The White Dragon is beating you to a pulp! He’s going to kill your family, you dope! Show me some of that kung-fu everyone’s been on about, won’t you? Are you a man or an amoeba? Come on, Phil! With great power comes great responsibility!

Phil: (and this I remember much better) There are failures in non-violence just as there are failures in violence.

I think that’s pretty profound. Yes, pacifism won’t necessarily solve all your problems. But then, fighting often doesn’t solve your problems either. Indeed, fighting can quite easily make things worse. You wouldn’t know that necessarily from reading super-hero comic books, of course — nor, perhaps, from public discourse in general. Which is why it might be worthwhile, sometimes, to remember that the power to right the world’s wrongs is given to neither man nor spider, and that we are all every bit as responsible for what we do as for what we don’t.
 

So what is pacifism? It is the uncompromising realization that we as humans are incapable of bringing about justice through violent retaliation. Hence, we relinquish all such acts to God in his sovereign and eschatological plan of judgment, justice, and mercy. Indeed, God have mercy on us.
—Mark Moore

Nice Guys, Finished

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In his recent post on Audition, Bert Stabler points out that the film is essentially a rape-revenge genre story. And yet, something isn’t quite right. Normally, we should experience the humiliation (and the sadistic pleasure) of the rape first, and then experiencing the sadistic pleasure (and the humiliation) of the revenge. That is the the inevitable, brutal, giddy fulcrum of narrative works. Conflict/resolution; crime/justice; brutality/counter-brutality; rape-revenge. It is the engine of plot stripped down to a crude, pointed bone.

In Audition, as I said, this simple axis of event goes awry. The front half of the film is essentially a romantic-comedy buildup — evoking a different, and perhaps uncomfortably analogous narrative simplicity. Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) , a producer and widower devastated by the loss of his wife, decides, at the urging of his son, to find a girlfriend. A director friend offers to hold a false film audition so that Aoyama can pick/ask out the most appealing of the actresses. Aoyama chooses a striking young ballet dancer, Asami (Eihi Shiina), who reciprocates his interest.

Only towards the film’s end does the rape start to coalesce, not as event but as disjointed image and memory. Our friendly middle-aged protagonist Aoyama learns (or imagines?) that his lover, Asami , was brutally tortured by her middle-aged dance instructor, and that she cut off his feet in revenge. Eventually, in what may be a dream, Asami cuts off Aoyama’s foot, linking him to her brutalizer. Essentially, rape and revenge occur simultaneously, or apparently simultaneously. The punishment calls forth the crime, or identifies the criminal. The narrative doesn’t drive the film so much as appear frozen and flickering at the end, a slowly strobing cascade of horror and violence playing ambiguously in the interstices of a supposedly more innocent life. Former audition and later exploitation merge; the film’s second half infects its first, and both intentionally implicate the director as manipulator of rape, revenge, and narrative. Indeed, with sequence broken, character starts to come apart as well, the filmmaker merges not just with Aoyama and his skeevy evaluation of female pulchritude, but with Asami and her gleeful vivisection. Scopophilia and sadism burst out of their narrative bonds to revel in frozen tableau — abjection freed from the facade of justice.

The 1984 Clint Eastwood film Tightrope has an oddly similar trajectory. Here too, a rape-revenge narrative wanders vaguely off its well-marked track. Police detective Wes Block (Eastwood) is, like Aoyama, a single dad (divorced, in his case) who loves his children (daughters, here)…but who also has an unpleasant side. Block frequents prostitutes, and seems to have a general inability to keep his dick in his pants. This complicates things considerably, since Block is pursuing a mysterious killer who rapes and murders prostitutes. The killer starts to follow Block and murder the prostitutes he sleeps with, and finally we learn that he (the killer) was once a cop himself.

Block and the killer, then, are insistently linked and doubled — and the film clearly flirts with the idea that it is Block himself who is the murderer. The murderer uses handcuffs on his victims; Block, too, has a thing for handcuffs in bed. The murderer likes to use ribbons for strangulation. Block…uses his tie.
 

 
When Block’s daughter (played by Eastwood’s real-life daughter) is raped by the killer, it becomes, paradoxically and queasily both the rape and the revenge — it is the trauma which punishes Block for the same trauma that he (the killer) has inflicted.

So, just as in Audition, the confusion of the rape/revenge is tied to a blurring or scrambling of characters. And also as in Audition, the complication or confusion of that narrative tends to create a fetishistic stillness. In Tightrope, this occurs not through dream-like images, but instead through repetitive focus on significant objects. The killer is identified again and again by a slow pan down to his shoes; his trademark red ribbons appear repetitively at different crime scenes; and of course because the killer is following the cop and the cop is following the killer, locations and characters repeat themselves with more ominous meaning (and music) as the film circles around and around itself in a slow twisting effort to catch its own tail.

Tightrope ultimately turns its back on its art film impulses and scurries back to the safety of being a Hollywood piece of shit, complete with dunderheaded final chase scene and Block heroically redeemed by fisticuffs and a good woman, not necessarily in that order. But before that happens, it, like Audition, exchanges the brutal rush of narrative for the immobile despair of, as Bert puts it, “endless defeat.” In these films, rape and trauma are not so much crimes that can be punished as stains that you stare at, day in and day out, till you can’t tell the nice guys from the sinners, nor violation from revenge.

Utilitarian Review 11/3/12

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News

I’m pleased to announce that Jacob Canfield is joining HU as a regular columnist. His bio is here. Welcome aboard Jacob!
 
On HU

From the Archives: Sean Michael Robinson interview Gerhard.

From the Archives: Jog on the Drifting Classroom without children.

Me on how Julia Roberts had to get old to get her best role.

Me on how Wonder Woman’s costume is booby-trapped.

RM Rhodes expresses skepticism about the storytelling in Heavy Metal magazine (prompting a really long thread.)

Domingos Isabelinho on Matt Marriott, one of the great comics westerns.

Matthew Brady on Hellraiser and Cloud Atlas.

Bert Stabler on Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Audition, vengeance and despair.

Me on the supposed feminism of Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body.

Robert Stanley Martin argues that DC treated Siegel and Shuster fairly.

Sarah Horrocks on sci-fi, horror, and Richard Corben.

Subdee on why Gangnam style rather than some other Kpop ditty.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Loyola Center for Digital Ethics, Violentacrez, Amanda Todd and sexism online and off.

Two at Splice Today:

David Brooks is an awful Republican partisan hack.

Jonathan Chait is an awful Democratic partisan hack.
 
Other Links

Roseanne Barr vs. trans women.
 
This Week’s Reading

Finished rereading Phillip Pullman’s forthcoming Brothers Grimm book of fairty tales; also finished Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory. Started “Ward Six,” a fantastic collection of Chekhov short stories/novellas which I bought in college more than 20 years ago and somehow never read. Better than many things I’ve read instead over those 20 years….