Fuzacky electronica mix. Download 4 here.
1. No Burden — Co la
2. Ballibat — Taragana Pyjarama
3. 4 — Aphex Twin
4. And They All Look Broken Hearted — Four Tet
5. Matthew Unburdened — Clark
6. Beep Street — Squarepusher
7. Max on a Stroll — Kettel
8. Tattoo — Venetian Snares
9. Headspin — Plaid
10. Hang Up Season — Andrew Coleman
11. Brace Yourself Jason — µ-ziq
12. Quiet Now —Daedelus
13. Minor Detour — Daedelus
The many faces of Psy in Gangnam Style. You can buy these as stickers. Collect them all!
First of all, here’s the video, if you haven’t seen it already. If you are sick of the song, you can also watch it without music.
Secondly, in my third-most-ever-favorited comment on metafilter, I talked about Psy’s Gangnam Style and race in America:
Gangnam Style isn’t the first viral smash Kpop song, or even the first viral smash Kpop song that sort-of sounds like LMFAO and was produced by Teddy Park of YG Entertainment (who has been working with the artists to adapt the same ultra-mega-popular song into a huge smash hit every six months like clockwork – here’s 2NE1’s I Am The Best and Big Bang’s Fantastic Baby, if you missed them the first time).
But of those three acts – each of which has already gotten a lot of U.S. attention, i.e. Pitchfork wrote about 2NE1, Will.i.am worked with them, MTV Iggy called them the best band in the world; Big Bang were crowned Best Worldwide Act at the MTV Europe VMAs and have been written up in US and European business magazines – Psy, a previous unknown (to the US), is the act the entire Western celebrity world has decided to back.
Psy and Bigbang’s G-Dragon, hanging out.
On metafilter, I speculated that while not precisely a conspiracy, the choice to throw US media and celebrity weight behind Psy and not another act was a tactical move:
Compared to those other songs, “Gangnam Style” is a lot more relatable to the average person – it’s a song about acting like you are rich, whether or not that’s really true, rather than a song about being actually rich and famous (although Psy is both of those things, in South Korea).
More than that, it’s relatable for the average American, who can comfortably put Psy in a couple pre-existing mental boxes: hilarious “not attractive” guys partying hard and getting the girl; funny Asian guys; funny viral videos built around dead-serious funny performances in public places; even subtle social commentary. Bringing Psy over here broadens people’s ideas of a viral pop song a little bit, since it’s in another language, but not too much, since, after all, Psy is singing about how he isn’t the
rich person he dreams of beingtypical celebrity guy.
Psy x Justin Bieber. They share a manager in the US, Scooter Braun.
To expand on that a bit more – and please forgive me for retreading already well-tread ground – Psy’s Gangnam Style video isn’t just funny in ways that Americans recognize, e.g. the hot tub scene borrowed from Austin Powers. It’s also implicitly critical of “all flash no substance” celebrations of celebrity vanity/megalomania.
For instance, here are videos by B.A.P., f(x), Jo Kwon, Tasty, Girls Generation and After School proclaiming their own greatness – although this last one is a Japanese single released by a South Korean group, not properly a Kpop song. It is, however, a great example of the kind of stadium-ready pop South Korea has been making since the World Cup last summer, and again this summer in celebration of the Olympics – for which Psy has, natch, written the official theme song.
Psy performing at one of his famously crazy concerts, underneath (cartoon) images of himself.
The difference between those groups and Psy isn’t precisely hubris as Gangnam Style is, after translation into English, already plenty boastful. Rather, it’s a comment on artificiality: Psy’s video is set in the real world – albeit one full of celebrity cameos and action-movie stunt acting – while other groups save money by filming in constructed worlds made up of empty mansions, empty clubs and empty rooms; or else in the “real” Kpop world of stage lights and dressing rooms. And that’s if there is any nod to reality at all. In its purest form, Kpop features locations that aren’t just abstract and prone to disorienting lighting, but subject to no other logic but the logic of capitalist consumption – a predilection that’s been noted on this blog previously.
Psy live in Australia, in a concert still that looks like an action-movie poster.
Of course, there’s a lot of self-awareness in the artificiality of these videos… in addition to being generally more economical, they sometimes also double, Lady Gaga-like, as commentary on their own artificiality (one, two, three).
Images of Psy proliferating everywhere on the latest episode of South Park.
But to return to the topic at hand: The good-looking teen and twenties celebrities who populate Kpop music videos belong in their world, being in part “constructions” themselves – that is, the groups are definitely constructed; the personas are partially constructed; and the faces and bodies are meticulously constructed through a combination of professional makeup, professionally-guided diet and exercise, and plastic surgery. Psy, although also a nominal member of this set – and actually hailing from the swank Seoul district of Gangnam, Korea’s plastic surgery capital – does not look like he belongs with them, and therefore has to fight to be recognized as belonging to a glittering world in which only handsome people exist.
Speaking of handsome people: Psy with Hugh Jackman
Despite what the Atlantic would have you believe, however, Psy is far from alone in his satirical take-down-from-within-the-industry. Even apart from direct critiques – of superficiality, of sexist double standards, of government censorship, of materialism and gender roles – Gangnam Style actually comes in the middle of a move toward broadening the appeal of Kpop by setting it in real places. Like This and Ice, for instance, are two of this summer’s other attempts, proceeding Psy’s, at LMFAO-style outdoor flashmob videos.
Psy leading an impromptu(?) flashmob on The View
With that said, there’s still plenty of artifice to go around. On metafilter I concluded that trying to viral-market any of the more obviously constructed groups in the US
would require a long explanation about what Kpop is and why those artists “really are” famous. This would require the U.S. public to buy into a world where the U.S. is not the center of all pop music production “that matters”. So yeah, I think there is quite a bit of commercial calculation behind the media push of [Gangnam Style]. Which doesn’t mean it’s not a great song worthy of being spread, just that there is a reason it was
thingthis song, and not some other one.
Psy presiding over many images of himself on the latest issue of Billboard
Do I still think this way about Psy’s smash hit? Yes and no. Here’s Ask a Korean, probably the first place you should go for answers to these kinds of questions, on the reasons for the song’s success overseas:
First, Korean pop music has been laying a solid groundwork for PSY to succeed. It is true that, thus far, efforts by Korea’s pop stars to break into the U.S. market resulted in a flop. Top stars like Wonder Girls, Girls’ Generation and 2NE1 never made a dent on America’s public consciousness. Nevertheless, the groundwork that these groups laid remains important. Because Korean pop music at least got on the radar screen of the insider players of American media market, PSY’s music was easily accepted by those insiders.
This is a crucial point that separates Korean pop music and pop music from other, non-Anglophonic countries. Through repeated contacts with American media, Korean pop music had a ready audience among American media insiders.
Check the original post for more, including a great graphic of a T-Pain-centric view of the universe.
Psy with ultimate Hollywood insider Steven Spielberg.
Though initially on the “why this song and not another?” train, I’ve since rethought my position. Maybe it’s true that Gangnam Style doesn’t threaten a US-centric view of the US’s place in the center of world the way that another, more nakedly imperial song would. On the other hand, this song is also popular in Istanbul!
This has been on my mind since I was Turkey recently. Istanbul, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, has pockets of hyper-capitalism inside a generally conservative culture – kind of similar to Korea? In any case, a gazillion Turkish parodies exist for Gangnam Style, including this one with found footage of old men dancing at weddings. “Uncool” guys acting “crazy” for the benefit of young, conventionally attractive women, whom they would like to impress, is a near-universal phenomenon, it would seem.
Another artist who is popular in Istanbul, Sardor Rahimhon. Lacking Psy’s discipline, he is occasionally photographed out of uniform.
And everyone loves a silly dance craze. This is anecdote, but it’s not just that this song is playing at cafes; from our hotel room in the old city, we saw a guy doing the horse-dance down the street…
Deadpool doing the Gangnam Style horse dance on the latest issue of The Avengers.
I have kind of come around on Gangnam Style, then, and now think the silly – and yet instantly recognizable – dance on top of the ridiculous – and yet instantly recognizable – LMFAO-style beat is the main thing, along with the boost from American media/celebs who rightly saw the viral potential of the video and performer.
In the final analysis, then, the viral power of Gangnam Style comes from its being instantly recognized, widely liked, and easily reproduced. But where is Psy getting that cool-dorky look from anyway? Technically, from trot: Korea’s traditional pop music form which is currently experiencing something of a revival. Psy only looks trot, though: his music is pure 00s bombastic stadium rock, mixed to already sound like it is being played over loudspeakers at a large sporting event.
But what about that trot beat, eh? Another thing I will throw out for your consideration – if only because I haven’t seen it mentioned elsewhere – is Serbia’s entry in the 2010 Eurovision contest. Op, op, op! Ovo je Balkans! For more on this connection, read on…
Frank Kogan – Koganbot – has been writing about what he calls the Austral-Romanian Empire, a pop music spectrum that ranges from Tu Es Foutu and We No Speak Americano in the East (Australia/Oceania) to D-D-Down and Mr. Saxobeat in the West (Romania). To his list of Kpop singles that incorporate sounds from across the (Eastern) world music spectrum, I’d add Musiche by Crazyno (pronounced Cray-ZEE-no)… a guy dressed up like a Balkan entertainer/a trot performer/Psy…
Crazyno is from Australia! Perfect! But is he willing to wear that suit every day for the rest of his life?
The influence isn’t one-way, of course. Kazakhstan has their own Kpop-style boyband, for instance: Orda, also here. And meanwhile, a Kpop group that’s always had a strong European following is TVXQ, who right now have my current favorite take on the LMFAO Party Rock beat. Even knowing about this connection, however, it took going to Istanbul for me to notice exactly how much like typical Eastern European pop the video for Tallentalegra – by former TVXQ member Xia Junsu – is. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about, right? It’s a look that’s so well known (on women) that it was parodied by Hilary Duff in Iraq War black-comedy War, Inc.
Last celebrity cameo! Psy with Golden Girl Betty White
So there’s that. In other examples of trend-chasing, meanwhile, there’s the micro-trend of British-chart-sounding singles at YG Entertainment (Psy’s company): Dancing on My Own, I Love You, Don’t Hate Me, CraYon. For comparison/contrast, here is UK pop group Girls Aloud.
No corner of the globe is safe, however! If you want to find some Spanish guitar-y singles, you can find them as well: Wow, I Wish. Is Block B going for a similar audience, or a US audience, or in fact a worldwide audience with their Pirates of the Carribbean-sounding single Nallila Mambo (which you absolutely must watch)?
All of this is without even getting into Kpop’s first successful overseas expansion…to Japan. As my friend Sabina said, this is where the Italo producers went after Italodisco died in Europe. 4minute have multiple Japanese singles in this style. When people talk about Kpop, “Gee” and the Norwegian wave, they are generally talking a collaboration between Kpop songwriters and European dance producers. Many words have already been spilled on this particular connection, so I won’t spill any more – check Thomas Troelson’s wikipedia page for a general idea.
So it’s no surprise that Turkey is ready to embrace this pop amalgam, existing, already, at the crossroads of pop. Pop music television in Istanbul is a mishmash: they got stuff from the US and the UK, stuff from Eastern Europe, stuff from Russia, stuff from India…
Okay okay, this is the last celebrity cameo. Psy with Ban Ki Moon, current Secretary-General of the United Nations
Someone called the Kpop style the style of the mashup, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I think there are some unique things that no one else really does, or at least that are not a part of mainstream pop elsewhere. For example, I think that Kpop produced for an older domestic audience follows slightly different trends and is slightly less bombastic – or at least is bombastic in a more complex slash tortured slash melodramatic slash tragic way. But as this post is already a bit long, perhaps I’ll talk about that next time.
To bring this back to Psy, the market is nothing if not adaptable. It didn’t take underground-rapper-with-pop-ambitions E.via very long, for instance, to come out with a response song and video. She’s even using a cartoon image of herself to promote!
And speaking of cartoons, you have been wondering about that Deadpool-doing-the-horse-dance Avengers cover, right? Wonder no more: Deadpool VS Gangnam Style.
Sarah Horrocks had a great comment about sci-fi and horror in comics (and out. It’s reprinted below.
I’m miscommunicating if I’m putting across that I don’t think sci-fi genre work is as good as anything else.
I’m still reading Dune on the first go through, but there are lines in this book so magical that they are already amongst my favorite. Game of Thrones is an exceptional work. Prophet blows my mind every month. I obviously feel pretty passionate about Druillet’s work. I love Giger and Beksinski’s sci-fi/horror paintings.
And I say all of this as someone whose background in education IS the study of literature.
I think what upsets people about sci-fi is that they feel it’s “merely” escapism, and they’ve been taught to view anything remotely escapist as a pejorative. But it is these fantastic other worlds that most bend and expand your mind, and allow you to change expectations and ideas when you end the work and come back to reality. Sci-fi as a genre is a world shaper. We probably wouldn’t be having this conversation on this thing the internet without science-fiction and it’s mind altering qualities. Sci-fi is good drugs.
And Druillet and Moebius are for me masters of it. I find their works hugely inspirational, and full of ideas that are even today fresh and interesting. Even just technically what they were able to pull off was virtuoso work. There are certain mechanics within western comic art that they absolutely are the gold standard for.
Corben is I feel something of a different beast entirely. I see Corben more in the horror mold–though that’s shaped because most of the Corben I’ve read, and continue to read is horror. And I think horror operates with a completely different set of rules from any other genre but porn. I think great horror is not plot based at all, but rather about generating a particular mind state within the reader–like the example I always use is in the film Texas Chainsaw massacre–the original–there’s this section where he’s chasing the girl through the woods with his chainsaw, and the night is blue, and there’s almost an impossible amount of branches that keep getting in the girl’s way–and leatherface is always like just inches behind her no matter how fast she runs–and the forest actually morphs within this scene and elongates from how we had previously seen it in the film. Suddenly it changes into this seemingly neverending labryinth. She stars running across the screen in directions and at distances that should get her out of the forest–but don’t. In terms of realism it is a failure. But what the work is engaging with is that creepy dream logic that infuses all of the best nightmares.
Most horror work in film and comics of the last 20 years have been failures because they do not understand that this element is what makes horror work. The plot and the realism is what detracts you from the sublime horror moment where art melds with dream. Similar to the moment porn melds with fantasy.
Horror, particularly in comics I think, should be less interested in plot and story compared to any other genre of comics–and be interested in creating these nightmare images and scenarios that come off of the page. More horror comics creators need to be surrealist pornographers.
This got off track. But horror is I feel an instance where adherence to plot and characterization rules that work in other genres produces spectacular failures of horror. The only thing you are left with in a horror work whose focus are those elements is a gore-fest, and trying to out-shock the last person. But true horror is not just gore, or shock–it’s much more subversive than that. And so horror is a huge indictment as a genre of this particular approach.
For me an excellent work of true horror did come out in comics this year, and it was done by Richard Corben. It was called Ragemoor. I remember reading the opening pages of that book and that section where the castle history is being explained–gave me chills like a comic hadn’t in a long long time. I think Corben has always had the chops to do great horror, and sometimes he has–but when he has failed it has been because of writing which is overly concerned with itself. Which is why it is hard to explain to people Corben’s place in comics history–because he truly is one of the greats–but he has very few works that are masterworks–and if you don’t get Corben art, and can’t focus in on what he’s doing visually on the page–you won’t understand.
Druillet and Moebius are different in that I think both of them the writing is in concert with the art–probably because they are handling both functions.
A version of this appeared in The Chicago Reader way back when.
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Jennifer’s Body is a basic rape-revenge narrative. Towards the beginning of the film, stuck-up high-school hottie Jennifer (Megan Fox) is brutalized. Subsequently, she wreaks hideous vengeance on men in general, and, eventually, on the perpetrators in particular. Action, reaction, gallons of blood. It’s not clever, but it has a crude, inevitable elegance. It works.
Or at least, it works in classic examples of the genre like I Spit on Your Grave or Ms. 45. Jennifer’s Body, though, isn’t satisfied with the formula. Writer Diablo Cody (Juno) and director Karyn Kusama want something a little smarter, a little more hip. They add some sparkling dialogue: in what is sure to become a classic line, Jennifer is described as “actually evil, not high school evil.” They include some wicked satire too; most notably Adam Brody’s gleefully oleaginous performance as an indie-rocker who earnestly explains how tough it is for bands these days just before butchering Jennifer as an offering to Satan.
So far so good. But the filmmakers also tinker in more fundamental and, unfortunately, less successful ways. The visceral rush of the rape-revenge narrative is distanced, complicated, and ultimately squandered. They take the rape itself, and they make it not quite a rape, but rather a virgin sacrifice gone horribly awry. They make Jennifer not just a woman wronged, but a possessed demon, who kills not for retribution, but for food. They take the revenge, and they push it back all the way into the credits, presented in a series of still frames, and performed by the wrong person. And then they add a series of twists and turns, quasi-homages lifted from a melange of horror/exploitation gone by. Demon Jennifer turns evil like the guy in Christine and vomits like Linda Blair in the Exorcist. She stalks the prom like Carrie, and gets a point-of-view shaky camera shot courtesy of a thousand slasher films. The movie even takes a bizarrely unmotivated detour into women-in-prison films, of all things.
The most ambitious change, however, is the introduction of female bonding. The classic rape-revenge films drew their energy, in large part, from a celebration of, and anxiety about, the castrating power of second-wave feminism. Women, these movies averred, had been wronged, and those women were going to rise up and cut your dick off (literally, in the case of I Spit on Your Grave.) Movies like Ms. 45 even made a sustained critique of patriarchy, linking workplace harassment, rape, and the general marginalization of women into a single crime — punishable by death.
But while rape-revenge films make much of feminism, they don’t, generally, make anything of sisterhood. In both I Spit… and Ms. 45, the women are notably isolated. They tell nobody about their suffering or their plans for revenge, because they have no one to tell. The point of the films, indeed, is the spectacle of an isolated, lone, helpless, weak individual turning the tables on the patriarchy. In short, for all their feminist gestures, the movies are for men; they’re about how men interact with women, rather than about how women interact with each other.
Jennifer’s Body is different. The central relationship of the film is not between Jennifer and her male oppressors/victims, but rather between Jennifer and her BFF, Anita, or “Needy” (Amanda Seyfried). Jennifer and Needy have been friends since nursery school, and they’ve remained friends even though Jennifer has blossomed into Megan Fox, one of the two or three sexiest women in the world, while Needy is merely run-of-the-mill jaw-droppingly gorgeous; i.e., a geek by Hollywood standards. In classic popular kid/geek stereotype, Jennifer is the dominant shallow demanding one, dragging Needy away from her boyfriend and out to bars, shooting down guys, and running around after indie rockers who are best left alone. Needy is the sensitive, smart, cautious one, always careful not to upstage her friend, and…well, you know the drill. Over the course of the movie, Needy realizes that she and Jennifer have grown apart, and that the best friend she once loved is now a shallow, jealous bitch, not to meniton a demon from the pits of hell who wants to eat Chip (Johnny Simmons), Needy’s sweet, long-suffering boyfriend.
The combination of rape-revenge with fraught female friendship isn’t, in itself, a terrible idea. Under the direction of more talented or thoughtful filmmakers, you could see it working out as the kind of feminist metaphor that Cody and Kusama seem, rather desperately, to be groping for. Jennifer’s victimization by, and subsequent embrace of, sexualized, partriarchal violence (“my dick is bigger than his” she says of one soon-to-be victim) could work as the wedge that drives her and Needy apart. Rape and the revenge it spawns could be set against or contrasted with sisterhood.
The problem is that, for this to work, the film would have to, at some point, sympathize with Jennifer. You’d have to understand why Needy loved her in the first place; you’d have to see the two of them interacting in a way which made sense of their friendship. This never happens. Jennifer is a bitch before she’s violated, and she’s a bitch after she’s violated. Her transformation into a succubus is a fulfillment of her character, not a negation of it — it seems, in short, to be what she deserves, both for her shallowness and for her sexual precociousness. When the two protagonists have their showdown at the film’s end, Needy tells Jennifer that she was never a good friend…and that seems to more or less be the case. Partially this may be Megan Fox’s acting limitations, but there’s never a moment where she does anything for Needy, or even seems to have straightforward affection for her. What did Needy ever see in her?
The movie does suggest an answer; one that is not at all, as it were, straightforward. The first time we see Jennifer and Needy, they’re sharing a meaningful glance and a flirtatious wave that causes a student sitting nearby to suggest aloud that they’re gay. The relationship’s temperature only rises after Jennifer is demonified; there are several suggestive scenes, and one smoking hot encounter on Needy’s bed with tongue and all. When Needy pulls away in disgust, Jennifer slyly mentions that the two used to “play boyfriend/girlfriend” at slumber parties.
That scene has been much publicized. But for all the brou-ha-ha, the film never seems to consider the possibility of Jennifer and Needy as an actual couple. Rather, the lesbianism is played for titillation, for shock value, and for laughs. Needy’s love for Jennifer is shown as a dangerous fascination that must be discarded. Cliff, the boyfriend is the sympathetic one; he’s obviously where Needy should end up, and part of Jennifer’s evilness is that she makes that impossible. When Jennifer does, in a way, possess Needy at the film’s end, it’s seen more as debasement than empowerment; a loss of self and of possibilities. In the typical rape-revenge, patriarchy is the evil to be overcome. Here, as the first line of the movie states, “hell is a teenaged girl” — or, more precisely, the friendships between teenaged girls. Cody claims that that’s somehow feminist, but I must confess, I don’t see it.
It doesn’t matter who the characters are in the 1989 film “Tetsuo: The Iron Man,” a brutal, seething, hurtling, cyber-mutant tone-poem directed by Shinya Tsukamoto. There are two men, both infected by a fetish for merging metal and flesh, bonded by a car accident. There is, temporarily, a woman, soon consumed by the wrath of a thick, grinding, motorized metal penis. Plot is spared, while there is no end of spawning microcircuitry, pounding mechanized rhythm, demonic cackling, and tortured erotic breathing. By the end of the film, one man declares to the other, “Our love can put an end to this whole fucking world.” It is a fairly realized vision of sadism– the key word being “vision.”
In Takashi Miike’s 1999 film “Audition,” more concessions are made to the demands of conventional cinema, and to worthy effect. The plot has a meaningful arc– a widowed movie director is convinced by his youthful son that he needs a new wife, and, by his friend and colleague, that he should find the ideal candidate by auditioning actresses for an essentially bogus role. Having followed his friend’s advice, he then ignores his further warnings when a breathtaking young woman auditions, and begins to occupy his thoughts. The romance first goes well, until the director reluctantly pulls back on advice from his colleague. But then, near the end of the film, things suddenly begin to go very badly. Flashbacks begin, a cackling demon appears in the person of the actress’ viciously abusive former ballet teacher, and our director ends up much like Tetsuo, in both of his bodies– shoved full of metal (long needles, in this case, with wires being employed to hack off his feet), and shuttling subconsciously between a variety of alternate nightmare realities.
Visual markers, from beer glasses to telephones to photos, pace out the slowly building dread in Audition, as the images of faces, cityscapes, and machinery escalate the hysteria in Tetsuo. The reason is that both movies are visual meditations, even if one employs stop-motion animation, with churning processed music and jump cuts, and the other uses long, still shots and a melancholy acoustic score. The plot in both cases is vengeance. As murky (and transparently irrelevant) as the plot is in Tetsuo, it is clear that the couple are punished for hitting the fetishist with their car (and then, J.G. Ballard- style, having sex in front of his crushed body). In Audition, as we eventually discover, the ballet teacher spent years training the actress, only to then physically and psychologically destroy her with sadistic sexual abuse. She has her just desserts with him, first severing his feet and eventually his head. But we also see her with a live body trapped in a sack, and then, in at least one of a couple competing reality threads at the end of the film, she ends up torturing the director, our protagonist.
The bodies of the director and the teacher merge in Audition as those of the driver and the victim merge in Tetsuo. They are sadistic, image-driven stories, and images exist to hybridize and proliferate. And yet, they are vengeance stories, supposedly following the plot logic of the slasher film, in which all brutality is punished– a logic that is not sadistic but masochistic. Nobody gets anything that’s not coming to them. This is the power of the rape-revenge film– in “I Spit on Your Grave,” to take an archetypal example, we are treated to a lengthy and nauseating rape scene, and then to the pleasure of seeing the rapists summarily slaughtered by the victim. In Audition, the ballet teacher gets his, and the director, when he becomes a victim, seems also to receive poetic justice in becoming an immobilized object, in recompense for treating the woman he acquired under false pretence like a commodity he could admire, customize, and ignore at his pleasure.
This strange dynamic, popularized in Hitchcock and then metastasized in the blockbuster action film, has been a way for the viewer to have the cake of violence and eat her moral turpitude as well. And, from Hitchcock to Lynch to Cameron, the viewer is, in some odd way and at some point, given the role of the director, the eye of the camera, which (pretty literally in the cyborgs of Terminator or Tetsuo), makes the pleasure monstrous and thus uncomfortable/ However, the discomfort of the monster becomes pleasurable when the monster is slain– as unresolved as this killing inevitably feels, in the ending as well as in all subsequent sequels. The problematic relationship between morality and pleasure, vengeance and forgiveness, is outlined with some profundity in these films, and then– left unresolved.
What is somewhat unique about Audition, however, is that the director is introduced as a thoroughly sympathetic protagonist from the very beginning. We see his warm, caring relationship with his son, his wistful love for his deceased wife, his dedication to his work, his thoughtful approach to decisions, his heartfelt fascination with the actress. And yet, what does it matter to her? He more or less picked her out like a mail-order bride, but without the decency to make his intentions clear from the outset. His obliviousness isn’t insignificant, but it may ultimately not be enough to separate him from the ballet teacher, who molds the actress to be his ideal vision, and then scars her so that she can never leave him.
Power operates through people, not in them. Whether a population is dispossessed by foreclosure or decimated by bombs, torn apart in civil war or religious conflict, the unending abundance in the midst of this competition for scarcity is the overflow of gleeful destruction, the cackle of the demon. When, with the Audition director, we lose control of the scopophilic machine that has started to enter us and cut us apart, we find that this machine was what we came to see, the flame that we flew to. What this film offers is not the ambiguous, tainted conquest that sullies the honest bloodthirst of the slasher genre. It offers endless defeat, in submission and in disintegration, which, as Simone Weil might assert, is one truth of force. And another, Tetsuo reminds us, is that force will, ecstatically and at any expense, feed itself forever.
Matthew Brady’s done a couple of short film reviews today in comments. I like them both, so thought I’d highlight them here:
First, on Hellraiser. (Halloween appropriate!)
Aaron: I like your take on both Hellraiser films (well, the first two, anyway; I don’t think I’ve seen any of the others, except maybe one of the sequels, called Hellraiser: Generations, I think, that I watched years ago on cable. It was all right). The first one was definitely more effective, but they both had their moments, especially in the way they sexualized their horror, making people with their skin flayed off alluringly sensual and lingering on the viscous parts of the exposed bodies. The most effective scene in the sequel was probably the bit in which one of the rooms in hell had beds that kept sliding out of holes in the wall, with female bodies writhing erotically under sheets (which sort of resembled body bags) on the beds, but covered with blood, making for a gross necrophiliac combination. Both films suffer from becoming action spectacles in their climaxes, which cheapens the unknowable horror of hell, making it a threat that can be solved by manipulating a demonic Rubik’s cube or just outrunning the waves of evil. That sort of thing is probably necessary, but if you’re going to sell hell as an inescapable realm of suffering (although I guess there are several people who do escape, so maybe that’s not the case?), the movie should end with everyone meeting a horrible end as a true nightmare of what is to come for everyone after they die (or are dragged into a nether dimension after delving into supernatural affairs in which man should not meddle). That’s not really what these movies are about, since they kind of squeeze themselves into a Hollywood slasher formula, but that’s what I would prefer, even if it’s easier said than done.
And then on Cloud Atlas.
I saw the movie last night, and it was pretty enjoyable, although, as you said, the message is ultimately pretty shallow. I haven’t read the book, but it seems like the stories might have been improved by being intercut throughout, rather than presented discretely. Or maybe they just seem to work better when we only see a few minutes of them at a time, and the clever callbacks and references can be highlighted and underlined by jumping directly between them. Plus, the motif of reincarnation and recurring tropes can be highlighted by casting the same actors in multiple roles in each story (Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant are always bad guys, Halle Berry and Jim Sturgess are always good, Jim Broadbent and Tom Hanks go back and forth). Ultimately, I don’t know how well it worked, or if it was really that good of a movie, but it was certainly an experience. I liked it for the most part, with my favorite aspect probably being how hammy Tom Hanks was in every role except one, and that guy died five minutes after he was introduced. I guess I recommend it?
“The Territory” by James Edgar and Tony Weare
“Matt Marriott” is, with “Randall, The Killer” by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Arturo del Castillo, the best Western in comics form. This may seem like damning with faint praise because the overall quality of comics Westerns is truly appalling (with the American ones in pamphlets and a newspaper comic strip like “The Cisco Kid” among the worst…). That’s far from being the truth though: both comics series include some of the greatest comics ever published. Unfortunately both share the same disdain from publishers and readers alike. “Randall” (published mainly in the Argentinean comic book Hora Cero Suplemento Semanal [zero hour weekly supplement], issues # 1 – 65: 1957/58, is long out of print; my attempt to bring it back to life failed because there’re problems among some copyright holders, or something…). So, in two words: no Randall. “Matt Marriott” is a British newspaper comic strip that ran in the [London] Evening News from 1955 until 1977. We know who the copyright holders are, but, in a similar attempt, I’ve learned that they can’t find the printing plates anywhere. In view of the fact that the original art was scattered around we just have Edgar’s and Weare’s masterpiece on microfilm in the British Library Newspapers, so, ditto: no Matt Marriott.
That’s how the amnesiac art of comics loses another chunk of its memory. It’s a huge shame that, on top of it all, it is one of its best parts…
Throughout the series Matt Marriott and his sidekick Jason “Powder” Horn, fulfill their odyssey wandering the West of the United States in a still divided (social wounds not totally healed) post Civil War. It’s a country in which the farmers’ settlements are competing with the ranch owners’ land (the Fence Cutting Wars). Other times the narrative focus is the railroad construction and the decimation of buffalo herds. Still in other occasions the social background is the Indian Wars. That’s the case in “The Territory”; not war exactly, I mean, but serious racial tensions that lead to blood shed.
Marriott and Horn are expelled for defending the Indians. (I decided to illustrate this Stumbling with original art scans only. The image is a good metonymy of how “Matt Marriott” was barred from the history of comics for not being a children’s comic.) “The Territory,” Evening News, 1973.
But let’s leave the territory (Montana) alone for a while to give a general look at the series first. I’ll start by putting what I don’t like about it out of the way: the usual formulaic nonsense of mass art genre Westerns (the American monomyth, basically, or something even more boneheaded). Unfortunately it exists even in “Matt Marriott” and Tony Weare knew it and abhorred it (Ark, 1990, 47):
I would have liked the characters to have been fallible, but, of course, being cowboys they have to be infallible. If there was a scene where Matt and Powder were camping out in the bush at night and they heard a noise, Powder would ask Matt if that noise meant there were Indians. Matt would calmly announce that it was an owl, and he’d be right. In another episode, Powder would say it was an owl and Matt would say it was Indians, and Matt would be right again. I always wished that they’d change it around for once. That side of cowboys is very boring. It’s the same with Batman. He can’t make a mistake either. […] In the gunfights the baddies shoot ten bullets and they all miss whilst the goodies shoot one bullet and it’s on target. I hated that side of it.
Me too!
As for the scripter, James Edgar, no one knows what he thought because of two facts: (1) comic fans like Denis Gifford (the only ones writing about comics at the time) suffered from acute childhood nostalgia syndrome: to them only old comics magazines like Comic Cuts were worthy of attention (even so Gifford wrote a 1971 ridiculously sparse “history” of British newspaper comics); (2) scripters weren’t even credited, let alone interviewed.
Anyway, in the International Journal of Comic Art (Vol. 9, # 1, Spring 2007) and elsewhere (Nemo Vol. 2, # 22, June 1996) I suggested the concept of the “absent hero.” A kind of Greek chorus that needs to be there for commercial reasons, but doesn’t intervene much in the action to avoid the cliché of winning the day every time. That’s what happens to Matt Marriott and Powder Horn in some episodes, but not in “The Territory,” or, at least, not completely. Looking at a fight between Marriott and the Miniconjou Indians is like looking at a rigged boxing match.
Almost every other narrative aspect in the series differ with more traditional genre tropes. The characterization, for instance, gives us a fresco of 19th century North American people that is unmatched anywhere. I’ll give you a small sample below.
“Nimbus McBride,” Evening News, 1968.
“Trail Drive,” Evening News, 1965.
The Indians are no exception as we can see in the following great panel.
In a now familiar procedure (to the readers of the Stumblings, that is), the shadows on the exterior of the face, mirror the characters’ inside feelings. The procedure was first called to my attention by Alain Jaubert in his great Arte TV series: Palettes. “When the Bear Runs,” Evening News, 1972.
In “Matt Marriott” there are miners and soldiers, hunters and merchants, politicians and businessmen, herd drivers and outlaws, lawyers and doctors, bankers and lawmen, etc… Women are homemakers, sex workers and boarding house keepers. Tony Weare’s great characterizations are only matched by James Edgar’s colorful characters and colorful language. Doc Massey in “Marshall of Fireweed” (1959), said to Matt: “How now my tall pillar of rectitude. There’s a puritan streak in you that doesn’t sit well with that gun on your hip.” The same Doc Massey described his situation after being mortally wounded as “being a little drunk with valediction.” “Powder” Horn wasn’t that bad with words either, as seen above in fig. 1 and in the below panel (in an old comics tradition the direct discourse is reproduced in pronunciation spelling).
[Untitled], Evening News, 1964.
Tony Weare’s drawing style evolved from a more conventional naturalism to a rough impressionism that’s quite impressive in its mixture of looseness and preciseness. Besides admiring Weare’s uncanny ability to lay out a scene it’s amazing how he could instill life and expression to a couple of brush strokes depicting a face. Ditto for the body language.
Violence had true consequences in “Matt Marriott.” Notice how Tony Weare could convey shock and dismay in the background characters’ faces with just a few brush strokes. “Trail Drive,” Evening News, 1965.
Tony Weare was also a master at shading. He was able to depict any moment of day or night simply by the intelligent use of black, white and the way he did the hatching and cross-hatching. I particularly like his dim lunar light.
“Trail Drive,” Evening News, 1965.
Other times I just like the nice touch of the little dog that no one seems to notice.
[Untitled], Evening News, 1964.
“Matt Marriott” was a daily strip published six days a week. Most of the strips had three panels which Tony Weare varied from medium shot to close up, varying the size of the panels accordingly (the closer the distance between the picture plane and the “object,” the smaller the panel; this is what Benoït Peeters calls: the rhetorical use of the page). This wasn’t a rigid rule, or anything, of course. Below, for instance, is an establishing shot in a two-panel daily.
“When the Bear Runs,” Evening News, 1972.
Like the Fates of old James Edgar was great at weaving plots. In his stories situations build on situations in a relentless pace. Actions have (sometimes brutal) consequences. In “The Territory” (a “Matt Marriott” story arc that appeared in the Evening News between May 4, 1973 and August 23 of the same year) a series of unfortunate events lead to the death of a young Indian followed by the kidnapping of “Powder” Horn (the Miniconjou want to punish him) and a hazardous rescue by Matt Marriott and friend Sam Folsom; a man who lives with an Indian woman and knows a lot about Indian culture and the hunger inside the reservations.
The grin in Horn’s face is explained by the fact that he’s a racist who feels pleasure in killing an Indian. This is one of those occasions in which Tony Weare would subvert the script – in cahoots with James Edgar or not, we’ll never know – going completely against the grain. The narrative implications of this simple drawing are huge. To say it in mass art lingo: the hero’s sidekick is suddenly a villain which means that the hero kills innocent people to save a guilty character. That’s what I call a good drawing (a drawing with meaning): technical skill only seems like a poor “set” of criteria to me. “The Territory,” Evening News, 1973.
Sam Folsom and ‘Relish’: The sexual politics of the “Matt Marriott” series could be a post of its own. “The Territory,” Evening News, 1973.
As in any other Western there are lots of evil doers in “Matt Marriott” (in “The Territory” the enemy is racism and the unscrupulous store keeper who sold alcohol to the young Indians), but Manicheism is softened as much as possible because Tony Weare avoided the “bad guy” stereotype and James Edgar gave plausible motivations to his characters. If you want to know “whom” the real enemy is, read below: it’s one of my favorite comic panels of all time.
Light and shadows and shades of gray. “Gospel Mary,” Evening News, 1973.
