Yearly Archives: 2012

Gluey Tart: Kicking and Dreaming

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Kicking & Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock & Roll, Ann Wilson, Nancy Wilson, and Charles R. Cross (It Books, September 2012)

As I work my way through the biographies of all my seventies and eighties rock heroes, I realize there’s no point in fighting my demographic destiny. I did expect this book to be dreadful, at least. Dreadful and tedious. Dreadful and tedious and full of repetitive boredom. Dreadful and tedious and full of repetitive boredom and clichés.  And of course it is not entirely free of dreadful, tedious, repetitive, boring clichés, but mostly it is “surprisingly readable,” title aside.

I have always wondered how Ann and Nancy Wilson managed to become kick-ass stadium rock stars in the age of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith and all those other very, very male bands. I always wanted to know how much of the early guitar sound was Nancy and how much of it was Roger Fisher.  And I always wanted to know how eighties and nineties Ann felt about being piled with huge hair and big, dark costumes, and shot mostly from the chin up in their videos in a viciously stupid attempt to keep us from noticing she had gained weight. (Answers: because they kicked ass; more Roger, in the songs I like best, but the acoustic stuff is Nancy; and humiliated and irritated, as one might expect.)

The book is told in snippets of narrative by Ann, by Nancy, by other members of Heart, by associates, friends, their mom, and Chris Cornell. This is a half-assed way to put a book together, but it does give Ann and Nancy their own voices. And they are charming. As fluttery, breathlessly dancing in a sun-dappled springtime meadow as you’d expect of anyone who wrote “Dreamboat Annie” and “Dog and Butterfly” and so on, but also as driving and relentless as you’d expect of someone who wrote “Crazy on You” and “Barracuda.”

That’s the dichotomy that made Heart brilliant, and frustrating. I can’t listen to any of their albums all the way through, and individual songs are often divided against themselves, the wild, hard-driving fervor never blending seamlessly with the frothy, acoustic effervescence. (I should point out that I speak of Dreamboat Annie through Bebe Le Strange; I don’t entirely acknowledge the existence of any of their other works.) But they have written some of my all-time favorite songs. I wonder if the hit and miss situation with so many Heart songs is because they were feeling out something that nobody had done yet.

A couple of million critics have written about this dichotomy as a balance of masculine and feminine, but that misses the point. It’s all feminine, and what gets called masculine is instead a side of femininity we don’t usually acknowledge. It was thrilling, back in the seventies, and it still is, more than thirty years later, even though we’ve gotten used to seeing women on a stadium stage. (“Straight On,” for instance, or “Magic Man” – these are pretty much perfect rock songs.) Which brings me back to wondering how they did it, when they did it. Or any time – but especially in the mid-seventies.

And they explain pretty well, considering that it’s really just one of those things. They start out by meticulously recounting their early lives, and in fact their entire family history. I found this touching, in part because I’m a huge fan of putting things in chronological order, but also because they love their family, and each other. I’m into that. They were a military family and moved all over the world during the girls’ childhood, making Ann and Nancy a solid, close unit. They were also musical from a young age. And they found the Beatles. Ann and Nancy see that as the crucial pinch of magic dust that launched them – or Ann, specifically – toward stardom. I’m less convinced; while all their friends were playing at being Beatle girlfriends, Ann and Nancy were pretending to be the Beatles, with guitars and everything. They already had whatever it was.

Next up: Who wrote what. I want to know who slept with whom or what as much as the next person, but I also want to know who wrote what, and under what circumstances. And the book has a lot about the music and about dealing with the music industry, which is always fascinating, in a degrading, evil kind of way. I’m curious about what inspired the songs, too, but that’s usually sort of discouraging. Magic Man, for instance, was a straight-up homage to Ann’s first and overwhelming love, Michael Fisher (brother of guitarist Roger Fisher and, for a few years, their manager). I’m somewhat uncomfortable with that overboard, overwrought song being about a specific man. That’s what happens when you listen in on someone’s creative process, though.

The book is also very much about Ann’s struggle with her weight – or, more accurately, the music industry’s struggle with Ann’s weight. She started gaining in the eighties and, eventually, she was fat. It doesn’t seem like such a horrible thing, but it just wasn’t allowed, in society or, especially, in the music industry. The shit everyone gave her over it destroyed her self-confidence, that blistering individualism that allowed her to get on the stage in the first place. (Well, that, and the music industry in general, and coke.) Have you seen any of those videos from the eighties and nineties? They have Ann’s hair so big she can barely stand beneath it, and her jackets and dark and broad of shoulder, excessive of lapel. She is shown in shadow, cloaked in smoke, or only in close-up, where the big hair and startling blush situation are supposed to fool the eye into thinking she’s smaller than she is. Or, perhaps, just short circuit the viewer’s thought process from an overload of confusion and perplexity. Either way, it’s pathetic. This is a beautiful and shockingly talented woman, and all the music industry could think to do with her was turn her into some kind of clown. That, and focus on Nancy.

This was more or less their approach to the music, as well. Most of Heart’s hits came after Bebe LeStrange, the 1980 album I consider their last acceptable one (although I haven’t checked in recently – I guess their albums from the last two years, Red Velvet Car and Fanatic, could be great – but I wouldn’t bet on it). Ann and Nancy tell the story of how the music industry repackaged them in the eighties, choosing hits they didn’t like and clothes they found ridiculous. I was pleased to find this out, because some of that shit is very, very bad, and knowing they realize this, at least to some extent, makes me feel much better about things. All the dirt about the music industry and its hangers on, by the way, is good stuff. It becomes very clear how bands go from brilliant to embarrassing in the space of one album. (Hint: Letting the music industry tell them what they need to do if they want to make it really big. Also, coke.)

I’d read a couple of popular feminist books recently, and I was surprised to find that the Heart biography was one, too. I don’t know why it surprised me, given their beginnings – perhaps because of songs like “All I Want to Do Is Make Love to You” (which it turns out Ann never liked, thank god; that song is the kind of shit you can’t wait to wipe off your shoe, and even then, you keep smelling it anyway). Ann feels strongly that she was judged by different standards than male rockers were judged by, and she suffered for it, and she resents the hell out of it. That isn’t tricky, as feminist arguments go, but sometimes simple is good. (I was glancing through the Amazon reviews, by the way, and noticed that Ron, an Indiana Republican who can’t spell, is unhappy about the book’s liberal leanings. Life must be frustrating for Ron.)

I got involved with this book, and not just because I spent at least a week reading it (its not exactly tight, and when you’re reading it in spurts of fifteen or twenty minutes a day, it seems endless). Also, I feel that now the Wilsons and I are so close, it’s cold of them to obviously leave out so much of the dirt – because the absence of certain things is palpable. (For instance, despite a decent number of generalized statements about drug use, there are surprisingly few actual anecdotes, making me suspicious. And in the later years, we learn about Nancy’s marriage to Cameron Crowe — and the demise thereof — but there’s almost nothing about what Ann was doing in her personal life over the last twenty years. What up, Ann?)  So, it was a bit of a slog, and a vague slog, at times, but that was all right. Ann and Nancy are likeable, and interesting, and they kick ass.

And I just saw that Rod Stewart has a biography out. God damn it.

Woman All Over

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Women are beaten time and time again into submission, but they always return, or if one women is eliminated, another takes her place. Whatever it is these women stand for, men and their phallicism are fairly powerless in its presence.”
—Anne Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan

Allison in the above quote is referring specifically to Japanese erotic manga of the 1980s and 90s, but her point certainly fits Junji Ito’s horror manga as well. Indeed, Allison’s quote is basically the plot of every one of Ito’s Tomie stories. In the first of these, “Tomie”, from 1987, the titular heroine, a bewitching high school girl, comes on to her teacher, Mr. Takagi, on a school trip. Another student confronts her, and in the scuffle she falls off a cliff and dies. Takagi then orders all the boys to take off their clothes and cut her body into pieces while the girls look out and make sure no one interferes. The boys then dispose of the pieces of her body. Shortly thereafter, though, Tomie miraculously reappears at school — causing several of her murderers to lose their minds.

This is the prototype for all of the Tomie stories. Tomie, it turns out, is a cancerous monster. Her beauty corrupts men, who love her and then attack her, chopping her into bits. Each piece then regenerates (more or less gruesomely) into a new Tomie. As Allison says, Tomie is always murdered and diced and always returns.

In her book, Allison argues that Japanese families during the 1980s and 1990s were strongly matriarchal. Men worked long hours and traveled even longer hours to work; as a result they were effectively absent from the home. Women were in charge of shepherding children through the complicated and rigorous Japanese school testing regime. The mother-son bond then was supposed to function as a lever to propel children into their place in Japan’s resurgent advanced capitalist society. Rather than an Oedipal dynamic, in which boys symbolically reject the mother to join the world of the father, Allison suggests that in Japan boys see mothers as symbolic of the (still very patriarchal) culture. Resentment against hierarchy and limits often manifests not as competition with men, but rather as resentment against women. Allison argues:

The real stress in all this might be less on teh breakage and more on the display: the show of aggression used as a device to ensure the continuity ofa relationship rather than to sever it…. Such “devices” are found in mother-child relations in Japan, where children are indulged in a degree of aggressiveness (hitting, slapping) against their mothers….

Again, it’s not hard to see how this maps onto Ito’s Tomie stories. Tomie is the constant target of sexual and physical aggression — and of physical aggression as sexual aggression. But all of that aggression is her fault; she is the instigator — the uber-feminine manipulating and devouring men.
 

 
In the ero-manga Allison discusses, men get to dominate women in ways which, while not perhaps entirely convincing (those pesky women keep returning!) are still clearly meant to be provisionally satisfying and empowering. In the Tomie stories, the anxieties are the same, but the outcome is (at least from the standpoint of the male ego) significantly bleaker. In “Painter”, for example, the erotic male gaze — surely a major site of aspirational male empowerment and dominance in ero manga — is brutally and explicitly reversed.
 

 
The painter has created a series of portraits of his girlfriend; by gazing at her and commodifying her, he has attained fame, fortune, and dominance. One look from Tomie, though, and that gaze is flipped; suddenly it is not him who has the commodity, but the commodity who has him. At her hypnotic instigation, he jettisons his former model and becomes obsessed with capturing Tomie’s beauty on canvas. He tries and tries and tries, but Tomie — like the education mother, both inspiration and task master — taunts him with his failure. Finally, he succeeds:
 

 
What he has captured is, precisely, an image of the commodity — Tomie as bifurcating product — as monstrous excess thing. Woman’s biological reproduction is conflated with capitalism’s artificial reproductive parthenogenesis. The feminine is nightmare proliferation; the object that subjects the gaze.

Reversing the gaze is often seen as a feminist move; a way to turn the patriarchy’s weapons against it. Tomie does certainly enjoy her power over men (at least the bits of her power that don’t involve her being chopped up into bits.) But overall, the feminine/capitalist uber-mommy isn’t exactly envisioned by Ito as empowering for women. When Tomie’s kidney is implanted in another women, for example, the other woman turns inevitably into Tomie. And another girl who encounters Tomie eventually ends up like this.
 

 
Women’s power for Ito, then, isn’t something that women themselves control. Rather, it explodes from inside of them, distorting their flesh and sending their severed gobbets across the landscape. Female-as-symbol is constantly bursting out of female-as-body, leaving behind a gaping corpse in the shape of a vagina dentata.

That maw is not so much women as feminized capitalism, a beautiful endlessly proliferating fissure. In one of the stories here, Tomie is a high school’s ethics officer, and that seems oddly apropos. She circulates, a fungible locus of power which reinscribes the same social roles over and over, men and women all welded into an organic, replicating mass by the remorseless workings of pleasure, image, violence and desire.

Twilight: The Graphic Novel

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This first appeared at The Comics Journal.

Twilight: The Graphic Novel; Stephenie Meyer and Young Kim; Yen Press;  $19.99; B&W, Softcover; ISBN: 978-0759529434

Twilight isn’t great any more than the original Superman comics are great. Both are essentially empty-headed wish-fulfillment, though differently inflected — in Superman, boys get to imagine that they are strong enough to save everyone; in Twilight, girls get to imagine that their love is so powerful that it magically makes those they care about safe. The day dream is too blatant to be anything but gauche — but the blatancy is also the power. Like Superman, Twilight has figured out how to give its audience exactly what it wants — and the result is mass enthusiasm, fame, fortune and infinite spin-offs.

I’m on my third iteration of the first Twilight novel myself — I read the book, watched the movie, and have now read the graphic novel (or the first volume of it, anyway.) Each has its own charm. The novel has the courage of its convictions, and the not -inconsiderable grace of its own obliviousness. Stephenie Meyer’s vision is melodramatic and often clueless (Volvos and baseball are the height of hip?), but she believes in it as fervently as Siegel and Schuster thought manly men wore their underwear on the outside, and there’s something about such utter faith that makes you sit up and take notice, even if just to exclaim in disgust. Twilight the movie didn’t have that potent naivete, but it made up for it —like the Superman movie before it — with a touch of camp, a sense of humor largely missing from the source material, and, most importantly, drop-dead gorgeous actors.

Twilight the graphic novel is more like the book than the movie. Indeed, reading it, it’s hard to escape the impression that Twilight should have started out as a manga-fied graphic novel in the first place. It’s true that, without Bella’s narration, and with manga’s faster pacing, both character and plot are much more attenuated than in the novel. Traits that are important in the book — like Bella’s clumsiness, or Jessica’s cattiness — are present only as asides in the GN. Similarly, the plot whips by faster than a sparkly vampire running through the forest — one moment Bella shows up in town, the next she sees Edward, and the next, hey, presto, she’d rather die than be separated from him. Overall, the pacing feels so rushed that I wonder whether you’d actually be able to follow the thing if you hadn’t read the book first — though, of course, everyone who buys the graphic novel has already read the book first, so it’s not really that much of a problem.

In any case, following Twilight isn’t necessarily the point— which is why the graphic-novel treatment feels so natural. In this version of Twilight, people and events largely disappear, and what you’re left with is lovely faces exchanging soulful looks in lingering freeze frames of fractured time. I’m not a huge fan of Young Kim’s art, which exists in an uncomfortable halfway zone between mainstream and manga, and which manages to be both slickly anodyne and clumsy — especially in the clunkily transparent speech bubbles. But…you know, slickly pretty is probably what most readers want from this experience, and Kim’s general instincts to show as many eyes in closeup as feasible seems similarly sound. The graphic novel, in other words, is just the juicy bits— a kind of distilled overheated fanfic version of the original. Since Twilight was essentially an overheated fanfic version of itself to begin with, though, that works out fine.

 

The Horror! The Horror!

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I recently watched Audition and Hostel, films famous for their viscerally graphic depictions of torture. I don’t think I flinched once during either of them; I didn’t look away, I wasn’t freaked out, I was unfazed and untrammeled. Needles through the eyes, feet hacked off, genitals severed — go ahead. Doesn’t bother me.

But I did watch one film recently that traumatized me so thoroughly that I almost couldn’t finish it. I covered my eyes; I stopped the playback; I walked away, ejected the disk, and promised myself I wasn’t going to finish it (though I eventually did.)

What was this terrifying, gruesome film you ask?
 

 
Would you believe Rob Reinter’s 1985 romantic comedy, The Sure Thing?

At least since I got through adolescence, I’ve always found sit-com style social embarrassment porn a lot more difficult to watch than anything having to do blood or horror. Watching Walter Gibson (John Cusack) squirm while his writing teacher reads out loud his roommate’s Penthouse Forum letter which he has mistakenly submitted for his composition assignment, or watching Alison (Daphne Zuniga) let herself be goaded into leaning out of a moving car topless — Eli Roth and Miike dream about attaining that level of sadistic ruthlessness.

Romantic comedies aren’t usually seen as sadistic of course. But The Sure Thing makes a good case that they are — or at least that this one is. Part of what’s so painful about watching it is the manifest contempt Reiner has for his characters. In “Say Anything”, Cameron Crowe presents his mismatched pair as lovable and natural — the female overachiever is cool and smart and funny and to be honored for her work ethic; the doofy kickboxing oddball is respected for his sweetness and his humor and his gallantry.

Reiner uses a similar smart girl/comic guy dynamic, but for him it’s an excuse for sneering rather than sympathy. Allison’s intelligence and focus are a constant cause for scorn; even her writing teacher tells her she needs to “live life to the fullest” — i.e., drink more beer and fuck more often. Walt, meanwhile, is given a completely standar-issue fascination with the stars to show that beneath the shallow, callous, frat boy alcoholic there lurk depths. Despite heroic efforts by Cusack and Zuniga, neither of their characters is remotely likable nor, for that matter, even provisionally believable. They fill the space labeled, “romantic lead here”, spouting more or less funny one-liners and/or engaging in cringe-worthy set-pieces, as the script moves them.

With the rise of reality television, I guess everybody now is more or less aware that people love to watch each other suffer extremes of humiliation. I don’t think folks usually connect those paroxysms of delightful social contempt with the pleasures of horror (or for that matter action) movie violence and revenge. But to me they don’t seem all that different — except, of course, that, compared to the gore and gouts of blood, the sit-com embarrassment is a lot more visceral.

Utilitarian Review 11/9/12

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HU News

Joe McCulloch (aka Jog) is going to be joining HU with a monthly column on first-run Bollywood films. Don’t have a bio for him yet (send me a bio, Jog, damn it!) but you can read his past posts for us here.
 
On HU

Featured Archive Post: Domingos Isabelinho on Otto Dix.

Me on nice guys and rape in Audition and Clint Eastwood’s Tightrope.

Me on how Lee and Ditko tilted Spider-Man against pacifism.

Me on why Axe Cop and Johnny Ryan are alike (hint: poop.)

Alex Buchet presents the cartoons of Enrico Caruso.

Voices from the Archive: kinukitty on politics and statistics.

Jog on how nobody likes Bollywood and a closeful of candyfloss.

Me on why there is no first comic, and what is a comic anyway?

Andreas Stoehr on the pain and pleasure of slasher movie sequels.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic, I talk about Phillip Pullman’s Grimm Fairy Tales and pandering to huamnity’s worst desires since 1812.

At Splice today I talk about:

Stefan Goldmann’s delightful electronica for robotic children.

Sneering at sneering at Romney voters.

Why liberals can still be depressed about an Obama election.
 
Other Links

Tim Callahan belatedly replies to the HU 10 best comics poll.

Mette Ivie Harrison has some thoughtful questions about Twilight (scroll down a bit to see them on her home page.)
 
This Week’s Reading

I read John Rieder’s excellent book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, and read a preview for review of Justin Hart’s book about public diplomacy Empire of Ideas. Also reread some Axe Cop and Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit #3, and started Junji Ito’s Museum of Terror volume 1.
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Harry Clarke illustration for Cinderella.

Stab, Rinse, Repeat: The Pain and Pleasure of Slasher Movie Sequels

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Is any other kind of movie as disposable as the slasher sequel? The Roman numerals at the end of their names even code them as factory product, fresh off the assembly line. They tend to be about 90 minutes long, rigidly formulaic, and instantly forgettable. With only a handful of exceptions, their (mostly young, mostly white) casts are interchangeable, and the same goes for their screenplays—“derivative” may be too gentle a word. Yet, thanks to a terminal case of morbid curiosity, I’ve watched dozens of ’em. Devoured ’em like popcorn. They’re not especially gratifying as art or entertainment; in fact, most are hacky, dull, and repetitive. But if you want to see how filmmakers wrestle with restrictive blueprints, low budgets, and fickle audiences… well, these movies have their pleasures.

The Friday the 13th movies, for example, are like Ozu dramas or Mondrian Compositions, these subtle variations on a theme. In this case, that theme is “Jason Voorhees kills everyone,” and part of each sequel’s pleasure lies in identifying those variations. How do you tell the same story over and over again without boring your audience? You tell it in 3D (Friday the 13th: Part III) and constantly thrust pitchforks and harpoon guns at the camera. Or you put it on a boat (Part VIII). Or you put it in outer space (Jason X). Honestly, the Friday the 13th movies could be titled like Friends episodes: The One Where He Has a Bag on His Head, The One Where Corey Feldman Kills Him, The One Where He Fights Carrie, etc., etc. Beyond these cosmetic differences, the films are near-identical, both in terms of plot structure and quality. (The latter metric staying at “not very high” for the duration of the series.)

Taken together, these films constitute a 19-hour saga as rhythmic and ritualized as its ki-ki-ki ma-ma-ma leitmotif. And taking them together, I just have to marvel at their collective contempt for spatial and narrative coherence, not to mention their shameless acts of self-cannibalism. Cat scares, roadside kills, disemboweled swimmers, bodies flung through windows: this is eternal recurrence localized entirely within rural New Jersey. On an individual level, however, each Friday the 13th entry instills a numbing sense of deja vu. My favorites are the most idiosyncratic ones: A New Beginning and Jason Goes to Hell, parts five and nine respectively. The former opens with a Fulci-esque graveyard scene, often gets distracted by the bizarre lives of its secondary characters, and has a twist ending Scooby-Doo would spit on. Jason Goes to Hell, the only Friday the 13th movie of the ’90s, is nothing but twists, retcons, and non sequiturs; it’s certainly not “good,” but at least it’s delirious.

Maybe it’s silly to prize delirium in a subgenre notorious for its homogeneity, but I get so tickled by slasher sequels that indulge in a little weirdness or, heaven forbid, warmth. Like the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, where reality is slippery and death is just a few seconds of shut-eye away. The series itself gets bad quickly, but its gory set pieces stay evocative: teenagers are fused with their motorcycles, reduced to pizza toppings, pulled into video games they can’t win, turned into comic book characters and then sliced to ribbons. It’s “high school sucks and parents don’t understand” blown up to tremendous, gory size. The only way out of this teenage nightmare? Solidarity. Indeed, the Nightmare movies are consistently the most teamwork-oriented of slashers, a refreshing shift from seeing kids picked off one by one until only the “final girl” survives. (This is that “warmth” I spoke of.) In the third and best Nightmare, subtitled Dream Warriors, a little sentimentality even blossoms up through the film’s blood-soaked carapace. This is no mere slasher movie; it’s a Reagan-era blend of afterschool special, action movie, and charnel house.

Of course, I’d be remiss to discuss the slasher cycle without a mention of Halloween’s myriad sequels. But I hesitate, because I kinda pity the series. Less consistent than the Friday the 13ths, less phantasmagorical than the Nightmares, the Michael Myers movies also have the misfortune of following John Carpenter’s original—the model for lean, low-budget horror. If this built-in redundancy sullies even the high-tension Halloween II, then heaven help something like The Curse of Michael Myers, which turns up four sequels later and stars a young Paul Rudd. At that point, the series still has its two mainstays—killing machine Michael and his personal Van Helsing, Dr. Loomis—but has long since squandered any momentum and is trudging through a morass of mythology. (Mythology that, like a sand castle at high tide, will be wiped away by Halloween H20.) Hence the pity: Halloween’s sequels exhibit glimmers of quality, but always retreat back into slasher tradition. As a result, they never carve out any unified identity beyond that deadpan William Shatner mask.

My favorite among the sequels, however, lacks even that. It’s the sui generis Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a conspiracy thriller that replaces Michael with the sinister Silver Shamrock mask company. Whereas Michael killed Haddonfield residents one by one, Silver Shamrock’s Samhain-loving CEO plots to kill all of America’s children in one fell swoop. It’s grim, yes, but laced with satire and as oddball as slasher sequels come. You couldn’t ask for a movie that undercuts viewer expectations more severely. Outside of Season of the Witch, the Halloween moment I treasure the most is the opening scene of #5, The Revenge of Michael Myers. Michael, we learn, has been hibernating ever since his last fake-out death a year earlier. Hibernating in a shack, that is, where he’s nursed by hermit. Once October 31st rolls around, he bolts up, kills the hermit, and walks back to Haddonfield. “Narrative logic?” laughs Halloween 5. “Fie!” Again, this may not be a “good” movie, but those first few minutes would leave even Luis Buñuel scratching his head.

The lesson here? Shoddy screenwriting can be a virtue as long as it makes a slasher movie stand out. Now that I’ve watched dozens of ’em, most of these movies have coalesced into a blur of knives and blood swirling in my head. I feel like I’m running in circles just trying to write about them. So anything memorable at all automatically becomes a strength. (Indelible performances, traces of visual style, and zippy pacing help too.) All of this explains why two franchises, Phantasm and Child’s Play, sop up most of my slasher love. Each has its dud entries, but both are unusually auteur-driven and blessed with spirited villains. Strip away their more macabre elements, and the Phantasm movies are a serialized Boys’ Own adventure; a Manichaean clash set against the desolate Pacific Northwest. There, evil is endemic… but still our heroes resist it, empowered by camaraderie and a sense of humor. The Phantasm movies envision a tiny light in the midst of vast darkness, making them a radical departure from their morally murky slasher brethren.

The Child’s Play movies, on the other hand, start out as conventional slashers. Their killer doll kills, is killed, and then lies dormant until the next sequel. The first three films lean heavily on two assets: 1) the fact that talking dolls are terrifying and 2) Brad Dourif’s bile-spitting vocal work as Chucky. But from there the series metamorphosed, culminating in the beautiful butterfly that is Seed of Chucky. The aggressively postmodern Seed doesn’t merely swallow its own tail—it gobbles it down in big, lusty bites. It turns slasher tropes inside out; it wallows in the a priori absurdity of a killer doll. Hell, it stages a full-scale 1950s melodrama in Jennifer Tilly’s attic. The movie’s vulgar, certainly, and its comedy is erratic, but it has chutzpah. How else could it so brazenly juxtapose old and new, revolution and tradition, pathos and cartoonish gore? As Seed of Chucky demonstrates, the “slasher movie” is only a template, a set of structuring ideas that tends to limit filmmakers’ imaginations but, on rare occasions, can also serve as a springboard for them. It’s a story syntax, a tool, and a resilient one at that; few others have been dissected and deconstructed so thoroughly yet lived to tell the tale. And, for better or worse, I suspect the slasher movie will always keep on rising from the dead.

Sequence Without Origin

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I’ve been reading John Rieder’s excellent book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. There’s lots of fun discussion about nightmare invasion scenarios, lost worlds, time travel, constructed humans, and how imperialists love being imperialists, satirize being imperialists, and more or less constantly freak out about the possibility of being imperialized.
 

 
So maybe I’ll talk about all that at some point. In the meantime, though, Rieder also has some really interesting thoughts on genre. Specifically, he argues that a genre is best understood not through a strict formal definition, but rather as a group of texts that bear a “family resemblance.” The term is from Wittgenstein, and Rieder quotes a further explication by scholar Paul Kinkaid:

science fiction is not one thing. Rather, it is any number of things — a future setting, a marvelous device, an ideal society, an alien creature, a twist in time, an interstellar journey, a satirical perspective, a particular approach to the matter of story, whatever we are looking for when we look for science fiction, her more overt, here more subtle — which are braided together in an endless variety of combinations.”

Science-fiction is then a “web of resemblances.”

If sci-fi is a web of resemblances though, that has some surprising implications. Specifically, if the genre is the web, it can’t exist before the web. There can’t be a point of origin, because a point isn’t a web. For there to be family resemblances there has to be a family. Or as Rieder puts it:

The idea that a genre consists of a web of resemblances established by repetition across a large number of texts, and therefore that the emergence of science fiction involves a series of incremental effects that shake up and gradually, cumulatively, reconfigure the system of genres operating in the literary field of production, precludes the notion of science fiction’s ‘miraculous birth’ in a master text like Frankenstein or The Time Machine. A masterpiece might encapsulate an essence, if science fiction had one, and it certainly can epitomize motifs and strategies; but only intertextual repetition can accumulate into a family of resemblances.

This has some obvious implications for the much-bruted question, What Is a Comic? Like science fiction, definitions of comics (most notably Scott McCloud’s) generally focus on formal elements — a sequence of images, in McCloud’s case. As a result, McCloud includes in his definition things like hieroglyphs, while excluding single panel cartoons.

However, if comics are seen as a web of resemblances, then the effort to look for origins or predecessors or even formal tropes starts to look misguided. Instead, it’s more useful to focus on the center — on what things are accepted as comics, as I put it in a post some time back. Comics are not a formal template; they’re a genre that has taken shape since around the early twentieth century, and which can have, like science-fiction, any number of hallmarks — including (for example) sequences of images, superheroes, cartoony art, funny animals, autobiographical storylines, humor, adventure, serialized formats, word bubbles, panel borders….etc.

No doubt some comics folks flinched up there when I called comics a “genre”. And that does bring up a possible objection. Isn’t it wrong to think of comics as a genre, like science fiction? Shouldn’t they instead be compared to a medium, like prose or art or music? And if so, how useful is Rieder’s discussion of genre? Yes, genres may be webs of relations. But aren’t mediums defined formally? Art is always art; writing is always writing — shouldn’t, then, comics always be comics, whether created by the ancient Egyptians or on the internets?

I think the answer to those question is no, still pretty useful, not really and not really. Rieder does couch his formulation in terms of genre. But it works so well for comics that I think it forces you to either decide comics are a genre, or else to decide that the difference between medium and genre isn’t as great as it tends to seem. Egyptian hieroglyphs, after all, can either be writing, art, or comics, depending on which web of relationship you want to emphasize — and once you start thinking about webs of relationships, it’s in fact pretty clear that they aren’t that closely related to any current medium. Similarly, is a novel a genre? Is it a medium? It depends on how you look at it, surely — meaning, specifically, how you look at the web of relations of which it’s a part, and how those relationships are embedded in time and culture.

Comics straddles the line between genre and medium for various reasons — mostly having to do with the fact that (for reasons of commerce and credibility) it still hasn’t consolidated its cultural position the way science fiction has (as genre) or the way film has (as medium.) It’s betwixt and between, which makes the task of definition somewhat fraught and conflicted. But surely Rieder’s discussion leads to the conclusion that drawing these lines is always fraught and conflicted. A generic designation isn’t about dispassionately fitting a model, but about the more emotional task of finding and claiming one’s relations. The downside is that comics, as an origin and a form, doesn’t really exist; the upside, though, is that that leaves so many possibilities open for what comics can be.