On HU
Short week this time out because of the holiday.
Featured Archive Post: Richard Cook with a history of Storm in covers.
Me on Charles Dickens fan fiction and how fan fic and criticism and art are all the same.
Chris Gavaler looks at panels and framing in comics.
Robert Stanley Martin with on sales dates of comics from March and April 1951.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Playboy
— I ranked every character in Quentin Tarantino’s movies. 16000+ words for 183 characters.
—I had a list of this year’s biggest whitewashing casting controversies.
At the Guardian I wrote about
—erasing the lesbian origins of the Bechdel test.
—casting a black Hermione and the confused racial themes of Harry Potter.
At Quartz I wrote about race in Hateful Eight.
At Random Nerds I wrote about the Last Days of Ms. Marvel and apocalypse from the margins.
At the Los Angeles Times I wrote about this year in outrage.
At Splice Today I wrote about
re Tarantino characters, what a wonderful idea! (On the other hand, good lord, how long did that take you?!) Especially love how you start by immediately disposing of six of the most discussed cases (all of whom richly deserve it, of course).
Not sure I would have put #6 below #5, but I guess #5 has to be pretty great, or the movie in which he’s the best character wouldn’t be Tarantino’s 4th best movie.
I find the choice of #3-4 both admirably gutsy and comforting. I thought I was the only one!
#1 is of course indisputable.
I think IB is Tarantino’s best, though it’s very close with JB. 5 and 6 were tricky, no doubt; Max is a great character. I wouldn’t die on a hill which put him ahead of Landa.
I was thinking it’s really a shame Tarantino couldn’t have gotten Pam Grier to play Django. I think she could have saved that movie (not least because gender swapping the plot would have helped a lot.) I was really struck on rewatching by how useless Jaime Foxx is. He’s just so flat and uninteresting in that role. Really a missed opportunity.
I’m glad someone else loves Arlene and Abernathy. Death Proof is Tarantino’s most underrated film, I think.
The idea for the piece actually came from my editor, Marc Bernardin… It’s hard to say how long it took me…I worked on it over three weeks or so, probably? There was rewatching everything, and then writing it…and obsessing over the ranking. It was fun though. Marc originally wanted me to do some of the films Tarantino had written too…but my interest in rewatching those didn’t exist, basically, so I kept it to his directing efforts.
Pam Grier certainly could only have helped and not hurt – great idea – but I wonder if DU (which just looks worse and worse to me in retrospect, even as IB looks better and better) wasn’t doomed in any case by Tarantino, though he clearly wants to be, at the end of the day just not being very interested in slavery (and/or movies about slavery).
I don’t know if it was lack of interest…I think the lack of films about slavery gave him trouble. IB works off of WWII films, of which there are a ton, whereas the main trope of slavery films is erasure; it’s a topic that’s dealt with by ignoring it. I think that made it hard for Tarantino to quite know what to do.
One more – I’m nibbling my way through that list from both ends. So far, among many interesting points, this is particularly excellent: “The best part of Mr. Orange, maybe, is that you don’t really know why he confesses at the end — and the fact that it’s not exactly out of character, because you don’t have enough information to know exactly who his character is.”
I know one person who would have disagreed with you about #1: Malcolm X.
He denounced with savage sarcasm and contempt the Plantation “house Negroes” who identified strongly with Massah and betrayed their brethren.
His description of such could have matched Tarantino’s take in the slightest detail.
Uh…I think you’ve flipped the list, B. Stephen is my least favorite Tarantino character, not the best one.
No, I got that straightaway. What I’m saying is that Malcolm X would’ve found Stephen to be a plausible and relevant character.
Ah, okay. I guess that’s possible. I don’t agree with Malcolm X on a lot of things. His emphasis on self reliance could lead him to blame black people for their oppression in certain ways. He’s thought of as radical, but there’s a sense in which he’s a heir to Booker T. Washington’s conservative black tradition. And while I have respect for that tradition, I think the analysis is ultimately flawed…and Stephen’s an example of its worst aspects (which are not coincidentally some of the worst aspects of racist white ideology as well.)
One note in the white washing piece on playboy you state Miles Morales has been around for 15 years, when the character was created in 2011.
Gah! I was sure he’d been around longer than that. Duh.
This is, maybe, off-topic, but I just read your piece you posted on your Twitter feed (on the side) about rape/revenge and gender experimentation. I also just saw Hateful 8 last night, and I started thinking about how Marquis’ story of raping and killing the General’s son retroactively frames Marquis’ story as a rape/revenge. He describes this brutal, awful coercive rape to the General, and then likens the promise of a blanket to the Union uniforms, “that you chose not to acknowledge” when the general slaughtered black Unionists. The message is pretty clear, that the General fucked black people, so a black man fucks the General’s son, and also vicariously rapes the General, who cowers behind his blanket, and gets killed by the black man’s gun when he tries to assert masculinity, thoroughly feminizing the General.
There’s not really a point to this rambling, it just reminded me how you’ve argued that black men (and, more generally, men of color) are often encouraged to identify with rape victims.
Tarantino’s definitely playing with rape/revenge tropes…not least in the way he frames them as tropes. It’s not clear that the Marquis’ story is true.