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When Is A Job Not A Job? When It’s In The Arts, Apparently.

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[IMPORTANT UPDATE AT THE END]

Here’s a story for you, and it’s a good one, an uplifting one in this time of constant headlines about this or that art form dying or being in yet another crisis. It’s about a little theater, a small off-off-Broadway space[1] towards the bottom of that Triangle Below Canal, a professional theatre well known for experimental work called The Flea. This little experimental theater nearly went out of business in the wake of 9/11, when Tribeca became a ruined, gray-dusted alien landscape. The Flea was only saved through a mixture of innovative fundraising and striking gold with a hit play called The Guys, a two-hander about a reporter and a firehouse hit hard by the WTC attacks that starred a roster of celebrities, ran for years and helped put the theater back on solid footing.

Now, thirteen years after the theater nearly went out of business, The Flea is thriving. Its resident acting company (called The Bats) numbers around 150 people and produces work constantly. A directing apprenticeship program helps mentor the next generation of directors. The theatre does a variety of programming with a kind of ambition—particularly where cast sizes are concerned—that no one else in town can match on a budget so small as to be almost unimaginable.

It’s a remarkable turnaround, so remarkable that The Flea has managed to raise $18 million to purchase a nearby building and convert it into a new space. The new space will have three state of the art theater spaces available to local companies to rent for cheap[2] and allow The Flea to produce more work. And so far, the plan has received rapturous coverage in the press, helping to raise the profile of The Flea even further[3].

There’s just one little wrinkle in this story, and it’s about The Bats. You know, the resident company of 150 or so early career actors? The ones the Times calls the “beating heart” of the theater? The young, hip, diverse troupe whose work helps ensure the theater is constantly full of young, hip, diverse audiences? Well, they’re unpaid.

*

Is it a problem that The Bats aren’t paid to act? It turns out that answering that question involves answering a whole lot of other sub-questions. Questions like: is acting a job? If it is, is exposure a form of payment, a kind of service in lieu of cash, perhaps? Are there mitigating circumstances that affect any of this? Does it matter that the kind of large scale, ambitious works The Bats often do at The Flea would be impossible if they had to pay their actors? Does it matter that there is the money to build an $18 million new space but seemingly no money to pay artists?

It turns out the answer to those questions change depending on who you talk to, depending on what kind of story you want to tell. The story that tends to get told about the arts leaves out labor issues[4]. If labor—and that no-no topic, pay—are brought up at all, they’re usually in the context of whether or not Broadway performers, musicians and technicians are getting paid too much, despite the fact that, as Terry Teachout discussed in the Wall Street Journal, ballooning marketing costs are largely to blame for increased ticket prices on the Great White Way.  Rarely discussed in the conventional story about theater and money is that salaries are so high on Broadway because those high payments make it possible for artists to remain in a system that, except for their brief tenures in the largest theaters, will ask them to do enormous amounts of work, often for little to no money[5].

The story we tell each other about creative work, meanwhile, is that it isn’t really a job, not really, and that you should be grateful for what you can get for it, even if other people are getting paid off of the work that you do.  This isn’t limited to theater. David Byrne recently talked about this issue and music in Salon, and Molly Crabapple wrote about it in the visual arts for Vice. Many (if not most) literary magazines don’t pay. Many major websites won’t pay for writing if they can get away with it. Hell, I am currently writing this essay about The Flea not paying its early career actors for a website that doesn’t pay its writers. I don’t always see a problem with this. Here at Hooded Utilitarian, no one, including Noah Berlatsky who works much, much harder on it than I, makes any money off of it.  HU is a labor of love (or, for some of you, hate) where we can get together and publish things we’re unlikely to place elsewhere. It’s a site where professionals do some non-professional—but hopefully professional quality— work.

There’s a term for this kind of work—professional grade labor that goes unpaid (and is thus amateur)—and that is “pro-am.” We’ve all witnessed how the internet has created an exploding pro-am writing sector. This has been positive in all sorts of ways. There is more great writing being produced every day, easily available at little to no cost for the reader. And as long as the reader’s costs are the only part of the story you’re interested in, it’s incredible.

I started working as a theatre professional as an actor in my teens. In the twenty years since, I’ve witnessed a similar explosion in the pro-am sector in the dramatic arts. Undergrad and graduate theatre programs have grown in number and size, and the number of paying jobs outside of academia hasn’t kept pace. This dynamic has both depressed wages and fueled vibrant pockets of “independent theatre” in many American cities, as artists have come together to create work for little to no money[6].

Given this reality, perhaps the right question then is… what’s the line? When does something stop being a pro-am labor of love and start being something more problematic?

In the case of The Flea, setting the boundaries of the acceptable is thorny.The Flea exists in a specific context and a specific industry. Early career actors tend to have only a few options available to them, all of them bad. They could self-produce work at great personal cost, even if they convince Uncle Shmuel and Aunt Betsy to kick in some money. They could act in self-produced work, which is something of a crap-shoot, exposure-wise. They could intern at a theater (likely for free), stuff envelopes all day, and if they are very, very lucky get someone to come to a show of theirs from, like, I don’t know, marketing. They could go to graduate school (at, again, great personal cost[7]) and, chances are, end up right back where they were only better trained and in enormous debt. Most perniciously, they could pay to take an “audition workshop” with a casting director (or just as often, a casting director’s assistant) which is really just a pay-to-play audition.

It’s a raw deal, in other words, this life of an early career actor. And it will continue being so for the foreseeable future because—and this should read familiar to any writers out there—the supply of actors so overwhelms the demand for them that the dollar value of their labor has been depressed to, essentially, zero. Given this, what The Flea provides—real exposure, free rehearsal space, frequent opportunities to get up on stage and learn one’s craft through getting work up in front of an audience, a chance to produce work, connections, a real community of fellow artists, and the opportunity to learn various ancillary skills of theater without having to pay a dime—is nothing at which to scoff.

All The Flea asks is that, in exchange for getting to be on stage, The Bats work three hours a week doing tasks around the theatre—more if they’re currently in a show since they’re benefiting more—an exchange that, when you talk to any current Bat seems to make perfect sense. It’s hard to argue that three hours of labor in exchange for the opportunity to be in shows is onerous.  Indeed, The Bats love being Bats, and don’t feel particularly exploited.

Unless you view acting in plays as labor. And how is it not labor? The Flea is charging money for people to see The Bats perform[8]. The institution is building itself based on their work. It’s one thing to accept that early career artists must be paid in exposure.  It’s another thing entirely to accept that they must be paid in exposure and that they must also pay for the opportunity in sweat equity.

That sweat equity is also problematic in ways not often discussed. Three hours is not a lot of work to ask an individual Bat to do per week. But with 150 Bats, each doing at least three hours of work for free, The Flea is picking up at least 450 hours worth of free labor per week. That’s ten full time employees worth of work. While this is clearly part of what makes The Flea able to do what it does on such a shoestring—and helps explain why, despite moving to a three-performance-space complex, they’re only expanding their paid staff by two—it has the unintended side effect of further depressing wages, setting an uncomfortable precedent for how a professional theater should be run[9].

These problems are only heightened by the new $18 million building. Practices that are forgivable amongst the scrappy are less so amongst the well-appointed, as Upright Citizens Brigade and Amanda Palmer have recently learned. Supporters of The Flea I’ve spoken with will tell you that paying actors and buying a new space are separate conversations, different stories. The Flea is currently spending around $17K a month in rent, and the new space will secure their future. Furthermore, it’s nearly impossible to raise money to pay artists properly and much, much easier to get donations for “brick & mortar” projects[10].

While I agree that the new building is necessary and am happy for The Flea’s good fortune, and happier still that off-off broadway companies will have access to three nice, clean, functional spaces at a low rental cost, this is almost too clever by half, this walling off the payment of labor from conversations about budgets, about donations, about the “public good” part of a nonprofit’s mission. It may be true that the problems of The Flea are the problems of the industry that The Flea is in. But that doesn’t mean The Flea shouldn’t show leadership on issues of labor fairness.

After all, The Flea has retooled The Bats before, to the mutual benefit of both the company and the theater. The work hour requirements for The Bats used to be higher, and the jobs more menial. The Bats used to perform in fewer shows, there used to be fewer of the Bats, and, according to current and former members I spoke to, less of a sense of community. The Flea even once charged actors a fee to audition[11], something they’d never imagine doing today. The Flea also hasn’t precluded rejiggering the program again three years from now when the new building is complete.

There are a number of changes The Flea could make that would still allow them to do ambitious large-cast projects with an excited community of performers while showing leadership on labor issues. The Flea could simply begin paying The Bats when they appear in shows. It needn’t be a large amount of money; even a stipend would send the message that the theater values The Bats and takes their art seriously. Being a Bat is often likened to a kind of practical graduate school, a training-by-doing program. Part of that training could—and should—include teaching The Bats that their art is worthwhile enough to be paid for practicing it.

If The Flea does not want to do that, they could drop the work requirement. Or they could work with the actors’ union to turn The Bats into an Equity Membership Candidacy program, a true apprenticeship[12] that ends with the actors well on their way to Union membership[13].

More drastically, The Flea could drop the 1-2 professional shows from their annual calendar and cease calling themselves a professional theater altogether.  This wouldn’t stop them from working with professional artists from time to time, particularly where playwrights and directors are concerned. The model for how The Bats work, a tight knit group of artists who do most of the work around the space including everything from running the concession stand to hanging the lights, is already closer to that of a community theater than it is to anything else. While “community theater” is a term loaded with all sorts of associations, most of them negative, it is where most Americans will go to see (or take part in) large cast, ambitious shows that don’t pay actors.

There will not be any pressure on The Flea (and other, even worse companies) to reform so long as the story we tell about art remains the same. So long as we keep telling each other that exposure is payment, that erecting a new building is the only true sign of success, and that labor issues are irrelevant, so long as we keep writing the same story, glowingly reporting the official line without digging an inch deeper, we’ll be stuck in the same place: Bigger, shinier buildings—or websites sold to AOL—with broke-ass people getting paid less and less to do the creative work that keeps them alive.

UPDATE: Since this article was posted, one of the people I interviewed for it (the one mentioned in the final footnote) e-mailed to say that she neglected to mention during our interview about The Bats and and payment that The Bats  receive a nominal stipend during tech rehearsals, since those are what are known as “10 out of 12s” which is to say, 12 hour rehearsals with two one hour meal breaks. This schedule makes it impossible for Bats to make money elsewhere, like temping or waiting tables etc. while in tech.  The stipend was introduced last year and is variable, but under $50.  This means that, when they appear in shows, the Bats are no longer working for free, which is a positive step.

That said, when The Bats are not working in shows, they are still doing 3 hours a week of uncompensated labor around the space. And I would furthermore argue that less than $50, framed entirely as  a way to make up for hourly wages lost elsewhere during tech rehearsals, is still inadequate. It is far less, for example, than the daily subway fare a Union actor is paid in a showcase production. And the larger issues of how we value the people who actually create art in our culture remain.  But it is a positive step in the right direction and reinforces my hope and belief that The Flea wants to find ways to do right by their ensemble.

[1] Off-off Broadway refers not to theater location but the kind of Union contract it uses when working with members of Actor’s Equity Association (aka Equity or AEA).  Off-off Broadway codes are for New York City theaters under a hundred seats. Off-Broadway is the designation for theaters holding between 100 and 499 souls. Anything larger and you’re in Broadway contract territory.

[2] This is no small thing. Theater space—even a 50 seat shithole—can cost thousands of dollars a week to rent, making the amount of cash young companies have to shell out to produce their work often the largest parts of their budgets.

[3] This is one of the reasons why theaters embark on building campaigns. Often the first season after a new building opens brings more audience members and donors, although I once heard a fundraising consultant say that those new donors and viewers often vanish after that first year or two.

[4] It was highly controversial, for example, when Jason Zinoman made the argument in the New York Times that the Upright Citizens Brigade should start paying at least some of its performers, given that a large and very successful institution had been built off of their labor.

[5] A union actor acting in an off-off Broadway show can make as little as daily subway fare in pay. Union actors working Off-Broadway often make under $500 a week. And that’s when they’re actually working on a show. Things like staged readings don’t always pay. And, of course, there’s the gaps between gig when actors aren’t getting paid at all.

Perhaps this is too much to get into in this space, but this is one of the many reasons why the current theatre system is set up the way it is, with larger “regional” (non-NYC) theaters hiring NYC-based actors. The theaters pay a premium for what is generally considered a more talented labor pool. Actors then make more money on the road both through higher weekly salaries and through subletting their apartments back in New York. It’s a system that screws just about everyone. Working actors pay an enormous premium to have a NYC mailing address. Local actors often won’t even get to audition for shows in their hometowns. And for audiences, to paraphrase monologist Mike Daisey, it’s something akin to going to see your hometown baseball team and finding out they’ve been replaced by a bunch of people who guested on Law & Order a couple of times.

[6] The vast majority of Portland, Oregon’s  theatre scene is made up of pro-am companies, for example. It’s worth saying that some indie theater companies take pride in compensating their artists to the best of their abilities.

[7] Nearly all graduate schools for theatre cost roughly one vital organ per year to attend.

[8] As this audition notice (http://www.theflea.org/blog_detail.php?page_type=4&blog_id=238) makes clear, performing is a lot of work in and of itself. In case you don’t feel like clicking over and reading it, this Bats production asks actors to commit to almost two months of six-days-a-week rehearsals plus two months of 5-days-a-week performances, tying up their schedule from January until May. This would, amongst other things, keep them from getting paying acting work for half of the normal theatrical season.

[9] After all, can you really call yourself a professional theater if the majority of the work in your theatre is done on a non-professional basis?

[10] Most of the money for the new building is coming from the City of New York. By comparison , the National Endowment for the Arts is legally barred from giving money directly to artists to support the making of art.

[11] According to an actor who auditioned during this time and joined The Bats a year later, in the wake of 9/11 they charged prospective Bats $25 to audition, saying that they needed to cover the hole in their budget caused by the terrorist attacks.

[12] The Bats are called volunteers, not apprentices or interns. Were the program called an internship, it could be illegal, as by law interns cannot do the work traditionally done by paid employees and more benefit must accrue to the intern than to the company they work for. These laws are on the books to prevent companies from skirting minimum wage laws, something it could be argued The Bats’ weekly work hours requirement clearly does.

[13] There are almost no professional actors in the non-profit system who aren’t members of Actors Equity Association. You cannot be a member of AEA and be part of The Bats. One Bat I spoke to loved being a Bat so much (and was getting regular acting work that she cared about) that she declined joining the Union so she could stay in the group.

Moon and Bá’s Daytripper: Meditation on Mortality or Plethora of Platitudes?

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I’ve just finished reading the Vertigo (DC Comics) compilation of Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá’s Daytripper, originally published in Brazil in 2010 as a 10-issue comic series. It is visually lush—expertly drawn and featuring a sensuous color palette by Dave Stewart (lettering by Sean Konot) — and attempts to ask good questions about the different routes a life can take, including the potential termination of these routes via depictions of the death of the protagonist, Brás, at key points in his life (page 28, 32, 41…). This conceit allows Moon and Bá to explore the “killing off” of a character’s development, without killing off the character himself, and it raises compelling questions about the places we do or do not find ourselves, the people we choose to embrace or dismiss, the work we choose to pursue or abandon.

My issue with the work, beautiful and promising as it is, concerns the textual, not the visual, elements. Since I actually weight the visual more heavily in graphic works, I try to avoid treating comics as standard text narratives, since this is nearly always a reduction of the comic. For this post, however, I am going to set the images aside, as I find the panels visually expressive, dense (in the best sense), and superior to that of many other comic works. This excellence, however, sharpens my disappointment in the verbal elements of Daytripper, which had the potential to be a complex and clever meditation on mortality, agency, and human interconnectivity. If the assertions of the narrator and the characters were as arresting as the images, we’d have a remarkable work here.

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My chief complaint is this: if you want to take on that ever-present, usually repressed, incessantly itchy problem that we carry with us at all times –I am going to die. I am going to die? I am going to die!—then it seems important to explore it with something more than just seize-the-day, marry-the-girl-already platitudes. Okay, yes, I’m feeling an extra dose of crotchetiness about the marriage and reproduction imperative—really, must everyone partner for life and procreate? Must everyone dutifully replicate himself/herself and augment our bloated population? More pointedly, do those of us who resist or fail to tick these life boxes (married w/children) have no essential purpose in life? Is mating and reproducing essential to being alive, being an adult, creating a life of value? I’m not really sure what’s compelling this fierce trend, but it seems like this basic aspect of our animal life has become the telos of every recent essay, film, and narrative and advertisement I come across (okay, being a little hyperbolic here, but still), and can even be seen in odd ways, for example, the overwhelmingly large number of (sub)genres in the “movies about marriage” Netflix category, which is more than double the total of the second-largest category, “movies about royalty” (see Alexis Madrigal’s fascinating recent article in The Atlantic, “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood”).

Daytripper purports to be “deep.” It reveals—effectively, I’d add—nuances about its protagonist’s Oedipal struggles against a famous father, the melancholia of youth, the attractiveness of risk, the pull of desire, yet when it opines on life or on death, it offers nothing more than received ideas. Here’s an early example: “Then Brás woke up and realized that when you turn that corner, that future you have written and wished for is not always there waiting for you. In fact, it usually isn’t at all what you expected…. Around the corner there is just another big annoying question mark. It’s called life (35).” A little while later, Brás—in love—calls up a nugget of his father’s wisdom: “…[H]e remembers what his father had been saying all these years—and it all made sense (78).” Ahh, splendid. This ought to be good. Brás’ father is a writer, a major novelist who is feted, annually, at a literary gala held in his honor. Brás is also a writer, albeit one of lengthy obituaries at the moment. A writer reflecting on a writing father’s wisdom: certainly, there will be pith. Here’s what follows: “The moment that won’t fade. The moment we all search for. The moment that he found or that found him. Inside he knew. It felt right, and he knew. She was the woman he was going to spend the rest of his life with (78).” Thump.

As Brás dies in various dead-ends, he also ages, coming ever closer to a fulfilling existence—yep, as a husband, and a father—culminating in a clever time-out-of-time depiction of father-son rapprochement: a letter written by his dying father on the eve of Brás’ child’s birth is not received at its intended time, but, instead, years later when Brás himself is an old man diagnosed with a terminal condition (reminding me vaguely of Lacan’s conclusion in his seminar on Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” that a letter always reaches its destination).So, the circumstances are interesting: Brás is now old, it has been many years since the letter was written. What will it say? What does the great man say to the son? This:

Dear Son,

You’re holding this letter now because this is the most important day of your life. You’re about to have your first child. That means the life you’ve built with such effort, that you’ve conquered, that you’ve earned, has finally reached the point where it no longer belongs to you. This baby is the new master of your life. He is the sole reason for your existence…. You’ll surrender your life to him, give him your heart and soul because you want him to be strong…to be brave enough to make all his decisions without you. So when he finally grows older, he won’t need you. That’s becauseyou know one day you won’t be there for him anymore. Only when youaccept that one day you’ll die can you let go…and make the best out of life. And that’s the big secret. That’s the miracle. (242-243)

Sigh. So he writes, unknowingly confirming the life Brás has chosen to lead. All is well, we’re made to believe; Brás has extended his existence properly, and though ever flirting with death (self-inflicted or not), has managed not to succumb. I’m simplifying a bit; the text as a whole challenges some of these platitudes, even—if I am generous—twisting them ironically at points. But it all seems to add up to the usual counsel: young man, put away your toys, your dreams, your wishes for an exciting “future,” and accept the natural order of things. Take up your proper position as an adult (who will die, and knows he will die), a father whose child, whose son, no longer needs him. This is definitely coded male, but is as restrictive as any discourse that casts woman as limited to her reproductive function. Is this the message of the old to the young? Join us, become like us, young men and women, as soon as possible. We have given over our lives to the next generation, and you must do the same. Even if I step out of my nulliparous state and imagine myself a parent hearing this message, I am equally chagrined. Are we solely here to continue the species?

If Moon and Bá want to explore the question of death and our business here in life, it seems to me that they should push harder, tunnel further, scrape away the expected aspects of life (you will find a career, you will find a life mate, you will engender more life) and source their unique individual essences – the mind each has been given (and the fact that they are twins makes this an even more interesting potential gleaning), the one time combination of genes, experience, thoughts, sensations and feelings that animate Fábio and Gabriel and could imbue characters created by them (I know, I know; I’m nearly committing the intentional fallacy). There are millions of husbands and fathers out there; I don’t want to hear their general resumes distilled down to Brás as everyman. I want Brás to startle me with his insights, as the eponymous protagonist of David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp does when reflecting on memory, or as Mark C. Taylor does in his recent philosophical meditation on mortality, Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living (Columbia UP, 2009).

You are my Jean Grey, I am your Cyclops: A History of Marriage in Comic Book Art

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I recently got engaged to my girlfriend. To mark my upcoming nuptials, I assembled a collection of comic book covers that celebrate holy matrimony.

Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor

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Cover by Irwin Hasen

Romantic Marriage #2

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Romantic Marriage #3

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Cover by Norman Saunders

Superman and Lois Lane

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Cover by Win Mortimer

Wonder Woman and Mr. Monster

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Cover by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito

Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane

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Cover by Stan Kaye and Ray Burnley

Batman and Batwoman

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Cover by Curt Swan

Aquaman and Mera

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Cover by Nick Cardy

Mr. Fantastic and The Invisible Girl

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Cover by Jack Kirby

Jimmy Olsen and a gorilla

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Cover by Curt Swan

Young Love #101

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Cover by Jay Scott Pike and Gaspar Saladino

Aunt May and Dr. Octopus

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Cover by Gil Kane

Superman and Lois Lane (again)

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Cover by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Dick Giordano

Donna Troy and Terry Long

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Cover by George Perez

Batman and Catwoman

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Cover by Jim Aparo

Human Torch and Alicia “Skrull Imposter” Masters

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Cover by Sal Buscema and John Buscema

Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson

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Cover by John Romita, Sr.

Cyclops and Jean Grey

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Cover by Andy Kubert and Matthew Ryan

Superman and Lois Lane (third times the charm)

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Cover by John Byrne

Tempest and Dolphin

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Cover by Eric Battle and Norm Rapmund

Storm and Black Panther

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Promotional cover art by Frank Cho

Black Canary and Green Arrow

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Cover by Amanda Conner

Archie and Veronica

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Cover by Stan Goldberg

Archie the Bigamist and Betty

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Cover by Stan Goldberg

Tibet, Superhero Tourist Destination of the World

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Zarathustra came down from the mountain in 1883. He’s Nietzsche’s reboot of the ancient Iranian prophet Zoroaster—which means the first Superman came down from a mountain in Asia. It’s been a popular continent for superheroes ever since. When DC rival Victor Fox needed a Superman knock-off for Wonder Comics in 1938, artist Will Eisener sent Wonderman to Tibet where a turbanded Tibetan was handing out magic rings.
 

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Wonderman couldn’t survive the kryptonite of DC’s court injunction, so for Wonder Comics No. 2 Eisner swapped his colored tights and briefs for a tuxedo and amulet-crested turban. Yarko the Great was one of a dozen superhero magicians to materialize in comic books over the next three years. Nine of them shopped at the same turban store—though Zanzibar the Magician got confused and grabbed a Turkish fez instead. Three of them imported Asian servants too.

The tights-and-brief crowd rallied and sent a half dozen new supermen East, three specifically to Tibet, with Egypt as a solid runner-up. My favorite, Bill Everett’s Amazing Man, is almost as naked as his earlier Speedo-sporting Sub-Mariner, but Amazing Man has the power of the Tibetan Council of Seven on his side. He could also turn into “green mist,” which must have annoyed the hell out of the Green Lama. Jack Cole threw in a Fu-Manchu supervillain too: the Claw attacks America from “Tibet, land of strange religions and mysterious customs.”

When Stan Lee’s boss gave him the same assignment (do what DC is doing), he bee-lined back to Tibet for his and Jack Kirby’s first (and mostly forgotten) attempt at a superhero, the 1961 Doctor Droom. Kirby even gives the formerly Caucasian physician slanted eyes and a Fu Manchu moustache as his lama explains: “I have transformed you! I have given you an appearance suitable to your new role!”

Droom flopped, so Kirby sketched an iron mask and Lee dropped the “r” and, voila!, supervillain Doctor Doom was born. The following year Doom was “prowling the wastelands of Tibet, still seeking forbidden secrets of black magic and sorcery!” Another year and Doctor Strange returns from Tibet as “Master of Black Magic!” Strange also picked up Wong, one of those handy manservants Tibetans hand out with their superpowers. The third Doctor emptied Lee’s Tibetan well, but Roy Thomas and Gil Kane’s Iron Fist kept Orientalism thriving at Marvel into the 70s.

Over at Charlton Comics, Peter Morisi’s Thunderbolt returned from his Tibetan adventures with the standard superhero package. Since Alan Moore’s Watchmen were borrowed from Charlton characters, twenty years later his Ozymandias not only “traveled on, through China and Tibet, gathering martial wisdom” but was “transformed” by “a ball of hashish I was given in Tibet” and next things he’s “Adopting Ramses the Second’s Greek name.” Even the 21st century Batman, as retooled in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, hops over to the Himalayas to learn his chops from yet another monkish mentor. And you’ll never guess where director Josh Trank sends his teen superhuman for the closing shot of the 2012 Chronicle.

The 1930s mystery men loved the Orient too.  Before Walter Gibson’s Shadow emigrated from pulp pages to radio waves, he first “went to India, to Egypt, to China . . . to learn the old mysteries that modern science has not yet rediscovered, the natural magic.” When Harry Earnshaw and Raymond Morgan conjured Chandu the Magician for film serials, they sent their secret agent to India to study from another batch of compliant yogis. And not only did Lee Falk’s comic strip do-gooder Mandrake the Magician pick up his powers in Tibet, his Phantom found his dual identity in the India knock-off nation of “Bengalla” (which magically wanders to Africa in later stories).

Before Doctors Strange, Doom and Droom (not a practice included in Obamacare) earned their degrees in Tibet, Doctors Silence, Van Helsing and Hesselius interned their first. You can add Siegel and Shuster’s pre-Superman vampire-hunting Doctor Occult to the list of eligible providers too. Like those turban-obsessed magicians, these world-touring physicians are armed with Oriental knowhow.  Algernon Blackwood’s Silence was a 1908 mummy-battling best-seller, cribbed from Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula.  Stoker’s Van Helsing is an expert on “Eastern Europe” and labels his vampire nemesis “a man-eater, as they of India call the tiger who has once tasted blood of the human.” Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 Dr. Hesselius hunts vamps too, but his first patient is an English reverend driven to suicide by visions of “a small black monkey” caused by his addiction to the “poison” green tea imported from China, ever the land of strange religions and mysterious customs.

Since none of the doctors bother to mention their mentors, the ur-guru award goes to Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 Kim. While no superhero, Kim is the prototypical colonial adventurer, and Kipling supplies him with his very own “guru from Tibet,” one who conveniently needs an English boy (for some reason Asian kids won’t do) to achieve his life-long spiritual quest. Kim in turn treats the guru “precisely as he would have investigated a new building or a strange festival in Lahore city. The lama was his trove, and he purposed to take possession.” Which soon became official policy for all aspiring superheroes trawling the Orient for superpowers. Kim and his guru even prefigure Batman and Robin—only reversed, since Asian mentors are just like underage sidekicks.

Despite Kim’s Superman-like influence on the genre, even Kipling has his predecessors. The first superhero to pinch his powers from an obliging Oriental is Spring-Heeled Jack. The masked Victorian used to leap through a dozen plays, penny dreadfuls, and dime novels. I like the Alfred Coates 1886 version. Jack’s dad reaps his fortunes in colonial India, and Jack returns to England with the workings of a “magical boot” that “savoured strongly of sorcery.” Jack “had for a tutor an old Moonshee, who had formerly been connected with a troop of conjurers—and you must have heard how clever the Indian conjurers are. . . Well, this Moonshee taught me the mechanism of a boot which . . . enabled him to spring fifteen or twenty feet in the air.” That old Moonshee (Jack must mean “munshi,” an Urdu word for writer that the Brits decided meant all clerks) is the first incarnation of Wonderman’s turbaned Tibetan.

The endlessly exotic Orient, the planet-spanning ring of Britain’s 19th century frontier. A superhero is the ultimate colonialist, seizing his fortunes in faraway lands and shipping them home to maintain his nation’s status quo, its global supremacy. It used to be the British Empire, then the American, but superheroes always serve as the imperial guard.

While Eisner’s imaginary Tibetan was handing out magical treasure in 1938, real Tibetans were arguing national autonomy with China and rights of succession with warring regents. Unlike Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the actual Zoroaster did not declare, “God is dead.” He was all about exercising free will in the service of divine order and so becoming one with the Creator. I’ve not read any of his surviving texts, and I seriously doubt Nietzsche did either. I’ve also never set foot in Asia—though I did gaze at it from a cruise ship docked in Istanbul, and that’s a lot closer than most comic book readers ever get.
 

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[For more on this topic, my related essay, “The Imperial Superhero,” appears in the new PS: Political Science & Politics, as part of an eight-article symposium on the politics of the superhero.]

Don’t Post So Close To Me

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As neoliberal logics enter more and more institutions, what it means to have civil rights may be gradually shifting. In her introduction to Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, Carol Greenhouse has pointed out that under neoliberal logics, the language of rights is increasingly used to sustain markets. Yet as anyone who has paid attention to recent arguments about government surveillance and privacy, it is not only the language of rights that is used to sustain markets. The very concept of rights is being revised to sustain markets, even in cases that seem too minor to require this imposition of neoliberal logic, such as when courts decide cases of wrongful dismissal. There is a category of person that in the United States has become one of the canaries in the coal mines for this process – K – 12 public school teachers. There are an increasing number of U.S. legal cases involving wrongful dismissal that address how teachers use new media. I am interested in how courts deal with the fact that teaching, along with many other jobs, is the kind of job in which sometimes teachers complain about their students and about the job itself. Teachers sometimes say things about their six-year old students such as “I am not a teacher – I am a warden for future criminals!” Teachers have been saying such things for many years, often wearily in their living rooms or a bit furtively in the school parking lot, having looked around first to make sure that there is no one who can overhear. Since 2006, they have also been typing such statements into their status updates on Facebook. When teachers do this on Facebook in the United States, it turns out that that they risk being fired. “My students are the future criminals of America,” or some such utterance, apparently is not something a teacher who wishes to remain a teacher says using new media. And sometimes, after the school system fires them, they or the union representing them, will sue, often pointing out that teachers are citizens, and saying unkind things about one’s students should be protected as a matter of free speech. In short, these legal cases are moments in which the U.S. courts reflect upon what it means to speak like a public school teacher, and adjudicate whether one’s First Amendment rights have or have not been violated because of one’s employment status.

Why teachers? I think that there are a couple of reasons why teachers and their utterances have become a focus of attention in the contemporary moment. First, teachers, because of the nature of their jobs, are constantly having to negotiate the unsettling properties of new media. They are constantly interacting with school administrators, fellow teachers, parents and students, all of whom have their own informal solutions to the communicative dilemmas that new media can pose to communities of users. Teachers are continually engaging with differently structured audiences, and often doing so using technologies that erase the boundaries between audiences – either literally merging audiences as Facebook’s interface often does, or through the ever-increasing ease of circulating words, as in the technological infrastructure of email and cell phones that enable people to forward emails and text messages so quickly and effortlessly.

At the same time, in the United States at the moment there is an ongoing effort by politicians and government bureaucrats to privatize education. Those funding education have increasingly been arguing that market-based solutions provide the best and most effective strategies to educate students. This involves breaking teachers’ unions, which are seen as preventing these market-based solutions and protecting inept teachers. The cases that come before the court are often cases in which teachers had tenure, and so were able to sue the school districts for wrongful dismissal, although there is in fact one case in which a teacher’s contract was simply not being renewed, supposedly for a rather turgid political poem he posted on Myspace months earlier. In short, by looking at teachers, I am turning to a moment in which audit culture meets the surveillance society.

This intersection has become particularly acute since 2006, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Garcetti vs Ceballos that a public employee’s free speech is not protected under the Constitution, although a citizen’s free speech is. Ceballos, a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, believed that there were substantial errors in an affidavit used to convince a judge to issue a search warrant. He wrote a memo suggesting that the criminal case be dropped, and ended up testifying in court after being subpoenaed by the defense counsel. He then faced what he considered retaliation at work for doing so – he was demoted, his cases were transferred to other less experienced colleagues, and he was barred from handling any future murder cases. The Supreme Court ruled that the salient question was whether Ceballos spoke as a public employee or a citizen, and in this instance, it was clear that he spoke as a public employee. As a public employee, he was not guaranteed protection under the First Amendment, his rights to free speech were only protected when he spoke as a citizen. With this ruling, the Supreme Court overturned 42 years of court decisions that had declared a public employee’s speech was in fact protected, now one’s job could determine what one was allowed to say. And subsequent relevant court cases reflect this changes, as the decisions now tend to revolve around how to define the defendant – as a citizen, public employee or simply employee. Other critical legal scholars have pointed out that this decision is extending a neoliberal logic by allowing employers to circumscribe someone’s rights to free speech when they define a position’s responsibilities. In these cases, one’s right to free speech is determined by one’s manager’s definition of the job. And this is in the background when courts decide cases about how teachers can use new media.

There are two primary ways in which new media is involved when teachers are fired. The first, and still most common situation, is when a teacher inappropriately sleeps with or sexually harasses a student or co-worker. In these cases, free speech is not an issue. The case revolves around whether or not the sexual misconduct did in fact take place. The court decision will mention people’s new media use, and primarily will discuss with some detail the frequency of contact between the teacher and student or co-worker. Tennessee vs. Binkley: “Those records indicated that the Defendant and C. B. exchanged messages with one another 841 times between March 10, 2008, and September 23, 2008 with some of those texts occurring as late as 1:00 am.” Frequency and time of communication here is part and parcel of court evidence of inappropriate interactions. In these cases, it is the relationship between the teacher and defendant and others that is at issue, and their use of a particular medium is relevant only inasmuch as the medium itself can enable police to trace how often and when contact was made.

But teachers also post things on Facebook or MySpace in which the utterance itself is considered the reason for firing someone, it is violation enough in itself, not merely a trace of other inappropriate practices. I want to turn to a case in North New Jersey that received quite a bit of media attention as well. In late March 2011, a teacher posted as a Facebook status update the following: “I’m not a teacher — I’m a warden for future criminals! They had a scared straight program in school — why couldn’t i [sic] bring 1st graders?” The Scared Straight program brings former inmates to talk to students who are 12 years old or older at schools, so when the teacher mentions being a warden, she is also implicitly referring to the program that took place at her school. In the hearing, the teacher explains her word choice in these terms. She had set up privacy settings for her Facebook profile, so only her 300 Facebook friends could see this status update. Her then principal was not one of her Facebook friends, but her former principal was. When her former boss saw the status update, he decided to contact her current principal by email, explaining he was troubled by the post, and cutting and pasting her status update into his email message. Her current principal then found a way to print out a copy of the actual Facebook profile and update, before meeting with the teacher and asking “what were you thinking”? After suspending her, news of her Facebook post circulated among parents and students, sparking a wave of protests. Her comments were interpreted as racist, in part because she had recently been transferred from another more affluent school to a poorer school where her first grade class was entirely comprised of African-American and Latino students. She had never been reprimanded before, but because of this Facebook post, she was dismissed. She was a tenured teacher, and so when she sued, claiming wrongful dismissal, her case went before an administrative law judge.

The judge’s decision reveals a deep concern with how best to conceptualize the role from which the teacher typed, as well as a critique of the teacher’s presentation of self, and in particular, of contrition. The judge describes at some length the ways in which the teacher apologizes, and why her words and lack of emotion did not count as a proper apology. The teacher seems to hold a different media ideology than the judge. The judge writes: “At the hearing, [the teacher seemed still unable to genuinely understand why her Facebook posts had engendered such an extreme reaction. But she disagreed with [the principal’s testimony that she did not apologize to him. [The teacher] stated that she told [the principal] that she was “very sorry that this caused trouble.” I offered [the teacher] an opportunity to elaborate on the reasons for her remorse by asking her why she apologized to [the principal]. [The teacher] reiterated that it was because she “was sorry for any fuss” her Facebook post created, and for the problems it created for her principal and herself.” The judge finds this apology unsatisfying, and later in her decision explains what the teacher should say – what a good teacher must utter in these circumstances: “If this was an aberrational lapse in judgment, a reaction to an unusually bad day, I would have expected to have heard more genuine and passionate contrition in [the teacher’s] testimony. I needed to hear that she was terribly sorry she had insulted her young students; that she loved being their teacher; and that she wanted desperately to return to the classroom. I heard nothing of the sort. Rather, I came away with the impression that [the teacher] remained somewhat befuddled by the commotion she had created, and that while she continued to maintain that her conduct was not inappropriate, she was sorry others thought differently.” In sum, it is not only [the teacher’s] Facebook posts that demonstrates she does not understand the correct ways to speak as a teacher, it is also her performance in the hearing – she continues to refuse to perform her role as a concerned and caring teacher properly according to the judge.

The judge is then faced with a dilemma – how best to explain that a Facebook post is not an issue of free speech. And here she resorts to a neoliberal argument to explain why free speech is not a relevant principle here. She argues that the teacher is like any other employee, obligated to the school as her employer to treat her customers well – and in this case the students and parents are defined as the customers. Businesses are supposed to be protected by law from employees’ rude speech to customers, and the judge determines that this Facebook posting violates this legal protection, and so the teacher can be legally dismissed.

These court cases become moments in which what it means to speak like a teacher are being both evaluated and policed. For the most part, when teachers speak in ways their schools and local communities judge inappropriate, these are dilemmas resolved more informally by principals and school boards. Courts are less frequently involved. However, the court cases themselves have a larger impact, teachers and prospective teachers have started policing their own new media presence. They are gradually realizing that their comments on social media are not only scrutinized, but can be a basis for dismissal. They become more and more aware that their individual understanding of how a particular medium structures what is or is not public speech must give way to a larger societal perception of what counts as public speech and what counts as private speech. In the process, they come to realize that the jobs one has determines the civil rights one has, that one’s relationship vis-à-vis business defines one’s speech far more than one’s relationship as a citizen vis-à-vis the state.
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Ilana Gershon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University.

Best Essays I Wrote In 2013

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I thought I’d list 10 or so of the non-HU essays I wrote this year I was happiest with. So here goes, in no particular order.

At the Atlantic I wrote about rape and rape fantasy and Nancy Friday’s Secret Garden. I think this is my favorite thing I wrote this year.

At Slate I wrote about 7 Miles A Second by David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger, and Marguerite Van Cook, in which I talked about the way the book links marginal pulp trash and marginal sexual identities.

At Public Books I contributed to a great 50 Shades of Grey roundtable,in which I argued that the novel fetishizes incompetence.

At Salon I had a long two part piece on Orson Scott Card’s defense of genocide, first in Ender’s Game, then in Speaker for the Dead.

At the Chicago Reader I had a kind of diptych about comics in the gallery. First on the MCA’s anxious and mediocre Dan Clowes show, then on the quietly glorious MCA Lilli Carré” show.

At Reason I wrote about the history of school reform failure,as discussed in Jal Mehta’s great book The Allure of Order.

At the Atlantic I had a piece about not having sex in college and being a virgin for a really long time. And sort of as a follow-up to that I had a piece about how the male gaze gets men at Splice Today.

I had two pieces at the Atlantic on 12 Years a Slave, one on the way it refuses to make slavery about masculinity, and one about slave narratives and truth, or the lack thereof.

At Wired I wrote about the music bargain bin and mysterious Japanese fusion.

And I wrote about different versions of I Can’t Make You Love Me at Splice Today.

Droll Hunting

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Imagine if crossed the Blair Witch Project with This Is Spinal Tap. Now set it in Norway with trolls — and you’ve got Trollhunter.

You may be asking yourself, do we need another Blair Witch knock-off? Do we need another Spinal Tap knockoff? Even together? Even in Norway? And the answer to all of your questions would be no. No, not really. Like the trolls it purports to document, the film’s existence is both superfluous and kind of ridiculous.

That’s not to say that the film is bad, exactly. Just that there’s something oddly mysterious in its unmotivated lumbering.

It’s possible something crucial has been lost in the translation from the Norwegian. Or, alternately, Trollhunter may suffer from excess of appetite. The eponymous government troll hunter Hans (Otto Jesperson), in one of his many quirky troll anecdotes, discusses a troll he saw who was so dumb it tried to eat its own tail. The movie itself seems to miss the mark in a similar way. It tries to be comedy; tries to be horror; staggers back and forth a little and then, getting into the swing of it, settles for just roaring a lot and knocking things over.

(Spoilers follow, if you care about that sort of thing.)

The dilemma is perhaps best summed up during what’s probably supposed to be an emotional highpoint; the death of one of the teenaged main characters three-quarters of the way through the film. The protagonists and Hans are trapped in a cave with marauding trolls. The doomed kid (the cameraman), in a panic, frantically rubs disgusting troll stink all over himself, hoping to hide his scent. Unfortunately, though, he is, as it turns out, a Christian, which means that the trolls can smell him. Shortly thereafter, he’s eaten, leaving his companions to wail at the uncaring heavens, “Why didn’t he just say he was a Christian!”

So that’s the joke, and it’s moderately funny in a ha-ha-we’re-all-atheists-here kind of way. It could almost be a really low-key Monty Python sketch — except that up to this moment, the dead character has been treated as an actual person, rather than a goofy gag line. Not that there’s a ton of character development or anything, but for purposes of the previous horror-movie-running-away-and-screaming, there’s been at least some effort to pretend that what happens to this guy matters. And then, all of a sudden, he’s just thrown away. And then you see everyone else grieve for a minute or so…and then they stop, and get a replacement cameraperson (who’s a Muslim, so trolls probably can’t smell her — only Christians, not Muslims. Get it?) The whole thing just ends up being not just crass, but unbelievable. This kid just died; there’s no investigation? No explanation to the police? The other teenagers don’t stop and say, you know, our friend just died; screw the trolls, I’m headed home?

Instead, on they go, trundling from set piece to dry-humored set piece. Hans dresses in armor to fight a troll; Hans explains that the trolls’ extra heads are just growths designed to impress other males and attract females; Hans talks about the trauma of killing troll infants; a veterinarian explains the improbable biology of trolls turning to stone when sunrise hits them. It’s amusing enough, and the trolls themselves, as special effects, are goofily effective. Over the entire film, though, the archness becomes tedious. The Last Exorcism, with its hand-held camera horror, was not a great movie, but it cared about its main character, about its genre, and about the story it had to tell. This Is Spinal Tap was a goof, but it clearly had great affection for the hapless band it parodied. Trollhunter, in comparison, has no real characters, no real story, no real point —just extended snickering and occasional enjoyable special effects.

In a way, it almost makes you hope for the inevitable English-language remake. If somebody cares about the thing enough to purchase the rights, maybe they’ll care enough to give the film some kind of direction. Laughing at the trolls is all right in limited doses, but if this is going to work, someone out there needs to love them a little as well.