Superheroes conflate goodness with hitting things. For the superhero genre, the best person in the world is the one with the greatest power; beating evil is a matter of hitting it harder. A world in which force and goodness are one and the same and both always triumph is a world in which you’re essentially worshipping force — and the worship of force is, as Richard Cooper pointed out last week in Salon, a good thumbnail description of fascism. No surprise, then, to find that early superhero tropes have roots in pro-KKK pulp novels and discourses around eugenics. A fantasy of eugenic superiority and righteous violence can give you Hitler or Superman, either one.
Chris Yogerst at the Atlantic objects to this characterization of super-heroes on the grounds that superheroes are, in fact, righteous and use their power wisely. Or as he says, “The “fascism” metaphor breaks down pretty quickly when you think about it. Most superheroes defeat an evil power but do not retain any power for themselves. They ensure others’ freedom.” But, of course, if you were making fascist propaganda, the fascist heroes wouldn’t be portrayed as power-hungry whackos. They’d be portrayed as noble and trustworthy. Batman’s a good guy, so it’s okay that he has all-pervasive surveillance technology in the Nolan films, because we know he’ll use it for good ends. Tony Stark is awesome, so when, munitions manufacturer that he is, he makes a superweapon, we know it’s fine because he’ll use it well. And all those superheroes can act outside the law and beat people bloody without trial, or even torture them, because they are on the side of good, just like the KKK can operate outside the law in Birth of a Nation because they are on the side of good. (Yogerst also argues that superheroes can’t be fascist because they often mistrust the government — as if there’s no history of fascist vigilantism, in Germany or here.)
In fact, as Yogerst and Cooper both acknowledge, there’s a long history of superhero comics criticizing the superhero genre specifically because of the fascistic way it links the good and the powerful. Back in the 1940s, almost as soon as the superhero genre was created, William Marston and Harry Peter created Wonder Woman as an explicit repudiation of what they saw as a male glorification of violence. Wonder Woman preached peace, and worked to convert her foes in lieu of (or sometimes in addition to) battering them senseless. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen presents superheroes as violent lawless bullies and megalomaniac monsters. The film Chroniclehas a teen with superpowers who picks up on the rhetoric of eugenics, with disastrous results. Chris Ware (in Jimmie Corrigan) has a Superman/God figure who acts as a violent ogre/bully; Dan Clowes (in The Death Ray) presents vigilante violence as a kind of adolescent fantasy leading to murderous psychopathy.
On the one hand, you could see the fact that this critique is so prevalent as evidence that it’s true; if so many creators over such a long period of time have seen the link between superheroes and fascism, and have questioned the equation of the powerful and the good, then that critique must have some merit. On the other hand, though, if so many superhero stories warn of the conflation of the powerful and the good, is it really fair to say that superhero comics always promote that particular fascist link? Superhero critique and parody is, and has just about always been, a central part of the superhero genre — so much so that Cooper’s essay can be seen not as an attack on the genre, but rather as an example of the genre itself. When he says, “Maybe one day we will get the hero we need: one who challenges rather than reinforces the status quo,” you could argue that superhero narratives have been doing that for a long time — and that his essay in fact uses superheroes to do just that.
Superhero narratives, then, are about fascism, and the glorification of violence as the good. But being about those things doesn’t necessarily always mean they endorse those things. Some, like the Nolan Batman films, seem to; others like Chronicle very much don’t; still others, like Iron Man, may go back and forth. Cooper and Yogerst correctly identify some of the key concerns of the superhero genre, but they both err in suggesting that those concerns have a single meaning. It would be more accurate to say that one thing superhero comics do is think about the relationship between the good and the powerful, sometimes equating them in a fascist way, sometimes criticizing the tendency to equate them, and sometimes examining that equation. The genre is one way we think about fascism — which is, no doubt, why it was so popular in World War II, and why it has had its recent, post-9/11 resurgence.
I participated in the Splice Today 2013 music poll, but I thought I’d put my top ten list up here as well. I reviewed most of them one place or another; links are provided. Feel free to put your own picks in comments!
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Who was the historical Jesus? Recent studies have razored the verifiable facts down to a skeleton so thin I made the mistake of suggesting at a dinner party that there’s not enough evidence to assume a real Jesus ever existed. Isn’t it just a question of faith?
This did not make me popular with the religion professor across the table. She cited the usual witnesses, Josephus, Tactus, Pliny, all nice guys but a bit flimsy on cross-examination. It’s tricky when you see just how many Christs (it’s not a name but a title, “the messiah”) were wandering Roman-occupied Israel during the first century. Add the even longer tradition of pagan godmen born of virgins who die for us and are reborn, and Jesus may be the most rebooted superhero in history.
But if Jesus wasn’t the first self-sacrificing demigod to save the world, he’s by far the most influential. It doesn’t take a biblical scholar to recognize other family resemblances: a Jew found by Egyptians, a Kryptonian by humans; a human reared by apes, fairies, or elves, a wizard by muggles, a king by backwater nobles, the son of God by Jews. The boy is always fated to grow up extraordinary: prophet, Man of Steel, jungle lord, Santa Claus, Voldemort-slayer, King of England, God. Movie directors also love to shoot their spandex godmen in crucifix-evoking poses, Superman especially (Smallville, Superman Returns, Man of Steel), and a Last Temptation motif runs through the screen genre too (Superman II, Spider-Man 2, The Fantastic Four, The Dark Knight Rises, The Wolverine).
There’s enough written on the historical Jesus to crash a Kindle, but the New and Improved Testament of Superman would be simpler. Did a historical Clark Kent ever walk the Earth? Interpretations fall into three camps:
1) Literalists accept the claims of the canonical Media as absolute: Clark was an extraterrestrial with supernatural powers dedicated to humankind.
2) Historicists analyze both canonical and non-canonical Media in search of the so-called authentic Clark, a human being of purely naturalistic ability around whom followers later developed legendary tales.
3) Mythicists reject that any Clark, human or extraterrestrial, existed, arguing that early Superman worship was actually an adaptation of pre-existing practices common to the era.
Literalism dominates popular culture. A 2012 Rasmussen poll found that 86% of Americans believe Clark Kent walked among us, and 77% believe he was resurrected after his battle with Doomsday. While vaguely aware of the academic controversies surrounding the historical Clark, the average comic book reader would never question Superman’s extraterrestrial origins and powers. Literalists prefer the traditional assumption that Superman Media were created through infallible inspiration and that dissecting long-cherished productions is an offense to followers. But no belief system, no matter how deeply ingrained in a cultural psyche, is exempt from intellectual examination. Believers should be willing to combine the faith of their convictions with the rigor of impartial analysis.
Looking first at canonical Media, both Historicists and Mythicists make much of the fact that Superman Adventures contain a lot of internal contradictions. Was, for instance, the infant Clark ever placed in an orphanage? The Adventures According to Max show that he was, but Adventures According to George include no orphanage and depict only the Kent foster parents finding and raising the Superman child. Max never even mentions the Kents. Some Literalists explain the inconsistency by citing Jerome & Joe, arguably the oldest of the Media, when the Kents deliver the foundling to an orphanage and then return to adopt him. Reliance on Jerome & Joe, however, points out other contradictions. Superman’s adoptive mother—Martha in the other Media and in most Literalist ceremonies—is Mary here.
The Media is also inconsistent regarding superpowers. Although tradition maintains that Superman always had the ability to fly, Jerome & Joe list no such power, and Clark’s propensity to “hurdle skyscrapers” and “leap an eighth of a mile”—from the earliest version of the Superman creed still repeated by followers today—implies the opposite. The creed itself has undergone multiple changes, and even DC Entertainment, that bastion of superhero fundamentalism, acknowledges that the addition of “and the American way” to Superman’s pledge to fight for “truth and justice” is an interpolation into George, as demonstrated by the phrase’s absence in the otherwise identical Max edition (Max is assumed to be older because later media tend to expand rather than condense earlier sources).
A study of non-canonical Media, or Apocrypha, raises further issues. While The Lost Episodes of Psuedomax can be dismissed, more has been made of the largely forgotten Adventures According to Christopher. The assertion that George and Christopher are the same creator (based mostly on the misreading of “Reeve[s]” as a surname rather than a title) is rejected by most scholars, but the video still challenges many elements of the tradition. Literalists cite it as an independent source supporting the general narrative of the canonical Adventures, but the Christopher depiction of Krypton varies radically with George and lends support to the growing consensus that all accounts of Superman’s planet of origin are conjectural.
Despite annual re-enactments of the baby Superman’s escape from doomed Krypton in his father’s rocket and the tearful farewell of his self-sacrificing biological parents, there’s little support for the tale’s authenticity. Only George in the Superman Media dramatizes it. Jerome & Joe and Max mention only the fact of the planet’s destruction and the arrival of the rocket on earth. Not only may Superman’s biological parents be inventions, but even the name of the planet is suspect (Krypton, or “Crypt-on,” translates “on or from the unknown”).
The most famous Apocrypha are the much maligned Infancy Adventures. These psuedographics, many attributed to the heretical Super Friends cult, feature a pre-adolescent Clark, or “Superboy,” engaging in acts clearly derivative of the canonical Adventures. Literalist tradition maintains that Clark Kent’s powers manifested with puberty. The Infancy Apocrypha pose no direct threat to Literalism, or even Historicism, but Mythicists use the tales to highlight temporal gaps in the biography. Neither Literalists nor Historicists can say much about Clark until the age of thirty when he dons his ceremonial costume and his followers dub him Superman (a title, Literalist point out, Clark never claimed for himself). It’s hardly surprising no records remain of Clark before the age twelve, but the dearth of information after the initial development of his powers and before his dedication to humankind is odd. It doesn’t, however, lead to the Mythicist conclusion that no historical Clark ever existed.
Mythicists also point to elements in the Superman Media that pre-date the composition of the earliest Adventures and so, they argue, disprove a historical basis for Clark Kent. They trace the name “Superman” to an obscure, German prophet and say the Clark/Superman duality is prefigured by the cult of The Scarlet Pimpernel. Mythicists also spend a great deal of time analyzing pre-Superman superhero prototypes in attempt to show that all portrayals of battles between good and evil must be fictional. Many Mythicists view the Superman Media as allegories showing how to realize you “inner Superman” by destroying your “home planet”(the lowly physical world ) and dedicating yourself to “truth and liberty.” Krytonite represents material distractions that prevent initiates from maintaining their spiritual powers.
Although the Mythicist approach is easy to lampoon, a purely Literalist approach is equally problematic. Historicists may unjustifiably dismiss the extraterrestrial nature of Clark Kent, but their scholarship can peel away inauthentic elements from the historical Adventures to reveal the true Superman. Followers owe it to the memory of Clark Kent to bring Superman worship into the 21st century. How can we dismiss other religion’s superstitious beliefs—with their magic cosmic rays and radioactive spiders bites—without fully examining our own?
As the definitive ubiquitous stylized two-dimensional simplification of reality in the world since the advent of access to print and cinema images, cartoons, particularly comics, seem extremely promising to advocates of literacy and art education. There’s good reason for this enthusiasm, as many young people have a sufficiently strong interest in comics and animation to learn the rules and expend the labor needed to produce a “readable” work of art. But this is only the first step in beginning to envision a work that will interest and entertain strangers. Understanding Comics creator Scott McCloud, praised as the grand popular theoretician of the graphical user interface, relates this kind of vision to knowledge and tangibility: “a vision of something which can be, which may be,” he expounded (with the visual aid of PowerPoint) in his 2005 TED talk.
It should be frankly acknowledged, however, that the vast majority of young people, who might get a lot of pleasure from consuming cartoons, absolutely do not have the level of focus and discipline to even approach, let alone excel in this area of highly specialized practice. And for teachers trying to get students to that first step of readability, the challenge is to simultaneously foster artwork that is “expressive,” but at the same time a storyline which is in some measure coherent, as well as “appropriate” for school. It is likely that both the student and the teacher will fail. But after all, as queer theorist Judith Halberstam says, “…failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods” (2011, p. 3). Drawing on my experience of 15 years teaching comics and animation in a wide variety of contexts in the Chicago area, I would like to think more about the fascinating nature of failed attempts at “sequential art.”
The last two decades, the ones in which I have been an adult teaching with cartoons (as opposed to a young person responding somewhat intuitively to cartoons) have seen the widening Western embrace of Japanese manga and anime, as well as the expansion of independently-produced animation on cable and online, not to mention a vast proliferation of print and online comics. I don’t consider myself a true aficionado of any particular era or genre of cartoons, but as an enthusiastic dilettante, it is my sense that popular cartoons now are less and less narrative, and more and more visual, than at any point in my lifetime. The problem for teachers who want to teach literacy, or relate the technical basics of producing cartoons systematically, is that the techno-primitivist works produced by young people are in many ways more relevant to cartoons being made now than is Scott McCloud’s rational visionary, questing after a “durable mutation,” yoked to a functional ideal of clear visual storytelling. Young people’s comics pages are dominated by unprovoked emotion or violence interspersed with hypnotic patterns of line, and animations dominated by shapeless images and choppy, chaotic repetition. Dialogue, if it exists, is in no particular order, as text or speech is generally sparse, garbled, or absent.
I want to make it clear that, while I am neither the most (nor the least) gifted art teacher in the world, I have always provided students with a great variety and quantity of examples, demonstrations, exercises, and preparatory steps, not to mention tireless encouragement. Many students may not be inordinately proud of their work, but this does not mean that students did not, in some sense, make the work they wanted to make. Elements of fantasy and pleasure, which dwell more in the implicit than the explicit schooling curriculum, flow throughout the transformations between the “input” of perception (to mangle Stuart Hall’s famed metaphor of cultural reproduction) and the “output” of participation. The deficits of my students’ comics and animations, their lack of smoothness in plot, rendering, or motion, can be seen as an incomplete effort, a first level of scaffolding, but it can also be seen as an unrefined but equally undiluted reflection of what moves these young people, and stays with them. They explicitly say a lot less than what highly realized cartoons have the ability to say, but they can express quite a bit about what we may not realize we all get from the experience of a cartoon.
It should be understood that cartoons have a distinguished history of blissful and brutal nonsensicality. Contemporary with the dawn of European Surrealism in the 1910s, Winsor McCay and George Herriman drew comic strips that made no more sense then than, I would argue, they do now. Max Fleischer and Lotte Reininger directed meandering somnambulistic animations that relied almost entirely on visual amazement rather than anything like a story. Even superheroes, like Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, the Flash, and Plastic-Man, contributed to the general fever-dream nature of “golden age” mass-media cartoons. In the world of Japanese cartoons, the aimlessly cavorting animals and monks of medieval scrolls have now given way to black-magic tech warfare and mystical post-gender romance, in stories created more for the beatifically glazed than the alertly attentive. The late-century boom of uplifting Disney movies, banal newspaper strips, and patriotic comic books was perhaps the anomaly. And even in those, the moments of absurdity and chaos were not entirely absent.
Actual plot lines did exist in many of my students’ comics—particularly the more “literate” ones. There were sumo-wrestling hamsters, croquet-mallet wielding heroines, time machine hijinks, animal zombies, friendships, romances, and disappointments, supernatural power struggles, practical jokes, and many basketball games and ninja/samurai battles. But in most comics I primarily see a visual density, an appreciation of certain shapes and atmospheres, reflecting a synthesis of what the artist is comfortable rendering and what she perceives as necessary for a complete comics page. In animation there is the challenge of simply executing a successful simulation of movement, which severely restricts the options available to the artist. But, in one of my earliest and most low-tech claymation classes, in which we simply recorded the camera fast-forwarding a series of still shots, one pair of students created an amazing vignette of a monster throwing a victim into a construction-paper lake, where he sank to his doom through the process of removing successive sections of the victim’s body. This is certainly a plot line, but this, among all the dancing words and shapes and balls of clay my students have animated, is perhaps the exception that proves the rule.
In many ways, the chaotic power struggles of dramatic play are a more social and kinetic version of the chaos of a cartoon. There is the sense that an ideal, unified world exists to be created by a story, but every element (every image in a cartoon or every player in a drama) is a misshapen contingent challenge to that world, in a way that words, written or spoken, or even audible sounds, which exist discretely in a temporal listening or reading experience, are not. In the case of a cartoon, however, the contents of the artist’s or artists’ idea of a stylized reality can be discerned—as when I, as a five-year-old who had never in my life seen explosions before, drew pictures of Star Wars scenes featuring, primarily, numerous clouds of flying debris. To correct this somehow (as I eventually did on my own), to bring my storytelling in line with the somewhat mundane plot of the film, was something of a pity—especially when, in Star Wars as in many cartoons, the visual world is what makes the experience worthwhile. Around the same time, I also drew dozens of biomorphic mazes, with a focus and glee that probably would have raised some autism-spectrum flags in this day and age.
What Gilles Deleuze said of Francis Bacon could be said (if immodestly) of my mazes and explosions, of Ben Strassman’s smudgy ninja story in my 2006 comics class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Victoria Gooden’s graveyard scene from a 2005 SAIC comics class, Joshua Franco’s seismograph-esque shading in his piece for my 2002 co-curated (with David Heatley) anthology The New Graphics Revival, or Austin Traylor’s amazing animation of a flying ball from a 2007 class at SAIC: “What interests him is a violence that is involved only with color and line; the violence of a sensation (and not of a representation), a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression.” (2003/1981, p. x). There are myriad forms of music, imagery, choreography (including fight choreography), stories, poetry (including lyrics), and other practices that mirror these vivid elements that draw young people to cartoons in ways they both fail to articulate, yet triumph in expressing.
Comic by Ben Strassman
Austin Traylor’s animation
This may be even more true with the use of pattern and superimposition in the romantic and reflective pages of students both Japanese and American, from a variety of backgrounds, but primarily female. On back to back pages in The New Graphics Revival, Yesenia Limon’s nostalgic lament for her Mexican homeland and the wordless illustration of a flute-player by Japanese high-schooler Juri Ishii both create, through inwardness and repetition, the sense of jouissance, an unbounded field of emanating love.
Yeseni Alimon, top; Juri Ishii, bottom
A similar impression is created in a hazy backlit stop-motion animation of paper heart shadows that two of my students at Bowen High School created last year. Again flirting with grandiloquence, these recall for me Julia Kristeva’s reverie in The Powers of Horror (1982, p.12):
When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think. The ‘sublime’ object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory.
Certainly these students could be encouraged to expand their skill base and use these powerful images in the service of a conventional format and narrative, but they also could be exposed to works of visual culture, highbrow and otherwise, that share these qualities of ecstatic levitation.
This is not to denounce storytelling or literacy education in any way. But I would suggest that, in the attempt to include “youth culture” in teaching while encouraging a critical creativity, imagination (versus production) can be a useful place to spend some time. While language, numbers, and music can seem baffling, an image has a presence that, even speaking as someone with a visual handicap, doesn’t seem to demand comprehension; thus the appeal of picture books for young readers. There are no end of images that young people can use to make more images, through drawing, video, collage, assemblage, etc. If the images and the goals of the project can be made meaningful, a story can be generated. But beware demanding closure; encouragement is worthwhile, but when a student is done with an image, for the moment or for good, more than likely that student is done. Closure, like clarity, is only an issue if the teacher lets it be one.
And if she does make it an issue, there could be resentment, or it could potentially yield benefits to a student, both in terms of building discipline and in learning how to generate meaningful content. But my experience has been that only the most rudimentary comics, one to two pages in length, can be expected from an average student. Animations may reach ten seconds, but don’t expect to necessarily have a soundtrack, or any edits. Another interpretation of this problem, if it is a problem, is one of motivation. So a different pedagogical design might be proposed, as cultural-studies-inspired education scholars Henry Jenkins and Mimi Ito have proposed, in which peer-to-peer learning, driven by student interests, should ideally be taking place over diverse, flexible, productive networks (Jenkins et al. 2009, Ito et al. 2013). In one sense, of course it should, and it will, especially if teachers can facilitate student access to larger public learning spaces, online or physically. This could recall the “trans-local” preservation of culture through games that has been practiced by African-American girls for generations (Gaunt 2006), or any other tradition of informal learning. In another sense, though, this streamlining of education and culture into a rationalized mode of production is not necessarily a departure from McCloud’s idea of art as interface, form as content.
Georges Bataille opted for a third term, something without form or content, a concept he called informe, or “formless.” Instead of simply affirming the universe as knowable, infinitely visible as McCloud might propose, Bataille might counter that:
affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. (p. 382)
Bataille did not expand much on this concept, but others have, including a creatively indexed 1997 catalog of art and writing entitled Formless: A User’s Guide by the art historians Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois. To make the concept of informe part of an art lesson is not challenging, once the idea of a singular goal is put aside, perhaps to be returned to at a later time. The experimental animations of Ivan Maximov, the Brothers Quay, or Norman McLaren, illustrational oddities of Trenton Doyle Hancock, Remedios Varo, Clamp, or W. W. Denslow, the surprising collages of Arturo Herrera, Wangechi Mutu, or John Stezaker, or the montages of Christian Marclay, could provide great jumping-off points for exploration of the twilight area between narrative and bedazzlement.
Certainly every student should be encouraged to build skills and pursue projects that she sees as meaningful, but the use of communicative media, like cartoons, to transmit various forms of noise is not a potential that should be overlooked. As pointed out by Jacques Ranciere (2013), the aesthetic dimension of social revolutions in the modern era has made abundant use of the incomplete and unresolved, often more movingly than visions of the achieved ideal. In an instrumentalized economy of symbols, the possibility of lending focus to formlessness could be a worthwhile purpose for teaching about and with culture.
Works cited
Bataille, G. (1985/1929). “Formless.” A. Stoekl, Ed. Georges Bataille. Vision of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927-1939, A. Stoekl w/ C. R. Lovitt & D. M. Leslie Jr., transl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (p. 382).
Deleuze, G. (2003 (1981)). D.W. Smith, transl. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. New York: Continuum.
Gaunt, K. (2006). Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes From Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. New York: NYU Press.
Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ito, M., Gutierrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J. Salen, K., Schor, J. Sefton-Green, J., & Watkins, S. C. (2013). Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design. (PDF file). Retrieved from www.dmlhub.net, December 17, 2013.
Jenkins, H. w/ Purushitma, R., Weigel, M., Clinton, K., & Robinson, A. J. (2009). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Kristeva, J. (1982). L. S. Roudiez, transl. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.
McCloud, S. (2005). “The visual magic of comics.” (video lecture). Retrieved from www.ted.com, December 14, 2013.
Ranciere, J. (2013). Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, Z. Paul, transl. London: Verso.
I think you hit on something I have been saying for a while about the racial and sexual other in superhero comics – they have to prove their worthiness through violence against and/or policing of others of their kind. The X-Men (esp. early X-men, but definitely into Claremont’s classic run) just reinforces this and is all the more egregious by white-washing the difference to begin with.
Xavier could only be MLK if MLK had armed young black soldiers that went into black communities to violently combat the threats to black middle-class respectability that he cared about above all – in other words, it doesn’t jibe with MLK both ideologically and in practicality.
Osvaldo, that’s a really good point. X-Men makes it particularly evident, through its use of an ensemble cast of many superheroes and supervillains. But this self-policing, masochism and assimilation seems like a foundational part of the genre. And one that I think comics is congratulated for– the ‘nobility’ of a guardian who loses his ability to ‘be one’ with the society he’s protecting. Or, how pure these fantasies are, coming from the brains of marginalized Jewish teenagers at the turn of the century.
There’s convincing evidence for superheroes stemming out of the stage and dime-novel melodramas (Alex Buchet’s work, for example.) Melodrama, when not fully occupied with sawmills and speeding trains, navigates a weird zone between comedy and tragedy– an unreconcilable schism is presented between the protagonist and society, which the narrative itself can’t solve, and so absolves it through a unifying trauma which stitches everyone back together. This is often the trauma of near death to a female body, the heroine lies freezing on an ice floe speeding towards a waterfall, etc. etc. Once she is rescued, it magically doesn’t matter that she’s still a fallen women, when the society that embraces her hasn’t come close to amending their value system.
To wind back to the central concept– while I’ve heard ‘secret identities,’ and ‘serialized thrills’ spouted as reasons for superhero comics to be melodramas, I’ve never heard them discussed as assimilationist fantasies. But it fits really well.
And melodrama is important! Probably no other narrative mode has had a great as influence on society and politics in the last few centuries, and melodrama increasingly pervades political and campaign imagery. Melodramas are ‘people-movers,’ and make whatever story they’re conveying especially sticky.
The image here is by Rick Remender/Oliver Coipel from Uncanny Avengers #5.
Spanish cult schlock director Jess Franco’s made roughly a billion films, and I’ve seen like five of them, so I’m hardly an expert on his oeuvre. Still, the 1973 The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff — recently released on DVD — seems like a fairly unusual Franco film. Mostly because it has a plot.
Of course, there are some typical Franco elements — murder, hot women in gratuitously short skirts, hot women falling out of their clothes, hot women murdering each other while falling out of their clothes, dream sequences, etc. etc. Not to mention the obligatory surreal detour into utter incompetence. The most delicious example of this here is a recurrent folk song sung in warbling tinny, out-of-sync lip-sync by the improbably ectomorphic and improbably named Davey Sweet Brown (Robert Woods.) Another highlight is disappearing subtitles, which (at least for non-Spanish speakers) add that dollop of incoherence that you’ve come to expect from any movie directed by Jess Franco.
So, like I said, one damn thing after the other, rather than, as in Vampyros Lesbos, one damn thing utterly divorced from the next damn thing, and then the third damn thing somewhere over there, and then, hey, breasts, and groovy music, and then lets go back to the first damn thing because why the hell not?
Which leads you to wonder, what caused Franco to suddenly turn himself into a bargain basement Hitchcock, with suspense and plot twists and dream sequences clearly marked off as dream sequences? Was he dropped on his head and suddenly set right? Or what?
Probably it’s just the script or his collaborators or the phase of the moon or something banal like that. But I like to think, more poetically, that what happened was Dr. Orloff. The Orloff character appears in a number of Franco films, — though he’s played by a plethora of actors and from what I can tell there’s little actual connection between one baddy named Dr. Orloff and the next. In any case, this Dr. Orloff is all about the eyes; the film opens with a close-up of him staring intently, and when Melissa goes about her bloody business, we occasionally get flashes back to the same deadly ojos, looking commanding and fiendish.
Thus, Orloff functions essentially as a director within the film. His vision determines the action; he sees, and Melissa obediently staggers off, woodenly wreaking havoc in the way that Franco characters usually wreak wooden havoc — albeit, in this case, with somewhat more focus. Orloff’s directorial impulses are at times suggested even more explicitly. In one scene, he tells Melissa that her family thinks she’s crazy because, he says, he needs to “see her reaction”, as if he’s a filmmaker trying to calibrate his audience’s response. Shortly thereafter, he pats her on the should and tells her, “ In that little head of yours the dreams and the reality are mixed together.”
This is of course diagetically true of Melissa, who dreams about the real murders which on waking she forgets. But it’s also true extra-diagetically: film is both reality (there are real people up there) and dream, all mixed together. Melissa’s dream of murder is (unbeknownst to her) real, and that reality is (further unbeknownst to her) a fiction, or dream. When Melissa kills the loyal family butler on a foggy deserted road, the artificial mist and oversaturated lighting at times makes it hard to see what’s going on; the viewer is forced to become conscious of not seeing, and so of seeing. Similarly, Melissa’s slow stiffness, her awkward limping, and painful zombie overacting, reminds us of the naturalness of her unnaturalness. She looks like she’s in a film because she’s in a film, with Dr. Orloff (whose eyes appear in a quick jump cut) directing. The horrified butler looks up at her not to demand she stop but to ask her, “Miss Melissa, what are you doing?” — a question that actors in Franco’s films must have asked themselves and each other on more than one occasion. And after she’s done the deed, the camera zooms in for a fish-eye close-up on her before she clutches her head and falls to the ground. It’s a reminder that what’s in her is what’s watching her. The filmmaker moves around in someone else’s body until, eventually, he gets tired with the scene and discards his toy.
Imposing your own will on others is, of course, a sadistic pleasure; Orloff, with his giant needles, surely experiences it as such. Franco’s no stranger to sadism either; as just one example, his 1975 film Barbed Wire Dolls opens with the extended beating of a nude woman chained like a dog. Watching The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff made me think, not only of the sadism in that scene, but of the sadism that must have been implicit off-camera for that scene to exist. What exactly was the conversation like in which Franco explained to the actress that she needed to strip down and put on a collar? And is that different in kind, or only in degree, from telling an actor or an actress what to say, where to stand, and how to feel?
Sinister Eyes also suggests, perhaps, that the rather desperate, over-the-top sadism in some of Franco’s movies might be linked to their fragmentation. Normally film directors are more like Orloff; they get their kicks not by elaborate beatings, but through more effective, and thus more subtle means of control. The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff is Franco imagining himself as a filmmaker who has a hold on his film and the actors in it. When the evil doctor leans over Melissa at the film’s end and tells her with lip-licking sibilance that he is going to inject her with a drug that will make her “lose her mind completely and forever,” it seems less like a threat than like a promise to Franco fans. The doctor’s execution seals the bargain; the director is dead. Next film, we’re back to insanity.
This being the last of our five-part roundtable on George Herriman’s seminal comic strip and coincidentally the last post before Christmas, I thought it might be fun to reflect on two Christmas episodes from Krazy Kat.
As consumers of pop culture, the holidays are a time for us to engage in uncritical enjoyment of TV Christmas specials. There’s something comforting about knowing that the fictional worlds of the shows we follow align with our own seasonal cycles. What’s more, television producers know that Christmas specials have to deliver more and newer viewing pleasures than the usual, so they tend to be worth watching. Christmas specials are always highly conscious of past Christmas specials, and even conscious of past Christmas specials from other shows, so they become uniquely citational, genre bending, and just generally “meta.” I’d like to think that Christmas specials are capable of “inoculating” their viewers against the undifferentiated time of those late-capitalist spaces associated with Christmas, such as big box stores and malls, by placing them into a more telluric time, even if through fiction. The same can be said of comic strips, which are published year-round, for typically longer runs, and which align perhaps even more neatly with the seasonal timeframe of their readerships than does TV.
The fictional universe of Krazy Kat is weirdly both atemporal and attuned to the progression of months, seasons, and holidays. A number of episodes demonstrate this atemporality through an iterative structure according to which the panel in the top right corner and the last panel (bottom right corner) mirror one another perfectly save for one or two small differences but always to remind the reader that there will be a return to the status quo between Kat, Ignatz, and Officer Pup. Frequent visual references to the Sisyphus myth (Kat hauling a bowling ball or a wheel of cheese up a hill in order to please Ignatz who is always disappointed, etc.) echo this sense of atemporality in Krazy Kat‘s fictional universe. In one episode, dated March 25th, 1917, we see Ignatz just awakened and making a vow to himself to “make this a day of great memory.” He asks the brick dealer for his “grandest brick” but is caught in a storm and saved by Kat. In the bottom three panels we see Ignatz awaken only to decree once again that he will “do a most magnificent deed.” Strikingly, the dialogue of these three panels is word-for-word the same as the top three panels. Except perhaps that this time the reader understands the brick dealer is exploiting Ignatz’s sense of singularity by selling each new day’s brick as the brick he considers his “masterpiece.” Ignatz dramatizes a tension between the thought that “today is a special day” and the fear that “today is the same as any other day,” between the eventful and the everyday. If we read the Kat-Mouse-Pup love triangle as a kind of allegory of American life, as E.E. Cummings did, Ignatz’s willful ignorance of the repetition in his life speaks to a need to experience repetition in one’s lives as though each iteration were singular and different. But this willful blindness to the repetitiveness of his life also prevents Ignatz from appreciating the paradoxical temporality of the holidays wherein we allow ourselves to enjoy and revel in repetition by calling it tradition.
In Krazy Kat‘s first Christmas episode (12/24/1916), the brick dealer begins selling “karbon briquets” instead of bricks for the season. His sign reads, “build a house or build a fire”. When Ignatz wakes to Krazy regaling him with Christmas carols he hurls briquets through the window at the besotted caroler. Krazy gives the “brickwets” to Senora Pelona Chiwawa, the Mexican war bride and her three “fatherless pups,” who use them to stay warm. The concluding panel shows Krazy sleeping under the mistletoe with a caption beneath him that says, “merry krismis and a heppy new year!!” Structurally, this episode is not too different from any other. Aside from the various holiday references and the transubstantiation of bricks to briquets that makes Ignatz into a foiled Scrooge figure, it’s business as usual. But the Christmas episode published two years later is much more self conscious about bringing the weird temporality of Krazy Kat’s fictional universe into dialogue with the equally weird temporality of Christmas. This next Christmas special opens with Kat spying on Ignatz as he verbalizes his disbelief in Santa Claus (“I don’t believe in “Santa Claus”, I’m too broad-minded, and advanced for such nonsense”), “a scene, rife with skepticism, and heresy,” as the caption reads. Kat endeavors to restore Ignatz’s faith and presents himself to the latter dressed as Santa. Ignatz bows down in humble apology to Kat-as-Santa whose tail and characteristic speech give him away almost immediately thereafter. The last panel shows Ignatz seated in the same position, saying word-for-word the same thing he utters in the first panel while the caption reads, “we close, with a scene, rife with skepticism, and heresy.” The ironic authorial tone enables the reader to partake in Kat’s uncritical enjoyment of Christmas while also partaking in Ignatz’s skepticism towards the holiday. In an atemporal fictional universe that nonetheless seems to follow the seasonal cycles of our own, there is room for such self-contradictory positions. There is room to be both cynical and credulous about the brick dealer’s claims, room to feel certain that today will be eventful while knowing that it won’t, room to enjoy Christmas even if we know it’s a scam.
