Utilitarian Review 7/6/13

According to World War Z, two things can trigger a zombie apocalypse: 1) stay-at-home dads, and 2) kindness to Muslims. It is nice, however, to see an American blockbuster starring Brad Pitt as that most un-American of creatures, a U.N. Investigator.

My book club recently spun off a zombie club of college professors, two in Economics and one in English, me (a Philosopher may be joining us soon too). I presented a conference paper on The Walking Dead last winter, but my knowledge base is dwarfed by the guy who makes guac on movie nights. So far we’ve only watched The Night of the Living Dead. We’d schedule Dawn of the Dead (the remake for some reason), but postponed when a wife (also an Economics professor) got called to Abu Dhabi on a family emergency.

George Romero, director zero in the genre contagion, gave his ghouls a clear cause: radiation from a returning Venus space probe. Brad spends most of WWZ’s 116 minutes and $190 million dollars searching for clues. Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman doesn’t care. But in terms of theme and discourse, the answer is always scene one.

Every zombie story (and, arguably, every story of every genre) begins with something rotten in the state of Denmark. It takes less than ten minutes (including the insufferably slow credits sequence) for that creepy old man to lurch at Barbra in the cemetery, but Night of the Living Dead has already provided a horde of apocalypse-triggering conflicts spawning across issues of religion, nation, capitalism, and family:

Johnnie’s stopped going to church and jokes about being damned. Romero shoots the American flag flapping backwards from a veteran’s grave. Is the exploitive funeral industry stealing the wreath off the grave and selling it back to them every year? The family unit is shattered in multiple directions: parents vs. children, brother vs. sister, grandparent vs. grandson. The kids discuss digging up the only vaguely remembered dad so they don’t have to drive hours out of town on their mother’s orders. Time itself is upturned. The first line of the film is a complaint about daylight savings.

World War Z is simpler. The pre-zombie preamble is an ode to the domesticated male. Brad Pitt is the perfect stay-at-home dad. His blissfully happy daughters joke that all he does since quitting his job is make breakfast, but his pancakes are better than Michael Keaton’s in Mr. Mom. Brad doesn’t mind scolding everyone to put their dishes in the sink, but in thematic terms, this is an apocalyptic inversion of stability. His bread-winning wife doesn’t even help with the plates.

When things heat up during the morning commute (Brad is chauffeuring everyone to school and work), his wife takes the wheel while he assumes the traditionally maternal duty of calming and comforting the asthmatically panicked daughter. If you were hoping for a 21^st century vision of shared gender roles, the formal plot doesn’t start till the wife is safely tucked away with the children. Her only job now is being a mom. Dad, meanwhile, reveals the secret depth of his professional prowess, including the power to call rescue helicopters down from the sky. In fact, he may be the only man left with a shot at saving the world. Sure, he only takes the job to safeguard his family, but at that moment the world has already been righted. Zombie plague restores domestic order.

Kirkman plays a similar game in Walking Dead. The comic book is a paean to traditional gender—though kudos to the TV team for trying to shake that up a bit. The zombie ur-heroine Barbra is significantly worse, a knock-off of Hitchcock’s Melanie in The Birds. When the going gets tough, the gals collapse into semi-catatonic dementia. Fortunately, Barbra retreats to a farmhouse first, which Ben (he wasn’t black until Duane Jones showed up for the casting call) boards up. This is where economic theory comes in. How do external threats alter group behavior? Which is the more profitable strategy: staying mobile or hunkering down?

World War Z is explicit about both. Director Marc Forster literally spells it out in subtitles: “Movement is life.” Not that those very nice but ultimately very stupid Spanish parents listen to Brad. And look who gets eaten in the next scene. Meanwhile, Israel boards up their whole country. But they also let in Muslim refugees, figuring a grateful live Muslim is better than an angry dead Muslim. Cooperation skyrockets as Israeli soldiers nod and smile and even hand over the PA system for group singing. I’ve never seen an airport customs line half as chummy.

But as every zombie fan knows, hunkering never works for long. Images of Middle East peace last two, maybe three minutes. Romero boarded up the Monroeville Mall (about two miles from my childhood home) for his first sequel, Dawn of the Dead, but its collapse is nothing to the geysers of Palestinian zombies flooding into the last nation on Earth. CGI turns Romero’s lurching latex-painted extras into blood cells gushing through urban arteries. Israel dies from its own kindness—a political allegory a lot of right wingers can probably live with.

That’s where Romero would have left things, with Brad ascending from the Tel Aviv airport into the ambiguous but not particularly hopeful unknown. WWZ is a 1950s scifi. When Don Siegel tried to end Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a chillingly open-ended “They’re coming!”Hollywood sent him back to the editing booth to tack on their contractual, world-is-saved last scene. Forster uses the same one. It turns out zombies dissolve in water! Or something like that. Which is also why at its surprisingly non-gory heart, WWZ isn’t a zombie movie.

Yes, these zombies are sprinters. And, no, they don’t eat the flesh off our bones—just a quick nibble and it’s welcome to the team. But their real genre faux paus is their willingness to bow to the deus ex machina of the human spirit. That’s the formula and American self-image Romero so thoroughly gutted in 1968. In Night of the Living Dead, the center doesn’t hold. Daughter eats mother, brother eats sister, and a posse of deputized rednecks gun down the last rugged individual. In fact, there never was a center. Government, family, God, those are just boards we nail around ourselves while waiting for oblivion to splinter through.

Not true of WWZ. Sure, the American experiment fails (our cops are just more lawless looters), but the world government holds. Instead of retreating to upstate Maine to wait out the vampire plague of I Am Legend (Romero’s literary influence), Brad’s patriarchal family reunites in Nova Scotia. Yeah, that’s right. Canada and the U.N. save humanity. Talk about a horror story!

Don’t Tell Tchaikovsky The News

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today way back when. It seemed like a nice piece to run for the 4th. Who’s America if not Chuck Berry?
______________________

Blues and folk musicians soldier on forever, keeping the tradition alive. Rock musicians soldier on forever, turning into lumbering saurian parodies of themselves. Somewhere in the middle are rock and rollers, whose latter-day work is neither exactly respected nor exactly despised. Rather, for the most part, it’s just ignored.

Which is why it’s so weird to realize that, unlike Elvis or Buddy Holly or Johnny Cash or Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry is still alive and still touring. He hasn’t recorded a studio album in more than 30 years, and hasn’t even had a live album in 8, but at 84 years old and counting, he still goes out there playing the same half-century old hits. Not a tradition or a parody, he’s no longer got a mass audience, exactly, but he’s still what he always was: Chuck Berry, performer.

It’s maybe fitting, then, that Berry’s last great artistic effort wasn’t a hit but a personal testament. His 1987 autobiography was, according to the man himself, “raw in form, rare in feat, but real in fact. No ghost but no guilt or gimmicks, just me,” and you can hear the truth in the rock of the phrase and the roll of the alliteration. Berry says he’s only read six hardbacks in his life, and that the dozens of paperbacks he’s paged through were “only for the stimulation”. Yet his love of language comes through on every page. Open at random and you find:

“Opportunity and temptation were anywhere you let them be. New ideas, ideals, and eye dolls were there to be held.”

“We were ‘short hairs and busted’ […] and were told if we wantd to kick back our ‘dime,’ we’d have to keep our mind off the streets, our hands off ‘ourselves,’ drink plenty of cool water, and walk slow.”

“Nine handsome young southern gentlemen were lined beneath the wing of the DC 3, elegantly welcoming me to Mississippi. I felt like the stately son of Stonewall Jackson, but it lasted only four minutes.”

There’s no doubt about it; that’s the same man whose lyrics included motorvatin’, coffee-colored cadillacs, and bobby soxers wiggling like whimsical fish.

While the voice is unmistakably Berry’s, though, it wouldn’t be quite right to say that the lack of a ghostwriter makes the book more honest. Even in the 3 minute medium of rock and roll songs, Berry’s quick wit tended to undercut a surface directness with a sly ambiguity. Those bobby soxers wiggling like whimsical fish — is Berry admiring them? Making fun of them? Lusting after them? The brown-eyed handsome man doesn’t just have brown eyes, surely; and why did Marie’s mom tear up that happy home in Memphis, TN anyway? Performers like Little Richard or Bo Diddley had lyrics which were exuberantly clever, but Berry was perhaps unique among the early rock and rollers in how he used words to dance around what he had to say. In the autobiography he notes that he rarely used songs to express love…but the broader truth is that, unlike almost all his peers, he rarely used songs to express any direct emotion. In a music pitched in some sense at kids, he always maintained a very adult distance.

The adultness and the distance are both fully visible in the autobiography. Berry can be remarkably frank; the book sometimes reads like a meticulous chronicle of every time he ever had an erection. Fellatio, cunnilingus, lesbianism, and condom use all make an appearance with just enough dissemblance to keep the book from out and out porn. He also talks openly about his fascination with white woman, discussing his obsession as a young boy with a white nurse and noting, “My mother’s nurse had a profound effect on the state of my fantasies and settled into the nature of my libido. I’ll tell you more later.”

And he does tell more later…sort of. There are numerous stories of sexual encounters with white women, from millionaires to hippies to prostitutes to French reporters. But how his philandering affected his relationship with his long suffering wife, or even his own emotional life, is skimmed over. His most important relationship with a white woman, his longtime association with his secretary Francine, is given a separate chapter which seems designed to hint at everything and confirm nothing. Berry actually includes a large section written by Francine, in which she praises him in phrases that sure sound like the endearments of a lover. But Berry never admits to sleeping with her, and certainly never lets slip what his wife thought about her husband and his devoted secretary jetting off to tropical vacations together while she stayed home to mind the kids. Nor do we learn how his relationships with either his wife or his secretary was affected by his abortive sexual dalliance with a 14-year old — a dalliance which he insists was never consummated, but which nonetheless landed him in prison on dubious-but-not-nearly-dubious-enough charges under the Mann act.

So it goes with most of the major themes of the book. Racism shadows his childhood, his relationships with white women, and his performing career, but it’s place in his psyche is more alluded to (as a source of fear or triumph or irritation) than elucidated. His consuming obsession with money is evident throughout, culminating in tax fraud committed, he says, because he wanted to get his bank balance to $1 million — but the closest he gets to actually explaining his attitude to his fortune are a few pithy, clearly misleading phrases about how he would play even if there were no profit in it. As for his songwriting, as Robert Christgau notes in an old review of the autobiography: “you get a funny feeling from this book: either music comes so naturally to the man that he gives it nary a thought, or he just plain gives it nary a thought.” (http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bkrev/berry-87.php)

It’s possible Berry doesn’t think about music — or possible, anyway, that he hasn’t thought about it in a long time. His style was set fairly early on, and while he mentions the Beatles and the Stones and some others, it’s clear he admires them, to the extent he does, for their fame and professional accomplishments, not because he cares a lick for their music. It’s the performers he heard in his youth — Muddy Waters to Nat King Cole — that he’s passionate about. If he was inspired by any musician after 1960 or so, you sure can’t tell it from this book.

Indeed, and as is the case for many celebrity bios, the material here about his childhood is the most vivid and the most powerful, from his joyful memories of squabbling over the piano with his siblings, to the queasy discussion of being forced to kiss the feet of a white woman on a golf course, to the even queasier account of a disastrous road trip turned hapless crime spree which landed him in juvenile detention on a ten year sentence. In this early section, you can see the connections between libido, race, music, ambition, and language which created a performer eager and able to conquer the world.

In adulthood, those connections get blurry — rubbed out, finessed, erased. A ghost writer might have gotten Berry to tell more, or at least to more directly refuse to talk about the stuff he doesn’t want to talk about. But if there’s not necessarily an honesty in the telling, there’s at least an honesty in the obfuscation. Berry’s about what he won’t tell you as much as about what he will. So when he goes out on stage and repeats the lyrics he wrote decades ago, you have to feel it’s not because he’s slacking off, but because he figures he already said what he had to say.

Good Dogs and Fickle Gods

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

[Spoliers throughout]

Twenty years is quite a length of time in the world of comics but it has been nearly that since Graham Chaffee last published a comic. Some old timers do remember him however, and he does retain a measure of respect for two books he drew back in the 90s namely, The Big Wheels, and The Most Important Thing and other stories. I wrote a review of those two publications way back then but I have to say I can barely remember what I wrote or even much about those books.

Of the cartoonists offering the author support on the back cover, James Romberger comes closest to the truth when he suggests an alternate history where the art form was not shuffled into a nether world of superheroics:

“…a book seemingly lost in time…his clean appealing storytelling and expressive brushwork evoke an alternative golden age of comics; an age perhaps in which superheroes never existed and the medium told more straightforward, poignant stories.”

The approach here does seem to hark back to an earlier age of cartooning and pacing—not so much in comic books but in newspaper strips and the woodcuts of Lynd Ward—one which might in fact be compared to an earlier age of film making where structural clarity and a vague kind of verisimilitude was of the essence; a kind of doggy neorealism of the Italian school. Chaffee largely eschews panels which are filled with multifarious meaning and intricate correlations, adopting congenial, unsensational storytelling, evoking time, place and character; the gentle rhythms of a nostalgia associated with the early to mid twentieth century. And as with the meaningful look of the dog, Ivan, in The Most Important Thing (see third image from top), the artist has lost none of his powers of observation, all the requisite emotion of his characters channeled not so much into words but the gentle strokes of his brush.

The publicist statement comparing the comic favorably to Animal Farm and Watership Down seems quite unnecessary if not a bit pompous. It is evident that we are to see our foibles in the actions and fates of the dogs which populate Chaffee’s comic. The central questions being tackled here appear to be those of belief, ideology, and faith. A tangential discussion of deist philosophy may not be out of the question as well.

The third page of Chaffee’s debut comic, The Big Wheels, shows a kindly dog licking a man lying in a drunken stupor on the pavement, and the “good dog” of his new book is clearly a reiteration of the dog in the title story of The Most Important Thing, a tale which I remember comparing to Tolstoy’s moralistic fables. Two pages from the latter story should help to elucidate the mysteries presented to us in Chaffee’s latest offering:

In answer to the cat’s question (“What’s the most important thing?”), Ivan answers “faith.” The cat’s answer is “independence–freedom of thought and deed.” A raven, not seen in these two pages, offers a third unspoken answer which appears to be despair and hopelessness. In Chaffee’s new comic, the responses of the cat and dog take center stage.

The initial scene in Good Dog shows our protagonist in the midst of a dream where a shepherd instructs him in the act of herding. Ivan seems quite successful at his task but in a cruel twist, all the sheep are transformed into rabbits. He gets a stern scolding from his master and the shepherd’s eyes even turn into little crosses.

In this master-dog relationship, we can see a mirror for our own relationships with our earthly and, if one is so inclined, unearthly masters. There is the question of correct and incorrect action; of duty; and a projection of “original sin” which has little to do with justice or any blessed theodicy than with pure chance and bloody-mindedness.

Once this premise is set up, our dog carries on in his good way leading the vexatious life of a stray, a seemingly hand to mouth existence. The key incidents from this period in his life can be narrowed down to two encounters. The first is with a young black woman called, Babe, who works at a bar called Ray’s 8 Ball (a character culled from the first few pages of Chaffee’s The Big Wheels and a short story in Drawn and Quarterly Vol. 2 #3). It turns out that she needs a watch dog for some chickens in her backyard. His second encounter of note is with a pack of strays led by a Malamute (with wolf ancestry) called, Sasha. The Russian sounding name is probably no accident recalling that hotbed of irreligious brotherhood which is the antithesis of the master-worker dynamic promoted by the bar proprietress.

Sasha’s sole purpose is a kind of heroic striving against merciless life, cruel fate, and unnatural masters—to leave a mark in this world. There is, of course, nothing unusual in this, especially among men of ambition. A familiar example might be Lincoln who was accused in his early political life of being merely a deist and not a proper Christian (he was not a member of any church). We can see in his remarks to his law partner William Herndon that mixture of belief and purely temporal concerns, the urge to be remembered in ways which seem out of keeping with any firm acceptance of a creator:

“…oh how hard it is to die and leave one’s Country no better than if one had never lived for it.”

The black woman—not the usual wizened bearded Ancient of Days—tempts Ivan with kindness, water, and food. The impermanence of this arrangement is highlighted earlier in the comic in the story of a dog called, Oliver—leashed to a harsh horse riding instructor who he deserts for the pack upon his death. Another canine friend of Ivan’s, Kirby, is found tied to a tree by his drunken master-god. He is the very image of the foolish, all-trusting believer.

Since this is a comic, one could be forgiven for seeing in that faithful bulldog a metaphor for that greatest of superhero artists. The correlations only go so far though Kirby’s gluttonous, intoxicated, and cruel master may be viewed in some quarters as an accurate portrayal of Marvel.

Chaffee’s presentation doesn’t question the existence of the otherworldly; it is as tangible as the humans which walk around the dogs in his comic. And these creatures are certainly without written creeds or ossified revelation. What matters to them is that single moment of physical comfort and emotional sustenance, ephemeral as it all may be. The death of the pack leader, Sasha, at the hands of the female bar owner leads to the dispersion of the pack and an existential crisis. Some continue their lonesome wanderings but Ivan finds his place at a water bowl left as a token of friendship by Babe—the cryptic epistle written above that bowl as mysterious to him as any divine apocalypse.

Perhaps it is a mark of man’s strange and natural religiosity that he is attracted to it.

At this point, Ivan encounters the Malamute’s right hand dog, a terrier by the name of Sawney. He looks enigmatically at Ivan at rest by his water bowl, presenting us with the singular mystery of the comic. Is that look a sign of disapproval and disgust? Or is it one of longing and satisfaction that Ivan has finally found his place in this world. The answers to these questions, so obvious to many, are in the end quite beyond mere human understanding.

Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore, Mom

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This is something of a follow up to my review of Dan Clowes show at the MCA which ran in the Chicago Reader last week.
_______________________

Dan Clowes published Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron as a collection in 1993; he published Wilson in 2010. The first is a surreal, dream-like pulp grotesque; the second is an exercise in the quotidian mundanity of literary fiction. Yet, despite their separation in time and genre, the two books have a major plot strand in common. That plot strand consists of two parts. (1) A man searches for his wife who has sunk into sexual debasement. (2) She dies.

In both comics, also, the women’s stories are simultaneously the center of the narrative and marginal to the psychodrama of the husbands. In Velvet Glove, Barbara Allen’s death happens in a blink-and-you’ll miss it off there on the panel edge joke, and is “retold” through a filmed showing for Clay Loudermilk’s benefit.

In Wilson, Pippi’s death occurs completely off-panel, narrated to Wilson over the phone as he sits in prison. Both deaths are carefully, deliberately degrading. Barbara is shot in the head during a pornographic fetish film; Pippi dies of a drug overdose. The anti-climactic awfulness of their passings is both a joke and a validation, underlining the nonsensical, adult viciousness of Velvet Glove and the banal, adult viciousness of Wilson. As in a gangsta rap song, or in one of the country death songs that both the names “Barbara Allen” and “Loudermilk” reference, coolness and a kind of manliness or maturity is conveyed through the killing of women, and, through the studied casualness of that killing.

That maturity is in fact what is at issue is made quite clear in both books, albeit in different ways. In Velvet Glove, the search for Barbara Allen is tied repeatedly to the obsessive search for pop culture collectibles…and thereby to the comics medium. Clay Loudermilk discovers Barbara in the opening pages of the comic performing in a violent, bizarre cult fetish film — a provocative, unique bit of alternaculture which stands in for and references Like a Velvet Glove itself. Loudermilk’s shocked need-to-know following the exhibit is diegetically because his wife was in the film, but for alternative comics fans it also has to reference the awakened passion of the collector.

This is only underlined when the search for Barbara becomes obscurely enmeshed with an iconic cartoon character, Mr. Jones, who appeared in old-time advertisements and is improbably tattooed on Clay’s foot — as if his search for obscurities has become a mark of personal identification, so that he has become his own infantile obsessions. When he shakes Mr. Jones, it is not to transcend him, but to embody him. His arms and legs (and Mr. Jones tattoo) are torn off by a steroidal, adolescent-power-fantasy of an antagonist, and Clay becomes a swaddled stump, cared for and fussed over like a baby.

In Wilson, the connection between women, comics, and childhood is routed (as is just about everything in Wilson) through Charles Schulz’ Peanuts. The non-funny gag strips substitute glib profanity and gallow’s humor for Schulz’s bizarre aphasiac non-sequitors and odd tangents, but the model is still clear enough. Pippi, then, is a grown up little red-haired girl; Wilson a grown-up Charlie Brown who, of course, hasn’t really grown up. The shifting styles veer back and forth between cartoonish/neotenous and more realistic, so that Wilson exists in a constantly vacillating iconic no-man’s land between kids’ fodder and serious fiction.

In both works, then, comics, cartooning, childishness, and women function as a knot of meaning, loathing, and desire. Clowes is a very self-aware cartoonist; I don’t think it’s an accident that the initial fetish film Loudermilk sees includes an image of a grown man dressed as a baby and crying.

Similarly, I’m sure the Freudian connotations of arrested development and desperate, childish bid for control are entirely intentional when Wilson sends his in-laws a giant box of dog shit. Both books present their protagonists as infantile, or in danger of, or tempted by, infantilization. Both books in turn, link their own medium of comics to that same infantilization. The narratives then become engines for demonstrating and reveling their own childishness, while simultaneously disavowing it.

Both the reveling and the disavowal are accomplished in no small part by making comics women, and then killing them. As Clowes is I’m sure well-aware, a fetish is technically a displaced symbol of the mother. Barbara as collectible, then, functions as a doubly referring, vacillating system, feminizing comics and comicizing femininity. Again, the final image of Clay, armless and legless, trying to draw on a pad with a pencil in his teeth while his monstrous fish girlfriend declares her love, fits neatly here.

It’s a masochistic, self-pitying vision of comics artist as child — distanced both through its own adult violence and through its vision of the femininity as monstrous. Similarly, Barbara’s brutal death is commanded by a young girl who spins out the stories that are used in the fetish film. The comic, then, is, Clowes tells us, under the control of a feminine infant — whose whims result in very adult violence and femicide. The narrative’s grown-upness is guaranteed by the fact that it makes sexualized violence out of a child’s story.

In Wilson, Clowes actually self-reflexively acknowledges the comics own investment in female degradation. Wilson insists that Pippi, after leaving him, ended up on the streets, in a life of prostitution and drug use. She keeps telling him that much of this is not true, but he either doesn’t believe her, or doesn’t want to listen to her.

In the terms of the narrative, Wilson wants Pippi to have fallen apart after she left him because he wants her to have made the wrong decision. But the comic itself seems to have its own motivations. Yet, despite all her denials, Pippi does in fact die of a drug overdose. Clowes, like Wilson, it seems, just can’t quite resist the idea of Pippi, or Barbara, humiliated and dead. And no wonder; violence, sex, perversion, death — everything that separates Clowes from Charles Schulz, or from the infantilized medium of comics, is neatly summarized in the image of a woman’s corpse. If, Bloomian poets must kill their fathers to replace them, Clowes suggests that serious comics creators must kill their mothers to escape them. Genius comes out of her grave.

Dorothy and the Wizard in Letters

Posted on June 30, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Comixology.
________________

That’s the first page of the first chapter of The Wizard of Oz, written (of course) by L. Frank Baum, and illustrated by W.W. (William Wallace) Denslow. As you can see, Dorothy is leaning on the first letter of her own name, standing beside a Kansas wheat stalk. She stares into a mysterious fairie twilight…and not coincidentally, also seems to be staring into the book itself, with its own mysterious fairie treasures. Dorothy is about to enter the story, and she’s also the story itself; she’s an image and a name. You can’t show her without showing the start of the book.

Denslow used illustrations like this, incorporating a letter into his picture at the beginning of each chapter.

In some sense, these are just flourishes; you don’t need the illustrations to follow the story, as you would in many comics. Yet, the intertwining of words and images fits Baum’s story unusually well. Rereading The Wizard of Oz in comparison with, say, The Hobbit or a more recent series like Patricia Wrede’s The Enchanted Forest, it’s striking how shallow Baum’s narrative is. Not that it’s not delightful or even moving — it’s both of those things. But Oz, the world itself, seems about an inch deep. You get the sense that Baum has thought only a sentence or so ahead of his protagonists, if that. The yellow brick road doesn’t so much lead Dorothy through the narrative as it skips rather desperately ahead of her. Ummm…creatures with bear bodies and tiger heads…and then, ur, flying monkeys, and…a city of china people! And next…creatures that shoot their heads like cannon balls! And the queen of the mice! Each section seems to come into being in the nick of time, just before Dorothy can put her foot down upon it.

Partially for that reason, one of my favorite passages in the book is when Dorothy and her companions are in the poppy field. Dorothy and Toto fall asleep. The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow can carry them, but the lion is too heavy, so they urge him to run ahead and get out of the field. So he “aroused himself and bounded forward as fast as he could go. In a moment he was out of sight” — running ahead of the story, and so vanishing into the poppies and dreams.

Literally, as it turns out. The others find the Lion

lying fast asleep among the poppies. The flowers had been too strong for the huge beast and he had given up, at last, and fallen only a short distance from the end of the poppybed, where the sweet rass spread in beautiful green fields before them.

“We can do nothing for him,” said the Tin Woodman sadly; “for he is much too heavy to lift. We must leave him here to sleep on forever, and perhaps he will dream that he has found courage at last.”

On the next page, there’s this striking illustration, showing Dorothy and Toto asleep and the giant, deadly poppies twining around them and breaking out of the panel borders. The poppies seem to be trying to reach and intermingle with the text on the facing page, as if to suggest the words are in Dorothy’s dreams and vice versa.

In that context, it’s worth noting too that the Tin Woodman’s hope for the Lion — “perhaps he will dream that he has found courage at last” — is exactly what happens. The wizard is revealed as a humbug…which is to say, he’s a storyteller.

The Scarecrow’s body rests on the letter “N” while the wizard takes the head to stuff it with brains — or, more precisely, with the word “brains.” The text is what surrounds the scarecrow and what’s going inside him, just as the Lion gets not courage, but a dream of courage. Which is, as it turns out, the same thing.

In his 1971 book The World Viewed, critic and philosopher Stanley Cavell argued that for the film version of The Wizard of Oz:

The unmasking of the Wizard is a declaration of the point of the movie’s artifice. He is unmasked not by removing something from him but by removing him from a sort of television or movie stage, in which he has been projecting and manipulating his image. His behavior changes; he no longer can, but also no longer has to maintain his image, and he demonstrates that the magic of artifice in fulfilling or threatening our wishes is no stronger than, and in the end must bow to, the magic of reality….

Whether or not this is the case for the film, it seems much less clear-cut in the book. Oz is revealed as a story teller, but he doesn’t stop telling stories, and those stories don’t stop being real. In fact, he seems a better wizard once he’s been exposed, not because he’s more real, but because — what with dispensing brains, hearts and courage — his humbug is more convincing. How can you tell the magic of artifice from the magic of reality anyway? How can you separate what you say from what you see?

That’s the last page of the book. Dorothy has skipped across the desert back to Kansas with her magic silver shoes, and they fall behind her. You can see one of them has fallen off already; it’s dropped in the “A”. Except…when I first looked at this drawing, I thought the shoe was Dorothy’s foot; it took me a moment to realize that it had gotten detached. Which seems apropos. Dorothy’s still in the text, even after all these years. The home she comes back to isn’t any more real than the words “Home Again” which float like a sign-post above the twilit Kansas sky. Which is to say, both aren’t real, and are.

Blood Feast in 5 Frames

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Nicolas Labarre

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Category Archives: Blog