Utilitarian Review 4/30/16

Posted on April 30, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Ng Suat Tong criticizes Dan Clowes on criticism.

Caroline Drennen on Turkish Airlines’ flights to Metropolis.

Ng Suat Tong on the theological confusion of Chester Brown’s May Wept.

Jimmy Johnson on what Aquaman’s ancestors were doing during the Middle Passage (and how slavery doesn’t exist in the DC/Marvel universes.)

Me on why it’s okay for artists and critics to know each other.

Chris Gavaler on Hamlet, superhero.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Daily Dot I wrote about

—how doxxing is abuse, not invasion of privacy.

—the upside of Google controlling everything.

At The Establishment I wrote about the virulent racism in Marston’s original Wonder Woman comics.

At PLayboy

—I interviewed Sara Benincasa about her new book, sex, art, and puppies.

—how Beyoncé is the most important pop musician ever.

At Splice I started a series on the Hammer Dracula films! I’ll be writing about all nine in chronological order; for this first one, I talked about how narrative sinks its teeth into you—with your help.

Also at Splice Today I wrote about

—how fame and money go together for writers less and less.

—being old and seeing old rockstars rock loudly.

At the Reader I wrote about La Sera, a band that’s a little bit country, a little bit the Smiths.

Other Links

Katherine Cross on male dreams of subservient female robots.

Nice Pitchfork write up of the new Dawn Richard track.

Andrew Wheeler explains that Frank Cho is an idiot.

Something is Rotten in the State of Gotham

Posted on April 29, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

“There’s only one Hamlet (and most children don’t read it), whereas comic books come by the millions.”

That’s what Frederic Wertham told readers of National Parent-Teacher in 1949, his second of three reasons why comics are bad for kids. Six years later in Seduction of the Innocent, he quoted a publisher using the same Shakespeare play as an excuse for comic-book content:

“Sure there is violence in comics. It’s all over English literature, too. Look at Hamlet.”

Wertham roundly mocked the comment, but the publisher had a point, and not just about violence. Lone heir of an aristocratic family avenges his murdered father in a society ruled by corruption. Sound familiar? Hamlet is the boiler plate for Batman and other vengeance-motivated vigilantes across the multiverse.

So while it’s true most children don’t read Hamlet, Hamlet knock-offs come by the millions. But if you don’t think Batman is a Tragedy, take another look inside Shakespeare.

Bruce Wayne, haunted by the unjust death of his parents, dedicates himself to a noble war on criminals. Does that make Bruce a tragic hero? Depends on your definition. Hamlet is a tragic hero in the sense that he is the hero of a tragedy. Macbeth is also the hero of a self-titled tragedy, but the two characters are polar opposites. Macbeth overthrows the peaceful order of Scotland by murdering the king and stealing the throne. In Hamlet, that’s Claudius, the guy who murdered Hamlet’s dad and set his ghost wandering the ramparts. It takes the not-of-woman-born Macduff to defeat the usurper Macbeth and restore order. In Denmark, that’s Hamlet’s vigilante mission.

The ur-Tragedy Oedipus Rex combines the roles of Macbeth and Hamlet into one character. Oedipus is the supervillain who killed his own father, stole his father’s wife and throne, and sunk the city of Thebes into supernatural plague. But he’s also the hero who solves the mystery and restores order by punishing the criminal—which means gouging his own eyes out. If you define “tragic hero” as that sort of a self-punishing criminal, neither Hamlet nor Macbeth make the list.

But Hamlet, like Batman, is an avenger. He didn’t make Denmark rotten. That was Claudius, and if Claudius self-punished like Oedipus, Claudius would be a tragic hero too. But Claudius is just a garden-variety villain, and so Denmark needs a hero to set things right. Enter Hamlet. He’s “tragic” only in the sense that he dies, and since he dies after completing his heroic mission, he dies triumphant. But unlike the deaths of Claudius, Oedipus, and Macbeth, his death isn’t necessary to restore order. It’s just an epilogue.

Unlike tragic heroes who start out unjust and so corrupt their kingdoms before eventually punishing themselves, an avenger is aligned with justice from the start. Hamlet is “tragic” only because he ends in what Northrop Frye calls social isolation. The most extreme version is death—six feet under is pretty isolated—but social isolation comes in a range, and avengers embody it all. John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett in The Myth of the American Superhero identify the standard type: “lonely, selfless, sexless beings” each of whom “never practices citizenship.”

Your traditional gunfighter doesn’t settle down after restoring order. He moves on. Which implies the role of avenger is socially subversive in itself. Because the avenger is a response to injustice, the avenger reflects and embodies that injustice. Once the criminal is punished and justice restored, the avenger also has to conform to tragedy’s ABA structure. His own pre-hero state has to be restored too. It’s a mini-version of society’s former golden age, an age free of crime and so also free of crime-fighters. A full restoration of justice ends the role of the justice-seeking avenger, and so the avenger has to vanish with the villain.

To end in social integration instead, an avenger has to give up the avenger role. That means hanging up the costume and getting married—how early proto-superheroes Zorro, the Gray Seal, and Spring-Heeled Jack all ended their crime-fighting adventures. Serial heroes like Batman remain avengers by prolonging the B phase of the tragedy plot structure, that quixotic war on criminals that by definition can never end. If Bruce just needed to hunt down his parents’ killer, he could have retired a long time ago and married Julie. Remember Julie? Probably not. She was Bruce’s original fiancé, but, like Ophelia, Julie called it quits long before the end of the action.

Other avengers at least pretend to be on a simultaneous quest for personal restoration. Superheroes often figure their fantastical abilities as blessings for society, but curses to themselves, and so their ongoing serials project a desire to give up their powers and live a normal life. Alan Moore mocked this idea when he took over Swamp Thing, calling “the premise of a monster trying to regain his humanity” flawed because

“if that were to happen, the series is over. The dimmest reader realizes that isn’t going to happen, meaning the character is going to spend the remainder of the series on the run, moping about what was not happening. So Swamp Thing ends like Hamlet or just a Silver Surfer covered in snot.”

Hamlet, grandfather of monstrously moping superheroes, is a prototype of the isolated avenger whose identity is too defined by the avenging mission to give it up. Once he has completed the mission assigned to him by his father’s ghost and restored justice to Denmark by punishing his mother and usurper uncle, Hamlet’s death eliminates the last traces of Claudius’s corruption.

Hamlet could instead “regain his humanity” and reenter society by marrying, but Ophelia dies because her boyfriend can’t stop being a hero—the same way Spider-Man would never willingly cure himself of his power-bestowing mutation. Marrying Ophelia before completing his mission would turn Hamlet into a failed hero or, worse, a villain, just another guy willing to be a citizen of a corrupt town. Like Batman, Hamlet can’t settle down till he’s scraped the rot out of Denmark. Lamont Cranston tells his fiancé the same thing: he can’t marry until he has completed his avenger mission as The Shadow, making Margo Lane an Ophelia who avoids death by accepting endless delay through a serial form’s never-ending B structure.

Which is a long way of saying: No, Frederic, there’s more than one Hamlet, and millions of fans do read them.

Artists and Critics Sometimes Know Each Other

Posted on April 28, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today.
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As a critic, I not infrequently know the artists or writers whose work I write about.

If you’ve been following the #gamersgate controversy at all, you know that some people think that this is really wrong. “Journalistic ethics!” people shouted over and over on twitter. It wasn’t exactly clear what they meant by this, but critics knowing artists seemed to be at least one semi-inchoate focus of outrage.

To some degree, you can understand the concerns. There’s a vision of journalistic objectivity which involves a reviewer ruthlessly evaluating the work in front of him or her without any reference to, or knowledge of the creator. The critic, in this view, is supposed to be a completely impartial observer, affixing a stamp of quality or animadversion so that readers can know that they are spending their hard-earned dollars in the best of all possible ways.

The reality is a lot messier. In part, that’s because, if you review a work positively, one of the things that often happens is that the creator of the work gets in touch with you to say, hey, awesome, you liked my work! Often creators will write me just to say thank you (which is lovely). Sometimes, though, they’ll contact me in the hopes that I might review their next book or project, too.

So, is that unethical? Now that I’ve talked to them, am I supposed to never write about their work again? That seems silly; the only reason I know them, after all, is that I like their work. I guess you could argue for some sort of disclosure — but what would I say? “Fair warning: I really like this creator’s work; this creator likes that I like their work. Now on to the review, where I say I like their work!”

The thing is, when I do like somebody’s work, that can also open the way for other collaborations. Many writers and artists I admire, like Ariel Schrag, Edie Fake, and Stacey Donovan, have posted on my little, all volunteer blog at one point or another, because I love their work and when they appear in my inbox to say they liked a review, I’ll sometimes ask them if they would be interested in contributing. If you were determined to be offended by that sort of thing, you could argue it’s a quid pro quo, and that I’m receiving content (even if not money) for good reviews. Edie even designed the banner for my site (which I happily paid him for.) But again, the whole reason I find their contributions valuable is because I value their work — which is what I say whenever I write a review talking about how awesome Ariel Schrag and Edie Fake are.

The disconnect here isn’t just about ethics. It’s about the nature of criticism. A lot of the people posting to gamersgate seem to see reviews primarily as a way to make purchasing decisions. Reviews, from this perspective, are a buyer’s guide; it’s the equivalent of a consumer report. You don’t want the person who evaluates the gas mileage on your Prius to be buddies with the Prius manufacturers, because you’d worry that they might try to help their friend out by saying that the Prius gets better gas mileage than it does. You want an objective take on the value of that Prius.

But while objectivity makes sense as a goal in evaluating Priuses, it doesn’t as a goal for evaluating art. Criticism of art is always, by its nature subjective. And, at least for me, criticism tends to be less about saying, buy this or don’t buy this, and more about trying to engage with, and think about, what an artist is saying, or what a work is doing. A piece of criticism is as much about talking to, or with, the artist as it is providing a consumer report. On #gamersgate art is seen as a product, which is certainly one thing art can be. But art’s also a community. Which is why having actual conversations with the artist in question doesn’t seem like an ethical violation. Having conversations with the artist is my job.

The Atlanteans and the Middle Passage

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Jimmy Johnson

A detailed drawing of the inside of a slave ship, showing how close together the "cargo" was packed. --- Image by © Louie Psihoyos/Science Faction/Corbis

This essay first appeared on CiCo3. It was inspired by Nijla Mu’Min’s extraordinary film Deluge. Thanks to Amrah Salomon for feedback on the draft.
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Superheroes have celebrated origin stories. Gamma radiation gives rise to shapeshifting rage monsters. Extraterrestrial parentage provides biological powers. A magician’s curse or a nibble from a radioactive arachnid can turn one superpowered. The story of how one gets one’s powers is a defining part of superhero stories. It is, after all, the sine qua non of any superhero’s existence. But what about the universes in which the superheroes operate? Why don’t we look at their origin stories? And what can those origin stories tell us about the comics universes and popular discourse? What follows explores the origin stories of the DC and Marvel universes through their respective Atlantean populations, focusing on a missing narrative fundamental to the world in which virtually all stories in the DC and Marvel lines happen: African Slavery.

The Marvel and DC universes take place, with some exceptions, in the United States settler colony. The United States has two systemic structures without which it does not exist: African Slavery and Indian Removal (or at least it does not exist in anything remotely resembling its current form). These are the bedrocks of settler colonialism on the continent. The simultaneous destruction of the native world and construction of the anti-Black one define everything— from many colloquialisms in White American English, to property and land law, to policing, to the names of sports teams, to holidays. They comprise the preponderance of U.S. history, not to mention the country’s entire physical geography.

Can this be less true in the Marvel and DC universes? They both have Black characters, albeit relatively few and poorly drawn – often in both senses of the term. Black as an identity (or, per anti-Blackness, a site of capital accumulation and location for gratuitous violence) is tied to the legacy of settler colonialism’s African Slavery. If there was African Slavery then there was transport of enslaved peoples from Africa to colonized Turtle Island (North America). So where were the Atlanteans of the respective DC and Marvel universes during the Middle Passage? Where were Aquaman’s and Namor’s ancestors when the first rebelling or newborn enslaved Africans were tossed overboard to drown, be eaten by sharks, or drift slowly to the bottom of the Atlantic?

Exploring these ideas identifies dramatic narrative gaps in between the worlds where these stories purport to take place and the world in which they are told. That they are missing from the Marvel and DC universes exemplifies settler normativity, how the destruction of the native world and construction of the settlers’ anti-Black one is naturalized in and baselines politics and society. Settler colonialism is the organization of power that accomplishes this simultaneous destruction/construction. It is how native Turtle Island becomes the anti-Black North America for example.

It also creates a worldview for its inhabitants. In the same way that men struggle to see sexism, instead just seeing ‘normal’, settlers struggle to see settler colonialism. This settler normativity is one of our very frames of reference. It is basic to our understanding of the world. It is why when we hear about the 49ers we think about the football team or the miners of the gold rush, not the populist genocide the actual ‘fortyniners carried out, even though the depopulation of native California by far being their most enduring and impactful legacy. To question settler colonialism is to question the very world the settlers make. We don’t ask where Aquaman’s ancestors were during the Middle Passage because African Slavery is naturalized in society. It, like men not seeing sexism, is a level below the observable because it is the frame through which observations are made.

So where were Aquaman and Namor’s great-great-great grandparents when they first encountered African Slavery? What was their reaction? How would those reactions change the DC and Marvel universes? I explore some potential scenarios in the paragraphs that follow. Some of these fit inside the current DC and Marvel continuities, namely, the more horrible ones. Others disrupt the current continuities, including those that stop African Slavery in its infancy.

Scenario 1: Hotlantis

Those thrown overboard are rescued by Atlanteans and form an Afro-descendent Atlantean population or are assisted in returning home. This does not require significant adjustment of current continuities.

Scenario 2: Successful Anti-Slavery Intervention

The Atlanteans intervene against the slavers and prevent the Middle Passage from happening. Scenario five can work in conjunction with this. This is, in the DC universe term, an Elseworld and is irreconcilable with the current continuities. Scenarios 3 and 4 show why it is irreconcilable.

Scenario 3: Post-Intervention A

Superman’s rocket lands in Pawnee country since there is no Kansas in which to crash without African Slavery. Superman is now a Pawnee hero. This is irreconcilable with the current continuities.

Scenario 4: Post-Intervention B

Without African Slavery there is no such place as Gotham in which Thomas and Martha Wayne are shot to later be patrolled by their son Batman. They remain British aristocrats. If Bruce Wayne grows up to be a billionaire vigilante he does so in the UK. This is irreconcilable with the current continuities.

Scenario 5: No Response

The Atlanteans first encounter African Slavery through the at sea disposal of newborns or rebelling Africans and either react only to the drowned bodies and not to the act of drowning or simply go about their business. Here the Atlanteans would be concerned with whaling ships more than slave ships (though the ecological damage of African Slavery is in fact substantial!), to the degree they’re concerned with surface dwellers at all. This does not require adjustment of continuities.

Scenario 6: Unsuccessful Intervention

The Atlanteans attempt to intervene and fail and the Middle Passage continues. This is the basis for the Atlantean distance from the surface dweller world for the next four hundred years until the eras of Aquaman and Namor. This does not require significant adjustment of continuities.

Scenario 7: Complicity

Both Atlantean worlds are monarchies of one kind or another which suggests regressive politics. It is thus entirely feasible that Aquaman and Namor’s ancestors were complicit in the Middle Passage in some way. Was a tribute or toll paid to those who control the seas? Thus Atlanteans owe reparations of some kind and direct action at the Justice League headquarters is in order. This does not require significant adjustment of continuities.

Scenario 8: Opportunistic/Humanitarian Intervention

The history of humanitarian intervention is dominated by the interveners integrating a crisis or oppressive system into their own politics rather than ending the crisis or oppression. Alternately put, humanitarian intervention is with few exceptions a tool of empire. Entirely plausible in an intervention scenario is Atlanteans taking over the slave trade rather ending it. This does not require significant adjustment of current continuities.

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An honest account of U.S. history means dealing with the ugly truths of settler colonialism. Settler society cultural production helps avoid these ugly truths by producing myths. Not myths as in, superpowered beings in symbolic grand battles. But myths as in, the United States settler colony somehow being post-colonial. As it stands, the most implausible thing about comics is not that some beings can fly without apparent means of propulsion, but that they take place in a United States without Indian Removal and African Slavery. DC and Marvel comics are not imagining a utopia without colonialism even if they may think they are. Instead they imagine a world where colonialism doesn’t matter or doesn’t matter anymore, mountains of facts to the contrary be damned.

Comics can do better. Comics can narrate the colonial present and retcon their respective universes to where settler colonialism, including African Slavery and Indian Removal, happen and impact the universes accordingly. Elseworlds-style stories are one way of accomplishing this. For example there is the as-yet not made story Superman: Alien where the Man of Steel’s rocket is found by Mexican migrant workers on a Kansas farm. He then gets deported with his adoptive parents and grows up to be a Mexican superhero. That is at least as plausible as him being found by the white farm owners. This and the more tragic alternate visions offered above veer away from the current continuities in that they contextualize events as if they take place in the universes they purport to.

The question is one of decolonizing comics. Not as in, comics were colonized and must now be decolonized. That is silly. Nobody colonized comics books. To the contrary, comics in the United States are part of settler colonial cultural production. So in decolonizing comics we seek comics that are decolonizing acts; that are decolonizing narratives and, potentially, tools. Some indie comics and zines already explore this. Yet mainstream comics can too play a role in subverting settler normativity through dealing with the world settler colonialism made, the world in which the comics universes exist. One possible story to tell in this direction is the one that tells the story of the Atlanteans during the Middle Passage. Aquaman’s ancestors have some explaining to do.

The Good and Faithful Chester Brown (and the Parable of the Talents)

Posted on April 26, 2016 by Ng Suat Tong

If you’re wondering why you’re reading a bible study during this blog’s weekly schedule, you can blame Chester Brown for creating a commentary-entertainment on the role of prostitution in the Hebrew and Christian Bible.

For those who have spent the last few years living under a rock, let me begin by stating that the provision of professional sexual services has, in recent years, become of paramount importance in the artistic and political life of Chester Brown.

Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus is his hymn of praise and justification for a much maligned occupation. The Mary in question is Mary of Bethany from John Chapter 12, now conflated with the “sinful” woman of Luke Chapter 7:38 who wets Jesus’ feet with her tears. The cover to the new comic is as archly playful as Zaha Hadid’s vaginal design for the Al Wakrah stadium in Qatar. The image is a symbolic representation of female genitalia with Jesus’ feet acting as a symbolic penis and the Bible in the position of the clitoris.

It is an accurate representation of the comic itself—which is thoroughly unerotic and studious. Any ecstasies the reader might hope to derive from Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus will only be derived from a study of scripture.

The art mirrors the earnestness of the endeavor and seems ground down into uniform shapes with all gnarly edges removed. Which is not to say that the work is devoid of imagination: there’s the God of Cain and Abel who is pictured as a naked giant with his back constantly turned to us, he holds Abel’s offering in the palms of both his immense hands; Mary of Bethany is only ever seen in silhouette and her actions disembodied into panels of darkness, her tear drops, and nard draining from an alabaster jar. We only see the angry reactions of the men surrounding Jesus. In so doing, Mary of Bethany becomes all the nameless women in the parallel stories found in the Synoptics but more than this, the entire anointment scene plays out as a metaphor for occult sexual intercourse.

Brown’s comic is concerned with the flexible and mercurial nature of the Hebrew and Christian God, the lack of fixity in his laws; and perhaps his occasional pleasure in those who flout them. If this seems at odds with what you’ve read about God in Sunday School, that would be because it is. Brown’s interpretation of the Bible has always been idiosyncratic, finding the nooks and crannies of hidden knowledge and, in the example which follows, not allowing facts to get in the way of a good idea (to him at least).

The central story of Mary Wept is “The Parable of the Talents.” This is one version which can be found online:

14 “Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. […] 19 “After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. 20 The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.’ 21 “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’ […]

24 “Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. 25 So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’

26 “His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! … […] … 28 “‘So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. 29 For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. 30 And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

(Matthew 25:14-30, NIV)

One problem with reading Brown’s copious notes is that they frequently communicate as facts that which is very much in dispute. To wit, in discussing “The Parable of the Talents”, Brown claims with a kind of divine certainty that “the work that we now call Matthew is a Greek translation of an earlier book that was written in Aramaic.” I suppose this represents the assurance of an artist who considers himself a kind of latter day Gnostic.

The idea that at least parts of the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in Hebrew is not a recent invention (see Papias by way of Eusebius) and is held by many Christians but hardly beyond dispute. There is as much reason to believe that this Gospel of the Nazareans (a names which appears only in the ninth century) is an Aramaic translation of Matthew (which is in Greek) or at least takes creative license and inspiration from that canonical book. This Gospel of the Nazareans has only survived in fragments brought down to us by various Church Fathers, and it is a summary of the Aramaic “Parable of the Talents” found in Eusebius’ Theophania (4.22) that provides Brown with his new reading.

From Bart Ehrman and Zlatko Plese’s translation of Eusebius’ paraphrase of “The Parable of the Talents” in Theophania:

“For the Gospel that has come down to us in Hebrew letters makes the threat not against the one who hid the (master’s) money but against the one who engaged in riotous living.

For (the master) had three slaves, one who used up his fortune with whores and flute players, one who invested the money and increased its value, and one who hid the money. The one was welcomed with open arms, the other blamed, and only the third locked up in prison.” [emphasis mine]

In his quotation of Ehrman in his notes, Brown deliberately leaves out the first section of Eusebius’ summary—that it was the servant who “engaged in riotous living” (i.e. the one who used up his fortune with whores and flute players) that was cast into the outer darkness with the concomitant weeping and gnashing of teeth. In so doing, he elevates the position of that servant in his retelling. In the original text, Eusebius quite clearly excuses the servant who hides the master’s money but in Brown’s rhetoric, it is the “whoring” servant who is rewarded

Brown cites John Dominic Crossan’s The Power of Parable as the primary source of his inspiration with regards his interpretation of “The Parable of the Talents” but while Crossan does provide the same reduced quotation from Eusebius, he obviously knows the whole and is clearly at odds with Brown’s reading:

“The version of the Master’s Money was presented in elegant reversed parallelism—a poetic device…But that structure means that that, of the three servants, the squanderer is “imprisoned’…The hider is, in other words the ideal servant.” (Crossan)

For Crossan, the parable is primarily about the conflict between the “Roman pro-interest tradition” and the “Jewish anti-interest tradition”; a challenge to live in accordance with the Jewish law in Roman society. Brown’s adaptation, on the other hand, seems to have been constructed out of whole cloth. If Brown’s adaptation of the “Parable of the Talents” has no historical or textural basis, then what are we to make of it? Perhaps Brown sees himself as a kind of mystic who has divined the true knowledge and the error in Eusebius’ (and presumably Crossan’s) prudishness.

More importantly, why would Brown even require a Christian justification for prostitution? Brown provides the answer to this in his notes—he considers himself a Christian though an atypical one. Moreover he considers secular society’s disapproval of prostitution (“whorephobia”) an unjustifiable legacy of poor Biblical interpretation, not least by a rather inconvenient person called Paul. Brown lives in Canada where it is illegal to purchase sexual services but technically legal to sell them. In this Canada has adopted the longstanding Swedish model, of which The Living Tribunal of this site (aka Noah) has grave misgivings, mostly because sex workers report that it puts them at risk.

Brown uses the story of Jesus’ anointment at Bethany to highlight the vulnerability of women in Jesus’ time. The title of Brown’s comic is a reference to the story told in Luke 7:36-50 where a (nameless) woman in the city “who was a sinner” bathes Jesus’ feet with her tears, drys them with her hair, and anoints them with ointment. The story has parallels with the story of Mary of Bethany’s anointing of Jesus’ feet in John 12:1-8, and Mark 14:3-11 where an unnamed woman pours expensive nard on Jesus’ head (“Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”)

After a period of vacillation, Brown has come down firmly on the idea that the woman in question (Mary of Bethany included) was a prostitute. By his estimation, the various versions of this story are not redactions retold for different ends but the exact same story from which the individual elements of each can be combined to form a richer more instructive whole.

Feminist interpretations of Luke (among others) differ greatly on this subject. The evidence for the woman’s sexual sin tends to come down to her exposure of her hair in public, her intrusion into the house of Simon, and her description as a “woman in the city”— all of these points have met with equally forceful rebuttals in recent years. These feminist readings focus on the sexualization of the woman and the fixation on her sin. They question scholars “who choose predominantly to depict her as an intrusive prostitute who acts inappropriately and excessively” despite the gaps in Luke’s text which allow a variety of readings. It is these gaps which opens this famous episode to a variety of rhetorical uses.

One of the great feminist readings of the New Testament, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her, concerns itself with the historical erasure yet centrality of women in the Gospels. At one point, Martha (Mary’s sister) is seen as a candidate for “the beloved disciple” when John places the words:

“Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” (John 11:27)

…into the mouth of Martha as the climatic faith confession of a ‘beloved disciple’ in order to identify her with the writer of the book. To Fiorenza, Mary’s action of using her hair to wipe Jesus’ feet is “extravagant” and draws comparisons to Jesus’ own washing of his disciples’ feet in The Gospel of John. Also of note is the decidedly male (Simon, the disciples, Judas) objection to her actions in every instance which is rebuked by Jesus.

While most sex workers are in fact women, Brown seems less interested in recovering the central status of women in the Bible. He has a somewhat different feminist (?) mission. Is it possible to be a sex worker and still be a good Christian? Even Brown seems to admit that it is impossible to reconcile prostitution or any form of sexual immorality with Biblical laws and Jesus’ admonitions. His new comic simply charts the curious areas where the profession turns up in the Bible and where its position in that moral universe is played out most sympathetically. While Jesus commands the woman taken in adultery to go and sin no more, I know not one Christian who has not continued to sin in some shape or fashion. Shouldn’t we be exercised about our own sins before those of perfect strangers? One would have to posit that the sin of sexual immorality is greater than all other sins (including our own) for one to be primarily concerned about its deleterious effects.

Brown’s position as a Christian in Mary Wept is that God’s laws are not immutable. Instead of a life of submission to curses and obedience to laws, he has chosen the “life of the shepherd” as espoused in Yoram Hazony’s The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture:

“…a life of dissent and initiative, whose aim is to find the good life for a man, which is presumed to be God’s true will.”

For Hazony, piety and obedience to the law are “worth nothing if they are not placed in the service of a life that is directed towards the active pursuit of man’s true good.” One presumes that Brown feels that he has found “man’s true good” in the sexual and personal freedoms afforded by prostitution. Whether he has found woman’s “true good” remains a far more controversial question.

#FlyToMetropolis

Posted on April 25, 2016 by Caroline Drennen

This is part of a series of essays written for Chris Gavaler’s comics class.

Unless you live under a rock you know about “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” And you probably remember the advertisements and promotional tie-ins. For the CBS Superbowl pregame one of the leading sponsors for the movie, Turkish Airlines, released two commercials, “Fly to Gotham City with Turkish airlines” and “Fly to Metropolis with Turkish Airlines.”

Both commercials are awesome but I personally like the “Fly to Metropolis” one more. Here are ten thoughts that I had while watching the commercial, which for the record I have watched about a thousand times now.

~Inspirational Music~

The commercial opens up with some inspirational music playing in the background while a narrator with a calm but strong voice tells you about the ~newest~ destination for the “airline that flies to more countries than any other.”

Maybe I’ll go to Metropolis for my next vacation

As I watched the Turkish Airlines jet fly over Metropolis and saw all the cool details of the city I seriously started wondering if I could go on a vacation there. One of the reasons why this is my favorite ad of all time is that it really looks like a real tourism video and it seriously makes me want to go to Metropolis for my next vacation. I usually hate all of those tacky tourism videos but this commercial left viewers with a sense of magic. (It also probably helps that it’s an imaginary city… but still.)

Damn that’s a lot like New York…

It takes a few seconds for it to sink in but the skyline that the jet flies next to is nearly identical to the NYC skyline. One of the bridges shown looks like a newer version of the Brooklyn Bridge and a building that appears in several different shots looks like a slightly different, LexCorp version of the Freedom Tower. There are also yellow taxis and at one point we see people sitting at a restaurant outside of the “Metropolis Museum of Modern Art,” which is clearly supposed to be the actual MoMA in New York City.

It’s like way cleaner though…

At this point I started to second guess myself and tried to convince myself that there was no way it’s actually New York because it was way too clean. There was almost no trash on the streets. No overflowing trash cans, no Starbucks cups littering the ground, and no one dropping their trash on the ground because they’re too lazy to go to the trashcan. It looked like they power washed the streets and sidewalks of New York.

There’s no pollution either and it’s so sunny! There’s no way this is New York…

It looks like a way happier version of New York. The sun is shining and the air looks so clear and clean. There is one shot in particular that shows a variety of people (bankers, construction workers, moms, kids, etc.) all walking in one spot but they aren’t pushing each other or yelling or flipping each other off. They’re just going about their business. The commercial also has several shots of the sun gleaming off buildings that definitely contributes to the perception of Metropolis as a more perfect version of New York.

Woo! Superman and Clark Kent!

~Major name drop~ This is when it becomes obvious to even the most disconnected people that the commercial is clearly about Superman. The narrator mentions “our heritage” and we are shown a shot of The Daily Planet building and then they mention “our heroes” and we see a statue that looks a lot like the statues of Atlas holding up the world but instead it’s Superman and he is bowing down to the city and holding it up.

LexCorp and Lex Luther

The main action of the commercial is Lex Luther holding a press conference on top of the unfinished LexCorp building and touting LexCorps “substantial contributions” to the city. It was at this point that I was calling him an obnoxious show off and saying that he has “no chill.” I also started to wonder if he was supposed to represent Michael Bloomberg. The resemblances are uncanny. Mainly that they run (or used to run) these major cities and that their companies donated large sums of money to projects aimed at revitalizing a city. After 9/11 Bloomberg’s company contributed $15 million to the effort to rebuild Lower Manhattan. This definitely brings in some dystopian elements and plays on current fears that corporations will take over or control entire cities/societies.

~More Inspiration~

~Visit the city of tomorrow, today~ Super, super corny but definitely hits a note with some people that would make them go and buy a plane ticket right after the commercial was over. This advertisement is definitely imitating a tourism commercial. They hit all the stereotypical elements of a tourism ad.

Damn Lex Luther back at it again with the white vans (or white suit)

Just kidding about the white vans. But Lex Luther does make another appearance except this time he is sitting first class in a Turkish Airlines jet holding a blue stress ball that makes it look like he has the world in his hand. He very creepily says, “We can’t wait to welcome you.” It seems so sweet but it’s just fake nice. This is when the dystopian vibes come in. Lex Luther looks like an evil genius that is plotting to brainwash us when we visit, or something crazy like that.

Was this really an Ad for Metropolis? Or was it about New York?

There are so many similarities between the two cities. The commercial also makes it look like they are selling tickets for flights to a perfect New York. Each time I watch the video I find more things that connect Metropolis to New York and it freaks me out a little. It also makes me question the motives of the movie: are they trying to comment on our society? Is this an undercover attack on Bloomberg?

I know I said it would be only ten thoughts but I can’t resist throwing in another and I have to point out how different this is from other airline ads.

Since 9/11 advertisements for airlines have changed a lot. Immediately after the attacks they focused on rebuilding trust with American consumers. They wanted to stop people from associating the attacks with the airlines too much and needed to make sure that 9/11 didn’t completely destroy the industry. American Airlines had to do a lot of damage control and released an entire ad campaign focusing on patriotism and trust after the attacks. But as 9/11 becomes further and further away, ads have started focusing more on customer service and perks instead of rebuilding trust and showing how much they love America. In other Turkish Airlines ads we can see that return to focusing on the perks associated with their company. They also usually incorporate humor into their ads and commonly feature celebrities. Fly to Metropolis though has a very different tone and is much more inline with the ads that we were seeing immediately following the attacks. The commercial hits a more serious yet optimistic note while also inspiring viewers. That tone is brought out through the ad’s treatment of Superman as an actual hero and not just a comic book character. It is also emphasized through the portrayal of Metropolis, artfully intertwining the story world with our world by making Metropolis so eerily similar to New York. This is one of the best commercials that I have seen. It has a very different tone and overall aesthetic compared to other commercials involving Superman and other contemporary airline commercials.

Utilitarian Review 4/23/16

Posted on April 23, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Chris Gavaler with a comics script about twins and death.

Me on Cinderella and pacifism.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote about

—superheroes as metaphors for assimilation and whitewashing Asian performers.

—Prince, and how rock has always been black music.

At the Guardian I asked Is Mowgli a superhero? (answer, no, thank goodness)

At the Daily Dot I wrote about the inevitable Marvel/Star Wars film crossover.

At the Establishment I wrote about Prescott Colleges’s new scholarship for undocumented immigrants.

At Splice Today I wrote about Little Windows, a great country record by Teddy Thompson and Kelly Jones.

At Random Nerds I highly recommended indie pop/rock/awesomeness artist Mobley’s new ep.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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