Category Archives: Blog

Superman on Trial

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Can reading detective fiction and Superman literature turn you into a supervillain? Super-lawyer Clarence Darrow says yes. He argued his case this week in 1924.

The facts were indisputable. His clients, Dickie Loeb and Babe Leopold rented a car, picked up Dickie’s fourteen-year-old cousin Bobby from school, and bludgeoned him with a chisel in the front seat. After stopping for sandwiches, they stripped the body, disfigured it with acid, and hid it below a railroad track. When they got home, they burnt their blood-spotted clothes and mailed the parents a ransom note. It was the perfect crime.
 

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Dickie was nineteen, Babe twenty, but both had already completed undergraduate degrees and were enrolled in law schools. They were also both voracious readers. Darrow, their defense attorney, detailed Dickie’s literary tastes: “detective stories,” each one “a story of crime,” ones, he said, the state legislature had wisely “forbidden boys to read” for fear they would “produce criminal tendencies.” Dickie “devoured” them. “He read them day after day . . . and almost nothing else.”

Darrow didn’t mention any titles, but Dickie must have snuck stacks of Detective Story Magazine past his governess. The Street and Smith pulp doubled from a bi-monthly to a weekly the year he turned twelve. Johnston McCulley was a favorite with fans. His gentleman criminal the Black Star wears a cape and hood with an emblem on the forehead. So does his Thunderbolt. Darrow said Dickie’s pulps “all show how smart the detective is, and where the criminal himself falls down.” But the detectives chasing the Man in Purple, the Picaroon, the Gray Ghost, the Joker, the Scarlet Fox—they never catch their man. Those noble vigilantes remain safely outside the law. They are also all young men born into wealth who disguise their secret lives. So Dickie, the son of a corporate vice-president, learned to play detective, “shadowing people on the street,” as he fantasized “being the head of a band of criminals.” “Early in his life,” said Darrow, Dickie “conceived the idea of that there could be a perfect crime,” one he could himself “plan and accomplish.”
 

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Babe was an impressionable reader too. He’d started speaking at four months and earned genius level IQ scores. Darrow called him “a boy obsessed of learning,” but one without an “emotional life.” He makes him sound like a renegade android, “an intellectual machine going without balance and without a governor.” Where Dickie transgressed through pulp fiction, “Babe took to philosophy.” Instead of McCulley, Nietzsche started “obsessing” Babe at sixteen. Darrow called Nietzsche’s doctrine “a species of insanity,” one “holding that the intelligent man is beyond good and evil, that the laws for good and the laws for evil do not apply to those who approach the superman.” Babe summed up Nietzsche the same way in a letter to Dickie: “In formulating a superman he is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern ordinary men.” A member of “the master class,” says Nietzsche himself, “may act to all of lower rank . . . as he pleases.” That includes murdering a fourteen-year-old neighbor as one “might kill a spider or a fly.”

So Babe considered Dickie a fellow superman. And Dickie considered Babe a perfect partner in crime. The two genres have one formula point in common: heroes are “above the law.” When Siegel and Shuster merged Beyond Good and Evil with Detective Story Magazine in 1938, they came up with Action Comics No. 1. Loeb and Leopold only got Life Plus 99 Years, the title of Babe’s autobiography. Prosecutors wanted to hear a death sentence, but Darrow wrote a modern law classic for his closing argument. It brought the judge to tears.

William Jennings Bryan liked it too. He quoted excerpts during the Scopes “Monkey” trial the following year. Bryan was prosecuting John Scopes for teaching the theory of evolution in a Tennessee high school, and Darrow was defending him. Scopes, a gym teacher subbing in science, used George William Hunter’s school board-approved Civil Biology, a standard textbook since 1914, and one that shocks my students when I assign it in my “Superheroes” course.

“If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved,” writes Hunter, “it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.” After describing families of “parasites” who spread “disease, immorality, and crime,” he argues: “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.”

This was one of Bryan’s main objections to evolution, a term he used interchangeably with eugenics: “Its only program for man is scientific breeding, a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind—an impossible system!”Bryan links eugenics to Nietzsche, as Darrow had the year before, saying Nietzsche believed “evolution was working toward the superman.” The claim is arguable, but the superman was “a damnable philosophy” to Bryan, a “flower that blooms on the stalk of evolution.”

“Would the State be blameless,” he asked, “if it permitted the universities under its control to be turned into training schools for murderers? When you get back to the root of this question, you will find that the Legislature not only had a right to protect the students from the evolutionary hypothesis, but was in duty bound to do so.”

Darrow declined to make a closing argument, preventing Bryan from making his before the judge too, so their final debate played out in newspapers. Either way, Darrow was talking from both ends of his ubermensch. “Loeb knew nothing of evolution or Nietzsche,” he told the Associated Press. “It is probable he never heard of either. But because Leopold had read Nietzsche, does that prove that this philosophy or education was responsible for the act of two crazy boys?”

Perhaps Darrow’s hypocrisy is an illustration of a superman only obeying his own laws. It didn’t matter though. Like Loeb and Leopold’s, Scopes’ guilt was never contested, and the court fined him $100 (later overturned on a technicality). That was 1925, the year the Fascist-inspired “super-criminal” Blackshirt joined Zorro and his merry band of pulp vigilantes, while Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf climbed the German best-seller list.

Superman was ascending.
 

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“For a Good Time. . .” – Calling Up Sexist Impulses to Sell Video Games

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This post originally appeared on The Middle Spaces.
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Long before the days of the internet and companies leveraging a fanbase willing to seek out commercials for their favorite properties and brands, TV spots and print ads were the only chance things had to catch on. By interrogating those old ads it is possible to uncover the strategies and cultural assumptions of those efforts to grab an audience. I recently came across an advertisement on the back cover of Power Pack #1 (1984) and it struck me as making an association that is simultaneously bizarre and prescient.

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I remember the ad from my early teen years (I turned 13 the summer this comic came out), but I had never given much thought to what it offered and how it offered it. The ad is certainly slicker than most ads of the time. I am sure at the time it seemed like an extravagance. For 50 cents you could call a 900-number to learn about Parker Bros video games. My mom kept a strict eye on phone use in our house, and no attempts to use math to show her that regardless of how long I stayed on the phone, local calls cost a flat fee of 10.2 cents ever worked. Mami was wary of what seemed like confused and obscure systems that siphoned away money. I knew better than to risk an errant 50 cents showing up on the bill. But regardless of how strict (or not) moms might have been back in 1984, I can’t imagine that this effort by Parker Brothers video game division was very successful. I knew of no one who enthusiastically described a soon to be released game that they learned about by calling this hotline, or some strategy for Gyruss that had heretofore gone undiscovered. No kid even claimed that his “cousin” had called and learned some made-up-on the spot news about a new Star Wars game.

No. What is noteworthy about the advertisement itself, is not what it offered, but the banality of its fucked up normalizing of masculinist behavior to sell its products to kids.

The ad features the perspective of being inside a bathroom stall, with “For a Vid Time Call 1-900-720-1234.” Beneath it is a bunch of boastful video game-related graffiti. Instead of the usual puerile context of bathroom stall scrawl, we have a poem about Q-Bert, a drawing of a snake (a knowing phallic reference to the dongs common to bathroom stalls?), and some back and forth braggadocio about owning the James Bond 007 video game. Below the photo is some text ostensibly describing the service, but not really saying much—like calling a number you find in a bathroom stall, you never know what you’re gonna get.
 

Common bathroom graffiti. Big boobs. No head! :/

Common bathroom graffiti. Big boobs. No head!

 
Think about it for a second…This ad is asking young, presumably male, readers to associate calling this number with calling a number scrawled on the door of a bathroom stall. Consider how bathroom graffiti of this type is mostly used to shame women (this in both men’s and women’s restrooms), make homophobic claims about other men, and for boasts about hypersexual pursuits. Putting a woman’s phone number in a stall is the analog version of internet slut-shaming and abusive social media commentary. “I fucked Stacy in this stall” is meant to give the current crapper a vicarious thrill, the suggestion that they too could have a quickie in a public bathroom—as a man they are entitled to it. (Though my estimation is that those who write that shit in bathrooms are the losers of the sexual world, just as studies show that online gamer abusers are the losers of their world).

crusa-1So for this advertisement to entice young men (and remember, comic readers at this time were still assumed to be boys between the ages of 8 and 14) with an allusion to the dirty side of sexual politics is just weird. Weirder still is that there was no objection to this idea being used to advertise these games (that I know of), perhaps because the feature never took off, but also in part because doing that shit is considered normal “boy” behavior. The ad’s direct association of a potential wealth of video game information with the sexual discourse of the public bathroom is speaking directly to a young male market that has already absorbed American culture’s obsession with virility and competition, and women’s place in that obsession. It is selling the 80s video game equivalent to Pick-Up Artist “culture,” with its email newsletters, seminars and books with “tips and tricks” for success. As reviews of the recent Adam Sandler film Pixels and its sad nostalgia remind us, in games ranging from Double Dragon to Cruisin’ USA, in the 80s the promise of a girl could be the prize of a video game (something the film makes a literal reality). (Actually, this hasn’t really changed at all, and you should check out Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women: Video Games for her excellent analysis of this in “Women as Reward“). Writing a woman’s number on a bathroom wall represents a sick double-valence: the possibility of an easy lay or the opportunity to spout uninvited salacious and/or abusive comments anonymously to a stranger.

Given the association of video games with a male-dominated space hostile to women as early as 1984 then the negative reaction by a segment of male gamers to a critique of sexist tropes in video games and the impossible categories the games settings, plots and assumptions create for women in the games makes perfect sense. The reaction is an extension of that same frustrated entitlement that writes Stacy’s name and number in a public stall.
 

 
In other words, in a sort of obtuse way, this advertisement prefigures the attacks on Sarkeesian and “Gamergate” vitriol directed towards any woman that speaks up about this topic.

A strange mix of private/anonymous location (the stall or the seat in front of the game screen) and the public behavior that emerges from the discourse of those places, leads to the automatic id-driven lashing out at interlopers who “don’t understand.” Just as the comic ad promises access to special knowledge and thus video game success (leading to being a “real” or “hardcore” gamer), the cultural gate-keeping of the geek-o-sphere seeks to maintain an area of male power through leveraging media conspiracies (“it’s about ethics in journalism!”) and narratives of the “fake geek girl.” These, of course, are narratives constructed after the fact to make the abuse cohere with their self-image. Just like any other activity that becomes synecdoche for masculinity, maintaining a particular male video gaming in-group status appears predicated on treating women like shit (or condoning others doing so). This activity is reinforced as a “cultural” value virtually through game actions (women as prizes, women as props) and explicitly through abusive language and other online behavior (or even sometimes in person!). All the while, this attitude is exacerbated by an expectation that any women involved with video games must be sexually available to men. It seems about as healthy as trolling for dates in a bathroom stall.
 
lobster-cockI do want to pause for a moment, however, and make sure that I do not come off as being anti-graffiti. I love graffiti, have maintained a tumblr with graffiti on and off for a couple of years, and spent many a lunch hour at my old job wandering around lower Manhattan taking snapshots of stuff ranging from toy-ass tags to totally bombed out walls. Graffiti, even bathroom graffiti, can be wild and inventive, creative in ways that impress me more than a lot of contemporary art. Spend time going through a Google image search for “bathroom graffiti” (though that link comes with a possible trigger warning) and you’ll see it can be funny and just plain appealingly weird (like the weird and raunchy, but not necessarily sexist, “lobster cock”). There is something about its invisibility through its ubiquity and the palimpsest quality of years of going over each other that makes discovering it a thrill. Not all of it is in the tradition of “For a good time call…” or homophobic claims about the bartender. However, the particular context of the Parker Brothers ad connects their product to unwanted sexual solicitation and normalized notions of women’s sexuality and male entitlement. It was not simply jokey cartoons about poop or reminding us that Led Zeppelin Rocks!

Anyway, this is all to suggest that the ad is a signifier for the way masculinity is linked to presumably male-oriented (or at least the subject of male-focused marketing of) activities and thus makes the culture around those activities pretty insular. It’s synecdochal. The activity stands in for manhood and manhood for the activity, but you need only consider the arc of video games in our culture (from kiddy novelty or nerd-stuff to billion dollar movies and New York Times reviews) to understand the malleability of masculinity. Hard and fast ideas of what being a man means and what a man does are absurd. The very fluidity with which masculinity can be framed is a good thing though, because it also means there is a chance to imagine a masculinity that does not require an underbelly of anti-woman and homophobic ideals to exist. The pathologies of masculinity makes us suckers for capitalism. Advertisements like the Parker Brothers’ Video Hotline tap into young boys uncritical acceptance of patriarchal ideology to shill another layer of advertisement that they hope the consumer will pay for. But whether it flies or fails, ultimately we all pay for it in the ongoing reinforcement of toxic and unnecessary ideas of male entitlement.

Now-Time: Enid Blyton, Spider-Man and the Illusion of Change

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In Enid Blyton’s novels, the time is always now. The sense of a peculiarly British, unending vacation transforms the literary space, whether the preteen Find-Outers stay in idyllic Peterswood or whether their counterparts from the Adventure series investigate smugglers of dangerous MacGuffins in distant, colonial climes. Nobody ever changes, past events are referred to with the most perfunctory of allusions and the future does not extend beyond the case to be solved. An evildoer painted the Siamese Cat! The butler is a smuggler! She was him all along! While the range of plot options is attenuated, this now-time is the main appeal of these YA ur-texts. The compact is a simple one, dutifully commented on by the protagonists: now-time will contain a mystery, but more importantly it will feature exhaustively described picnics, antics by animal companions, denigrated sidekicks from lower classes and a perennial movement away from home. Adults fade into the background, functioning mainly as the assurance that the status quo will, ultimately, be assured as a paternal deus ex machina swoops in to give legitimacy to the feats of detecting already accomplished. “MOTHER, have you heard about our summer holidays yet?” asks the Famous Five’s Julian at the beginning of their first literary outing. Yes, Mother has heard. So have the readers. Everyone knows what to expect.

There is no coming-of-age in these novels. They present readers with something akin to heterochrony. With this, the French philosopher Foucault designates other time, which “functions at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.” The terms of exchange for this break are simple: young readers do not expect the formula to progress, do not even (as the old defence of genre fiction would have it) expect a blues-like variation on a narrative standard. In Blytonland, readers demand to be released from time. Any break with now-time is swiftly passed by, anything that contains too much future has to be ignored. A protagonist’s assurance that they will all check in on the Indian helper figure in a couple of years is but a hitch in the suffocating comfort of a vacation that never ends.

When Stan Lee offers his own now-time for his expectant true believers, it comes with a well-known caveat: illusion of change. “Evolution, but 360 degrees’ worth. Same old Spider-Man, same old Peter Parker, same old problems at the core”, as Peter David puts it in the 1998 Comic Buyer’s Guide. Spider-Man will always return where he was. And why shouldn’t he? Why should we not grant Spidey and his readers the same now-time Blyton’s characters have been afforded with cosy abandon? After all, once readers catch on to the formula, they were expected to have already moved on to other cultural forms.

The current Marvel Behemoth (the company, not the character), however, will not allow us to abandon enthusiasm. Notably, the Disney-subsidiary has announced its filmic takeover as a succession of phases, a new one (Phase Three!) to receive its Cumberbatchian inauguration next year. And Spider-Man, too, has been recast for an intra-superheroic Civil Fistfight which will, once more, Change Everything. Now-time is dissolved in breathless development. This is not so much illusion of change as illusion of propulsion, of eternal growth, a movement from movie to movie and a universe steadily expanding from phase to phase. This self-replication is masked by dint of sheer forward momentum: How are we to notice that we are still in the same now-time, when we suddenly find our heroes in pursuit of magic (newly introduced to the shared universe) or, according to collective fingers-crossing, are finally graced with a celluloid superheroine? The films do not refute the recurrences of the same – it is half the fun. Critique is pre-empted by the movies themselves: the self-copying robot and the knowing, quippy subversion of tropes assure us that everyone is in on the joke. Corporation, fans, media – genre-savvily, we co-develop the illusion of change together. It is ours.

In contrast, Blyton’s heterochrony is a simple one. “’Ask her if we can go there!’” cries Famous Five’s Dick, “’I just feel as if it’s the right place somehow. It sounds sort of adventurous!’” It does and it will. The slightest twist of the plot-dynamic suffices. If there is an illusion of change, it is a flimsy one. That’s not what these texts and their perennial present are about. In a similarly straightforward way, comics used to embrace their stasis. Half the appeal of Silver-Age Superman is the staunch refusal of development: the details of the zany plot are less relevant than the fact that Lois, once more, tries to expose the Man of Steel’s secret identity. Jimmy has transformed into any number of other Jimmies and is dutifully restored. Superman had a son for a while, but he vanished. In genuine superheroic now-time, freed from illusions of change, reduplication in space replaces development in time.. Another Bizarro version. A superdog. A superhorse. Robotic doppelgangers. Krypton in a bottle. These are similar terms of exchange to the ones accepted by the Blyton-reader of yore: several groups of friends in several series. Remote places. Antagonists. Why should anything change? The next novel in the series is right there.

Foucault again: the role of heterochronies “is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.” The best thing about this non-place of the now? We can leave it behind. Doomed planet, desperate scientists, last hope, kindly couple: at some point we have seen it all, repetitions and reduplications notwithstanding. After a decade of superheroic cultural hegemony, this movement outwards, away from now-time, towards other unique temporalities, is more difficult as we are invited to partake in a trans-medial illusion of change. Which character have we glimpsed in the new teaser? More after the jump. Consider yourself teased. A new phase is about to begin.

Unabashed heterochrony is a thing of the past. “Have you heard about our summer holidays yet?” We used to. And no one expected us to pretend otherwise. Now, instead, we are invited (Summer 2016!) to anticipate a new era, a perennial movement forward. This breathless anticipation effaces the ways in which it is, after all, still the same summer, the same vacation, the same radioactive spider. Conventions are not to be leisurely accepted and abandoned but celebrated as blatant now-time has been recast as coming-soon-time. Blyton’s eternal present, as smug, self-satisfied (and, not to forget, insufferably racist) as it seems today, was, at least, much easier dismissed.

For Love of Cocaine and Empire: Narcos season 1

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The new Netflix series Narcos tells a story of Pablo Escobar’s construction of a gangster capitalist empire centered on the cocaine trade and the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) efforts to capture or kill him. Narcos opens with an uncredited quote from Matthew Strecher: “Magical realism is defined as what happens when a highly detailed realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.” Neither that the quote is wholly inapplicable to the story nor that it is uncredited and grabbed from Wikipedia’s introductory paragraphs on magical realism are surprising given the story that follows.

Wagner Moura plays Escobar, the Colombian narcotraficante par excellence who teams with his cousin Gustavo (Juan Pablo Raba) to found the anchor of what became the Medellín Cartel. The pair are hunted by DEA agents Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) and Javier Peña (Pedro Pascal) and Colombian cop Horatio Carrillo (Maurice Compte). How exactly that happens is the meat of the story. And despite a s a slew of fine performances, solid photography and high production values, the meat is rancid.

A Badly Drawn Story for White Americans

Chris Brancato and Paul Eckstein are the team behind Narcos and they previously collaborated on Hoodlum, a film notable for Laurence Fishburne’s performance and for the extreme divergence in its best concept/worst script pairing. Just as they poorly imagined the Harlem numbers game, so too do they mangle the Escobar story from every angle and do so to to tell an American story in Colombia for a white American audience. Empire’s subjects do not have a voice.

Narcos is one of few shows to have significant Spanish and English dialogue. In contrast to the wonderful Jane the Virgin however, Narcos is made first and foremost for English speakers. This is evident in the pan-American casting where all kinds of accents, frequently Mexican and surprisingly few Colombian, visit the screen as Colombians. What could be a partly redeeming feature of decent performances is undermined by bad accents, some worse than Keanu Reeves’ British turn in Dracula. In some cases they’re not even trying and in one particularly silly example, a Colombian nicknamed ‘The Mexican’ speaks with an obvious Puerto Rican accent. For an audience reading the middling quality subtitles the various accents are perhaps not an issue. A (possibly) positive result of mediocre translation is that ceaseless Colombian homophobic slang is infrequently translated as homophobic. Sometimes it is made into misogyny, which is a reasonable translation of meaning in some circumstances, and other times ungendered insults but most often it is not translated at all (this will be surprising to some given how much is translated).

The cumulative effect is not so much a bilingual program as an American English one with a preponderance of Spanish(es) in it. It does not help that the script includes groan inducing dialogue such as, “Like Goldilocks he had three options,” and confused phrasings like, “Escobar hadn’t built himself a prison at all. He’d built himself a fortress. But no matter how you decorate it, a cage is still a cage.” Nor that many characters are so shallowly drawn as to be two dimensional. The wide-eyed innocent plane bomber, for example, is less a character than baby-like naiveté given an adult body.

Empire’s Narrator

“Sometimes bad guys do good things” the narrator (Murphy) says in reference to mass executions of drug dealers carried out by Chilean dictator Pinochet. In what ethical universe are mass executions ok? In addition to the ‘heroic’ mass executions, the show doesn’t pause to reflect on the tremendous body count the DEA is directly and indirectly racking up in Colombia. All this is narrated with the ultimate hipster voiceover: an omniscient semi-folksy white guy with a ‘cynical above it all’ cadence that in the end is still deeply dedicated to hegemonic narratives. It sounds like nothing so much as Ray Liotta’s Goodfellas voiceover if it was instead narrated by one of the cops.

Narcos lays on thick an orientalist narrative of Colombia. The following exemplars all come from the shitty, ceaseless voiceover:

  • “And the best smugglers in the world were in Colombia”
  • “Emeralds are a pretty rough trade even by Colombian standards. If you make it to the top it means you’ve killed your enemies…and sometimes your partners.”
  • “The problem was Colombia itself. It was too small a country for a fortune that big.”
  • “A drug dealer running for president, it’s crazy right? Well not in Colombia.”
  • “There’s a reason magical realism was born in Colombia: It’s a country where dreams and reality are conflated, where in their heads people fly as high as Icarus.”
  • “But in Colombia, when money is involved, blood inevitably flows.”
  • “In Colombia, nothing goes down the way you think it will.”

Narcos narrates Colombia with explicit, condescending racism and is just as racist in its brief forays narrating the United States, albeit implicitly. The narrator asserts, “Back then [1979] Miami was a paradise.” For whom? Not for working class Black people, Haitians, Cubans, Jamaicans and Puerto Ricans. Equally absurd are declarations about U.S. prisons. Peña and Murphy aspire to have the various narcos extradited to the U.S. to rot in jail there. “Back home it was a whole different deal. Seventh richest man in the world? No one gives a shit. You still get a 6 x 8 cell like every other loser.” This bizarrely idealistic view of the carceral state, carceral empire really, is at complete odds with the supposedly worldly narration and reality. It shows how the narrator’s supposed cynicism about the status quo is actually deployed to affirm its mythos.

Racist and imperialist logics are normative throughout the story. Modest assertions of Colombian prerogatives are met with condescension and arrogance by the DEA agents and narrator. When Colombia temporarily suspends one kind of U.S. surveillance in Colombia the narrator declares, “We sat on the sidelines, hands tied by bureaucracy.”

What the writers show as necessary and virtuous furthers this. Agent Murphy heroically steals a Colombian baby and heroically interrogates a man by putting a gun in his mouth. The U.S. military engages in positively portrayed torture and constant interference in Colombian affairs is portrayed as a good thing.

Gangster capitalism vs. the Neoliberal capitalist state

Narcos posits narcotraficantes buying off Colombian politicians and bribing/sponsoring police forces as abnormal and corrupting when the real history of Colombian politics mirrors that of all capitalist states; the politicians are bought off by capital interests approved by the state. In the U.S. example this is called ‘campaign donations’, ‘lobbying trips’ and ‘corporate sponsorship’. Corruption is thus not the buying of politicians and media — corruption is (literal) gangster capitalists doing the buying. Alternately put, the gangster capitalists’ crime is trying to buy wholesale something that was already bought by the oligarchy. The closest Narcos comes to realizing this is when Escobar’s forces, in an attempt to sway policy, begin kidnapping the children of the rich and famous to replace the prior tactic of public bombings.

Narcos shares this analysis with the The Wire. When Lester Freamon follows the Barksdale outfit’s money through to lawyers and developers making campaign donations the problem identified is not that capitalists are buying policy and favor but that it is drug money used for the buying. Thus pharmaceutical companies producing legal addictive opiates and stimulants can give campaign donations and support police projects that purveyors of criminalized opiates and stimulants cannot. This isn’t just a case of missing the forest (capitalism) for the trees (the drug trade). The creators evidence no knowledge of forest or tree. Judging by the finished product their main source of analysis for the politics of narcotrafficking and counternarcotics is the same as their source for magical realism: the introductory paragraphs of a Wikipedia article.

All this supposedly has something to do with magical realism. It does not. There is nothing magical or fantastic about any of it. The writers mean surrealism but do not know it and that would still be a stretch as narcotrafficking is quite logical in its operations. Formal and informal capitalist markets have tremendous political consequences and frequently astonishing body counts. Hard, cruel logic is not surreal and certainly not magical. Only through a rigidly orthodox discourse of the capitalist state could informal markets seem surreal or magical.

In the end Narcos has some tremendous performances and terrific production value, all in the service of poorly drawn characters, bad dialogue from cliché scripts and imperialist politics. It is a well polished turd that mangles Colombian history and dialects and embraces racism and imperialism. In this way Narcos reminds me less of other televisions shows and more of Kermit Roosevelt and Larry Devlin’s autobiographical writings about their time with the CIA in Iran and the Congo. They narrate cynical, realpolitik histories where yeah, maybe a couple of things could’ve been done better, but the cause was just and their hands were clean. Narcos narrates the DEA and US military in Colombia this same nasty way and it leaves a bad taste made worse when combined with a crap story. A good cast, fascinating topic, high budget and fine production value should go a long way but Narcos only in brief moments rises to mediocrity and all the cocaine in the world couldn’t save it.

Utilitarian Review 9/5/15

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On HU

From the archive: Anja Flower illustrates Wallace Stevens’ Earthy Anecdote.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from the end of 1946.

Charles Bell on Disney eating Star Wars.

Me on R. Crumb and how you can’t satirize racism by exaggerating it.

Chris Gavaler imagines a world in which all superhero movies aren’t the same.

Donovan Grant on Starfire’s supposedly sexy innocence.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian:

—I wrote about hating children and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. Good bye, Wes.

—I wrote about the joys of superheroes fighting superheroes.

—I contributed to an article about how hunger strikers in Chicago are trying to keep open Dyett high school.

At the New Republic I wrote about Miss Piggy and how we don’t think about domestic abuse of men.

At Playboy I interviewed erotic author Selena Kitt.

At Splice Today I wrote about Freddie deBoer and why the purity of one’s beliefs maybe doesn’t matter that much.

At Ravishly I talked about the raid on Rentboy.com, and how it shows anti-prostitution laws are based in prejudice.

At Broadly I wrote about She Shreds’ proposed SXSW panel on representations of women musicians.
 
Other Links

Sarah Nyberg on gamergate’s hate campaign against her. Reposting because said hate campaign has been intensified this week. I know Sarah only slightly, but she is a lovely person, and what is being done to her is evil.

Great piece on the mismanagement of Cooper’s Union (and how college presidents screw everyone else.)

C.T. May on how Ramesh Ponnuru is overconfident about Trump.

Katherine Cross on Ashley Madison and making up women for men.

Ignorance Isn’t Bliss

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A memorable scene from Community season 3’s episode “Regional Holiday Music” involves brainy overachiever Annie Edison (played by Alison Brie) indulging in a baby-doll styled performance of song and sex for Jeff Winger (Joel McHale). Donned in fishnets and high heels, Annie plays up the sex appeal of the childlike vamp, conflating an eagerness to be taught with sexual availability. The joke completes itself three times over when her song ends with the line “Boop be doop be doop doop sex!”, McHale’s visibly uncomfortable Jeff stating “Eventually you hit a point of diminishing returns on the sexiness.”, and Annie responding with a clump of incoherent babbling.

The point, quite clearly, is that the sex appeal traditionally found in female ignorance can evaporate quickly if over-exploited. It’s a scene I keep thinking back to when reading Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti’s current Starfire series. A revamp of the character made infamous in the title Red Hood and the Outlaws at the start of DC’s New 52 company lineup back in 2011, this version of Starfire is a narrative of an alien foreigner growing accustomed to ordinary human culture. As the series establishes its new setting of Key West, FL, it also presents the character of Starfire as ignorant to the point of idiocy. Her her mental state contradicts the level of reasoning and understanding she displaced in the years following the new 52. It’s ostensibly the same character trying to start fresh on Earth, yet concepts like currency, fruit and simple metaphors are completely new to her.
 

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Beginning with the premise of the book, it’s easy to see why Conner and Palmiotti took this approach to the character. The blatant sex-object nature of her first appearance after the new 52 reboot was universally rejected. Starfire has a younger, larger and more female fanbase than many DC characters due to her appearances in the Teen Titans cartoon from 2003-2006. In that series, the character’s reaction to Earth customs (typically teenage Earth customs) was played up to be more wide-eyed and innocent than she ever actually was in the 1980s “New Teen Titans” comic where she first appeared. While the initial version by Marv Wolfman and George Perez had an intrigued and bemused fascination with human and American sensibilities, the cartoon version was decidedly more excitable and energetic. It’s a point made by an online fan comic that portrayed the cognitive dissonance between what new fans of the character enjoyed and what DC was presenting them with when showcasing her in Red Hood and the Outlaws.
 

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The thing is, Starfire’s always been a problematic character. Interplanetary ignorance and alien sex appeal are both aspects of what makes her recognizable to fans of all kinds (the other being the warrior princess trope). Her character has historically championed free love, self-love and a refusal to stigmatize nudity, which is fine in and of itself. The problem is that she’s been depicted this way primarily by male writers, although not exclusively. Sex appeal was always a selling point of the “New Teen Titans” comic despite “teen” being in the title. George Perez flaunted both the male and female bodies in issues where the Titans take a day at a pool, spar and hone their fighting skills in a pool, battle to the point of ripped clothes and are generally sexualized in ways DC Comics character had yet to be seen up to that point in the mid-80s. Starfire was and still is generally remembered as the hot alien babe who took Robin the Boy Wonder’s virginity, and this is often played up in the fan discourse bleeding into the published work.
 

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So in reinterpreting the character for the cartoon series, the producers used her fresh alien perspective and positive sense of self to present a character that eschewed negativity. She was less defined by the men and women around her and more by how she saw the world. In “Red Hood and the Outlaws” she was completely defined by how she was used to her male teammates advantage, at least initially (the public backlash to the first issue prompted a backing off on the sex toy aspect). Now in “Starfire”, the main recurring element is how everything she encounters is treated as a bewildering new experience for her.

It would be extremely easy to write Starfire off as untenable and suggest never featuring her in any type of presentation again, but I have to consider the potential audience for this type of character in a best case scenario. The Teen Titans animated series most certainly dumbed her down to a basic archetype, but it ended up being the least harmful. The original character of the 80s was the best of both the cartoon world and the New 52 world, being sexualized just as much as everyone else featured in the series. The only immediate problem is her relation to the men in her life, from being sold into slavery to being forced into a political marriage. Starfire would be best defined on her own in a solo title, so the solution for the current run is to not make her so unbelievably stupid. Degrees of naivety are aspects of her character, but too much of that clashes with common sense.

The central conflict is figuring out how to present a character who can embody several positive qualities without the objectifying narrative of the male gaze. Perhaps you can’t in the superhero genre, despite her book being written and illustrated by female creators, but a sense of relative intelligence shouldn’t be hard to include. There is nothing cute or appealing about a grown woman wandering around in a fog of ignorance in ways which defy logic. If Amanda Conner got rid of the foreigner aspect of the title, what else could she have to work with? Starfire could preach about acceptance of self, love of self and others and maintaining a positive outlook on life. This would undoubtedly clash with the genre the character exists in, but perhaps that’s the key. She doesn’t work well enough in the macho-fueled world of superheroes, so maybe she could be the first female alien Jesus Christ figure, preaching peace and love in ways which recall the original Wonder Woman. This would put her at odds with almost every single character she came across, but that’s the only reasonable solution to properly writing the type of person she generally is. The DCYOU marketing image for the Starfire title reads “She’s an alien warrior trying to find peace…and will fight anyone or anything to get it!”, which has nothing to do with the tone or direction of the book itself. If she however were to interact and present her views to the people of Earth and be put in a position to defend them, it would place her in the role of the protagonist that lends a sense of enlightenment as opposed to ignorance and removes the theme of the human way being the right way that is implicit whenever someone interacts with Starfire’s alien-sense of love and happiness.
 

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I would very much like to see that character, but it doesn’t look like it will happen. For the forseeable future, as in the past, her creators don’t seem to be thinking very hard, and so Starfire is dumb.

Superhero Screenplay, Act 1

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New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott declared in 2012 that the superhero movie genre, “though it is still in a period of commercial ascendancy, has also entered a phase of imaginative decadence.” According to Scott, it’s been all downhill since Heath Ledger won the 2008 Best Supporting Actor for the Joker.

I think 2008 was the tipping point too, but not because of The Dark Knight. I miss movies like Peter Berg’s 2008 Hancock. Not because Hancock is better than The Dark Knight–it’s not–but because Hancock marks the moment Hollywood stopped experimenting with original superheroes.

M. Night’s Shyamalan’s 2000 Unbreakable is another good, imperfect movie–one made better in retrospect because of its ability to experiment with tropes by creating its own characters. 2008 also marks the start of Marvel’s ascendancy with Iron Man, and so the financial incentive to duplicate instead of innovate. The experimental phase was over.

So I am returning to the year 2008 of an alternate Earth in which an alternate Hollywood did not embrace the Marvel and DC pantheons, but instead explored those formulas with new characters who mirrored and warped the Avengers and Justice League in different directions. This screenplay isn’t necessarily better than those coming out of Hollywood these days (except for the Fantastic Four, it’s definitely better than the Fantastic Four), but at least it’s not identical to them.

Here’s the first act:

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THE DAILY STAR

LOGLINE: Superheroes must escape a government prison that’s brainwashed them into thinking they’re only their mild-mannered alter egos.

 

 

INT. BLACK SCREEN.

 

JOHNNIE (V.O.)

Okay, let’s get this started.

 

INT. LOLA’S BEDROOM — MORNING.

 

Close-up of LOLA’s face, eyes closed, head on pillow. A pair of hands opens her eyes and shines a medical flashlight into each. Another pair of hands is touching up her make-up. Voices continue as though through headphones from a remote location.

 

TECHNICIAN ONE (V.O.)

Initiating reboot.

 

TECHNICIAN TWO (V.0.)

Chip interface engaged.

 

JOHNNIE (V.O.)

Clear the room.

 

TECHNICIAN TWO (V.0.)

All levels clean and steady.

 

JOHNNIE (V.O.)

I said clear the room.

 

All hands withdraw.

 

TECHNICIAN THREE (V.O.)

Active in three . . . two . . . one.

 

LOLA opens her eyes.

 

TECHNICIAN ONE (V.0.)

We are online.

 

LOLA sits up in bed and blinks. She’s expressionless, perhaps a little uncertain as she takes in her perfectly decorated and antiseptically neat bedroom. Her nightgown is blandly conservative. The alarm clock on her bedside table starts beeping as it flips to 7:00. She turns to look at it but doesn’t turn it off. A skirt suit is draped across a chair ready to wear. She touches it and then withdraws her hand. A row of star-shaped, newspaper writing awards stand on her desk. She looks at them and blinks expressionlessly and then touches her temple as though registering a vague pain.

 

TECHNICIAN THREE (V.O.)

Ah . . . do we have a problem?

 

JOHNNIE (V.O.)

Hang on.

 

TECHNICIAN TWO (V.O.)

Maybe yesterday’s containment dose was too—

 

JOHNNIE (V.O.)

I said wait.

 

Finally, LOLA shakes off her daze, clicks the alarm off, and steps off screen to start her day.

 

JOHNNIE (V.O.)

Okay.  We’re rolling.

 

INT. SURVEILLANCE ROOM — DAY.

 

Pan across a row surveillance screens as technicians chatter. We see LOLA stepping into her shower, and then five other subjects at increasingly later points in their morning routines: dressing, eating breakfast, kissing a wife goodbye, hailing a taxi on the street.

 

The fifth, however, is CARL CLARKSON, who remains in bed. The camera pauses on his sleeping face, which twitches as if he’s lost in a disturbing dream.

 

JOHNNIE (V.O.)

And how’s our big boy doing?

 

TECHNICIAN TWO (V.O.)

Sleeping like a baby.

 

TECHNICIAN THREE (V.O.)

Scary, big-ass baby with artificially suppressed circadian cycles.

 

TECHNICIAN ONE (V.O.)

Ready, sir?

 

JOHNNIE (V.O.)

Yeah. Hit him.

 

INT. CARL’S BEDROOM – DAY.

 

CARL jerks awake, disoriented. His childish pajamas are mismatched, half-inside out, and a size too large and/or too small. The bedroom is an equally flamboyant mess. He grabs the alarm clock on his bedside table, knocking his glasses and a newspaper to the floor in the process.

 

CARL

I forgot to set it again?!

 

He fumbles out of bed, chasing his glasses across the fallen newspaper. Camera follows his feet as he steps on the newspaper and stubs his toe on an inconveniently positioned chair. He puts on his glasses and makes his way to the bathroom, cursing “Darn it! Darn it!” Zoom into the front page of The Daily Star and a photograph of OMEGA MAN in full superhero costume. Zoom closer to reveal that OMEGA MAN’s face is CARL’s, only grinning and beaming with confidence.

 

CREDITS OVER A SEQUENCE OF NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPHS.

 

Documentary-style pan over Daily Star photos of THE POWER LEAGUE, some posed, some in action. OMAGA MAN and AMAZONIA are most prominent, with SHAPESHIFTER, SPEEDSTER, CYBORG and POWER RING. The characters’ garish unitards look absurd, but their actions appear nonetheless superhuman. The last headline reads: “Power League Thwart Dr. Megastein Again.” There’s a photo of AMAZONIA punching a supervillian. The byline includes a small image of reporter LOLA LITTLE in perfect make-up and her hair in a confining bun.

 

INT. BACK SEAT OF TAXI — DAY.

 

The newspaper is held by a pair of well-manicured hands, which fold the paper to reveal LOLA looking identical to her photo. Setting the paper aside, she glances outside at detour signs and construction crews working around bomb-like craters in the street.

 

LOLA

What’s all the damage from?

 

TAXI DRIVER

You mean the construction? Didn’t you hear? They’re extending the subway line. It’s always something, ain’t it?

 

LOLA nods and rubs her temple as though just aware of a forming headache.

 

EXT. STREET — DAY.

 

LOLA steps out of the stopped taxi and pays the driver through his window. She’s carrying her briefcase and two newspapers.

 

LOLA

Keep the change, Max.

 

TAXI DRIVER

Thank you, Miss Little! You have a good day now!

 

Pan up the height of the 1930s era skyscraper to the giant Daily Star star-logo mounted on the roof, identical to Lola’s star-shaped awards. The building, like the streets, appears to have sustained recent damage.

 

INT. DAILY STAR LOBBY — DAY.

 

LOLA strolls past fresh-looking plywood blocking ruined walls; only a sign, “The Marketplace,” indicates that a café previously filled the space. A JANITOR is mopping the floor by the elevators.

 

LOLA

Morning, Charlie. What happened in here?

 

JANITOR

Renovations. Always got to be changing something, don’t they, Miss Little?

 

LOLA nods, frowning at other signs of damage in the lobby, but keeps moving to the waiting elevator. JANITOR glances back at her before speaking into a microphone in his collar.

 

JANITOR

Gamma at final checkpoint.

 

EXT. STREET — DAY.

 

Cab pulls up, and CARL rushes out. His tie is crooked and he’s fighting back a yawn.

 

DRIVER 2

Hey buddy, you gotta pay me!

 

CARL fumbles with his wallet and briefcase, almost dropping both.

 

CARL

Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry, here, it’s a, how much, let me, um . . .

 

The DRIVER takes a bill.

 

DRIVER

Thanks for the tip.

 

CARL

Oh, actually, if you could give me . . .

 

The taxi pulls away.

 

INT. ELEVATOR — DAY.

 

LOLA enters the elevator, and the doors begin to close as she sees CARL running toward her.

 

CARL

Lola! Hold the door please! Lola!

 

She grimaces, and her hand shoots for the “close” button, but then freezes. At the last moment, she presses “hold” instead. CARL steps inside with a look of surprise.

 

CARL

Well, thank you, Lola.

 

LOLA

No problem, Carl. We’re partners after all. Need to watch each other’s back.

 

CARL

Partners. Wow. I always sort of got the sense you saw me as a kind of, I don’t know. Competitor? Not, I mean, I’m obviously not half the reporter you are, but —

 

He interrupts himself with an achingly wide yawn.

 

CARL

Oh my, excuse me. I can never seem to get a good night’s sleep.

 

LOLA begins to reflexively agree, but then stops, surprised.

 

LOLA

Actually. I slept great last night. Best sleep I’ve had in years.

(a realization)

I feel like a new person.

 

INT. DAILY STAR NEWSROOM — DAY.

 

Elevators doors open to an expansive newspaper newsroom, reminiscent of the 1970s. LOLA almost steps out but then freezes. She blinks out at the room. CARL stares at her, confused that she’s not jumping into her day.

 

CARL

After you, Lola?

 

LOLA steps out, gazing around uncertainly. MR. BLACK, Editor-in-Chief, steps between LOLA and CARL.

 

BLACK

Afraid you two were trying to take the day off.

 

CARL

Of course not, Mr. Black, we would never –

 

BLACK

What’s the status on the Omega Man feature?

 

LOLA is in a daze.

 

BLACK

Lola?

 

LOLA

What? Oh. Sorry, Chief. Final edits. On your desk by noon.

 

BLACK

And the Governor’s interview?

 

LOLA

His people are whining for an advance look, but I said . . .

 

BLACK

You said . . . ? No way, right?

 

LOLA

Right. Of course, I did. Wasn’t part of the . . .

 

BLACK

Deal.

 

LOLA

Deal.

 

BLACK looks at her nervously, but moves on to CARL.

 

BLACK

How about you, Carl? You ever going to finish that global warming thing?

 

CARL

Actually, my source is getting cold feet, so I may have to call another expert, you know, to make sure the data is absolutely correct?

 

BLACK

Playing it safe, Carl. That’s what we like about you.

 

BLACK pats CARL on the back and watches him walk toward his desk. BLACK surreptitiously inserts a Bluetooh in his ear and speaks under his breath.

 

BLACK

Omega on script, but Gamma barely functional. Thought you said she sustained no damage yesterday?

 

INT. SURVEILLANCE ROOM — DAY.

 

A metallic, high tech room with a wall of surveillance screens and TECHNICIANS in the background. Most of the screens now show angles of the newsroom. JOHNNIE, a twenty-something incongruously dressed in a bowtie and suspenders, speaks into a Bluetooth while snapping his fingers at one of the TECHNICIANS.

 

JOHNNIE

She checked out, but they’re running another diagnostic right now.

 

TECHNICIANS jump to action at the implied command. Move in closer to the screen in front of JOHNNIE to show a black and white image of BLACK standing in the newsroom. He glances up at the ceiling camera.

 

BLACK

Good. Now get out here with those donuts.

 

BLACK pockets Bluetooth.

 

INT. NEWSROOM, CARL’S WORKAREA – DAY.

 

CARL stumbles over a trashcan as he reaches his desk; he’s watching LOLA intently across the newsroom. CY, another reporter, is seated at the adjacent desk, fighting with a 90s era PC.

 

CY

Why won’t this thing work? I hate these damn machines! Hate them!

 

CARL

Why don’t you call IT? I swear you do this every . . .

 

CARL watches LOLA rubbing her forehead in pain as she arrives at her desk.

 

CY

You say something, Carl?

 

CARL

Sorry, Cy. You should just ignore me. I swear I’m not myself today.

 

CY

Yeah, you look a little off. I’d tell you to go home, but . . .

(gesturing at BLACK entering the conference room)

when was the last time the chief gave any of us a day off?

 

CARL tries to echo Cy’s good-natured laugh as CY stands and head toward the conference room with his yellow pads.

 

INT. NEWSROOM, LOLA’S WORKAREA – DAY.

 

LOLA sits at her desk as the extravagantly dressed fashion editor, CAMELLIA, strolls by. Her pearl CHOKER stands out from the rest of her outfit. LOLA is too distracted to notice her.

 

CAMELLIA

Morning, Lola.

 

LOLA

Oh, Camellia. Hi. Good morning. Nice out . . .

 

Something catches LOLA’s eye, and CAMELLIA flinches, afraid her appearance is imperfect.

 

CAMELLIA

What’s the matter?

 

LOLA

Is that the same choker you wore yesterday?

 

CAMELLIA

This old thing? I just threw it on today for a lark. Classy, don’t you think? Some things never go out of . . .

 

She appraises LOLA’s suit and sneers, before sauntering off.

 

CAMELLIA

Style.

 

LOLA looks around her desk, still dazed. ROGER is seated at the desk adjacent to her; he’s rifling through drawers frantically searching for something.

 

ROGER

Where is it? Where the hell is it?

 

LOLA

You lose something, Roger?

 

ROGER

My ring. It was right here a second ago.

 

LOLA

Don’t worry. I’m sure it’s . . .

 

LOLA looks around the newsroom with an anxious expression.

 

LOLA

. . . somewhere.

 

JOHNNIE, now acting the part of a boyish intern, jogs past carrying a donut box.

 

JOHNNIE

Staff meeting in the conference room, one minute!

 

LOLA, jarred back into action, grabs one of her two newspapers and starts to follow him, but stops when she notices JANIE, young sports reporter dressed in a running suit, slumped at her desk. Everyone else is moving into the conference room.

 

LOLA

You okay, Janie?

 

JANIE lifts her head, bleary-eyed.

 

JANIE

I just can’t seem to get myself moving today.

 

LOLA

Here. Let me give you a hand.

 

LOLA helps her stand and the two hobble toward the conference room together.

 

INT. CONFERENCE ROOM — DAY.

 

A long table with a wall of windows looking out at the city, except one of the windows has been recently cracked and is sealed with tape. The walls are decorated with framed Daily Star front pages that feature large photographs of the Power League members. Everybody is taking seats. BLACK notices CARL looking intently at LOLA as she enters with JANIE. BLACK slides the box of donuts at him.

 

BLACK

Make yourself useful, Carl.

 

CARL

What, sir? Oh. Right, sorry.

 

CARL struggles to open the box, his eyes still on LOLA. She sits as JANIE crumples into the last chair. LOLA looks at the cracked window.

 

LOLA

What happened in here? I swear this town looks like a war zone today.

 

JOHNNIE

Oh, funny story, Miss Little! Those window cleaner guys were messing around with that elevator thingy when one of the controls –

 

BLACK grabs the box of donuts from CARL, zips it open, and skids it to the center of the table.

 

BLACK

Okay, people, listen up, we got a big day here. I need everybody 100% focused.

 

JOHNNIE

Gosh, Mr. Black, don’t we ever get a day off?

 

BLACK

If we make this deadline, we can all have a well earned vacation. But first thing first. Camellia, how’s that fashion spread?

 

CAMELLIA

I need another half-page.

 

BLACK

No changes.

 

CAMELLIA

But the photos are so tiny, you can’t see —

 

BLACK

How many times do we have to go through this? Stay inside your borders.

 

During BLACK and CAMELLIA’s exchange, CARL notices ROGER neurotically winding a piece of paper around his ring finger.

 

ROGER

(whispering)

Have you seen my ring, Carl? My wedding ring? I swear I was just wearing it. If my wife finds out I lost it she’s going to kill me.

 

CARL

I haven’t seen it, Roger. Did you leave it at home?

 

BLACK

Something you two want to share, Carl? It’s only a newspaper I’m trying to run here. I don’t have to tell you how important this edition is. Cy, the technology insert, ready to print?

 

CY

It would be if my PC hadn’t crashed.  Now I’m going to have to retype the whole —

 

LOLA

Why is it important?

 

All look at her in startled silence. CARL’s reaction is particularly acute.

 

CARL

What did you say, Lola?

 

LOLA

This edition? We put out a paper every day. What’s so important about today’s?

 

More stunned silence.

 

JOHNNIE

Gosh, Miss Little, that’s not a very constructive attitude.

 

CAMELLIA

Next she’s going to say newspapers are a dying breed or something.

 

JOHNNIE

It’s like Mr. Clarkson is always saying — what’s that expression of yours, Mr. Clarkson?

 

CARL

Ah . . . live each day like it’s the only one you have?

 

JOHNNIE

Now that’s what I call philosophy!

 

CY

Yeah, you’re quite the philosopher, Carl.

 

CARL

Oh, I didn’t think that up myself —

 

BLACK

Lola, update everyone on your Omega Man and governor pieces. I haven’t decided which to lead with. Got an opinion?

 

LOLA

Neither.

 

The room is further shocked.

 

BLACK

And what, go with Carl’s global warning thing?

 

The others chuckle.

 

CARL

The front page? I really don’t think something I write belongs on —

 

LOLA

Omega Man, the governor, that’s yesterday’s news.

 

BLACK

You got someone better to interview?

 

LOLA

Yes. Doctor Megastein.

 

Silence, then the staff breaks into more laughter, except for CARL who forces a smile but is looking at LOLA with increasing interest.

 

CY

Good one, Lola.

 

JOHNNIE

The most evil supervillain who’s ever lived.

 

ROGER

Yeah, ask him about his next plan for world domination so the Power League can get ready for it.

 

CAMELLIA

Ooo, and I can do a photo spread of his tacky battle suits!

 

LOLA

I’m serious.

 

BLACK

And how exactly are you planning to find him to get an interview?

 

LOLA

Well, he is in custody.

 

Laughter ends with renewed shocked silence. BLACK is about to speak, but CARL cuts him off.

 

CARL

How do you know that, Lola?

 

LOLA

It was in the paper.

 

CAMELLIA

Ah, we write the paper, darling. I think we would have noticed if —

 

LOLA unfolds the newspaper she’s been carrying. It’s the New York Times. Photo of damaged streets and buildings. Headline: “Government Meta-ops Subdue Terrorist.” There’s a photo of an explosion on the street outside and people running; some kind of aircraft is visible through the smoke. Another photo is a close-up of the terrorist, Dr. Stein, a middle-aged man with a goatee.

 

LOLA

Not The Star. The Times.

 

CY

The what?

 

CAMELLIA

Oh my god, when did this happen?

 

ROGER

New York has another newspaper!

 

CY

“Government Meta-ops Subdue Terrorist.”

 

CAMELLIA

What’s a meta-op?

 

CARL picks up the paper.

 

CARL

Lola, where did you get this?

 

ROGER

What’s a terrorist?

 

BLACK grabs the newspaper from CARL and shoves it at JOHNNIE.

 

BLACK

Ok, people, settle down.

 

JOHNNIE

I’m just going to go check on the, um . . .

 

JOHNNIE rushes out of the room with the paper.

 

BLACK

Lola, after the governor and the Omega Man feature are in print, you can interview Adolf Hitler for all I care. Tomorrow. But today we stay focused on today. So get cracking, people! Let’s go! Let’s go!

 

JANIE jerks awake.

 

JANIE

Okay! I’m going! I’m going, I’m . . .

 

She melts back down as others obediently file out. LOLA is rubbing her forehead. ROGER is crawling around on the floor.

 

ROGER

Has anyone seen my ring?

 

INT. BLACK’S OFFICE – DAY.

 

Large desk with exterior windows behind it and in front of it a wall of interior windows with a wide view of the newsroom. BLACK enters and is about to close the door when CARL appears in the doorway.

 

CARL

Mr. Black, I don’t want to bother you, but I was thinking about what Lola—

 

BLACK

So don’t.

 

CARL

Don’t?

 

BLACK

Bother me.

 

CARL

(after a self-deprecating chuckle)

But I was thinking—

 

BLACK

Don’t do that either. You’re not here to think. You’re here to report.

 

CARL

I know, I do, but if there are reporters at other newspapers who know so much about—

 

BLACK

Carl. This is the Daily Star. The best newspaper in the world. You know that, right?

 

CARL

Yes, of course, but—

 

BLACK

So do your job.

 

BLACK closes the door. CARL remains visible behind the glass and the slats of the blinds. BLACK twists the cord. CARL tilts to look in through the next window, finger raised to speak, and BLACK closes those blinds too. He closes all of the blinds until he’s sure he has complete privacy.

 

INT. PRIVATE BATHROOM – DAY.

 

BLACK steps into the private bathroom connected to his office. He slides the toilet paper dispenser aside to reveal a secret panel with a scanning pad. When he holds his hand to the pad, a green light blinks and the wall of the bathroom begins to open.

 

INT. SURVEILLANCE ROOM — DAY.

 

Lola’s taxi driver is seated with the wall of monitors and TECHNICIANS in the background. JOHNNIE is yelling at him while shaking the New York Times in his face.

 

JOHNNIE

What do you mean it’s not your fault!

 

TAXI DRIVER

The damage from the attack, I had to take a different route, so when she stops for her paper like always she must’ve found a second vending machine, a real one.

(pointing at newspaper)

I didn’t even know they still sold these damn things!

 

JOHNNIE

You didn’t keep eyes on her?

 

TAXI DRIVER

That’s against protocols. Don’t make her paranoid, that’s what you said.

 

JOHNNIE

Did I also say contaminate the entire meta-quarantine with rogue information?

 

JOHNNIE doesn’t notice BLACK entering from an armored door behind him. Through the door is a brief view of BLACK’s bathroom and office.

 

BLACK

Better than chip malfunction.

 

JOHNNIE turns.

 

BLACK

I was afraid we were headed for a full defection scenario.

 

BLACK turns to the TECHNICIANS.

 

BLACK

The chip is fine, right?

 

The monitors show the Daily Star staff in the newsroom. Some are just the black and white surveillance images, but others appear higher tech with heat signatures and LED readouts. They are studying LOLA.

 

TECHNICIAN ONE

All levels within standard ranges.

 

TECHNICIAN TWO

Her cognitives are running high though.

 

TECHNICIAN THREE

But expected given the contagion.

 

BLACK plucks the Times from JOHNNIE’s hand.

 

BLACK

Which means the problem disappears after reboot.

 

And he chucks it into a metal wastepaper basket.

 

TECHNICIAN ONE

If the anomalous behavior is an environmental response, then yes. She wakes up her old self tomorrow.

 

JOHNNIE

Which is a long time from right now. I say sedate her, keep her isolated until we can purge them all.

 

TECHNICIAN TWO

You risk serious cerebral damage. Yesterday’s post-activation containment dose would have lobotomized an elephant.

 

TECHNICIAN THREE

Plus you keep any of them unconscious too long and their cortexes fry.

 

JOHNNIE

A necessary risk.

 

BLACK

Tell that to the Pentagon. Look, after what Stein pulled yesterday, this is nothing.  Just walk her through her script. We’ve done it a thousand times.

 

JOHNNIE leans down to stare at LOLA in a monitor as she stands up from her desk. He’s frowning.

 

JOHNNIE

Right. What could possibly go wrong?

 

INT. NEWSROOM — DAY.

 

CARL is seated, carefully squinting at newspaper copy, while cross-referencing information in the several large scientific volumes spread around his desk. He holds a pencil in his hand and is unconsciously driving it into the palm of his other hand. He glances down shocked to see that he’s ground the pencil to a stub, but there’s not a mark on his skin.

 

LOLA appears behind him, an open folder in her hands. She waits for him to notice her, but he’s too absorbed.

 

LOLA

Carl.

 

CARL yelps and spins, tosses the pencil stub at his garbage can, misses the can, retrieves the stub from the floor, and drops it into the can.

 

CARL

Lola! Yes, uh, yes, I’m sorry, what —

 

LOLA

I need your help.

 

CARL

You . . . you what?

 

LOLA

You’re the science expert around here, can you look at —

 

CARL

I would hardly call myself —

 

LOLA

I’m going over the Omega Man feature, and, I don’t know. Some of it sounds a little . . . silly.

 

CARL

Silly? The most powerful man on the planet?

(nervous whisper)

You know he might be able to hear you?

 

LOLA

This bit about how some “magical sorcerer” gave him his “Omega” powers? He says a secret word and a lightning bolt strikes him?

 

Beat.

 

CARL

What’s silly about that?

 

LOLA

Where does the lightning bolt come from?

 

Beat.

 

CARL

The sky.

 

LOLA

But the main current, the part of lightning you see, it travels up from the ground, not down to it. Wouldn’t it make more sense if the bolt came out of him? With the release of some kind of artificially contained energy. It must build up while he’s passing as human.

 

CARL

Passing? You make it sound like he’s trying to trick us.

 

LOLA

He is. When he’s in his human disguise. What if the “magic word” is only psychological? A post-hypnotic trigger?

 

CARL

That’s crazy, Lola. Next thing you’ll be saying that, that Amazonia isn’t really an Amazon.

 

LOLA

A lost city of woman warriors hidden in Antarctica? How come nobody’s ever found it?

 

CARL

It’s Antarctica. People don’t go wandering —

 

LOLA

But satellites? The military’s never sent jets to locate it?

 

CARL

The government would never do that! They respect her too much, her and all the superheroes. They need them to protect us. We’d be lost without them.

 

LOLA

Exactly. They’re invaluable. Like, like the police or, or nuclear deterrents. Superheroes are just ICBM’s. Only with free will. Bombs with brains.

 

CARL

That’s not a very nice way to think —

 

LOLA

What if the U.S. nuclear arsenal woke up one morning and decided it didn’t want to work for the United States anymore? What if they decided to take a day off? What do you think the government would say to that?

 

CARL

The Power League would never abandon America. Omega Man has dedicated his entire life to serving truth and justice and —

 

LOLA

But why?

 

CARL

What do you mean why? Because . . . because . . . he can’t help it. He’s a good person.

 

LOLA

No, he’s not. He’s not a person at all. Good or bad.

 

CY has stopped working as he listens. ROGER pops up from the floor where he’s been scouring the rug for his rings.

 

CY

Huh. I never thought of it like that. Omega Man, Cyborg, any of them, they could just up and quit any time they like. What could the government do?

 

CARL

But they wouldn’t! They’re superheroes. That’s what makes them super!

 

LOLA

I thought their powers made them super.

 

ROGER

(unconsciously winding a rubber band around his ring finger)

If I had a power ring, I could do anything I wanted.

 

LOLA

So they don’t have a choice? They’re just prisoners?

 

ROGER

Anything.

 

CARL

No. I mean yes. To their nature. They’re prisoners to their nature. Isn’t everybody?

 

JOHNNIE and BLACK suddenly appear as though having just sprinted into the room. Their faces betray masked panic.

 

JOHNNIE

Wow, Mr. Clarkson, you really are a philosopher!

 

BLACK

Lola! Great news! I got you that interview. Let’s get you out of here.

 

LOLA

With Dr. Megastein?

 

BLACK

You bet, come on, we have to leave right now, on the double.

 

LOLA

Fantastic, I’ll grab my briefcase!

 

BLACK

Okay, everybody, back to work! Back to work! This is a newspaper, not a, not a

 

JOHNNIE

(under his breath)

Government prison for brainwashed superheroes.

[END ACT I]