Under the Gun

Posted on July 23, 2015 by Kate Polak

After a year in New York City, where the claustrophobia was so oppressive that I sometimes snuck out into the hallway to beat on the plywood screwed onto the roof hatch, my husband and I moved to a small village in Ohio. Yellow Springs is a town you may have heard of, in spite of its population of only a few thousand; the hometown of Dave Chappelle, a liberal enclave filled with older radicals and young free-spirit entrepreneurs, it is bounded by farms and parks. The Tecumseh Land Trust, a sort of demilitarized zone whose maintenance keeps strip malls and chain stores at bay, insures a level of charm annihilated by an influx of big box stores in neighboring towns. It is bounded on another side by Glen Helen, a small nature preserve with winding trails leading over a waterfall and a modest center for the rehabilitation of injured birds of prey. Our downtown consists of a few restaurants, a few coffee joints, a number of shops devoted to the functional and ornamental artwork of locals, a movie theater, and a local grocery. On Saturdays, much of the town turns out for the farmer’s market, populated by piles of organic peppers and tomatoes, small-batch fermented vegetables, and cheese from the cows I walk past on foggy mornings.

A year after our move, the pavement was still hot against the soles of our feet as my husband and I stood, arms around one another’s shoulders, looking far down the street. This was an awkward posture for us—neither a cold nor an overly affectionate couple—and after a while, we ended up standing apart but close, as the rattle of gun shots down the block shuddered through the air.

I came from a neighborhood where SWAT raids, random gunfire, and despair were not uncommon. I was in eighth grade when a girl in my class was gunned down in a nearby parking lot—I didn’t know it was her, but I had seen a body lying in a parking lot on a walk. One morning, I woke to the train whistle, more insistent than usual. A block away, a man had simply sat down on the tracks and waited. The rails were awash in blood by the time I was going to school, a fine spray over the rocks in the cess. A stray bullet fired by a neighbor in a fury of celebration one July 4^th afternoon lodged itself in the wall above my parents’ bed. If it had been the evening, it would have penetrated my father’s abdomen. He dug it out of the wall and displayed it next to the pennies he and my mother crush on the train tracks.

On this night, however, violence was out of place.

The gun battle was raging at 11pm on a Tuesday. After picking Ian up from work when the sirens began wheeling around our neighborhood, we padded back and forth between the porch and the intersection between our street and a major road. For two blocks beyond the intersection, police cars lined either side of the street, and the main road was rapidly filling with news cameras, giant lights casting a surreal glow on the corner I normally turned to walk past a friend’s wild flower-strewn front garden. She sometimes punctuates the arboreal splendor with artfully curated holiday decorations. The pavement was still hot against the soles of our feet as Ian and I stood, arms around one another’s shoulders, looking far down the street. This was an awkward posture for us—neither a cold nor an overly affectionate couple—and after a while, we stood apart but close, as the rattle of gun shots down the block shuddered through the air.

Facebook had exploded with rumors two hours before, but by 11pm, we know that the shooter was Ian’s friend Paul, that he was barricaded in his house a few blocks north on our street, and that he would not be coming over for dinner on Wednesday.

We had been trying to find time for a cookout for a year, in part because I had never met him in person. Online, Paul’s regular posts on Ian’s Facebook wall, while littered with extraneous ellipses, were well-reasoned, and emotionally raw—a mockery of form that nonetheless commanded respect for their naked subjective engagement. In spite of this, however, he was not known for his delicacy of approach. Debates about guns were particularly vituperative. Paul had, several years before, been the subject of a raid, which turned up hundreds of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. All of it was legally purchased, and all of it was returned. Several other friends had already blocked him, and his rambling responses were occasionally aggressive. Unlike those on most internet commenting threads, however, the longer Paul interacted, the sweeter he became—after what began as a particularly vicious battle, the thread would eventually devolve into Paul’s declarations of love and appreciation, grateful for the debate.

Ian had seen him the day before, Monday, at Kroger, and was a bit sad and distant after watching Paul limp to the plastic pharmacy counter to collect his blood pressure medication. He had picked me up from mucking out stalls, I was flush with the new strength in my arms, and reeked of dirt and manure, my spine singing from the muscles knitting and thickening across my shoulders and back, and easily gamboled over Ian’s ache for Paul’s reduction.

Tuesday morning was spent pulling meat out of the freezer to defrost and marinate.

My fingers closed on Ian’s arm as we counted seventeen shots in rapid succession. We walked back to the corner, looked down at the army surrounding Paul’s small house, briefly embraced, walked back.

On Wednesday morning, I started to weep.

A week before, the day after I defended my dissertation, my friend Jeremy was gunned down in a local bar after what can only be described as a psychotic break. During high school, Jeremy’s parents’ porch was a safe space; conveniently placed alongside of a main drag, but tucked just away off on a side street, the wide, concrete steps could accommodate more than a dozen milling youth, while the solid stone paling shielded us from passersby. Teenaged girlfriends and I loitered while he and his friends joked around, but the unusual element in this scene was that Jeremy and his friend Phil policed the discourse; it was a misogyny-free zone, the only anodyne social space in my adolescence.

Jeremy and I had been in irregular but enthusiastic contact since we were in high school, using the innovations of digital correspondence to manufacture political debates every few months. Looking back on a long conversation on hate crimes, I’m struck more by the pleasantness of the exchange than by our stark disagreement. Jeremy thought that the existence of the legal designation of hate crimes amounted to criminalizing thought, while I see them as a classification of a crime committed against an individual but intended to terrorize a larger group. Jeremy thought profiling could be useful, while I think that profiling is an act of racism. These are wide gulfs in thought and approach, but his respect for my views was apparent in his phrasing. He wasn’t seeking to convert me—merely to show me that his point-of-view was reasonable. I often explain to my students that this is the only truly honorable approach in a debate.

On the day of his death, according to reports, he argued with his mother before departing her home. When confronted by police he removed his gun from its holster and waved it around in a threatening manner, at which point he was repeatedly tased and then shot to death in a bar around the corner from his parents’ house, the only bar in crawling distance from my apartment of half a decade. He had apparently tried to raise his gun as officers struggled him to the ground.

It has been nearly two years since their deaths, and I have fought with myself over how to say something meaningful about them. Mass shootings are in the news more often than not, and each time another young man murders, I think back to Paul and Jeremy. Their stories are not unfamiliar: both had issues with mental illness, both had easy access to firearms, and both had a deep and abiding suspicion that gun regulation was the first step down the road towards fascism. But both were also deeply compassionate, vulnerable, had families they loved and large social circles. They were friendly and warm, and when they talked about the issues they cared about, they spoke clearly and calmly, and they listened respectfully to other views. It won’t do to memorialize them with another call to fund mental health services, to regulate the sale of firearms, or to expand government oversight. They had good access to mental healthcare, they purchased firearms within the bounds of the law, and they would have been appalled if I leveraged their memories for more regulation. It won’t do to call on neighbors and friends, or to point towards a particular viewpoint or conspiracy theory. They had friends and family who cared deeply, and they weren’t rigid ideologues. They were nuanced.

In both cases, the authorities tasked with handling Jeremy and Paul’s respective outbursts were in danger, but also were both heavy-handed, which led to discussions in Cincinnati and Yellow Springs about the increasing militarization of the police force. It’s a discussion that should continue, but it is not the only discussion worth having in relation to outbreaks of gun violence (if their perpetuity can even be captured by the term “outbreak” anymore).

These deaths recall for me a darker aspect of our culture. As I mentioned at the opening of this essay, I’m not a stranger to violence. The neighborhood I grew up in goes through regular cycles, the ebb and flow of blood that is a fact of life in poverty. As a teenager, I had guns trained on me by both criminals and officers, and never in the context of a “drug deal gone wrong” or during an arrest. Instead, it was during activities remarkable in this context only for their dailiness; walking home from getting a cone of shaved ice, walking into my parents’ back yard. When the ATF raided the house two doors down and pulled 147 illegal guns out of one side of the duplex, kids had been playing in the front yard an hour before. The girl in my 8^th grade class who was shot to death in a parking lot two blocks away. Shots fired were nothing irregular. These were not the experiences of the vast majority of my white classmates, whose houses were nestled in quiet cul-de-sacs in different neighborhoods that seemed very, very far away.

But now, the boundaries are failing. It isn’t that mass shootings are becoming more frequent. It’s that they’re becoming more frequent in ways middle-class white people can see. At 33, now a middle-class white person myself, it is eerie to watch the type of violence I grew up understanding to be common follow me into areas where the police brutality, the S.W.A.T. raids, the tanks, the guns, and all of the other attendant material hallmarks are clearly perceived as something new.

One of the things that always bothered me in discussions about gun violence and violence in general is that those who have not grown up in the shadow of its threat often assume that we acclimate ourselves to it. Environments of violence don’t breed an adjustment period that is capped with a reconciliation with one’s surroundings. It doesn’t get less traumatic just because it happens every day.

I’m a professor of English now. My work is concerned with the representation of violence in literature and the study of empathy. The longer I consider the questions that have guided my life and career, the less I believe that empathy exists beyond a very narrow engagement with the people around me who are like me. Who are around you, who are like you. I worry sometimes that my academic interests are turning me into a sort of voyeur sociopath, who has feelings but suspects that they are considerably more limited and less useful than most would assume. As I read over the essays written by smart, caring people attempting to grapple with this suddenly more unsafe world, I think back to the neighborhood of my youth, where if you chalked the outline of every body that had lain on those streets, you couldn’t take a step without toeing the outline of another tragedy.

The last discussion I had with Jeremy centered on gun control, gun rights, and intent versus contemporary usage in Constitutional rights. While he advocated for gun rights, he was nonetheless disturbed when I sent him information about the connection between the ratification of the Second Amendment and Virginia’s slave-hunting militias. He had a conceal-and-carry license, and frequently encouraged me to buy a gun and take classes in order to better protect myself. In one of our last exchanges, he told me that he wanted to be “the good guy with a gun,” and that he hoped, in spite of my views, I would thank him. Winky face.

I can’t help but wonder, as I re-read those messages, whether a relentless consciousness of the chaos at the gates was what compelled him to have that gun, and if a more immersive vision of it—as I had in my old neighborhood—would have made him feel any differently. But I don’t get to ask him, which is itself a tragedy, because he would have had some interesting thoughts to share.

Sex Comics and 9/11 in Multiple Warheads

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Philip Smith

I came to Brandon Graham’s Multiple Warheads by way of the Best American Comics 2014 collection and so I was unaware, when I began reading, that it had started life as a sex comic. It came as some surprise, then, when, after around 200 pages of visually packed images, surreal Soviet landscapes and cheap but charming puns, I turned the page to find images of the main protagonist, Sexica, having a large phallic object inserted into her anus, attaching a werewolf penis to her boyfriend, and then having sex with him while he transforms into a wolf.

None of this was entirely without precedent in the chronology of the collected edition – that the main characters enjoy an active sexual relationship is apparent throughout the story. On several occasions they are shown either in bed or lounging around in states of undress and on two other occasions we see the main couple engage in sexual activity.

However, on these occasions, as Eric Mesa argues, Sexia is not drawn as unrealistically proportioned, and the sexual acts depicted (including cunnilinguis) are as much to do with female pleasure as male desire. I would not describe the comic as a shining, or even good, example of pro-sex feminism (if such an ideal even exists) because Graham also consciously presents Sexica as erotic spectacle (at one point he reflects on a 2007 comic ‘I sure drew a lot of butts’). I don’t see the comic as particularly feminist, but I can at least understand Eric Mesa’s argument.

The sex comic, therefore, was not a complete thematic break, but it did run counter to many of the representations of sex and gender in other episodes of the comic. It reverses all of the points Mesa raises. Sexica is drawn with exaggerated proportions. She expresses her discomfort at being anally penetrated and is told that this course of action is better because her unnamed smuggling contact gets to ‘shove it up your butt’. The smuggling contact gives a satisfied ‘Heh’ upon successfully penetrating her. The following series of panels seem to take gleeful delight in depicting her walking with discomfort.

The male gaze is also given more explicit form; when Sexica passes through the security scanner the x-ray labels her body parts ‘tits … ass … leg… leg’ and informs anyone looking at the scanner that her breasts are unevenly sized. This image breaks a female character into parts and presents the male gaze as objective. In sum, the sex comic is problematic not only because of its use of the female body, because it undermines the potentially positive readings which rest of the comic might elicit.

This mix of misogynistic humor and cartoonish eroticism was punctuated, bizarrely, by several overt references to the September 11th terrorist attacks. As the object is fully inserted into Sexica’s anus the sound she makes is represented by an image of the second plane about to hit the Twin Towers.

Later, two security officers monitoring an x-ray scanner are too busy sharing jokes to notice, first, that Sexica is smuggling an illegal item inside her body and, second, two men carrying a comically large explosive device labelled ‘blow yer ass*up’.

I understand what misogynistic erotica was doing in the comic, but why the references to 9/11?

I really don’t know what is happening here, but I have a few ideas. My first thought is that the (perhaps inappropriate) connection between sexual and territorial violation with regard to the September 11th terrorist attacks is well-trodden ground. In Sam Glanzman’s short comic ‘There Were Tears In Her Eyes’ for the collection 9-11: Artists Respond, one character (problematically) compares the destruction of the Twin Towers to the Statue of Liberty being raped. Tonally, however, Multiple Warheads has little in common with the theme of mourning in the 9-11 collection. If anything, Graham seems to engage with what occurred using a discordantly light-hearted register.

This, in itself, could be read as a way to manage one’s fears by parodying them. Graham is a New York resident and, while we cannot presume to know how he was personally affected, I think it is reasonable to assume that it had some impact on him. Perhaps transforming trauma into something visual and tangible, even darkly humorous, is a way to reduce and contain it?

Conversely, the handling of the September 11th terrorist attacks might be read as a tribute to the taboo-breaking which characterised the Underground Comix movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Underground Comix were, broadly speaking, designed, among other things, to offend the sensibilities of white, hawkish, church-going Americans. Many artists used their medium as a means to give shape to their darker fantasies simply to draw the most violent and depraved acts they could imagine. No topic, however taboo, was off limits. As Sabin argues ‘the comix revelled in every kind of sex imaginable [and] took bloodshed to extremes’ This openness, inevitably, spilled over into misogyny as the genre’s commitment to bearing all positively embraced political insensitivity – if you were offended, Comix declared, that was your problem.

If read as a stylist continuation of the Underground Comix genre, we might therefore understand this episode of Multiple Warheads as designed primarily to test and outright violate boundaries of good taste. The taboos of crypto-beastiality, sexual violence, and of making light of national tragedy seem all to exist within a continuum.

These are all just guesses, though. I am still baffled by the mix of cartoonish eroticism, grotesque and misogynistic humour, and national trauma, and perhaps my theories are just me trying to make sense of something which was never meant to bear analysis. I would be interested to know how others read this.

Zorro’s Firm and Blood-Straightened Vein

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

So here’s my favorite gay superhero sex scene:

“I . . . placed my hands on his face. . . With one palm over his forehead and the other palm over his nose and mouth, I looked into those deep, dark pupils and saw the way he used to look at me when he was Dark Hero, when I didn’t know. Goran took my hand off his mouth and held it. He raised it to his mouth, placed his warm lips in the middle of my palm and kissed it. . . . I reached my arms around Goran, pulled him in, and our lips met.”

I know, pretty tame stuff, definitely not a passage from Unmasked: Erotic Tales of Gay Superheroes. It’s from Perry Moore’s 2007 Hero, and look how it echoes Zorro from one of the first superhero novels ever written:

“He grasped one of her hands, and before she guessed his intention, had bent forward, raised the bottom of his mask, and pressed his lips to its pink, moist palm.”

Johnston McCulley tells us Zorro is motivated by government persecution of monks and natives, but he and his alter ego Don Diego spends more effort seducing his future wife. Moore’s hero masturbates to online porn of wide-nippled Uberman (the one page I mumbled over when reading aloud to my kids), but he doesn’t find real intimacy until he and the better half of his dynamic duo have shared secret identities. The novel’s most touching scene takes place not in bed but during a picnic lunch in a public park, with both heroes fully clothed but unmasked. Zorro, however, likes to keep his mask on:

“The moment I donned cloak and mask . . . My body straightened, new blood seemed to course through my veins, my voice grew strong and firm, fire came to me! And the moment I removed cloak and mask I was the languid Don Diego again.”

That’s my favorite passage from all of superhero literature. It’s also one of the most thinly veiled descriptions of a penis I’ve ever read. For McCulley’s Zorro, a mask is a fetish. It literally makes him hard. Without it, he’s limp. It has a similar effect on women. Senorita Lolita is bored by the unmanly Don Diego, but she is titillated by his masked outlaw:

“And suddenly she was awakened by a touch on her arm, and sat up quickly, and then would have screamed except that a hand was crushed against her lips to prevent her. Before her stood a man whose body was enveloped in a long cloak, and whose face was covered with a black mask so that she could see nothing of his features except his glittering eyes.”

This is the erotic subtext to a surprising range of superhero tales. The hero dons his manly disguise not fight crime and uphold justice, but to woo the girl.

Before McCulley published The Curse of Capistrano in 1919 (it was renamed The Mark of Zorro after the Douglass Fairbanks film adaptation the following year), Zorro’s predecessors (Spring-Heeled Jack, Scarlet Pimpernel, Gray Seal) established unmasking as the ultimate act of intimacy between a superhero and his love interest. Though those earlier writers wedded the mask and the marriage bed, McCulley takes the striptease to new extremes. Zorro “tore off his mask” only after he gets Lolita to reveal “her true heart” and agree to “have offspring.” Don Diego’s seduction is complete. Although Lolita “would rather have you Senor Zorro than the old Don Diego,” she now loves “both of them.” Don Diego can retire both his mask and his “languid ways.” People “will say marriage made a man of me!”

This all sounds quaintly old-fashioned, but the same plot turns today’s superheroes. Alan Moore (no relation to Perry) makes Don Diego’s languid impotence explicit in Watchmen. Daniel Dreiberg can’t keep himself strong and hard (“Oh Laurie, I’m so sorry, it isn’t you, it’s just . . .”) until he’s dressed as Nite Owl (“Did the costumes make it good?”).

Or take a more recent look at the 2010 film Kick-Ass. (Forgive me, Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr., but I’ve not read your 2008 comic book yet.) Dave, the mild-mannered hero, can’t get the girl. Why? Because she thinks he’s gay. Fairbanks played the effeminate Don Diego to similar effect. Katie, however, thinks this new superhero Kick-Ass is pretty damn sexy. Where does Dave reveal himself to her? Her bedroom. What happens afterwards? The obvious. In fact, now Katie can’t keep her hands off Dave, and next they’re fornicating in back alleys too.

McCulley might have blushed at the R-rated sequence, but his Lolita had similar adventures in mind for her boy wonder. Like Don Diego, Dave and Dan are nothing without their masks. That’s why I prefer Moore’s hero, a gay man who never hides in his closet. Dark Hero’s alter ego is no languid Clark Kent either. By making the hero and his love interest gay, Moore unmasks the homophobic subtext and sets the superhero genre straight.

The Ways of White Critics

Posted on July 16, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Why is it when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis?”

—Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug”

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book Between the World and Me has prompted the critical establishment to embarrass itself even more than is its wont. As I wrote earlier this week at Splice Today, the Economist and the NYT both wrote the same review of Coates’ book in which they flapped anxiously at his lack of respect for 9/11 firefighters and assured him that the world was getting better all the time because of nice establishment folks at the NYT and Economist, why oh why must he be so bitter? To follow that, Freddie de Boer spoke up for the anti-establishment establishment to insist that he did like Coates but only within limits—which is to say, he didn’t like him as much as he liked James Baldwin. DeBoer then went on to insist that the rest of the media overpraises Coates, thereby implying (in line with the anti-establishment establishment playbook) that he alone is telling it like it is and everyone else is blinded by something that sure sounds like liberal guilt, even though deBoer assures us that’s not what he means. (Posts are here and here.)

DeBoer on twitter suggested that objections to his minor critiques of Coates demonstrate his point—i.e., that Coates is overpraised. But I don’t think the resistance deBoer is meeting is because he criticized Coates. Because, as lots of folks have pointed out, there’s tons of criticism of Coates. Again, reviews in the NYT and Economist — two of the largest profile venues around—were both mixed to negative. There have also been a number of criticisms questioning his treatment of black women, notably Shani O. Hilton’s piece at Buzzfeed and a really remarkable essay by Brit Bennett at the New Yorker. I also saw Coates being taken to task in no uncertain terms earlier this week on twitter for alleged failures to reach out to black media with advanced review copies. The idea that Coates is somehow sacrosanct is simply nonsense. Though as Tressie McMillan Cottom pointed out on twitter, it might be easy to miss those critiques if you’re not reading, or considering the words of, any black writers.

And I think that’s really the frustrating thing about deBoer’s argument here. The discussion of Coates’ work, and the reception of it, is framed almost entirely in terms of the health and thought of a left which is figured as implicitly white. In an earlier piece on online media, for example, deBoer made a glancing sneer at folks who frequent Coates’ lovingly moderated comments section at the Atlantic. DeBoer characterized them as a “creepshow” and sneered that they were “asking [Coates] to forgive their sins.” I don’t know how to read that except as a suggestion that Coates’ commenters are actuated by white liberal guilt. Which assumes that none of the commenters are black. Which is a mighty big assumption to make, it seeems like.

Presumably deBoer would say that he wasn’t talking about all the commenters, just the creepshow white ones. But then, why are white commenters the only ones who get mentioned? Why is the criticism and the conversation always focused on white people? Why does a discussion of Coates’ work, turn, in deBoer’s second post, into an embarrassing paen to deBoer’s own righteous consistency? “They used to say I was leftier-than-thou, that I always wanted to be left-of-left. Now they say I’m anti-left. I guess that changed. But I didn’t change,” he declares. Coates’ book isn’t a chance to talk about Coates’ book. It’s not even a chance to respond to Coates’ criticism, exactly, since deBoer doesn’t directly acknowledge in his second piece that one of the people calling him out is Coates himself. Instead, the post is an opportunity for deBoer to declare himself, again, the one righteous man, stuck in the same righteous rut as ever.

I wish deBoer weren’t trapped in quite that impasse for various reasons, but the most relevant one here is that there really is a worthwhile discussion to be had about how white critics can, or should, approach black works of art. On the one hand, I think it’s important for white critics to engage with work by black artists because those works deserve serious consideration by everyone, of whatever color. Creators like Ta-Nehisi Coates, or Rihanna, or Jacob Lawrence, are not in some marginal genre, to be considered as footnotes. They’re at least as important as Harper Lee, or Madonna, or Picasso, and they should be treated as such by whoever happens to be sitting down at the keyboard.

But at the same time, when white critics write about black artists, they often bring with them a lot of presuppositions, and a lot of racism — both personal and structural. White people have been defining and criticizing black people for hundreds of years, and mostly that process has ended up with white people declaring, in one way or another, that black people aren’t human, not infrequently as a prelude to killing them. “Too often,” Ellison writes, “those with a facility for ideas find themselves in the councils of power representing me at the double distance of racial alienation and inexperience.” There’s a brutal, relevant history there that you have to think about before you as a non-black critic blithely insist a black author is too bitter, or start spiraling off at random to discuss your own career prospects.

Too easy praise can be as condescending as too easy sneering, of course. There’s no easy route to truth, though an awareness of the difficulty of the task should probably be balanced with the recognition that the trials of the white critic are not the most difficult trials ever devised. In any case, it’s worth keeping in mind, when that piece takes shape in your head, that out there in the world black people exist, who have been known to criticize black art themselves, and even, at times, white critics.

“So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.”

—Langston Hughes, “Theme From English B”

The Most Obscure, Uninteresting Comic Book Character

Posted on July 15, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

“What if an American comic book company were to ring me up (not that it was going to happen) and they offered me my first U.S. assignment, only it was the most obscure, uninteresting character I could imagine? So let’s, out of the blue, pick the most obscure American comics character I could think of and just see if I could reinterpret him and make him interesting.”

That’s Alan Moore describing himself, just before an American comic book company really did ring him up. It was DC editor Len Wein offering him a shot at Swamp Thing.

Weirdly, the “most obscure American comics character” Moore had practiced on was The Heap—the 1940s character Wein had knocked-off to create Swamp Thing in 1971.

The character type was oddly popular in the early 70s. Roy Thomas had been a Heap fan as a kid, and so when he got a staff writer job at Marvel, he created the Heap-like Glob for The Incredible Hulk #121 in 1969.

A year and a half later, Skywald comics resurrected the original Heap.

Thomas had told his pal, former Marvel employer and Skywald co-founder Sol Brodsky, it was a good band wagon to jump on since Marvel had its own Heap knock-off, Man-Thing. Stan Lee dreamt up that name, but apparently the Glob was all the regurgitated Heap that Thomas could swallow, so he handed the assignment to scripter Gerry Conway. Gray Morrow’s drawings even include a visual homage to the Heap’s vine-like nose in Savage Tales #1 (May 1971).

Thomas tossed the next Man-Thing assignment to Len Wein and Neal Adams who worked up a second episode, but Marvel cancelled Savage Tales after the first issue. Wein also freelanced at DC where he created Swamp Thing with artist Bernie Wrightson for House of Secrets #92 (June–July 1971). It took another year, but the Wein-Adams Man-Thing eventually surfaced in Astonishing Tales #12 (June 1972), just a few months before Wein and Wrightson updated their House of Secrets Swamp Thing for DC’s Swamp Thing #1 (October–November 1972).

That’s a murky swamp of overlapping characters and creators to sift through. Worse, Wein and Conway were sharing an apartment at the time, and yet Wein swore Swamp Thing had nothing to do with Man-Thing—even though Man-Thing’s premiere is dated a month before Swamp Thing’s.

Thomas’s timetable doesn’t add up either: Skywald’s Heap premiered in Psycho #2 March 1971, three months before Man-Thing in Savage Tales #1. Add in the unknowable differences in production time, and the quagmire keeps deepening.

Neither Marvel nor DC tried to sue the other for copyright infringement, since both their characters were infringing on the Heap that Harry Stein and Mort Leav created for Hillman Periodicals’ Air Fighters Comics #3 in 1942. But Stein and Leav don’t get original credit either, since the Heap looks a lot like Theodore Sturgeon’s short story “It,” published two years earlier in Street and Smith’s Unknown.

Wein says he conceived Swamp Thing in December 1970, but

“Why I decided to make the protagonist some sort of swamp monster . . . I can no longer recall. . . . Coincidentally, Joe [Orlando, then-editor of THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY and THE HOUSE OF SECRETS] had been thinking of doing a story along the lines of Theodore Sturgeon’s classic fantasy tale ‘It’ . . . a story I had actually never read.”

And the swamp goes full circle when Roy Thomas scripted Marvel’s “It” adaptation for Supernatural Thrillers #1 (December 1972).

Sturgeon was invited to the 1975 San Diego Comic Convention so Ray Bradbury could hand him a Golden Ink Pot award. “I learned,” wrote Sturgeon, “for the very first time that my story ‘It’ is seminal; that it is the great granddaddy of The Swamp Thing, The Hulk, The Man Thing, and I don’t know how many celebrated graphics.”

The comic book swamp, however, was already draining, since Man-Thing was cancelled in 1975, and Swamp Thing the year after. It’s hard to explain the initial rise, though it probably has something to do with the 1971 change in the Comics Code:

“Vampires, ghouls and werewolves shall be permitted to be used when handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high calibre literary works written by Edgar Allen Poe, Saki, Conan Doyle and other respected authors whose works are read in schools around the world.”

The Heap, after all, is a reanimated corpse. Though the cause of that reanimation is as murky as Swamp Thing’s creative origins. Is “the unearthly transformation” because World War I German pilot Baron Emmelmann’s “will to live” is such a “powerful force” that it merges his body with the slime and vegetation of the Polish swamp where his plane crashed, causing him to rise two decades later as “a fantastic heap that is neither man nor animal”? If so, why does the Heap “die” two issues later, only to be reanimated by a nefarious zoologist’s “serum”? And what does that mysterious serum have to do with “Ceres, Goddess of Soil,” who in 1947 is retconned (by an uncredited writer) into the origin, raising the dead pilot as an agent of peace in defiance of the god Ares?

Alan Moore did an even deeper retcon to Swamp Thing. Instead of a man transformed into a plant, the 1984 Swamp Thing is a plant transformed into a man.

The 2005 Man-Thing movie (it apparently was intended to be theatrical release before demoted to the Syfy channel) goes for supernatural agency, though the Lee-Thomas-Conway-Morrow original was pure scifi: the inventor of a super-soldier serum injects himself and crashes his car into a swamp to keep the serum from the bad guys. The “formula”—updating Captain America’s premise for the Vietnam-era—is apparently napalm-based (a newspaper headline reads “NAPALM BOMB” as the inventor laments: “It’s bad enough the chemical will be used for more killing”), and so Man-Thing’s touch burns. Or it did until the second episode, when Wein decided it only burns those who feel fear because . . . that’s how napalm works? Steve Gerber ran with that non-scifi premise, mixing more supernatural agency into his revised swamp, which, it turns out, is really a doorway to multiple dimensions.

Although Man-Thing hasn’t been lying completely dormant for the last few decades, I’d say he’s still a descent contender for the current “most obscure, uninteresting comic book character” category. Or at least a mindless, shuffling heap of muck that reflexively burns people who are afraid isn’t a superhero high on Marvel Entertainment’s film and TV project list. Like Thomas for the Heap though, I have a squishy spot in my heart for him. So let me take on Alan Moore’s thought experiment, and see if I can “reinterpret him and make him interesting.” Or maybe the problem is Man-Thing is already too interesting? So my assignment is to cover his range of weirdness while sticking to a single, scifi-only premise.

I’m placing my swamp near New Orleans and staffing it with weapon designers. Instead of napalm and super-soldiers, it’s a burning black plasma that swirls and geysers when in contact with a remote control beacon, incinerating everything else it touches. But to be practical in the field, you’d need a live soldier to operate it. So the new design is a hazmat body suit with direct neural interface. The head gear includes two large red “eyes” and tubes down the nose and sides. Things are going great until the suit-tester starts getting nervous. As his vitals rise, the plasma hits new levels of heat and mobility. It starts burning through the suit, and before they can shut it down, it incinerates him, leaving only a blackened skeleton and gas mask. But since the plasma is encoded with the last neural input, it’s now moving on its own, splashing and lurching around the complex with its puppet of a charred corpse. When it breaks outside, it vanishes into the swamp, where the plasma merges with the muck and bonds around the skeleton. What emerges isn’t sentient. It’s not even alive. It just roams randomly or sits dormant until its eyes glow red with internal heat when it senses human fear—which it then extinguishes with its burning touch.

The original Conway script includes a scantily-clad female spy who betrays the inventor and then later gets her face burnt off by Man-Thing—so let’s please avoid that double dose of misogyny. Maybe the inventor is the woman this time, and the guy testing the suit is the spy who’s seduced her to steal the tech. His vitals spike because she’s about to find him out—so it’s not just fear but his guilt too. To his own surprise, he really does love her, and it’s only his bursting into flame that prevents the discovery of his betrayal, giving his transformation a redemptive edge. Turning into a monster stops him from being a monster. And I’m betting at the end she’s the only one who can face him without fear, an act of forgiveness that also allows the plasma to finally shut down and Man-Thing to collapse into a puddle of mud and bones.

Okay, so maybe not the light PG-13 tone of the current Marvel movie universe, but what do you expect from a mindless, fear-burning swamp beast? I suggest Marvel use the character for a multi-episode subplot during season three of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, not unlike how they used Deathlok (another early 70s super-soldier monstrosity) in season one.

Now let’s see if anyone rings me up.

(Meanwhile, instead of sitting by his own phone, Swamp Thing is headed to Reykjavik, Iceland, for the International Popular Culture Association Conference at the end of July. Nathaniel Goldberg, a colleague from the Washington and Lee University Philosophy department, and I are presenting our paper, “Donald Davidson and the Mind of Swamp Thing.”)

Heavy Metal Magazine is Not Punk

Posted on July 14, 2015 by RM Rhodes

By now, everyone knows that Grant Morrison is taking on the role of Editor in Chief for Heavy Metal magazine. As someone who is three years into a complete reread of the entire run of the publication, this is of great interest to me.

My first reaction to this announcement was “again?” I’ve seen this kind of stunt casting for Editors before. When I read Grant Morrison’s comment that “[w]e’re trying to bring back some of that 70s punk energy of Heavy Metal,” I had to wonder if he actually, y’know, read the magazine during the 70s and 80s. Of all the labels that could possibly be laid at the feet of Heavy Metal during that period, punk is the only one I wouldn’t use.

First of all, the magazine was originally published by National Lampoon, a not-inconsiderably-sized company that released movies (Animal House, Vacation) and sold an awful lot of branded merchandise during the 70s and 80s. The pages of early Heavy Metal were packed full of advertisements for National Lampoon stuff. None of that really came across as punk to me at all. As Heavy Metal went on, they became much more obviously commercial, with their own brand of merchandise that was advertised in every issue.

An ad for Animal House from an early issue of Heavy Metal.

Second, a lot of the early material is very psychedelic and appealed mostly to the aging hippy demographic, which was, if I remember Sid and Nancy correctly, directly antithetical to the ethos of punk. Furthermore, Ted White was a big prog-rock fan and the material that was produced under his guidance leaned very heavily in that direction. If you were an Ultravox fan, Heavy Metal in the early 80s was absolutely the magazine for you.

An ad for a Ted Nugent album, from March of 1979. Tres punk.

Third, the revolution that really drove Heavy Metal was very distinctly French and had a lot more to do with the format of how French comics were serialized than with any kind of musical aesthetic, something that is largely transparent to Anglophones. Instead of serializing stories 22 pages at a time on a monthly basis, French BD magazines serialize their stories half a page at a time in weekly anthologies and have done since the 50s. It was a technique made popular with Tintin magazine, and perfected by Spirou. By the end of the 60s, Pilote (under the editorial guidance of Rene Goscinny, not coincidentally, the writer of Asterix) was the big boy on the block, largely due to this production methodology.

The collected editions of popular stories and characters would stack half-pages together to create magazine-sized albums. Take a look at any French (or European) BD collection produced before 1970 – Asterix, Valerian, Corto Maltese, Blueberry, Philemon, Spirou – and you will notice a white gutter running horizontally through the middle of almost every page in the book. This is a direct artifact of the serialization methodology, regardless of whether the story was actually serialized or not. There were occasional splash pages in these books, but that’s more of an exception than a rule.

A page from Blueberry – note the A and B in the bottom right corners of the half pages.

But when you look at the material that Moebius and Druillet were producing in Metal Hurlant, you can really see a massive revolution in format. The pages are not formatted to be chopped in half for serialization – the page layouts are a direct challenge to the old commercial methodology. In addition, the fact that three or four pages were printed at once to present a complete story in a single issue was a major shift.

For contrast, a page from Arzach, also by Moebius

It’s probably not a coincidence that Les Humanoïdes Associés came mostly from the Pilote stable of artists. They pushed against the solid editorial format of the establishment and, when that didn’t get them where they wanted to go, they went out and formed their own magazine – something that just about everyone in the Francophone market did at one point or another. There were many, many anthology magazines on the stands at the time and still are.

The Metal Hurlant revolution can be better understood to an Anglophone comics audience as analogous to the Image revolution – a bunch of artists got together and did their own thing because they wanted more creative control. It’s a shame that this part of the history isn’t better understood, because it would have been more appropriate to compare the Image revolution to the Metal Hurlant revolution because of the order they occurred in. C’est la vie.

After Metal Hurlant proved to be a successful commercial powerhouse, the BD market shifted. Not everything had to be in half-page increments anymore and there were far more experiments in format. By the early 80s, things like Les Cites Obscures by Schuiten and Peeters started showing up in complete albums without serialization and multipage stories by Caza were appearing in Pilote.
When Heavy Metal appeared on American newsstands in 1977, there were already a number of other anthology titles floating around. Not quite part of the underground movement, these were referred to as the “ground level anthologies” (because they were a step above the underground and a step below the mass market) and, to Anglophone eyes, Heavy Metal fit right in.

The granddaddy of these was (in my opinion) witzend, which started in 1966 and was published irregularly through the mid 80s. Star*Reach and Hot Stuf’ were around in the early 70s and provided venues for artists like Howie Chaykin and Rich Corben, who went on to make great material for Heavy Metal.

Interestingly, 2000AD also started in 1977.
By the early 80s, the ground level anthologies business was very popular. Every little (and some not-so-little) publishing house was putting out their own anthology – Eclipse, Epic Illustrated, Warrior, Raw, Weirdo, 1984 (later 1994) all came and went during the heyday of Heavy Metal. There was even a short run of a Scottish anthology in 1980 called Near Myths that featured a strip called Gideon Stargrave by a young up-and-comer named Grant Morrison.

It’s entirely possible that the young Morrison saw Heavy Metal in punk terms because that was what he was immersed in when he was 20, when he was working on an anthology created in clear imitation of Heavy Metal. But that doesn’t mean that Heavy Metal had any kind of real “punk energy” during that period. Maybe we are predisposed to define all future revolutions (including the ones we create) in terms of the first revolution that we live through.

A really revolutionary act would be for Morrison to go back and read those issues with fresh eyes and see what made Heavy Metal distinct (the European material, which none of the other ground level anthologies had in such a high volume). In the Entertainment Weekly article, he is quoted as saying “One of the things I like to do in my job is revamp properties and really get into the aesthetic of something, dig into the roots of what makes it work, then tinker with the engine and play around with it. So for me, it’s an aesthetic thing first and foremost.”

He also plans to write and create original material for the magazine, which doesn’t fill me with a lot of hope that he will, in fact, recapture that original aesthetic – mostly because the most honest way to do that would be to hire revolutionary European creators and give them room to really challenge the status quo. But I don’t see him trawling Angouleme for new creators anytime soon.

One thing is certain: given my commitment to read the entire run of Heavy Metal, I’ll get to his issues eventually. I’m currently on the 1989 issues, so that will be three to four years from now, based on my current reading speed. At this point, though, I really don’t feel a sense of urgency to jump ahead and read them as they are released, based on his remarks.

Biting the Hand That Feeds: Hannibal, Rihanna, and Sexual Harassment

Posted on July 13, 2015 by Kate Polak

I had somehow missed The Silence of the Lambs, viewing it only a few years ago, well into my adulthood. After years of making jokes about how “it rubs the lotion on its skin,” my husband got frustrated with my blank looks of incomprehension and queued it up on Netflix. As Buffalo Bill grows increasingly irate with his captive, screaming at her “or else it gets the hose again!”, I burst into tears. A 30 year old woman frantically crying over an often-mocked scene in a 20 year old film.

My husband was unnerved to say the least—he had seen the film when it came out, and since it circulated in popular culture in a recognizable way for him, the line had lost its teeth. It was cheesy, and morphed into a joke. I, on the other hand, had no context for the line, and had heard it for years as a cutesy phrase that referenced a film I’d never watched. Having it replaced in its proper milieu was jarring. Instead of a tacky scene worthy of ridicule, something about the pronoun—“it”—and the directive about lotion reached around the rational part of my mind and struck me directly in the amygdala.

I unintentionally overlooked the television series Hannibal until two seasons in, when I was looking to kick off last summer with some horror. The glorious cinematography, the powerfully reserved acting, and the beautifully rendered script combined to make a stunning and tense dance of intellect and gore.

The first and second seasons are fixated on the strain between knowledge and ignorance. Will Graham, a special investigator for the FBI, is capable—according to Dr. Lecter—of “pure empathy”; he can mentally reconstruct a murderer’s actions, playing the role of the criminal in his internal recreation of the drama. Special Agent Jack Crawford contacts Will to assist him on a case in which young women of the same physical description have been disappearing. Crawford’s initial role is less that of a capable investigator than a pushy delegator. Dr. Alana Bloom, a purportedly intelligent psychiatrist, has taken an interest in Will, and wants to protect him from what she sees as Crawford’s potentially disruptive pressure. To this end, she introduces Crawford to Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who is tasked with monitoring Will.

The show relies on the audience’s pre-existing knowledge of Dr. Lecter operating in the background. Assuming we have seen the unhinged Anthony Hopkins biting the cheek off of a prison guard and recounting eating a liver with “some fava beans and a nice Chianti,” we are faced instead with an eminently rational and restrained Lecter in the show.

Lecter’s self-possessed mien in Hannibal stands in stark contrast to Hopkins’ portrayal, and while the audience knows he is the “bad guy,” the show operates less on the shock value of the murders under investigation or Lecter’s own gastronomical vagaries, and more on how power and knowledge must be—as Michel Foucault insisted—thought together.

Foucault equated knowledge with power, something that those currently struggling under the auspices of austerity in the academe may find laughable, but it’s an equation that is nonetheless compelling for situating current debates about the role of those with knowledge, and what types of knowledge can (or should) be leveraged into power. In Hannibal, Lecter uses his intellect, as well as his privileged status as confidant and guide for Will, to conduct increasingly bizarre experiments on him while the latter is in a fugue state. Lecter manipulates those around him, relentlessly curious about the boundaries of goodness and empathy in those who have the capacity for them.

Foucault is careful to distinguish between knowledge that is laden with power and knowledge that is marginalized. He specifically notes the “disqualified knowledges” of the mentally ill, but broadens this to say that “We are concerned, rather, with the insurrection of knowledges that are opposed primarily not to the contents, methods, or concepts of science, but to the effects of the centralizing powers which are linked to the institution and functioning” of a discipline (Power/Knowledge 84). In regards to this, he parses the way in which power is only thought of as something that is exerted, rather than something that is naturalized and replicated without direct activity.

As shorthand, it can be thought of as the distinction between the power of having and the power of doing.

Hannibal’s ability to unnerve and disquiet rests not on the “reveal,” as with many crime thrillers. The audience already knows who the villain is, even as the team tries to sort out other cases of varying drama and terror. Instead, the appeal of Hannibal rests almost entirely with the tacit knowledge shared by the audience and Lecter: that he is the antagonist, but we still want to see precisely what he is capable of in relationships. In fact, the least interesting scenes in the show are those that depict him enjoying a meal of a person alone. The tension instead resides in watching Lecter use the knowledge he has of himself—as well as his developing theories about other characters—to his own ends.

I’ve been reflecting on Hannibal throughout the year because its peculiar blend of refinement, psychopathology, and epicureanism holds me in a strange thrall. It reminds me of other debates about power, both the having and the doing, because the show has crafted a world in which the rules of behavior and the exercise of power are nearly illegible to those in the best position to address the atrocities occurring within their midst.

In particular, as I watch the third (and possibly final) season of Hannibal, I’m also embroiled in the ongoing debate about campus sexual harassment, launched in part by Laura Kipnis in her now-famous Chronicle of Higher Education article “Sexual Paranoia Strikes the Academe.” This may seem an odd pairing—a show about a psychiatrist/cannibalistic serial killer and a turgid debate about whether or not professors should be permitted to have sex with students—but I can’t help but think that the same questions about power are at stake.

For those who haven’t followed the discussion, Kipnis’s argument rests on three major elements. The first is that administrators are overstepping their boundaries and are infringing on academic freedom. This is patently true, and doesn’t merit debate. Administrative overreach has been consistently critiqued over the past 30 years, and is getting worse as faculty are increasingly shifted to the status of contingent labor. Furthermore, because of this administrative overreach, it is increasingly clear that non-educators are determining educational policy, always to the detriment of students’ actual development.

Second, she contends that an obvious example of this is new policies prohibiting professor-student romantic relationships. These policies have been implemented at a variety of universities to quell the tide of demonstrations against campus sexual assault. While I personally agree with these policies, I can see the potential problems with them, and am willing to debate them.

Third, she argues that the supposed “sexual panic” on campuses is vastly overinflating a relatively benign problem, and that students’ own sense of exaggerated vulnerability is actually making professors the more vulnerable class. This is ridiculous. Professor-on-student sexual harassment and assault are still significant issues. While student-on-student sexual harassment accounts for 80% of reports on campus, that still leaves a sizable problem. Furthermore, many cases of both varieties go unreported. For example, Kipnis asserts that

For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square. Let no one think I’m soft on harassment. But I also believe that the myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life, because that’s simply part of the human condition.

Here, she is conflating normal misunderstandings with harassment.

My annoyance with the tenor of this discussion has increased with the tone-deafness of Kipnis’ understanding of power and its subtle manifestations.

In Hannibal, the audience is in reluctant collusion with Lecter as he manipulates and slaughters characters. There are—of course—the “ordinary interpersonal entanglements” of daily life. Will Graham and Alanna Bloom share an attraction, but because Alanna is concerned about Will’s mental state, she refuses to enter into a relationship with him. Jack Crawford’s pressure on Will to use his empathy can grow harsh. However, standing in stark contrast to these relatively benign interactions is the maneuvering of Lecter.

Interestingly, both Will and Lecter work from the point of curiosity about human emotions and motivation. While Will is able to adopt the perspective of others who have committed misdeeds in the past, Lecter is able to use his observations to predict future behavior. Both are talented, but only one begins the series with a sense of the way in which his knowledge brings him power. In the first season, Lecter experiments on Will after discovering that he has the symptoms of encephaly. Instead of seeking surgical treatment for his patient, Lecter devises a series of experiments in the clinical setting to encourage Will to lose time. In entrusting his mind to another, Will is violated at both the psychological and bodily levels because he fails to discern how this power can be leveraged against him.

After Will reconstructs a crime scene that includes a grisly totem pole of bodies, he loses time and appears at Lecter’s office door. Lecter tells him that this is the result of his psyche “enduring repeated abuse,” and Will frantically objects that “No, NO! I am NOT abused!” Lecter repeats that Will has an empathy disorder, and that disregarding his disordered psyche is “the abuse I’m referring to.” Here, abuse is relocated as being the act of the person suffering—abuse at his own hand—rather than being visited from the outside. This recalls Kipnis’s argument that it is students’ sense of vulnerability, rather than objective conditions in which they are disempowered, that is the problem.

Will wants to find a physical—objective—cause for his disorder. The viewer already knows that Lecter is hiding some aspect of this from Will, but it is not until the following episode that we see there is indeed a physical cause for Will’s rapidly fraying sanity, a cause that Lecter pressures the neurologist to conceal. Much like the objective problem of sexism within the academe, Will’s disordered brain matter has psychological effects that are erroneously attributed to more ethereal causes.

It is not that Will or Lecter stand in an easy allegorical relationship to students and professors in relation to Kipnis’s argument. Instead, Will and Lecter represent two distinct modes of knowledge, both of which are necessary to understand the real causes, circumstances, and consequences of sexual harassment in the academy and elsewhere. Lecter has power in his superior knowledge of the mind, and is not afraid to leverage it to his own ends. In this sense, we must remember that knowledge is not equivalent to ethics.

Will, on the other hand, has the capacity to understand others on an experiential level—to feel as they feel—but this very gift is also potentially disabling. Neither emotion nor reason are able to wholly grasp the diegetic world of Hannibal. Instead, there is a third term—power, and its subtle operation—with which all of the characters in both the on-screen and real-world dramas must contend.

It would be foolish, however, to equate Lecter’s power with his capacity to do violence on others. Violence is almost beside the point of the show, much like violence is frequently beside the point in terms of sexual violence. It remains popular to say that “rape isn’t about sex. It’s about power.” However, too often, those who remark on this conflate power with violence, as if violence is the only way in which power operates. Power in the world of Hannibal is not Lecter’s murders, or the murders by other various and sundry psychopaths populating the chorus of the show. It is the leveraging of psychological force.

One of the greatest myths that persists to today is that sexual harassment, and sexual violence, are invariably violent in the traditional sense of the word. The ham-handed training on sexual harassment provided by private companies making money off of universities trying to comply with Title IX do little to help this issue, as they have themselves a vested interest in concealing how subtly power circulates in a workplace, classroom, or clinic.

Perhaps this is less than legible for those who have acclimated themselves to shows of force. For example, Mads Mikkelsen, the actor who plays Lecter in Hannibal, was recently featured in Rihanna’s new video “Bitch Better Have My Money.” The video represents Rihanna as a kingpin of some sort whose accountant, Mikkelsen, has stolen her money. She kidnaps and tortures his wife, which doesn’t particularly phase him, so she goes on to torture him.

The video is an interesting contrast to Mikkelsen’s role on Hannibal. While he is still situated in relatively luxurious surroundings, he is ultimately at the whims of Rihanna. Furthermore, some critics have levelled the charge that the video is misogynistic because of the violence she visits on the woman who plays the wife of Mikkelsen. Speculations flew about whether or not this was a revenge fantasy about Rihanna’s real-life former accountant. Feminists of color have (rightly) pointed out that white feminism hasn’t always been welcoming to women of color.

Even the debates surrounding this video illustrate how fraught power is, particularly in relation to those who have been historically oppressed. Of course, the theft of money and sexual harassment or assault are not equivalent. Instead, this clearly illustrates how the public tends to react to obvious displays of violence—particularly from a disadvantaged woman, and in this case, particularly a woman of color—versus its critical acclaim of a white man with an advanced degree who eats people.

Hannibal is more than a show about a dude with “refined tastes,” however. It’s a series that best hits its stride when the audience is gazing on the beautifully plated delectables we know for a fact are composed predominantly of the minor character killed off in the previous scene. It’s a series that does more with an eyebrow raise, a small hand gesture, or a mild remark, than most shows are capable of doing with an ample explosives budget.

And it is loved—and found disturbing—precisely because we recognize that the power wielded by Lecter is at its most insidious when it is least obvious.

Obvious displays of power are few and far between. It would be delightful if tomorrow I could wake up in a world where power had shifted so far from the hands of professors and administrators that students weren’t threatened in a variety of ways by their moods and their decisions. Lecter remarks late in the second season that “Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude,” but even at this point, Lecter still knows much that Will does not.

After all, Hannibal kills both for pleasure and for necessity. He only eats those he considers equivalent to the animals most humans ingest. As he remarks to a character he’s keeping captive, “This isn’t cannibalism, Abel. It’s only cannibalism if we’re equals.”

And so goes Kipnis’ argument. It is only sexual harassment if we pretend that we are equals, and that there are not small, subtle (or even obvious) power dynamics at play. It’s only violence if it looks like it to her.

Power isn’t merely in the exercise thereof. It is in the ability to assess whether or not it was exercised.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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