Category Archives: Blog

How HBO Killed Art

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For many years, HBO has made money using a simple formula: one part full frontal nudity plus one part excessive gore plus one part family sentimentality = wildly successful drama. They have applied it to many different locations and historical time periods, from California, to World War Two, to Ancient Rome, to Depression-era New Jersey, to present-day New Jersey. Nothing much changes except for the set pieces and accents.  Other networks are trying to cash in but have struggled because HBO continues to up the ante – the prudish FCC still being uncomfortable with eviscerations, incest, rape and any combination of the three. Yet this is in itself uninteresting. TV entertains because it excites the senses and sex and death are very exciting. What is interesting is how this formula has garnered so much critical acclaim. At what point did the mere display of sex and violence become the equivalent of aesthetic sophistication?

Much of daily life in the modern world involves the denial of the fact of sex and death. When Leave It to Beaver aired, people were having sex in America and people were being murdered; therefore the show was false, for it ignored the reality of violence and desire.  It logically followed that to be true shows should not be afraid to show sex and death on screen. The more skin and guts exhibited, the more real it became. This is a valid critique, especially as concealment often helps control women’s bodies and obviates institutional injustices, but over the last twenty years this logic has snowballed dangerously. Today’s sophisticated viewers, those who want quality TV, who consider themselves well-informed, sensible, cultured, people, now assume violence and sex to be aesthetic criteria of the first order. In other words, a show is often considered artful in so far as it is willing to transgress taboos.

This is not to say HBO shows do not have other aesthetic qualities, that they do not have interesting plots, engaging characters and fine acting. They often do. These elaborate soap operas are packaged for demanding audiences who expect twists, ironic dialogue and calibrated tension. But so are many other shows, including traditional soap operas. Nor is this to say that violence and sex should not be on TV. There are plenty of programs that use both effectively. What sets HBO shows apart is how they have made violence and sex central to their appeal. Whether the public wants to admit it or not, this is what makes Rome and Iwo Jima alive to them, not the characters’ lives but how they die and what they look like naked. Many see this as an evolution for television on par with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a brave artistic achievement, when in fact it takes hackneyed assumptions about family, friendship and personal growth and glosses them with meticulously rendered brutality, vulgarity and debauchery.

Some will protest that they are drawn to the shows not for this gloss at all, but the opposite, for the exquisite family tensions and dramatic pathos behind the blood and boobs. They like the way that the shows let us sympathize with ever-proliferating anti-heroes in new and provocative ways. The sex and violence simply provide a more honest and engaging backdrop. This is true. Nothing pleasantly surprises viewers more than the fact that people who kill also have sex and families except perhaps for watching people with families have sex and kill. It makes their own family life feel more authentic while simultaneously making that of killers and ne’er do wells more relatable. Generally this might be a good thing, to appreciate how someone might turn to crime or kill to save a loved one; unfortunately, this apparent empathy is predicated on violence, specifically on the idea that what unites is sex and violence alone, and elides the plot’s trope-ridden sentimentality.

Band of Brothers, beloved by most everyone in the early aughts, exemplifies this formulaic blend of sentimentality and violence. The producers of that show did what they could do be historically authentic, relying on period costumes and up to date staging like any other period movie. The plot too was little different than work that came out in the 1950s, or even propaganda from the 1940s, replete with neatly-packaged assumptions about different officer types, friendships and personal growth. Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back pretty much told the same story. The only difference was the supposed realism in Band of Brothers, the way in which the producers were unafraid to show violence, and how this violence, the havoc of war, both intensified and obscured the schmaltzy and predictable plotting. Viewers could feel mature and jaded while simultaneously indulging in kitsch and sentimentality. The show seems quaint now, not because HBO has given up on a formula that equates realism with violence but because they have made their shows exponentially more debauched, and, according to their logic, exponentially more real.

HBO’s most recent locale is Westeros, a land that is not real in the physical sense but has been made so through violence, and if major web publications are any evidence, many viewers find this fantasy world more real than the war in Afghanistan. This is not especially surprising. Ewoks are more real to Americans than Afghans. What is unique is the way in which over-the-top sex and violence dictate the show’s plot and popularity. Critics anticipate the next slaughter and rape with relish, judging each episode for its audacity, and gauge its success by the number of children killed and sisters slept with. People do not tune in for the dragons and dwarves. That wouldn’t be real enough for them.

George Martin, the author of the original Game of Thrones, has defended his story’s excess by appealing to Sumerian history, essentially arguing that they did it first. He also claims to be informed by his experiences growing up during Vietnam, when atrocities committed in that war pushed him to represent the brutality that comes with war. Others have sought similar solace from British history in attempting to rationalize or justify the show as being authentic. All this is true: war is brutal. Women (and men) are raped. We would be remiss to obscure this. But we are a long way from John Wayne when it comes to art about war. Such a defense conveniently misses not only the fact that this brutality is part of the appeal of war, and is often the reason people go to war and line up to watch war on TV, but the way in this turns real off-screen violence into the only possible human reality. Those who protest are told that this is the way the world works. To shy away and watch anything else is to be inauthentic – to be a coward or a prude.

No matter that this is a fantasy. No matter that there is plenty of literature, movies and shows that honestly attempt to explore these cycles of violence in the modern world without making shocking violence so essential to their artistry. In the end, the titillating carnage in this show and others like it functions as violence does outside of television: as a mind-numbing spectacle that effectively mutes out all other considerations of life and art in the name of a supposedly undeniable and inviolable truth, an ultimate reality that justifies the barbarity we crave by making it impossible to imagine a world without barbarism.
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Michael Carson deployed to Iraq in 2006. He now writes criticism at the Wrath-Bearing Tree. Follow him @WrathBT on Twitter.

Is Fury Road Really All That Feminist?

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I read a few reviews of Fury Road, then, with my expectations set suitably high, I went to watch it. The main point that struck me as I sought to reconcile what I had read with what I was seeing, was how readily some seem to be to award the title ‘feminist’. Men’s rights activist Aaron Clarey called the film ‘Feminist Propaganda’ (I am not linking to his review because I don’t want to give him the hits, but go ahead and google him if you must). Kyle Pinion of The Beat described the film as a ‘feminist blockbuster’. His review went on:

[I]t’s one of the most feminist action films in recent memory. Fury Road centers on a group of women taking their own agency and pushing against patriarchal rule. While this franchise has always had an undercurrent of pacifist themes, Miller has laser-focused his message, to a point where one interaction at the midway point of the film ends up stating the obvious: this is what happens when old white men run the world unchecked. That may rankle some feathers in the audience, but this is an action movie that isn’t just empty spectacle or aiming for the lowest common denominator. This is a motion picture that’s actually about something with a strong point of view, and that’s worth standing up and applauding for. It’s basically the film equivalent of an album by The Clash dropping in the middle of a sea of bad arena rock.

Furiosa (Theron) is, indeed, a strong female character leading freed female slaves (who we see symbolically stepping out from the jagged chastity belt of male power) to what she heavily implies will be an Amazon-style eco-feminist utopia. She shoots better than Max, is as tough as he is, and makes many of the major decisions in the film. Even her apparent breakdown is brief and expressed not through uncontrollable sobbing but by falling to the knees Platoon-style. She does not become embroiled in a romance plot and, at the end of the film, appears set to lead a large group of people.

The film does, further, suggest that patriarchal dictatorships are a bad thing – Furiosa has liberated the harem of an altogether despicable warlord named Joe. The all-female group who the characters later encounter are Amazon warriors in the sense that they are competent, comparatively democratic, mutually-supportive, and (perhaps) ecologically-minded. So far, so laudable.

The feminist reading collapses there, however. The mcguffin of the film is a group of five women (what NY Daily News calls ‘the beauties’) who spend the majority of the story being beautiful, inept, and providing reaction shots for explosive spectacle. Rescuing the women (and the death of one of the women) serve as the primary motivation for the male characters and one female outlier. These women are not people in any meaningful sense – they are in equal parts prop and chorus for the main actors in the story. The first time we see them proper they are hosing one another with water. They are pictured in parts rather than as a whole, scantily-clad, nipples erect, and apparently unaware of the camera’s presence. The sequence is a depressingly textbook example of Mulvey’s male gaze theory. This is disappointing but hardly surprising. It is, if anything, par for the course for a blockbuster action film.
 

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What concerns me is that one is presented as though it excuses the other – that once the film has established its feminist credentials it feels that it has a free pass to indulge the male gaze and present certain female characters as the prize in a wholly phallic contest between male agents.

The central slogan of the women’s escape is that women should not be kept as slaves. They make sure we get this point by painting it on the walls of their cell before they depart. Female slavery is, of course, a very real problem. Even if we set aside imprisonment through economic and social systems, there are women today who are literally kept as slaves. I am not sure that Fury Road is quite the venue to address this issue, though. The majority of the audience for this film, I would hope, are not in a position where they are undecided whether or not the trafficking of women is a bad thing. As a feminist assertion, therefore, the statement that women are people and that people are not property is something of a low bar, and an argument, one would hope, that only has relevance to human traffickers and wavering sociopaths.

An argument could be made, however, that raising awareness of these issues (albeit very indirectly) is important and if this were the central message of the film, even as a relatively uncontroversial assertion, I would still read it as largely positive. The presence of a group of women, however, who lack agency and, to all intents and purposes, are treated as objects in the context of the film, undermines the message. What we are left with is a movie which alternately gestures toward a feminist message while simultaneously offering the female body as erotic spectacle. It tells us that women are people while simultaneously treating the majority of the female cast as objects.

Utilitarian Review 5/23/15

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Joy DeLyria on long fictions.

Me on slow, cheerful doom.

Me on whose gender is artificial.

Phillip Smith on Darna, the Filipino Wonder Woman.

Chris Gavaler on Raskolnikov and the problem with Hollywood super dudes.

Kim O’Connor on why we need to take the sexual harassment allegations against Louis CK seriously.

Me on Game of Thrones and comics to change your gender.

Kate Polak on sexual violence and implicating the viewer in Game of Thrones.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the New Republic I wrote about Game of Thrones and how critics write about all the same things all the time.

At Playboy I

—wrote about why B.B. King is the King of Rock, not just blues.

—interviewed Dianna E. Anderson about purity culture and creating a better Christian sexual ethics. .

—wrote about Game of Thrones and the complimentary media portrayals of sexual violence against women and violence against men.

—8 Minutes and why sex workers don’t need to be saved.

At Ravishly I wrote about how erasing male victims of domestic violence hurts both men and women.

At Splice Today I wrote about books for white guys.
 
Other Links

Chris Blattman on that faked gay marriage study.

Barry Ritholtz on how the minimum wage doesn’t kill jobs; it just reduces corporate profits.

Rex Huppke on how the Mad Max movie is a feminist trick.
 

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We’re More Theon than Sansa: Game of Thrones’ “Subtle” Viewer Trolling

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I can’t seem to gin up the expected outrage about Game of Thrones’ most recent controversial rape scene. From Senator Claire McCaskill’s tweet that “Gratuitous rape scenes are disgusting and unacceptable” to Joanna Robinson’s article “Game of Thrones Absolutely Did Not Need to Go There with Sansa Stark,” many are angry over the nature of the scene. The outrage is to some extent understandable: a beloved main character is raped by a man who was already clearly in the “bad guy” camp. The scene altered the plot line in the book, making Sansa rather than Jeyne Poole the victim. The camera leaves the viewer with Theon’s miserable face, a fact to which Sarah Ditman responded “Apparently violence against a woman counts for more if it distresses a man.” That said, the bulk of my reaction to these critics can be summed up in Amanda Marcotte’s fabulously patient, clear delineation of the flaws in each objection. She does, however, neglect one major point that made me appreciate the scene in an unexpected way—we as viewers are asked to identify with—or empathize with—the right character given the viewership. Before I clarify that argument, let me pace out a few questions in terms of fiction and real-life correlates.

What constitutes a “gratuitous” rape scene? Dividing rape scenes between “justified” and “unjustified” already seems to be treading into very hazy moral territory. While I’m talking about works of fiction, much of the fan resentment is centered around the fact that many women in the non-fictional universe are raped, and that when rape is depicted in film, television, or literature, it should be done in such a way that:

  • Does not make rape “sexy.”
  • Makes sense in terms of what came before in the plot
  • Focuses on the victim character.

I’m not entirely convinced that demanding that rape scenes adhere to a certain set of rules necessarily serves the audience’s best interests. Rape in real life is often as confusing as it is terrifying, and rape in fiction should better reflect the complexities of the crime. In Sapphire’s Push, the incestuous rape scene that opens the novel also includes the victim feeling sexual pleasure in spite of her fear, anger, and confusion. When I first read that scene, I was appalled. In retrospect, given what follows, this depiction makes sense in terms of carefully crafting the utter lack of clarity in the main character’s world. Of course, this was a novel that resisted identification at every turn.

The second parameter insists that the rape be a legible, understandable outcome of previous plot points. I find this to be the weirdest expectation. Rape in real life tends to happen unexpectedly. Retroactive attempts to impose meaning or narrative arc on the events leading up to a rape generally focus on how the victim could have made different choices and thus avoided the rape—which, of course, is the type of victim-blaming we don’t want to see in relation to rape cases. Furthermore, claiming a desire for understanding why it happened tends to also naturalize rape as a logical outcome of some series of events, rather than a grotesque violation.

Why can rape only be included in a work when it “drives the plot forward”? The question of plot works both prior to the rape scene and after the rape scene. The rape scene must have meaning, some argue, and it must be a transformative experience that later results in the character who was victimized having more agency and a stronger sense of self. Well, yes, that would be ideal, but it neglects the fact that rape doesn’t always bring about a radical transformation of a character, and that the expectation of this transformation is… creepy. After all, this isn’t exactly what we’d like to see modeled as a “rite of passage” for young women.

It’s true that the rape of a woman has too often been used as a device to galvanize male characters into action (see Gail Simon’s Women in Refrigerators). But it also remains true that rape doesn’t only affect the victim. Sexual violence is a poison that affects society. While it disproportionately directly affects women, the effects of sexual violence are as far-reaching as its prevalence, and it’s worth considering that when we speak out against rape. Rape damages at physical and psychological levels, and those wounds reach out like skeins of telephone wire, transmitting pain and fear and confusion wherever they land. While I do not mean to argue “but what about the menz?!”, anecdotally, I’ve seen many men care more about the sexual violence visited upon women when it happens in some social proximity. In addition, because they are so often given scripts of vengeance for the violation of “their” woman, they find themselves impotent in the face of a society that tends to frown upon vigilantism, no matter how warranted.

At the level of fiction, men are capable of investing in female characters (although the evidence points towards the fact that most of us identify less with female than male characters). And for me, this is the site of the brilliance of this particular representation of rape in Game of Thrones. The assumed audience is male. While the viewership skews slightly male, it’s considerably more evenly divided than one might expect given the subject matter. With that said, even female audience members—in light of the data—are more likely to judge female characters (and real women in their lives) harshly, an attitude that extends to sexual violence.

Rather than focusing on the sadistic Ramsey, which would have repulsed the audience, or co-opting Sansa’s point-of-view, which would have allowed viewers to vicariously adopt the mantel of “victim-heroine,” they instead chose to focus on Theon. This choice is absolutely essential to the ethical project of the show because it subtly indicts the viewer (assumed male, but also assumed to judge female characters) for standing idly by while the rape epidemic unfolds—quite obviously—all around them.

 

 

 

 

Comics to Change Your Gender

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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Comics in the United States have traditionally been associated with guys. The stereotype of superheroes as male adolescent power fantasies has more than a little truth to it; Neil Shyminsky’s informal survey found that 95% of X-Men readers were male. Surveys focusing on a wider array of comics have found a less lopsided breakdown, though one still tilted towards men.

But the link between comics and XY chromosomes isn’t some sort of preordained biological truth. In fact, in Japan, comics (or manga) have been read by just about all demographics — kids, adults, men, women, and everybody else. Manga’s deliberate appeal to a wide range of audiences is one reason it became so successful in the U.S. in the 90s: shojo manga titles, or comics for girls, catered to a niche in the American market that the mainstream superhero publishers were unable/unwilling/too clueless/too sexist to fill.

One of the first major manga American successes in the late 1980s/early 1990s was Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma ½. Takahashi supposedly had determined to write a comic that would appeal more to girls than some of her earlier series, and that series couldn’t have been much more straightforward (if that’s the word) about its cross-gender  ambitions. “Ranma” refers to the hero of the book; “1/2” refers to the fact that, due to an accident at a cursed spring, that hero spends a significant portion of his time as a heroine. Whenever he’s splashed with cold water, he turns into a girl; when he’s drenched in hot water, he turns back into a guy.

If that sounds like a preposterous premise for a series — well, that’s the least of it. Viz has just started to rerelease Ranma 1/2 in budget two-for-one volumes, and re-reading the beginning of the series again, it’s hard to express, right from the start, how completely, joyfully absurd it is. By page four, we’ve got Ranma (as a girl) racing up the street pursued by a giant panda bear — a giant panda bear who turns out to be Ranma’s father, Genma Saotome. At the same time that Ranma fell into the cursed spring that turned him into a part-time girl, Genma fell into a spring that turned him into a part-time panda. And a very cute part-time panda at that.

This labile approach to gender and species is mirrored in the book’s genre commitments. The narrative is devoted to a series of crushes/romantic entanglements interspersed with violent martial arts battles interspersed with gender switch hijink and a heaping helping of sexual farce.

Though Ranma is the titular star, he shares the spotlight with Akane Tendo, a young girl who loves martial arts, hates boys, and is kind of/sort of Ranma’s arranged fiancé at the behest of their parents. The two have hardly met before they’re engaged in a martial arts battle (with Ranma as a girl), and they’re hardly done fighting before they’re running into each other naked in the bath, where the hot water has changed Ranma back into a guy. This is but the first of many nude sexual teases, all the more giggle-inducing it’s unclear who the fan service is for. Are we looking at female bodies for male gazes? Male bodies for female gazes? Both for either? Or are there other possibilities? In one scene, female Ranma and Akane run into each other in the bath again, both naked, prompting Akane to deck him (or her.) “But you were both girls, right? Doesn’t that make it okay?” Akane’s older sister Nabiki asks. For Nabiki, the gender (and genre) changes ease or erase sexual tension. For Akane, though, the male/female switch makes all relationships potentially charged with polymorphous verve.

Ranma ½ as a whole leans towards Akane’s interpretation. In making a book aimed at both boys and girls, Takahashi doesn’t opt for a middle-of-the-road, appeal-to-everybody kind of story. Rather, she revels in the way that she can giddily bash boys’ genres and perspectives against girls’ genres and perspectives and come up with ridiculous risqué adventurous loopiness for all. Thus, upperclassman Kuno’s mano-a-mano desire to best Ranma in single combat for the hand of Akane slips inevitably into courtship, as the antagonist confusedly falls in love with Ranma’s girl form, thrusting flowers at her (him) with the same hostility/obsession with which he first went after him (her) with a sword.

As the first male-male martial arts rivalry in the book, the Kuno-Ranma rivalry/romance sets a blueprint for other encounters. When the next antagonist, Ryoga, shows up, his ill-defined desire for revenge (because Ranma stole bread from him at some point?) seems like it could just as easily be some other ill-defined passion. The slipperiness of motive fits into other slipperinesses; Ryoga too fell in a cursed spring, and when exposed to cold water he turns into an adorable baby pig. That pig wins Akane’s heart, and the Ryoga/Ranma battle ends when Akane drags off the irresisitibly neotenous ungulate to cuddle in her bed. So Ranma goes to get him out of Akane’s room, and there’s an epic battle with Ryoga-pig boucing around the room in an explosion of racing motion-lines. The cuddly-animal martial arts battle ends with Akane discovering that her little comfort pet has been replaced in her bed by a very embarrassed Ranma, the funny animal comic for kids morphing into a sex comedy with the same sort of audible “Bloosh!” that always greets the panda’s ascent from water.

Those easy substitutions — of genre for genre, gender for gender, species for species — are enabled by, or work as a metaphor for, the comics form itself. Each panel in a comic is a different, fractured moment. We see a picture of Ranma kicking here and a picture of Ranma punching there and we determine those are two images of the same person simply because we’re told they’re the same person. So you can call this pig and that human the same character if you’d like; who’s to stop you? Identity in comics is a convention — and if self is simply a trope, then so is gender, and even species. Comics don’t have to be for boys only, because in comics even boys don’t have to be boys only. Ranma ½ is its own cursed pond; you fall in and come out every which body, whether a boy reading girls comics, girls reading boys comics, or a panda reading both.

 

 

 

 

Louis CK Will Never Get Cosby’d

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Bill Cosby’s rotten reputation has finally solidified in such a way that there’s no doubt it will be his legacy. It’s strange to realize that less than a year ago, this was emphatically not the case. Not yet a monster, he was still more or less Dr. Cliff Huxtable in our collective imagination. He had a TV show in development with NBC, a 77-stop comedy tour, and a new brick of a biography that, in September, was one of Amazon’s best books of the month. An elder statesman of comedy, he had been raping women for at least 45 years.

Last week, just one day before Louis CK hosted the season finale of Saturday Night Live, Gawker posted the latest episode in what has been years’ worth of rumors surrounding the comedian’s sexual misconduct. (I’ve been aware of it since their first post along these lines, which was in 2012.) Much like CK’s comedy on his TV show and in his standup, the subject of the allegations is pathological masturbation. No longer able to satisfy his exhibitionism by talking about jacking off in front of an audience, it seems that he prefers the real deal, in person, in front of non-consenting female comics. They say he once went so far as to block his victims’ egress from his hotel room by standing in front of the door.

On Monday, the same culture outlets (Slate, Vox, and Vulture, among many others) that heavily criticized Bill Cosby’s non-interview last week tweeted furiously about Louis CK’s transgressions. They weren’t referring to the accusations of sexual misconduct. Instead, they were talking about his “edgy” Saturday Night Live monologue, which included jokes about pedophilia. Was his monologue offensive? Maybe. Waving his dick around at people who didn’t want to see it? Apparently not.

To my ear, CK’s “boundary-pushing” jokes about child molestation were pretty lazy. They were much less polished than, say, any given joke in one of CK’s stand-up specials. I’ve watched them all, I think, in addition to seeing him live in 2010. I watch Louie. And while I think he’s often funny, and mostly likable, two things have always bugged me: his tired jokes about not having sex with his (now ex-) wife, which were prominent in the first stage of his career, and his weird brand of sanctimony, which has become more pronounced over time.

The latter might sound counterintuitive given that CK has built an empire on exploiting his own flaws. But to me his comedy persona (not unlike Cosby’s) has always been centered on the idea that he’s a good person. The SNL thing was for shock value—and don’t get me wrong. He does that, too. But much more often, CK’s comedy is about being a Good Dad. His “mild racism” bit from that SNL monologue is another good example of how aggressively he presents himself as a good person, even as he’s ostensibly putting himself down.

Like many people who celebrate their own goodness, it seems as though Louis CK has a bad, bad secret. So far there have been no formal charges—only whispers. These sorts of rumblings often surround serial abusers in male-dominated industries, where it’s hard for women to come forward. The CK allegations are gossip, not journalism, but remember Jian Ghomeshi? There was a whisper campaign around him too, which many people wrote about once he had been fired. One woman described it like this:

I’ve said that “we” knew about Jian, but I couldn’t tell you exactly who all that means. For years, the “we” was so amorphous, a shifting chorus of voices that whispered or shouted and slipped away. To be clear: what I heard and what I knew was not special. It was not secret knowledge. It was open and clear as day, a smear of bright-red warning paint slashed across entire loose-tied social scenes.

Hannibal Buress was the turning point with Cosby. When his bit went viral last year, victims saw a cultural shift and understood they’d be believed—unlike the 13 women who had preceded them. Dozens more ended up coming forward. I’m a huge fan of Buress, and I don’t take what he did lightly. But I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the conditions that made his joke sayable: he was already well established, and Cosby, who can barely string a sentence together, was no longer a potent figure in the industry.

Louis CK, in sharp contrast, is the reigning king of comedy, and at some point during the last year or two, people have also started to think of him more as an artist and an auteur, the same protected class in which we’ve placed Woody Allen. Even with the minor backlash surrounding Season 4 of Louie, his cultural status isn’t likely to diminish anytime soon. He’s at the top of the heap, but he’s still retained his status as a comedian’s comedian, a vital force in a relatively insulated world.

Stand-up comedy is one of the hardest hustles there is, even for men—and on top of that, of course, it’s an especially misogynistic milieu. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a struggling comic going on the record to say that Louis CK forced her to watch him jerk off. I mean, would you want to risk throwing away your life’s ambition for that? Is that how you would want to be known?

Dunderfucks like Patton Oswalt perceive the most salient issue in comedy to be censorship, but as ever the real stakes are a different kind of silence. I think about CK making jokes about how gross he is—something I myself once paid $40 to watch. I think about Cosby’s bit about drugging women. I wasn’t there for that one, but on the recording you can hear the crowd laughing their heads off. Comedians can say whatever they want, and that’s one thing. What we’re willing to laugh at is another, and what a comic’s colleagues endorse and support—explicitly or otherwise, onstage or off—is another still. Comedians tend to close ranks around even their worst specimens (like Daniel Tosh). Collectively, the comedian, his audience, and his colleagues form a system. And it is broken.

Unsourced accusations shouldn’t preclude discussions of CK’s talent, but they can’t quite be separated from it either. The most recent Gawker piece is sketchy as hell, but statistically speaking, women aren’t likely to lie about allegations like these (even to their friends). In the absence of concrete charges, I don’t have an easy answer for what’s the “right” way to talk about Louis CK. But I’ll tell you one thing: if I were one of the girls he assaulted, I would have taken one look at Twitter over the last few days and resolved to take it to the grave. That’s not just on CK. It’s on us.

The Problem with Hollywood Super-Dudes

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The summer superhero blockbuster season has officially commenced:

Avengers 2 opened in May, Ant-Man follows in July, and Fantastic Four in August. That’s only half of 2014’s six films, but 2016 will make up the difference with a record eight.

There was time when I thought the genre had an artistic future. But after Heath Ledger’s Oscar for playing the Joker, Warner Bros. and Marvel have only been interested in reproducing the same formula-driven commercial product again and again. So to analyze the nature of Hollywood superheroes, I’m calling in two experts from opposite ends of the literary spectrum: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one of the most acclaimed novelists of Russian literature, and Blake Snyder, a third-rate screenwriter that Sylvester Stallone once likened to a flatworm.
 

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I read Crime and Punishment in A.P. English as a high school senior—and I even finished it (a dubious honor my adolescent self did not award Moby Dick). I started The Brothers Karamavoz in college while working graveyard shifts as a warehouse security guard, but after totaling my Toyota on a sleepy drive home, I quit both.

Snyder started his career writing episodes for the Disney Channel’s Kids Incorporated before going on to pen Blank Check and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, a comedy Roger Ebert called “moronic beyond comprehension” and which its star, Sylvester Stallone, declared “one of the worst films in the entire solar system,” insisting “a flatworm could write a better script.” And yet when a good friend of mine—a former script reader for a California production company—wanted to collaborate on a screenplay, he handed me Snyder’s Save the Cat!

The how-to screenwriting guide explains why the Sandra Bullock comedy vehicle Miss Congeniality is a better movie than Memento. It comes down to formula: Miss Congeniality hits all 15 beats on The Blake Snyder Beat Sheet, while Christopher Nolan’s directorial debut “is just a gimmick that cannot be applied to any other movie.” If Snyder were a poetry professor, he would lecture about the superiority of sonnets to free verse, while defining the greatest works of literature by the uniformity of their iambic beats.
 

save-the-catCrimeandpunishmentcover

 
Rodion Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s pawnbroker-murdering philosophy student, would classify Snyder as “ordinary.” Raskolnikov explains: “men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. . . . The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them.”

In other words, Hollywood spec writers play by the rules. And Snyder understands those rules well. He divides the universe into ten idiosyncratic genres. His “Dude with a Problem,” for example, includes Die Hard and Schindler’s List, while “Superhero” goes beyond Batman Begins to claim Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind—and probably anything else starring Russell Crowe. Snyder’s ur-Superhero is Gulliver surrounded by Lilliputians: “a Superhero tale asks us to lend human qualities, and our sympathy, to a super being, and identity with what it must be like to have to deal with the likes of us little people.” So Batman, Frankenstein, and Dracula are all Superheroes “challenged by the mediocre world around them,” because it’s really “the tiny minds that surround the hero that are the real problem.”

Raskolnikov would agree. His second category, “extraordinary” men, “all transgress the law,” because “making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people.” So “all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals—more or less, of course. Otherwise it’s hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to remain in the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it.” The rut-dwelling Lilliputians, meanwhile, will try to “punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfill quite justly their conservative vocation.”

Snyder fulfills his Lilliputian vocation for Christopher Nolan when he shouts “screw Memento!” and dismisses all the “hulabaloo” because of its low box office revenue. That was in 2005, the year Batman Begins premiered, and three years before Heath Ledger won Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight. Raskolnikov warns that “the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them,” and sure enough, Synder lauds Nolan’s caped crusader for following “the beats down to the minute.”

Or does that means Nolan is a Superhero who overcame his Gulliverness by conforming to the Lilliputian Beat Sheet? Either way, he, like Bruce Wayne “is admirable because he eschews his personal comfort in the effort to give back to the community.” That, says Snyder, solves the problem of “how to have sympathy for the likes of millionaire Bruce Wayne or genius Russell Crowe.” They save the cat.

And Raskolnikov agrees again. His “extraordinary man” has “an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep” if overstepping “is essential for the practical fulfillment of his idea,” and idea which might be “of benefit to the whole of humanity.” That’s how he rationalizes killing and robbing that nasty old pawnbroker. He argues (faux hypothetically) to a cop: “Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?”

It doesn’t matter how the cop answers, because a real Gulliver wouldn’t have asked a Lilliputian for his opinion. That’s Raskolnikov’s downfall. He’s reading from the wrong page in Save the Cat! He wants to be a Superhero (“An extraordinary person finds himself in an ordinary world”), but he’s really just a Dude with a Problem (“An ordinary guy finds himself in extraordinary circumstances”). Worse, his circumstances are self-inflicted. He fell for Snyder’s Superhero formula because it “gives flight to our greatest fantasies about our potential.”

Raskolnikov fails to be “a man of the future,” but Nietzsche (who ranked reading Dostoyevksky “among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life”) took that “extraordinary” character type and renamed him the ubermensch. After Jerry Siegel adopted it, DC completed the circle by calling Superman “The Man of Tomorrow.”

But Dostoyevsky is no origin point. After explaining his theories, even Raskolnikov admits: “there is nothing particularly new in all that. The same thing has been printed and read a thousand times before.”Or as one of Snyder’s studio execs told him: “Give me the same thing . . . only different!”

That, sadly, is the state of the Hollywood superhero.
 

stop! or my mom will shoot