Category Archives: Blog

Utilitarian Review 10/11/14

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Allan Haverholm on comics definitions.

A few of us talked about the best music of the year so far.

Me on Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call.

Nicholas Labarre on the history of the history of meta-Godzilla.

Me on Alexis Coe’s book about a lesbian murder in Memphis, Alice and Freda Forever.

Ng Suat Tong on the crappiness of the Dishonorable Woman.

Christopher Lehman on warnings about racist content on Tom and Jerry episodes.

Chris Gavaler on Les Mis, superheroes, and the closet.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Reason I wrote about how Internet activism helps sex workers.

At Pacific Standard I wrote about

—Emma Watson being wrong about Beyoncé performing for the male gaze

— Steven Salaita and how the university doesn’t care about teaching

At Splice Today:

— I finally saw the Avengers and it sucked.

— I finally saw the Game of Thrones pilot and it wasn’t so great either.Center for Digital Ethics I argued that it’s unethical to look at stolen celebrity nudes.

At the Chicago Reader, a brief review of Marketa Irglova.

A short music mix for Publik Private.

 
Other Links

A comic on stripping and stigma.

Samantha Field on Buffy and Riley’s abusive relationship.

Jamie Nesbitt Golden on grieving for her mom.

Olga Khazan on Nickelodeon and white guys.
 

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How to Out Yourself

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I don’t know if Victor Hugo was gay. But I do know he wrote some of his most influential work from exile—including political pamphlets, three books of poetry, and Les Misérables, a historical novel about the French Revolution that he “meant for everyone.” Hugo describes it like a superhero answering a cry for aid: “Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: ‘open up, I am here for you.’”

I did not see Les Mis, either on stage or on screen, but my kids went with their Nana after my wife and I escaped for our own outing: fancy dinner (turns out steak tartare is a raw hamburger), romantic movie (Jennifer Lawrence is a shape-shifting genius even when not playing a blue-skinned mutant), and historic B&B (former haunt of musical legend Oscar Hammerstein). We had a better time than the kids. My son was not wooed by Hugh “Wolverine” Jackman, and my daughter would not list on-set singing among his superpowers.

But the X-Men casting choice did spotlight some secrets in the musical’s origin story. Both literary blogger Chrisbookarama and Slate culture editor David Haglund declared Jean Valjean a “superhero.” They note his dual identity (alias “Monsieur Madeleine”), his superpowers (the strength of “four men”), and his arch nemesis, Inspector Javert (inspired by real-life detective Eugène François Vidocq). There’s even an unmasking scene:

“One morning M. Madeleine was passing through an unpaved alley” where an “old man named Father Fauchelevent had just fallen beneath his cart.” A jack-screw would arrive in fifteen minutes, but “his ribs would be broken in five.” Madeleine sees “there is still room enough under the cart to allow a man to crawl beneath it and raise it with his back,” and he offers five, ten, then “twenty louis” to anyone willing to try. Javert, “staring fixedly at M. Madeleine,” declares: “I have never known but one man capable of doing what you ask.”

Although Valjean is breaking the law by disguising his past as a convict, he “fell on his knees, and before the crowd had even had time to utter a cry, he was underneath the vehicle.” Even the old man, “one of the few enemies” Valjean has made as Madeleine and then only from jealousy, is begging him to give up, when “Suddenly the enormous mass was seen to quiver, the cart rose slowly, the wheels half emerged from the ruts,” and “Old Fauchelevent was saved.”

“Just like a superhero,” writes Haglund, “outed by the noble use of his super strength.”

My daughter assured me the film framed it as a burst of Hulk-like adrenaline, but Victor Hugo was going for much more. Although Valjean emerges in torn clothes and “dripping with perspiration,” he “bore upon his countenance an indescribable expression of happy and celestial suffering” as the old man calls him “the good God.”

It’s the self-sacrificing yet self-ennobling choice saviors make every day. Even Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ wants to hide in a mild-mannered lifestyle, before fully accepting the job of super-savior. Ditto for Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker and Michael Chiklis’s Ben Grimm. A hundred years earlier, O. Henry’s safe-popping Jimmy Valentine outs his Valjean past by saving a child from suffocating in the town bank vault. Philip Wylie’s superhuman Hugo Danner longs for the quiet life too, but fate slams another would-be victim into another character-revealing bank vault.

And there’s always a Javert standing right there trying to glimpse your secret self. Jimmy has detective Price on his trail (though in a typical O. Henry twist, he lets his Valjean go). That pesky tabloid reporter followed Bill Bixby for five seasons, always ready to snap a picture when Lou Ferrigno burst out during the emergency-of-the-week. Like Les Mis director Tom Hooper, the CBS team decided their Incredible Hulk was just a burst of green adrenaline, the kind that allows Clark Kents to shoulder cars off endangered loved ones. That’s the phenomenon Bixby’s Banner is researching before his laboratory mishap, his atonement for failing to save his wife when fate dropped Fauchelevent’s oxcart on her.

But Haglund’s comment unmasks another kind of outing. When my former department colleague and next door neighbor Chris Matthews read that Slate article “Why Tween Boys Love Les Miz,” he emailed me about Hagland’s “silent premise,” the implication “that there’s something weird about boys liking musicals.” And we know what alter ego lurks under that tale-tell proclivity. “The figure of the musical-loving boy or man,” says Chris, “has long functioned as both an element of gay male identity and as a handy stereotype for mocking ‘effeminate’ men, gay or not.”

I noticed plenty of family photos decorating the Hammerstein B&B, evidence that Rodgers was his partner in the strictly professional sense. But it did occur to me to check. GLBTQ, the online encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender & queer culture, lists Hammerstein as “apparently quite straight,” but the site still can’t explain “the attachment many gay men have to the musical theater or the fact that in the popular imagination a passion for showtunes is practically a marker for homosexuality.”

Les Misérables premiered in 1980, twenty years after Hammerstein’s death, ninety-five after Victor Hugo’s. I was fourteen, Chris’s age when he saw it on stage. Haglund was nine his first time, so his pubescent body wasn’t bursting through his sweaty clothes just yet. Maybe that’s why he remains a tone-deaf Javert when it comes to identity-shifting. He sounds relieved that a superheroic explanation for Miz-loving boys hit him while watching Jackman belting it out. Why Do Tween Boys Love Superheroes? Because they’re not “weird.” He thinks his men-in-tights insight is “more particular” to boys, even though both sexes get equally erotic eyefuls of Jackman’s shirtless flexing. Sorry, David, but as my former neighbor points out: Hugh is hot.
 

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Chris, by the way, is not gay. At least not in the I-like-to-have-sex-with-other-men sense. Like my and Hammmerstein’s homes, his is decorated with family photos. He claims to be “terribly low on football-related and power-tool-based conversation,” but wow can he unman me on a racquetball court—an advantage none of my Hulk-like adrenaline can match. Chris also grew up in the apparently quite straight world of comic books. While his tween-self was singing along to the Les Mis soundtrack, he was flipping pages of Spider-Man and Moon Knight. “Superheroes were not the guise of normalcy I wore over the shameful secret of loving a musical,” he says, “they were yet another way of getting around the pressures to be normal.”

Saturday October 11 is National Coming Out Day. It’s not a Revolution. It’s just a celebration of the superheroic who continue to overthrow the pressures of the so-called normal. I wish them all a safe return from their personal exiles.
 

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How Should Tom & Jerry’s Ethnic Humor Be Packaged Today?

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Amazon Prime and iTunes have included a warning with their packaging of Tom and Jerry – Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s series of theatrical cartoons starring Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse. From 1940 to 1952, an African American female domestic servant appeared in episodes, and in that period the characters often appeared in blackface. These images undoubtedly are the reason why the warning says that the cartoons may contain “ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society.”

The warning has its detractors. Some of them find the disclaimer unnecessary because to them Tom and Jerry is not racist, and others dismiss the warning as another example of contemporary excessive political correctness. The problem is that detractors are using personal feelings to try to stop a potentially useful discussion about ethnic depictions in American entertainment. Their knee-jerk “It’s not racist” and “liberal political correctness” reactions are only opinions that disregard the facts concerning the cartoons.

In my book The Colored Cartoon: Black Presentation in American Animated Short Films, 1907-1954, I chronicled the servant character’s development from her debut to her final episode. I noted that in her twelve years in the series, MGM never changed her dialect. The writers of the scripts gave her the same mis-conjugated verbs and spelled her mispronounced words exactly the same throughout that period, refusing to develop her at all. Also, none of the scripts give the character a name. She is the “maid” or “colored maid,” and the denial of an identity is part of her lack of development over a decade’s time.

I also looked at the blackface scenes in MGM’s cartoons, most of which have a character darkened after an explosion. Again, the scripts are stereotypically charged, using phrases like “looking like a pickaninny” and walking “a la Stepin Fetchit.” Thus, the MGM artists made these cartoons with ethnic jokes at African Americans’ expense very much in mind. Even one of the series’ animators I interviewed called the maid an “outright racist cartoon character.”

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As for the cries of modern political correctness, it’s not that modern. In my book I note that civil rights groups protested the showing of Tom and Jerry episodes in theaters as early as 1949. They claimed that the exhibitions of the maid character harmed the minds of children, and they occasionally convinced theater-owners to withdraw the cartoons.

Such protests became so impactful to Hollywood that MGM eventually became proactive about the maid. The studio reanimated the 1948 episode The Little Orphan in wide-screen format as Feedin’ the Kiddie in 1957. The original episode featured the maid, but the remake omitted her entirely. Then in 1965, MGM prepared the series for Saturday morning network television by reanimating all of the maid’s appearances. The studio replaced her with a European American maid character in all of her scenes. In recent years, the original scenes returned for cable television broadcast on Cartoon Network and  Boomerang, bur MGM overdubbed Lillian Randolph’s stereotyped vocal performance with Thea Vidale’s dialect-free delivery.

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The 2014 warning is just the latest attempt to make Tom and Jerry commercially viable in a changing ethnic American landscape. The disclaimer is a new approach in that it does not censor or gloss over but instead informs. It allows an opportunity for education about the films, while the detractors get to enjoy the uncensored original episodes.

Does the warning do enough to address the ethnic content of the series? Are other solutions besides disclaimers possible?

 

The Dishonourable Woman

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Let me attempt to describe the experience of watching the BBC’s widely acclaimed 8 part mini-series, The Honourable Woman.  Imagine walking into a five star restaurant and being ushered to your seat by a beaming maitre d’ with a cultivated English accent. The immaculate dinner service is laid out on a pristine white tablet cloth and the wine is served to you in fine crystal goblets. The initial tasting seems quite promising. Then you take a full mouthful of the fine red wine and it leaves you with the distinct impression of pure unadulterated piss. The only thing that could have possibly made this experience more memorable is if a cockroach had crawled down your throat as you swished the wine around in your mouth. Was this a mistake? Did you do something to offend the gods or the owners of the restaurant? Did you deserve it? (maybe) Or is this all they’re capable of—excellent table settings in the service of excrement.

The Honourable Woman is the brain child of Hugo Blick who was also responsible for the somewhat overrated crime drama, The Shadow Line. It stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a Jewish heiress named Nessa Stein who witnesses the brutal assassination of her father as a child. He is ostensibly killed by radical Palestinians in revenge for selling arms to Israel. Now fully grown and the CEO of her father’s company, she is in the final phases of a plan to lay a fiber optic cable network throughout the West Bank. But that enterprise only forms one part of her larger project of altruism and reconciliation. Her educational foundation (run by her brother) also funds a series of universities throughout Israel with a mind to providing equal access to higher education for both Arabs and Jews.

Yet her righteousness and sense of ethical obligation is of an even high order then is shown by these acts. As is revealed in later episodes (but well telegraphed to viewers from at least the second episode), she was kidnapped and raped during a visit to Gaza some 8 years back, and forced to have the child of her Palestinian rapist.

For some inexplicable reason, a number of reviewers have highlighted Nessa’s sense of agency and ability to outwit the various machinations of the organizations which circle her (MI6, the CIA, the Israelis, and various shadowy Palestinian organizations). Nothing of the sort occurs in The Honourable Woman.

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Nessa is persistently caught on the back foot and is almost always at the mercy of her tormentors. This is by no means a subset of the “realism” which Blick presumes to have foisted on his audience, for Nessa is entirely positioned as a self-sacrificing martyr. She is twice kidnapped, twice raped, physically abused on several occasions, betrayed at every point, constantly threatened with murder, and so thoroughly psychologically tormented that she sleeps in a safe room every night. She faces all of this with the equanimity of a modern day saint; all cropped hair and rays of light shining down on her stained, anguished face like the light of God.

In her sexual torment, she joins a select group of female saints, for there are precious few of these who are recorded as having been raped (though no doubt many were). It is no coincidence then that Gyllenhaal frequently appears to be channeling Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the few saints to have been thus abused. In the penultimate episode of Blick’s concoction, Nessa even wears a white pant suit to a groundbreaking ceremony in Hebron just as was Joan’s wont.  She is very nearly offered up to the flames when a bomb goes off at the same ceremony, the shrapnel tearing into her back leaving the marks of a flagellant.

Nessa initially resists her rape at the hands of her Palestinian kidnappers but then quietly lies down and accepts her fate when she sees her friend being assaulted. Years after this, she is date raped while in a depression fueled alcoholic haze. This she seems to accept, at least at first, with a drunken pragmatism. The MI6 minder/friend who ensures her swift medical care even asks her if she has been engaging in high risk behavior over the years. When questioned by the Palestinian leader behind her rape (and her brother and father’s deaths) as to her lack of desire for revenge (as is his own desire), she babbles through tears that she has often asked herself this question following her innumerous scourgings,  and has concluded that she “deserve[s] it.” It certainly helps that said evil Palestinian mastermind resembles nothing less than a James Bond villain with an intravenous line substituting for a white Persian cat and wobbly optics.

I’ve seen some talk concerning this drama’s subtlety and convoluted plotting. The first point, at least, can be quickly dispensed with. If the foregoing description hasn’t already made this clear, Blick’s ideas are wielded like cudgels.  For instance, we understand that Nessa has daddy issues because her father scrutinizes her from the heights of a family video projected on her study walls even as she fucks a MI6 mole (presumably a subset of her high risk sexual behavior).

Any talk of complex plotting certainly demands a lengthy harangue if not frequent slaps with a large wet fish. If there is one reason why the central conspiracy would never occur to the average viewer, it would be because it resides in that fantasy land lying between ignorance and pure imbecility.

The plot deserves to be spoilt quite thoroughly. In short, in the final episode, the United States is revealed to be working in concert with the Palestinians (I don’t know who; maybe Fatah and various other rogue groups) to create a climate receptive to Palestinian Statehood right under the noses of the Israelis. Following the bombing in Hebron, the U.S., who masterminded this false flag operation with the Palestinians, will no longer veto any U.N. applications with regards the recognition of the Palestinian state.

Yes, you heard that right—the writers of The Honourable Woman have the U.S. (or at least its Secretary of State) working with the Palestinians to thwart Israel in a false flag operation. This would be the same United States which opposed Palestine’s full membership in UNESCO in the face of overwhelming support (107-14) in 2011; the same United States which cast the single “No” vote in July 2014 on the issue of investigating war crimes committed in Gaza; the same United States which voted overwhelmingly to send more funding to Israel for the Iron Dome missile defense system and to allow Israel to raid its arms stockpiles to rain more misery on the Palestinians.

To add even more salt to the wound, one of the closing scenes has a news report stating that China and Russia might veto said U.S. plans not to oppose Palestinian statehood. Let me see, this would be the same China and Russia which have voted “yes” to Palestinian recognition, “for” UNESCO membership and “for” non-member observer state status. Care to guess how the U.S. voted on all these issues? These two nations also voted decisively to support the investigation into war crimes in Gaza in 2014. But do we really have any right to be surprised at this in a delusionary world where rape is martyrdom, and a device to give depth and agency to women? The asinine logic on display here derives from the same place as those who feel that Schindler’s List was about Nazis saving the world from Jews.

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Zionist commentators are of course horrified at the abuse meted out at Israel in The Honourable Woman.  But let us count the ways in which the state of Israel has been denigrated.  Firstly, Jews are portrayed as arms merchants which is certainly an injustice since Israel doesn’t traffic in arms. The Israelis (Shin Bet? Mossad?) are also shown tapping into Palestinian cell phone traffic through Nessa Stein’s fiber optic cable which is of course absolutely disgusting and unthinkable! The Israeli representative in London also admits to plans to capture and interrogate a Palestinian businessman who is making deals with the U.S. Secretary of State, but guess what? They’re so ineffectual that they’re beaten to the punch by the nefarious U.S.-Palestinian cabals running amok throughout London. The latter elite agents fake the suicide of one of their own in order to silence him. These same Palestinians have the ear of politicians and secret agents throughout the English speaking world, which must explain why U.S. and U.K.  have been such “fine” supporters of their cause through the years.

The Palestinians have it much easier. They’re portrayed as drug addled rapists, general haters of women, mass murderers of their own countrymen, criminal masterminds consumed by vengeance, and as generally confused with regards to morals. Nice Palestinians? I don’t think they exist in the world of The Honourable Woman. The only good Palestinian in Blick’s masterwork of blockheadness is a dead Palestinian or at least a silent one. Even the Arab-Muslim hating worlds of Homeland and 24 didn’t hit rock bottom quite so hard. The BBC is often said to have a balance issue with regards Palestine, but on the basis of the dramas which they have commissioned, I think we can safely say which side of the scale they have their thumbs on.

There is a more charitable way to read Blick’s drama, and that is to see in it a call for reconciliation and a (wishful) metaphor for Israeli-Palestinian relations. This is most clearly seen in the narrative path taken by Nessa’s Palestinian confidant, Atika. Atika turns out to be a vengeful subversive lying in wait to do harm to Nessa and her family. Among other things, she leads Nessa’s brother to his doom in the penultimate episode of the series. Yet her demands for violent compensation stop short of Nessa’s rape (which she tries to stop) and she is the only person with sufficient compassion to care for the product of that assault.  In the final act, she is killed while saving Nessa and her kidnapped child from some fellow conspirators less enlightened (presumably) than herself.

If viewed from a biblical standpoint, both Nessa and Atika can be seen as scapegoats with the former “offering” sent into the wilderness (for Azazel, see Leviticus 16:8) and the latter given as a blood sacrifice to God. This explains Nessa’s constant position of suffering in this farce as well as her sense of culpability; they are acts of contrition on behalf of the nation of Israel. Yet the twisted nature of the characterizations and political drama overwhelm any such noble intentions. Any fixation on this line of reasoning will inevitably lead the viewer to wonder why the only “saint” allowed for in The Honourable Woman is a Jewish one.

The Honourable Woman is certainly sufficient cause for the donning of sackcloth in shameful repentance, and no doubt obscene enough to earn a host of Emmy and BAFTA nominations come award season. It is an embarrassment for all involved whatever their declared political leanings—a beautifully composed addition to the annals of degenerate propaganda.

Alice and Freda Forever, Whoever They Are

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51pnwOH6kIL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Identities are made out of stories, and stories are made out of identities. That’s certainly the case in Alexis Coe’s new book, Alice and Freda Forever, about 1892 century Memphis murder of Freda Ward by her lover and fiancé, Alice Mitchell. Alice and Freda were both well-to-do young women; they’d met at the Higbee School for Girls. Freda had agreed to marry Alice, but their families had discovered the plan and put a stop to it. Alice feared Freda would forget her and perhaps marry a man. So she stole her father’s razor and slit her ex’s throat; she was stopped before she could kill herself as well.

The murder was a massive story at the time — the O.J. Simpson trial of its day — precisely because of the identities of the killer and her victim. “Journalists knew that the story would be far less consequential to readers if the murderer and victim had been male, not white, or of lesser economic means,” Coe says. Identity for the public at the time was the story — as it is, in a different way for us. Would Coe, or her readers, be interested in this particular trial if it weren’t for the fact that Alice and Freda were lesbians?

Alice and Freda planned a same-sex wedding before the term, or even the concept, existed. As a result, it’s easy to identify with them; they seem like they’re part of a familiar story. But that familiarity can be deceptive. A firm lesbian identity didn’t really exist for Americans in the 1800s. As Sharon Marcus says in her book Between Women (focusing on England, but the general argument seems to apply to the U.S. as well), passionate same-sex relationships between women in the Victorian Era were accepted and even encouraged as part of a normal, mainstream heterosexual identity. Those relationships could include kissing, hugging, passionate declarations of love, and even, on occasion (as with Freda and Alice) sex. But people at the time didn’t organize any of those actions into an identity. Same-sex relationships between women were not policed, or codified. As a result, for most practical purposes, they were invisible.

If Alice had murdered someone in the 1950s, when homophobia was widespread and virulent, her violence probably would have been blamed immediately on her dangerous deviant lesbianism. But in the 1890s, Coe reports, people seemed to have difficulty even understanding the relationship between Freda and Alice. Their plan to marry was seen as impossible. One psychological expert, foreshadowing future anti-marriage-equality argument asked her incredulously how she could think of marrying Freda when the two of them couldn’t have children.

Those psychological experts were there in the courtroom less to evaluate Alice than to make sense of her; they weren’t figuring out if she was sick so much as they were figuring out what to do with her. Just as the Oscar Wilde trial a couple of years later solidified homosexual identity in England, the Mitchell trial — haltingly, hesitantly — took steps towards creating and defining a lesbian identity. That definition, at this point, was medical and marginal. The defense argument, which prevailed, was that Alice’s love for Freda was a sign of insanity. To buttress that argument, the lawyers made her love for Freda into her identity, playing up her childhood interest in sports and her later lack of attachment to men. She was masculine, disordered, and wrong. The argument was that her identity was not (jealous) murderer, but (lesbian) madwoman. The jury bought it — and so gave her a story that ended, not on the gallows, but in an insane asylum (and a few years later, in death, though whether by tuberculosis or drowning suicide remains unknown to this day.)

Coe is very sensitive to the ways in which Alice’s identity and her story wrap around one another. As an upper-middle class white woman, Alice’s range of movement and actions were extremely limited. Her plot to dress and pass as a man to marry Freda seems, from what Coe could determine, to have had little to do with a trans identity, and much more to do with economics. White women of Mitchell’s class weren’t supposed to, or allowed to, work, and Alice and Freda needed an income if they were going to live together as a couple. On the other hand, Alice’s race and resources ensured high powered lawyers and a sympathetic jury — luxuries which certainly wouldn’t have been afforded to anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, who, as Coe discusses, was forced to flee Memphis at around the same time as Alice’s trial. White Memphis found it easier to empathize with a white killer than with a black opponent of murder.

Even as she points to the ways in which Alice’s race and class shaped her story for her contemporaries, though, Coe can’t help but write her own narrative around our current reading of Alice’s identity. Very near the end of the book, Coe describes how Alice, before being sent off to the asylum, asked to be allowed to visit Freda’s grave.

We will never know what Alice was thinking at Elmwood that day, and neither did the journalists who watched from afar. But they did report what they saw, and what they wrote seemed believable: Alice dropped to her knees and, for the woman she loved without shame, wept openly.

It’s a moving scene — not least because, in that reference to “without shame”, Coe connects Alice to the current gay rights struggle, and its narrative of pride and identity. There’s no question that Alice was a startlingly brave young women, willing to own her own love and work towards a life that her family, and society, could barely conceive of or imagine. She was heroic. And yet, at the same time — she murdered her lover out of jealousy. If she were a man, she would be seen as participating, not in the narrative of gay rights, but in the long, ugly, misogynist narrative of domestic violence, in which the infidelity of a wife (and Freda was to be a traditional wife, Alice’s letters make clear) gives the husband the right to kill. That’s not to criticize Coe, who certainly doesn’t downplay or excuse Alice’s crime. It’s just a reminder that people often don’t fit neatly into the identities we use to tell their stories, nor into the stories we use to create their identities.

Inside Gozilla’s Rotting Carcass

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In 1999, Warren Ellis, John Cassaday and Laura DePuy explored the Godzilla imagery in the second issue of Planetary, “Island”. The series was still in the process of codifying its relationship to its readers and was very open about its objectives and methods. It sought to present the archeology of fiction by conflating the narratives of popular texts and their very existence as popular objects, and having the heroes of the series excavate and interpret these condensed remains.
 

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The carcass of Mothra, in Planetary #2 (May 1999)

 
Thus, when the Planetary team meets Godzilla, they also encounter Godzilla, the cultural phenomenon. The history of the monster merges with the history of the monster genre and the demise of the latter mean the former have turned into rotting carcasses. In the series, these rotting carcasses are to be found on Island Zero, where the Planetary team is summoned in order to stop a sect, whose members intend to feast on the corpses of the Kaijus. By the time the team arrives, the members of the sect and the local Japanese soldiers have killed each others, positioning the heroes as spectators. Only at the end of the issue does the reader get a modicum of explanation, through a piece of expository dialogue:

Jakita Wagner: It all started the day after Hiroshima. […] We can’t say it was an atomic bomb. We can’t say these things are radioactive mutants. I mean, that’d be stupid. […] But five years later, island zero was populated by great monsters. They died off for some reason. They never left the island and they died.

The parallels are obvious, and even readers with a passing knowledge of the daikaiju genre are likely to notice the similarities between its history and Jakita’s story: the Japanese giant monsters movies appeared after World War 2, with Godzilla in 1954, and the giant pterodactyle Rodan (a stunning sight in the last page of the Planetary issue) in 1956, then spawned a popular series of films until the mid-70s before a prolonged eclipse; although the genre was very popular in Japan, it also remained profoundly insular, exotic imports in the rest of the world, it “never left the island”. The “five years later” reference does not quite match, though it could be a reference to 1948 Unknown Island, a little known RKO film by Jake Bernhard, in which a group of adventurers stumble a lots island populated by (giant) dinosaurs, in the form of cheap costume-wearing extras.
 

Unknown Island (1948) trailer

 
Planetary thus transmuted the history of the genre – a history shaped by Western perception, which means the 80s renaissance of Godzilla, which was barely distributed abroad, can be ignored – into a history of the dead monsters on Island Zero. This strategy, which the series applied to a variety of popular genres and cultural objets, has been since praised by critics and academics as a challenging, complex and satisfying bridge between meta-fiction and popular texts.

I suspect that in the last few years, this conflation of Godzilla and Godzilla has become the default mode of engagement with the character. This is at last what the two most recent film incarnations of the King of the monsters suggest. Indeed the most interesting sequences of both Godzilla Final Wars (Ryuhei Kitamura, 2004) – the final Japanese entry in the franchise – and Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014) both introduce the history of the franchise in the diegetic world. In both cases, this insertion occurs during the opening credits, setting the tone for the whole film.

During the credits of Godzilla Final Wars, excerpts from previous films in the franchise are intertwined with rolling dates, from 1954 to the present. The status of these images is not made explicit, but the construction of the sequence connects the chosen excerpts to suggest a continuous narrative rather than a collage. The movies blend into each others, are presented out of chronology, accompanied by prominent dates (1960, etc.) which do not correspond to any film, and create an artificial continuity. Godzilla is thus presented as having been a continuous presence since 1954, a description which can only be applied to the cultural phenomenon it represents, and is incompatible with the premise of most of the movies compiled in these sequences. Godzilla’s death at the end of the first movie, but also the various reboots, are glossed over, the better to repurpose existing images. Plots, foes and stories are briefly cast aside in order to foreground the cultural icon trough its five decades of existence, archetypally stomping over cities and soldiers. Though the movie itself includes numerous homages – and even a match versus the 1998 Emmerich version – it never develops this idea explicitly.
 
In Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla, the process is slightly less overt. As in the case of Godzilla Final Wars, the credit sequence opens with images of an atomic blast footage, before inserting Godzilla into actual footage from the 1950’s atomic tests in the Bikini islands. 1954 is only mentioned later in the film, in a passage of blunt exposition. Nevertheless, popular-cultured spectators are expected to understand that the discovery of the creature roughly coincides with the date of Honda’s first film.

True, this is a revisionist reading of the origin of the creature and of the American role in particular. In Edwards’s films, based on a script by Max Borenstein the tests did not disturb Godzilla, they were an attempt to destroy the creature. However, this history again acknowledges the age of the franchise, its historical origin. Incidentally, this is also, as in the case of Planetary, an example of redacted, or secret history. We are invited to re-read what we thought we knew: we thought we were familiar with the Bikini tests, we thought we knew Godzilla, but a new light will be shed on both.
 


Godzilla (2014), opening credits

 
Although both films purport to be modern takes on the king of monsters, it is striking that they both emphasize the age of the franchise and its now removed point of origin. In doing so, they acknowledge the fact that the Godzilla franchise – a familiar series of cultural objects, with a well-established connection to the atomic trauma in Japan – is bigger than any specific movie. The success of both endeavors is predicated on the existence of an audience eager to connect with the franchise as a whole rather than with a specific film or series of films. The story of the Japanese Godzilla may have been rebooted in 2000, but it is hard to conceive of a spectator going to see Final Wars with no awareness of the previous films. Neither film is a period piece, though: Godzilla is at once current and historically grounded, as if some of Planetary’s erudition and esteem for its readership has seeped into both productions. Still, while Planetary made the exploration of the link between history and stories the center of its narrative, the movies contain it in a space where they can still claim plausible deniability. The ambiguous space of the opening credit seems perfectly appropriate to negotiate this tension.

The comparison with the 1998 Roland Emmerich version is enlightening. That film tried to imagine a modernized origin, one which would transpose the story of the original films with no respect for the film as film. It is hard not to see this as another expression of the changing conception of the audience among mass media producers. The subculture connoisseur may not be the target audience, but he or she is important enough to warrant the creation of these two opening sequences.

More generally, this embrace of history also sheds a light on the cultural status of various icons of popular culture. Godzilla is a 1954 creation and the movies acknowledge it, yet it seems unimaginable to have a major Superman or Batman film taking the thirties as a point of origin (Captain America is a somewhat complex exception here, since the character is both of the forties and the sixties). DC did produce a short film doing for Superman what the opening credit of Godzilla Final Wars tried to achieve, but crucially, it was distributed separately from Man of Steel, thus maintaining a clear distinction between the character in the story and the character in cultural history.
 

Superman at 75


 
It may be that Superman and the other superheroes have a less overt relation to their historical points of origin. It may also be that these characters haven’t been consistently used a mass-media franchise over the course of their existence – Superman Returns did touch on the tension between diegetic and non-diegetic time. It may be the fact that explaining a 50+ year-old Godzilla is more acceptable than a 70+ year-old Batman. Or it may be that a franchise with a history is less likely to be repurposed as entirely in a different setting as super-heroes have been over the last 16 years.

Gothic Tenderness

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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Nick Cave is not known for restraint. His career has been mostly devoted to ravenous gothic excess; to teetering, gibbering show tunes about murder and hell and despair.

Which is why it’s so odd that his best album is also, probably, his quietest. The Boatman’s Call, from 1997, is filled with slow, gentle, piano-based tunes. Most of the lyrics are about love — often, even, about, requited love. “Lime-Tree Arbor,” for example, couldn’t be much more inoffensive.
 

 

The boatman calls from the lake
A lone loon dives upon the water
I put my hand over hers
Down in the lime-tree arbor

That’s the first verse. If you’re a Nick Cave fan, you’re probably expecting him to murder her and dump her in the water by the end of the song, or to reveal that she’s a corpse, or something grisly and gruesome. But nope; the lyrical music ripples on as gently as the loon diving down, and Cave’s baritone never wavers in its sincerity. The only thing that happens is that he touches her hand and she touches his. That’s the song.

And yet, somehow, even while sketching an idyll, the gothic excess hovers overhead. In “Lime-Tree Arbor,” the music’s measured tread, the minor colorings, and Cave’s mannered delivery all gesture towards a darker outcome, or at least a darker possibility. “There will always be suffering/It flows through life like water,” Cave declaims, and it flows through the song too, so that the touch of two hands seems like it occurs above, or next to, an abyss. Cave’s trademark hyperbole hasn’t deserted him; it’s just moved to the background, so that he seems to be not so much proclaiming love as clinging to it against a wailing blackness.

This is even clearer in the album’s best song, “Into My Arms.” Built around a simple, semi-classical repeating piano figure, Cave opens by stating with full-on, slow-burning romanticism:
 

 

I don’t believe in an interventionist God
But I know darling that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask him
Not to intervene when it came to you.

By proclaiming his disbelief in God, Cave paradoxically opens his love song up to the divine. When he declares, “But I believe in love,” it becomes, not a standard pop song trope, but an almost desperate substitution for religion, which is all the more moving, and all the more sexy, because of its desperation. As in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” atheism becomes all the more reason to “love one another” — God’s absence sacralizing the human tenderness upon which the world must now rest.

The Boatman’s Call doesn’t so much break with Cave’s past style as it rechannels it. Instead of laughing maniacally with the gargoyles on the rainswept chuch front, for this album Cave puts us inside the church, huddled together on a pew, listening for the storm outside we can’t quite hear. The album’s smallness is every bit as histrionic as Cave’s slavering murder ballads. The theatrically, ironically self-deprecating moroseness which only becomes more sincere because of its own self-conscious artificiality is reminiscent of the Smiths. Though I don’t think even Morrisey has ever managed a song as preposterously bleak and bleakly preposterous as “Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?”
 

 

In a colonial hotel we fucked up the sun
And then we fucked it down again
Well the sun comes up and the sun goes down
Going ’round and around to nowhere.

Ennui becomes as portentous as a gallows dance. “The carnival drums all mad in the air/Grim reapers and skeletons and a missionary bell/O where do we go now but nowhere?” is sung at a funereal pace. The song may be about losing a child, or simply about losing a relationship, but either way, mundane grief bloats and staggers, emotions becoming hypertrophied parodies of themselves and then helplessly collapsing. Excess exhausted and exhaustion as excess roll over each other and whelm and wane, till you can’t tell if you hear a Brobdingnagian bellow from a long way away, or a muted call from your decadent heart.