Contempt: A Visual Reading and Other Loose Ends

Lucien Goldmann, a Marxist critic, said that Contempt, a film by Jean-Luc Godard (1963): “is about the impossibility of loving in a world where The Odyssey can’t be filmed.” (In a world without gods.)  It’s an imaginative interpretation, and a surprisingly reactionary one coming from a Marxist critic commenting on the work of a Marxist director, but it links two of the picture’s themes: 1) the end of the couple Camille (Brigitte Bardot) and Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli); 2) the difficult relation between art and commerce; i. e.: the creative differences between director Fritz Lang (himself) and producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance).  The problem with Goldmann’s thesis is that he reached a totalizing conclusion starting with a particular example, but, mixing gods to the equation, the film invites such an universal statement.   

Apparently the reason why Camille starts to despise Paul is more down to earth than hinted above: she feels used by her husband. When Jeremy Prokosch hits on her Paul does nothing until it is too late (he even encourages his advances ignoring her supplicating eyes). Godard himself said that Camille is like a vegetable

“acting  […] by instinct, so to speak, a kind of vital instinct like a plant that needs water to continue living.”

Contempt is a tragedy (George Delerue’s score never let’s us forget it; Paul to Camille:

“I love you totally, tenderly, tragically.”)

and that’s why Lucien Goldmann isn’t that wrong. The events are linked together in a fabric weaved by the fates. Paul Javal was a hack who sold his wife the moment he sold himself. Camille doesn’t rationalize her reactions, but she’s a victim of the commodification of human relations.

The gods no longer exist, so, they can’t influence the lives of humans, but, in a capitalist world, money took their place reigning supreme over everything. That’s why Jeremy Prokosch says:

“Oh! Gods! I like gods! I like them very much. I know exactly how they feel.”

To which Fritz Lang replies:

“Jerry, don’t forget: the gods have not created men; men have created gods.”

If men created gods and destroyed them, they can also destroy capitalism.

It wasn’t the first time that Paul was an hack either. He previously wrote Totò Against Hercules. We can only imagine a comedic peplum (Totò, Antonio Gagliardi, was an Italian comedy actor). Contempt’s producer Joseph E. Levine did produce Hercules in 1958 though. He may very well be the target of Godard’s satire. Prokosch is a caricature, obviously: showing him lusting after a nude female swimmer in Fritz Lang’s The Odyssey is a comment on his producer’s insistence to show Brigitte Bardot’s body in the film (Paul:

“cinema is great: we look at women and they wear dresses, they participate in a film, crack, we see their asses.”)

Contempt is full of self-referential and autobiographical details like the one above. Another is Brigitte Bardot wearing a black wig to look like Anna Karina, Godard’s wife. Paul is clearly Godard’s alter ego: wearing a similar hat (as shown in his cameos) and a similar admiration for American films (Camille:

“I prefer you without hat and without cigar.”;

Paul:

“It’s to imitate Dean Martin in Some Came Running.”)

While being on the terrace of villa Malaparte Camille waves at some point. At whom? The paparazzi who infested the surrounding bushes?…

At the beginning of the film, at Cinecittà Studios in Rome (sold by Prokosch to a chain of malls), we can see film posters of Godard’s own Vivre sa Vie (To Live Her Life) and his favorite films also produced in 1962: Hatari by Howard Hawks, Vanina Vanini by Roberto Rossellini; and 1960: Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock. We may draw two conclusions from this list: 1) not everything that money touches is crap; 2) the Italian film industry wasn’t as dead as it seemed because masterpieces continued to be created.  This means that the reading of the images gives some nuance to an otherwise seemingly boneheaded message.  

Camille being trapped between the posters of a film in which men hunt and a film about a sex worker. It’s no wonder that she wears a dark color. More about that, later…

In the above image, taken from Godard’s La Chinoise (1968)  we are invited to confront vague ideas with clear images. The image is clear enough to me: it shows a bourgeois interior with red furniture. Red being the symbolic color of communism the contradiction is self-evident, but how many viewers do the reading? In a logocentric culture, what’s shown to us is automatically hidden.

Being a commercial product directed by an avant-garde director means that Contempt self destructs. Godard even mocks the choice of CinemaScope, a format that, in the words of Fritz Lang:

“Is not suitable for Men. It’s suitable for serpents and funerals.”

And yet… it allows the most interesting formal device of the film. CinemaScope is the format of epic action movies so something unusual was bound to happen when put in the service of domestic drama. In the central act of this three part play (some may argue that it is the most interesting) Camille and Paul are shown in a maze of walls and doors. (The door without glass that Paul opens to enter a room while returning through the wide opened hole is a Keatonian gag. Ditto Camille absent mindedly passing under a ladder to avoid doing the same on her return when she realized what she had just done.) The couple is shown like mice in a lab experiment, the architectural obstacles between them being symbols of their gradual estrangement. Godard even shows a book about opera and an image of the interior of an opera house to further hint at how ridiculous his producers’ ideas of grandeur are (or as an omen of tragedy). In the duly famous conversation between Camille and Paul with the white lamp between them Godard forces the wide format to behave like a more intimate close up framing refusing to do what would be obvious: to show both actors at the same time.

Another great device used by Godard is color. He uses it (especially the clothes’ colors) as symbols. We know Godard’s attraction for primary colors. In Contempt they’re codified as indifference (yellow, but also green), antagonism, communism (red, but also orange), fate, fight, Neptune (blue). All those colors are shown at the beginning of the film (as filters) to contradict the love scene. Or, in a Deleuzian image-time manner to flash-forward what’s already written in the fates’ tapestry script. The living room in Camille and Paul’s house has blue chairs, a white lamp and an orange couch (it’s almost bleu, blanc, rouge, the French flag; France is viewed as a nation divided). The examples of the use of colors as symbols are too many to cite here: it’s in the orange couch that Camille discovers that Paul is a member of the Italian Communist Party. This turns his selling out to capitalism even more unforgivable of course (being Paul Godard’s alter ego it’s obvious how self-loathing this scene is; ditto Paul using a bath towel to look like a toga in Levine’s peplum). On the other hand the Italian Communist Party was an important member of what was called back then eurocommunism, that is, a revisionist mild version of hardcore communism. We may thus read Paul’s betrayal as a more profoundly political one. Ditto the singer in orange and red at the theater singing a pop song to the masses around her (24000 baci24000 Kisses – by Adriano Celentano with the lyrics detourned to include the word “politics”) . In the same sequence Fritz Lang quotes “poor” BB – a pun between Bertolt Brecht’s initials and Brigitte Bardot’s nickname:

“Every day, to earn my daily bread/ I go to the market where lies are bought/ Hopefully/ I take up my place among the sellers.  […] Hollywood.”)

At the end of the film Prokosch’s red Alfa Romeo (Camille:

“get in your Alfa, romeo.”)

has an accident against a blue oil (!) truck. Prokosch, Neptune’s tool, is dressed in red while Camille, a willing sacrificial victim on the altar of capitalism is dressed in blue. (Fritz Lang:

“Death is not the end.”

It isn’t because the film has an epilogue.)

This use of color influenced John Cassavetes in Opening Night (1977). A film about theater as Contempt is about filming. In it actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) fights with a red dress (life and youth) against the forces of aging and decay (black).  

Godard, like Johannes Vermeer frames domestic drama to give us the feeling of peeking some secret that we’re not supposed to witness.

 

Like Rembrandt Godard uses shadow to a dramatic effect: showing melancholia and distress…

The opening shot ends with Raoul Coutartd’s camera pointed at us, the viewers, while a voice over quotes Michel Mourlet (not André Bazin as stated):

“The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in accordance with our desires. Contempt is a story of that world.”

What are these desires, then? The camera asks… Do we want tragedy and catharsis like the old Greeks did in their theater? Or do we want unresolved disturbing truths? Godard’s film ends with the death of Camille and Prokosch, victim and tool of an inhuman system. The last sequence being shot in Contempt of the diegetic The Odyssey ends with a victorious Ulysses, as he arrives at his homeland, Ithaca. He is facing the sea (Neptune), to tell him that, against all odds, he fought and beat him. In this story outside a story the

“truth 24 frames per second”

could never do that. (Another cinephile reference in Contempt is Viaggio in Italia – Journey to Italy – 1954 – by Roberto Rossellini, in which a troubled couple finds redemption. The same thing doesn’t happen in Contempt, of course.) The last words belong to Jeremy Prokosch and Francesca Vanini, yes, Vanini (Georgia Moll): after being reminded by Paul that Fritz Lang fled Germany because he didn’t want to have anything to do with the Nazis, the former simply put it:

“This is not 33, it’s 63.”

(There’s no escape.) Plus: Francesca to Paul:

“You aspire to a world like Homer’s, but, unfortunately, that doesn’t exist.” 

Eat, Drink, Read Manga

I am a foodie. You rolled your eyes just now, didn’t you? I don’t blame you. Everyone is claiming to be a “foodie” these days, from your brother-in-law who just discovered white truffle oil (Gordon Ramsay says that’s sooo last year….) to your Mom who found an ethnic restaurant in town with dishes whose names she can’t pronounce. (“Mom, it says ‘salad’.”)

I am not the kind of foodie that drifts from one trendy flavor to another (seriously, mangosteen is over) at all. I’m the kind of foodie who loves food. I mean, I just like to eat. Think less Ted Allen, more Homer Simpson.

It is often said offhandedly that there is “manga for everyone,” but until recently, that was largely not true in English. There was manga for everyone if by “everyone” you meant everyone 12-18 years old or so. Now that the manga bubble has burst, manga publishers, searching for an audience that actually has money to spend on books – and prefers books to downloads – have stumbled on the niche adult manga market. Which means we’re actually getting manga these days more suited to adult tastes. Today we’re talking four food and drink manga that can help train your mind and palate and give you an instant one-upsmanship with your non-manga-reading foodie friends. Welcome to Pretentious Gittery in Food and Drink the Manga Way.

 

Oishinbo has the be the first course. Any rube can tell you that they taste the difference between regular California short-grain rice and Koshihikari rice grown and imported from Japan, but Oishinbo will help you to discuss the difference in the more pretentious terms. Was the storage area dry enough? Where was the water used for cooking from?

Wrapped in an equally entertaining and annoying tale about rival newspapers and rival father and son food experts, Oishinbo in Japan was begun in 1983, and is now up to 104 collected volumes. Written by Tetsu Kariya, with art by Akira Hanasaki, Oishinbo is not a cooking manga. It is a food manga. It is about the experience of eating food, and often covers the subtle differences that husbandry, farming, storage, shipping and preparation can have on that experience. In America, a few select chapters have been collected into an ala carte’ selection, focused around specific food areas. Sushi and Sashimi, Rice, Gyoza and Ramen, Sake, Traditional Japanese cuisine, Vegetables, Pub Food…each volume picks and chooses from chapters published over the last 30 years. By the end of the American volumes, you’re sorely tempted to go out and try ramen at your favorite local place, just to complain about the use of food coloring and MSG.

 

If you find the tone of one-upsmanship too harsh in Oishinbo, then try a more feminine touch with Not Love, But Delicious Foods Makes Me So Happy by Fumi Yoshinaga. Yoshinaga presents this foodalogue as an amusingly insulting candid autobiography of her life and the food she eats.  Where Hanasaki’s art has improved over the last 30 years, Yoshinaga’s art starts at levels far exceeding anything you’ll see in Oishinbo. The people are drawn both beautifully (and less so,) but the food is always gorgeous. Her relationships with the people in her life are organized by their ability to appreciate food. Of all the books on food and drink that I have read, this one most closely approximates my own foodie existence.  Yoshinaga’s take on food is approachable, but her focus on texture and mingling of flavors are both things that Americans particularly, are bad at and so, become an accessible first step into pretentious gittery.

The inevitable next step after reading Not Love is to hop on over to Yelp and start reviewing your favorite restaurants.  Don’t forget to discuss the Bolognese sauce at your favorite Italian restaurant as “authentic” even if you’ve never been to Italy, much less Bologna.

 

Now that you’ve taken your first steps into being a pretentious git about food, it’s time to get ready for the big guns of pretentious gittery – Wine.

Is there any area of food or drink that has such a well-established pedigree for encouraging pretentious gittery as wine? Perhaps, but even those who don’t know anything about food or drink shudder at the thought of being seated with a person who “knows a lot about wine.”

Tadashi Agi’s Drops of God has been so influential in forming, educating and influencing the Asian wine market that long before it was translated into English, this manga had articles written about it in the Wall St. Journal and the New York Times. In fact, so grown up and pretentious is this series, that the New York Times actually deigned to allow this manga on their “Graphic Novels Worthy of Being Gifts” List this year.

Once again wrapped in a story about a rivalry, and a quest for the greatest wines on earth, Drops of God allows the audience to learn the importance of decanting, about village wines, terroir and other things that no one else at the table cares about, really, as long as the wine tastes good. If your family member or friend actually does know a thing or two about wine, don’t expect to impress them with this manga. They already know this stuff and are unlikely to be moved by a comic book. More importantly, the manga itself addresses the pressure that wine snobbery places on everyday people and provides a brilliant tip to glean the credit while knowing nothing. If you’re not a wine drinker, this manga will be a hard read. Everyone eats food…not everyone drinks wine.  But if you’re starting to get into wine and can taste the difference between a  Merlot and a Cabernet, or a family member or friend is in that space, this is a good way to bump up pretension to expertise in a fun way.

 

Last, after all of our food and drink, we turn to dessert, and back once again to Fumi Yoshinaga with Antique Bakery. Unlike the rest of the manga here, the pretentious gittery in Antique Bakery is not the actual story, it is merely decoration on the plate. Nonetheless, if you can’t stand to not be a git about the cream used in your choux à la crème (or, shu cream, if your pretentious gittery leans toward Japan, rather than France,) this manga makes a perfect ending to your meal.

The goal here today is not to bore your friends and family (although that outcome is probably inevitable) but to indulge your brain along with your tastebuds.

To end, I want to share with you a real story about pretentious gittery.

I was at someone’s house and they poured me a glass of wine that, they said, had a distinct scent of tobacco and traces of mushroom. I took a sip and said, “You’re right, it smells like an old man bar and tastes like a moldy basement.”

I may never become a good pretentious git about wine, but I’m great at being a pretentious git about manga. ^_^ These manga are perfect for the inner pretentious git in you.

 

A Conversation about Habibi’s Orientalism with Craig Thompson

Around the time I was writing my critique of Orientalism in Craig Thompson’s Habibi a strange thing happened: I got to know Craig Thompson. Through a mutual acquaintance and a series of chance convention run-ins at San Diego Comic Con and the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco, we became casual acquaintances. While writing up my honest reaction to Habibi I decided to burden our new friendship with the weight of criticism by calling to ask him a few clarifying questions. The result expanded the scheduled ten minutes of chat time in to a much longer conversation about Orientalism, feminism, cultural appropriation, the burden of relationships, and the thematic successes of Habibi. The only thing I’d like to add before presenting our conversation is something that should become evident to you while reading it: Craig Thompson is a supreme class act. Not only did he take time out of an extraordinarily busy schedule to directly confront my criticism of a book he spent over seven years making, but he did it with an amount of grace and humility that I didn’t know was possible.

 

Nadim Damluji: I want to start by talking about Orientalism, which it appears you were conscious of during the process of making Habibi. During the creation process, did you ever second guess your ability the distinguish between using Orientalism as a playground versus simply reproducing it?

Craig Thompson: I don’t want to repeat myself, but I keep saying that the book was a conscious mash up between the sacred medium of holy books like the Qu’ran and the Bible and the trashy medium of Comic Books. And I was keeping in sight this sort of unpretentious, self-deprecating, low-brow, motivation of comics.

As for the charge of Orientalism, I knew it was going to come up no matter what, so why not embrace it? More broadly, I’ve always liked genres that have a degree of exploitation to them like horror films. They play on these really crass and appealing elements that also exist in 1,0001 Nights or French Orientalist paintings. It was fun to think of Orientalism as a sensationalized genre like Cowboys and Indians, which is a very poor representation of the reality of the American West, but fun to think of as a fantastical genre. And at this point in history, most people who watch things in the Cowboys and Indians genre totally realize it paints an inaccurate image of what the West was like … well actually you know there are people who watch cowboy films and think that’s what it must have been like. In fact, I’m pretty sure George W. Bush is one of those guys whose political beliefs are shaped by those films.

 

ND: I’m familiar with French Orientalist paintings and it feels that you are expanding on the snapshots those painting provide — like the scenes of Habibi that take place in the Slave Market or in the Sultan’s Palace — but those images are very loaded with this implicit “White Man’s Burden” element. In other words, we need to save the Arab women from the Arab men, and that’s how the French imagined “the Orient.” Did you ever fear that you were carrying the baggage of the medium by imitating that style? Specifically, I’m curious to know how you set a limit for yourself when sexualizing Dodola to avoid reducing her to simply another exotic Arab woman in Western literature?

CT: I wanted to sexualize Dodola, because I wanted the reader to experience her through the lustful gaze of all men, and primarily the gaze of Zam. Hopefully the lust of Zam is transmitted in those drawings, and maybe at times the reader identifies with it or other times feels disgusted by it or ashamed by it, which mirrors the experience Zam was having. Throughout the book even the Orientalism is a commentary on exoticization. Which isn’t just about any specific culture or ethnicity, but a stereotype of what men do in general or what a lot of people do in romantic relationships. I’m examining American guilt and I’m examining male guilt. In male guilt there is so much of this energy of objectification and idolatry and eroticization. When I think of those French paintings I don’t see the “White Man’s Burden” of the French needing to save the beautiful Arabic women from their oppressors, I see the opposite: French men swarming in a perverted sort of way and trying to make fantasy reproductions of what those ladies look like under their hijab. I don’t think it paints the colonists in a positive manner, it makes them seem like these creepy little voyeurs.

 

ND: Especially because so many of those paintings were created without the painters actually going to the Middle East…

CT: Yes, exactly.

ND: Which makes those paintings problematic because those landscapes are imagined but purporting to portray reality. You’ve talked previously about trusting your subconscious in the creative process to guide you in navigating taboo. That makes for two distinct parts of Habibi: the subconscious imagined landscapes element that is the bedrock of Zam and Dodola’s love story, which you’ve noted was created aware of Orientalism, and then the research heavy elements of the book which deal more with the Qur’an. What I’m afraid of is that readers will take the more imagined and playful parts and give them the same level of plausibility as the clearly research heavy sections of your book. Now obviously you can’t be responsible for all your readers…

CT: That’s an understandable concern. For me it seems, on some level, a little silly that people keep talking about and examining Habibi as if it were some academic book, which it definitely isn’t. I keep labeling it as a “fairy tale” because that is definitely my intent. As much as an artist I want to strive to create comics as art or as literature, I’m still at my core just a cartoonist. Cartoonists want to make these exaggerated caricatured playful ridiculous irreverent drawings in some ways. I do feel reverent and respectful to elements of Islamic faith, but through the whole book there is a sense of play and self-awareness around the fact it’s still just a comic book. It’s super heroes in some ways. It’s Star Wars. But maybe the energy to focus on Habibi as an academic text is coming from outside the comics medium, where people are surprised to see more mature elements in a comic. In some ways the dialogue should also revolve back to the medium itself, which still has a satiric intent. I hesitate to say that, because I don’t want to say that Habibi is satiric towards any faith or religion. But comics are this sort of a self-deprecating medium inherently.

 

ND: I can speak to the academic tendency! For me, a lot of that has to do with the packaging. It’s this big tome and it’s by “Craig Thompson, author of Blankets,” and it feels a lot more “literary” just by virtue of packaging and the Pantheon label than more crass comics do. Do you ever feel a burden as one of a very few comics artist that is sold in Barnes & Nobles as well as local independent comic shops? You have those two worlds of fans that you have to appease and respond to.

CT: I feel privileged to be in that position. Since I’ve started my career in comics I always wanted to extend to a broader audience. I always felt that comics as a medium was untapped in terms of audience potential and that I was being held back by a lot of the retailers, distributors, and the attitude of fans in the industry. I definitely wanted to embrace this little fad in publishing of “graphic novels” because it feels like a window to extend comics to a bigger audience. I was excited to bring comics outside of the weird collector’s world. You know there’s been these different explosions in comic’s history of interest in the medium, but they’ve always seemed real tied up with the speculator culture. For me the bookstore is taking it back to the mass arts roots, like the Daily Newspaper, something that a common reader has access too and stumbles on and not just sequestered to a little cult Indie following the way an obscure punk record store would be. And I love buying a lot of those “tome” like products…

 

ND: Me too! When you’ve talked previously about about the goal for Blankets being 500-pages before you even had the story, I get that as a collector and fan of books in general.

CT: But I would like to create more modest projects too. Maybe naturally Habibi had to be this kind of book as a follow up to Blankets, because there was so much expectation of this as my “sophomore effort.” I don’t know, I think it also happened because of the emotional space I was in at that point in my life. I was being reclusive and in my Salinger phase. It would have been strange to emerge from that with something less.

 

ND: You’ve mentioned Joe Sacco as an influence. I don’t know if you understood it this way, but I found a lot of the Qur’anic elements to be a more Sacco-like project that had you looking at the footnotes of Suras and Haddith to pull out a really interesting research thread. Those are the parts of Habibi that I felt were most in your voice. I wonder if you ever had more of a desire to work in that vein as opposed to fiction? And jumping off that, our mutual friend Edward Said writes about the need for authors to “catalogue personal inventory” which in a very basic sense is a call for the author to put themselves in relation to the text in writing which creates a space for readers to know where the author is coming from. This is especially crucial in writing about the “East” from the “West,” which Sacco seems aware of by putting himself in his comics with obscured glasses; he is drawing in his subject position. Have you ever thought more about if post-Habibi you’d attempt a project more explicitly like that?

CT: You know what they say about dream analysis is that every character in your dream is a role that is played by yourself. You have to look at your dreams like “why am I stabbing myself with a butcher knife?” and you can’t judge any character because they are all representations of you. I feel similar about fiction. I can see parts of myself in pretty much every character in Habibi, even the ugly ones. For example there is one of the eunuchs that is creepy, more bad cop hijra, and I tried to draw that as a gross drag version of myself. I thought, what would I look like if I was a hijra and I focused it on my features. So there you have a character who is supposed to be a ridiculous hijra version of myself. Elsewhere I certainly saw myself in the fisherman, Noah. The Sultan, a lot of my female readers are disturbed and disgusted by him, but most of my male readers think he’s hilarious and identify him as a caricature of male sexuality in general. I can see that. I was playing that up for laughs for myself, like this is the way guys think a lot of the time.

 

ND: It’s really illuminating to hear that. The Sultan’s one of the more problematic characters for me so it’s interesting to hear you recast him in that light. With the fisherman, and the recurring focus on the Abraham story from both the Bible and Qur’an, it seems that Habibi is a way for you to explore sacrifice and the role it plays in our lives. It might be hard to articulate, but why was that such an important thread for you at the time you were making Habibi? I mean the role of sacrifice in relationships must have been important if you agreed that you were going to spend 7 years on a project dwelling on it.

CT: Well that definitely coming from a more Christian angle. That’s something I was thinking about while working on the book. Other than obviously the core Abraham story, sacrifice overall is a bigger theme in Christianity and the shame and guilt associated with having someone sacrifice their life for you. But, personally at the inception of Habibi I was processing being a caretaker in a relationship. I was in a long romantic relationship where I was also a caretaker and those are conflicting roles: to be a parent and a lover simultaneously, which is what Dodola is to Zam. I’m getting off track… I was thinking a lot about how much these sort of guilt feelings that shape my spirituality are purely about coming from a Christian background. As I talked with a lot of Muslim friends I didn’t find they shared that same core guilt and shame and sense of martyrdom in their faith. Of course, if you look at Islamaphobic observations of Islam people think of suicide bombers and jihad. So there it becomes an idea of sacrifice and martyrdom.

 

ND: As a Muslim myself, I feel the Qur’an is more about exploring love than extreme sacrifice. Although, there is Ramadan. Either way, I do really like that thread and how you weave it throughout Habibi. I want to switch gears to talk about Wanatolia and the decision to make it a timeless city, and how that factors into the end of the comic. I was hoping you could articulate how you had the decision for Dodola and Zam to return to Wanatolia and the reveal that it is modern in the western conception, even though at the heart of it is this palace which is backwards.

CT: In earlier drafts of the Sultan’s palace, I was mediating on the Bush administration and feeling like it was this sort of clueless world that existed outside of our own society. That was in the aftermath of 9/11 when you would see Bush off golfing somewhere. And certainly some Sultans during the Ottoman Empire have been critiqued historically for being clueless what was happening in society. That’s how the Ottoman Empire fell, the Sultans were living in a hedonistic cushion. By hedonistic I don’t mean they were sleeping with all their courtesans … it’s just the role of Americans and rich people in general that are totally oblivious of the state of the world. In terms of that clashing of the new and old world, that exists everywhere. If you travel to a developing country, you see people living in incredible poverty and living very simple lifestyles similar to 100 years ago brushing up against modernity and global trade. You can see how obviously our consumerist society is feasting off of poverty in their countries and how all our waste is there. Here we just consume and produce a lot of waste and then it sort of disappears and we don’t have to deal with it precisely because we are heaping it on to other people. And that’s a reality… I’m doing a fairy tale or parable version of that, but I don’t feel like it’s dramatically abstracted from the world we live in.

 

ND: For me the way it does feel abstracted is that there are no time markers and there are key fairytale elements. But then there’s that page in the book where you write “The proximity of the site of both our separation and reunion disrupted the boundaries within me” when Dodola and Zam see the Sultan’s palace from their new makeshift condo. The problem I had with this moment is the extent to which the backwardness of the “timeless palace,” as a place where they are both slaves, and the spot of their freedom, evidenced by that moment when Dodola takes off her hijab, are so close; I find it somewhat disrupting. And you don’t have to account for why me or any reader should feel disrupted by this revelation, but it is a shocking thing to have a modern city fueled by such tremendous backwardness that I don’t see justified in the text. Hearing the George Bush analogy at least helps put Wanatolia in a better context.

 

CT: Being in a city is about being in America basically. Having all these creature comforts and material comforts, but Dodola and Zam are coming from a place where they are also aware of suffering elsewhere. Which is sort of an adult experience, becoming more aware of the privileges you have compared to the rest of the world. It’s developing a sense of how you’re a passive participant in taking advantage of other cultures. And someone else has brought up the hijab thing to me, and for me the only real moment Dodola removes her hijab is when she does it to wrap up and clothe this little child at the end. For me that’s the only real moment and any other moment is incidental. If she has a hijab in one panel and off in the next, it mostly has to do with the comfortable space between her and Zam.

 

ND: The scene I’m specifically referring to is when she sees the “modern women” shopping in the city and there is a moment she takes it off then she gets accosted by lustful men a page later and she puts it back on…

CT: For me that scene is not “Oh! I realize I can be free like this women,” but more that she wants to fit in in this new context. She feels like an outsider, which I think the reader will perceive the other women that way because they seem to be from another world. And she does cover herself up because of this male gaze.

 

ND: This brings us back to how Dodola’s body functions primarily as a commodity, how even when the resources run out her body remains a marketable asset. I’m curious about if you ever felt aware of the baggage of her being sexed the whole time, even if that is purposefully through Zam’s perspective. If you ever felt wary of the contradiction between putting a feminist character into a societal position where there is perpetual forced sexualization of her body. I understand you as a “feminist” by putting Dodola out there in a way readers can sympathize with her, but then there’s an aspect of some readers maybe living out their own perverse sexual fantasies through the ways she’s treated. Do you see a danger in that?

CT: I don’t see a danger in it, but I definitely see a contradiction in it. So when you define me as a feminist, I’m OKAY with that, but there’s an irony in men claiming to be feminist to some degree. You can be sort of intellectually feminist, or claim to be, but there’s still a more primal animal instinct. You know, it’s the irony that some men who claim to be so intellectually feminist are the exact same people who are womanizers. Every time I meet another sensitive male it just bores me. And there’s nothing more painful than hearing a guy say he’s a lesbian trapped in a male body. So I’m exploring that contradiction: any man claiming he’s feminist is bullshitting, because your still animalisticly male. Again, I’m talking about heterosexual desires, but this crosses over to all sexual genders from transsexual people to homosexuals. That’s what I was exploring in my own life, that your sex drive is in conflict sometimes with ethical beliefs and you have to recognize both energies. If you put all the negative aspects of your sexuality in the shadow, then you’re probably going to fuck up and make some sort of mistake in your life, the way that politicians and televangelists do when we hear about their sexually deviancy. It’s the classic Catholic Priest scenario: if you don’t own up to your own shadow elements then they’ll emerge anyways and much more destructively.

 

ND: Without a doubt that sounds like a contradiction worth exploring. The problem for me is that for much of Habibi we go for long stretches of only seeing the shadow and then it becomes an issue of who’s casting that perverse shadow. When I hear you talk about it it makes a lot more sense holistically, but when I’m reading it as a stand-alone piece there is this disembodied voice of the author that makes it harder to accept those narrative choices. I guess that you exploring your own sexual contradictions gives readers a space to explore that to and maybe what I’m responding to is how uncomfortable that makes me as a reader feel…

CT: GOOD! That makes me happy I think. Maybe not happy, but it means the art has done its job if it makes the reader uncomfortable.

 

ND: When I heard about the project of Habibi I was expecting maybe a lighter fairy tale, but then as a reader you get confronted with slavery and rape and it’s all at the service of this endearing love story, but it’s pretty jarring throughout.

CT: And when I think of fairytales I think of those dark elements. It seems that all the great nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and children’s stories are full of those exact same dark twisted elements. It’s the tradition of the genre. And I’m not speaking of 1,001 Nights even, but Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood.

 

ND: Well to pick up on that it seems that in order for you to call it a fairy tale it has to have a more happy ending. And you provide that by having Dodola and Zam reunited and creating a safe space for a new child, but did you ever have the impulse for it not be happy at the end? To just be brutal?

CT: Oh yeah. Definitely. I never wanted the book to have a cinematic Hollywood ending, and I wrote variations that were more cynical, but ultimately the end that was the most truthful was the far more optimistic one. That said, people see what that they want to see in the endings. With both Blankets and Habibi I’ve heard people say both that they were either super depressing or super hopeful. I find it very interesting when the reader imposes their own experience onto the endings.

 

ND: In Habibi there are these moments were you get a completely new character, like Noah the Fisherman, that feel part of their own complete story. Was that a product of the amount of time you were spending on Habibi and needing a new narrative voice to take a break?

CT: Noah was there from the very first draft. As I was working on the book a lot of people wanted me to remove him. They felt he was too much of a total aside and irreverent basically. But I really enjoyed writing him for my own sake and felt he was a necessary dash of levity in the midst of all the darkness and heaviness. For me he made me laugh a lot and there’s a lot of pleasure writing that character even though there’s an intense sadness to him. I did want the chapters to feel like their own graphic novels to some degree. I was very aware that Zam and Dodola would be apart for hundreds of pages, I wanted it to feel that way almost to the point you forgot about the other character at times. They only existed in this idealized memory. I like that in books where things wander for quite a while and you lose site of where you began.

 

ND: It’s definitely a powerful element that they go through so much change on their own and have to reconcile that when they are reunited. I’m interested in your fan’s reaction to Habibi and what readers have said to you about Dodola and Zam. Are they taking to them the same way they do a cute Chunky Rice?

CT: I think so actually! Yeah! Which is the greatest compliment as an author. I felt really attached to them and they felt like real people to me and that is the sort of response I’m hearing from readers.

 

ND: So if this book is coming from a place of post-9/11 guilt, which I interpret as Islamaphobia in the US, then do you think that Dodola and Zam were the direct product of that? 

CT: No no no! They are unrelated to it at all. They don’t even seem like they’re created. They just kind of arrived from the subconscious fully realized. And they predate anything else in the book. They’re of their own making. Laughs.

 

ND: So they came with their geography and their own history?

CT: I knew they were child slaves from the start, but I didn’t know what kind of world they inhabited. And my research of slavery and randomly reading books about slavery pointed me in the direction of the East African/Arab slave trade that predated the cross-Atlantic slave trade by 700 years. As I was reading some of those research books they eluded often to 1,001 Arabian Nights which drew me towards that, and while reading Nights I became aware of the Orientalism in the Richard Burton anthology. Around the same time I started studying Islamic Art. But I did attach myself fairly early on to the Arabian Nights landscape. Right away I could see it for both its strength and weaknesses, but I thought of it as a genre that would be fun to work in like Superheros, Science Fiction, or Noir.

 

ND: But is just such a loaded genre…

CT: Yeah! Bring it on, right!

 

ND: And I think that’s ultimately my response: it’s hard separating you as a creator who’s clearly very sympathetic and is so good at humanizing characters — which comes across so well in the Qur’anic parts — and the fact that you are swinging around in this playground that is so deeply tied up in a history of otherizing.

CT: And ultimately I like the conflict between those two elements.

___________
This is part of an ongoing roundtable on Habibi and Orientalism.

I, Reboot

Most of us can generally agree that the treatment of women in fiction of the 1960s or earlier was by no means sublime.  Consider Lieutenant Uhura, of Star Trek, The Original Series, a Communications Officer aboard the bridge of the starship Enterprise.  Traipsing about the bridge in a short, short skirt, she contributed to the exploration of space by answering the phone and relaying messages.  Consider Barbara Gordon of the Batman comics, a part-time librarian in a skin-tight costume, who carried most of her arsenal in a handy batpurse.

 

It would be a mistake to consider these narratives, however, without the context of their time period.  While they might be offensive to some today, these female characters are progressive for their time in terms of what roles women play.  Uhura was hugely significant, because she was an officer who had a job that involved more technology and know-how than making coffee; Barbara Gordon was one of the first female action heroes who acted on her own.

 

It’s relatively easy to compare social values of the sixties and of the current decade, and conclude that the position of women has significantly changed.  What remains unclear is whether current treatment of women in fiction has improved proportionately.  Reboots, meanwhile, provide the unique opportunity to directly compare the treatment of those values in narrative while taking into account the context of changed social environment.  By taking the same story and telling it in two different time periods, one can easily juxtapose the treatment of values against said time periods.

 

Obviously, reboots often neglect to take advantage of these opportunities, recapitulating the social environment of the past instead of offering commentary on it, or updating it to reflect modern times.  Perhaps this is one reason why the recent boom in reboots, reimaginings, sequels, etc, is seen as stale and unimaginative.  In these reboots, the position of women relative to “current” society is exactly the same as it was fifty years ago.

 

However, there are some reboots in which the changed role of women in the narrative is not merely a recapitulation, but actually seems to be a regression.  That is, not only has the treatment of women in narrative not improved proportionately to the changed role of women in society; some of these reboots would seem significantly behind their source texts even in the sixties.  Christopher Nolan’s Batman reboot, J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, and to some extent Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who sequels and Sherlock Holmes re-imaging in some respects make female characters of the sixties sometimes look damn good.

 

Certainly, it is questionable to suit up hot girls in latex and show off their bodies as they fight crime, and certainly it is objectionable that a gal in a short skirt is a glorified secretary on a show about the future.  The reboots in question remove all that pseudo-feminism by portraying ladies as love interests and lawyers, while men retain their careers of kicking ass and fighting crime with superpowers.  The reboots remove those icky questions of motivation—in which girls only act because they’re daughters/mothers/lovers or because some guy tells them to—by simply removing female agency altogether.  In some of them—instead of females being somewhat questionable representations of the feminist progressive movement—females barely exist at all.

 

Nolan’s Batman reboot is perhaps the most radical repositioning of the female in narrative relative to its source text.  Although Batman’s early forms can be read as male-centric, there is no denying the place of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl in the overall Batman narrative.  Plenty of iterations of Batman, however, do not include Barbara, just as several do not include Robin.  Barbara’s exclusion in these iterations can be seen less as a commentary on her position in the narrative, and rather as subjection to the extreme complexity of the overall Batman story.  There are enough supplemental characters that it is difficult to include them all in any single retelling.

 

However, Nolan’s rendition is particularly interesting due to the heavy emphasis on men, particularly the relationships between fathers and sons.  Martha Wayne, Bruce Wayne’s mother, appears in several scenes, but has no lines.  Her impact on Bruce (and the film) is negligible in comparison to Thomas Wayne, Bruce’s father.  While the role is small, Thomas Wayne colors Batman Begins, establishing the father figure trope and demanding that it be filled in that character’s absence.  Thomas is of course replaced by R’as al Ghul, and when Bruce returns to Gotham, father figures are filled by Alfred, Jim Gordon, and Lucius Fox, with varying degrees of reproof and complicity.  Never is there the suggestion that any of R’as al Ghul’s daughters could possibly show up to ruin the neat pattern-making of prodigal sons and disapproving fathers, because the one significant woman in these films is Rachel Dawes.

 

As a feisty lawyer-type, Rachel Dawes not only suggests that women can have careers, but that they may have an active position in the plot, able to help Batman put away the criminals he catches.  While some might argue that this is progressive, this statement is little different than what Superman suggested even in the 1940s.  In short, Dawes is a rehash of characters such as Lois Lane, Vicky Vale, or oh, even say April O’Neil.  The only new social commentary is in Dawes’ profession as a lawyer, rather than a reporter, which suggests that women can take on still more varied careers, but still, this hardly seems as progressive as Barbara Gordon insofar as the role of women in today’s society.  After all, Barbara Gordon became a vigilante independent of Batman; there is no suggestion whatsoever that Dawes could possibly sustain her own narrative.

 

Nolan’s reboot more directly fails in regard to feminism in The Dark Knight, when Dawes dies.  This is Dawes’ most significant action; it is the crux that instigates all further action.  Her death causes Two-Face to emerge, and Batman to realize that his hopes of legitimate justice are inherently flawed.

 

The idea that a woman’s single greatest strength is self-sacrifice is a common trope in narrative.  It seems to fit in nicely with the idea that a woman’s only strength lies in the help, support, and nurturing of menfolk.  Giving of self is a strength many women do have, and take pleasure in actively offering; however, this is not their only possible form of action.  Self-sacrifice is often portrayed as the ultimate nurturing action (see The Giving Tree) and thus the ultimate strength (see Sucker Punch); a female sacrifices all of her agency so that others may have it.

 

The Dark Knight, however, presents a much less active role; in The Dark Knight, it is not active self-sacrifice but rather passive death that forms the crux of all the rest of the action.  In fact, it is the very passivity of the death that motivates Harvey Dent.  She didn’t have a choice; it was all due to chance: the death of a perfect innocent.  Her earlier fumblings towards agency are thus redeemed; any specters of latex or objectified ass-kicking are thus removed.  In the context of the film, of course, it is a perfect tragedy.  In the context of this male-centric universe, juxtaposed the Batman narrative of the 1960s, however, it is—well.  Still a tragedy.

 

The complete eradication of Barbara Gordon occurs during the climax of the arc of Jim Gordon, police commissioner and traditionally, the father of Barbara Gordon.  Towards the end of The Dark Knight, Two-Face threatens the person Jim “loves most.”  Jim says, “Don’t hurt my family,” and Two-Face reiterates he will only harm the person Jim, “loves most.”  Two-Face chooses not Jim’s wife or daughter, but Jim’s son.  In spotlighting Gordon’s son—however briefly—at the expense of wife or daughter, the film narrowly avoids reference to any possible suggestion of Barbara Gordon and that whole feminist problem that she presents.

 

Canonically, Jim Gordon does have a son (or two), but his daughter Barbara has always been far more important to the Batman narrative.  It’s true that this scene attempts to parallel Rachel Dawes and James Gordon Jr, thus demonstrating that not only females, but children also, may passively die to instigate action.  However, I really admire the manly resistance to even throw fans a bone in this scene by refusing to allow Jim’s daughter—who is present—a name or any lines.  Doing so makes it impossible for fans to draw parallels between Barbara Gordon and Rachel Dawes, which might have resulted in the disastrous suggestion that girls are not bright shining forces of integrity, but may be morally questionable also.

 

Abrams’ recent Star Trek does not manage to avoid these issues quite so neatly.  The role of Uhura is significantly expanded in the reboot, as opposed to The Original Series, which gives us more time to question the treatment of female identity.  Disappointingly, said expansion is due not to an expansion of Uhura’s role on the Enterprise, but rather to her new position as a love interest.  Furthermore, in the source text, Captain Kirk’s various relationships with women showcases the show’s unwillingness to consummate the homoerotic overtones, and yet Kirk’s relationships never seem as serious or integral as the friendship between Kirk and Spock.  By providing the apparently sustained relationship between Uhura and Spock, the reboot further paints over the problematic issue of homosexuality.  The position of women aside, the reboot certainly reads as more heteronormative than The Original Series.

 

Uhura in The Original Series is never really treated as a love interest.  In one episode she falls for a man, in several, she has somewhat flirtatious conversations with Spock.  In another, Kirk kisses her, but the scene is appropriately problematized, because “aliens made them do it.”  Perhaps Uhura is never treated as a love interest due to her race, or perhaps she was never deemed important enough to “deserve” a romantic relationship.  However, she was a regular, important part of the crew and the show not because of any relationships she had, but because of her career, and that was significant at the time the show aired.

 

In some ways, it’s understandable that Uhura in the reboot is a love interest.  There are very few mainstream action and adventure narratives that don’t involve the central protagonists in some sort of romantic plot—though it is interesting to note that the ones that manage to avoid it tend to center around two male protagonists, complete with homoerotic overtones (see House, BBC’s Sherlock, Supernatural, and oh, anything without girls).  So maybe we can blame mainstream culture for its insistence on sexual overtones, without directly citing lack of feminist concern or insight for Uhura’s position.

 

After all, Uhura may not get to fight Nero, pilot a ship into a black hole, or participate in the climax of the film at all, but she does get to translate a Romulan message, which is somewhat pivotal to earlier action.  We also get to see a portrayal of determination, strength, and ambition when she demands that Spock change the roster so that she can go aboard the Enterprise.  The strength of this scene is somewhat negated by the fact that she uses her relationship with Spock in order to get ahead; however, it is possible that Spock did not initially place her on the Enterprise in order to protect her.  Thus Uhura’s demand is an insistence on not being treated like a delicate flower.

 

Overall, whether the role of the reboot Uhura is an improvement in terms of feminism on original Uhura is somewhat murky, both objectively and considering the context of the time periods.  Her position would be more clear if they had sacrificed her in a passive manner, as Nolan did with Rachel Dawes, and as Abrams does with Spock’s mother.  The death of Amanda Grayson, Spock’s mother, motivates Spock’s actions and furthers the plot; while it is a small point, the passive death of Nero’s wife also furthers the plot.  Nero, the villain, is a Romulan whose wife died when the star of Romulus went supernova; he is out to kill Spock for revenge.  Thus the central antagonist and one of the central protagonists act in response to women who were not seen to act themselves.

 

Kirk, meanwhile, is motivated by the death of his father.  His father, moreover, actively sacrificed himself to save his wife and child.  We have no idea what happened to Kirk’s mother, because after giving birth to him, she is no longer important to the narrative.  We also have no idea what happened to Number One, the woman who is canonically (according to The Original Series) second in command to Captain Pike.  She does not exist in the reboot.  One may assume that the alternate universe created by Nero’s intrusion on the timeline resulted not only in Kirk’s blue eyes, but the eradication of Number One.  This deletion conveniently removes concerns we may have had in The Original Series about her lack of a first name or Pike’s somewhat dismissive treatment of her in canon.  Without her existence, we need not be concerned with women in positions of leadership in Starfleet at all; there is nothing to cause us to question it or wonder.

 

Instead, there is Gaila: the green girl Kirk sleeps with in order to get codes to reprogram the Kobayshi Maru.  Considering her skin color, she is most likely an Orion, which—according to canon—is a kind of sex slave.  That she is in Starfleet at all is both progressive and problematic, similar to the original Uhura—or Tasha Yar, in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

 

Tasha Yar is the Chief Security Officer who spent her youth on the streets, avoiding “rape gangs.”  She is the 1990s commentary on the treatment of women, perhaps a reproach to The Original Series, which rarely showed women who could fight or wear pants.  Yar’s troubled past may have been an attempt to highlight her strengths as a warrior and survivor, but it fed into an unfortunate trope that women must overcome slavery, rape, or similar to be as tough as men.

 

Fortunately for the show, The Next Generation managed to eliminate the problem of portraying a warrior female with an icky past when the actress who played Yar demanded a larger part.  The show was left with females who portrayed their strengths through more nurturing functions (counseling and doctoring)—again, an important form of action, but not the only one of which a female is capable.  But because it was the main form of action for women on the show, The Next Generation in some ways seems a lot less progressive than its counterpart, The Orginal Series.

 

Gaila’s own history, however, is never addressed, as opposed to Tasha Yar’s.  Furthermore Kirk has sex with her in order to use her, thereby bringing all those issues that never achieved their full ick-capacity with Tasha Yar right up to the fore with Gaila.  The new Uhura receives a first name, which is more than the original Uhura or Number One ever got, though there is some question too as to whether those characters lacking a first name was somewhat progressive in its own way.  Gaila doesn’t have a name at all in the reboot; “Gaila” comes from a deleted scene.

 

Many other reboots besides these seem to not only lack progressive statements in comparison to modern times, but also in comparison to their previous iterations.  The new Doctor Who is not quite a reboot, since it takes previous canon into account, but it does provide the same sort of reflection on the previous series.

 

The central companions to the Doctor—all female—in the new Who kick a whole lot of ass, but I cannot help but notice that the first two, Rose and Martha, are both in love with the Doctor and seem to believe he can do little wrong.  While there is absolutely nothing wrong with being in love, the distinct power imbalance between the Doctor and, well, everyone else of his acquaintance, suggests that these infatuations are somewhat problematic.  The show, however, doesn’t problematize the power imbalance, only the fact that the Doctor apparently has feelings for Rose, but cannot be with her, and apparently doesn’t really have romantic feelings for Martha.

 

The next companion, Donna, is not in love with the Doctor, and seems positioned to critique his hubris and many, many questionable actions.  However, by the end of her arc she trusts the Doctor without reservation, and seems behind even his morally ambiguous behavior.  This, too, seems to highlight the power imbalance without asking any questions about it.

 

Donna’s arc ends powerfully; she essentially saves the world—but this she can only do by becoming the Doctor himself.  Because even the Doctor realizes the danger there being two of him prevents, he erases Donna’s memory completely, returning her to her former life as though he had never entered it.  This is particularly disturbing because Donna had very little motivation or agency before she met the Doctor; through her adventures with him, she found her strengths and gained some measure of power, even if it was only by means of the Doctor.  By leaving her with no memory of her experiences, Donna once again lacks confidence, and possibly continues the existence she later herself saw as shiftless and meaningless.

 

The Doctor’s most recent companion also begins in a similarly male-influenced, passive manner: as a little girl, Amy Pond meets the Doctor, and she’s obsessed with him ever since.  For two seasons, there is little to no reflection on the fact that Amy’s early beliefs and desires are influenced, even manipulated by a very powerful male authority; her later actions are all predicated upon the Doctor creating a strong impression on her as a child.

 

However, the most recent season expands the role of another female character, River Song, who—while somewhat problematic in her own right—is at last a female who at last can challenge the Doctor in terms of knowledge and power.  The recent season also problematizes Amy’s early relationship with the Doctor—which, for the sake of girls prevailed upon at an early age by male authority figures, is well.  Nice.

 

Hopefully Moffat’s next installment on BBC’s Sherlock will progress similarly.  Sherlock, unlike Doctor Who or Star Trek, is not a reboot of a 1960s narrative, but a reimagining of a late nineteeth century narrative; thus it is no surprise that women do not play large or progressive roles in the stories.  It’s that very lack that makes me wonder at the sudden boom in reboots, reimaginings, and retellings—after all, historical accuracy is not only a convenient, but sometimes a perfectly valid excuse for sexism.

 

Sherlock, however, is a modernized reinvention of Doyle’s stories.  Admittedly, the space for females in the structure of the narrative itself, not just the Victorian time period, is somewhat confining; there has never been a large cast in these stories.  We know characters like Moriarty, Mycroft, and Irene Adler well because so many variations on the stories exist, but canonically, they do not appear very often.  Irene Adler appears only once—though we may applaud reboots for her use and reuse as an attempt to bring a strong female into the narrative.  But if one remains close to canon, there are only two central heroes, John Watson and Sherlock Holmes, and sometimes a third, somewhat lesser protagonist, Inspector Lestrade.

 

However, there is absolutely no reason the issue could not have been addressed in a modern adaptation by merely changing the sex of one of the characters.  Lestrade could have been a girl; there is no reason, canonically or thematically, that Lestrade has to be a man.  One might argue that Moriarity and Mycroft must remain men, as they serve as mirrors to Sherlock, though there seems very little reason why—in a modern context—a woman can’t serve as a parallel character to a man.  Lastly, there is no reason Sherlock cannot be a girl.

 

Sherlock Holmes is a quintessentially male character, but it is not due to sexuality, or physical strength, or other qualities that society tell us are overtly masculine.  Instead, he is masculine due to his phenomenal intelligence and social ineptitude with other people.  There is absolutely no evidence or rationale behind the idea that these traits are inherently masculine, and yet there are few, if any, characters in most of literary or media western canon which are as overwhelmingly intelligent and cerebrally inaccessible as Sherlock Holmes, who are also women.

 

The one reboot I will mention in conclusion is, of course, Battlestar Galactica, which does change the sex of one of the original characters, and reimagines other roles with females to fulfill them.  The reimagined Starbuck is singular not only because she is played by a woman, but because she retains many of the “masculine” characteristics so central to the original character.  She smokes, she gambles, she gets in brawls.  She is not, however, merely a male character with breasts, some of her plots and concerns are considered by society feminine, and other plots and concerns could only happen to a woman.

 

That is not to say that the entirety of Starbuck’s arcs are shining examples of everything a female character should be in narrative.  On the contrary, some of her characterization—like latex and batpurses in the sixties—is a reflection of the deficiencies of our modern times: the not yet perfectly equal role of women in today’s society.  And yet, like Batgirl and the original Uhura were in the sixties, I would say the reboot Starbuck is progressive for her time.  Her role is to ask the questions; we provide the answers.

 

I’m actually not a huge fan of Batgirl.  And I really, really enjoy Nolan’s reboot of Batman, as problematic as it is.  When considering these narratives, however, it’s important to look beyond the diegesis to the context of the time period, and ask questions regarding the situation of social values within the world of the story.  It’s important to do so in the case of reboots and reimaginings in particular, because it is so easy to neglect context not only in favor of the diegesis, but in favor of a context that is valid only to the source text, not the reimagining.  If these retellings do not themselves push boundaries, we are in danger not only of said boundaries remaining in place, but actually backsliding into the positions they so comfortably held decades ago.

More is Never Enough, or Kant’s Numerical Sublime

Ah, the Kantian sublime stands a great craggy edifice,  its  very mention sends shudders through the soul. Well not so much…however, talking about Kant is always fraught. The very name “Kant” invokes the sublime as one tries to wrap one’s head around his prolific ideas. Thus, to discover relationships on the comic page from the mind of the great Kant, it seems like a good idea to break his ideas into panel-sized pieces.

Published  in 1790, Kant’s Critique of Judgment  proposes two aspects of the sublime, the numerical sublime and the dynamical sublime. His rigorous mind comes to these two forms from his discussion of aesthetics and they represent for him an attempt to grapple with the sublime. Even though the sublime experience happens in the body, technically the sublime is our experience of what we see, Kant offers a diagnosis of what might trigger an attack of the sublime. I defer to medical, psychological terms because the sublime is a disruptive force that disturbs the human mind and body. The sublime disturbs order, well-being, bienseance in the Enlightenment sense and represents a charged and potentially dangerous experience.

The feeling of the sublime is a feeling of  displeasure that arises from the imagination’s inadequacy, in an aesthetic estimation of magnitude, for an estimation by reason, but it is at the same time also a pleasure, aroused by the fact this very judgment of the inadequacy, namely, that even the greatest power of sensibility is inadequate, is (itself) in harmony with rational ideas, insofar as striving toward them is still a law for us.

So for those thrill seekers who love to be disturbed, disrupted and knocked out of complacency by comics, the question is where is it and how can I get more of it. For those who like to gaze at the stars and contemplate the enormity of space, actually you are engaging in both of Kant’s sublimes simultaneously, the dynamical unbounded, immense and the numerical that tries to count the stars and is blown away by the impossibility of the task.

At present, I want to count stars if you will, or more properly consider the improbability and achievement of representation of the numerical sublime in comics.

All that being said, it seems that there are self-evident reasons for artists not to want to draw crowd scenes, but there are some that thrive on the creation of minutiae. Phillipe Druillet for example undertook the task of representing Gustav Flaubert’s  Salammbo and the results are stunning.

In this image, the ziggurat panels and small inserts of emblems, add order and assistance to a series of complex, visually stunning images that refuse easy assimilation.

Druillet orders the panels so that the densely articulated depictions of soldiers become patterns. The patterns take on aspects of movement as the viewer struggles to rest his focus on any single aspect of the dense and lushly colored planes.  The panels allow us to fall into these impossibly detailed surfaces and  while his gesture is conceivably  an attempt to contain the sublime, we even add into the landscapes because we resolve the problem of the numerical sublime with an articulation of infinity.

Moebius his contemporary, also works with scale and prolific figures. This overhead spread literally gives the reader a birds eye view of the sprawling action. The detail draws the viewer into the depth of the landscape.

Further, Moebius constructs space in such a way as to open geographies with limitless potentials. At the same time, his vision manages to bring a plausibility to bear that gives a substance to the  fearsome scope of his world.  This image has a life outside of the panels.

His influence is readily obvious in this piece by Geoff Darrow for film  “The Matrix”. The narrative of the film suggests the  numerical sublimity of alternate universes or of unleashed and uncontainable technology. Darrow’s image suggests an unnerving numerical sublime.

Darrow’s work is compelling in its detail. Yet, a strange thing occurred when I began to seek the numerical sublime depicted in comics, the examples that I thought I recalled, were not there. Apparently, my imagination had filled in the blanks. I was surprised to find that the imaginary capacity to see  a more complex world in one’s imagination is not limited to words and reading, but it seems we are able to do this with visual data as well. We are able to store that imaginary information as though it we had seen it. I’m sure the experience of looking for an image that “one is sure is in the comic but just isn’t there when you look” is a commonly shared event.

I definitely thought there were more figures in this Frank Frazetta image for example, the movement and depth of field left me believing that I had seen more than was actually there.

As it turns out this is incredibly useful to the overworked artists who dread the hyper-multiple.  Milton Caniff shares this story about how he dealt with the the demand for the impossible:

The writer comes in sits down, sits at a typewriter and types out this paragraph to direct the artist. The artist comes in and has to draw a man and a woman standing on a windswept hill and 10, 000 Chinese communists coming up with drawn bayonets. Now when you’re the artist and the writer you do the same scene, but you show a fairly close up shot of the hero and heroine, some wind lines and clouds behind with a few leaves going by to show a windswept hill. The man has his arm around the girl, pointing outside the panel saying: “ Look! Here come 10,000 Chinese.” That’s when you’re writing. and drawing. And that’s to make the point.

SABA: You’re making it easier for yourself, is what you’re doing, (laughter).

Caniff: And that’s an exaggeration of the point, that the artist can control it. If he wants to he can draw the 10,000 Chinese soldiers, but usually he finds a way out.

All the same, Caniff takes the challenge:

These roiling compositions are rare, but notwithstanding, their accomplishment stays with the viewer long after they have been seen. It is as if they gather exponentially from the details and the superfluity that they offer.

Artist Tony Salmons offered pithy comments from his perspective in an interview with James Romberger about an artist’s  challenges when representing crowds :

Salmons notes three seemingly innocent words often seen in scripts, ‘a crowd gathers.’ Salmons says, ‘A writer scripts or merely plots this line down on paper and goes on to the next scene. I spend an entire day researching, casting, lighting and acting out that crowd. Is it an opium den? SF or Hong Kong? Texas? German beer garden? Rainbow room at 30 Rock? What kind of crowd? If I do it with total commitment the considerations can go way beyond this. And the writer’s contribution is 3 words, ‘A crowd gathers.’ No matter what the story requires, the artist must make it so.

Salmons is clearly up to the task. His ability to work with space and depth, through black spotting and line work shows off his skill in this sublime image. Movement in the figures seems to amplify the effect in the depiction of a multiple figure composition.

James is also able to produce a crowd:

There are artists who it seems are born to create numerical chaos. James’ image was created during the LA riots in 1992.  The numerical sublime seems to lend itself to revolutionary statements, both literally and figuratively. Consider how radically Gary Panter’s proliferating, unmoored marks assaulted  the parameters of comics.

This type of chaos; of uncontained, irrational imagination stood in direct opposition to the world of corporate comics. Yet Panter was not the first to explore the possibility of overloading the senses to fracture the present from its traditional past. The sixties brought us S. Clay Wilson and other underground artists who filled the page with so many marks in the attempt to  literally “blow our minds.”

It is hard to think of Captain Pissgums without his disturbing cohorts, or to image the revolting  Ruby without her subversive dykes. Wilson, by the sheer volume of  his outrages, insists on a dislocation from the anchors of  America’s received concept of civilization in the sixties. More is always more. These images enter our brains and continue to propagate, because the sublime works to replicate itself. The sublime is sublime, it just keeps adding to its own being.

Jack Kirby too played with sex and the sublime, recognizing the sensory, even erotic power of its energy. For him in the image below, the sublime offers as a site of irony, perhaps bizarrely preemptively and philosophically connected to the vision of  Wilson:

In Kirby’s vision, the senses demonstrated through a mania of eroticism, threatens the virility of Captain America and thus  destabilizes the rationalist  face of order to bring out a collapse of social coherence. While the gesture is not one that many feminists would at first relish, it is nonetheless  interesting for  its alignment of feminine energy with a romantic, revolutionary world.  It is a world slipping out of control.

The numerical sublime is exciting and dangerous, precisely because it is uncontainable. It is hard to achieve, yet ultimately desirable as a destination for many comic artists who seek to escape the confines of the panel and the comic pamphlet. Bernie  Krigstein discusses a project that he would like to undertake with John Benson in a special 1975 issue of Squa Tront and immediately falls into the abyss of the sublime as his concept multiplies itself into infinity:

BENSON: And you would adapt the entire novel?
KRIGSTEIN: Yes; maybe hundreds of pages, or whatever the number of pages it would run to. But as I look at these sample breakdowns, even then I didn’t do it the way I would do it now. I still didn’t give enough space to the pictures. I would make it even much more pictorial in proportion to the number of words that it has here. I’d expand this passage here, where he’s running desperately; I’d expand it much more. And this one passage here, where the regiment is swinging from its position, could practically be a story in itself.
I’d have broader monumental breathtaking sweeping panoramas of the armies. I’d want to convey the notion of the enormity of it and then the contrast of the microscopic things going on inside of this enormity. And I would expand these sequences in order to elaborate on the microscopic things happening to where they’d have the character of deep stories. And the whole thing would be a connection of many many stories into one huge monumental panorama. These roughs still do not convey my real approach, what I would do right now. But some parts of it I find very satisfactory anyway.
BENSON: Actually, you’d have to excise some portions of the novel so that you could treat other portions fully the way you wanted to.
KRIGSTEIN: Exactly. But on the other hand, while cutting out stuff from one point of view, I would insist on an open-ended expansion from an editorial point of view. It might take 100 pages; or I’d like to have the freedom to take 1,000 pages for the same amount of text. I’d like to have no limit on the amount of space for pictures. But now I’m fantasizing; what I’m saying now is pure fantasy.
That would be a monumental enormous project. It means that every single one of these panels has to be a picture, a real picture, without compromising. I couldn’t rely that much on close-ups, either. I’d make it much more pictorial.

Krigstein never manages to enclose the scope of his discussion or one imagines, of his project.  Its ability to continue to grow, exponentially and out of control is self evident in his comments and in his breakdowns for a proposed adaptation of Steven Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. The depiction of these kinds of ideas present problems for the very best:

The lower left hand panel that represents the mass of troops has turned into an abyss of black marks. Chaos occupies the otherwise ordered mind and controlled hand of an experienced and competent artist.

I leave with an image by Hal Foster, who often composed panels with multiple figures and I invite you to consider whether his images are ordered or chaotic. Whether and how the force of the numerical sublime can be made to serve its master, or whether it inevitably escapes free to roam unchecked.

What’s the Big Deal About Sailor Moon?

More than 15 years after its initial debut in Japan, and just about 10 years since its debut in America, the Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon manga is making a comeback, with a brand new edition in English from Kodansha, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon.

Of course there are many fans that are thrilled by this – I count myself among them. For those of us who love this series, no explanation, no reasons, no critical analysis need be applied to the series. We love it, full stop.

However, the refrain I’m hearing over and over from those people who did not catch the wave the first time around, is “I don’t “get” it. What’s the big deal?”

First of all, let me disabuse you of the notion that there is a Big DealTM about Sailor Moon. There isn’t. If you don’t like it, don’t “get” it, can’t understand what we’re seeing, you’re not missing anything critical. Let’s be honest here – if you think Usagi is annoying, and don’t like the premise, the clothes, the romance…there’s nothing I can say to change your opinion. You don’t like Sailor Moon. Own it. I don’t like Dragonball Z and nothing any one of the zillions of fans is ever going to say will change my opinion.

So…what is the big deal about Sailor Moon? Let me tell you my story.

I used to collect American comics. I still have long boxes full of Avengers, Defenders and Invaders. But honestly, by the late 80s my interest was waning. Janet hadn’t killed her asshole husband Hank yet and the Valkyrie still wasn’t lesbian, even though she obviously was. There were fewer and fewer good female characters. When Storm joined the Avengers, and the Legion of Superheroes couldn’t tell that Quisling was the traitor among them, I knew I was done. Although I stopped collecting, I didn’t get all anti-comics. I just left comics and stopped filling the longboxes. I kind of missed the stories, but not enough to go back. Indie comics were too full of themselves (and had no women either) so I just…stopped.

In the late 1990s, anime and manga were starting to become popular here in the US. Cartoon Network used power anime series Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon to spearhead an afternoon anime block. It broke all records for animation in America.

I knew of it, of course. By then I was already making tentative steps into derivative fan work, with some fanfic of Xena: Warrior Princess and, for the first time in many years, found my interest in comics returning…only this time, it was all about manga. Friends came to the house with anime; we watched popular series like Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi Muyo and it was all laughs and fun and games.

So when my wife was home unemployed, and she started watching this series on TV called Sailor Moon, I wasn’t all that surprised that we liked it. I’ve told this story many times, that the first episode I watched was titled in English “Cruise Blues” and when Amy asked Ray if she noticed that they were the only ones on the ship without boyfriends and Ray replied that they didn’t need boys to have fun, I turned to my wife and said, “We are watching two different cartoons. You are watching the pre-pubescent little girl cartoon and I am watching the one with tremendous lesbian subtext.” And so, we were both hooked.

I started to research this Sailor Moon and instantly encountered the fact that two of the Sailor Senshi were a lesbian couple (and this outside of the not subtle lesbian subtext between Usagi and Rei, Minako and Makoto, later Ami and Makoto, and in the manga Minako and Usagi and Rei and Minako. It was actually kind of hard to avoid it, unless you worked hard at it.) And then there was the obvious, incestuous triangle of Usagi, Mamoru and Chibi-Usa. And that was only in the first two series!

Once I learned about the third season, the appearance of the “Outer Senshi” and the fact that they had what was as close to an out lesbian couple as I’d ever see in anime (this was back in the late 90s, remember,) I dug around until I found fansubs of the series. Fansubs weren’t easy back then. You mailed a blank VHS plus postage to some guy somewhere and he sent you back a VHS with a nth generation copy with subtitles manually entered and timed. If you were lucky, the guy was making copies from an LCD.

That’s how I discovered Sailor Moon Super or Sailor Moon S, as most people call it. And how I discovered Sailors Uranus and Neptune, who are indeed a fabulous lesbian couple.

As my wife and I watched Sailor Moon S in Japanese, I realized I could parse some of the linguistic patterns and since I really, really wanted to read the manga for this series (it was still years before Tokyopop would consider putting it out) I started to learn Japanese…just to be able to read Sailor Moon.

The manga was pretty sketchily drawn. Takeuchi’s feet and hands are not worthy of praise. But her characters are beautiful. Yes, they all have the same face…there’s darn few manga artists that don’t do a find and replace face. That’s exactly why hair styles and colors are so strange in shoujo and shounen manga – because otherwise all the characters have the same features. And yet, those lines are lovely, feminine and appealing. Takeuchi wasn’t afraid to dress her characters up, or play a little with their personalities.

The plot is…childish. A slightly-below average middle schooler is the leader of a group of “Guardians” from an ancient Moon Kingdom? Well, gosh that makes tons of sense, doesn’t it? I have two words for you – Dragonball Z. The plot doesn’t have to be sensible, any more than Cinderella’s fairy godmother giving her a glass slipper does. Sailor Moon is childish because it’s written for children. For girl children who want to be Princesses who fight for love and justice and who get the guy, but get to rule the Queendom, rather than adorn the King’s arm. Not for nothing is Queen Serenity accompanied by Prince Endymion. But all the characters were, at heart, girls that any girl might identify with. Girls who are a little – or a lot – different. Each Senshi reflects an archetype, a zodiac. Each Senshi reflects us.

So what is the big deal?

It was a series for girls, when little to no series took girls seriously. Like Xena, Usagi fought for good. Like Xena, Usagi gathered around her allies and enemies. Like Xena, Usagi’s allies become more than just friends. Unlike Xena, Usagi was just a regular girl. Perhaps it was the zeitgeist but for me, having Xena and Gabriel on TV paved the way for me to love cool, attractive Junior Racer Haruka and genius violinist Michiru. The anime fed into the manga, which fed back into the anime. Character qualities and experiences spilling from one into the other and back created a body of canon, fed by the deep well of fanon in the form of fan art and fanfic (many dozens of which I wrote and still ocassionally write) that created the spring with which our fandom was irrigated.

I don’t know if anyone coming to Sailor Moon now can feel that, but I do know it’s been on the New York Times Best Seller list since Volume 1 was released. I’m not surprised at all. Usagi is still annoying yet lovable, Ami is still admirable and sweet. Makoto is strong, yet feminine. Minako, when she arrives will be goofy, but a staunch leader. Setsuna will be mature and mysterious, Chibi-Usa will be 10x annoying, but sympathetic, Haruka and Michiru will be talented, cool, and deeply, obviously in love. And last, but almost never least, Hotaru will be pitiable and amazing.

What’s the big deal about Sailor Moon?

You tell me.

Can the Subaltern Draw?: The Spectre of Orientalism in Craig Thompson’s Habibi

“Edward Said talks about Orientalism in very negative terms because it reflects the prejudices of the west towards the exotic east. But I was also having fun thinking of Orientalism as a genre like Cowboys and Indians is a genre – they’re not an accurate representation of the American west, they’re like a fairy tale genre.” – Craig Thompson, PopTones Interview, September 1, 2011

It’s easy to inventory my feelings about Craig Thompson’s Habibi. For well over a year, I approached its release with equal parts excitement and fear. The fear sprang from the 2010 Stumptown Comics Festival — held in Thompson’s hometown of Portland, OR near the completion of Habibi — as I sat in the audience of a Q&A session with him about the processes of publishing and creation. There he explained (as he has in many venues since) that Habibi was going to be an expansive book about Islam and the idea was birthed out a place of post-9/11 guilt he felt in reaction to America’s Islamophobic tendencies. Had he traveled much in the Middle East? No, except Morocco. Did he know Arabic? No, but he had learned the alphabet. At one point he actively said he was playing “fast and loose with culture” picking from here and there in order to tell his story as he saw fit. As I sat in the audience I saw red flags going up. I was about the spend a year abroad studying how The Adventures of Tintin is a Orientalist text precisely because Hergé rarely left the confines of Belgium while drawing the far off landscapes of India, Egypt, China, or made-up Arab lands like Khemed. And here was Craig Thompson some 80 odd years later, well intentioned, proposing a very similar project of creating a made-up Arab land of Wanatolia for the purposes of quelling his own guilt. What he called “fast and loose,” I called cultural appropriation.

Habibi at its best and worst.

Now that the tome is here and I’ve had a chance to read it I feel no less nauseous or enthusiastic about the work that Thompson has produced. To be clear, Habibi is a success on many levels, but it also contains elements that are strikingly problematic through the lens of Orientalism. There are three key components to Habibi: Calligraphy and Islamic patterns, illustrated Suras from the Qur’an and Haddith, and a love story between the characters Dodola and Zam. On the first two counts, Thompson has more than excelled in creating a beautiful rarity for U.S. bookshelves. On the last count of the decades-spanning love story that Thompson has chosen to tell and the setting he has chosen to tell it in, I find that Habibi is a tragically familiar Orientalist tale that a reader can find in books by Kipling or many a French painter.

The Slave Market by Jean-Leon Gerome (1866)

I will get to how the book fails to escape many classic Orientalist trappings soon, but first let’s discuss what Habibi gets right. The good is found foremost in the calligraphy and geometric patterns Thompson employs throughout Habibi. Given the technical skill and confidence Thompson uses when writing in Arabic, it is really unbelievable that he doesn’t actually know the language. Here is a prime example from early in the text:

From any perspective this is stunning artwork. Through Dodola’s first husband, a scribe, Thompson creates a space to explore the beauty of calligraphy in the larger narrative. Therefore, on a meta-level, Habibi is a format for Thompson to practice calligraphy: an art form that lends itself well to the loose expressive brush line he made iconic in Blankets. As a reader, Thompson’s joy in learning the Arabic alphabet and how it can work simultaneously as a symbolic and literal art form comes across. His perspective as a non-native speaker with a strong artistic background works towards him making interesting connections about Arabic in Habibi:

Along these lines, Thompson explores the geometric shapes of Islamic art to great success. The heavily detailed patterns he often uses in borders are the work of a talented, and slightly obsessive-compulsive, artist. The finely detailed explorations of Islamic patterns are a key part of what makes reading Habibi such a treat. As a reader I was often forced to pause in a page in praise of Thompson’s technical skill. While over-relying on this ornate style as shorthand for “Arab setting” made me raise a cautionary eyebrow beforehand, it is clear that Thompson is thoughtful in a way that escapes the pitfall. Here is a late in the text explanation of patterns that offers a glimpse into how thorough the cartoonist was in his research:

The second thematic triumph of Habibi is the manner which Thompson explores Islam. This clearly and heavily researched portion of the text contains the most exciting and memorable sections of Habibi by far. Thompson has mentioned the influence of Joe Sacco during the book making process and it is clear this is where Sacco’s research and report approach has influenced Thompson the most. Just as Sacco’s work lives in the footnotes of Gaza, here we get the product of Thompson diving deep into Islamic Hadith (the reported statements and actions of the Prophet Muhammad during his life), specific suras (chapters) of the Qur’an, and pre-Qur’anic mysticism. The threads he pulls out of his research are fascinating on their own right. His act of discovery is shared with the reader and it is clear he was excited to make it.

After reading the book it is evident that these are the sections Thompson refers to in his press when he talks about the book coming from a place of post-9/11 guilt. In the aftermath of September 11th, American Islamaphobia was predicated on understanding the attack by a few extremists as representative of an entire faith. Realizing this, Thompson uses Habibi to perform the due diligence of going into the Qur’an to reveal the large venn diagrams in between faiths. The question Thompson puts out there is: How can so many Christians and Jewish people be so against Islam when there are so many similarities between the faiths?

This exploration of the slight differences of the Abraham story between the Old Testament and the Qur’an — namely which son he takes to sacrifice — is one of the more successful uses of the Qur’an in Habibi. Thompson returns to this story of sacrifice multiple times in the narrative to increasing success, even when it simply used as a visual cue. By the end we get Thompson resolving the story by noting that in both versions what matters is that God spared the son, and from them the lineages of both faiths became deeply intertwined.

Thompson uses Habibi as a venue to argue that Islam and Christianity are not at odds with each other, but interconnected to one another. On this mark, Habibi is a well-done and original contribution to the canon of contemporary Western comics literature. I applaud Thompson for humanizing a religion that many have been quick to vilify, and for managing to do it in a non-preachy way. In fact, because he approaches Islam with a clear compassion and level-headedness, I suspect many readers let Thompson off the hook for the Orientalist elements of the text.

Which brings us to the bulk of the book: the love story between Dodola and Zam spanning multiple decades, set predominately in the land of Wanatolia. While this story is drawn with the same detail-attentive pen that Thompson uses at the service of calligraphy and geometric patterns, here it predominantly captures the vagueness of stereotypes. Thompson contributes to (instead of resisting) Orientalist discourse by overly sexualizing women, littering the text with an abundance of savage Arabs, and dually constructing the city of Wanatolia as modern and timeless.

One of the biggest missteps that Habibi makes is relying heavily on unrequited sex as a main narrative thrust. In John Acocella’s critique of Stieg Larsson’s popular Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series from earlier this year, he notes that some charge Larsson of “having his feminism and eating it too” based on the blunt manner in which he uses rape as a plot device. I think a similar charge can be laid against Thompson, who uses the repeated rape (and sometimes consensual sex by circumstance) of Dodola as an emotional tool that never feels wholly earned.

The rape of Dodola

What Thompson makes repeatedly explicit throughout Habibi is implicit in the classic Orientalist painting “The Slave Market” by Jean-Leon Gerome pictured earlier. In that painting, as with many more from the same era, the savagery of Orientals is imagined by European artists and portrayed for European audiences. What is reflected in these paintings is the White Man’s Burden: the felt need among those in the West to save Arab women from Arab men. By imitating the style of French Orientalist paintings as a vessel for his story, Thompson also transfers the message those paintings are loaded with. It is the same White Man’s Burden that drives readers to register Dodola as a damsel in distress (a position she inhabits for the majority of the book). She needs saving from the savage Arab men that over-populate the book.

Furthermore, Thompson creates a world where Dodola’s chief asset is her sexed body. She sacrifices herself to men to feed Zam, gain a version of “freedom” with the Sultan, and save herself from jail. Thompson crafts a societal position for the main character of the book where she must always be exotic and sexualized. Proof of our empowered heroin:

The thing about this version of empowerment (as Acocella argues with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) is that while readers do feel solidarity with Dodola, they are also given a space to live out a version of their own sexual fantasies via the text. It’s hard to make the distinction between a character being overly sexualized as a necessity for a larger feminist narrative and the reality that the product of this narrative is a book with a nude exotic Arab woman in panel after panel.

The question, then, is if Thompson so badly wanted to tell a story about what sex means in the context of love (familial to sexual), survival, and sacrifice, why did he choose this vessel? The answer I come to is that because this was the easy context. The artistic playground he chose of barbaric Arabs devoid of history but not savagery is a well-trod environment in Western literature, and one that is consistently reinforced in the pages of Habibi. In too many panels, Thompson conjures up familiar and lazy stereotypes of Arabs. From the greedy Sultan in his palace, to the Opium dazed harem, to the overly crowded streets of beggars, and the general status of women as property, Thompson layers the book with the hollow caricatures from other literature. These settings are easy to imagine because they have been passed down and recycled throughout much of Western media, so we immediately register these vague settings as natural:

Nudity in Sultan’s Harem

Thompson constructs a version of the Orient that is filled with savage Arab men and sexualized Arab women, all at the service of penning a humanizing love story between slaves. The thing about humanizing, the way that Thompson does it here, is that while Dodola and Zam arrive as three-dimensional characters, they are made so by comparison to a cast of extremely dehumanized Arabs. While reading Habibi you can count the characters of depth on one hand with fingers to spare, but the amount of shallow stereotypes embodied in the supporting cast is staggering. The Sultan’s palace perhaps contains the most abundant examples of Thompson’s Orientalism. For the majority of the comic that takes place in the palace, the dialogue is so cliché-ridden that one could take out the words from the panels and the flow of the story would not be disrupted.

The Tusken Raiders present “the phantom courtesan of the desert”

Thompson has often mentioned the influence of 1001 Arabian Nights on him when creating the setting for Habibi. It’s easy to see this connection through Dodola’s status in the palace, but I think Thompson may be understating the influence of a more contemporary take on one of those tales: Disney’s Aladdin. In the same way that this Gulf War children’s classic is a prime contemporary example of Orientalism in America, Habibi repeats many of the moves in a more highbrow setting. As Aladdin opens, a nameless desert merchant sets the tone for viewers in a song about the Arabian Nights we are entering:

Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place

Where the caravan camels roam

Where they cut off your ear

If they don’t like your face

It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home*

I thought of these lyrics repeatedly while reading through Habibi, as I could easily imagine the same desert merchant popping up in panels of Habibi to chime in: “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!” In Habibi, Dodola and Zam are struggling for a better life in a fixed system of backwardness. What is ultimately most frustrating about the brutality of Habibi‘s Arabs is it is a brutality that is never justified or made to face consequences: it just sits there as normalcy. Dodola being raped, the harsh way the city treats Zam when he is on his own, the Sultan’s ruthlessness, the caravan camels roaming: these are all just acceptable facets of Wanatolia being a faraway place. Like Arguba in Aladdin, Wanatolia is a made-up and timeless setting for love to spring in spite of Arabness.

Wanatolia represents the heart of Habibi’s most problematic elements. In the sense that Habibi is a fairy tale (which Thompson has stated he was intending to create) it is understandable that the city is constructed as “timeless.” In other words, the majority of Dodola and Zam’s story isn’t tied to an analogous timeline. The problem arises when in the latter chapters of the book Thompson reveals that the same backward setting of Wanatolia (which houses the harem filled palace of the Sultan) dually houses a modern urban city. When Dodola and Zam return to Wanatolia after escaping the palace and recouping with a fisherman, we see the city in a completely new light: it is now a vibrant bustling city with billboards for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, SUVs, and free women pushing strollers.

The reveal means that readers now have to reconcile that the same city of Wanatolia houses in a small proximity a site of forced sexual slavery and a site of Western-style modernity; a city where an Arguba-like brutality lives in tandem with a KFC. Therefore, Thompson presents a version of modernization for Arabs that is fueled by backwardness. The entire events of the book are retroactively a modern reality in the wake of an urban Wanatolia.

Dodola flirts with “being modern,” where “being modern” means taking off the hijab.

Wanatolia represents the poignant identity crisis at the heart of Habibi: it wants to be a fairytale and commentary on capitalism at the same time. The problem is that in sampling both genres so fluidly, Thompson breaks down the boundaries that keep the Oriental elements in the realm of make-believe. In other words, the way in which Wanatolia is portrayed as simultaneously savage and “modern” reinforces how readers conceive of the whole of the Middle East. Although Thompson is coming from a very different place, he is presenting the same logic here that stifles discourse in the United States on issues like the right to Palestinian statehood. If we are able to understand Arabs in a perpetual version of Arabian Nights, then we are able to deny them a seat at the table of “civilized discourse.”

Ultimately, when looking at Habibi we are left with the value of intention. Thompson has argued rather convincingly in recent talks that the book is knowingly Orientalist and he wanted to engage with these stereotypes to simply play within the genre. As he claims in the quote that leads this review, he intended to use Orientalism as a genre to tell a tale about Arabs the same way that stories in the genre of Cowboys and Indians are both fun and inaccurate. The problem in making something knowingly racist is that the final product can still be read as racist.

I know that Craig Thompson is a great guy who would probably win an award for thoughtfulness if such an award existed, but the issue remains that Habibi reproduces many of the Orientalist stereotypes already abundant in Western literature and popular culture. Although Thompson set out to play with these stereotypes, he never does a good enough job distinguishing what separates play from his own belief.

Habibi is an imperfect attempt to humanize Arabs for an American audience. There are definitely large technical and thematic triumphs to note, some of which I’ve mentioned here (from calligraphy to Qur’an) and others of which I didn’t get to (particularly the role of water/environmental concerns in the narrative). On an aesthetic level, Habibi is a wonderful experience that I recommend to anyone with spare time and the ability to lift heavy objects. Thompson is one of the most talented comic artists and writers working today, and that he took seven years working on Habibi is evident in the ink on display throughout the book. Yet, between the eroticized women, the savage men, and the presentation of these elements as constituents of Arab modernity, it is unfortunate Thompson’s skills are being used at the service of a mostly Orientalist narrative.

* The lyric “they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face” was removed in subsequent versions of Aladdin due to a complaint by the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). I recommend reading the ADC’s explanation of the situation.
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Update by Noah: Nadim’s thoughts have inspired an impromptu roundtable on Orientalism. which can be read here as it develops.