Ugliness, Empathy, and Octavia Butler

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Qiana Whitted

This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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How do critiques of identification complicate Western models of empathy? What might empathy look like, and produce, when it doesn’t require identification? What about more difficult cases in which the reader is required to empathize with the oppressor, or with more complicated protagonists? – Megan Boler, “The Risks of Empathy”

She was not afraid. She had gotten over being frightened by “ugly” faces long before her capture. The unknown frightened her. The cage she was in frightened her. She preferred becoming accustomed to any number of ugly faces to remaining in her cage. – Octavia Butler, Dawn

I didn’t agree to participate in this roundtable on Octavia Butler because I enjoy her writing, but rather because I don’t. My admiration for her storytelling is nothing short of begrudging; I have to work at it. And I’ve always been careful to attribute my resistance to matters of personal taste. Butler is, after all, a beloved award-winning writer in science fiction, a pioneer who helped open a space for communities of black speculative fiction writers that I adore, including Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemison, Tannarive Due, and Zetta Elliot. So if I find the slug-like aliens in Dawn nauseating or if the pedophilic undertones in Fledgling nearly keep me from finishing the novel, then I assume that’s my problem.

My displeasure doesn’t prevent me from recognizing Butler’s importance in my African American literature courses and I teach her fiction whenever I can, with her 1979 novel Kindred being the most popular. Students are eager to embrace the story’s invitation to see the interconnected perils of slave resistance and survival through Dana’s modern eyes, grateful that the narrative’s historical corrective comes at the comfortable distance of science fiction tropes. The book raises provocative questions for debate, although I admit to being troubled by how often readers come away from Kindred convinced that they now know what it was like to be enslaved. Too often, their experience with the text is cushioned by what Megan Boler characterizes as “passive empathy”: “an untroubled identification that [does] not create estrangement or unfamiliarity. Rather, passive empathy [allows] them familiarity, ‘insight’ and ‘clear imagination’ of historical occurrences – and finally, a cathartic, innocent, and I would argue voyeuristic sense of closure (266).

Much of Butler’s fiction doesn’t work this way, however. Estrangement and unfamiliarity, particularly in relation to ugliness and the repulsiveness of the alien body, are central to her work. And this is what gets me. The non-human creatures she imagines make me cringe and their relationships with humans in her fiction are even harder to stomach. My first reaction to the Tlic race in Butler’s 1984 short story, “Bloodchild,” was disgust, made all the more unnerving because of the great care Butler seemed to take in the description of the strange species; the serpentine movements of their long, segmented bodies resemble giant worms with rows of limbs and insect-like stingers.

bloodchild

It doesn’t matter to me that the Tlic can speak English and feel pleasure and build governing institutions, not when they look like that. In the story, they use humans of both sexes to procreate in what initially appears to be a mutually beneficial, parasitic relationship, at least until the main character, a young human male named Gan, begins to question the status quo. Butler’s description of Gan curled up alongside T’Gatoi, the Tlic who has adopted him and his family, is not really an image I want to grapple with for long:

T’Gatoi and my mother had been friends all my mother’s life, and T’Gatoi was not interested in being honored in the house she considered her second home. She simply came in, climbed onto one of her special couches, and called me over to keep her warm. It was impossible to be formal with her while lying against her and hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny.

“You’re better,” she said this time, probing me with six or seven of her limbs. “You’re gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous.” The probing changed subtly, became a series of caresses. (4)

T’Gatoi uses her authority as a government official to protect humans (called Terrans) in exchange for the use of their bodies as reproductive hosts. The balance of power between the two species tips back and forth in the interest of self-preservation and free will. Gan isn’t sure he wants to be impregnated – is he a partner or a pet? – but he ultimately submits under the terms of a negotiated relationship that takes into account both his discomfort with the T’Gatoi’s rules and his reluctant longing for her affection. T’Gatoi, too, has desires and cares for Gan. She also wants her Tlic children nurtured in a loving home if they are to survive. And while I admit that I can relate to these feelings and conflicted needs, this is a kind of intimacy that I’m willing to share with a pregnant man, not with a bug.*

Boler asserts that Western models of empathy are based on acts of “consuming” or universalizing differences so that the Other can be judged worthy of our compassion. Despite our best efforts, we end up using the Other “as a catalyst or a substitute” for ourselves in order to ease our own fears and vulnerabilities, rather than actively working to change the assumptions that shape our perspective (268). I’m in awe, then, of the way Butler’s science fiction heightens readers’ physical discomfort with characters like the Tlic in order to rebuff passive empathy and other modes of identification that absolve us of the need for critical self-reflection. T’Gatoi is the Other that I can never fully know. I can’t easily reduce her experience to my own, but I also can’t deny the prickle of recognition that comes from the emotional struggle between the Tlic and the Terrans. When Gan’s mother jokes, “I should have stepped on you when you were small enough,” I recognize her bitterness as a survival strategy, an attempt to upset a social hierarchy and dissociate from the Not Me.

So when I recoil at every reminder of T’Gatoi’s “ugliness,” I wonder what this emotion says about my approach to difference in society and in myself. How does my reaction to the unfamiliar outside the story, my unwillingness to engage the socially embodied strangeness of 2014, compare to the blustery panic of creepy crawly things I want to step on because they are small enough? (And what about those times when the bug is me?)

“Bloodchild” turns my personal readerly aversion into an ideological dilemma and advances the more challenging work of what Boler describes as “testimonial reading”:

Recognizing my position as ‘judge’ granted through the reading privilege, I must learn to question the genealogy of any particular emotional response: my scorn, my evaluation of others’ behaviour as good or bad, my irritation – each provides a site for interrogation of how the text challenges my investments in familiar cultural values. As I examine the history of a particular emotion, I can identify the taken-for-granted social values and structures of my own historical moment which mirror those encountered by the protagonist. Testimonial reading pushes us to recognize that a novel or biography reflects not merely a distant other, but analogous social relations in our own environment, in which our economic and social positions are implicated. (266-7)

Boler’s work on emotion and reading practices draws on her experience teaching Art Spiegelman’s Maus and other fictional works about historical events to make her case. But Butler’s science fiction thought-experiments also provide a framework for a mode of bearing witness that is just as complicated .

In the 1987 novel, Dawn, the first book of Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy (retitled Lilith’s Brood), the main character models the task of testimonial reading against the “affective obstacles” that hinder awareness of “the power relations guiding her response and judgments” (265). These obstacles initially come in the form of extraterrestrials called the Oankali whose bodies are entirely covered with writhing, grayish-white sensory tentacles. They have rescued groups of human survivors, including a black woman named Lilith, in the wake of nuclear destruction on Earth. Awakened on their ship years later, Lilith is required to remaining in her room with one of the ugly creatures until she can look at them without panic. The aliens know that before Lilith can interact with their society without harming herself or others, she must grapple with her revulsion at their physical appearance:

[The Oankali] walked across the room to the table platform, put one many-fingered hand on it, and boosted himself up. Legs drawn against his body, he walked easily on his hands to the center of the platform. The whole series of movements was so fluid and natural, yet so alien that it fascinated her.

Abruptly she realized he was several feet closer to her. She leaped away. Then, feeling utterly foolish, she tried to come back. …

“I don’t understand why I’m so… afraid of you,” she whispered. “Of the way you look, I mean. You’re not that different. There are – or were – life forms on Earth that looked a little like you.”

He said nothing.

She looked at him sharply, fearing he had fallen into one of his long silences. “Is it something you’re doing?” she demanded, “something I don’t know about?”

“I’m here to teach you to be comfortable with us,” he said. “You’re doing very well.”

She did not feel she was doing well at all. “What have others done?”

“Several have tried to kill me.”

She swallowed. It amazed her that they had been able to bring themselves to touch him. “What did you do to them?

“For trying to kill me?”

“No, before – to incite them.”

“No more than I’m doing to you now.” (16-17)

Entire chapters are spent detailing the process through which Lilith learns to view the Oankali named Jdahya without fear. Their exchange invites comparisons with the xenophobia and prejudice of our own world, of course; Lilith’s dark skin could easily elicit similar reactions. Untangling the “genealogy” of her emotional responses becomes even more daunting once she learns that the aliens have three sexes and the ability to manipulate the genetic material of other beings. She is repulsed one moment, curious the next. Unable to look away, she demands answers from Jdahya until her body’s refusal to accept what he is becomes physically and emotionally exhausting. It is then that she begins to ask questions of herself. “God, I’m so tired of this… Why can’t I stop it?” (26).

Butler turns Lilith’s reactionary apprehension into a more productive space for her and for us as readers so that we may all think more critically about the larger forces at work in our judgments of others. To me this is what makes Butler an exceptional storyteller, whether I like her writing or not. Equally important is the fact that Lilith’s encounter with this single Oankali is only a first step. She’ll have to leave the room, meet others, apply what she has learned. For my own part, I’m now half way through Adulthood Rites, the second book in Lilith’s Brood and it is slow going, but I want to finish. The story has been difficult and deeply rewarding for me in a way that I’ve come to expect from Octavia Butler, a reading experience not unlike the probing of limbs that turns to a series of caresses.

*Nnedi Okorafor also explores dynamics of power through human companionship with an insect-like robot in her terrific short story, “Spider the Artist.”

Works Cited

Boler, Megan. “The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze.” Cultural Studies. 11 (2) 1997: 253-73.

Butler, Octavia. Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996.

—–. Lilith’s Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. New York: Warner Books, 2000.

The Most Popular Movie Column in the Entire World #5 – Two Excerpts from the Life’s Work of a Dedicated Analyst and Top Earner

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Jog

Six miles away from my office is a theater that plays Bollywood movies simultaneously with their Indian release. This is one such film.

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Holiday: A Soldier Is Never Off Duty
Directed by AR Murugadoss, 2014

***

I first learned of AR Murugadoss in the way most people in the United States learn of AR Murugadoss: he is the writer and director, we are told, of ‘the Bollywood version of Memento.’ Moreover — and this is the important bit, the part that raises eyebrows, because it is about money, and all notions of cultural superiority and/or prevailing taste can generally be cast aside in the U.S. on the proviso that one culture’s lucre is roughly as good as another’s — the Bollywood version of Memento did just as well as the real Memento in global theatrical grosses, and isn’t that something?

It’s true. Memento (2000) carries an estimated worldwide box office take of $39.7 million. Ghajini (2008), its multitudinous crore translated to USD, weighs in at roughly $38.3 million. This remains quite large for an Indian film, but in ’08 it was unprecedented. Know this: while Memento was a small, tricky crime movie made by a near-unknown British director, Ghajini was groomed to be a hit – a massy-classy vehicle for Aamir Khan, one of the most recognizable stars in Bollywood, struck from the proven success of an earlier, Tamil-language film of the same title, which Murugadoss had written and directed in 2005 to splendid response.

One year later, the Salman Khan vehicle Wanted would touch off a lucrative vogue for remakes of “south” films, but Ghajini sat aloof, only ceding its record to Aamir Khan’s next major endeavor, the inspirational comedy 3 Idiots. Its success seemed unique, and Murugadoss was not a straightforward masala man anyway.

Accounts vary as to how Murugadoss came to borrow from Memento, ranging from his having watched the film halfway through writing the script to Ghajini and plunking down its main character in a snap of inspiration, to Jodorowsky’s Dune-like tales of his having merely heard the premise of the English film described to him while concocting the story. Either way, Ghajini is best understood as less a singing, dancing Ballad of Leonard Shelby than a random episode of an imaginary television anthology consisting of nothing but crime stories about people with anterograde amnesia, Memento having served as the pilot.

Personally — as I am wont to do in most circumstances — I tried to ignore the existence of Christopher Nolan to focus on something more interesting. There is a profoundly odd dialectic at work in the Hindi Ghajini. Like the Nolan film, in detailing his story of a man on the hunt for revenge, Murugadoss includes both scenes of ‘present’ action and scenes from the ‘past.’ But there is no tension between b&w and color, and no tricks with the chronology. Instead, all of the ‘past’ footage is shot in a bright, sunny, eminently artifice-driven manner common of Hindi entertainers. A silly Bollywood romance, which ends with the heroine getting bludgeoned to death. It is a memory, horribly preserved; a film by which Aamir Khan’s protagonist might memorialize his happy former life.

The ‘present’ footage, in contrast, is noticeably drabber and dull, with whipping camera movements and ‘gritty’ editing which (to this American) calls to mind network police procedurals. Basically, it is a different kind of entertainment, coexisting in space with its fluffier sibling. At one point, Khan attends a gala function in pursuit of his nemesis, where a stage show is about to begin. He then seems to hallucinate a massive, impossible dance sequence, full of beauty and glamor and costume changes. Normal Bollywood pictures do this all the time, but they merely cut to the dancing, warping the cast into a music video and ignoring reality altogether. Murugadoss, however, implicates diegesis, which I found utterly fascinating – was the director attempting to comment on the psychological salve of candyfloss cinema? Gangs of Wasseypur, a much more self-evidently ‘serious’ project from a ‘serious’ filmmaker (Anurag Kashyap, 2013), would break off syrupy, sentimental songs from older movies and recontextualize them as motivating factors for a criminal antihero; was Ghajini really so different? Hell, would Murugadoss reveal that ‘dark’ stylization might be just as artificial as ‘light,’ pulling the rug out from under the whole vigilante concept? The possibility is delightfully teased!

But this is a tease without climax. Ghajini, in the end, is a pretty common revenge picture, one which entirely fails to answer any of the cinematic questions it raises – if, indeed, it was aware it was raising them.

Clues, perhaps, might be found in Murugadoss’ background. He’d been a writer and an actor during school, his artistic tendencies encouraged by his beloved father, a man of modest means who did not live to witness his son’s success. “AR” were the older man’s initials, folded by Murugadoss with numerological assistance into a lucky pseudonym. Purportedly, Murugadoss also toyed with radical politics in college, though it seems his Naxalite flirtations derived less from a doctrinally Maoist point of view than a generalized concern for social justice. His film school applications were rejected after graduation, so he instead worked as a novelist and story writer while pursuing on-the-job training as an AD, which finally led to his debut as auteur in 2001. He has written every one of his eight directorial ventures. His films have never failed to make money.

When asked once about his success, Murugadoss replied pragmatically: “I am focused; I analyze film trends and work extensively on scripts.” Elsewhere he adds that this is not to copy the latest theatrical successes so much as to understand the tastes of the audience, and hit them with something they haven’t realized they want. He also apparently keeps an eye on foreign concepts; his follow-up to the original, ’05 Ghajini was a Telugu-language picture which took its premise from the notorious sentimental drama Pay It Forward(!!), transformed into a socially conscious action-drama with the amazing title of Stalin. It was then remade in Bollywood under the title Jai Ho, where it grossed over Rs 100 crore, though Murugadoss did not direct; he was too busy with other projects, and no doubt analyzing further trends.

And as I became less ignorant, I wondered: is sophistication a mistake of culture? I saw Ghajini as unusually sensitive and inquisitive re: pop cinema properties, but couldn’t that also be a directness that evades my provincial expectations? In ‘normal’ American films, you expect a steadiness of cinematography, of color correction, so as not to disrupt the illusion of witnessing actual life occurring before you. But since Bollywood films frequently break out into music and dancing anyway, it could be that it makes perfect sense just to ‘code’ the happy scenes as happy, and the serious scenes as serious, in an intuitive visual manner that audiences wouldn’t need to be able to explain in order to know. This way, the maximum number of viewers could interface with a fairly complex plot, as there could be no mistake as to the film’s intent from moment to moment. This is also why Murugadoss, by his own admission, tends to set his films in cities: because they translate better to different languages across India, with little need to worry about anyone puzzling over local customs or obscure dialects.

Analytics. Logic. He’d seem almost a robot, this Murugadoss, if he weren’t so fucking perverse.

***

Holiday: A Soldier Is Never Off Duty, is the newest film written and directed by AR Murugadoss. It is an extremely close remake of his 2012 Tamil-language smash Thuppakki; if you have not been keeping count, know that one quarter of Murugadoss’ directorial oeuvre consists of remakes of films from elsewhere in his catalog, though the filmmaker appears to view “remaking” a film as an opportunity to isolate the flaws of an original and create a perfected version. Holiday, then, can be seen as the final form of Thuppakki. It is not based on any discernible Hollywood antecedent, so I am left to grasp at the trend its analytic creator must have identified.

The answer, I guess, is martial patriotism.

Toward the beginning of this year’s summer blockbuster season, I was advised away from director Gareth Edwards’ new version of Godzilla on the allegation that it engaged in Michael Bay-style military worship. I saw the film anyway, and disagreed. While it is true that the hero of the story is a Navy man, and that Our Armed Forces more-or-less save the day, the American military is nonetheless shown to make dangerous, critical mistakes. They must be saved — as men often are in Godzilla films — from their own hubris.

There is no such vacillation in Holiday; its closest English-language equivalent is 2012’s Act of Valor, a film starring real Navy SEALs and live Navy firepower. Akshay Kumar, about whom I’ve written before, stars as Virat Bakshi of the Indian Army, who is secretly a nigh-unkillable specialist with the Defence Intelligence Agency. He has returned home to Mumbai on leave, where his family plots his arranged marriage with a nice girl, by which I mean a grown adult, but do keep in mind that heroine Sonakshi Sinha *is* young enough to be Kumar’s daughter, and, like a child, is not given a single goddamned thing of substance to do at any point whatsoever.

Even some admirers of this film have suggested it could be even better with the romantic track excised. I suspect, however, that Murugadoss is hedging his bets; the widest audience, after all, may not want to stare at a sausage party, and those with a stake in the promotion of romantic songs will be even less pleased. With Ghajini, a crowd-pleasing romance was built right in to the plot; no such luck here, so best to keep it painless with a familiar jodi – of Sinha’s thirteen film appearances, six have been in Akshay Kumar vehicles, and the two share an easy, convincing chemistry, ideal for mass placation.

And yet!

As with Ghajini, Murugadoss plays the romance and thriller elements of Holiday directly off of one another, this time as deliberate interruptions. In fact, the first 35 or so minutes of the film betray no suggestion that there’s even going to *be* any action – it’s a completely straightforward mismatched couple scenario, complete with a big, ditzy song number where Kumar hilariously and romantically pisses Sinha off by imposing himself on all of her extracurricular interests. This, the film says, is the [h]oliday a soldier can enjoy, but alas, it is short-lived – soon a satchel bomb explodes in a crowded bus, the camera leering at an elderly couple trapped in an adjoining car as they’re enveloped, luxuriously, by flames.

This time, Murugadoss allows no variation in visual approach; everything is shot in a distinctly bright, it’s-gonna-be-okay-the-hero’s-gonna-win type of manner, even as Kumar, having spotted the terrorist behind the bombing escaping with ease from his hospital confines, abducts the man and whisks him away to a bedroom torture chamber, where the hero slices a joint from one of that bastard’s fingers and immediately elicits wholly accurate information. Stow your murmurs, American liberals: not only is torture necessary, it is SO FUCKING COOL.

Before long, Kumar has discovered a pestilence coursing through the blood of India: “sleeper cells,” always pronounced in English, with the frequency and intonation of “LSD” in a ’60s drug film. A talking head on a television fills us in on the details, praising U.S. domestic security policies in the wake of 9/11. This is hardcore shit, quickly lapsing into feverish, ecstatic fantasy. Gathering a group of Army buddies at a wedding reception, Kumar suggests a jolly game for the well-dressed bunch to play. Having kept the original, tortured terrorist dosed on ketamine and locked in a closet for days, Kumar now allows his escape; as would any of us in the same situation, the man immediately and accurately goes about facilitating the complicated, dozen-man bombing mission planned for that date. Men break off from Kumar’s party to follow each new sleeper agent, until it is 12 heroes following 12 villains.

Reach into your bags, Kumar says, and you’ll find I’ve given you a gun! The man you are following is a terrorist! On my signal, you must draw your weapon and shoot him dead in public! Each player agrees without hesitation, and on Kumar’s signal Murugadoss cuts rapidly across one dozen gory headshots, crack crack crack: a coordinated strike on terrorism, just like the coordinated attacks they launch on innocents! Twelve handsome, well-dressed cosmopolitan men — the livelihood of a strapping nation — flee the scene, and the news media immediately and unanimously identifies each and every victim of this ritual as dirty terrorists, causing the leader of the terrorists, played by model-turned-actor Freddy Daruwala, to glower in his well-furnished estate… and summon further terror, via mobile!

It is too much: a quality that seems to have been discerned by the poster designers, at least (see above). If the writer/director is aware, however, he does not overplay his hand, and lord knows he could. Akshay Kumar is more than capable of playing things five-alarm broad, but here he’s subdued and emphatic. He’s a big improvement over “Vijay,” the preternaturally collegiate star of Thuppakki, sneering his way through every scene like the cockiest freshman in general science and requiring some combination of wirework and intrusively rapid editing to accomplish anything in the way of fighting. Kumar, though 46, is still fit enough to draw from his background in martial arts performance and pull off some genuine stunts, so Murugadoss gladly extends the duration of certain major confrontations to flatter his hero’s proclivities. It makes for rightly perfected action.

There is also an interesting deletion from the Thuppakki version of the story. As I’ve mentioned, both films begin as a sort of feigned romantic comedy, only to abruptly transform into an action-thriller. The romance, however, keeps bumping its way back in to both versions, complete with a ludicrous subplot about Virat’s superior officer becoming engaged to the heroine. In the midst of all this — and so self-evident is the intrusion that Murugadoss at one point has the heroine interrupt a conversation between Virat and a friend about the thriller plot to drag him into the romance track, only for the friend to call Virat on his cell phone near the end of the romance scene to beg him to continue explaining the thriller plot — Thuppakki sees the superior officer try and set Virat up with a sexy lady, only for comedy to ensue when Virat finds out she’s a call girl, with whom no respectable man would ever associate with on a personal or professional level. That’s basically the joke. She’s a nice lady, but she’s trash.

This bit is absent from Holiday. Possibly, Murugadoss felt it detracted from the pacing, but then again – he does plan to work with Sinha further, this time as solo star on a Hindi-original project, an untitled 2015 action movie “based on a story which is close to my heart and has a very personal and powerful message for all Indian women.” Might he now sense the trends shifting?

Holiday otherwise remains comprehensively patriarchal, both in terms of how it approaches women, and how it approaches military protection. Kumar gets quite a lot of people killed due to retributive violence over the course of this film, but it’s all collateral damage. At one point he even manipulates his own sister to be kidnapped and nearly murdered by terrorists, just so he can track ’em down, shoot ’em up, and lock the lone survivor in the boot of a commandeered vehicle. The girl castigates her brother’s lack of compassion on the ride back, only for Kumar to shut her down in borderline Marine Todd fashion by declaring that if terrorists are willing to die in their mission to kill thousands, civilians ought to be ready to pay the same price as the soldiers and police who gladly face death to protect them. BOOM.

The girl then informs her brother that he’s not yet killed all of the terrorists, which does not so much challenge the statements made as segue into another round of enhanced interrogation (SO COOL), only for the romantic track as personified by Sonakshi Sinha to scale a ladder a la Clarissa Explains It All and surprise her man inside his bedroom/torture chamber. Kumar manages to hide the prisoner in a closet, only for someone else to approach the bedroom door; thinking it’s his mother, Kumar then shoves Sinha in another closet, only for the second intruder to reveal himself as a policeman friend. A relieved Kumar opens up all the closets. “Don’t you keep any clothes in there?” asks the friend.

Then there is a romantic song sequence, and immediately after we see that Kumar has tortured his prisoner to death and dumped his corpse in public. Perhaps he did it in the ‘real’ world, while the romantic daydream played. The news identifies the dead man as a terrorist; there is no dissent.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what the sleeper cells are hoping to accomplish. I’ve watched two extremely similar versions of this movie in two languages, and I’m still not 100% sure on that myself, but from what I can gather there’s a bit of a twist involved. The terrorists, it seems, are at the beck and call not of religious zealots or foreign nations, but certain factions of the Indian government itself, hoping to extract prestige and wealth from scaring the population into trusting them, then playing the hero as the pre-planned attacks stop. Only the Indian Army is pure of sleeper cell contamination.

I like this scheme. It brings us right back to Murugadoss the would-be Naxalite – “empowered with arms,” he said, “to fight for the masses.” Think like an analyst: who is more *acceptably* armed than the Indian Army? And it isn’t a novelty to have them cleaning up the government at large; there, Murugadoss is drawing from the library of his great role model, Tamil pop cinema icon Shanmugam Shankar, who — before whipping up a frenzy of computer graphics at the helm of mega-blockbuster Enthiran — created popular vigilante films in which men who can’t take it anymore enact lurid expressions of popular disenchantment with widespread corruption. In Bollywood, this sort of thing arguably goes back to the ‘angry young man’ persona of superstar Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s. Massy hits are lousy with crooked cops, dirty politicians, avaricious bureaucrats – positioning those scumbags as the power behind the sleeper cells isn’t radical, it’s logical.

And as we’ve already established, AR Murugadoss is a very logical man, both in terms of popular calculation and the raw nerve appeal of vulgar poetic vengeance.

There’s a scene leading into the climax of Holiday where Freddy Daruwala, model-hot terrorist kingpin, phones Akshay Kumar with a nasty surprise. A bomb has been hidden in a mall, where one of the 12 assassins has taken his whole family, and it will explode in ten seconds! Frantic, Kumar phones his buddy, and urges him to take his wife and kids and flee the premises, but the man becomes paralyzed considering all the people he’d want to save. He and the camera, and therefore we, stare into the eyes of happy children, one after another… until a blast rips down the walls!

Anything is justified in the face of this. Never mind that Kumar arguably sort of provoked this response – anything is justified in the face of this. We might even imagine a quiet respect, underneath the agony, for the screenwriting utility of this grandest of gestures. From this sacrifice — small, really, when you consider the safety of a nation’s people! — the hero is beaming and uncomplicated again, like pressed linen or a polished gun. Murugadoss knows.

In seconds, the hero will be addressing an audience of army officers – all of them confined to wheelchairs. They will be reactivated for one last mission: to mold plastic explosives with their own hands, so wizened with sacrifice. Imagine: a suicide bombing on the terrorist leader! A taste of their own medicine at last! The audience of crippled veterans applauds with passion. Murugadoss knows. Audiences in cinemas across the globe are cheering too.

Every one of us knows.

You needn’t conduct a survey to get the consensus on that.

‘Chiko,’ ‘A View of the Seaside,’ and ‘Mister Ben of the Igloo’: Visual and Verbal Narrative Technique in Three Classic Manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Tom Gill

(This article is the third in a series on Tsuge Yoshiharu. The two previous articles may be found in here and here)

“Tsuge tries…to grope for images that will enable him to reach the umbilicus of his uncertain existence. … He became a symbol of youth culture and also counter-culture…” (Tsurumi 1987: 417)

“Yoshiharu Tsuge stands among the giants of the world of comics.” (Randall 2003: 135)

“In the history of Japanese comics, Tsuge has his place on top of the mountain.” (Marechal 2005: 28).

As these quotations show, Tsuge Yoshiharuⁱ is widely recognized as one of the truly great manga artists. At least two critics (Yamane 1983, Marechal 2005) specifically place him alongside Tezuka Osamu as one of the ‘twin peaks’ of the modern manga landscape.ⁱⁱ Yet very little of Tsuge’s work has been translated, largely due to the reclusive character of the author, and he remains under-researched and little understood in the English-language world. In two previous papers for IJOCA (Gill 2011a, Gill 2011b) I have discussed some of Tsuge’s seminal works from his golden period of 1966-68 for the underground magazine Garo. In this series of papers for IJOCA, I have attempted to make a start on filling the void in English-language Tsuge criticism. The first paper introduced some of the key Tsuge themes – alienation, madness, spiritual freedom, city-dwellers adrift in the country – through an analysis of a single manga, Nishibeta-mura Jiken (‘The Incident at Nishibeta Village’, December 1967).’ The second compared the treatment of the motif of an abandoned fetus in Tsuge’s Sanshouo (‘Salamander’, May 1967) with several manga by Tsuge’s contemporary, Tatsumi Yoshihiro. In this paper I propose to focus on Tsuge’s brilliant exploitation of the range of literary and visual techniques available only to the manga artist, by taking a close look at three more of Tsuge’s finest manga from his Garo period: Chiko (Chiko), Umibe no Jokei (A View of the Seaside) and Honyara-do no Ben-san (Mister Ben of the Igloo).ⁱⁱⁱ They date respectively from 1966, 1967 and 1968. During these crucible years, Tsuge’s muse was developing so fast that it makes sense to describe these manga as representative of his early, middle and late Garo periods, although they were all written within a period of two years. Since none of these manga have ever been translated,^iv I will give a brief plot summary of each before proceeding to discuss the way literary and visual narratives play off each other in each of the stories. I will also discuss the insights of Japanese critics, especially Shimizu Masashi, who to my mind is the most interesting of Japan’s numerous Tsuge scholars.

‘Chiko’ (Garo, March 1966, 18 pages)

Figure 1: ‘Chiko’, opening frame

The second of Tsuge’s great Garo manga,^v this is one of several that is heavily autobiographical, and hence operates at one level as a reflection on the nature of the manga artist’s profession. It depicts a struggling manga artist living with his girlfriend. His career is stagnating, and she is working at a hostess bar to support both of them. She buys a baby Java sparrow (buncho) with pocket money she has saved by abstaining from playing pachinko. That night she fails to come home at the usual time. He waits at the station until the last train has come and gone, then returns home to find her lying collapsed in the hallway. She is totally drunk and has been out for a drive with a customer from the bar. This triggers an ugly row: he resents the fact that her work involves flirting with other men; she resents the fact that his lack of success forces her to do that kind of work in the first place.

The dark atmosphere of the yarn is dispelled by the antics of Chiko. There is an unsignalled gap of a few weeks or months after page 10. Chiko has grown into a pretty bird who enjoys flying around the apartment. The girlfriend mentions that they have had far fewer fights since Chiko arrived. While she is out, the artist tries to draw a picture of Chiko, and he puts her little body in the sleeve of a cigarette box to keep her still while he draws. Then he playfully tosses the box into the air. Chiko manages to get out and fly to safety. Delighted, he tries to repeat the trick but this time Chiko fails to escape and is killed on impact with the floor after pathetically struggling for a few moments (figure 2). In a small but telling detail, the sparrow’s little red beak turns white before his eyes.

Figure 2: The Death of Chiko

Deeply shocked, he buries Chiko in the garden and pins the picture he has just drawn of her on the doorpost. He lies to the girl that Chiko has escaped; she does not believe him. She accuses him of killing Chiko out of jealousy because she loves the little bird so much, gets a trowel and starts digging around in the garden. She announces she has found Chiko. In fact it is a strange, hysterical joke: she has put the picture he drew of Chiko in a bush so that it looks like the real thing. As they look at it, a gust of wind lifts it into the air and it appears to fly away as they look blankly up at it (figure 3). The End.

Figure 3: The picture in the bush

This is a symbolist fable, in which the sparrow seems to work on at least three levels. First, it symbolizes the girl. She twice refers to the fact that Chiko never tries to escape even if left by an open window. We wonder why she herself does not try to escape from the manga artist, who frequently addresses her rudely and fails to provide for her. When she does make a show of escape, she ends up dead drunk and collapsed on the floor. This scene is later visually echoed by the dying bird on the floor (figure 4).

Figure 4: ‘Chiko’ p. 8 bottom frames, p.14 frame 9

The death of the bird – thrown up in the air in a cigarette packet by the manga artist – results from a casual deprivation of freedom perhaps similar to that he has imposed on the girl. When its red beak turns white on death, that could symbolize the end of their affair: blood draining away equating to passion fading away. Chiko’s little red beak could even be read as a symbolic clitoris, as opposed to the phallic duck in Numa.

Secondly, the sparrow is a symbolic child. One might say that of all pet animals, but especially of this one. Shimizu points out that the wheedling way the girl talks about wanting to get the bird – “I’ve been wanting one for a while now… they become very attached to you if you raise them from chicks” etc., sounds almost as though she is talking about wanting a child, and he even experiments with rewriting the conversation so that she is telling him about an unexpected pregnancy rather than spotting some chicks in a pet-shop (Shimizu 2003: 31-2). He then reads the ensuing events as symbolically representing the abortion of a fetus. That is a speculative reading, but certainly the killing of the bird appears to be killing the relationship, whether you read it as symbolic abortion or infanticide.

Thirdly, like all caged birds, Chiko also represents the trapped human spirit. The story is saved from being unremittingly bleak by the final twist where the picture of Chiko appears to morph into the real thing and fly away in the final frame. The mysterious ending may not signify the saving of the relationship (the shocked/bewildered expressions on their faces tell us this is not such a simple happy ending), but perhaps it does remind us that the end of a relationship can bring freedom as well as loneliness.

Figure 5: ‘Chiko’, final frame (left); detail (right)

There is something very playful in this final image of an image of Chiko: is she really coming back to life, turning this into a magical fable? Or is it just a trick of the light? The bird certainly seems to be coming away from the paper, but it is still in the standing pose as drawn by the artist. It almost seems to be riding a magic carpet. There is of course a layer of ironic self-referentiality here as Inaga (1999: 125) points out: the ‘real’ Chiko is really just a drawing in a manga, which is itself about a manga artist, shown drawing it in the second frame, so at one level the closing frames constitute an intellectual joke at the expense of the reader.

And then Tsuge plays one more trick: though to get it, we have to return to the title page (figure 1). Here’s a charming study of Chiko, sitting on a little branch amid foliage, looking very perky indeed. And then we remember: this scene never happened. Chiko was taken from the pet shop as a fledgling, reared in captivity, and never flew out of the window. So what is she doing on this branch? Perhaps this story, like its predecessor (Numa, the Swamp^vi ), is readable as a loop, in which the first page leads on from the last, in which case Chiko really did come back to life, at least in the artist’s imagination, reminding us again that this is a manga within a manga, and inviting us to reflect on the artist as god on paper, even as he struggles with poverty and alienation outside the frames of his work. Yet another layer of self-referentiality comes from the fact that Chiko’s death follows her entrapment in a cigarette pack (the ‘Peace’ brand) which has a picture of a flying bird on it – the dove of peace. There is a sad irony in Chiko’s death, deprived of her ability to fly by a box with a flying bird depicted on it. She has been trapped by the artist, just as later, on the final page, she will be liberated.

In an interview with Gondo Shin, Tsuge comments about the time when he was writing Chiko: “I felt this sense of liberation from the story-driven, entertainment manga I had been drawing up till then… I think there was some sense of propriety inside me that said this was how manga have to be. That gave way to a feeling of liberation” (Tsuge and Gondo, 1993(2): 38). I would argue that the image of Chiko the sparrow, peeling away from the paper she is drawn on as she drifts into the sky, is an expression of that sense of liberation. It is not a simple achievement of happiness – a story in which the little bird came back to life bringing happiness to all would have been trite indeed – but that final image allows us to hope. Along with the opening image of Chiko, this is one of very few frames which are set outdoors and in daylight. Otherwise the story is set in an unremittingly claustrophobic interior and mostly at night. Note too that the opening and closing frames are by far the largest: most pages in Chiko have 7 to 11 little frames, but the 2/3 of a page devoted to the opening portrait of Chiko, followed by a cinematic half-page frame on p.2 taken from an elevated position in the manga artist’s room and showing him at work, draw us into the story while the whole page of the final scene brings closure/revelation. As Yomota argues, frame design is a device that distinguishes manga from film: variations in size and shape by the author, and the time taken over viewing each frame by the reader, create a unique communicative experience (Yomota 1994).

The rhythm of the frame sequencing is enhanced by some simple graphic techniques. Backgrounds are drawn in alternating shades of white and grey, with hatched shading used at dramatic or ominous junctures. Human figures are sometimes drawn in silhouette, notably the girl when she lies collapsed on the floor. A fairly conservative reliance on rectangular frames gives way to asymmetrical trapezoid frames at four crucial junctures in the story, disrupting the balance and perspective of the visual narrative. Figure 6 shows a good example. The playful antics of the manga artist as he waves a mirror to confuse Chiko are given an ominous tone by the trapezoidal frame and the black silhouette of the dancing doll in the foreground.

Figure 6: ‘Chiko,’ p.10 frames 6-10

Sound effects are faded in and out – with typical manga use of onomatopoeia, Tsuge lets us hear the sound of the bird chirping or the door opening when the girl comes home; but he leaves us in total silence as the crowds of commuters hurry out of the station. Again, the sparrow’s death rattle (kukuku) is the last sound effect in the story. Apart from one slight rustle in the bushes, there are no sound effects in the last four pages of the story – we never hear the digging of the grave, the return of the girlfriend, the opening and closing of the door, or the whistling of the wind that carries off the picture of Chiko. Except for a little dialog, Tsuge has silenced the soundtrack as his fable moves from social realism to magical realism.

‘Umibe no Jokei’ [A Description of the Seaside] Garo September 1967; 27 pp

Visual and literary narratives pull in opposite directions in this story of a young man finding love on a solitary trip to the seaside. It opens with a 2/3 page frame of holidaymakers playing in the surf at a beach, seen in black silhouette while the surf crashes in. The second frame shows the swimmers in close-up, seeming to struggle desperately against the breakers, though they are supposed to playing (figure 7).

Figure 7: ‘A View of the Seaside’, page 1

On page 2 another large frame shows parasols and sunbathers on the beach, one young man sitting separate from the others in the foreground. Two more frames pan in on him from behind (figure 8 top). Each shot is from a different angle, as though we were approaching the boy in a serpentine movement. On page 3 the camera has traversed and we see him from the front, sitting alone in dark glasses, smoking (figure 8 bottom). A pretty young girl in a bikini throws herself down on a towel nearby and looks at him. She seems interested in him. He shyly looks away and lights a cigarette.

Figure 8: ‘Seaside,’ p.2 frames 2 and 3 (top), p.3 frame 2 (bottom)

An older man comes over and warns her of sunburn. She asks him to rub olive oil into her back. Our hero is jealous and walks away. Blazing sun, steepling stratocumulus, black birds tossed across the sky Van Gogh style. He stands in front of a cove with crashing surf; huge cliff on far side. Senses a presence: finds the girl sitting on the other side of an outcrop in a hooped one-piece. As their eyes meet, a big fish leaps out of the sea, hooked on a line (figure 9). A fisherman standing on the cliff has caught it and hoists it up into the air, but the line snaps and the fish falls back. She wonders what kind of fish it is but he doesn’t know.

Figure 9 ‘Seaside’ p. 7 Frame 4

He lights a cigarette and she asks for one. They are shown in a big frame, silhouetted in front of the white surf and black cliff beyond. In conversation, she tells him that she is on her own – she says she enjoys travelling alone, but her eyes are wistful. It turns out they are both from Tokyo. He has been invited to the seaside by his grandmother – he is pale and unhealthy and needs to get some sunshine. He came reluctantly, “but I’m glad I came. I’m really glad.” He speaks in silhouette against a grey sky with a single bird flying across it. “It’s indescribably better than staying put in my gloomy apartment in Tokyo. If only this feeling would continue forever…”

He explains that his mother was born in this town and that he lived here himself for a year when he was small. He is now staying at his grandmother’s house, but doesn’t know the other people there – it’s been twenty years. She says she envies him having relatives in such a lovely place.

Walking along the foot of the cliff, they notice the fish – floating there dead. It must have been killed on impact when it hit the sea. He now recalls an incident from childhood – a drowning victim was found caught in the nets of a fishing boat over by the cape. The victim was totally white, with mouth and nostrils full of seaweed. “Do fishermen sometimes get drowned?” she nervously asks. “It was a woman, with a child,” he replies. “The child was half skeletonized. It was terrifying. There’s a nest of octopuses under that cape.” She thought octopuses were cute, but he tells her they are voracious predators – as one can see from their sharp beaks. While speaking, they pass a set of wooden frames with caught octopuses hung out to dry (figure 10) – some of these voracious predators at least have been defeated.

Figure 10: ‘Seaside’ p. 13 frame 5

Standing in front of two vast silhouetted fishing boats (figure 11), she asks if he will come to the beach again tomorrow. He says yes, probably just after lunchtime. They part at a beached rowing boat. These two frames take up a whole page. The story is moving more slowly, more cinematically, than ‘Chiko.’ Where ‘Chiko’ had 142 frames in 18 pages, this story has 116 frames in 26 pages; 4.5 frames a page, against nearly eight for Chiko.

Figure 11: ‘Seaside’ p.13 frame 1

The next day, rain is crashing down on the beach. Hero is sitting alone in the shelter of a small hut for boat hire, smoking (figure 12). He tosses the butt into the sea, then lobs a couple of pebbles at a flock of seagulls gathered in the water just off the coast. They fly up, in black silhouette. He is about to give up waiting and go home, when the girl comes running in a tiger-stripe one-piece, a towel over her head. She is sorry she is late – she has been working. He correctly guesses that she is a fashion designer. How did he guess? “The dress you’re wearing now shows very good sense.” “It’s just a towel,” she says, slipping a strap off the shoulder. The pace of the narrative is picking up – we are briefly up to eight frames a page.

Figure 12: ‘Seaside,’ p.15 (top); detail (bottom)

They sit down together in the boat-hire hut. “There’s nobody here at all,” he observes. “Nice and quiet this way,” she replies. He offers her some honey beans^vii he has sneaked from his aunt’s house. She enjoys a spoonful, then says she is going to go swimming in the rain. She strips off to reveal a new bikini; he says it suits her incredibly well. Their eyes meet significantly. “You’re a nice guy” (anata ii hito ne) she says. They run into the sea together, silhouetted and with lots of black gulls above them. She admires his swimming style – now the gulls are all white. He proudly tells her he got a first-class swimming certificate when still in junior high school. But he confesses he has lost strength since then – and indeed, he is puffing and panting now. She notices that he is unhealthily thin and his lips have gone blue. She suggests they should get out. He is about to agree, but changes his mind – since she has praised his swimming, he will do some more.

He starts swimming back and forth amid the dark, swollen breakers, while she retreats to the shore and watches from under a traditional lacquered paper umbrella. He is breathing heavily, totally absorbed in the swimming. She looks on in a half-page frame, saying “you are lovely” (anata suteki yo). The final frame (figure 13) goes over two whole pages and is one of Tsuge’s most famous images. Hero is still swimming, and she is standing under her umbrella saying “feels good” (ii kanji yo). Both of them are black silhouettes, like cut-out holes disrupting the otherwise photographic zero-point perspective of the image. The camera has pulled back from the previous frame, revealing a hazy horizon, vast banks of bulging clouds, and rain coming down like needles. It is a fittingly cinematic conclusion, and prompts Takeuchi Osamu to discuss it at some length (Takeuchi 2005: 76-82) as an exemplar of what he calls “the narrator of perspective” (shiten no katarite).^viiiWhen the protagonists are conversing, the camera is positioned fairly conventionally, close up and just a little above the speaker’s face. But at intervals the camera pulls out, and the narrator of perspective takes over. In these frames either the characters are silhouetted or the landscape is blacked out. The former effect foregrounds the characters; the latter brings the landscape closer and reduces the characters to anonymous ciphers. The net result is to “alienate reality” (genjitsu o kairi saseru) (ibid.81).

Figure 13: ‘Seaside,’ last frame

On the face of it, things seem to have gone very well for our shy and awkward hero – an attractive girl is consistently positive towards him and we might even expect a conventional romantic conclusion. But the relentlessly dark tones of the drawing, and the disturbing imagery of the dead fish, drowned woman, vicious octopuses etc., lead the reader to expect the worst – perhaps the hero’s exertions in attempting to impress her with his swimming will lead to his own drowning. As he dives into the water, his form clearly recalls the dead fish (figure 14). In the end, we get neither the romantic nor the tragic conclusion: instead, the story ends with an upbeat, romantic last line and a dark, foreboding image. Both expectations and fears are left unrequited.

Figure 14: ‘Seaside’ p.12 frame 1, p.23 frame 5.

Shimizu (2003: 413-414) offers a daringly Freudian reading. For him, this is an oedipal fable, the man wanting to return to the womb / eternal mother = the sea. The fish leaps up in the air at the moment our hero catches sight of the girl – a phallic moment. But then we see it is not leaping but caught – hoisted into the air and then dropped to die on impact with the sea.^ix Shimizu sees this as a metaphor for the young man, the fisherman being his father-figure. The girl is a siren, luring him back to the sea / death. On the second day, when he appears sitting in the boat-rental hut with the rain pouring down, he is already dead. As evidence, Shimizu points out that behind his head are two diagonal black lines, resembling the black ribbons at the top corners of a dead person’s photo at a funeral (figure 12 bottom). In the next frame, the diagonal lines have mysteriously disappeared, but he has a small pot next to him (figure 12 top, frame 2). In plot terms it contains the honey beans that he will share with the girl, but in symbolic terms, Shimizu argues, it contains his own ashes.

Tsuge’s fables are more ambiguous than Shimizu’s intermittently brilliant commentaries on them allow. There are plenty of sinister characters in his works, but the girl in ‘Seaside’ is sweet and innocent. She is scared of octopuses and tries to persuade our hero to leave the dangerous cold waters of the sea. She is not a plausible siren. But we do not have to accept the whole of Shimizu’s radical interpretation to appreciate the sinister effect on the atmosphere of the story from the visual devices that he identifies. ‘A View of the Seaside’ is a classic example of Tsuge’s brilliant use of the manga medium: the visual narrative, with its huge brooding cliffs, sinuous black waves and silhouetted hulks of ships, creates a constant undertow pulling against the tentatively optimistic verbal narrative.

‘Honyarado no Ben-san’ [Mr. Ben of the Igloo]. Garo, June 1968, 28 pages

Tsuge published this story in a special issue of Garo devoted to his work, along with ‘Neji-shiki’ (‘Screw-style’), his most famous work and one of the few available in a good English translation (Tsuge 2003). Though ‘Mr. Ben’ is a sad story, it does not have quite the doomed atmosphere of the other two, and it lacks their sexual tensions, focusing instead on the relationship between the artist/narrator and the intriguing man who becomes his host.

Figure 15 ‘Mr. Ben,’ first frame

In the hamlets around Uonuma county in Echigo (Niigata prefecture), they have a custom called Torioi (Chasing off birds), held at Koshogatsu (Little New Year, Jan 14-15), in which the local children build igloos, called honyarado, and then spend the night sleeping in them (figure 15).They wear straw hoods, carry lanterns, and sing a song telling the birds to fly off back to Shinano (neighboring Nagano prefecture in today’s Japan). It is supposed to promote a good harvest in the coming year, by chasing away birds that might otherwise eat seeds, grain etc.

Figure 16 ‘Mr. Ben,’ p. 2 frame 4

Our hero, a struggling manga artist on a solitary journey in quest of inspiration, arrives at Ben’s inn, on the outskirts of the village. Ben has not bothered to sweep the snow off his roof, so the inn resembles a giant igloo. Hero finds Ben lugubriously drinking alone (figure 16). He is Ben’s first guest for six months. They discuss hero’s inability to sell his work. Both men appear to be failing in their respective professions. Hero asks for dinner, but all Ben has is some grilled goldfish that he admits he stole from the neighboring village, where they are farming them. With that he falls asleep – hero has to rouse him to obtain a futon. Ben asks hero why he is traveling in such remote parts so soon after New Year, and suggests he must be lonely. Hero insists he just likes traveling and staying at inns like this one. Old pendulum clock shows 10.10 as they drift to sleep.

Next morning Ben catches a lot of dace, by banging on the ice with his mallet – the reverberations stun the fish and they float to the surface where he catches them in a net. He has placed a brazier in the toilet among various efforts to make the accommodation more comfortable. He has a pet rabbit called Pyon-chan in a cage with its name written on it. Ben is enlivened because he thinks hero will stay a few nights, but as Ben heads off to buy food, hero tells him he is not planning to stay any longer. He can’t afford it. Ben persuades him to stay and draw some manga. Hero says he needs a theme. For instance, the oddity of the rabbit with its cute name in an old man’s inn – there must have been children here lately. The inn is too big for a single man to run. Taken aback, Ben grumpily remarks “manga aren’t what they used to be.” Hero has sensed Ben’s wrecked marriage. Hero cheers Ben up by saying he might as well lay in a pen and some paper during his shopping.

Figure 17; ‘Mr. Ben’ p. 18 frame 1

Night falls; Ben is back from the shops. Snow falling; clock ticking. Hero cannot think of manga idea. He will have to go home tomorrow. Ben suddenly resolves to go out and steal some more goldfish. Hero goes with him. Strong images of their figures struggling through snowbound countryside (figure 17). It is four miles to the neighboring village. Ben nets a beautiful golden carp in a pond there which he says is probably for export and worth about 100,000 yen – over $1,000. He is caught in the act by his daughter, a little girl in a straw hood, who is waiting for her friends to show up for the torioi. Ben asks after her mother. The girl says ‘nanmyohorengekyo’, a sutra, indicating that mother is a Nichiren Buddhist, possibly a member of Soka Gakkai.^x Ben makes his daughter swear that she will tell nobody that she saw him here. Her friends arrive; she runs to join them; all are wearing straw hoods that make them look like birds. They chant the traditional lines and knock wooden blocks together to make the birds leave the crops alone (figure 17).

Figure 18 ‘Mr. Ben’ p.21 frame 3

Ben and hero complete their escape with the carp. Ben explains that his wife thinks the success of her fish-farming enterprise is due to her sincere religious belief. He wonders maliciously how she will account for the disappearance of her prize carp despite all her sutras. When they get home, Ben plans to throw the carp into his own pond, so that he can look at it every day and say “serves you right” to his wife. But when hero takes it out of the net, it is frozen solid with its back bent. It has been a three hour walk home through intense cold. Ben is deeply shocked. They take it indoors, thaw it out and eat it for sashimi instead.

Last two pages. Hero and Ben drinking saké at the hearth. Hero asks: “In the end, what were we really doing in the snow?” (Ben empties saké cup). Hero continues: “If someone looked at us like items added to a landscape, in the final analysis what general meaning would it convey?” Still getting no reply, he asks, “Old man, how do you find the taste of a 100,000 yen carp?” Ben merely rolls over to go to sleep, aying “how you do go on – blah, blah, blah (bera-bera)…” (figure 19). The clock starts striking eleven, bon, bon, bon, seen on its own in dark shadow in the final frame. In a comic that makes very little use of sound effects, the clock is the loudest thing in the house: silent when first observed on page 6, its accentuated ticking (katchi-katchi) dominates page 15, and its funereal chimes on page 27 bring the story to a lonely conclusion.

Figure 19 ‘Mr. Ben’ p. 27 frames 2, 3

Once again, the story ends on an enigmatic note, challenging the reader to decipher it. In the closing pages the reader merges with the manga artist in the story, wondering what on earth the two men have been playing at and fearing that his own interpretation could be no more than the “blah blah” cynically dismissed by Ben.

The first clue is in the title – Mr. Ben of the igloo. It focuses on the relationship between the man and his house. It is a cold and empty house – his family is gone. The house is a macrocosm of the man. With its thatched roof it physically resembles Mr. Ben when wearing his straw coolie hat. When Ben is happy because of the arrival of our hero, the snow is piled up in front of the house in a way that resembles a smile (figure 20 left). In its final exterior shot (figure 20 right), where light pours from two eye-like windows beneath the thatched roof, the snow falling before it suggests lonely tears.

Figure 20 ‘Mr. Ben,’ p. 12 frame12, p.27 frame 1

His solitary igloo is counterpoised to the cozy domesticity of the children sitting in couples in the cluster of igloos in the opening image of the story (figure 15). Shimizu, determined Freudian, also finds a hint of sexual bliss in the image of the little children sitting in boy-girl pairs in their igloos – or maybe the igloos are like little wombs (Shimizu 2003: 134). Later he also describes Ben’s inn as a kind of womb, warm and moist against the cold dry air outside. Ben several times rolls up in a fetal position (figure 19) – he is returning to the womb, and he doesn’t really want to wake up from his frequent drunken stupors (ibid. 164). When we first see Ben (figure 16) he is sitting apathetically in a homely room bathed in warmth and light and dotted with symbols of domesticity – a broom, a ceramic cat, a wooden screen with some clothing hung over it, the hearth, the cooking pot. But by the hearth is an empty cushion – in the position where, as Shimizu points out, we would expect his wife to sit (ibid. 136).

As the yarn unfolds, the sad tale of Mr. Ben’s failed marriage is gradually revealed. The marriage seems to have foundered on religious differences. His wife’s obsession with her religion has taken her and the daughter away from Ben, who is deeply skeptical. She has gone back to her family, who share the same religion and the same obsession with fish farming. These farmed fish are counterpoised to the wild fish that are symbols of freedom in other Tsuge manga such as ‘The Incident at Nishibeta Village’ and ‘A View of the Seaside.’ Ben’s four-mile journeys to the neighboring village to steal carp may well be prompted not only by resentment against his wife and her family, but also by the possibility of catching a glimpse of his daughter.

We may guess that the break-up was fairly recent – the rabbit with its childish name is still alive and well. Perhaps the half year since Ben last had a customer corresponds to the time since his wife went back to her folks.

Once again the final frame (figure 21 bottom) is laden with significance. Shimizu points out a subtle touch: though the chest of drawers next to the clock is shrouded in darkness, we can just about make out a basket, with a small flute and the head of a kokeshi doll protruding from it (ibid. 163). These are no doubt things that Ben’s little daughter used to play with, and they bring a very lonely note to the ending. This chest has already appeared 20 pages earlier (figure 21 top) but there the top of it was deliberately concealed by a talk bubble, so we did not see the reminder of lost domesticity (ibid. 164). In another brilliant use of the manga medium’s potential, Tsuge draws attention to the little basket by concealing it and then revealing it with a device not available to any novelist, painter or film director. One can only nod in agreement when Shimizu admires the skilful use of these subtle devices in Tsuge’s work (ibid.).

Figure 21: ‘Mr. Ben’ p.6 frame 5 and p.27 final frame

Here, however, the acutely observant Shimizu makes an uncharacteristic error. On close inspection the object next to the flute in the final frame proves to be not a doll but a little drum with a handle and two tear-shaped black decorations. This is also a traditional child’s toy, but one more likely to be associated with a boy. This opens up a way for us to get deeper into the hidden back story of Mister Ben than even Shimizu has managed. I would suggest that in fact Mister Ben had two children, a boy and a girl, of which the boy has died. Likely it was the boy’s death that prompted his wife’s departure and increasing obsession with religion; maybe she blamed Ben’s impiety for a greater misfortune than just the decline of their inn-keeping business.

This interpretation, admittedly speculative, could account for Ben’s bizarre behavior with the stolen carp. He apparently thought it would still be alive after the three-hour journey home, since he proposed to throw it into his own pond. When it turns out that the carp is frozen stiff, he reacts in horror, and stands there cradling it in silence for two frames (figure 22), though to most people there is nothing obviously more shocking about a frozen dead carp than a limp dead carp. Perhaps the carp is a symbolic substitute for the dead boy… and Ben is totally unhinged. Once it is discovered that the carp is frozen stiff, Ben and hero thaw it out and eat it for supper, a fairly sensible thing to do in normal circumstances but deeply shocking if we take the fish as a symbolic equivalent of his son. No wonder Ben is plunged into total silence as hero asks him lots of questions about the meaning of the day’s events. We sense there is a great secret hidden behind his silence… I suggest that the two toys in the final frame represent two children, hinting at a deeper tragedy than the break-up of Mr. Ben’s family.

Figure 22 ‘Mr. Ben’ p. 25 frames 5, 6

There are a few more strands to the sadness of Mister Ben. First, the story is woven around the Torioi festival, designed to expel harmful pests from the village community.^xi Ironically, Ben’s carp thievery means that he himself is now just such a harmful pest. When his daughter joins with her little friends to chant the ritual words of the Torioi festival, she is symbolically expelling her own father from the community. And second, there are times when a certain camaraderie seems to develop between Ben and the traveler, raising the possibility of male friendship as an alternative source of emotional warmth in the igloo. But that hope is dashed in the final frames, when the traveler tries to intellectualize their experience of the night, but Ben just complains about too much talk. He never even formally admits that the girl is his daughter, that his wife has left him, or anything else about his personal circumstances. Rather than opening up to the traveler, he rolls over, in a posture that could resemble a fetus, or maybe a frozen carp, and goes to sleep, next to his probably emptied sake bottle.

Conclusion

All three of these manga turn out to revolve around abnormal emotional states. The destructive relationship in ‘Chiko’ crystallizes around the little bird, functioning in a slightly similar way to the wild duck in Ibsen’s play of that title. Indeed the brooding atmosphere of this story and its sister piece, ‘Numa,’ which also features a duck wounded by a hunter’s shot, often recall the great Norwegian playwright. The woman’s game with the picture of Chiko is an act of madness. The young man in ‘Seaside’ appears to be risking death in a desperate bid to impress the young woman. Mister Ben has rejected society and is losing the will to live. Each of the stories also features a dyadic central relationship, and leaves us to ponder the state of the other partner: when the manga artist sees the image of Chiko fly into the sky, has he too been drawn into madness? Is the pretty young woman in Seaside an innocent, a siren, or both? And what of the artist in ‘Mister Ben,’ lost in the snow, struggling to make sense of his own actions?

Visually, the association between people and animals – a Java sparrow, a hooked sea fish and a frozen farmed carp in the three stories discussed here – is central to the symbolic system throughout. The line between humans making willed, conscious decisions, and animals governed by brute instinct and vulnerable at all times, is deliberately blurred, with ominous implications for the protagonists. The subtle variation in shape, size and shading of frames creates a distinctive narrative rhythm which is further refined by silhouetting and the use/non-use of sound-effects. Subtle changes in perspective and focus leave the reader unsettled and occasionally staring at frames that are works of art in their own right. Where some see comics as an inferior creative medium, literature not good enough to work without pictures, these works of Tsuge’s constantly remind us that in the hands of a master, this is a medium that can surpass the limitations of both art and literature, creating something truly new.

References

Gill 2011a. ‘The Incident at Nishibeta Village: A Classic Manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge from the Garo Years.’ In International Journal of Comic Art 13(1): 475-489.

Gill, Tom. 2011b. ‘Fetuses in the Sewer: A Comparative Study of Classic 1960s Manga by Tatsumi Yoshihiro and Tsuge Yoshiharu.’ In International Journal of Comic Art 13(2): 325-343.

Inaga, Shigemi. 1999. ‘Images of an Oriental Artist in European Literature.’ In Text and Visuality: Word and Image Interactions 3:117-126.

Marechal, Beatrice. 2005. “On Top of the Mountain: The Influential Manga of Yoshiharu Tsuge.” In The Comics Journal, Special Edition: 22-28.

Randall, Bill. 2003. Introduction to his translation of Tsuge’s “Screw-style” in The Comics Journal, vol. 250: 135.

Shimizu, Masashi. 2003. Tsuge Yoshiharu o yome (Read Yoshiharu Tsuge!). Tokyo: Choreisha.

Takeuchi, Osamu. 2005. Manga hyogengaku nyumon (An introduction to manga expressionism). Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 1994a. Akai Hana (Red Flowers). Tokyo: Shogakukan.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 1994b. Neji-shiki (Screw-style). Tokyo: Shogakukan.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu. 2003. ‘Screw-Style’ (translation of ‘Neji-shiki,’ 1968). In The Comics Journal #250. Seattle: Fantagraphics; 136-157.

Tsuge, Yoshiharu and Shin Gondo. 1993. Tsuge Yoshiharu Manga-jutsu (The Manga Art of Yoshiharu Tsuge). Tokyo: Wise Shuppan. 2 volumes.

Tsurumi, Shunsuke. 1987. A Cultural History of Postwar Japan 1945-1980. London: Routledge.

Yamane, Sadao. 1983. Tezuka Osamu to Tsuge Yoshiharu: Gendai Manga no Shuppatsu-ten (Osamu Tezuka and Yoshiharu Tsuge: The Starting Point of Modern Manga.) Tokyo: Hokuto Shobo.

Yomota, Inuhiko. Manga genron (A basic theory of manga) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1994).

^{i. Born 1937. Though still alive, he has not published a new manga since 1987. Note that in this paper Japanese names are given with the family name first, personal name second except where quoting works that use the reverse order.}

^{ii. Comparisons are odious, but for what it is worth I personally would rank Tsuge far above the overrated Tezuka as an auteur/artist. I would also rank Shigeru Mizuki, Sanpei Shirato and several others above Tezuka.}

^{iii. All three have been reprinted in numerous Japanese editions. I used a cheap paperback edition that handily covers all Tsuge’s major Garo period works in two small volumes (Tsuge 1994a, 1994b). ‘Chiko’ is in volume 1; ‘Seaside’ and ‘Mr. Ben’ in volume 2.}

^{iv. The exception is an unauthorized and rather stilted translation of ‘Chiko.’ Along with various other unofficial Tsuge translations, it can be found at SAP Comics.}

^{v. The first being ‘Numa,’ (‘The Swamp’), published a month earlier. This also has a poorly translated scanlation at SAP Comics.}

^{vi. This story starts with a girl finding a wounded duck struggling in a swamp and ends with a young man standing by the swamp and shooting a bullet into the sky.}

^{vii. Mitsumame – a mixture of gelatin cubes, boiled beans, and fruit topped with molasses.}

^{viii. Readers may object that “narrative of perspective” or “perspective of the narrator” would make more sense, but “narrator of perspective” is the precise meaning of Takeuchi’s Japanese expression.}

^{ix. Readers of my previous IJOCA paper on ‘The Incident at Nishibeta Village’ will notice a recurring theme here in which a fish escapes from a fisherman only to be killed anyway – by hanging in ‘Nishibeta’ and by impact with the sea here. In both stories, the fish and fisherman are both defeated, with nihilistic implications.}

^{x. A popular Japanese religious movement that branched out from Nichiren Buddhism. A massive social phenomenon, Soka Gakkai today controls a major political party, Komeito.}

^{xi. The Torioi Festival also features at a dramatic juncture in the famous novel Yukiguni (Snow Country) by Nobel literature prize winner Kawabata Yasunari. That novel deals with a doomed love affair between a rural geisha and a wealthy traveller from Tokyo. Tsuge’s story echoes Kawabata’s in various suggestive ways, and if my theory about Ben’s son is correct there may be an oblique reference to Yukio, the consumptive youth who dies in Kawabata’s novel.}

Men, Women, and Virgins

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Much of the discussion around the recent murders at Santa Barbara has centered around the fact that the killer, Elliot Rodger, was a virgin, and wrote a manifesto in which he linked his rage and violence to the fact that he had not had sex. Some media outlets have labeled him as the “virgin killer”, and others have talked about how virginity weighs on men.

As somebody who was a virgin into my late 20s, I agree that virginity can be painful for men. But I think it’s important to realize that it doesn’t just weigh on men. The idea that men, in particular, are diminished when they are virgins, or that men, in particular, are sad and lonely in their teen years, risks falling into Rodger’s warped view of the world, in which women are only important, or only thought of, in relation to male desires — as sexual objects who satisfy men or make men miserable, but don’t have any desires or problems themselves.

The truth is, there are many women, just like there are many men, who are virgins into their late teens and beyond. One of them was my friend, Megan (a pseudonym). She and I talked last week about virginity, gender, and miosygny.

Noah: So, I guess I thought I’d start by asking you why you don’t like the term “virgin”?

Megan: It’s just horribly binaristic. Women are this and men are that, women’s bodies do this and men’s bodies do that. What does “virgin” MEAN, anyway? One who has never had vaginal sex? That’s the common definition. But there are plenty of situations in which a person could be sexually active, sexually FULFILLED even, without vaginal sex being involved.

Basically, I feel like I “lost my virginity” 5 years before I started having vaginal sex.

At about 13-14 years old, I reacted to my first understanding of misogyny, and what it does, and how I didn’t do a fucking thing to deserve it, by thinking that I could slip the noose if I just distanced myself from femininity, as far as I possibly could. I think a lot of girls do that. Some women keep doing it their whole lives. I just tried as hard as I could not to be perceived as female. I remember something that happened when I was about 16–I made a comment about a guy, somebody I thought was cute, and a male friend of mine who was a couple years older was just horrified at the idea that I actually had a sexuality. So I guess I did a pretty good job going full tomboy. The end result was, I didn’t fuck anybody as a teenager, or in college. I went on a couple of dates. I let a guy see my tits once. He didn’t really like me that much.

Then, when I was 22, I went to get my first pap smear, and found out that I had a hymen that was basically made out of Teflon, and would have to be removed surgically, under general anesthesia, if I ever wanted to have vaginal sex.

So it was just as well I’d always been uncomfortable with my femininity and clueless about how to interest guys sexually.

I went ahead and had the surgery, when I was 22, but then–this sounds so stupid–it took me five whole years to actually figure out how vaginal sex worked. How to get it in, you know? I just had no experimentation period whatsoever before that point. I could never even wear a tampon.

So, the way I feel about it is, I stopped being a virgin when I was 22, pre-surgery, and had an orgasm for the first time with somebody else in the room. That’s basically my working definition of virginity. But if that’s the definition, then virgin birth is actually really common.

I mean, obviously we need words to explain our sexual history to each other. But I think “I have no sexual experience” or “I’ve done X but not Y” are perfectly good replacements for “I’m a virgin.”

Noah: Talking about how you feel that the term “virgin” doesn’t fit your experience reminds me of my own struggles with terminology around being a virgin. Specifically, through college, and into my 20s, I would wonder, somewhat idly, if I really counted as heterosexual, or if the term fit. I wasn’t having sex with anyone, it didn’t feel like I was every going to have sex with anyone, did I count as heterosexual? Obviously you look back and say, well that’s ridiculous, but I think it gets at the way that labels, and narratives about how identity works or what you should be can produce lots of anxieties in lots of different ways when you don’t fit into the mold the way you’re supposed to.

I was curious about that too, from your perspective. I’ve talked a bit in my pieces about this about how a lot of anxiety around being a virgin, for me, was less some sort of physical or emotional need per se and more about feeling like I just wasn’t doing things right, like I wasn’t being a man correctly. And I suspect that’s why it’s hard for guys to acknowledge often in these conversations that female virgins even exist. or that girls can’t have sex anytime they want, automatically. Failing to have sex in the right way seems like it’s so tied up with not being a man in the right way, so then, girls don’t have to be men, so how could they have a problem here?

I guess I’m curious what pressures you felt in terms of having sex. It seems sort of complicated, since you were saying that at least for a while you were actively trying to not be a girl by not being sexual, or by being a tomboy. Was there some point where that stopped and you felt like you weren’t performing femininity correctly? Or were you anxious or depressed about not having sex until your twenties?

Megan: Oh God, yeah, so anxious and depressed!

The whole thing about being a tomboy was that maybe it helped me avoid the gaze of some sexual predators in high school–I know they were there, they preyed on my friends–but I was still (mostly) heterosexual, and I wanted male attention, and femininity was all guys seemed to look at. I was invisible, for better or worse.

But I wasn’t completely invisible. There were a couple of guys who did look at me. They weren’t the guys I wanted. I think that’s the case with almost everybody, even the UCSB shooter–there’s probably someone in the world who’ll fuck you. You might not see them, for whatever reason. They might not be up to your standards. You might have completely unrealistic standards, like most misogynists do.

The unrealistic standards that the PUAHate crowd think women hold men to are nothing in comparison to the stringency of their own fantasy standards for women.

It occurs to me that the PUAHate crowd are projecting their own hatred of femininity onto women, by assuming that hypermasculinity is the only thing women desire. They have no idea what women want. How could they know? They can’t even hear us when we talk.

I never wanted an alpha male. I never wanted money or a nice car or great big biceps. I like smart guys who wear glasses and care about art and can make me laugh.

Noah: Ha! I don’t think that’s especially unusual.

I think for me at least it wasn’t just about the wrong standards. There was a woman or two maybe who was interested in me who I wasn’t interested in, but there were also a number of women who were interested, who I thought were attractive and would have been happy to date.

But I just couldn’t figure out the cues. Like, not with great frequency or anything, but a few times, a woman would ask me out, and we’d go out, and we’d have a good time…and that would be the end of it more or less because I was too shy to try to kiss them when I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. You sort of talk about this a little, but at some point the actual physical mechanics, and not knowing how they work, becomes this huge barrier. Which I think has a lot to do with the expectation (self-expectation as much as anything) that you’re supposed to know what you’re doing, and the fear that you don’t and will somehow make a fool of yourself if you give it a try and it doesn’t work.

So was there something of a double bind for you? You felt that if you were feminine, you’d end up getting stalked and treated as a sexual object only, but when you presented as a tomboy you became asexual and unwanted?

Megan: The double bind is a good phrase… I feel like that’s the essential state of being female within patriarchy, you’re always in a double bind.

Noah: Julia Serano in Excluded talks about double binds as the basic way that all prejudice works; you get marked as other, and then no matter what you do, you’re wrong because you’re marked. If you have sex you’re a slut, if you don’t have sex you’re broken or wrong.

I think for men it’s not really a double bind; more a measure against an impossible standard, where you always fail to one extent or another. Less about losing whatever you choose, and more anxiety about hierarchy.

Megan: I think women get a little more leeway in the “knowing what you’re doing” area… We’re allowed, culturally, to let men take the lead, sexually. But that was a moot point when I was invisible.

I don’t know if this is relevant to anything… The first experience I had with a guy who did look at me went pretty badly wrong. It didn’t amount to sexual assault, but he just kept touching me in ways I didn’t want. Even when I bluntly told him I didn’t want them. I wound up fending him off with a chair. He left me alone after that. This was when I was about 15.

He presented as a male feminist. Sometimes he wore skirts. He was Different From The Other Guys. Except not where it really mattered.

Noah: Christ. I think it’s really relevant to a discussion of virginity to think about the fact that for a not insignificant number of women especially, a first sexual experience is of some form of sexual assault. That can happen to guys too, but it seems much less frequent. I could be wrong, but my sense is that guys who are virgins can feel completely desexed and unsexual in a way that doesn’t tend to happen to women in the same way. But the flip side of that of course is that women are never quite desexualized in that way because they’re always objectified and seen as fair game for sexual violence.

I don’t know. Does that ring true to you?

Megan: I think there may be women who feel that way, desexed and unsexual, because they can’t get laid… But I may not be understanding you correctly.

I remember having a vague desire during my tomboy phase to have breast reduction surgery, not just because being a D-cup interfered with the way I presented, visually, or because of male reactions to my breasts, but because they didn’t feel appropriate to the state of my soul, in some way. I felt like I was meant to be an A-cup.

I also remember having a feeling that I was going to rot, curdle, go wrong inside, if I stayed a virgin. I wrote bad teenage poems about it.

Noah: The breast reduction surgery for the state of your soul kind of fits with what I was saying, maybe, though I probably went too far in talking about internal states — I’m sure as you say women can feel desexed too. I think it’s true though that femininity is seen as inherently sexual, so it makes sense that people’s reactions to being desexed, or feelings about being desexed, would be affected by their relationship to gender. Which sounds like what you’re talking about; feeling desexed and so wanting to be less stereotypically feminine physically as well.

Megan: Yeah, I guess you could look at that as an indication that the female body is always coded as sexual. Therefore, if I felt desexed, I needed to change my body. Did you ever feel a disconnect between the state of your body and the state of your sexuality?

Noah: That’s a good question. I think the answer is basically “no.” I wasn’t having any sex, and I felt like my body was awkward and hopeless and undesirable, so everything was as it should be, in that sense.

There was this one instance where there was a party (I never went to parties; this one was unavoidable for logistical reasons I won’t go into) and our very drunk female swim team assistant coach looked up at me and said, “you have really nice legs, Noah!” I was completely at a loss; being a sexual object was more or less utterly at variance with my self-image, so I just sort of ignored her. I don’t think she’d ever spoken a full sentence to me before, and I didn’t put myself in a position where she could later.

I’d imagine that that sort of drive by sexual objectification happens to women more frequently, and often in ways that are considerably less pleasant. Not that it was unpleasant; it was just odd, for me. Lord knows what I would have done if anyone ever actually tried to hit on me.

Megan: Oh man, yeah, I’m just thinking about that scene with the genders reversed. I think a lot of women would find a way to flee the scene as soon as possible if a male acquaintance they weren’t interested in suddenly complimented their legs while very drunk.

Noah: Right; she was older too; in her early 20s and I was a sophomore I think.

Megan: It might be useful contextual information for this whole thing that I grew up in a fairly liberated, feminist household. My father never made me feel less-than because I was a girl, not even once. I had a pretty crappy relationship with my mother but she was openly feminist and did manage to inculcate me with a lot of her values. When I was about 12 I even read through her copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves when she wasn’t around. I had plenty of information; I just never knew why the heck I couldn’t insert a tampon.

If nothing else, it illustrates that even openly feminist parents have a really hard time preventing internalized misogyny from developing in their daughters

Noah: In their sons too, I’d imagine.

I was wondering if you were at all affected by the idea of female virginity as valuable? There is some cultural weight there, and it seems like it could provide some sort of counterbalance to the feelings of worthlessness you talk about, but it doesn’t sound like it did?

Meagan: Re: female virginity and value: I never really felt that. I think, being raised feminist, I associated those ideas with the repressive olden days when my whole worth and function was as a vessel for some man’s heirs. It seemed pre-suffrage, pre-modern and I felt like I was beyond that. I definitely didn’t feel like there was any special allure or cachet in my being a virgin at 22.

Noah: What do you think about discussions of virginity related to the shooting?

Megan: I haven’t read very many. What I have read has been partly focused on male nerd culture. The thing about that culture is that a lot of people within it absolutely refuse to understand that there is such a thing as female nerd culture: “There are no girl gamers.” “Girls don’t read comic books.” They can’t imagine a woman who’s had experiences similar to theirs–rejection, persecution, humiliation. They can’t imagine empathizing with a woman. But every single one of my teen girl friends had a deep internalized sense of rejection, which they got from teen boys. Teen boys are vicious to the girls they don’t want.

That’s not exactly an answer to your question, sorry.

Noah: No; I think it’s an answer! You’re saying that virginity can be linked to male nerd culture in a way that excludes women, or that suggests that women can’t experience pain or sadness. So erasing female virginity becomes a way to erase women’s humanity.

From the Dawn of YA to the Present, By One Who’s Been There

Posted on June 2, 2014 by Nora Olsen

There have always been books about teens—Jane Eyre, for example, with its eighteen-year-old heroine. Wuthering Heights—it’s just like Twilight, minus the vampires! But as a marketing category, YA (Young Adult) has only existed since the late 1960s. Prior to that, books that were about teens and very popular with teens were not actually marketed to teens. Catcher in The Rye, Chocolates for Breakfast by Pamela Moore, Lord of the Flies, and A Separate Peace were all literary fiction for adults. On the other side, the Nancy Drew books, the Hardy Boyhe s books, and Helen Dore Boylston’s Carol and Sue Barton books were all technically children’s books. Some series, like Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series or the Little House on the Prairie books, followed a character from childhood through the teen years to adulthood and (of course!) marriage. Books that today we would think of as YA, like Beverly Cleary’s Jean and Johnny or The Middle Sister by Lois Duncan, would have been shelved in the children’s section when they were published in 1959.

In 1967 one book changed everything—The Outsiders, a novel about sensitive, misunderstood Oklahoma gang members. Written when its author Susie Hinton was only sixteen, The Outsiders literally has everything a good book could have. This novel was so successful it launched YA as a new marketing category. S.E. Hinton wrote three more killer novels and then—either because she burnt out, was intimidated by her own fame, or simply wanted to do something else like any normal person does—took a long hiatus. Nine years later she came out with a YA novel called Taming The Star Runner which was pretty great but lacked the incandescent power of her earlier novels, and went on to write two picture books, a novel for grown-ups, and a short story collection. The Outsiders has stood the test of time, selling 14 million copies so far, and I imagine it will stay in print until civilization collapses completely. Starting in 1967, there was an explosion of great YA books that you will still find in the library (such as Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender and Paul Zindel’s The Pigman.) Some novels originally conceived for adults, such as Robert Cormier’s incredibly disturbing, violent, awesome, but sometimes misogynist novels, were redirected to a YA audience.

I was lucky enough to grow up during what many call “The Golden Age” of YA, the 1970s and 1980s. (And, to be fair, the late 1960s, before I was born.) The titles alone were amazing. (They’ll Never Make A Movie Starring Me! A Hero Ain’t Nothing But A Sandwich. The Fog Comes On Little Pig Feet. I’m Really Dragged But Nothing Gets Me Down. My Darling, My Hamburger. Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! Why Did She Have To Die? And I’ll Get There. It Better be Worth the Trip.)The cover art was fabulous. Of course there are great covers today, but no matter how nicely you art design your stock photo, it still looks like a stock photo.

And what was inside these inventively-titled, beautifully-packaged books? Mind blowing stories! “Problem novels” reigned supreme, with the result that sheltered shut-ins like myself got to read about all sorts of lurid topics. Go Ask Alice was the real diary of an anonymous teen drug addict who died of an overdose—except of course it turned out to be fiction. (I did always marvel at how the girl managed to keep such a meticulous diary when she was traveling all over the country stoned out of her mind.) Want to read about a girl becoming an exploited sex worker? Try Steffie Can’t Come Out To Play by Fran Arrick. It was not uncommon for the main character to die at the end, especially if the book was about running away from home. See Dave Run by Jeanette Eyerly (who was writing YA before it was called YA) and Runaway’s Diary by Marilyn Harris were two in particular that broke my young heart.

In 2011 the Wall Street Journal, a periodical that’s always looking out for the best interests of young people, ran a very controversial piece suggesting that contemporary YA was too dark and teens should be offered more upbeat fare. People replied with sensitive, well-reasoned arguments and many teen bloggers offered heartfelt responses about how much YA fiction had helped them when they were struggling with things like suicidal feelings, self-harm, bullying, and eating disorders. But my reaction was, “Where were you in the 1970s, O literary guardians of the wellbeing of the young?”

Although many of these novels were extremely heavy-hitting, they also had more leeway than today’s YA to be “literary” or take their time winding up to the conflict. A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Patton Walsh, a historical novel about the Plague ravaging a 17^th Century English town, spends Lord knows how many dozens of pages talking about sheep and rural life before anyone so much as coughs. It makes it so much more disturbing when you finally reach what the book is “about.” Silver by Norma Fox Mazer (rebranded as Sarabeth #1 so it can be part of a series like all the cool books) is very typical of its time in its hyper-realistic, picaresque style. It’s all about a working-class girl who lives in a trailer park with her fun young mom and then transfers to a different school where she makes new friends. About two thirds of the way through the book, the “issue” is introduced. That would never fly today. Today aspiring YA writers are trained to “grab the reader by the throat” in the opening sentences. This is not because experts discovered that young people like to get straight to the point. It’s because in today’s competitive market, agents don’t have time to read more than a page of your novel before deciding that it’s not what they’re looking for.

The line between YA and middle grade (for 8-12 year olds) was blurrier back then too. Silver isn’t really a YA novel by today’s standards, with its twelve-year-old protagonist. Another wonderful classic YA/MG novel with this old-fashioned feel is The Summer of the Swans by Betsy Byars, a contemplative, character-driven novel about a girl whose intellectually disabled brother goes missing. Today only a successful veteran writer like Lois Lowry (The Giver) can still afford to use the slower-paced style from the 1970s that gently wraps you up into a fictional world, and even then typically in middle grade books rather than YA.

But I’m not sorry that the “Golden Age” is over, as much as I loved it. (Pretty much every time anyone starts to get nostalgic for a time gone by, I need to pause and reflect whether me and my friends would have been able to get birth control or kiss the person we liked, just for a couple examples, in those bygone days.) Contemporary YA books have a lot to offer that classic books don’t—like more characters who aren’t white, or LGBTQ characters who make it through the whole book without being raped, beaten up, humiliated, or dying.

Promoting diversity is the battle in YA today. There are little milestones all the time. 2004, the first YA novel featuring a teen who is transgender (Luna by Julie Anne Peters.) 2009, a Latino author (Francisco X. Stork) makes the New York Times list of annual notable children’s books, with his awesome YA novel Marcelo in the Real World, which features a Latino teen on the autism spectrum. 2010, the first YA novel to make the (children’s) bestseller list with a gay main character (Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan.) 2014, the first YA book showing two boys kissing on the cover (Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan.)

Sure, it’s fun to read a YA novel about an Olympic athlete that has a coded subtext of same-gender love (Zan Hagen’s Marathon by R.R. Knudson, 1984,) but now you can read a YA novel about an Olympic athlete where the straight-up text is same-gender love (The Next Competitor by K.P. Kincaid.) Why read a YA novel about boarding school life where the idea of being a lesbian makes students vomit and cry with shame (The Last of Eden by Stephanie S. Tolan, 1981), when you can read Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg or Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle series for some queer boarding school fun?

YA publishing today is not a shiny Plato’s Republic of respect for diversity. YA novels with LGBTQ main characters or themes represent less than 1% of all YA novels. YA and middle grade books starring people of color make up about 5% of all YA/MG titles. At least on the LGBTQ side, this represents a huge increase over years past. The fact that it’s getting better at all is for the usual reasons, activism and the dedicated hard work of some people in the industry. Every time some damn fool thing happens, readers and professionals rally and push back. Usually without having to put down their phones, because all the dialogue seems to take place on Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

When viewers of the Hunger Games movie began tweeting that it was “awkward” or upsetting or made them lose interest to see the character Rue portrayed by an African-American actor, there was an outpouring of support for diversity in YA novels. (Writer Suzanne Collins clearly described Rue in the novel as having satiny brown skin, but many readers were unable to take that in. What I took away from all this in terms of writing is that it’s a waste of time describing what your characters look like since no one pays any attention to it anyway.) In 2011 when writers Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown came forward with the story that an agent considering their manuscript had asked them to de-gay some of the characters, the outcome was a campaign called #yesgayya which brought the issue of LGBTQ themes in YA into public discussion amongst the Twitter set.

There’s also a continual outcry against whitewashing, the practice of putting a white face on the cover of a book about a person of color. (What you more frequently see, but it’s harder to say it’s not simply for artistic reasons, is a book about a person of color that has a silhouette or any image that is not a person.) The most publicized example of this was Justine Larbalestier’s Liar in 2009. The original American book cover featured a white teen while in the narrative the teen is African-American. The uproar was so huge that Bloomsbury apologized and changed the cover to a similar image featuring an African-American girl. The probable reason they did such a dumb thing in the first place, against the wishes of the author, was they believed they would sell more copies with a white face on the cover.

The bigger problem is that some people in publishing not only think a cover featuring a person of color won’t sell, they think a book featuring a person of color won’t sell either. And this is also an industry where agents and then editors have to feel mad, overwhelming passion for a book in order to take it on. If there’s anything about a manuscript that makes an editor feel uncomfortable, or makes them feel that they can’t relate to a character, that is a reason to pass.

Lucky me, as a writer I no longer have to worry about any of this. I write for a small press that specializes in LGBTQ books, Bold Strokes Books. 30% of all the not-very-many LGBTQ YA titles published each year are published by small presses like this, as well as some publishers who are not part of “the Big Six” but are still quite big from my worm’s eye view, like Disney Hyperion. My only concern would be if I ever wanted to write a YA novel about cisgender heterosexual teens, because then how would I ever get it published? But not all writers are as lucky as I am. Some of us are still toiling away in the foothills of mainstream publishing, hoping that one of those godlike creatures will smile down.

Earlier this month there was a very popular Tumblr campaign called #weneeddiversebooks, in which people posted photos and statements about why everyone benefits from kid lit about people from diverse backgrounds. This happened partially as a response to the announcement of an all-white, all-male panel of “luminaries of children’s literature” at Bookcon (which is a big deal NYC publishing event.) There were many moving and funny statements. My favorites: 1) Two guys holding signs that said, “I’m not him, but I’d like to get to know him better.” 2) ‘#WeNeedDiversesBooks because “my sister has Down Syndrome” followed by “my sister has a black belt” shouldn’t catch everyone so off guard. Books show casing people with disabilities excelling or kicking butt would educate the general public, and show others with disabilities that being the star, saving the day, or being the heroine is something they can also strive towards.’ 3) “#weneeddiversebooks because if I’d ever seen myself in fiction, I might’ve understood myself better and not have been driven to suicidal-depression and self-harm as a teenager.” 4) A tall boy with a basketball holding a sign saying “Because I like pink too!” 5) “#WeNeedDiverseBooks because i’m black, queer, fat, and a bunch of other marginalized and oppressed identities. And I want to be the hero and ride a fucking dragon in books too.”

The natural corollary of campaigns like this is encouraging people to support diverse YA by buying it. If the industry think diverse books don’t sell well, prove them wrong. If you say you want to read books about a more diverse swathe of characters, prove it. If you don’t have money to be buying all these new books, put them on hold at the library—trust me, those librarians are keeping track of what books are popular.

It’s still true that most readers of YA (Young Adult) books are teens. But just barely. Almost half of YA readers are over eighteen, with the 30-44 year olds accounting for 28% of sales. If you picked up The Fault in Our Stars or the Harry Potter books, you were reading YA too. There’s a new genre developing called “New Adult” that aims to appeal to this older segment of the readership by combining the magic of YA with more adult things, like explicit sex. New Adult books mostly feature college-aged protagonists because otherwise, ick!

What is the enduring charm of YA? I think it’s simple. YA delivers more reliably than literary fiction, which can be so awful. YA needs a strong storyline to keep teens’ attention otherwise they will put the book down. And it must have heart and authenticity, because young people are exquisitely calibrated bullshit detectors. If you haven’t read any YA since you were a youngster, think carefully before you try it. You might be hooked for life.

Here Come The Planes

Posted on May 27, 2014 by Isaac Butler

(NOTE: This was first published a few years ago in the now-defunct web journal “The Fiddleback.” Noah was kind enough to let me repost it here.)

At first, it’s just Laurie Anderson’s voice, looped on an Eventide sampler. A pulmonic agressive ha repeats, calling out from 1981, exhaling middle-C. The ha continues through the duration of the song. Seven hundred one times at a pace of eighty-four beats per minute. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a little bit over eight minutes. And yet this song, with its curious title, “O Superman,” and cold, borderline-cheesy lyrics and seemingly endless repetitions was, briefly, a monster hit. Up to #2 in the UK. One very bad recording of it on YouTube boasts that “this is what we all used to dance to back in the day.”

There are few other sonic elements introduced over the song’s eight-minute-plus length. There’s a handful of synthesized string lines and some organ. The faint sound of birds once or twice. And there’s Anderson’s vocals, a robot chorus announcing a new age.

Anderson’s work as a performance artist and musician relies heavily on distortions of her alto voice. She pitch-shifts it down two octaves, becoming a male “Voice of Authority,” or adds reverb and delay effects to punch home emotional beats. In both United States I-IV—the four hour stage show where “O Superman” debuted—and Big Science—the commercial album it appears on—Anderson sings through the vocoder, a kind of synthesizer that attaches your voice to notes you play through an instrument. You’ve heard it used by Peter Frampton on his biggest hits, or by Afrikaa Bombaata. The British also used it during World War II to send coded messages, breaking the sound up into multiple channels for spies to assemble later.

The opening lyrics of “O Superman” (“O Superman, O Judge, O Mom and Dad”) are a play on Le Cid’s aria “O Souverain, O Juge, O Pere.” In the opera, these words are uttered as a prayer of resignation, the hero putting his fate in God’s hands. In the Laurie Anderson song, the three O’s change meaning. First, she prays to Superman (Truth! Justice! The American Way!) but by the end she longs for Mom and Dad, and gives this longing voice in a series of vocoded ah’s: “Ah Ha Ha-Ah Ah-Ah-Ha.”

Despite Anderson dedicating the song to Le Cid’s composer, the two biggest influences it draws from are The Normal’s “Warm Leatherette” and the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera Einstein on the Beach. Indeed, “O Superman” can in some ways be read as a marriage of the two, of the uniting of brows both high and low, the repetition of minimalist opera lensed through the repetition of the dance floor.

Anderson is open about the debt she owes Einstein on the Beach. In interviews from the time, she cites the show as opening up possibilities for what a stage show could be, a process that lead to United States I-IV. O Superman’s repetitive “ha” references the sung counting during Einstein’s opening, and the keyboard lines not only sound Glassian, but the actual specific organ tone is one fans of the Philip Glass Ensemble will recognize.

The relationship between “Warm Leatherette” and “O Superman” is more tenuous. Certainly “O Superman” would not have garnered Anderson chart success and a seven-album deal with Warner Brothers without The Normal’s game-changing single from three years prior. Several sawtooth waves—chords, a siren gliss and a thwap-thwap rhythm—make up the entirety of “Warm Leatherette”’s music, while Daniel Miller, The Normal’s sole member, delivers ominous couplets about sex and car crashes. The song is essentially a musical setting of the JG Ballard novel, Crash, in which a car crash awakens the novel’s narrator to the sexual possibilities inherent in the automobile and its destruction.

It’s through “Warm Leatherette” that “O Superman” accesses JG Ballard’s apocalyptic vision of techno emptiness and Cold War nuclear anxiety. “Warm Leatherette” echoes Crash’s alienated space in which everything becomes simultaneously mechanized and eroticized. “O Superman,” meanwhile, creates a space of mechanization and alienation that also contains our human responses to this alienation: paranoia, loneliness, and a kind of heartbroken yearning. No character in a Ballard novel would ever beg to be held by Mommy, as Anderson does by the end of the song.

Coming as they do out of a theatrical tradition, Anderson’s songs, even at their most abstract, tell stories. “O Superman” is no different. Here, more or less, is its story:

You sit in your apartment in New York City at night. You are alone. Perhaps this apartment is on Canal Street, nearby the Holland Tunnel. It is 1981.

You sit in your apartment in a chair rescued off the street. The day you found it, you felt grateful that no one needed this chair anymore. This is the economy of New York furniture. People lug their unused belongings to the curb: The televisions and air conditioners with yellow paper taped to them, the word WORKS written in sharpie; the chairs that look fine, but might contain bedbugs; the couches that get waterlogged while you try to round up friends to lug them up the four flights of stairs to your apartment.

Concrete Island lies open on your lap, off to your right on a stack of milk crates rests a glass of cheap wine. Your violin leans against a nearby bookshelf, desiring your fingers and the bow.

Your phone rings. You decide that you will let the answering machine get it. People own analog answering machines, with real tapes that run and run and run out in the middle of their friends’ loquacious messages.

You hear your own voice first. “Hi. I’m not home right now. But if you want to leave a message, just start talking at the sound of the tone.”

A beep. And then. “Hello? This is your mother. Are you there? Are you coming home?” You hear need in her voice, along with a drop of reproach. Perhaps she didn’t approve of your moving to a hellhole like TriBeCa to be an artist. You do not pick up the phone. You do not tell her when you are coming home.

Another beep and then a voice you do not recognize. A man’s voice. “Hello? Is anyone home?” You do not answer it; you are not in the habit of speaking to strange men on the phone in the middle of the night. Instead of hanging up, however, he speaks more. “Well you don’t know me. But I know you. And I have a message to give to you.” Uh oh. Is this a crank caller? A stalker?

He speaks again. “Here come the planes. So you better get ready. Ready to go. You can come as you are. But pay as you go.”

You’ve had it with this man’s warnings and rhymes. You pick up the phone and say into it, “Okay, but who is this really?”

When the voice replies, what he says is terrifying. “This is the hand, the hand that takes.” He repeats it. He won’t stop saying it. You imagine just a mouth, the rest of the face shrouded in shadow, rendered in grayscale, like in an old movie.

And then he says: “Here come the planes. They’re American planes. Made in America. Smoking, or non-smoking?” He babbles on about the post office, about love, justice and force. And mom.

You hang up the phone. Confronted with this warning, with this mysterious stranger, the hand that takes, perhaps America itself, what can you do? You think about the first message. Your mother. She called you. She wants you to come home.

Sitting in your apartment, stranded in the night in New York, which despite the popultion density can feel like an island bereft of human company, you want your mother.

So hold me mom, you think to yourself, in your long arms.

You are so shaken from the phone call that the vision of your mother holding you gradually changes, becoming perverse and terrifying, but as it does so, you find yourself even more comforted.

* * *

Here come the planes. They’re American planes. Made in America.

In 1981—the year of O Superman’s commercial release—Ronald Reagan broke the air-traffic controllers’ strike and expanded the US military by the equivalent of $419,397,226.33 (adjusted for inflation).

In 2010, we’ve lost great amounts of our manufacturing sector, but one area remains triumphantly intact. We still make machines of war here in America. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are still based in the United States, the former in Chicago, the latter right outside Washington, D.C. Their plants also remain in this country, in places like Witchita, Kansas, Troy, Alabama and Columbine, Colorado. The Martin F-35 Lightening II—of which the United States intends to buy 2,443 for a price tag of over three hundred billion dollars—performed its first test run in Fort Worth, Texas.

In 2001, Mohammed Atta flew a Boeing 767—manufactured in Everett Washington— into the North Tower of the World Trade Center Building.

* * *

If you haven’t guessed by now, I might as well come clean: I was obsessed with Laurie Anderson in college. I tracked down out of print monographs of her work. I attempted to sneak her into just about every paper I wrote. Laurie Anderson thus joins a long line of serial obsessions on my part. She sits right between Eddie Izzard and Charles Mee if you’re ordering it chronolgoically.

I only knew one other person who loved Laurie Anderson. He discovered her via a twenty-six CD series titled New Wave Hits Of The Eighties that he bought off of late night television when he was in high school.

Despite all of this, four months after graduating from college, on the actual day when the American Planes Made In America finally showed up, I did not think about “O Superman.” On the actual day, U2’s borderline easy-listening track “Beautiful Day” took up unshakeable residence in my skull. It’s been said often enough to become a cliché, but the eleventh of September, 2001 really was gorgeous. The sky blue and cloudless, the temperature perfect for a walk from my then-girlfriend’s office on 56^th and the West Side Highway to deep into the East Teens.

The blue sky loomed ominous, the way nights dark and stormy foreshadow murder in a potboiler. If we couldn’t trust the weather to tell us how to feel, or what would happen next, what could we trust? As we walked, desperate to put our backs to Times Square or any famous piece of Manhattan real estate, occasional planes flew overhead. When this happened, our faces blanched and our clutch on each other’s hands tightened as we ducked into the shadows of a skyscraper to watch the planes streak the blue dome above us.

And in my head, Bono wailed all the while. “It’s a beautiful day, don’t let it…” Go away? Go to waste?

I discovered that I did not actually know the words to the song. As we stopped at a McDonald’s for food, bought water off a street vendor, and entered the East side, I became fixated on figuring them out, worrying the words like a loose tooth. Solving this annoyance seemed more important—or at least more manageable—than the attack itself, the questions about my DC-dwelling parents’ safety or where our nation was headed.

Unlike most Americans, I did not see what had happened to my city until many hours after the second tower fell. By then, our epic walk concluded, we sat on our friend Alison’s couch and watched the BBC. Again and again the plane flew into tower two, again and again the orange flower bloomed, again and again the towers collapsed and we jump cut to a POV shot of someone running from a wall of dust.

One of us said what became a constant refrain. It looks just like a movie. And indeed it did.

During the weeks to follow, we heard this idea everywhere. Just like a Bruckheimer film or I thought they were showing a disaster movie, until I realized it was on all the channels, or Just like Independence Day.

What we did not ask then is why. Why, at the height of our powers, had we imagined our own destruction so often that we had a ready-made database of images to compare this moment to?

Instead, we clicked our tongues in disapproval. This showed, we believed, the shallowness and alienation of our psyches. Now the time had come to end irony once and for all. We chose this interpretation instead of acknowledging how in tune with our deepest fears mass entertainment really was.

Through the nineties, when everything seemed so good that a blow job consumed media attention for years, it turned out that we both knew and feared that the clock would run out on our exceptional good fortune. The multiplex transformed into the only place to explore these premonitions of what was to come. The movies responded by doing what they do best. They thrilled us again and again, so we didn’t have to feel bad or, really, think much, about any of this.

We did not ask these kinds of questions in the aftermath because we did not have the leisure or distance or time to ask them. Instead, we asked other questions. Questions like, Who did this? And, Whose ass do we get to kick now? And—in certain circles of the left—Is it right that we kick their ass?

The first two questions we immediately answered with a nebulous body known as “the Arabs,” later refined to “Al Qaeda.” First thing we should’ve done, someone said to me at Thanksgiving dinner that year, is turn the Middle East into a parking lot. Even on that day, when we had no idea who had done this or why, we knew it must be “the Arabs.”

On her couch—which she invited us to stay on for as long as we want—Alison launched into a monologue about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She did not know that my girlfriend hailed from a Muslim country and I, although a Jew, am not a Zionist. The story culminated with her running into a Hasid on the street two hours after the second tower fell. “Hey man,” she recalls herself saying, “I’m with you and Israel all the way.”

She wanted to hug him, she said, but knowing the prohibitions against touching women, did not.

In that moment my mind wandered back to my girlfriend copping to a desire to bump up against Hasidic men on the subway and then claim to be menstruating. I did not mention this. Sitting next me, my girlfriend was silent. After crying until her pale skin turned a shade of red I did not think occurred in nature, she stared at the television, unblinking.

* * *

“O Superman” contains three moments of wordplay. The first comes right after Anderson mentions the planes, when she then asks, “Smoking or non-smoking?” Since we are not riding in these planes but are instead being warned about them from a mysterious voice, the phrase takes on a double meaning, becoming about corpses.

The second is when Anderson recites the Postal Creed: “Neither snow nor rain/Nor dead of night/Will stop these couriers/From the swift completion/Of their intended rounds”

Because if (once again) we are talking of airplanes, and talking of the death they bring, then the couriers become something different, and the package they are delivering is one you certainly don’t want. Nothing will stop them. A motto of American can-do becomes a motto of uncheckable military aggression.

Or, listening to the song today, dread of the unstoppable terrorist other.

Over the 2010 holidays, as the privacy (and genitals) of white people unaccustomed to legally sanctioned harassment were violated, America seemed to wake up to the absurdity of trying to stop terrorists with the pat down and the extra large zip-loc bag. If they can’t get on a plane, they’ll blow up a subway car. They are nothing if not tenacious. Neither scanner, nor banning of liquids, nor cavity search will stop them from the swift destruction of their intended targets.

The third moment of wordplay comes at the end as Anderson calls out to her mother. Like the question about smoking, the yearning for mommy’s arms gives way to a pun, of all things. “Arms,” of course, contains two meanings, one of which is enshrined in our Second Amendment.

And so, with a mournful, churchlike basso organ sound, Anderson’s mother turns from human into weapon. Her arms progress from “long” to “automatic” to “electronic” to “petrochemical” to “military” and back to “electronic.”

When Anderson sings “petrochemical,” if you turn the volume up very high and listen very closely, you will hear birds chirping.

In college, the merging of mom and machine struck me as a silly bit of early-80s “we are the robots” kitsch. I realize now how I wrong I was. I know now that the comfort found in waging war. I know that hurting others can feel like a familial embrace.

Did our desire for this comfort—the comfort of anger, the comfort of righteousness, the comfort of inflicting, rather than receiving pain—lead us so swiftly to retribution?

And what of other kinds of comfort?

I am at atheist. On 9/11, the only working phone I could find was in a Christian bookstore. I made two phone calls while the employees praise-Jesused behind me. The first was to my girlfriend to tell her I would walk to wherever she was, the second was to my mother. My father works for Congress, and was in who-knows-what federal office building that morning.

In the week that followed, everyone I knew in New York wanted to be held in some way, to be comforted. A friend called me to tell me she had been to church that morning. I laughed into the phone, finding it—and her—absurd. Like me, she was both a Jew and an Atheist. What possible business did she have in a church?

“I was walking down the street and I saw this woman outside a church, and, she just, she just looked at me, and I knew that that was where I needed to be.”

* * *

From the fall of 2001 until the Spring of 2010, I didn’t listen to “O Superman” or really anything by Laurie Anderson. It wasn’t until I left New York to drive across the country with my now-wife that I played it again. We were all gone to look for America. We were all sorts of cliches. We didn’t care.

As the curving asphalt ribbon of the Pacific Coast Highway unspooled before us, I click-wheeled over to the song. The instant I pressed play it started to rain and we sat in silence and listened to it. And it wasn’t until I got lost in the ha that I realized how long it had been since I had heard it. How did that happen? How did a totem that I carried with me, loved so hard, like it was a person, like it belonged to me, like I made it, how did I abandon this thing for so long?

Right before Anderson’s two-minute litany of different kinds of arms, I looked over at the driver’s seat, seeking approval. Now-wife displayed the face of a champion poker player. On the stereo, Anderson paraphrases the Tao Te Ching, singing, “‘Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice, and when justice is gone, there’s always force, and when force is gone, there’s always mom.” And then her voice breaks a little, and in a rare moment of humanity Anderson says, “Hi, mom.”

It felt like letting her read my diary from before we met. I wanted to be known better by this woman I would soon marry and move from New York with. I wanted to let her see the embarrassing parts that resist verbalization and need the true falsehoods of art. Part of me felt, in this moment, like all young men who like imposing their tastes on their loved ones—that somehow my self-worth was caught up in this moment in this purple Honda listening to this song.

Why had I stopped listening to O Superman? The answer seemed obvious now. After that sunny September day, her work became unbearable to me. The song contained too much of what I tried not to feel and not to recognize about the world and myself and the country in whose name horrible things were being done.

Instead, the song went into a cardboard box in a dusty attic closed off from my soul. Also in that box: a book of plays that lay, spine cracked on my windowsill collecting mysterious black and grey and green dust from September 12th through 15th. It sits on my bookshelf now, spine facing the wall, unopened, a guardian against destruction.

* * *

At the end of the song, Anderson repeats a vocodered melodic line from the beginning: “Ah Ha Ha-Ah Ah-Ah-Ha.” This time, however, she interrupts herself with a synthesized string line that once again feels like it could come out of the Philip Glass playbook.

This string figure references the vocoder melody off of the song “From The Air,” the track right before “O Superman” on Big Science.

“From the Air” is a song about a plane crashing into New York City.

Via crossfade, an honest-to-god tenor saxophone replaces the synth strings. The only instrument to appear in the song without some kind of treatment on it, it makes its realness known by being slightly out of key.

And then, at the very end, everything cuts out, giving way once again to the ever-present, omnipotent “Ha,” repeating itself solo for seventeen seconds.

If you turn the volume up very high and listen very closely, you will hear sirens in the background.

* * *

As the song ended, we feared for our lives. The storm transformed the Pacific Coast Highway into something treacherous, slick, unknowable. The next pulloff onto more trafficked streets lay tens of miles ahead of us. Did we have enough gas to make it? Would our stomachs give out amidst the twists and turns? And—most importantly—did my now-wife like the song?

“Huh. Wow.”

“It’s kinda brilliant, right?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s also kinda unlistenable at the same time.”

Kinda brilliant, kinda unlistenable is about as close to a judgement of the aesthetic quality of “O, Superman” as I can offer.

An odd component of post-9/11 American life has been the failure of art to address the event itself. Many—including some of our greatest living artists—have tried.

Instead, we’ve had to turn back to before the smoking day to find art that resonates. Some claim that Radiohead’s Kid A is the best album ever made about 9/11, despite coming out years before. Immediately after the event, the pundits on television wanted so badly to believe in our President that they told us to reach back to Shakespeare’s Henry V to understand how a drunken spoiled brat could become a Good Christian King.

Why not, then, appropriate “O Superman”? Laurie Anderson herself remains unclear as to the inspiration of the song. She claimed in one interview that she wrote it in response to the Iran-Contra scandal, which broke over five years after the song’s improbable chart climb. Like JG Ballard claiming to have seen the flash over Hiroshima from Hong Kong, this memory is impossible, invented but right nonetheless.

Our claming of these artifacts as being “about 9/11” shows that—rather than changing everything—that day recapitulated and unleashed what lurked, buried underneath us like one of Lovecraft’s ancient Gods. As much as we said this was the day we’d never forget, it revealed how much we’d already forgotten.

I Want to Be a Boy for My Birthday

Posted on May 21, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Sixteen Candles is thirty this year. It remains a beloved teen comedy; an iconic story of a young girl growing up to be a man.

All right, Sixteen Candles isn’t actually about a trans man, unfortunately; representations of trans people in media were even rarer two decades ago than they are now. But rewatching the film, it is surprising how obsessed this girl’s coming-of-age story is with manliness. Partly that has to do with the subplot involving the Geek (Anthony Michael Hall) as he tries to convince protagonist Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald), or anyone, really, to have sex with him. His nerdishness and awkwardness is related repeatedly to a lack of manliness; Sam calls him a “total fag,” and he taunts his even geekier henchman by telling them “don’t be such faggots.” At one point, he even accidentally takes birth control pills, foisted on him by Caroline Mulford (Haviland Morris). He spits the pills out quickly, though…and soon thereafter, as if getting rid of those contaminating hormones is some sort of rite-of-passage, he finally manages his transition to not-womanly by having an unspecified but mutually satisfying intimate tryst with the seemingly way out of his league Caroline.

Like the Geek, Sam is trying to grow up — a process made no easier when her entire family forgets her birthday. Growing up for her doesn’t mean becoming a man, but getting one: in this case, the Robert-Pattinson-before-there-was-Robert-Pattinson hot, soulful Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling). Yet, getting the guy and being the guy are wrapped around each other in complicated ways. Sam (whose name is suggestively androgynous) is a sophomore; Jake’s a senior. Her eagerness to be older, then, is a wish to be like him, as well as a wish to be with him. Her desire isn’t just about romance, but about the desire to be acknowledged rather than erased — to get out of her beautiful sister’s shadow, and out from under the bleak school hierarchy. It’s not an accident that the film’s one glimpse of nudity is a scene in the girl’s bathroom in which Sam and her best friend stare at a topless Caroline in an excess of envy at her body and at her good fortune in dating Jake. The camera focuses first of all on her breasts before it pulls back; it’s an eroticized moment, in which the jealous sophomores’ desire to be Caroline (and so date Jake) is visually blurred with the desire to be with Caroline (and so essentially be Jake.)

Adulthood in Sixteen Candles, then, is in many ways coded as male — a patriarchal economy underlined by the viscious Asian stereotype of the quintessentially nerdy, iconically non-manly Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe.) This link between adulthood and manliness isn’t a surprise; power in the 1980s, and still today, is generally coded as masculine. To grow up, to stop being a “fag” or (as one cruel upperclassman calls Sam) a “void”, is to grab hold of the male thing. Desire is not just about love, but about (male-coded) strength and substance and influence — thus the attraction of Bella to Edward, or of Anastasia to Christian Grey, or, for that matter, of Dorothea to Casaubon. Love isn’t just about wanting a man, but about wanting to be the man. Jake’s attractiveness , too, is not just his pretty face; it’s also his fancy cars and his place at the pinnacle of the school’s pecking order — and also the fact that he’s dating the desirable, visibly adult Caroline.

So romance is all about patriarchy? Well, not exactly. Or at least, the dynamic of wanting to grow up by loving and becoming the loved one isn’t restricted to heterosexual love stories. For example, it’s the basic premise of Nora Olsen’s wonderful lesbian YA novel, Frenemy of the People, out last week. At the start of the book, Lexie is the one out lesbian at the high school: she’s fiercely political, anti-bourgeois, and (in what I take as a deliberate Holden Caulfield wink) hates the smarminess and fakeness of her classmates. Clarissa, on the other hand, is a straight girl from a Conservative Christian family who rides horses and has tons of friends in the popular clique.

But then Clarissa suddenly figures out she’s bi (she has an epiphany where she realizes she likes pictures of Kimye as much for Kim as for Kanye) and she and Lexie begin a wary process of falling in love. That process isn’t just about learning to like one another; it’s also about becoming like one another — growing up both by loving and by turning into the loved one. At the end of the book, it’s the fierce Lexie who says, “It’s like Clarissa cracked me open, and all this tenderness spilled out of me that I didn’t even know I had” — and it’s the political Lexie who admits that “All I do now are bourgeois things, like horseback riding and lying around kissing my girlfriend.” Meanwhile, it’s the popular high school girl Clarissa who says that Lexie has “made me more fierce and brave,” and who gushes about the joys of property destruction. (“I can’t wait to do more things like that.”) The two girls have grown and found themselves — and the selves they’ve found are each other.

You could argue that the absence of patriarchal fantasies, not to mention the absence of stupid gay slurs and emasculated Asian stereotypes, makes Olsen’s coming-of-age story better than Sixteen Candles. And “Frenemy of the People” is in fact much superior to the film. Olsen’s a wittier and smarter writer than John Hughes, with a broader range of interests and sympathies than Hollywood formula can manage (the book tackles everything from the housing crisis to mental disability issues, all with an immaculately light touch.)

Nonetheless, I think reading Sixteen Candles through Frenemy actually makes me appreciate the film more, not less. Yes, the anxieties around masculinity are a bit off-putting. But at the same time, as Olsen shows, it’s natural for Sam to want to be Jake, because people, of whatever gender or orientation, often want to be, as well as to be with, their sweeties. If there’s some suggestion that she likes his status and his maturity — well, what’s wrong with loving someone because they have qualities you admire, and want for yourself? When you’re looking for it, you can even perhaps see Jake doing something similar himself — he gives an impassioned speech about wanting a serious girlfriend; he’s sick of partying. Growing up for him means putting aside the childish things that comprise being on top of that social hierarchy, and getting to be more like Sam, quiet and out of the spotlight. Maybe it’s Jake’s birthday too, there at the end of the film, and the gift he gets is to grow up to be the girl he loves.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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