Category Archives: Featured

How Ariel Became Disney’s Bad Woman: A Look at Disney’s Frozen and The Little Mermaid

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Tongue in cheek, a few of my friends will wonder aloud how I can be so very obsessed with Disney if I’m a feminist. Wink, nudge.

Though these jokes are, well, jokes, they hint at common cultural understandings of Disney’s relationship to women and feminism. Comments that I’ve heard imply that being a feminist can, somehow, be quantitatively determined by one’s hobbies and likes and, once graphed on some X-Y axis or other, that feminism is negatively correlated with an appreciation for Disney movies. Similarly, some Disney princesses are seen as more or less feminist by virtue of their hobbies. Merida from Brave is a feminist because she doesn’t care for marriage and likes archery, but Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, isn’t a feminist icon because, well, she obsesses/lusts/romances over a prince and surrenders her voice in an attempt to win him over. However, this reading of Ariel is too easy, too clear, an analysis that lacks the messiness that comes hand-in-hand with desire and obsession.

Strangely, however, instead of rigorous feminists accusing Disney of this mish-mash of oppression, the protests against Disney show up on my Facebook feed from casual allies, non-feminist men, brogressives, and teenagers engaged in various sub-cultures. Protesting Disney is no longer the foray of feminists who, in any case, have been long-time fans of complicating narratives, a tradition in which I am happily cemented. Just as male comic book nerds protest the antiquated gender roles in Twilight, so too have these groups accused Disney of not following some make-believe feminist handbook. I’m left hearing sarcastic comments or well-meaning comments, both annoying, that caricaturize the meaning of strength and reconstitute feminism as a rigid set of rules instead of an analytical category with emancipatory possibilities. What of Virigina Woolf, who declared that “a feminist is any woman who is honest about her life?”

I’m not interested in rescuing Disney from its errors—of which there are many—but I am interested in complicating dominant narratives surrounding Disney heroines and how our very rejection of romance, a rejection based on a belief that Strong Women just don’t do this and that and they especially don’t obsess over boys, is a form of reifying traditional gender norms. Not only does rejecting infatuation create social problems (goodbye, teenage girls, your problems matter no more), but the existence of uncontroversial female characters who don’t make mistakes, experiment with love, and aren’t obnoxiously demanding risks veering into Mary Sue territory. In Frozen, Disney avoids controversy by constructing a plot where good people react to situations beyond their control. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is an active participant in her own plot; she makes mistakes that she then tries to fix, or makes decisions that the audience finds disagreeable but that she defiantly claims for herself. In fact, Ariel’s entire character is marked by defiance and resistance, making her a more compelling but polarizing character.

I enjoyed Frozen, as I was instructed to enjoy the film—I couldn’t help but feel like the film was green-lit with the approval of a focus group consisting entirely of my clones. But as I watched the film, I shifted uneasily in my seat because, though Disney had created a story focusing on sisterly love instead of the usual male-female romance, the plot was underdeveloped because the main character, Anna, was written as a parent-approved role model. The desire to avoid the criticisms that have usually stalked Disney princesses suffocated Frozen like a pageant parent who scrubs her child clean and only allows her to perform in ways approved by the judge. The result is a delightful movie, a movie that we expect. But is creating a clean-cut and uncontroversial character a sign of progress?

Disney’s Frozen was a film that was self-aware of its legacy, as illustrated by the song “Love is an Open Door,” where Anna falls in love and becomes engaged to Prince Hans in the course of a 3 minute song-montage on the night of her sister’s coronation. Like many contemporary young adult films and books, an inevitable love triangle occurs once Anna leaves the castle in search for her sister and befriends Kristoff. He asks her, in absolute disbelief, how she could become engaged after knowing someone for one day. (And he also insists that all men pick their noses and eat their boogers, a statement which I refuse to empirically verify.) Anna retorts that it’s true love, duh. Disney engages in some fun inter-textual analysis where it pokes at its own films. Historically, their films have featured heroines that have hopscotched into a life of happily-ever-after once the obligatory two-second kiss has been bestowed by a prince whose name the audience doesn’t even know.

Instead of focusing on the love triangle, however, Frozen is a story about sisterly love, though still featuring the theme of sacrifice commonly found within Disney. Its strength lies in its characters grappling with notions of responsibility and learning what love truly means. However, despite its excellent passing of the Bechdel test, Frozen has a number of problems with plot. Here I grated my teeth. Because I was supposed to fall in love with Frozen and I kind of did—finally, a Disney film that could meet my feminist credentials. Except, as a wannabe storyteller, I could see the problems caused by trying to keep Anna controversy-free and within the box of “appropriate role model.”

Frozen’s plot seems to advance through convenience instead of character agency. Ariel must choose between her obsession and her family, a decision which infuriates casual Disney watchers—how could she choose a boy over her family? How could she give up her voice for a man? But Anna isn’t required to make this decision. Instead of Anna rejecting Hans, admitting that she may have made a mistake, Hans is conveniently revealed to be a Bad Guy who used Anna as a way of becoming king. This plot-twist is also familiar, though Disney seems to have gender-bent the trope. Margaret Atwood once remarked that Victorian love-triangles often featured ailing wives dying conveniently so that the path would be made clear for the heroine and the dark, brooding hero to get married without facing the prospect of actually divorcing, a decision which would remove sympathy from the male lead. Anna’s good-heartedness is solidified when she is omitted from having to make this difficult decision; if Hans had been good and she had broken off the engagement then she becomes too complex, too authoritative, too unsympathetic.

In a sense, Frozen features characters that are the victim of circumstance rather than their own choices, a writing mechanism which shields them from the controversies that have plagued other princesses who have made questionable decisions. Anna discovers the true nature of love by saving her sister, a type of selfless love that is above criticism but a role that girls and women have traditionally been expected to fulfill anyway. Anna’s life is never seriously in danger, of course, (and not because Disney is the creator—the studio has made a number of darker films) and so the question of her sacrifice, plot-wise, is compromised. Discovering the meaning of selfless love is an important part of human development, but a theme that would have been sharply criticized had Anna sacrificed herself for Kristoff instead of Elsa—a claim that I cannot prove empirically, but which I feel confident in asserting upon observing how we treat teenage girls trying to understand their sexuality –poorly. Despite Anna being distinctively cute, Frozen is relatively free of sexual desire minus short bursts of puppy love and infatuation with Hans, which are shown to be a Big Mistake when Hans reveals his duplicitous nature. In the end, Anna faces a choice; be rescued by true love’s kiss (from Kristoff) or sacrifice herself to save Elsa. She chooses the latter.

Disney’s The Little Mermaid is an undeniably darker story, though the original story by Hans Christian Anderson is even more bleak. Whereas Anna and Kristoff share a bumbling and endearing kiss at the end of the film, Ariel spends much of The Little Mermaid lusting after Prince Eric’s body. She wants to be human, wants their legs, to know what it feels like to walk. Eric is a prince, but he’s also a body that is imbued with symbolism—he’s not only Eric, but a representation of everything she wants. She gushes over him, and once she saves Eric from the peril of the sea and returns him to land, pauses to admire him, leaving no question that her crush is based on sexual desire. It’s this sexual desire that makes Ariel a controversial character.

Though Ariel is often condemned for leaving her family for “a boy,” she is, to me, a more interesting character because she made a difficult decision with moral consequences that cannot be waved away with a magic wand. It is precisely Ariel’s aggression, stubbornness, and ability to carve out her own plot by making questionable decisions that leaves a lasting impact. The permanence of her decision makes Ariel’s sacrifice more impactful than Anna’s sacrifice, the latter whose decision we know will have no lasting consequence because love will act as a magical healer and “save the day.” Ariel’s decision to marry Eric, however, isn’t heroic—heroism is selfless, and her desire to marry Eric is tainted by the fact that she’s doing something for herself. In the real world, she might be called selfish or a bitch.

She crushes hard on a human prince, has a hoardish obsession with collecting human artifacts, and eventually exchanges her voice for a pair of human legs so she can pursue Prince Eric and, if he falls in love with her in the requisite time period, will remain human forever. These human legs come at the cost of engaging with Urusula the Sea-Witch—but only after her father, King Triton, discovers her cave of human objects and destroys all that she loves, objects which are the source of her knowledge and curiosity. This tough-love disciplinary approach is for her own good—an argument as novel as the Old Testament when Adam and Eve were tossed out of the Garden because Eve just had to taste the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Ariel becomes Eve, obsessing over artifacts that promise to unfold secrets but with the potential to unbridle her sexuality. Eventually, her decision to give up her voice for a pair of legs is shown to be a mistake, because post-1990 Disney films always comes with the “be yourself” moral message. However, the film is perfectly clear that her father was also mistaken to control her. Some audiences remember the former message, but not the latter.

I am still surprised when people condemn Ariel, especially when her father is the one who believes that her desire for human knowledge is a source of harm and whose destruction of her possessions drives her into the arms of Ursula the Sea Witch, a character who functions as some kind of fat woman quasi-capitalist obsessed with creating unfair contracts in hopes of usurping the monarchy and the “rightful” king—she’s worthy of admiration, really. Ariel is the prototypical Bad Woman, removed from the roster of Acceptable Feminist Heroines (by those who parody feminism?) because she has sacrificed her family for self-fulfillment. We’re condemning Ariel for her disobedience.

In the end, her father realizes that it’s unfair to prevent Ariel from being happy and, with his magical trident, grants her legs. The reconciliation between Ariel and her family mirrors the ending of Bend it Like Beckham, but the latter is situated as a British “girl power” movie because the main character wants to play soccer, a goal that is valued more than romance in the hierarchy of fictitious Approved Feminist Activities. (And because the main character of Bend it Like Beckham is brown, and we’re more comfortable seeing brown daughters rebel against their fathers because our own orientalist inclinations lead us to view their family structures as innately oppressive—but girls rebelling against white men? Well, that just won’t do.)

My conclusion is fairly trite and I don’t mind admitting it; imperfect characters make for compelling stories. Restraining ourselves and making characters that shy away from controversy can actually reaffirm the gendered expectations that we’re trying to avoid. Often, what we do not question, such as selfless love for family, is steeped in normativity. Allow teenage girls the agency and the opportunity to make mistakes, to lust. Stories can do many things, and at the very least we should, on occasion, be challenged. Stories also deserve our criticism, of course, but they deserve levelled, thoughtful, and nuanced criticism that does not unintentionally reproduce a hierarchy of values that only congratulates selflessness and condemns self-fulfillment.

Reverse-Engineering Fairbanks

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Silent film star Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939) was hugely popular in his time. He was one of the first performers of whom it could be said that he was less an actor than a star who was considered to be “playing himself.” He was so universally recognized and his audiences’ expectations were so great that in his films, his actual name would come up on the intertitles as he was introduced onscreen. The first part of his career was spent making vigorous comedies full of antic chase scenes, such as His Picture in the Papers, Manhattan Madness and His Majesty, the American, all of which blended his facility for comedic timing with great acrobatic skills. He became the quintessential boys’ hero.

United Artists: Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks

United Artists: Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks

By the time of his formation of United Artists with the even more popular stars, his wife Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, Fairbanks had come to retain considerable control over his movies. He produced, wrote and starred in his own films and was in a position to select his casts and crews from the best talents Hollywood had to offer. With his 30th film, The Mark of Zorro, he initiated the action genre in film. Thereafter, he dedicated the remainder of his career to the costumed adventure genre. He set a source precedent for all of the action stars to follow such as Errol Flynn, Burt Lancaster and the nameless protagonist of the My Name is Nobody spaghetti westerns, as well as even the semi-humorous performances of musical star Gene Kelly—and influencing contemporary stars of action/comedy like Jackie Chan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Johnny Depp and “The Rock.”

Fairbanks’ 1920 silent feature film version of The Mark of Zorro derived from the prose serial adventure “The Curse of Capistrano” by Johnston McCulley that ran in six parts in the pulp periodical All-Story Weekly in 1919. Fairbanks’ son Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in his autobiography says that McCulley’s story was brought to his father’s attention by agent Ruth Allen, who was a friend of Anna Sully, his mother and Fairbanks’ first wife. Fairbanks initially was reluctant to diverge from his modernist comedic image to do a period piece, but eventually he was convinced and procured the option. The resulting film became so popular that it determined the trajectory of his future career:

(The Mark of Zorro was) by far the most successful movie he ever made…a more than minor classic of its kind, widely imitated and remade…the phenomenal success of Zorro convinced my father from there on to take more time and concentrate on producing a series of high-quality, expensive films that would be exhibited first for long runs in regular theaters (not movie houses) with reserved hard-ticket seats (Fairbanks Jr. 64).

The exclusivity implied in this type of limited engagement and the increasingly impressive budgets Fairbanks commanded for his productions served to elevate the formerly crass medium of movies into something more resembling an art form. Although, a factor in Fairbanks’ decision to make The Mark of Zorro was a consideration of economy: the events of the film, set in Spanish California at the end of the previous century, were placed in the same location as Fairbanks’ studio in the southern part of the state, which was tremendously convenient and served to keep costs down.

The Mark of Zorro was directed by Fred Niblo, who would also helm Fairbanks’ next adventure film The Three Musketeers, but as was typical for the star, he wrote the film scenario and took a firm hand in all aspects of the production. In his auteuristic capacity, Fairbanks took the initiative to deviate from his pulp source and alter certain story points to telling affect. Significantly, he added several tropes to the original source story that would be credited as the inspiration for Batman and other popular cultural vigilante heroes.

However, while Fairbanks’ Zorro is certainly one of the prototypes for the dark masked hero with a ubiquitous identifying symbol intended to strike fear into the hearts of evildoers (i.e. Zorro’s slashed “Z,” Batman’s “bat signal” and The Phantom’s skull ring, which leaves its impression on the chins of the villains he punches), the earliest precedent for the swordsman vigilante with a symbol and a “foppish” alter ego is Baroness Emma Orczy’s the Scarlet Pimpernel, a hero of adventures set in the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution. The Pimpernel’s other identity is Sir Percy Blakeney and at the scenes of his escapades, he’d leave a calling card on which was printed an image of the flower of his namesake. The character first appeared in book form in 1905 and the character debuted in Hollywood as early as 1917, when a silent feature directed by Richard Stanton and starring Dustin Farnum was released by the Fox Film Corporation.

It would seem that Fairbanks took inspiration from the Pimpernel to add the “Z” symbol and to emphasize Zorro’s “effeminate” plainclothes disguise, Don Diego de la Vega. Actually, Don Diego is not Zorro’s true identity, but another smokescreen for a hero who has two false faces. This has been counted as Fairbanks’ innovation by his biographer Jeffrey Vance: “Fairbanks’ exploration of the different natures of masculinity is a source of continuing comment…The Mark of Zorro’s juxtaposition of the effete Don Diego and the vigorous Senor Zorro is the most distinctive delineation…both identities are masks. Don Diego Vega is neither fop nor fox.”

Comics scholar Charles Hatfield concurs and further says that the dual deception of Zorro enables the hero to navigate “an ironic class mobility à la so many versions of Robin Hood” and displays a bending of gender expectations to denote a “masculinity…made triumphant, queerly enough, through flamboyance” (Hatfield 113). These descriptions run very much along the lines of Batman’s alter-ego, Bruce Wayne, who lives in a mansion with only his butler Alfred and his teenaged ward Dick Grayson, an arrangement that was decried as “like a wish dream of…homosexuals living together” by psychiatrist Frederick Wertham in his 1954 expose of supposedly degenerate comics, Seduction of the Innocent, which raised such a controversy that public sentiment turned against the comics medium and a congressional inquiry subsequently served to drive many publishers out of business (cited in Williams, 4).

Hatfield’s sources include an essay by Catherine Williams that takes the gendering questions that arise from considering these depictions much further. Concentrating on the Tyrone Power remake of The Mark of Zorro but making observations that are also applicable to Fairbanks’ original and his prose source as well, Williams first explicates the phallic symbolism of the ubiquitous swordplay of the Zorro films, then offers:

Zorro fights for the aristocracy without their support and, while becoming a folk hero of sorts for the peons, does little to improve their constrained circumstances. It cannot be mere coincidence that Zorro, the flamboyant guerrilla who is outside all political systems, has as his alter ego an openly gay man, an outlaw of sorts himself” (Williams 13).

Williams claims that such closeted homosexuality is deliberately used by the powers that be, which then begins to cross over into the non-fictional real world: “(Zorro) isn’t really about a revolution led by a gay man to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Diego/Zorro’s mission, it turns out, is about preserving the line of succession, about maintaining the system’s power to ‘reproduce’ itself” (13).

With the long-standing, long-accepted “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies of the American military, Williams asserts, “one can ‘be’ gay as long as one does not pursue gay sex or inform the military of one’s orientation” (14). For superheroes and homosocial institutions such as the military alike,

(They) must forego sexual relations in the line of duty while manufacturing a deliberately misleading persona. Thus their ability to serve as warriors is a direct result of a “secret” or closeted identity. What is most terrifying about this link between popular culture and government policy is the way the closet is reinforced as a ‘noble’ or ‘heroic’ institution—something that should be done for the good of the country (Williams 14).

Williams thusly links the closeted identities of fictional vigilante and superheroes to the agendas of the very real military-industrial complex, an enveloping conspiracy if ever there was one.

But, regardless of these implications and perhaps in ignorance of the earlier Scarlet Pimpernel, Batman’s creators credit Fairbanks and his Diego/Zorro as an influence. Bob Kane co-created the character in 1939 with writer Bill Finger, who said, “My idea was to have Batman be a combination of Douglas Fairbanks, Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow and Doc Savage as well” (Steranko, 44). The creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, also claimed Fairbanks as a prime influence on their character, whose early appearance often depicted him in the star’s signature hands-on-hips stance.

In fact, Fairbanks’ amendments to Zorro’s character were also assimilated by author McCulley for his subsequent sequels. Such Fairbanks-initiated devices as Zorro’s slashed “Z” symbol and Diego’s ineffectual “handkerchief illusion”, prefaced by the character saying “Have you seen this one?” turned up in McCulley’s follow-up story in the now-renamed Argosy All-Story Weekly, “the Further Adventures of Zoro” (sic) which as I found, thanks to HU contributor Alex Buchet, was deceptively cover-subtitled with “In which Douglas Fairbanks will again play the Hero” :

Left: cover of All-Story Weekly, 1919. Right: cover of Argosy All-Story Weekly, 1922.

Left: cover of All-Story Weekly, 1919.
Right: cover of Argosy All-Story Weekly, 1922.

Fairbanks did not subsequently adapt that story for his own Zorro sequel, the 1925 Don Q, Son of Zorro— but rather, he appropriated some of its elements for another film property entirely, The Black Pirate. According to Fairbanks scholars John C. Tibbetts and James M. Walsh,

Similarities between McCulley’s sequel and the Fairbanks pirate film include scenes wherein the heroine is captured by a pirate ship, the hero scampering about the rigging of a pirate ship, a rescue affected by allies of the hero in a pursuing ship. Even the character of Barbados is echoed somewhat by Donald Crisp’s portrayal of a tough old pirate with a heart of gold. (Tibbetts & Walsh 124).

David A. Cook cites Fairbanks as the originator of the adventure spectacle, whose “star personality so influenced the character of his films that he deserves to be called an auteur”, who embodied the “all-American boy—boisterous, optimistic and athletic—who detested weakness, insincerity, and social regimentation in any form” (Cook 222). Additionally, Cook and other film scholars rank Fairbanks among the earliest champions of experimental film color for his use of the expensive two-color “cemented positive” Technicolor process for The Black Pirate.

It can’t be overstated just how profoundly Fairbanks set the heroic standard of his time. The star kept himself in extremely good physical condition—apart, that is, from his heavy smoking habit. He was famous for doing his own stunt work and a great part of his preparations for his films was dedicated to making his onscreen physical feats viable. For The Mark of Zorro, he engaged the assistance of stuntman Richard Talmadge. According to Vance,

In rehearsals, Talmadge mainly served as a model; Fairbanks, along with his trainer, Lewis Hippe, watched him go through the action in order to eliminate flaws and minimize hazards. Once a stunt routine was effectively refined to Fairbanks’ satisfaction, the star himself executed the feat for the cameras. (…) Invaluable expertise was also provided by a Belgian fencing master, Henry J. Uyttenhove…who choreographed all of the film’s dueling sequences (Vance 96).

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. corroborates his father’s stunt-training methodology with an account of the star’s preparation for Don Q:

One of the principle gimmicks of this Zorro sequel was the expert cracking of a giant Australian bullwhip. In order to learn how to do tricks with the monster lash, Dad had sent for the famous Australian athlete and bullwhip expert Snowy Baker. It didn’t take long before Dad was able to whirl the long blacksnake, make it crack like a pistol shot, and then snap a cigarette out of a brave and steady mouth fifteen or more feet away (Fairbanks Jr. 104).

In this way, Fairbanks used experts to give his stunts a feel of authenticity and won his audience over by displaying what seemed to be incredible feats of physical strength and stamina, in much the same manner as did the earliest incarnations of the “cinema of attractions.”

Fairbanks’ subsequent films were all action/adventures with his trademark comedic touch. One of the greatest is certainly The Thief of Bagdad. Fairbanks’ performance in this film is astounding; he seems more like a dancer than an actor as he moves in fluid choreography through sets which are built on a huge, vaulting scale, nearly dwarfing the performers. The climactic scene where Fairbanks attacks a city with a massive magical army that appears in puffs of smoke reminds me of nothing so much as director George Lucas’ first sequel to the Star Wars trilogy, The Phantom Menace. It is strange to think that in 1999 I waited with my son in line for hours to see what I recall mostly as a screen filled with legions of digitally created, exponentially replicated clone warriors that hardly look any more convincing than what Fairbanks was able to create onscreen in 1924.

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(Note: as with my other HU posts about film, this is a revised version of an essay originally done as a final paper for a recent class. In this case, I accepted my professor’s challenge to write about Fairbanks and to that end, I proposed to “reverse-engineer” a storyboard for one of the star’s  silent films.)

For the preparation of the storyboards that follow, I studied the narrative techniques of storyboard artist and legendary cartoonist Alexander Toth. It is coincidental that Toth is not only one of the most exemplary storyboard artists, but also an artist whose career is inextricably linked with the character of Zorro. In fact, Toth’s most famous comic books are his adaptations of the late 1950s, early 1960s Disney TV version of Zorro starring Guy Williams—and those are among the most refined products of the best-selling and family friendly but often relatively bland Dell imprint:

Alex Toth, “Zorro: Garcia’s Secret,” Four Color Comics #933, 1958

Alex Toth, “Zorro: Garcia’s Secret,” Four Color Comics #933, 1958

In his introduction to the reprint collection of his classic Zorro series, Toth wrote, “Fairbanks…created the visual film persona for all later renditions of Zorro to imitate.” However, Toth claimed to prefer the 1940 remake of The Mark of Zorro, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Tyrone Power. Of Fairbanks’ original The Mark of Zorro, Toth recalled, “I did see this silent classic at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art film seminar series in the 1940s and enjoyed its zesty, witty gymnastics, but the film’s dated style pales in contrast to Mamoulian’s ageless 1940 epic” (Toth 11). Despite this disclaimer, Toth’s Dell comics depictions of Zorro often echo the feel of Fairbanks’ version of the characters and settings equally as much as Powers’ update.

The storyboard is my fabrication to make a point. Fairbanks was unusual in that he not only produced and starred in his own films and did his own stunt work, but he wrote them as well. Though almost all films did eventually came to be done from scripts, in actuality the early silent films were rarely if ever scripted. Fairbanks was known to work from a relatively loose scenario, which left a good amount of leeway for improvisation in the filmmaking process. His films and indeed, all silent films were likely never storyboarded.

Storyboards first were used by the Walt Disney studio for a 1933 short, Three Little Pigs—and the first live action feature to be entirely storyboarded was the 1939 Gone with the Wind. But, Fairbanks is the founder of the action film, a genre that at the present time provides the bulk of storyboard artists’ employment, as action sequences are where their skills are most needed and in the most demand. And so, in order to study how Fairbanks articulated his action scenes, I undertook to make a storyboard for a six minute sequence in The Mark of Zorro. I did not have access to Fairbank’s script, or the source story he adapted his script from, so I watched the sequence in question once and as I did, I lightly sketched a bare-bones layout with action notations, which came out to 13 six-paneled pages. To render this, I then didn’t look further at the film, but wholly reconstructed the images from memory and in many cases simply invented the poses.

The result echoes my previous experience with storyboards, which is that the finished film looks quite a lot like what is drawn, but not exactly—a lot of detail and much greater precision of choreography in how sequences actually play out are developed in the process of filming. The storyboard is not intended to be particularly pretty; it looks and is a bit rushed—it is meant to provide a template, a starting point to guide the filmmakers; and that is what my storyboard looks like, to the best of my abilities within the time constraints I had to deal with, which also reflect the abbreviated schedules that many film productions labor under.

 

Click on images to enlarge:

Zorro 1

Zorro 2
Zorro 3
Zorro 4
Zorro 5
Zorro 6
Zorro 7
Zorro 8
Zorro 9
Zorro 10
Zorro 11
Zorro 12
Zorro 13

Thanks to Professor Marc Bolan and Marguerite Van Cook.
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Sources

The Black Pirate. Dir. Albert Parker. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Billie Dove. United Artists, 1926. Web. 06 Dec. 2013. Link

The Mark of Zorro. Dir. Fred Niblo. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Marguerite De La Motte, Noah Beery. United Artists, 1920. Web. 06 Dec. 2013.
Entire film: Link
Storyboarded scene: Link

The Thief of Bagdad. Dir. Raoul Walsh. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Julanne Johnston, Anna May Wong. United Artists, 1924. DVD, Kino Video, 2004.

Basinger, Jeanine. Silent Stars. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Print.

Buchet, Alex. “Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 6): The Fabulous Junkshop.” Hooded Utilitarian, October 24, 2013. Web. 09 Dec. 2013. Link

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1996.
Print.

Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas. The Salad Days. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Hatfield, Charles. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. Jackson, Miss: The University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Print.

Steranko, James. The History of Comics 1. Reading, Pa: Supergraphics, 1970. Print.

Tibbetts, John C. and James M. Welsh. His Majesty the American: The Cinema of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. New York: A.S. Barnes and Co. 1977. Print.

Toth, Alex and Darrell McNeil. By Design. Los Angeles: Gold Medal, 1996. Print.

Toth, Alex. “A Forward’s Look Back and Askance” (author’s introduction). The Complete Classic Adventures of Zorro. Fullerton, Ca: Image Comics, 1999. Print.

Vance, Jeffrey with Tony Maietta. Douglas Fairbanks. Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press, 2008. Print.

Williamson, Catherine. “’Draped Crusaders’: Disrobing Gender in The Mark of Zorro”, Cinema Journal 36.2, (Winter 1997): p 3-16. Web. O9 Dec. 2013. Link

On the Interpretation of Mind MGMT

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mindmgmt-8

Matt Kindt’s Mind MGMT (by Dark Horse Comics) unfolds like a dream.  Not like a Hollywood dream, where, despite some strangeness, the dream remains coherent and dictates useful messages to the protagonist to be sussed out in waking life. Nor like the constructed dreams in Christopher Nolan’s wildly overrated film Inception. That film had the worst representation of dreaming I have ever seen. Its insistence that dreams have to “make sense” or else the dreamer will awaken is at odds with how severely and fascinatingly strange dreams can really be—a strangeness our dreaming selves can sense or even question, but that does not disrupt the dream. In fact, it is the very understandable abruptness of the sensation of falling or violence that often startles us awake, not the strange, not the incoherence of the dream. The kinds of compression and transference that occurs in dreams—the conflation of people, the access to pure knowledge, displacement of people and events in time, the superimposition of places, the transgression of social norms, etc…—is the normality of the dream-world. The cold sleek video game-like architecture of Inception is really the death of dreams and of human imagination­—plus, the film itself is a mess that fails on the many levels of genre it tries to emulate. Inception completely misses what makes dreams useful and fun. Dreams are malleable protoplasmic psychical energy that functions as a form of mind management that resists interpretation, and that is often diminished by attempts to do so.

MindMGMT-4The problem with representations of dreams in literature and movies echoes Susan Sontag’s concerns in her seminal essay “Against Interpretation.” She writes, “Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there.” The same is true for dreams. In her indictment of the interpretive impulse of the contemporary critic, she of course brings up Freud, whose work, despite being widely discredited, has permeated Western views of art, relations, culture, what-have-you, to such a degree as to become a nearly invisible force. He remains unnamed, even as his terminology is put to use or re-appropriated in the language of not only critics, but everyday conversation. Sontag’s concern with the hermeneutics of Freudian interpretation emerges from the problems inherent to the manifest content of the dream (“the dream” in this case being the stand-in for “art”) being a transformation of an unreachable latent content.  As Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams, “I am led to regard the dream as a sort of substitute for the thought-processes, full of meaning and emotion, at which I arrived after the completion of the analysis.” The emphasis there is Freud’s, but if I were to emphasize something it would be: at which I arrived. This is nothing new, I guess, but the idea that Freud or his psychoanalytic protégés serve as gatekeepers for secret knowledge gleaned from the free association of dream material is laughable. Freud’s own writing feeds this doubt.  He admits the over-determined nature of dream imagery, making their connection to a singular source (and thus meaning) impossible. He explains that “[Dream-work] only comes into operation after the dream-content has already been constructed. Its function would then consist in arranging the constituents of the dream in such a way that they form an approximately connected whole, a dream-composition.” In other words, even telling a remembered dream, even before its content is analyzed, is a form of preliminary interpretation.  This form of dream-work deals with the consideration of intelligibility. To re-tell the dream the dreamer must order and edit the dream and/or make poor excuses to mitigate its incoherence. “And somehow, despite looking like mi abuela’s nursing home, I knew it was my college cafeteria…”

Sontag is right that in making the meaning of the dream the primary concern, the experience of the dream is lost.  She warns that the over-emphasis on the content of art devalues critical concern with its form.  In the case of dreams, we seem to have something that resists attainable meaning in terms of its images, scenarios, sensations, but whose form is predicated not on its experience, but on its telling—a telling that requires a bit of both conscious and unconscious interpretation.  She writes that “interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable,” and that certainly falls in line with Freud’s interpretation of dreams.  In Freud’s view, dreams are a form of wish fulfillment in which the latent conflicts our conscious mind will not let us express manifest themselves in the incoherent and fragmented experiences of the dreaming vision and sensation.  Dreams then are a form of safety-valve that lets out the pressure built within the dreaming subject through conflicts between id and super-ego but that transforms them from the literal desire into the strange and symbolic.  The dream manages the mind’s discomfort with the mind’s own anti-social taboo desires.  Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever the source and function of the dream experience, more time needs to be spent with the dream itself—with the dreaming of it.  The same is true in literary analysis. More time must be spent with the text. Whatever my other theoretical concerns may be with any text, the foundation of the work is the experience of (close-)reading.

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Mind MGMT provides ample material for just that—spending more time with the dream itself. It is a fantastic example of how compelling dreams can be. While the series itself does not purport to convey a dream world like Nolan’s Inception or 1984’s cheeserific Dreamscape, it constructs a dream-like world nonetheless. In fact, since its world slowly unfolds through the eyes of Meru (or sometimes—as in a dream—from outside of herself) without calling itself a dream, the sense of it being dream-like is all the more compelling. Furthermore, the inclusion of strange complimentary stories, mission briefs and directives in the margins of its pages, provides hypnogogic knowledge—the sense of just knowing something, as you often do in dreams. In this way, Mind MGMT avoids even the certainty of doubt, and lets the reader float along as layers of secrets are peeled away to reveal more mystery.

Reading the first collected volume, The Manager, the series begins with a reference to dreaming, with the focus of it panels shifting from a fighting couple falling from a balcony, to a figure on the street below throwing a Molotov cocktail into a bookstore window, to a man walking by the burning store to shoot another man in the head, but who in turn has his throat slashed by a woman with a large knife.  The captions read: Ever have a dream that is like a story? And at the end of the dream there’s a twist ending?  Some kind of shocking surprise? How can your mind do that to you?  You’re creating the dream.

These multiple shifts of perspective in the first couple of pages set the tone for the rest of the series. A blacked-out panel provides the only transition to the “real” story, Flight 815 (a Lost reference–Damon Lindoff wrote the intro for the first collected volume) where all passengers and crew apparently and very suddenly lost all their memories. Two years later they have not regained them.  This disassociation is shared by Meru who “awakens” in her apartment with no food in her fridge, a table full of past due bills and her ”new” idea to write  about the amnesia flight, a follow-up book on her true-crime bestseller.  However, upon calling her literary agent, it appears as if the idea is not as new as it seems to her. Somehow he already knows, but this does not strike her as strange. Sensing something familiar even as she starts a project anew, Meru’s hunt begins to find Henry Lyme, who according to the flight manifest, boarded the plane, but was not among those who got off when it landed.

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A dream is a strange limbo in its ability to put the dreamer in a state of simultaneous knowing and unknowing. There is a great library of knowledge immediately accessible to you—you just know things and the experience of the dream cannot shake that knowledge.  Conversely, there is the experience of cognitive dissonance—not accessing what you know you know. Meru’s search for Henry Lyme becomes one of these simultaneously impossible and possible tasks that even accomplishing does not accomplish.  As complications increase, she becomes enmeshed in a complex plot of agents and former agents of Mind MGMT—a defunct and yet somehow still-functioning agency of paranormal people: immortals who can recover from any wound, animal empaths who teach dolphins to talk, people who can see the immediate future, ad writers who can encode brainwashing messages into their ads, a man who can kill by pointing his finger, and so on. Meru’s investigation for her book — which should be at least somewhat routine given her previous success at investigating “true crime” and writing a best-selling book — becomes mired in a fruitless cycle of discovery and amnesia—a deep questioning of the “true.”  Secrets are peeled away to reveal more secrets, more mysteries. Mind MGMT, both the comic and the agency it is about, is a journey through layers of secrets hidden by barely disguised suspicion that serves as a fetish—obsession with peeling away the façade of intelligibility of the dull everyday waking life in search of more intelligibility, which itself can only be another layer of façade—an eternal onion with no center.  If the cycles of the dream experience are allowed to continue it becomes the substitute for understanding through interpretation.  Each latency is the manifestation of another latent conflict.

Meru’s quest—and thus the reader’s—however, becomes not about learning some truth, but about constructing some form of legibility in a world that increasingly seems like it has no stable framework.  Meru is learning to interpret this dream she is living in.  As such, Kindt’s book becomes about the experience of interpretation, of encoding intelligibility upon the unintelligible. It challenges the reader to take up Sontag’s perspective on art regarding the experience of it, while providing an experience of the intellectualized process of interpreting it.

The transformation of discovery into more mystery is reinforced when even finding Henry Lyme fails to lead to an end, but just turns Meru’s quest back on herself.  She is the source of mystery, or at least the mysteries she explores in the outside world are just mirrors of her own half-remembered history—the self-created dream with the surprising end.  Even her name, Meru, calls to mind Mount Meru, a sacred mountain in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist cosmology, considered to be the center of all the physical, metaphysical and spiritual universes, suggesting that she is the source of all she investigates. In Lacanian terms her self only exists as a symbolic relation to an unattainable self. The self is a narrative that is told through a dream language of expanding and compressing symbols that can never be read the same way twice.

MindMGMT-3As such, Meru’s hunt for herself is in relation to a fluid dream vision of  history in Mind MGMT —tensions between Mind MGMT and a Soviet counterpart either parallel Cold War anxieties, or a schism in the agency creates them.  A variety of crimes and disasters, Hollywood murders, Zanzibar tsunamis, suburban riots, university uprisings, the undefinable terrors of human history are revealed to be the results of Mind MGMT agents working with or against orders—who can tell? Some agents are put into a form of sleep, unaware of their mission or abilities, until awakened, accidentally or intentionally to cause mayhem when the conflicts of a constructed life and their secret lives come to the surface­—but even that secret life might turn out to be constructed when picked at again.  As the story progresses Meru moves from the periphery to the center. The CIA agent tailing her and apparently ignorant of Mind MGMT may have once been her lover and one of their recruits as well—knowledge and relations are suddenly constructed from nothing with equal measures of doubt and certainty.  Examining the panels of early issues reveals that figures later revealed to be involved in the layered conspiracies were there all along, in crowd scenes, in the background, as a shadow.  Kindt succeeds at making the coincidental seem planned and vice-versa. Mind MGMT exists to shift public opinion and fulfill political goals, but also to police itself.  The world is managed and the managers are managed until all sense of origins is lost. There is no unmanaged mind. It is always already managed—managing itself, managing others into managing it. And so on. To arrive at a place against interpretation is to have interpreted your way there.

There is a moment early on, when Meru—being simultaneously led and followed on her hunt for Henry Lyme—is alone in a Chinese jungle. The text reads “She’s stripped down to nothing. Just a translator. No provisions. No map. No weapon. But…no rent due, no utilities turned off. No bounced checks.”  The suggestion is that this nightmarish adventure is a form of wish fulfillment—an escape from the mundane responsibilities of her life.  And yet, at that point the narration is Lyme’s voice, not hers.  He is narrating her desire and perspective. She sees herself from without. The concerns Lyme imagines she escapes from are the modern post-industrial concerns of an elite worker class that finds itself scraping by as the apparent systems of world capital fail it. It is not until Meru finally finds Lyme, that the narration shifts and her voice takes over telling the story. Could it be that that those everyday concerns are also a form of wish-dream? Lyme’s word balloons are blotted out by Meru’s narration in caption boxes, and for the first time she seems to awaken into her real self through his telling her of his own history—but even that will come into doubt. The timelines of their narratives don’t match up, nor do the identities and motives of the people they involve.  As in a dream, times, places, events, people are unanchored.

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As the story unfolds and collapses, Kindt’s art beautifully reinforces the dream vibe.  The use of watercolor throughout creates a fluidity marked by the translucent saturation only possible with that medium.  The panels are a bit of dreamy haziness as the color bleed out of the penciling in several places.  Furthermore, the panels are placed within the confines of non-photo blue guidelines that indicate the area on the page within which Mind MGMT agents are to print their reports, creating a juxtaposition between the wash of uncertain color and the officiousness of the blue ink’s message. The comic itself is uninterrupted by ads, except those that seem to be selling something encoded with secret messages to possible Mind MGMT recruits—but to further confuse the issue, sometimes the back page seems to all have small classified ads for actual comic shops and the like.

MindMGMT-9Ultimately, there is something Foucaultian about Mind MGMT and its depiction of the relationship between power and knowledge.  In the series, power is dispersed globally and manifested through the creation of knowledge. As Foucault reminds us, not only does knowledge equal power, but more surreptitiously, power equals knowledge.  The Mind MGMT agents use their powers to create, destroy and shape knowledge for each other, for themselves and for the world at large.  The very concept of “meaning” loses all meaning when experience is shunted aside as a valuable category by the Freudian hermeneutics that freely associate discrete categories of latent meanings to infinite manifestations. Mind MGMT effectively demonstrates that the distinction between experience and interpretation is a false dichotomy.  The mind is always already managed. Returning to Lacan, I can’t help but think of his concept of the unattainable Real.  It is impossible to exist outside the symbolic. As such, rather than concern ourselves with the categories of experience (of the body and the senses) and intellect (of the mind), it is better to perceive the human condition as the Sinthome (symptom without cause). Meru’s troubled stories (for Mind MGMT arcs overlap and partially efface each other) are a telling of the sinthome, which “can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys (jouit) the unconscious in so far as the unconscious determines the subject.” Mind MGMT revels in that sometimes (often times?) frightening space of the undifferentiated conscious and unconscious and finds joy in being, but understands simultaneously that to be is to be in relation to being.

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This post has been cross-posted at The Middle Spaces.

Bureaucrats and Grunts: B.P.R.D. Women

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How common are three-dimensional female characters in American superhero comics? I’m spectacularly unqualified to answer that question, since I read very few contemporary superhero comics, but I’m worried that the continued viability of sites like Gingerhaze’s Hawkeye Initiative and Heidi MacDonald’s Brokeback Tumblr means that most comics continue to be sexist junk. One series that I’ve kept up with, however, that doesn’t get enough credit for its cast of active, intelligent females, is B.P.R.D., written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, and currently drawn by a rotating group of artists, including Tyler Crook, James Harren and Laurence Campbell.

B.P.R.D. is a spinoff of Mignola’s Hellboy title, and chronicles the adventures of agents who work for a U.S. government organization that battles occult menaces. (“B.P.R.D.” stands for “Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.”) The agents are a mix of characters with special abilities, like the aquatic Abe Sapien and the ghostly Johann Kraus, and non-superhero grunts just doing their jobs. B.P.R.D.’s premise isn’t innovative, but there’s a lot right about the follow-thru: Arcudi writes terse, realistic dialogue, Mignola and Arcudi’s soap-opera plots deliberately and suspensefully reveal information about their characters and their increasingly bizarre world, and the art, always competent and legible, is sometimes magnificent, as in the three pages by Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon that open B.P.R.D.: Vampire #1 (2013).

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Script by Mike Mignola, Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon. Art by Bá and Moon.

Script by Mike Mignola, Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon.
Art by Bá and Moon.

 
Out of context, these images echo Dario Argento’s approach to horror violence, where tortured and murdered women become an aestheticized misogynist spectacle. But B.P.R.D. is more complicated than that. The bodies drifting downstream have been killed by two ferocious female vampires, who torment a male agent, Simon Anders, throughout three mini-series, 1947 (2009), 1948 (2012) and Vampire. (The female vampires operate like film noir femme fatales: they’re evil and defined by their sexuality, but they’re also powerful and vibrant.) Further, in B.P.R.D. violence against men is just as common as violence against women: the first issue of B.P.R.D.: Monsters (2011), for instance, ends with a money shot of a gutted male torso missing its arms and legs. Most importantly, however, is the fact that Mignola and Arcudi write some of the most compelling female characters in all of comics, and for me that offsets the series’ gender-indiscriminate violence.

Before I discuss these characters, though, I want to be clear that my praise for some of B.P.R.D.’s female characters isn’t an unqualified rave for the series as a whole. I agree with the critical consensus that B.P.R.D. has dipped in quality since the departure of artist Guy Davis in 2011. One example of this critical consensus is the Comic Books Are Burning in Hell podcast on “The Long Death” storyline, where Chris Mautner, Joe McCullough, Matt Seneca and Tucker Stone point out that after two decades as the best superhero-comics line, the Mignolaverse has begun a decline precipitated by the replacement of Davis with less accomplished artists (especially Crook) and overproduction of both the main B.P.R.D. book (now monthly) and various spinoffs (Abe Sapien, Lobster Johnson). At its height, B.P.R.D. was sensational. The run from 2004 to 2010 (essentially the material collected in volumes two through four of the Plague of Frogs hardcovers) is my second-favorite genre comic ever, edged out by my favorite Lee/Kirby Fantastic Fours, but it’s currently not at its best.

Even when it was the best comic book at the shop, however, B.P.R.D. included plots that were occasionally problematic in their treatment of gender issues. You’d expect Liz Sherman, a firestarter who was part of Mignola’s original B.P.R.D. team with Hellboy and Abe Sapien, to be the title’s strongest, most independent female character, but not so: through much of the Plague of Frogs issues, her consciousness is invaded by a Fu-Manchuesque mystic named Memnan Saa, in a grindingly prolonged mind-rape that was handled with more energy and comparatively merciful brevity by Chris Claremont and John Byrne in their X-Men issues. (There’s the queasiness of “mind-rape” itself, and then the fact that it happens mostly to comic-book females: the only example of a male character being mind-raped by an invasive female consciousness is in the aforementioned B.P.R.D.: Vampire series, where Simon Anders is possessed by the spirits of the two vampire sisters.) My ability to identify with Liz, then, and admire her strength and power, was problematized by the way Mignola and Arcudi defined her, over a period of years, as Memnan Saa’s victim.

Further, the recent B.P.R.D. comics have been subtitled Hell on Earth, to show how Mignola, Arcudi and company have moved their fictional universe close to Armageddon. Chicago is infested by monsters, Houston is destroyed by a massive volcano, and the mantra for the Hell on Earth publicity is Mignola’s pitch that he and his collaborators are “breaking stuff we can’t ever fix.” Another troubled locale is California’s Salton Sea, where a giant creature stood immobile for a year, exhaling gases that changed humans into monsters, before she started laying eggs:

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From B.P.R.D. #105 (HELL ON EARTH: A COLD DAY IN HELL, 2013).
Script by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, art by Peter Snejbjerg.

 
In recent issues of B.P.R.D., both Abe Sapien and the precog teenager Fenix have traveled, separately, to the Salton Sea, where they encountered religious cults sprung up around the eggs. This monster/egg plot remains unresolved, though I’m worried that it will become an expression of what Barbara Creed calls the monstrous-feminine. Writing in the psychoanalytic theoretical tradition, Creed argues that numerous movie monsters—Samantha Eggar and her throbbing external wombs in David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), the egg-laying homicidal extraterrestrial in Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)—express a deep-seated patriarchal horror of female biology: giving birth is disgusting, women are disgusting because they give birth, and the Salton Sea monster might be another oblique metaphor for male revulsion towards female bodies and reproduction. I actually like body horror, and The Brood, and Aliens, but I hope Mignola and Arcudi take their egg-laying plot in a less predictable and sexist direction.

One more caveat: virtually no female creators have worked on Mignolaverse titles. The covers for the two-issue Pickens County Horror arc (2012) were drawn by Becky Cloonan, and one variant cover for The Dead Remembered (2011) was by Jo Chen, and that’s it. Three covers. (If I’m wrong about this, please correct me in the comments.) This isn’t an unusual situation in superhero / “mainstream” comics, but it is a shame, and I’d love to see Mignola and editor Scott Allie recruit talents like Colleen Doran and Pia Guerra (or maybe Renée French?) to contribute to the Mignolaverse.

Despite my misgivings about some of the gender politics in B.P.R.D., I still want to compliment Mignola, Arcudi and Davis for their portrayal of Dr. Kate Corrigan, the leader of the B.P.R.D. since Hellboy quit the organization. Based in appearance on Mignola’s wife, Corrigan isn’t a firestarter like Liz Sherman, though her achievements (before joining the B.P.R.D., she was a tenured professor at New York University and an author of over a dozen books on the occult) seem superhuman. Despite her credentials, Dr. Corrigan’s introduction into the Hellboy world was inauspicious. In The Wolves of St. August (1994), she travels with Hellboy to a small Balkan village whose inhabitants have been murdered by werewolves; defined as a bookworm (“I know about this stuff, but…it’s different when you read about it”), she doesn’t do much except dump exposition, fall through an old castle floor, and watch as Hellboy beats up a badass werewolf. She reprises her spectator role in 1997’s Almost Colossus, as she’s taken captive by a homunculus (brother to Roger, another golem who later joins the B.P.R.D.) and saved once again by Hellboy.

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From HELLBOY: ALMOST COLOSSUS #2 (1997), Story and art by Mike Mignola

 
Corrigan is also a bit player in 2001’s Conqueror Worm, though she is enough of Hellboy’s confidant to support his decision to quit the B.P.R.D. In 2002, B.P.R.D. became its own title, and Hellboy’s absence allowed Corrigan and other supporting members to step into starring roles, as Corrigan did in my all-time favorite B.P.R.D. story, The Universal Machine (2006). Corrigan is kidnapped again, this time by the Marquis Adoet de Fabre, an ageless collector of occult memorabilia and owner of a rare book Kate and the B.P.R.D. need.

Universal Machine

The cover for the final issue of THE UNIVERSAL MACHINE mini-series (2006). Cover by Mike Mignola.

 
In Universal Machine, Corrigan’s intelligence is treated as more than just ineffectual window-dressing, and she saves herself through her knowledge of history and through decisive action. (I’m being oblique because I don’t want to spoil the story.)

In the Mignolaverse, time passes at the same rate as in our own world. Many first-generation characters, like Hellboy, Liz Sherman, Abe Sapien and Kate Corrigan, are now in their 50s. Concurrently, Mignola and Arcudi juggle plots over extended periods of time, playing a “long game” that Chris Mautner (in the Comic Books are Burning podcast) compares to the deliberate pacing of Jaime Hernandez’s decades-long Locas serial. This is true of Corrigan’s gradual ascent into the B.P.R.D. hierarchy; she entered the series as a freelance consultant to the B.P.R.D., and over years of both story time and real time became the director of field operations. With the advent of Hell on Earth, Corrigan is now the leader and premiere strategist for the organization, as well as the liaison between the B.P.R.D. and more conventionally bureaucratic organizations like the United Nations. Sometimes Corrigan’s new job is played for laughs, as in this Guy Davis-drawn scene where Kate tries to dodge a U.N. functionary:

Kate Avoids

From B.P.R.D.: HELL ON EARTH: NEW WORLD #2 (2010).
Script by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, art by Guy Davis.

 
More commonly, though, Corrigan suffers under the enormity of her responsibilities. Her dedication to the B.P.R.D. nixes any chance of a romantic relationship with German police officer Bruno Karhu, and she weeps over the decisions she makes that sacrifice the lives of field agents. Because I’ve been reading about Kate Corrigan for almost two decades now, I feel like I know her, and I sympathize with her.

Other readers might not find Kate Corrigan as interesting a figure, but part of her appeal to me is in how she revises the hero’s journey. My wife Kathy Parham is a fan of the Battlestar Galactica TV show (the 2004-2009 reboot), and when I told Kathy that I was writing about a Hellboy cast member who was a middle-aged woman and a leader without superpowers, she immediately compared Corrigan to Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), the Galactica character drafted as the President of Earth’s survivors. Kathy also directed me to an insightful LiveJournal posting about Roslin, where Galactica fan “larsfarm77” explains one element of Roslin’s attraction for female viewers:

I’ve watched a lot of science fiction. I can honestly say that I’ve never, ever, seen the classic hero arc played out for a woman, much less a mature one. How many times have we heard “it’s a coming of age story,” wherein [Luke, Harry, Frodo, Neo, Jake…] realize that they are so much more, that they have a destiny. Aided by his mentor [Obi-wan, Dumbledore, Gandalf, Morpheus, Grace…], he learns and grows, only to truly accept his role with the mentor’s death. And the woman’s role in all this: most often girlfriend, loving supporter of “the one.”

“Larsfarm77” then mentions that this aspiring hero/mentor pattern plays out in Galactica between two women (Roslin and religious visionary Elosha), a narrative trajectory that was “a long time coming.” Reading these words, I realized that I admire Corrigan for the same reasons–she’s an intelligent, mature woman who’s grown from being Hellboy’s helpless sidekick to the person most responsible for saving the human race–and I’m grateful to Mignola and Arcudi for writing her as a strong hero.

I suppose identification is easier where similarities exist between characters and readers. I like Kate Corrigan because she’s a middle-aged academic, just like me, but it’s possible to overstate the importance of these similarities. Storytellers can make me empathize with all kinds of different humans and creatures, and shift my identificatory attention between and among characters with frightening ease. (As a teenager, two works prompted me to identify across gender and other ideological boundaries: Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics [1965], which put me in the mind-sets of dinosaurs, mollusks, and colors, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960], which effortlessly steered me to connect with both Janet Leigh’s petty larcenist and her murderer.) It’s identificatory fluidity and increased empathy that we want to encourage in readers of formulaic, sexist culture (e.g. superhero comics and Hollywood blockbusters, which are increasingly the same thing), and I like how B.P.R.D. sticks to the narrative/cultural formula of the mentored hero’s journey while abandoning much of the sexism. Any comic that encourages superhero fans, most of whom are male, to identify with an adult, normal-looking, smart, woman like Kate Corrigan is a comic I’m glad to read.

Recently, Mignola and Arcudi have introduced other, non-superpowered females into B.P.R.D., and snapped them into trajectories designed to grow them into central characters, just as Corrigan evolved from a victim to a leader. One such character is Carla Giarocco, introduced into the comic in 2011 through both a normal walk-on and an ominous premonition. We first see Giarocco in Hell on Earth: New World, as a field agent who phones Corrigan and inadvertently reveals to Kate that Abe Sapien has gone AWOL into the Canadian woods. Among the non-superheroes now prominent in B.P.R.D., including agents Gervesh, Tian and Vaughn (all of whose histories are nicely summarized in an essay by Mark Tweedale), Giarocco has been given the most backstory. In a black-and-white freebee distributed at the 2010 Emerald City Comicon, she reveals to a Seattle cop that she grew up in Rochester, New York, and is married with a three-year-old son.

Seattle

From B.P.R.D.: HELL ON EARTH: SEATTLE (2011).
Script by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, art by Guy Davis.

 
Giarocco also seems the toughest of the new crop of agents: she survives a fight against a blood-crazed were-jaguar (!) that eviscerates almost an entire BPRD battalion (see The Long Death arc, 2012), and she teams up with Russian director of occult operations Iosif Nichayko on a dangerous mission (see A Cold Day in Hell). In fact, the only thing poised to slow down Giarocco is a tragic, predestined fate. After Liz Sherman and the B.P.R.D. kill Memnan Saa, but before Giarocco enters the series, Saa’s spirit returns from the dead to show Liz a future world devastated by the Ogdru Hem, the Lovecraftian overlords of Mignola’s world, and their frog-like minions. Here’s Liz wandering around in Saa’s vision of catastrophe:

Giarocco

From B.P.R.D.: KING OF FEAR #4 (2010).
Script by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, art by Guy Davis.

 
Carla Giarocco’s skeleton appears in B.P.R.D. before the live Giarocco does. We might try to write off this vision as a lie fabricated by Saa to punish Liz, but how do we explain the “Giarocco” nametag if neither of them know who Carla Giarocco is? Further, the zoom-in of the last panel is clearly for our benefit rather that Liz’s: we’re supposed to notice her name, and then fret as Giarocco joins the B.P.R.D. This reads as Mignola and Arcudi’s homage to other superhero teams with stories staged in the future tense–think of the “imaginary” Adult Legion of Superhero stories, or the X-Men’s Days of Future Past–and doesn’t auger well for Giarocco’s long-game future in the series.

Although she’s less important than Giarocco, my favorite of the Mignolaverse’s new female characters is Ashley Strode, who’s appeared in three B.P.R.D. comics, War on Frogs #3 (2009) and the Hell on Earth: Exorcism arc (2012). The four-issue War on Frogs series chronicles the day-to-day dangers and horrors B.P.R.D. agents experience as they murder the ambulatory frog-monsters who serve the Ogdru Hem. (War on Frogs isn’t a simple-minded action comic: Mignola and Arcudi establish in the fourth issue that the frogs have feelings and souls, and the B.P.R.D.’s purging of frog populations is a kind of genocide rather than just a herd-thinning.) In War on Frogs #3, Ashley Strode is a young agent reminiscing about how she’s tried to be friendly with Liz Sherman, especially during a mission to a supposedly abandoned frog site. Although much of the narrative is a flashback from Strode’s memory, our emotional center is Liz: we feel Liz’s numb horror as she repeatedly ignites and decimates nests of frogs, and the issue ends with images from Liz’s point-of-view, as we see her isolation (a symptom of which is her aloofness toward Strode) when her consciousness is taken over by Memnan Saa. In this story, Strode is less a fleshed-out character than a pretext for human-frog violence and an exploration of the consequences of Liz’s mind-rape.

We learn more about Strode in Exorcism, a two-issue tale written and drawn by Cameron Stewart, best known for his Eisner Award winning webcomic/graphic novel Sin Titulo. (Mignolaverse editor Scott Allie, presumably in consultation with Mignola and long-term collaborators like Arcudi, sometimes give characters to specific artists: stories starring the B.P.R.D. vampire agent Simon Anders are now reserved for Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon, and Ashley Strode for Cameron Stewart.) Initially in Exorcism, Strode freezes when confronted with a possessed young boy, and learns how to handle occult situations only after she battles a demon on the “spiritual plane” alongside a legendary Catholic exorcist. Stewart draws Strode as young, perky and cute–not to Lolita-ize her, but to emphasize her status as a B.P.R.D. greenhorn. By the end of the story, Strode is contemplative in the face of the apocalypse, yet confident enough to return and confront the devil inside the little boy.

Strode

From B.P.R.D.: HELL ON EARTH: EXORCISM #2 (2012).
Script by Mike Mignola and Cameron Stewart, art by Stewart.

 
I don’t know when Cameron Stewart will do another Ashley Strode story. In a Twitter thread from October 2013, Stewart said that he would no longer draw “sketches/commissions of characters that aren’t my own” at comicons, and indicated that this would keep him from drawing Strode. Maybe Stewart is moving in a more personal, creator-owned direction, and won’t return to B.P.R.D. I’d still like to read stories where Ashley Strode advances and matures as Kate Corrigan did.
 
Earlier, I typed the word “were-jaguar” and then flinched as I wondered what Domingos or Suat might think of the wholesale superhero-horror-genre-wallow of B.P.R.D. My comparison of Laura Roslin with Kate Corrigan might also put some readers off; perhaps the problem isn’t the absence of women characters in the aspiring hero/mentor formula, but the endless repetition of the formula itself. I’m not particularly interested in defending my pleasure in B.P.R.D., but maybe even people who hate superheroes can share my relief that the Mignolaverse has comparatively strong female characters rather than objectified toys and damsels in distress?

When Is A Job Not A Job? When It’s In The Arts, Apparently.

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[IMPORTANT UPDATE AT THE END]

Here’s a story for you, and it’s a good one, an uplifting one in this time of constant headlines about this or that art form dying or being in yet another crisis. It’s about a little theater, a small off-off-Broadway space[1] towards the bottom of that Triangle Below Canal, a professional theatre well known for experimental work called The Flea. This little experimental theater nearly went out of business in the wake of 9/11, when Tribeca became a ruined, gray-dusted alien landscape. The Flea was only saved through a mixture of innovative fundraising and striking gold with a hit play called The Guys, a two-hander about a reporter and a firehouse hit hard by the WTC attacks that starred a roster of celebrities, ran for years and helped put the theater back on solid footing.

Now, thirteen years after the theater nearly went out of business, The Flea is thriving. Its resident acting company (called The Bats) numbers around 150 people and produces work constantly. A directing apprenticeship program helps mentor the next generation of directors. The theatre does a variety of programming with a kind of ambition—particularly where cast sizes are concerned—that no one else in town can match on a budget so small as to be almost unimaginable.

It’s a remarkable turnaround, so remarkable that The Flea has managed to raise $18 million to purchase a nearby building and convert it into a new space. The new space will have three state of the art theater spaces available to local companies to rent for cheap[2] and allow The Flea to produce more work. And so far, the plan has received rapturous coverage in the press, helping to raise the profile of The Flea even further[3].

There’s just one little wrinkle in this story, and it’s about The Bats. You know, the resident company of 150 or so early career actors? The ones the Times calls the “beating heart” of the theater? The young, hip, diverse troupe whose work helps ensure the theater is constantly full of young, hip, diverse audiences? Well, they’re unpaid.

*

Is it a problem that The Bats aren’t paid to act? It turns out that answering that question involves answering a whole lot of other sub-questions. Questions like: is acting a job? If it is, is exposure a form of payment, a kind of service in lieu of cash, perhaps? Are there mitigating circumstances that affect any of this? Does it matter that the kind of large scale, ambitious works The Bats often do at The Flea would be impossible if they had to pay their actors? Does it matter that there is the money to build an $18 million new space but seemingly no money to pay artists?

It turns out the answer to those questions change depending on who you talk to, depending on what kind of story you want to tell. The story that tends to get told about the arts leaves out labor issues[4]. If labor—and that no-no topic, pay—are brought up at all, they’re usually in the context of whether or not Broadway performers, musicians and technicians are getting paid too much, despite the fact that, as Terry Teachout discussed in the Wall Street Journal, ballooning marketing costs are largely to blame for increased ticket prices on the Great White Way.  Rarely discussed in the conventional story about theater and money is that salaries are so high on Broadway because those high payments make it possible for artists to remain in a system that, except for their brief tenures in the largest theaters, will ask them to do enormous amounts of work, often for little to no money[5].

The story we tell each other about creative work, meanwhile, is that it isn’t really a job, not really, and that you should be grateful for what you can get for it, even if other people are getting paid off of the work that you do.  This isn’t limited to theater. David Byrne recently talked about this issue and music in Salon, and Molly Crabapple wrote about it in the visual arts for Vice. Many (if not most) literary magazines don’t pay. Many major websites won’t pay for writing if they can get away with it. Hell, I am currently writing this essay about The Flea not paying its early career actors for a website that doesn’t pay its writers. I don’t always see a problem with this. Here at Hooded Utilitarian, no one, including Noah Berlatsky who works much, much harder on it than I, makes any money off of it.  HU is a labor of love (or, for some of you, hate) where we can get together and publish things we’re unlikely to place elsewhere. It’s a site where professionals do some non-professional—but hopefully professional quality— work.

There’s a term for this kind of work—professional grade labor that goes unpaid (and is thus amateur)—and that is “pro-am.” We’ve all witnessed how the internet has created an exploding pro-am writing sector. This has been positive in all sorts of ways. There is more great writing being produced every day, easily available at little to no cost for the reader. And as long as the reader’s costs are the only part of the story you’re interested in, it’s incredible.

I started working as a theatre professional as an actor in my teens. In the twenty years since, I’ve witnessed a similar explosion in the pro-am sector in the dramatic arts. Undergrad and graduate theatre programs have grown in number and size, and the number of paying jobs outside of academia hasn’t kept pace. This dynamic has both depressed wages and fueled vibrant pockets of “independent theatre” in many American cities, as artists have come together to create work for little to no money[6].

Given this reality, perhaps the right question then is… what’s the line? When does something stop being a pro-am labor of love and start being something more problematic?

In the case of The Flea, setting the boundaries of the acceptable is thorny.The Flea exists in a specific context and a specific industry. Early career actors tend to have only a few options available to them, all of them bad. They could self-produce work at great personal cost, even if they convince Uncle Shmuel and Aunt Betsy to kick in some money. They could act in self-produced work, which is something of a crap-shoot, exposure-wise. They could intern at a theater (likely for free), stuff envelopes all day, and if they are very, very lucky get someone to come to a show of theirs from, like, I don’t know, marketing. They could go to graduate school (at, again, great personal cost[7]) and, chances are, end up right back where they were only better trained and in enormous debt. Most perniciously, they could pay to take an “audition workshop” with a casting director (or just as often, a casting director’s assistant) which is really just a pay-to-play audition.

It’s a raw deal, in other words, this life of an early career actor. And it will continue being so for the foreseeable future because—and this should read familiar to any writers out there—the supply of actors so overwhelms the demand for them that the dollar value of their labor has been depressed to, essentially, zero. Given this, what The Flea provides—real exposure, free rehearsal space, frequent opportunities to get up on stage and learn one’s craft through getting work up in front of an audience, a chance to produce work, connections, a real community of fellow artists, and the opportunity to learn various ancillary skills of theater without having to pay a dime—is nothing at which to scoff.

All The Flea asks is that, in exchange for getting to be on stage, The Bats work three hours a week doing tasks around the theatre—more if they’re currently in a show since they’re benefiting more—an exchange that, when you talk to any current Bat seems to make perfect sense. It’s hard to argue that three hours of labor in exchange for the opportunity to be in shows is onerous.  Indeed, The Bats love being Bats, and don’t feel particularly exploited.

Unless you view acting in plays as labor. And how is it not labor? The Flea is charging money for people to see The Bats perform[8]. The institution is building itself based on their work. It’s one thing to accept that early career artists must be paid in exposure.  It’s another thing entirely to accept that they must be paid in exposure and that they must also pay for the opportunity in sweat equity.

That sweat equity is also problematic in ways not often discussed. Three hours is not a lot of work to ask an individual Bat to do per week. But with 150 Bats, each doing at least three hours of work for free, The Flea is picking up at least 450 hours worth of free labor per week. That’s ten full time employees worth of work. While this is clearly part of what makes The Flea able to do what it does on such a shoestring—and helps explain why, despite moving to a three-performance-space complex, they’re only expanding their paid staff by two—it has the unintended side effect of further depressing wages, setting an uncomfortable precedent for how a professional theater should be run[9].

These problems are only heightened by the new $18 million building. Practices that are forgivable amongst the scrappy are less so amongst the well-appointed, as Upright Citizens Brigade and Amanda Palmer have recently learned. Supporters of The Flea I’ve spoken with will tell you that paying actors and buying a new space are separate conversations, different stories. The Flea is currently spending around $17K a month in rent, and the new space will secure their future. Furthermore, it’s nearly impossible to raise money to pay artists properly and much, much easier to get donations for “brick & mortar” projects[10].

While I agree that the new building is necessary and am happy for The Flea’s good fortune, and happier still that off-off broadway companies will have access to three nice, clean, functional spaces at a low rental cost, this is almost too clever by half, this walling off the payment of labor from conversations about budgets, about donations, about the “public good” part of a nonprofit’s mission. It may be true that the problems of The Flea are the problems of the industry that The Flea is in. But that doesn’t mean The Flea shouldn’t show leadership on issues of labor fairness.

After all, The Flea has retooled The Bats before, to the mutual benefit of both the company and the theater. The work hour requirements for The Bats used to be higher, and the jobs more menial. The Bats used to perform in fewer shows, there used to be fewer of the Bats, and, according to current and former members I spoke to, less of a sense of community. The Flea even once charged actors a fee to audition[11], something they’d never imagine doing today. The Flea also hasn’t precluded rejiggering the program again three years from now when the new building is complete.

There are a number of changes The Flea could make that would still allow them to do ambitious large-cast projects with an excited community of performers while showing leadership on labor issues. The Flea could simply begin paying The Bats when they appear in shows. It needn’t be a large amount of money; even a stipend would send the message that the theater values The Bats and takes their art seriously. Being a Bat is often likened to a kind of practical graduate school, a training-by-doing program. Part of that training could—and should—include teaching The Bats that their art is worthwhile enough to be paid for practicing it.

If The Flea does not want to do that, they could drop the work requirement. Or they could work with the actors’ union to turn The Bats into an Equity Membership Candidacy program, a true apprenticeship[12] that ends with the actors well on their way to Union membership[13].

More drastically, The Flea could drop the 1-2 professional shows from their annual calendar and cease calling themselves a professional theater altogether.  This wouldn’t stop them from working with professional artists from time to time, particularly where playwrights and directors are concerned. The model for how The Bats work, a tight knit group of artists who do most of the work around the space including everything from running the concession stand to hanging the lights, is already closer to that of a community theater than it is to anything else. While “community theater” is a term loaded with all sorts of associations, most of them negative, it is where most Americans will go to see (or take part in) large cast, ambitious shows that don’t pay actors.

There will not be any pressure on The Flea (and other, even worse companies) to reform so long as the story we tell about art remains the same. So long as we keep telling each other that exposure is payment, that erecting a new building is the only true sign of success, and that labor issues are irrelevant, so long as we keep writing the same story, glowingly reporting the official line without digging an inch deeper, we’ll be stuck in the same place: Bigger, shinier buildings—or websites sold to AOL—with broke-ass people getting paid less and less to do the creative work that keeps them alive.

UPDATE: Since this article was posted, one of the people I interviewed for it (the one mentioned in the final footnote) e-mailed to say that she neglected to mention during our interview about The Bats and and payment that The Bats  receive a nominal stipend during tech rehearsals, since those are what are known as “10 out of 12s” which is to say, 12 hour rehearsals with two one hour meal breaks. This schedule makes it impossible for Bats to make money elsewhere, like temping or waiting tables etc. while in tech.  The stipend was introduced last year and is variable, but under $50.  This means that, when they appear in shows, the Bats are no longer working for free, which is a positive step.

That said, when The Bats are not working in shows, they are still doing 3 hours a week of uncompensated labor around the space. And I would furthermore argue that less than $50, framed entirely as  a way to make up for hourly wages lost elsewhere during tech rehearsals, is still inadequate. It is far less, for example, than the daily subway fare a Union actor is paid in a showcase production. And the larger issues of how we value the people who actually create art in our culture remain.  But it is a positive step in the right direction and reinforces my hope and belief that The Flea wants to find ways to do right by their ensemble.

[1] Off-off Broadway refers not to theater location but the kind of Union contract it uses when working with members of Actor’s Equity Association (aka Equity or AEA).  Off-off Broadway codes are for New York City theaters under a hundred seats. Off-Broadway is the designation for theaters holding between 100 and 499 souls. Anything larger and you’re in Broadway contract territory.

[2] This is no small thing. Theater space—even a 50 seat shithole—can cost thousands of dollars a week to rent, making the amount of cash young companies have to shell out to produce their work often the largest parts of their budgets.

[3] This is one of the reasons why theaters embark on building campaigns. Often the first season after a new building opens brings more audience members and donors, although I once heard a fundraising consultant say that those new donors and viewers often vanish after that first year or two.

[4] It was highly controversial, for example, when Jason Zinoman made the argument in the New York Times that the Upright Citizens Brigade should start paying at least some of its performers, given that a large and very successful institution had been built off of their labor.

[5] A union actor acting in an off-off Broadway show can make as little as daily subway fare in pay. Union actors working Off-Broadway often make under $500 a week. And that’s when they’re actually working on a show. Things like staged readings don’t always pay. And, of course, there’s the gaps between gig when actors aren’t getting paid at all.

Perhaps this is too much to get into in this space, but this is one of the many reasons why the current theatre system is set up the way it is, with larger “regional” (non-NYC) theaters hiring NYC-based actors. The theaters pay a premium for what is generally considered a more talented labor pool. Actors then make more money on the road both through higher weekly salaries and through subletting their apartments back in New York. It’s a system that screws just about everyone. Working actors pay an enormous premium to have a NYC mailing address. Local actors often won’t even get to audition for shows in their hometowns. And for audiences, to paraphrase monologist Mike Daisey, it’s something akin to going to see your hometown baseball team and finding out they’ve been replaced by a bunch of people who guested on Law & Order a couple of times.

[6] The vast majority of Portland, Oregon’s  theatre scene is made up of pro-am companies, for example. It’s worth saying that some indie theater companies take pride in compensating their artists to the best of their abilities.

[7] Nearly all graduate schools for theatre cost roughly one vital organ per year to attend.

[8] As this audition notice (http://www.theflea.org/blog_detail.php?page_type=4&blog_id=238) makes clear, performing is a lot of work in and of itself. In case you don’t feel like clicking over and reading it, this Bats production asks actors to commit to almost two months of six-days-a-week rehearsals plus two months of 5-days-a-week performances, tying up their schedule from January until May. This would, amongst other things, keep them from getting paying acting work for half of the normal theatrical season.

[9] After all, can you really call yourself a professional theater if the majority of the work in your theatre is done on a non-professional basis?

[10] Most of the money for the new building is coming from the City of New York. By comparison , the National Endowment for the Arts is legally barred from giving money directly to artists to support the making of art.

[11] According to an actor who auditioned during this time and joined The Bats a year later, in the wake of 9/11 they charged prospective Bats $25 to audition, saying that they needed to cover the hole in their budget caused by the terrorist attacks.

[12] The Bats are called volunteers, not apprentices or interns. Were the program called an internship, it could be illegal, as by law interns cannot do the work traditionally done by paid employees and more benefit must accrue to the intern than to the company they work for. These laws are on the books to prevent companies from skirting minimum wage laws, something it could be argued The Bats’ weekly work hours requirement clearly does.

[13] There are almost no professional actors in the non-profit system who aren’t members of Actors Equity Association. You cannot be a member of AEA and be part of The Bats. One Bat I spoke to loved being a Bat so much (and was getting regular acting work that she cared about) that she declined joining the Union so she could stay in the group.

Don’t Post So Close To Me

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As neoliberal logics enter more and more institutions, what it means to have civil rights may be gradually shifting. In her introduction to Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, Carol Greenhouse has pointed out that under neoliberal logics, the language of rights is increasingly used to sustain markets. Yet as anyone who has paid attention to recent arguments about government surveillance and privacy, it is not only the language of rights that is used to sustain markets. The very concept of rights is being revised to sustain markets, even in cases that seem too minor to require this imposition of neoliberal logic, such as when courts decide cases of wrongful dismissal. There is a category of person that in the United States has become one of the canaries in the coal mines for this process – K – 12 public school teachers. There are an increasing number of U.S. legal cases involving wrongful dismissal that address how teachers use new media. I am interested in how courts deal with the fact that teaching, along with many other jobs, is the kind of job in which sometimes teachers complain about their students and about the job itself. Teachers sometimes say things about their six-year old students such as “I am not a teacher – I am a warden for future criminals!” Teachers have been saying such things for many years, often wearily in their living rooms or a bit furtively in the school parking lot, having looked around first to make sure that there is no one who can overhear. Since 2006, they have also been typing such statements into their status updates on Facebook. When teachers do this on Facebook in the United States, it turns out that that they risk being fired. “My students are the future criminals of America,” or some such utterance, apparently is not something a teacher who wishes to remain a teacher says using new media. And sometimes, after the school system fires them, they or the union representing them, will sue, often pointing out that teachers are citizens, and saying unkind things about one’s students should be protected as a matter of free speech. In short, these legal cases are moments in which the U.S. courts reflect upon what it means to speak like a public school teacher, and adjudicate whether one’s First Amendment rights have or have not been violated because of one’s employment status.

Why teachers? I think that there are a couple of reasons why teachers and their utterances have become a focus of attention in the contemporary moment. First, teachers, because of the nature of their jobs, are constantly having to negotiate the unsettling properties of new media. They are constantly interacting with school administrators, fellow teachers, parents and students, all of whom have their own informal solutions to the communicative dilemmas that new media can pose to communities of users. Teachers are continually engaging with differently structured audiences, and often doing so using technologies that erase the boundaries between audiences – either literally merging audiences as Facebook’s interface often does, or through the ever-increasing ease of circulating words, as in the technological infrastructure of email and cell phones that enable people to forward emails and text messages so quickly and effortlessly.

At the same time, in the United States at the moment there is an ongoing effort by politicians and government bureaucrats to privatize education. Those funding education have increasingly been arguing that market-based solutions provide the best and most effective strategies to educate students. This involves breaking teachers’ unions, which are seen as preventing these market-based solutions and protecting inept teachers. The cases that come before the court are often cases in which teachers had tenure, and so were able to sue the school districts for wrongful dismissal, although there is in fact one case in which a teacher’s contract was simply not being renewed, supposedly for a rather turgid political poem he posted on Myspace months earlier. In short, by looking at teachers, I am turning to a moment in which audit culture meets the surveillance society.

This intersection has become particularly acute since 2006, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Garcetti vs Ceballos that a public employee’s free speech is not protected under the Constitution, although a citizen’s free speech is. Ceballos, a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, believed that there were substantial errors in an affidavit used to convince a judge to issue a search warrant. He wrote a memo suggesting that the criminal case be dropped, and ended up testifying in court after being subpoenaed by the defense counsel. He then faced what he considered retaliation at work for doing so – he was demoted, his cases were transferred to other less experienced colleagues, and he was barred from handling any future murder cases. The Supreme Court ruled that the salient question was whether Ceballos spoke as a public employee or a citizen, and in this instance, it was clear that he spoke as a public employee. As a public employee, he was not guaranteed protection under the First Amendment, his rights to free speech were only protected when he spoke as a citizen. With this ruling, the Supreme Court overturned 42 years of court decisions that had declared a public employee’s speech was in fact protected, now one’s job could determine what one was allowed to say. And subsequent relevant court cases reflect this changes, as the decisions now tend to revolve around how to define the defendant – as a citizen, public employee or simply employee. Other critical legal scholars have pointed out that this decision is extending a neoliberal logic by allowing employers to circumscribe someone’s rights to free speech when they define a position’s responsibilities. In these cases, one’s right to free speech is determined by one’s manager’s definition of the job. And this is in the background when courts decide cases about how teachers can use new media.

There are two primary ways in which new media is involved when teachers are fired. The first, and still most common situation, is when a teacher inappropriately sleeps with or sexually harasses a student or co-worker. In these cases, free speech is not an issue. The case revolves around whether or not the sexual misconduct did in fact take place. The court decision will mention people’s new media use, and primarily will discuss with some detail the frequency of contact between the teacher and student or co-worker. Tennessee vs. Binkley: “Those records indicated that the Defendant and C. B. exchanged messages with one another 841 times between March 10, 2008, and September 23, 2008 with some of those texts occurring as late as 1:00 am.” Frequency and time of communication here is part and parcel of court evidence of inappropriate interactions. In these cases, it is the relationship between the teacher and defendant and others that is at issue, and their use of a particular medium is relevant only inasmuch as the medium itself can enable police to trace how often and when contact was made.

But teachers also post things on Facebook or MySpace in which the utterance itself is considered the reason for firing someone, it is violation enough in itself, not merely a trace of other inappropriate practices. I want to turn to a case in North New Jersey that received quite a bit of media attention as well. In late March 2011, a teacher posted as a Facebook status update the following: “I’m not a teacher — I’m a warden for future criminals! They had a scared straight program in school — why couldn’t i [sic] bring 1st graders?” The Scared Straight program brings former inmates to talk to students who are 12 years old or older at schools, so when the teacher mentions being a warden, she is also implicitly referring to the program that took place at her school. In the hearing, the teacher explains her word choice in these terms. She had set up privacy settings for her Facebook profile, so only her 300 Facebook friends could see this status update. Her then principal was not one of her Facebook friends, but her former principal was. When her former boss saw the status update, he decided to contact her current principal by email, explaining he was troubled by the post, and cutting and pasting her status update into his email message. Her current principal then found a way to print out a copy of the actual Facebook profile and update, before meeting with the teacher and asking “what were you thinking”? After suspending her, news of her Facebook post circulated among parents and students, sparking a wave of protests. Her comments were interpreted as racist, in part because she had recently been transferred from another more affluent school to a poorer school where her first grade class was entirely comprised of African-American and Latino students. She had never been reprimanded before, but because of this Facebook post, she was dismissed. She was a tenured teacher, and so when she sued, claiming wrongful dismissal, her case went before an administrative law judge.

The judge’s decision reveals a deep concern with how best to conceptualize the role from which the teacher typed, as well as a critique of the teacher’s presentation of self, and in particular, of contrition. The judge describes at some length the ways in which the teacher apologizes, and why her words and lack of emotion did not count as a proper apology. The teacher seems to hold a different media ideology than the judge. The judge writes: “At the hearing, [the teacher seemed still unable to genuinely understand why her Facebook posts had engendered such an extreme reaction. But she disagreed with [the principal’s testimony that she did not apologize to him. [The teacher] stated that she told [the principal] that she was “very sorry that this caused trouble.” I offered [the teacher] an opportunity to elaborate on the reasons for her remorse by asking her why she apologized to [the principal]. [The teacher] reiterated that it was because she “was sorry for any fuss” her Facebook post created, and for the problems it created for her principal and herself.” The judge finds this apology unsatisfying, and later in her decision explains what the teacher should say – what a good teacher must utter in these circumstances: “If this was an aberrational lapse in judgment, a reaction to an unusually bad day, I would have expected to have heard more genuine and passionate contrition in [the teacher’s] testimony. I needed to hear that she was terribly sorry she had insulted her young students; that she loved being their teacher; and that she wanted desperately to return to the classroom. I heard nothing of the sort. Rather, I came away with the impression that [the teacher] remained somewhat befuddled by the commotion she had created, and that while she continued to maintain that her conduct was not inappropriate, she was sorry others thought differently.” In sum, it is not only [the teacher’s] Facebook posts that demonstrates she does not understand the correct ways to speak as a teacher, it is also her performance in the hearing – she continues to refuse to perform her role as a concerned and caring teacher properly according to the judge.

The judge is then faced with a dilemma – how best to explain that a Facebook post is not an issue of free speech. And here she resorts to a neoliberal argument to explain why free speech is not a relevant principle here. She argues that the teacher is like any other employee, obligated to the school as her employer to treat her customers well – and in this case the students and parents are defined as the customers. Businesses are supposed to be protected by law from employees’ rude speech to customers, and the judge determines that this Facebook posting violates this legal protection, and so the teacher can be legally dismissed.

These court cases become moments in which what it means to speak like a teacher are being both evaluated and policed. For the most part, when teachers speak in ways their schools and local communities judge inappropriate, these are dilemmas resolved more informally by principals and school boards. Courts are less frequently involved. However, the court cases themselves have a larger impact, teachers and prospective teachers have started policing their own new media presence. They are gradually realizing that their comments on social media are not only scrutinized, but can be a basis for dismissal. They become more and more aware that their individual understanding of how a particular medium structures what is or is not public speech must give way to a larger societal perception of what counts as public speech and what counts as private speech. In the process, they come to realize that the jobs one has determines the civil rights one has, that one’s relationship vis-à-vis business defines one’s speech far more than one’s relationship as a citizen vis-à-vis the state.
_______
Ilana Gershon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University.

Uncharted Territory: Skim, by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki

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For years I have recommended Skim, by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, as one of my favorite comics. While beautifully illustrated and competently told, I’ve been hard-pressed to explain why I love this book so deeply. I often fall back on biographical justifications— I was once a teenager who romantically pursued someone significantly older, and its rare for me to find a book that accurately captures this experience. I’m tired of this explanation, as it does a disservice to Skim, which is an exceptional work on its own terms. I’m going to try to articulate, here and now, why Skim is a comic I keep coming back to, and shows much more promise for the medium than I see it accorded.

Skim is told from the perspective of a high school junior, Kimberly Keiko Cameron, nicknamed Skim because she is not. Skim chronicles of the fall semester of several young women, who navigate an all-girls Catholic school fixated on the suicide of a local boy. As counselors and students perpetuate an indulgent cycle of hysteria and healing, Kim and Lisa, two best friends, lampoon the faculty and student-body. As they grow apart, Kim falls in love with the young, maverick teacher Ms. Archer. Ms. Archer crosses the line, realizes her mistake, and immediately begins to withdraw from Kim and the school. Meanwhile, Katie, the well-loved ex-girlfriend of the local boy, becomes caught in the hurricane-eye of the school’s morbidity, and eventually enters onto Kim’s horizon.

Skim spread 1

Skim spread 2

 Skim is darkly comic, though it hits the usual targets—small towns, personal religion, high school, high school girls.  Kim and Lisa visit a Wiccan circle that turns out to be an Alcoholics Anonymous recovery group. Kim receives a kitschy mug from her father’s girlfriend, adorned with a ludicrously ignorant slogan. A group of self-absorbed ‘popular’ girls form a club called ‘Girls Celebrate Life!.’ Etc. etc. Smartly, Kim and Lisa are not cast as the sole bastions of truth. Lisa spouts punk cliché after punk cliché, and while Kim knows better, she can only respond with clichés in turn. There’s comedy to be mined in the pathetic graspings of a group of hypocrites and posers, sure. Remarkably, Skim’s cynicism plays second fiddle to a sense of grace. Dark humor drops like stones through the surface of the narrative—the story is actually formed by the rippled answer to these plunks, a visual whisper that the world is much bigger, stranger and more beautiful and than these ironies suggest. Lingering hands, a telephone pole, or footprints in the snow somehow always get the final say.

Skim thump thump

Skim’s attention to its story-world both accentuates and minimizes the scope of Kim’s depression– if there is a world outside black comedy, this world also continues after tragedy. Kim is observant enough to know that she’ll recover from her loss, but she’s lonely. She simply wishes this recovery was more important than the tragedy everyone seems hungry to witness, as she vocalizes below:

Skim Romeo and Juliet

Kim’s yearning for that “something else,” describes Skim’s particular kind of storytelling. The book passes by the iconic moments of adolescence in favor of their lingering aftertaste– the doubt following confident pratter, the assurance found in being abandoned. Its humor can be a bit manufactured, but its nocturnes are feral and strange. Skim‘s characters find their true colors at night. When Ms. Archer quits teaching, Kim follows her at her house after school, where she is reluctantly welcomed inside each time. She quietly absorbs a family photograph, the clutter, the way Ms. Archer lifts her cat with one hand. A heady mood leaks from every dirty teacup and grey corner, leaden with hard decisions. Skim includes  its environment and telling gestures, occasionally at the expense of the conversation they lead to.  Most importantly, we hear Kim’s voice immediately after each incident reeling from or reconciling what happened. I appreciate that Skim judges this moment spent walking home as worthwhile, or even more valuable, than the confrontation itself. This is where Kim slips into uncharted territory. Similarly, Katie and Kim see each other fully one late night, escaping prom. Kim suffers insomnia, which leaves her both exhausted and exalted.

Skim could have easily been a much narrower story without its sinewy brush-work, and the nuance of its characters’ performances. It’s laudable that Mariko Tamaki, the writer, doesn’t overreach her character’s limited voices. Kim’s speech above is about as articulate as anyone gets. It’s an awkward but honest testament for the story. I also appreciate Jillian Tamaki’s figure drawing, which is at times grossly loose, pinched and contorted– tiny misshapen hands and swollen legs abound. They capture the sensual topsy-turvy of confused vision. Skim is a pretty book, but not a stunning one, for the best. If the book had been heart-stoppingly beautiful, the panels might have crystallized the moments, rather than letting them flow into a magpie’s nest of dirty lines, black pools, and wintry negative space.

Skim’s perspective is similarly messy, and inconsistently shifts between diary entries and third-person. The clumsy steps back and forth nevertheless give breathing space.  Jillian and Mariko cover several complex transformations over three months. High school dramas often take the symbolic course of autumn to spring. What kind of personal-growth narrative starts in fall and ends in winter? Perhaps its a mistake to classify Skim as a ‘personal-growth’ narrative at all. While the characters seem to be better people by the end, no one acts any differently. Lisa is carried away in love. Ms. Archer flies off for somewhere new. On the final page, Kim goes off to meet Katie. She approaches a woodland very similar to the one which she and Ms. Archer frequented. Only the top of Katie’s head is visible, dressed in its little cap. She’s more a ghost, or a pale echo of Ms. Archer’s body pages before, than a person. Its ambiguous as to whether Kim’s budding friendship with Katie has begun to slide into something else. It’s possible they are all about to repeat the same intimate miscalculations.

Skim final page

 I admire Skim for its brave vulnerability, its tone and message, and also for its independence as a comic work. It doesn’t traffic in wish-fulfillment, overt camp, nor nostalgia– surprising for a comic book about high school. It is self-deprecating without secretly being self-congratulatory, a la Art Spiegelman. It isn’t distracted by its ‘comic-ness.’  It is not epic, nor controversial. It is not drawn in an iconic way. It is also completely about young women, and quite short.  Frankly, there isn’t much cultural currency to be gained by reading Skim, discussing it, or recommending it. American girlhood is undervalued and easily reduced.  Skim is a relatively unambitious book, but this isn’t a bad thing. Unpackaged from the neurotic cultural agendas that reinforce comic’s masculine, canon-mongering, Skim treats comics as a legitimate medium fit for a self-contained story. It doesn’t talk about being a comic, or push the boundaries of the medium for their own sake.  It doesn’t need to prove that ‘comics aren’t for kids anymore.’ It simply tells an adult story. This resistance to being impressive or fantastical, combined with its ‘young adult’ high school setting, deplorably positions it outside the conversation of contemporary comics.

Skim’s comic treatment does justice to, and perhaps deepens, an excellent story. At the end of the day, I believe comics would be more widely attended to if they did just this.

Skim stray cat