Attack on Pacific Rim

Posted on August 28, 2013 by subdee

Editor’s Note by Noah: Attack on Titan is currently being serialized in English, by Kodansha USA. You can purchase it from Amazon here

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I’m starting to feel alone in my disappointment with Pacific Rim. I mean, I know the critics agree with me – even the ones who liked the movie admit it lacks psychological complexity, is full of one-dimensional stock characters, and often drags. But somehow gentle criticism doesn’t seem like enough when Pacific Rim is – really – the best example yet of why screenwriters shouldn’t force every blockbuster into the Save the Cat! mold.

I mean, my friends liked – no, loved – this movie. They loved the Kaiju designs, cast, and art direction. They’ll defend the movie against people who point out that there didn’t need to be four – count ’em, four – “plot twists” or reversals, mostly all predictable. (The first twist is the exception – that one was surprising and quite moving.) Or that there didn’t need to be a 15-minute narrated prologue that boiled down to “monsters appeared so we built giant robots to fight them, P.S. I am your obligatory knucklehead fly-boy protagonist”. Or that between the big set pieces, the movie was mostly one long planning or training sequence.

They’ll even defend the fact that nearly every character is a walking cliche. Or, if they are less passionate in their opinions, they’ll say what everyone says: that it’s just a mindless summer blockbuster, so really, what were you expecting? Don’t you know that all of these big-budget action movies are being made for an overseas audience, anyway?

So maybe my problem with Pacific Rim isn’t that the movie was awful, but that I went into it with the wrong mindset – because truthfully I was expecting something much, much better.

Described to me as “Guillermo del Toro makes a live-action Evangelion“, I was expecting a very different movie: not Evangelion, obviously, but something with at least a little bit of the psychological depth and roller-coaster pacing of that anime. Instead I found a movie built for defense, not suspense: it’s armor-coated against anyone’s possible complaint that it didn’t hit the right note at the right time. (Headstrong protagonist check, strong female love interest check, stern commanding officer check, eccentric scientist double-check, minorities in non-speaking roles, check).

Some plot points are similar to Evangelion’s – the monsters that suddenly appear from a portal over Antarctica/the Arctic, the shadowy global organization that requires pilots to mind-meld in giant robots to fight them, the pilot-pilot romance – but those are pretty superficial similarities, really. Pacific Rim is a very different, and far less cynical, beast – which is fair enough, considering that Guillermo del Toro’s most popular movies have generally been made for children.

Anyway, I was wrong to expect classic cult-hit anime Evangelion. What I should have expected was current cult-hit anime Attack on Titan.

So let’s not talk about Pacific Rim. It’s a monster movie made for an international audience; it hits all the right notes; it looks great. There are even one or two genuinely moving scenes. It’s kid-friendly and has positive, uplifting messages about humanity. (In short, it’s boring.) Let’s not even talk about Evangelion, since Pacific Rim has very little in common with that anime.

Instead, let’s talk about Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan.

In the world of Attack on Titan, humanity has retreated behind three colossal walls. (In Pacific Rim, there is a plan to build a colossal wall, but it fails right away.) The wealthy and politically powerful live in the innermost ring, where they barely worry about being attacked by human-eating monsters. The hard done-by live in cities projecting from the wall of the outermost ring, where their main purpose is to attract Titans. It’s not economical to defend the whole wall, you see, so concentrating people as bait in small areas reduces the area that needs to be defended.

From the set-up alone, you can feel the cynicism, right? Attack on Titan is a fairly cynical – or you could say realistic about the failings of large-scale social structures – series. Pacific Rim supports the well-worn, slightly unfashionable trope of humanity banding together when faced with a common threat; Attack on Titan, on the other hand, interrogates it:

The source of horror is different, too: more threatening, more personal, and harder to fight. In Pacific Rim, the monsters are absolutely victorious for a short time… but only before the movie starts, and only offscreen. For 90% of Pacific Rim’s running time, barring one or two on-screen causalities, humanity is containing the threat.

In Attack on Titan, however, just when it seems that people finally have the upper hand, the monsters evolve intelligence – or armor – or kung-fu – or even more monstrous size, and whatever advantage humanity might have had is taken away. And then it’s back to being chased, trapped, overcome, and eaten, by horrible monsters that are impossibly bigger and stronger than you.

The Titans… why do they exist? Why do they eat people? Why are they sometimes only 9 feet tall, and sometimes over 50 feet tall? Why are some unclothed and some armored? Why are some mindless and some intelligent? Why do some behavior predictably and others unpredictably?

It’s all a mystery. Each time humanity makes some progress toward understanding the Titans, the Titans become that much more horrible and unstoppable in response. The logic here is the logic of nightmares – that you can’t escape, that you’ll always be devoured in the end. It is the horror-movie logic of absolute powerlessness.

The mysteriousness of the Titans is a big part of what makes them horrible. That’s because once you know what something is – once you know how it can be defeated – you have already taken the first step on the path from powerless victim to crafty survivor. Knowledge is the difference between an existentialist horror movie like The Grudge – where the only way to win against the haunted house is to not enter it in the first place – and a survivalist horror movie like the American remake of The Grudge. There are moments of hope in Attack on Titan, but the overall tone is bleak: when the monsters outnumber the humans and are practically impossible to kill, what can be done?

The Kaiju attacks in Pacific Rim are quite different – they only appear to be random, but are in fact highly regular, to the point that they can be predicted mathematically. As explained by Eccentric Scientist#2, the kaiju appear first in an uninhabited place and then head for major population centers, where they primarily damage infrastructure. At first they appear singly, with long gaps in between, allowing humanity plenty of time to regroup. As the movie progresses, they show up more frequently. The fights between the monsters and the robots are destructive – we see Hong Kong basically leveled – but due to this attack pattern they are also clean, with minimal casualties.

In Attack on Titan, the action is smaller-scale and messier. The monsters look like us – like nude people, but bigger and uglier, with sharper teeth. Regular humanity doesn’t have giant robots, or even tanks or guns: only canons, swords, “gas packs” and climbing hooks. The fights are up close and personal… and so are the losses.

You see, the Titans have no interest in property damage. They exist only to eat people. They don’t need to eat people – they don’t have stomachs, are hollow inside.

So why do they eat people? Because eating people is horrible.

But don’t get me wrong: Attack on Titan isn’t purely a horror series. At first it seems that way: in a prologue from the point of view of the three main characters as children, the Titans can’t be resisted, and so everyone who doesn’t escape from them is eaten. Once the main characters grow up and join the army, however, the tone changes. We find out that the military Scouts – who seemed incompetent from the outside – actually do know a thing or two about fighting Titans. In fact, they know quite a lot! Occasionally they are even able, with the skills and knowledge they have painstakingly acquired, to temporarily win against the Titans.

The protagonists constantly learn and adapt, but it’s never enough. The manga is a push and pull between gaining power to venture out into the unknown; and finding out that the world is more even more unpredictably cruel than you had imagined. That kind of push-pull, between power and powerlessness, is similar to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, and indeed you can see a kind of homage in one sequence involving an intelligent, sadistic giant monkey.

Jojo fans who’ve read Part 3: Stardust Crusaders will know what I’m talking about here.

In the world of Attack on Titan, people are sometimes good, but just as often they are weak or venal. Additionally – and this can’t be said enough – the world is a cruel place. However, the cruelty of the world is no reason to stop fighting – if anything, it’s a reason to keep fighting:

And yet, within this cruel world, people do their jobs quite well. Even more than Pacific Rim, with its ex-marine protagonist, Attack on Titan is oriented toward military values. The chain of command should be followed at all times; commanders are competent most of the time; to die for no reason is ignoble but death in service of the greater good is honorable; in order to make sure that death is not pointless, further deaths are required.

It seems obvious to me that this set-up – although it leans further toward the Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here end of the horror-movie spectrum, and although it is far more pro-military than anything del Toro has ever made – would appeal to the guy who made Pan’s Labyrinth: fundamentally it’s a story of overcoming childhood trauma, and banding together to defeat nightmarish monsters who are almost, but not quite, human.

Because adult humans who are bigger and stronger than you are fucking scary when you’re a child, am I right?

It’s also clear why del Toro, with some very popular children’s movies to his name, would want to tell a more optimistic and less depressing version of this story about transcending abuse.

And while this might be a stretch, honestly the two series seem to have enough specific similarities that I’d bank on Attack on Titan being one of the properties that went into del Toro’s Japanese-monster-movie stew. It’s not even much of a secret, really: when the main character of Attack on Titan is Eren JAEGER and the robots that fight monsters in Pacific Rim are JAEGERS, surely we can acknowledge the possibility of a connection?

And that’s just to start with. This scene might be a bit familiar to anyone who’s seen Pacific Rim:

In Pacific Rim, Mako is a Strong Female Character: the only one to best the main character in a physical fight. She’s also the only Asian character with a speaking role, in a movie that owes an obvious and explicit debt to Japanese anime and monster movies.

One could argue that she is interesting because of her hand-to-hand combat skills; because her backstory is the best and most moving scene in the movie; because the actress who plays her is charismatic; because she occupies both the Strong Female Character role and the Properly Respectful Japanese Person role, as if to say that one can uphold the cultural role expected of one and yet still be a strong person at the same time.

In Attack on Titan, the equivalent character is Mikasa. She is not just the only “Oriental” in the script, but in the whole world:

Given that both properties have an “the Asian bad-ass fighter chick” character, and given that I’m writing an article arguing for the superiority of Attack on Titan, and I don’t want to make it solely about the fact that I prefer thornier, more cynical and scarier stories, let’s talk about the treatment of female characters in each. Pacific Rim doesn’t only suffer from having a single female character with speaking lines; it suffers from the role that character plays in the story. Mako is attached to the commander of the Jaeger program because he saved her as a child; so is Mikasa is attached to Eren Jaeger. Looking similar so far – but why must Mako “belong” either to one man or another? Can’t she leave the protective custody of the father-figure without entering the protective custody of the suitor? Must women be passed from one man to another?

This isn’t a problem in Attack on Titan, not because Matsuko isn’t devoted to Eren – she is, pathologically so – but because there’s a diverse cast of female characters who are not all like her. In fact, the eccentric scientist who is a little too into the monsters is a woman – and not only a woman, but a female commanding officer!

The diverse cast of women belong to themselves, not to fathers or lovers. They’re explicitly on the same level as the male cast, fighters in the same unit of the army. The whole cast, male and female alike, share a comradely bond.

Speaking of comradely bonds, at first I thought that this series – humanity confined behind walls, lacking any way to proactively engage the enemy – might be a metaphor for a non-militarized Japan. It is, definitely, very pro-military, very pro-intervention, and very pro-violence. There are other hints of conservative thought, as well, starting from the author’s fundamentally mistrustful view of human nature.

Even disregarding the difference in worldview between Pacific Rim and Attack on Titan, though – because there are perfectly good reasons to prefer more a more optimistic narrative – Attack on Titan is the more thoughtful series, as well as the one that offers a more powerful social critique, despite being set in a stacked-deck fantasy world. The author of Attack on Titan is interested – not only in the mechanics of the fight or how the protagonists resolve their personal differences and come together to face an alien enemy – but also in the structure of the world. How do ordinary citizens feel about their taxes going towards a (seemingly useless) military? What is the incentive structure of the military, and how does it cause the best and brightest to avoid posts where they would do the most good? Is it always necessary for the minority to adapt to the needs of the majority? How does one bring about the social change one wishes to see in the world?

Of course, the series has flaws. It’s by no means trope-free, for one thing: from the dumb/suicidal shonen hero who is totally average except for his determination (to murder Titans); to the strong, silent warrior character who ensures that the main character can uphold his ideals; to the physically weak character who is nevertheless a genius strategist; there are plenty of stock characters here, too. Attack on Titan as well as Pacific Rim takes advantage of the hero’s fundamental vanilla-ness to give more spotlight to generally sidelined – but more competent! – supporting characters, which is a good and worthwhile trend I support (see also: Teen Wolf Season One), but why not take that extra step and remove the bland main character entirely?

So it’s not all gravy. And in some ways, the comparison is apples (Hollywood summer blockbuster) to oranges (Japanese manga and anime). But I’ll say it again: Attack on Titan is the stronger work.

Am I just a cynic? Do I prefer Attack on Titan because it is “darker” and (therefore) more “realistic” (as if there is anything realistic about giant monsters who eat people)? Or do I prefer it because it is, in my view, more complex, both in its characters and in the social structures they inhabit?

Maybe. I might be alone – at least among my friends – in my almost total disappointment with Pacific Rim. When even the positive reviews come with caveats that you shouldn’t “think too hard”, that you should “just enjoy the movie”, that monster movies “all about explosions”, that only “snobs” expect engaging characters alongside engaging fight scenes, however… it’s a sign that there is something amiss. I’ll stick with Attack on Titan, downer worldview, flaws, and all: at least it’s obviously the product of one person’s idiosyncratic worldview.

There’s something to be said for that downer worldview, anyway: when your protagonists are losing the battle at least half the time, their occasionally victories feel that much more earned, and sweeter.

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Again, Attack on Titan is available here

MegaReview

Posted on August 27, 2013 by James Romberger

Optic Nerve #13 by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly)

In his previous issue of Optic Nerve, Tomine seemed to be playing around with stylistic tics borrowed from Frank King and Dan Clowes. In the main story of the current issue, “Go Owls,” Tomine does some very assured drawing and storytelling in a naturalistic mode that in this case is a little reminiscent of Jaime Hernandez. But there is no doubt, he is his own man and he is getting better all the time. Here the artist breaks significantly away from his previous stories that dealt more with educated young urbanites to depict the relationship beween a Middle-American, more proletariat couple who meet in a recovery program. Reading it, I felt as if I knew them.

The guy is an asshole, but Tomine manages to show that without hammering the point; he enables his story to unfold in a quite believable manner and elicit sympathy where he wants it directed with subtlety. The use of varying colors in a very limited palette throughout works nicely and is balanced by the exquisite control shown in the full color story in the back of the book, which also displays the high level of skill and delicacy that Tomine is growing into with his art.

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The Daniel Clowes Reader, edited by Ken Parille (Fantagraphics)

This fascinating collection of some of Clowes’ best works is published in the form of a teaching guide, copiously annotated to the nearly absurd degree of including subglossaries defining miniscule details hidden in the author’s panels. In this way, editor Ken Parille begins to resemble Kinbote, the deranged poetry afficianado from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, whose notes that introduce and permeate the posthumous edition of his idol/victim’s supposed masterwork begin to entirely supplant the work that they are supposed to supplement. It caused me to Google Parille to try to find out if he is real, or if he is an alter ego of Clowes himself. But, Parille apparently exists in his own right and while I might have chosen a few different stories if I had assembled this book, much of it is admittedly essential and well-served by the package.

The collection includes the entirety of Ghost World, such seminal stories as “Like a Weed, Joe” along with relevant essays and commentary by sundry credible sources, plus Clowes’ excellent polemical pamphlet Modern Cartoonist and another of my favorite pieces of his, reprinted for the first time from Zadie Smith’s groundbreaking 2007 comics/prose anthology The Book of Other People: the brilliant color short “Justin M. Damiano,” a classic that needs to be read by anyone who writes criticism on the internet.

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TEOTFW (The End of the Fucking World) by Charles Forsman (Fantagraphics)

Forsman’s epic minicomics series is collected into a small, thick trade paperback that I’d prefer was fully titled on the cover, rather than intialized as it is. The story resembles the real-life 1958 murder spree by Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, but transposed to modern times and with the gender balance in terms of sociopathy debatably reversed. Forsman’s pair of nihilists are shown to be the results of terrible parenting and are so estranged from human society that they have difficulty feeling emotions and pursuing a viable relationship together, much less to recognise when other people are not psychopaths.

Forsman, a graduate of Vermont’s Center for Cartoon Studies, has a solid grasp of comics storytelling and his lightly drawn page compositions display an intriguing degree of variety. I’d imagine that this would have read in a much more disconnected way in serialized, episodic form; collected, the book reads smoothly and quickly.

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Avery Fatbottom by Jen Vaughn (Monkeybrain)

To my mind, a good thing is that so many of the young cartoonists now emerging reject the contrived plasticity of technique and assembly-line methodology that defines contemporary mainstream comics to instead employ an auteuristic, handmade aesthetic in their work. This can be seen in the work of the cartoonists coming out of comics-oriented schools like that of the Center for Cartoon Studies. Another alumni of that program is Vaughn, who displays a breezy, humorous delivery for her comic Avery Fatbottom, a story of young renaissance fairgoers, which is expressively drawn with loose, appealing brushwork, handlettering and organic watercolor halftones.

Vaughn’s romantic sensibility does not take itself overly seriously and so, her evident pleasure in making her comics has an infectious quality. As with the works of Forsman, these efforts cause those who read them to also want to do their own comics, which is pretty much how I got into this game myself.

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The Outliers by Erik T. Johnson (Alternative)

This comic, the first of a series which apparently is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign (a large group of contributors are thanked in descending order of generosity inside), has some elaborate production values. It is a small square-bound “floppy” that is printed in two colors, including blue and a sort of lime green that gives it the look of a tract.

The cover is comprised of sketches of alien-appearing creatures surrounded by squiggly lines and printed with silver ink on black paper, but one doesn’t notice this immediately because it is wrapped in a somewhat undersized full-color dustjacket. The story within has a sort of adolescent breathlessness and the art is brushy and dense while also suitably organic and (mostly) handlettered, as befitting a semi-underground coming-of-age fantasy comic featuring a Bigfootish monster.

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Failure by Karl Stevens (Alternative)

Production values also dominate this handsome but ultimately frustrating trade paperback collection of panels from the author’s weekly strip in the now-defunct Boston Phoenix. Stevens’ clearly evident rendering abilities hark back to those of the engravers of yesteryear, but his photorealism makes me think of nothing so much as an alt/lit Alex Ross.

After admiring the impressively labor-intensive application of crosshatched tonalities and watercolors, I wished that there was a bit more connective tissue to the semi-autobiographical bones and meat of the book than the most prominent theme of drunkenness.

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Linen Ovens by Keren Katz/Molly Brooks/Andrea Tsurumi/Alexander Rothman (self published)

My favorite of the works I got at Brooklyn’s Grand Comics Festival, this is an anthology that takes advantage of the compatibility of poetry and comics. Poetry can be greatly enhanced by drawings which do not seek to be redundant with the accompanying words, but rather work in an oblique manner with the text, or run parallel to it.

Art by Keren Katz

Under Tsurumi’s striking cover, handlettering is intrinsic to these pieces; it guides the eye through the soft watercolors of Rothman, for example. Color figures most notably in the semi-abstracted panel transitions of Brooks and the unusual and effective pastel illustrations of Katz.

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The Crow: Curare by James O’Barr and Antoine Dodé (IDW)

It feels to me like a thousand years have passed since the emergence of O’Barr’s pre-Vertigo character/property The Crow in comics and feature films, but here at this late date is a new miniseries drawn with rounded expressivity by Dodé, involving a cop’s desperate search for a child murderer, aided by the shade of one of the pathetic victims. In the two issues I read in PDF form, the title character has yet to rear his head, but the stage is certainly set in a most murky and moody manner by Dodé’s beautifully unforced storytelling.

The poignancy of the art is further facilitated by its being printed from uninked pencils which are then digitally colored with a limited palette of primarily sepia and pale blues. Of course, since this is an IDW publication, as with most mainstream comics, the lettering is digital, which tries but fails to detract from the rich personality displayed in the artwork.

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March: Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell (Top Shelf)

This book is partly written by its subject, the distinguished civil rights pioneer Congressman John Lewis and since it details the early years of the struggle for desegregation in southern states by African-Americans, it justifiably boasts a back cover blurb by former President Bill Clinton. It is a story that we have heard before, but one that bears repeating in a time when a rotten cluster of power has gutted the voting rights that were so hard won.

One might have expected such a meaningful project to be published by a high-profile mainstream company such as Marvel or DC, who would presumably bring it to the widest possible audience; but instead it is the product of a smaller company known for artist-owned comics, Top Shelf. This makes it odd that the book is copyrighted only to Lewis and his co-writer/press secretary Aydin, omitting the artist who does much of the heavy lifting here, Nate Powell. Because, apart from the unquestionable historical importance of the very real experiences of Lewis, it is surely Powell’s dramatic layouts that make this narrative function as well as it does in the comics form and his lush halftones are some of the best I have seen since the glory days of Ditko and Wrightson in the Warren magazines.

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XIII: The Irish Version by Jean Van Hamme and Jean Giraud (Cinebook)

I really looked forward to the English translation of this book because I wanted to see Giraud drawing in a contemporaneous mode—-and while I am not disappointed in his drawing and storytelling in any way, it is at the service of a somewhat standard adventure story in which the entire Irish/English conflict is boiled down to be the backdrop of the origin tale in a long-running superspy narrative that makes the artist’s Blueberry westerns seem progressive in comparison. Besides that, the art is printed in a format so reduced that it becomes difficult to read, much less show Giraud’s impeccable deep-space compositions to advantage.

The coloring likewise suffers somewhat from a standardized approach, which drives the point home that Giraud is a much better colorist than anyone his work has been desecrated by since the peak years of Metal Hurlant. However, as he did on his final two Blueberry volumes, O.K. Corral and Dust, Giraud himself put his hand into the coloring to a limited degree to digitally “dirty up” the art, to add lighting effects and ruddier complexions, all of which go a long way to improving the look of what are, sadly, some of the last Moebius comics we shall ever see.

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Playing Narrative Part 2: Survivor’s Guilt

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Isaac Butler

(Hey! As the title indicates, this is part 2 of something! Part 1 is here!)

(Warning: Spoilers. Including the end of the game.)

Somewhere around the halfway mark of Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us, Joel, the hardened survivor of a plant-parasite-fungus-zombie-apocalypse that you spend most of the game controlling, finally makes it to his brother Tommy, located somewhere in the vast middle of America. Joel’s there to try to hand off Ellie, a teenage girl who must be taken to the Fireflies, a subversive group located somewhere out West. It’s the second time you’ve seen Tommy. In the game’s prologue, set twenty years before the rest of the action on the day the apocalypse started, Joel, Tommy and Joel’s daughter attempted to escape Austin, Texas. Now, relations between the two of you have cooled. Or, as Joel tells Ellie, “His last words to me were… I don’t ever want to see your goddamn face again.”

The player never learns exactly what caused Joel and Tommy’s falling out, but when Tommy—who now has a wife and helps run a small town based around a hydroelectric plant—refuses to help Joel, you get some idea. Joel tells Tommy that he’s owed this, “for all those goddamn years I took care of us.” Tommy replies, “took care? That’s what you call it? I got nothing but nightmares from those years.”

“You survived because of me,” Joel, tells his brother.

“It wasn’t worth it,” Tommy says, looking at the camera, stricken and haunted.

What could possibly make not-dying not-worth it? Likely, it’s the stabbing, shiving, Molotov-cocktailing, strangling, shooting, archering, punching, bricking, bottling, and IEDing that the player has spent the last seven hours making Joel do to various zombies and humans. The Last of Us is a game that takes its violence and its theme of survival very seriously, and gradually asks the player to do the same. In doing so, we come to realize that Joel, the man we inhabit, may be a survivor, but he sure ain’t a hero.

After the prologue, when we jump twenty years in the future and re-meet Joel as a childless middle-aged man, he is a lowlife. He smuggles drugs, ration cards and weapons, serving up some terrible ownage on people who cross him. He runs in a relationship of sexual and financial convenience with a fellow smuggler named Tess, who will go on to summarize their lives by saying “we’re shitty people, Joel,” and mean it. Later still, after Joel and Ellie take on a group of marauding bandits, Joel reveals to Ellie that he’s “been on both sides of this thing.” When a different group of bandits invade Tommy’s power plant, Tommy asks Joel if he still knows how to kill, but the look on Tommy’s face tells you that he’s disgusted with himself for asking.

Joel, just to be clear, isn’t an anti-hero. Nor is he another in a long line of video game asshole warriors. He’s not a Don Draper or Tony Soprano charming psychopath. He’s actually kind of a piece of shit. Not that he doesn’t have his complexities, particularly in his relationship with Ellie. She sees a goodness in him, the same goodness we glimpse in the prologue, the goodness he appears to have lost. It’s a goodness that, when it’s just the two of them together, The Last of Us dangles in front of us as a possibility. Joel’s a broken man, physically strong and spiritually bereft. A man who has turned off his soul for twenty years, and, over the course of The Last Of Us, we begin to care whether he gets it back or not, just as much as we care about whether he and Ellie ever make it out West.

Much of the time, however, Joel’s like a mix between Rooster Cogburn from True Grit and Theo Faron from Children of Men, sans most of the redeeming qualities of both. What makes The Last of Us so startling is that it knows this. And, gradually, it makes the player know it too.

Naughty Dog became famous over the last decade for a series of Indiana Jones like games called Uncharted that, as cinematic acts of storytelling, are actually better than half of the Jones films and all of Jones’s latter day imitators like The Mummy and National Treasure. In those games, the player controls Nathan Drake, a descendent of Sir Francis Drake and international treasure hunter who gets in over his head having a series of thrilling, funny, genuinely charming adventures having to do with lost artifacts that may hold great power. The Uncharted games harken back to movies like Treasure of the Sierra Madre or Romancing the Stone, the kind of big budget, exotic locale, rakish hero, adventure films that Hollywood used to be able to do well, while removing the problematic racial politics that often make those films unwatchable today.

There’s just one problem: These are, of course, action games. Which means that the player also spends a great deal of time killing people. Hundreds of people, it turns out. After Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception came out, more and more people started raising a stink about this issue. It’s pretty clear that the team on The Last of Us—many of whom also worked on Uncharted—wanted to see what would happen if they started taking all the killing seriously and asked their audience to do the same.

While The Last of Us, like The Walking Dead, takes place in a world hit with a zombie apocalypse, the similarities pretty much end there. TWD’s gameplay functions through dialogue and action choices. The Last of Us has very little choice in it at all. TWD’s graphics are stylized and cell-shaded. The Last of Us uses motion capture. TWD is an adventure/puzzle game. The Last of Us is a stealth/action game.

Most importantly, TWD takes place immediately following the zombie apocalypse, as people learn how to survive. The Last of Us takes place twenty years in, and is set amongst the whittled down population of people who’ve figured it out.

Survival is what The Last of Us is all about on both a thematic and gameplay level. If Naughty Dog were in search of an alternate title for the game, Survivor’s Guilt (with “guilt” here meaning both the feeling of remorse and the state of having done something wrong) would’ve been a good stand-in. As with The Walking Dead—where a series of choices serves as an essay on ethics when you realize death in inevitable—it is this interweaving of theme and mechanics that enriches The Last of Us and makes it work.

In the game you have limited weapons, and all of them have limited uses. You have to worry constantly about making too much noise, alerting nearby enemies. Killing people is difficult, noisy, and time consuming. All of the materials you find are necessary to craft multiple items. You can’t carry very much. There are also many points in the game where you can sneak by adversaries and not engage with them, leading—if you are, like me, both ethically minded and neurotic—to calculations that go something like Well, I’m low on supplies and I bet I could take these guys out and loot their corpses. Wait. Am I seriously contemplating killing six people who aren’t a threat to me for the express purpose of looting their corpses? Oh my God. I’m the worst.

In The Walking Dead, violence is very personal. Most of the time, it is being dealt by or to someone Lee Everett knows. The Last Of Us, on the other hand, primarily features the kind of depersonalized violence that most video games trade-in, it just makes that depersonalization part of the point. Joel—who has survived precisely because he’s selfish— can’t see the people he’s killing as human.

Not that the game is a relentless downer. Much of it is spent wandering overgrown urban landscapes and idyllic vistas talking with Ellie and deepening the bond between the two of them. Ellie is one of the few great characters to emerge from video games. She’s funny, charming and human and feels in many ways like a real fourteen year old. Indeed, any affection the player gains for Joel is likely the end result of loving Ellie, and wanting to love what she loves. For each of the game’s acts (there are four of them, one for each season), Ellie and Joel meet and team up with other survivors, who all prove to be interesting, fully realized characters written and performed with that rarest of video game traits: subtext. The Last of Us is a game where watching facial expressions and listening to tone of voice changes meaning, and the few choices they give you along the way are entirely about character development. You can stop to explain to Ellie what a coffee shop was, or pet a giraffe. You can find comic books to give her to read. You can give a man a Dear John letter from his boyfriend.

Ultimately, however, The Last of Us’s themes cannot be escaped for long. And yet, because it is a very well designed game, it is fun play. And yet, because it takes what it is doing seriously, it’s a disturbing and wrenching and truly, deeply, haunting. The ending of the game is anti-cathartic and disturbing and in no way resolves the central tension between depicting the urge for survival while also problematizing it, suggesting that perhaps, at times, being a survivor means being a monster.

Joel, you see, is presented with the opportunity to save the world, but doing so entails Ellie’s death. Ellie is immune to the parasite that has destroyed civilization, but creating a vaccine from her body would involve removing her brain. Joel saves her life, killing a hospital full of people, and ends any hope of humankind’s recovery. The Last of Us twice hints that Ellie would’ve accepted her death if given the opportunity to choose. But she never knows she had the choice because Joel lies to her about it. Joel, we come to understand, is as selfish as ever. Needing and loving this new surrogate daughter, after having lost his own twenty years before, he is unable to let her go for the greater good.

For those of you reading this who don’t play video games, I want you to understand that this kind of ending—one that is neither triumphant nor cathartic, but instead haunting and true to its characters—basically does not exist in mainstream video games. In fact, it’s the kind of ending that most mainstream blockbuster movies—and The Last of Us is the equivalent in terms of budget, market presence, hype and sales—would never dare attempt.

It’s these kinds of elements—story, theme, structure, subtext, writing, performance—that are responsible for the nearly universal critical rapture that has greeted The Last of Us, and they flow directly out of the thematic integration of gameplay and story, and from questioning the purpose of all the violence the video game marketplace demands. It is in this way similar to Watchmen. By taking its subject matter seriously, it simultaneously is a masterpiece of its form (the superhero comic/ the action game) while undermining the existing status quo.

And that brings me to the ultimate problem with making the resolution of ludonarrative dissonance the ultimate goal and measure of quality of video games. It’s no mere coincidence that The Walking Dead and The Last of Us take place during the apocalypse. There’s a limited number of scenarios that justify the kind of violence that the form regularly contains and that audiences demand from it. While we can get moralistic about this, high body counts have graced our literature since The Iliad, our theatre since The Persians, our films since Intolerance and on and on. As someone interested in video games becoming a richer source of stories, of examining theme, subject, narrative and character through the unique medium of a player interface, I’m less concerned with the virtues of violent games and more by how thuddingly boring and narrow their possibilities often are. As the current “gritty downer” era of superhero comics and films shows, replacing the current narrow possibilities of the medium with a different set of narrow (but critic-approved) possibilities isn’t really a solution, even if we get more games like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us along the way.

Superheroes With Cigarettes

Posted on August 7, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

A little bit back, Peter Sattler noted that Dan Clowes’ career in comics often seems like a long, bitter struggle against comics. As Peter says:

[Clowes’] work goes out of its way to thematize the artist’s and/or the story’s struggle against comics themselves – against a form that, as Clowes presents it, seems unable to encompass interior states, unable to escape its own theatricality and artificiality, unable to circumvent its own closed system of beginnings and endings, set-ups and punch-lines. Clowes dramatizes his contest with these limits, transforming that contest into the content of his graphic novels.

Peter talks about this mainly in terms of formal limits…but to me it seems like it’s a cultural issue as well. Comics seem unable to encompass interior states, and unable to move beyond largely bone-headed gags, because comics are for kids. As I discuss here, Clowes in comics like Velvet Glove and Wilson seems to compulsively assert his distance from a form, and from influences, which he views as both infantile and inescapable. Much of the adult/edgy content, misanthropy, and violence against women in his books comes across as a kind of desperate signaling that he is not (like say Charles Schulz) writing for children. His comics can be seen as a long insistence that he is too grown up — an insistence which is (as he is certainly aware) infantile. From this perspective, Enid’s obsession with older men is not (just) a kind of self-flattering, but is a displaced expression of Clowes’ own obsessions. He’s an older guy who is fascinated with the idea, and the impossibility, of being an older guy.

The Death Ray is pretty much in the same mold. It’s a super-hero parody whose protagonist, Andy, gains super-strength by smoking cigarettes — an obvious reference to wanting to look and be older. The rest of the story is built around exploring what super-hero stories would really be like, as Clowes, familiarly, uses the genre to underline his own adult distance from it. Andy wanders around looking for criminals to beat up, but nobody attacks him. He punishes people who don’t particularly deserve it at the behest of his best-friend, Louie, and then feels bad about it. As Aaron Leitko wrote at the Washington Post “The Death-Ray employs the core super-hero conventions — the origin story, the costume and the sidekick — in the most banal ways possible.” That banality (like the banality in Wilson, or in alt comics more generally) is the validating boredom; the sign that we are not children, but adults, who understand (to paraphrase Ambrose Bierce) that realism is the world as it is actually seen by toads.

So Clowes is doing his usual thing. But…his usual thing, in this context, isn’t nearly as irritating as it usually is. The main reason for that, I think, is that, in this case, Clowes’ agonized relationship with his material doesn’t come across as condescending or wearisomely anxious. It just comes across as another superhero comic. After all, the main reference here seems to be to the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man — and how different is Andy from Peter Parker, really? Not very. Like Andy, Peter is a nerdy, angry, unhappy, orphaned kid; like Andy, Peter uses his powers for self-aggrandizement; like Andy, Peter’s powers make things worse for him, not better; like Andy, Peter makes his own kind of doofy looking costume.

And, like Andy, Peter, and the comic he’s in, is obsessed with growing up. As Chris Gavaler pointed out here last week, the whole Spider-Man story is basically a metaphor for puberty, with radioactive spider bite standing in for surging hormones. Clowes changes the spider bite to a cigarette, which makes the metaphor more pointed, but it doesn’t really change it’s nature. The Death Ray, almost despite itself, is extending its source material — the anxiety and angst that Clowes’ taps is the same in essence as Lee/Ditko’s angst. That’s very different from Wilson, for example, where Charles Schulz’s whimsy and weird humor are replaced with jokes about shit and ass rape (and not with funny jokes about shit and ass rape, either.)

All of which perhaps helps to explain in part why parody has always been so central to the super-hero genre. From Plastic Man and Captain Marvel to Superduperman to the 60s Batman television show to the Watchmen, superhero parodies have always been both critically lauded and extremely popular. On the one hand, you could argue that this is because superheroes are really stupid, and no halfway intelligent creator is going to take them seriously. And I certainly think there’s a lot to that argument.

But Death Ray also suggests that parodies are the best superhero narratives not only because they undermine the stupidity of superhero narratives, but because they fulfill them. Superhero stories are, as everybody knows, adolescent power fantasies; they’re a way for children of all ages to pretend to have ascended to the prerogatives and super-strength of adulthood. And what is more adult than parodying the silly fantasies of youth? Clowes is (fairly amusingly) sneering at the stupid dreams of fanboys of all ages who want to be grown up — but he’s also providing those fanboys with the exact same dream. Andy takes a hit from his cigarette; Clowes’ readers take a hit of The Death Ray. It’s Clowes’ best comic because, almost despite himself, it’s the one in which he’s able to provide the genre pleasures that obsess him without compulsively assuring his readers and himself that he’s too good for them.

Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 1): Waltzing with Frankenstein

Posted on August 6, 2013 by Alex Buchet

Manfred on the Jungfrau, by Ford Madox Brown

“In any case, one can state that much of the so-called Nietzchean ‘superhumanity’ has as its origin and doctrinal model not Zarathustra but the Count of Monte-Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas.”

– Antonio Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale, III, ‘Letteratura popolare”.

This quote comes from Umberto Eco‘s introduction to the French translation of his 1978 book of essays, Il superuomo di massa.

As Eco elaborates:

I found Gramsci’s idea seductive. That the cult of the superman with nationalist and Fascist roots be born, among other things, of a petty bourgeois frustration complex is well-known. Gramsci has shown clearly how this ideal of the superman could be born, in the nineteenth century, within a literature that saw itself as popular and democratic:

“The serial replaces (and at the same time favorises) the imagination of the man of the people, it is a veritable waking dream (…) long reveries on the idea of vengeance, of punishing the guilty for the ills they have inflicted (…) “

Thus, it was legitimate to wonder about the cult of the right-wing superman but also about the equivocal aspects of the nineteenth century’s humanitarian socialism. [tr:AB]

The French title of Eco’s collection is, aptly, De Superman au surhomme– ‘From Superman to the superman’.

But what of the reverse — how did we go from the superman to Superman?

How did we get from here:

…to here?

Art by Joe Shuster

The superhero is one of the strongest — and strangest– modern pop charactertropes; I propose we dig into its roots– which I maintain go back to the 18th century’s massive cultural shift: a revolution in politics, thought, and culture.

The superhero is an ultimate narcissist fantasy of identification; it thrives in a modern world of atomised society, where the basic unit is the individual to a historically unheard-of degree. Thus we’ll start with the centuries that enshrined individualism, the better to give a cultural context to our enquiry.

We’ll also examine why the superhero is so dominantly an American cultural artifact; this will lead us into some dark territory.

First, though, we must distinguish the superhero from his heroic predecessors in myth and legend.

The Classic Hero

The idea of the superman was spawned in the 18th and 19th centuries. This statement may strike the reader as historically false; what of the superhuman heroes of myth and legend, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Herakles and Achilles, Roland and Rustam, Cuchulain and Tomoe Gozen?

Heracles Farnese

These heroes were enmeshed in the fabric of myth. They were part of the structure of society, of the “great chain of being” that descended from the divine to the infernal, through the human; many were demi-gods, the legitimacy of their power stemming from godly parentage. Others were avatars of a warrior culture– linked through duty and right to the formal, “ordained” structure of the polity: for example, the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table, or the Argives besieging Troy.

What the classic hero was not was an individual.

Indeed, when the hero asserted his individuality — repudiating or even betraying the obligations that hampered and enmeshed him — the result was tragedy. The Greeks spoke of a person’s hamartia, or fatal flaw: very often, this took the form of hubris, pride or ambition so excessive as to invite divine wrath:

“Seest thou how God with his lightning smites always the bigger animals, and will not suffer them to wax insolent, while those of a lesser bulk chafe him not? How likewise his bolts fall ever on the highest houses and the tallest trees? So plainly does He love to bring down everything that exalts itself.”

– Herodotus, History

Thus Herakles, after drunkenly massacring his family, is punished by enslavement to his enemy Eurystheus; Achilles in his anger withdraws from the Trojan war, so imperilling his fellow Argives and bringing about the death of his lover Patrocles.

Sir Lancelot betrays his liege, King Arthur, by taking the king’s wife as a lover: the kingdom is subsequently torn apart by civil wars. The mighty warrior Roland is trapped with Charlemagne’s rearguard at Roncevalles by an overwhelming force– but pride stops him from blowing his horn to summon help until it is too late, and his army is killed to the last man.

Too late, Charlemagne

To deviate from duty, from his proper place in the scheme of the world, brings about the hero’s downfall and inflicts disaster on the community.

This is decidedly not the fate of the new character type– the superman.

The Birth of the Individual and the Coming of the New Hero

We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men, their manner of appearance in our world’s business, how they have shaped themselves in the world’s history, what ideas men formed of them, what work they did;–on Heroes, namely, and on their reception and performance; what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs.

(…) For, as I take it,Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns,and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.

Thus Thomas Carlyle (1795 — 1881) in Heroes and Hero Worship (1840). For Carlyle, the sole true root of human progress was that man who could rise above the mass, transcend his time and shake the world into a new form– the Hero. Examples he cites include Muhammad, Cromwell, Shakespeare, and Napoleon.

Unlike classic heroes, these men were not the servants (if often rebellious ones) of fate: they shaped fate. They stood above it.

The individual as giant was the logical extrapolation of the individual per se, who had in the eighteenth century assumed an importance never before acknowledged:

I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself.
I know my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature did wisely in breaking the mould with which she formed me, can only be determined after having read this work.

These are the opening words of the 1769 Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 — 1778).

Portrait of Rousseau by De la Tour

It was something unheard-of: the Self as subject, in all its raw nakedness, faults and all.

The rise of the individual found political expression in the Enlightenment, as well. The notion of his or her personal rights was enshrined in such foundational documents as the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution and the French ’ Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’.

Individualism also flourished in the wider culture. The school of sentimentality in literature, as typified by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s The Sorrows of Young Werther or Laurence Sterne‘s A Sentimental Journey, valued the enjoyment of emotion for its own sake– not as a source of empathy or catharsis. In parallel, the psychological novel was born — examining the inner life of the self.

The Italian innovation of the apartment, intimate, cosy and — above all– private, began to supplant the old houses and manors where many generations of different families and classes would live together.

Diners were less and less eating à la française, seated at large banquet tables and sharing from common dishes: in the new restaurants, they could be seated and served alone, at their own separate tables.

Dinner service à la française

The dance craze that was sweeping Europe was the waltz; in contrast to the group dances such as the pavane or the quadrille theretofore prevalent, couples twirled alone.

Even so seemingly trivial detail as shoe size underwent the individualistic evolution; in prior centuries, shoes were undifferentiated between left and right foot, and came in few standard sizes. Now cobblers were literally tailoring each piece of footwear to the specific foot.

Yes, heady times for the individual! All the headier after the French Revolution sent shock waves rocketing through Europe, ripping up the ancient structure of the world, bringing terror and war in its train.

The old order was shattered; the new citizen was deprived of “natural” superiors to look up to, the King, the aristocrats and the clergy. This was a vacuum waiting to be filled.

Came the moment, came the man — the Hero as Carlyle later conceived him, who bent the forces of history itself to his will; the true progenitor of the superman– Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon crossing the Alps, by David

The armies of revolutionary France were marked by a new kind of professionalism: an officer’s commission was no longer secured by genteel birth or outright purchase. Thus men rose in the ranks through merit– and in the case of the artillery lieutenant Bonaparte, he would rise to the throne of the world’s mightiest empire.

Nothing seemed able to stop him; destiny was clay in his hands; nations fell or were born at his word. He elicited worldwide admiration even from his enemies. (To this day, the British, his most tenacious foes, allude to Waterloo as if it were a defeat — ‘He met his Waterloo in the 2008 election’– rather than the greatest victory in British history; and it is a compliment to call a man, say, ‘the Napoleon of finance’.)

Wordsworth, Goethe, Beethoven, Byron– they were excited by this seemingly superhuman figure who was poised to sweep the old corrupt order onto the trash-heap of history.

(Great was their disgust and sense of betrayal when the former revolutionary crowned himself emperor:

O joyless power that stands by lawless force!
Curses are his dire portion, scorn, and hate,
Internal darkness and unquiet breath;
And, if old judgments keep their sacred course,
Him from that Height shall Heaven precipitate
By violent and ignominious death.
–Wordsworth, 1809

The moral being: don’t expect too much from supermen, and you’ll not be disappointed.)

It is a cliche of the lazy writer or cartoonist to depict a lunatic as one persuaded he is Napoleon; yet there have been hundreds of such cases documented, from Napoleon’s own time to the present, attesting his power over the imagination. Napoleon himself was a canny curator of his own image. That famous pose with the hand tucked under his shirt? It was suggested to him by an actor. That hat? He had dozens of them, to be left as souvenirs wherever he travelled.

(He is also the exemplar for world-conquering villains; there is a direct line of descent from Napoleon to Doctor Doom.)

Napoleon formed a template for the superman; and he further smoothed the path for the latter by radically institutionalizing meritocracy, “career open to talents” as embodied in the Grande Ecole schools of France or in the University of Berlin, institutions of excellence set to turn out the genius leaders of tomorrow.

A new elitism was in the shaping, and the idea of the superman largely sprang from it into the cultural zeitgeist.

Masters of Nature

Welch erbaermlich Grauen Fasst Uebermenschen Dich?

[What vexes you, oh superman?]
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (1808)

The eighteenth century was also marked by a growing mastery over the physical world. The very idea of progress flourished as never before; for most of history, it was thought that mankind had regressed from a long-vanished golden age. (Mark how the classic heroes all belonged to the past.) Human beings now, however, were going from strength to strength with no end in sight.

This was the age of the Industrial Revolution. Steam power gave men the might of Titans; nature seemed to yield more and more of its secrets to the natural philosophers not yet given the new name of “scientists” ( coined in 1833).

Let us consider the below painting, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, painted in 1768 by Joseph Wright of Darby (1734 – 1797):

click image to enlarge

A cockatoo is trapped in a glass jar from which the air is gradually pumped out, leaving the bird slowly to die, suffocating in the vacuum.

Note the two weeping little girls to the right, distressed by such cruelty; but one of the experimenters is at hand to explain how this suffering is necessary for the progress of science. The other experimenter stares out at us — challenging us, perhaps, to dare contest his will to knowledge.

This painting presages another avatar of the superman: the scientist, wresting control of the secrets of the universe as the titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods.

Yes: a modern Prometheus… as an 18-year-old Englishwoman dubbed her fictional challenger of Heaven:

So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein — more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.
–Victor Frankenstein, in Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley

Frankenstein and his monster; illustration by Theodor von Holst

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 – 1851) published her novelFrankenstein; or, the modern Prometheus in 1818.

The title hero usurps God’s privilege by creating life: a monstrous, manlike creature endowed with reason.

Yet, to do so, Frankenstein eschews the occult, magical methods of the Fausts of previous fiction. His power derives from a mastery of the elements attained by rational study and experiment– from science. He aims to join that near-Godlike elite of researchers so admiringly described by his teacher Waldman:

They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air that we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its shadows.

– Shelley, op.cit.

No need for bowing to demons to do his bidding. Frankenstein is free of God and Satan alike. (Shelley was, in her youth at least, an atheist.) He replaces God, in fact; and though the novel shows him punished for his deeds, it is clear that his destruction comes not from a vengeful heaven, but from his own flawed character– Shelley, like her female equivalents in the Darby painting, could see the cruelty in the scientist’s will to power.

Victor Frankenstein points forward to other, future ‘scientific superman’ characters; to Verne’s Captain Nemo and Robur the Conqueror, to Wells’ Griffin (the Invisible Man) and Dr Moreau, to countless Mad Scientists and scientific heroes like Tom Swift, Doc Savage or Captain Future.

(As for his tormented monster spawn, he too has superhero descendants, in the ‘monstrous’ vein: the Heap, the Hulk, Swamp Thing…)

Indeed, many literary historians credit Mary Shelley with creating a new literary genre: science fiction, of which more anon. She was also writing within the perimeters of another new genre: the Gothic.

Romanticism and the Gothic Backlash

Not everyone welcomed the new industrial age. The rapid changes of the modernising world alarmed and alienated people of all classes. There came to be a yearning for nature, for sublime landscapes and ruins, for an idealised past; to the cold new rationality were preferred the warmth of feelings.

The literary expression of this backlash was the Gothic novel, the first of which is generally agreed to be that of Horace Walpole (1717–1797), The Castle of Otranto.

Walpole’s neo-Gothic castle, Strawberry Hill

There followed a flood of spectre-haunted volumes, many of which featured brooding predecessors of the superman: the title character of William Beckford’s The History of the Caliph Vathek, who dares to invade Hell; Charles Maturin‘s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a damned, dark near-immortal; Lord Byron‘s Faust-like Manfred, who defies God and Satan alike; and perhaps the most proleptic of all, Byron’s secretary John William Polidori‘s The Vampyre (1819).

The Gothic novel was also the first narrow commercial genre of popular fiction.

The nineteenth century saw the rise of the first true mass media, and the birth of literature for the masses; Polidori’s book will serve as a useful transition to the next chapter.

Next, in Part 2: The true birth of the superman.

When Puberty Lasts a Lifetime

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

“I grew up in Indiana,” writes Chris Huntington, “and saved a few thousand comic books in white boxes for the son I would have someday. . . . Despite my good intentions, we had to leave the boxes of yellowing comics behind when we moved to China.”

I grew up in Pennsylvania and only moved down to Virginia, so I still have one dented box of my childhood comics to share with my son. He pulled it down from the attic last weekend.

“I forgot how much fun these are,” he said.

Cameron is twelve and has lived all those years in our southern smallville of a town. Chris Huntington’s son, Dagim, is younger and born in Ethiopia. Huntington laments in “A Superhero Who Looks Like My Son”(a recent post at the New York Times parenting blog, Motherlode) how Dagin stopped wearing his Superman cape after he noticed how much darker his skin looked next to his adoptive parents’.

Cameron can flip to any page in my bin of comics and admire one of those “big-jawed white guys” Huntington and I grew up on. Dagim can’t. That, argues Junot Diaz, is the formula for a supervillain: “If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.” Fortunately, reports Huntington, Marvel swooped to the rescue with a black-Hispanic Spider-Man in 2011, giving Dagim a superhero to dress as two Halloweens running.

Glenn Beck called Ultimate Spider-Man just “a stupid comic book,” blaming the facelift on Michelle Obama and her assault on American traditions. But Financial Times saw the new interracial character as the continuing embodiment of America: “Spider-Man is the pure dream: the American heart, in the act of growing up and learning its path.” I happily side with Financial Times, though the odd thing about their opinion (aside from the fact that something called Financial Times HAS an opinion about a black-Hispanic Spider-Man) is the “growing up” bit.

Peter Parker was a fifteen-year-old high schooler when that radioactive spider sunk its fangs into his adolescent body. Instant puberty metaphor. “What’s happening to me? I feel—different! As though my entire body is charged with some sort of fantastic energy!” I remember the feeling.

It was 1962. Stan Lee’s publisher didn’t want a teenage superhero. The recently reborn genre was still learning its path. Teenagers could only be sidekicks. The 1940s swarmed with Robin knock-offs, but none of them ever got to grow-up, to become adult heroes, to become adult anythings.

Captain Marvel’s little alter ego Billy Baston never aged. None of the Golden Agers did. Their origin stories moved with them through time. Bruce Wayne always witnessed his parents’ murder “Some fifteen years ago.” He never grew past it. For Billy and Robin, that meant never growing at all. They were marooned in puberty.

Stan Lee tried to change that. Peter Parker graduated high school in 1965, right on time. He starts college the same year. The bookworm scholarship boy was on track for a 1969 B.A.

But things don’t always go as planned. Co-creator Steve Ditko left the series a few issues later (#38, on stands the month I was born). Lee scripted plots with artist John Romita until 1972, when Lee took over his uncle’s job as publisher. He was all grown-up.

Peter doesn’t make it to his next graduation day till 1978. If I remember correctly (I haven’t read Amazing Spider-Man #185 since I bought it from a 7-EIeven comic book rack for “Still Only Thirty-five” cents when I was twelve), he missed a P.E. credit and had to wait for his diploma. Thirteen years as an undergraduate is a purgatorial span of time. (I’m an English professor now, so trust me, I know.)

Except it isn’t thirteen years. That’s no thirty-two-year-old in the cap and gown on the cover. Bodies age differently inside comic books. Peter’s still a young twentysomething. His first twenty-eight issues spanned less than three years, same for us out here in the real world. But during the next 150, things grind out of sync.

It’s not just that Peter’s clock moves more slowly. His life is marked by the same external events as ours. While he was attending Empire State University, Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter appeared multiple times in the Marvel universe. Their four-year terms came and went, but not Peter’s four-year college program. How can “the American heart” learn its path when it’s in a state of arrested development?

Slowing time wasn’t enough either. Marvel wanted to reverse the aging process. They wanted the original teen superhero to be a teenager again. When their 1998 reboot didn’t take hold (John Byrne had better luck turning back the Man of Steel’s clock), Marvel invented an entire universe. When Ultimate Spider-Man premiered in 2000, the new Peter Parker is fifteen again. And he was going to stay that way for a good long while. Writer Brian Bendis took seven issues to cover the events Lee and Ditko told in eleven pages.

But even with slo-mo pacing, Peter turned sixteen again in 2011. So after a half century of webslinging, Marvel took a more extreme countermeasure to unwanted aging. They killed him. But only because they had the still younger Spider-Man waiting in the wings. Once an adolescent, always an adolescent.

The newest Spider-Man, Miles Morales, started at thirteen. What my son turns next month. He and Miles will start shaving in a couple years. If Miles isn’t in the habit of rubbing deodorant in his armpits regularly, someone will have to suggest it. I’m sure he has cringed through a number of Sex Ed lessons inflicted by well-meaning but clueless P.E. teachers. My Health classes were always divided, mortified boys in one room, mortified girls across the hall. My kids’ schools follow the same regime. Some things don’t change.

Miles doesn’t live in Marvel’s main continuity, so who knows if he’ll make it out of adolescence alive. His predecessor died a virgin. Ultimate Peter and Mary Jane had talked about sex, but decided to wait. Sixteen, even five years of sixteen, is awfully young. Did I mention my daughter turned sixteen last spring?

Peter didn’t die alone though. Mary Jane knew his secret. I grew up with and continue a policy of open bedrooms while opposite sex friends are in the house, but Peter told her while they sat alone on his bed, Aunt May off who knows where. The scene lasted six pages, which is serious superhero stamina. It’s mostly close-ups, then Peter springing into the air and sticking to the wall as Mary Jane’s eye get real real big. Way better than my first time. It’s also quite sweet, the trust and friendship between them. For a superhero, for a pubescent superhero especially, unmasking is better than sex. It’s almost enough to make me wish I could reboot my own teen purgatory. Almost.

Meanwhile the Marvel universes continue to lurch in and out of time, every character ageless and aging, part of and not part of their readers’ worlds. It’s a fate not even Stan Lee could save them from. Cameron and Dagim will continue reading comic books, and then they’ll outgrow them, and then, who knows, maybe that box will get handed to a prepubescent grandson or granddaughter.

The now fifty-one-year-old Spider-Man, however, will continue not to grow up. But he will continue to change. “Maybe sooner or later,” suggests artist Sara Pichelli, “a black or gay — or both — hero will be considered something absolutely normal.” Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield would like his character to be bisexual, a notion Stan Lee rejects (“I figure one sex is enough for anybody”). But anything’s possible. That’s what Huntington learned from superheroes, the quintessentially American lesson he wants to pass on to his son growing up in Singapore.

May that stupid American heart never stop finding its path.

Nicolas Winding Refn: “White Movie Nerds Must Die” (An Imaginary Story)

Posted on July 23, 2013 by Jog

The first we see of Ryan Gosling, he is shown flexing his hands and squinting with terrific meaning before a statute of a strapping, shirtless boxer, and this, one suspects, is pertinent to why every critic in the world hated Only God Forgives.

I exaggerate, of course. A glance at any popular review aggregator will reveal a modest selection of minds sympathetic to this latest picture from popular Dane Nicolas Winding Refn, whose previous feature, 2011’s Drive, was met with a lingering rapture so disproportionate to its derivative pleasures — seriously, just sit down with Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man for two hours and you’ll get basically all of Refn’s deeper thematics, plus a stellar turn by Peter O’Toole — the observant reader can’t help but catch a whiff of guilty score-settling, or at least the unmistakable grimace of an indulgent teacher left embarrassed by a prize pupil’s misbehavior.

These are good concerns, because this new film is all about authority, and behavior, and guilt.

But before we get to that, I must make a personal confession. Absolutely critical to my experience with Only God Forgives was the realization that it is deliberately mistitled. There is, in fact, no English-language title displayed on screen during the opening credits; instead, the title is a Thai phrase, written in Thai script, which merely translates to “Only God Forgives” via subtitles at the bottom of the frame.

Moreover, it soon turns out that quintessential Hollywood hunk Gosling is not, in fact, the film’s hero, but an arguable co-protagonist with Thai actor Vithaya Pansringarm, whom not a few viewers of the original red band trailer mistook for the story’s villain – as perfect a coincidence as those (over-)sensitive to western exceptionalism could possibly dream!

Or did writer/director Refn plan it all that way? It seems unlikely – and not just because I have no idea who cut that trailer. Supposedly, pre-production on Only God Forgives began in 2009 with a much more traditional action movie scenario, but Refn — having subsequently overseen the mutation of Drive from a purportedly more ‘normal’ crime thriller to its languid final form — re-thought the picture as a moody, ‘foreign’ thing, eventually rolling with production crises to further that impulse: a lack of English-capable local actors resulted in a *lot* of subtitled Thai-language dialogue, and the absence of money for a soundtrack of American tunes inspired a recurring device of Thai characters performing domestic songs via karaoke.

That’s right. There’s three song sequences in Only God Forgives; three less than the average Telugu film, yes, but divvied out at similarly well-spaced junctures, as are the surprisingly modest action scenes. Did you know Refn once authorized a no-budget Hindi-language remake of his debut film Pusher, by a British filmmaker with an eye toward appealing to Indian audiences? This too got me thinking.

Having watched anime from a young age, I am accustomed to feelings of embarrassment. All around you in that peculiar fandom, at all times, is a strange fetish for marginal aspects of a foreign culture, or snatches of culture marginalized by their use: honorifics (mis)applied as a signifier of ‘understanding,’ weird debates over the accessibility of translation, and — since I knew mostly men — desperation-laden desire for an exoticised notion of female perfection, apparently native to Japan. This is not to say that some fans didn’t eventually develop a sophisticated understanding of language, culture and dubiously popular entertainment, but many more remained ignorant of their tourism, convinced instead that the meager abridgement of cultural engagement that is buying (or stealing) shit elevated them above the rabble, away from the debasement of American things and toward a verily rising sun.

I feel much the same way watching Indian movies today, though I am cognizant, of course, that a movie does not care who is watching. Like any single-screen front-bencher settling in for an evening of straightforward masala, I am invited to cheer the swaggering cop heroes and delight in the beautiful women, though I know that, fundamentally, part of my interest will always be the novel character of entertainment not exactly tailored toward a thirty-something heterosexual white American middle-class male, as is a good deal of the U.S. product which more and more seeks to dominate the filmgoing experience of international audiences as a valuable supplement to its already considerable returns.

Guilt, guilt, guilt. Need I mentioned I was raised stolidly Catholic? I do so wonder about Nicolas Winding Refn.

The plot of Only God Forgives concerns a murder of frustration, and the waves of incrimination that radiate outward in the manner of a stone dropped into a lake. The stone, in this case, is played by English actor Tom Burke, who is first spotted seething in a Bangkok kickboxing gym run by Gosling, his younger brother, as a front for the family’s lucrative narcotics smuggling trade. This is not deliberately a foreign expansion – Gosling had to be moved far away from America to escape a certain crime, and Burke, we might guess (though, like much in the film, we are not told), is supposed to be supervising him. Later, Burke skulks around the streets of the city, growling at a local pimp “I wanna fuck a fourteen-year old,” before offering the man an exorbitant sum for his young daughter. It is probably less a serious offer than a sneering display of the economic superiority that will always keep the locals polite, no matter how much it pains them.

Eventually, Burke secures the services of a prostitute, whom he then murders, for reasons which are never revealed, and perhaps unimportant.

Enter: Pansringarm, as a severe police lieutenant who observes only black and white moral distinctions. Instead of arresting Burke, he locks the white man in a room with the prostitute’s bereaved father, who pummels the killer’s skull into hamburger. Yet justice cannot end there, for the father too was a party to his daughter’s exploitation. The man pleads that economic and cultural circumstances led him to this place — he has no sons, which is financially disadvantageous — but because A is A, one of his hands is ceremonially cut off by Pansringarm’s righteous machete.

All of this Ditkovian melodrama is interspersed with images of Gosling staring at his own twisting hands, occasionally suffering precognitions of a confrontation with Pansringarm while wandering long, red-lined halls. He also fancies a local prostitute, though he seems disinterested in paying her to sleep with him – fantasies are crucial to Gosling’s life experience, and so he envisions his hands slipping up between her long legs, those instruments of violence depicted as, essentially, his primary sexual characteristic.

Alas, soon his wicked, wicked mother arrives from America, and Gosling — appalled at his brother’s actions and hoping things will remain settled — finds himself tempted into pursuing unenthusiastic vengeance against Pansringarm, turning those hands again… toward killing!

Pulpy material indeed, presented with a minimum of subtlety and maximal art direction, with a seemingly bottomless appetite for hoary visual metaphors. Flexing your hands in front of a statue of a boxer, washing your hands of illusory blood – by the time Kristin Scott Thomas’ malevolent mommy wraps herself around Gosling’s waist with her face pressed toward his crotch in commemoration of the Oedipal subtext at play, you can understand why connoisseurs across the globe dismissed this picture as the very definition of pretentious trash.

Still, I was utterly engrossed by the cultural dynamics central to the film. Put simply, all of the white characters are consumers, tourists, and their consumption is what causes much of the trouble for Bangkok’s luckless citizenry. Thomas contracts with an Australian fixer to assassinate the people who killed her son, an assignment then subcontracted to local thugs who shoot up the clientele of an entire cafe to get to Pansringarm, who himself then battles frightfully up the racial/class ladder until he has the white fixer pinned to his seat in a prostitution bar with needles plucked from ladies’ formal hairdos and flower arrangements, gouging out his eyes and gashing open his eardrums to relieve him of the senses he has misused.

The director is plainly thrilled by this old-school manliness, having once described his scenario as a ‘take’ on the great American cowboy films (though Bollywood movies too are full of heroic police who abuse due process to bring about Good); interestingly, though, the locus of manliness appears to have shifted from Gosling to Pansringarm during the film’s sequential shoot. You can easily picture him in a tall white hat, dispatching baddies without any angst. During the Australian’s torture, a theatrical police assistant urges all of the women in the club to close their eyes, while all the men are bidden to look closely, so they might appreciate the wages of sin. What showmanship!

Meanwhile, Gosling takes the prostitute with whom he is besotted to a fancy dinner attended by his mother, who proceeds to berate and humiliate the two of them in a fantastically vulgar manner, pausing only to turn to an off-screen waiter and order the table food. There is a certain ambiguity to exactly how much of Thomas’ absurd ugliness is occurring in Gosling’s imagination — and Thomas growls her dialogue with such lusty camp that she provides the film its sole source of comedy relief by virtue of performance alone — though plenty of external confirmation establishes her as a racist, grasping, misanthropic terror on her own terms, the kind of woman who perhaps sees a problem with what her older, departed son has done, in the abstract, maybe, but will inevitably choose the bonds of family over any exercise of empathy toward the funny local people who delay her activities through their broken English.

Outside, the prostitute expresses disbelief that Gosling would put up with such shit. Angered, the white man demands the girl remove the lovely dress he bought for her. She complies, standing proudly in her underwear and holding the fabric out toward Gosling, who is so ashamed he can scarcely reply.

Never have I seen an action-thriller so intimate with shame.

The ‘evil mother’ is a favorite character type of Alejandro Jodorowsky, to whom Only God Forgives is dedicated. And by this point in the plot, it is clear that Refn is sending Gosling out on a quest of spiritual and psychological evolution, as does Jodorowsky with so many lost souls. Santa Sangre — in which a man is maneuvered into violence by the specter of his mother guiding his *hands* — is a good reference point. Of course, to Refn, the idea of ‘evolution’ is to understand one’s true nature, like Gosling’s Driver in their prior collaboration, who is stunned to discover that he really is the super-cool expert killer he’d been playacting for so long.

But here, evolution terminates in annihilation.

Only God Forgives, you see, is also reminiscent of Eli Roth’s Hostel series, in which tourists are ushered onto the next level of humans-as-commodities by their own bad behavior. But Refn does not characterize Pansringarm’s working class machete cop as himself an uncontrolled evil of capitalism; instead, he is unambiguously righteous, like a slasher movie’s killer cast as the hero, or a comic book avenger given a religious twist. Pansringarm himself has suggested a polytheistic reading of the character, positioning him as a literally magical “superhero” character, if but only one god among many Thai deities; Gosling’s situation, however, is specifically applicable to his domain, leading viewers of a certain religious disposition to inevitably conjure visions of a looming, Old Testament-style fire ‘n brimstone Gawd.

Politically, this is arguably problematic. Thailand’s recent history is marked by periods of military crackdowns on democratic activity, yet Refn places all of his enthusiasm in a brutal representative of Authority, one whose tolerance of prostitution/intolerance of individual prostitutes can easily be taken as advocacy for retrograde gender assumptions. No questions are asked by Refn – this is all necessary, one assumes, to combat the hellacious rudeness of capitalistic white condescension, of which Gosling, try as he might, cannot wriggle free.

Yet Refn knows he himself cannot do it either.

***SPOILERS FOLLOW***

In my addled little head, the act of Refn’s filming a movie in an exotic foreign location, for occidental delectation, became a metaphor for consuming foreign entertainment. Gosling is the ‘good’ consumer, looking to forge real relationships with women, respecting local performers/athletes, not murdering anyone, etc. But he learns, gradually, that he is still implicitly in the position of abuser, unable to escape the dread orbit of his mother; he cannot really accomplish terrific feats with his hands, and he is impotent as a lover – it is exactly the reverse of Drive, the bloody fantasies of which were so loved.

Inevitably, it comes to pass that Gosling asks Pansringarm for a fight. The powerful cop absolutely destroys Gosling, who doesn’t land so much as one punch, leaving the room with his pretty Hollywood face rearranged into a monster makeup mosaic of bruises reminiscent of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tokyo Fist. The climax of the movie quickly follows. Pansringarm confronts Thomas, who reveals that Gosling murdered his own father, and suspected her and older brother Burke of having an incestuous affair. Not one to abuse his emotions, Pansringarm cuts her down.

Intercut throughout is Gosling’s own attempt to track and kill Pansringarm at his home. Too late, Gosling realizes that his backup thug has orders from Thomas to murder not only Pansringarm, but his wife and young daughter. The white man stands still as the woman is shot dead, but he acts in time to prevent harm from coming to the little girl, who in an earlier scene expressed to her daddy an interest in people solving their problems by talking them out. In a Christian sense, she is the peaceable [Son] to Pansringarm’s wrathful Father, and she stares silently at Gosling while he departs, as proud and stoic as the prostitute he shouted at, perhaps having already forgiven him.

Doubtlessly, many viewers will expect the film to conclude with a final battle between crook & cop; they will have to content themselves with memories of Albert Brooks’ stabbing. Gosling discovers his mother, slices open her womb, and fiddles around inside, perhaps eager to return; this could be the ultimate goal of his incestuous urge, to be like a child again, and not care about anything. This is futile, so he goes again to pay and watch his favorite prostitute, who can’t entirely get rid of him so long as he has money.

Pansringarm meets him there.

Gosling imagines they are in a field.

The white man offers both his hands in penance for his and his family’s sins.

Only God Forgives.

And then we are back in the karaoke bar, where Pansringarm takes the stage to sing the song from that original red band trailer. There are no white people in the theater. The lyrics are not translated; it is a communication Western audiences will not understand. The dream of obliteration is realized. Closing credits are displayed over the performance, again in Thai script, but with English translations now provided just below each name, instead of out of the frame. Hope remains, at least, for the future.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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Nicolas Winding Refn: “White Movie Nerds Must Die” (An Imaginary Story)