My Definition of Comics

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Roy T. Cook

In my last post, Why Is Comics Studies So Predictable, I considered a number of approaches to defining the concept comic, and found them wanting. In particular, I looked at four sorts of approach, which can be summed up (with some simplification) as:

Formal: Something is a comic if it has the right formal properties.
Moral: Something is a comic if it tells the right sort of story.
Historical: Something is a comic if it has the right sort of causal or historical pedigree.
Institutional: Something is a comic if it is accepted as such by the art world.

I also considered approaches (Delany, Wolk, Hatfield) that reject either the possibility, or the usefulness, of a definition in the first place. A predictably lively and helpful conversation ensued – one that ended with Jones, one of the Jones boys, writing this:

…that said, could you at least gesture in the direction of a sketch of a promissory note for what a better strategy for characterizing comics might look like? Do you have anything particular in mind?

Almost immediately after this, I was visiting the comic studies program at the University of Wisconsin, and Adam Kern (director of the program, comics scholar extraordinaire, and professor of East Asian Languages and Literature) similarly pressed me for a definition, or at least account of the nature of comics.

Now, I should begin by pointing out that I am not convinced that a completely correct, precise set of necessary and sufficient conditions is even possible. But I do think that, even if we had good reasons for thinking such a perfect, precise definition is impossible, it would still be worthwhile to think about initially promising-looking definitions. Why? Because we are likely to learn a lot about the nature of comics, and how comics work, by carefully determining why carefully formulated, plausible-looking definitions fail. For example, discussion of the anachronistic objects that get characterized (incorrectly) as comics by McCloud’s formal definition of comics, such as the Bayeaux tapestry and ancient Egyptian carvings, helped to foreground the important role that institutions and history have in grounding our judgements that particular objects are or are not comics (even if later historical or historical attempts at definition failed equally spectacularly, in part due to ignoring the formal aspects of comics).

So, I began to think about how I would define comics, if I had to give a definition. What is the best such definition I can think of? This is what I came up with, in its initial short, snappy form:

Comics are narratives that we look at, and do so at our own pace.

The basic idea meant to be captured here is one that can be traced back to Will Eisner when he writes that, in comics, “Text reads as image!”(Comics and Sequential Art, 1985). In more detail, the thought is this: typically, we experience text and pictorial images differently – we read text, but we look at images. In comics, however, even if we read some parts of the work (such as the squiggles typically found in thought balloons), we look at all of the parts. This is Eisner’s insight: we look at the text in comics in the same way that we look at a painting, which is not the same way that we experience text in, say, standard novels (where the visual characteristics of the font used typically doesn’t matter so long as it isn’t strange enough to detract from our experience of reading). The final bit about looking at our own pace is to distinguish comics from animation, where the pace of experience (of looking) is controlled by the author and/or projector (and this also emphasized what I take to be a critical difference between comics and animation – it’s not so much the movement, but the fact that the viewer doesn’t control the pace of the movement).

There are, of course, some additional kinks to work out. The first has to do with the fact that we can look at anything, in the relevant sense of “look at”. I can look, and admire the visual characteristics, of the font in which this post is typeset. That doesn’t mean that this post is a comic (even if we grant that this post is a narrative in the relevant sense). So it must be the case that comics are narratives that we are meant to look at. But even this is a bit ambiguous – meant to by whom? Here I am just going to bite the bullet and invoke authorial intention in a manner I am comfortable with, but other “Death-of-the-author” types might not be.

AbstMolo Second, the above simple version implies that any comic involves a coherent narrative of some sort. Andre Molotiu, editor of the amazing Abstract Comics volume, would be very displeased! So I am going to insert some academic-sounding gobbledygook about some kind of “meaningful agglomeration” to cover this case.

Finally, we need to make sure that everyday paintings and photographs don’t count as comics. So we will invoke a formal constraint – one that doesn’t invalidate the idea that the practice of “looking at” is what is of central importance. A comic has to involve two or more distinct parts that we look at separately. Importantly, however, these parts could be (1) an image and (2) a caption below it, or (1) an image and (2) a speech balloon laid over it, or (1) an image and (2) another image, etc. Basically, it need not be a sequence of two images, but must be a fusion of two distinct visual foci of some sort.

Hence, we arrive at something like this: A work is a comic if and only if:

It is a narrative (or other meaningful agglomeration) composed of two or more visually distinct parts.
Each of the parts is intended by the author to be looked at (i.e. experienced, interpreted, and evaluated in the way we experience, interpret, and evaluate images, rather than text), and looked at separately from the other parts.
The audience is able to control the pace at which they look at each of the parts.

So that’s what makes something a comic.

Sam Zabel or How the pen became mightier than the penis

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Ng Suat Tong

Sam Zabel is suffering from a terminal case of writer’s block. He also thinks, not without reason, that he is a talentless hack churning out inferior versions of late Golden Age superhero comics to the strangely obliging masses. If only he was as accepting of his lot as the other hacks who have prospered mightily at the offices of Marvel and DC; if only he was able to earn a living doing comics like Pickle, one time home of that classic of alternative comics, Hicksville.

The panacea to this obstruction, that pill for renewed creativity (as in Hicksville), is other comics. The “magic pen” of the title is merely an excuse to explore and retread (selectively) the history of comics—from the innocent sexism of the non-superhero golden age to the somewhat more sexually liberated climes of an all-female pirate comic (a kind of Paradise Island with eye patches and peg legs). Mayhem, fight scenes, and assorted lessons on creativity are all offered up with a sense of harmless fun and deference to easy readability.

The conceit here is that a number of comics of differing vintages and genres have been drawn with a magic pen. These comics if given the breath of life draw the reader into them, allowing them to inhabit their fantasy worlds. Zabel finds just such a comic in a used book shop, unattended and unloved but seemingly placed there for the singular purpose of reinvigorating his person and artistry. By tale’s end, we are gently apprised—as with all fantasies about the creation of art—that all pens are magic and we need only put them to paper to concoct these “inhabitable” worlds.

Horrocks seems as eager as Scott McCloud once was to syncretize and reconcile the comics form with the long history of art itself. In one of the final scenes in the book, the protagonists of his tale are brought back to the “the beginning”; to the first pen, a finger dipped in red ochre doodling on a cave wall and hand stencils produced by spitting pigments on to an outstretched hand—all this as it once was in places like Cueva de El Castillo and Chauvet cave.

Horrocks affection for the comics form is well known but Sam Zabel also reveals his boundless passion for the naked female body. The first world that Zabel gets sucked into is that of a comic called, The King of Mars —a kind of third-rate Barsoom where the inhabitants are expecting a god king-creator. As such, they quickly latch on to Zabel as the most likely suspect. The women here are all green and sex-starved. To some this will seem unexpected and liberating, to others almost interminable in its execution. And while opinions can differ, there is something to be said for the idea that “less is more.”

But this too might be part of Horrock’s divine plan, that jumble of suffocating nakedness being a metaphor for the excess that extinguishes creativity. A pity then that the nudity here is so unalluring, so lacking in temptation and passion. Seldom have so many naked women been deployed in the service of a comic so thoroughly unerotic.

All of this is a function of Horrock’s far greater gifts as a writer than as an artist. In Horrock’s survey of the exquisite prurience of pre-Code comics, his almost unvarying line and its distinct lack of sensuality is a very great handicap. At one point in the comic, Horrocks does appear to be attempting a different style…

…which gives the reader some hope that a Jungle Girl will appear with all the skill of the illustrators of old (or at least the crudely rushed pen work of the early Sheena) but this is not to be. Horrocks doesn’t have the ability to emulate the line of an Alex Raymond or even an Iger Studio artist. Nor is this the kind of bravura display of cartooning where one might expect to find “normal” characters inhabiting the worlds of a Fletcher Hanks; which means that any sense of mystery or delight in the archaic remnants of a different age rest solely in the minds of the reader. While Horrocks attempts to emulate the compositions and use of negative space of rough drawn horror manga classics, Miki (Zabel’s Japanese school girl guide through the “magic pen” comics) is never quite convincing; she will never look like that cross between Sailor Moon, Doraemon and Astro Boy which she is supposed to be.

The fantasy worlds of the comics Zabel is drawn into are as flat and unexciting as the dumpster truck he finds himself in when ejected from those worlds. If an “eyeball” seems like an interesting mode of interplanetary transportation, its actual deployment on the page leaves something to be desired. One need only compare the fertile world building creativity found in the likes of the reinvented Prophet comic or Farel Dalrymple’s Wrenchies to notice the lamentable gap in accomplishment.

While Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen works on a certain level as a reassuring tale of a mid-life crisis expunged, it also creates a simplistic notions of right and wrong fantasies, or at least divisions between fantasies which are generally safe and those which are dangerous.

In this schemata, the John Carter-Buck Rogers-Flash Gordon fantasies of old are of the generally harmless variety while the hentai worshiping otakus are not to be trusted—and are perhaps even to be blasted into a reformed Jungle Girl comic to get their asses whipped. It is an easy formulation since it conforms to popular taste and morality in such matters. It is the hentai otaku who hides his wares on a subway train and not the fan reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. I suspect that most people would much rather be caught reading A Princess of Mars on the train then the tentacle rape fantasies of Hokusai and Kuniyoshi.

At one point in the comics, Horrocks presents one of the foundations of his comic, that…

“even a comic book can shape the real world, contributing to the culture, encouraging attitudes and assumptions…”

Not for Horrocks then are notions that we are all predestined products of familial and genetic destiny. How art actually shapes culture and attitudes is, however, altogether less certain and barely broached in the pages of the comic; all we can gather on this issue from Horrocks is incidental and second hand. Suffice to say that the villain of the tale is a cartoonist who has tipped pages of his deranged rape (?) fantasies into several more sedate and juvenile manga. He is, in other words, a sociopathic sexual deviant the likes of which we see every other week on American primetime TV.

Which leads one to wonder which ideas have the greatest influence—the sexual fantasies of a marginalized group of readers or the vastly more popular works of the golden age of pulp; the embarrassing sexual fetishes of a select few or the John Carter stories of the 21^st century —like this one, which makes plain the colonial template upon which the Martian fantasies were based.

Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen could be described as a post-modern, vaguely autobiographical meta-comic, but it also remains safely conventional —I suspect more by accident than through any concerted planning. Thus the exoticization of manga—the short skirts, school girl uniforms, panty shots, and general deviance – is less the result of xenophobia then of simply reaching for the easiest examples at hand. The effortless rehabilitation of the sexist Kiwi cartoonist of the early twentieth century is contrasted with the irredeemable villainy of the hentai reader and fantasist simply because every story needs an explosive climax and a moral. Horrocks challenge to this easy equation is that Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is a veritable hentai comic in itself, a phallic object with a PG-13 label—innumerable pairs of naked breasts are on display but only one dick-sucking scene as far as I can tell.

It seems that a sizable number of white male confessionals of this modern age tend to lead back to Portnoy’s Complaint—that “disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” The impotency of Philip Roth’s protagonist is replaced by Zabel’s writer’s block. We can add to this the defiant sexuality often of an embarrassing nature (if one considers fantasies about fucking several Orion slave girls at once to be embarrassing) and other assorted masturbatory revelations. There are no prostitutes in the comic but cradle snatching is elevated to its preeminent place in our great sequential art form. All this mixed in with a few snippets on the artistic impulse and various ethical considerations.

The main difference would appear to be that where Portnoy remains self-pityingly pathetic, Zabel finally gets to reunite with his family. Where “Portnoy” gets to write a famous novel, Zabel/Horrocks finally has a new long form comic after years of silence. After all, isn’t this the way all pulp fantasies end—happily ever after?

_______

Further Reading

From an interview at Paste Magainze:

“The central question, in a way, is asked out loud by Sam halfway through: “Do we bear a moral responsibility for our fantasies?” The book sets out to have a conversation about that question.”

“I’m totally fascinated by wish fulfillment fantasies: how they work; their strange familiar contours; the weird mix of yearning, pleasure, embarrassment and shame we feel about them; what happens when they become “property” — a franchise or brand. Obviously, that’s a big part of the history and landscape of comics, but I think it’s also an underrated element in so-called “literary fiction” and “serious” art.The Magic Pen gave me an opportunity to unpack some of my own ambivalence about wish-fulfillment fantasies, but it also helped me find my way back to their power and joy.”

“The big shift for me was to stop giving myself such a hard time about my work. I had spent years feeling very uncomfortable with my drawing, because it was so clumsy and inept. I tried to draw like other people; the first issue of Atlas (Drawn & Quarterly, 2001) is full of my attempts to draw like Edmond Baudoin, Blutch, Tibor Gergely and other artists I admire. But it’s kind of a mess. The reality is, I can’t draw like other people, I can only draw like me. Luckily, no one else can draw exactly the way I do, either.”

Human Behaviour

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Kim O'Connor

Like comics, folk tales and fables are sometimes mistaken for children’s stories. The pretty palette and cutesy end papers of First Year Healthy belie enough abandonment, blood, and weird sexual situations to match the original Grimm brothers’ tales. That’s not to say it comes stocked with shriveled villains and plump children with rosy cheeks. There’s a baby, I guess, but it looks like the kind of thing you might find on a dusty shelf, in a jar. A quintessential Michael DeForge character, you probably wouldn’t want to touch it without latex gloves.

The fuck is up with this baby.

Question number one: what is this thing, anyway? Not the baby, I mean, but the book. I suppose in terms of genre it falls somewhere between faux folk and modern myth. Is it, as the synopsis on the back suggests, a “parable about mental illness”? I’m not sure that captures its central paradox, so let’s say a sinister fairy tale, or an inscrutable fable. Horror-barf meets early Björk.

DeForge’s specialty is drawing charming things with a palpable sense of disgust, a sensibility that particularly suits First Year Healthy. A slender story with big illustrations and short typed paragraphs of text, it’s reminiscent of a Little Golden Book. Plot-wise, of course, we’re pretty far afield of the poky little puppy. This is the story of a troubled young woman—our narrator—trapped in a hostile landscape filled with joyless sex and uncaring neighbors. Her chief interests seem to be wound care and walking on thin ice. Mm-hmm, literally.

“My hobbies include anything that sounds like a huge bummer.”

Our girl has recently emerged from an extended stay in a mental hospital. For what, we do not know, though we learn that her absence was long enough for her brothers to get married and have children to whom she has not been introduced. (Or is it possible she’s confused?) Her present-day life is full of intrigue, but it’s not exactly fraught. In fact, there’s something uncanny about the calm way in which she tells us her incredible story, which involves an orphan, several gangsters, and an enormous magic cat. All her observations seem to occur on a delay, as through a thick layer of static. Her flat affect hints at severe depression or even schizophrenia—or maybe she just doesn’t GAF.

The writing is well paced and strong, and the tension between it and the format, along with the wordless sequences with the magic cat, are probably what I would point to if someone were to get all Well, actually… about this book being not-comics. So far as I can see I stand alone in finding DeForge’s work aesthetically uneven. To me he’s at his best when he finds organic outlets for his inventiveness, like with the nightmare baby or the gray-faced gangster. The latter is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while.

I like the artist’s weirdness less when it feels like affectation. Take, for instance, the opening image, an aggressively strange composition of some gore in a fish shop, or just the protagonist in general, whose inverse Cousin It situation is a bit much. (There are a million less ridiculous hairstyles that could’ve established a visual connection between the woman and the cat, who is—bear with me a moment—more or less her murder dæmon.) DeForge is more consistently successful with his use of color. While his tones here are earthy and muted compared to his penchant for neon, frequent shocks of pink and orange suggest that some things in our narrator’s world burn a little too brightly.

While it’s never clear how much of the story takes place in the narrator’s head, First Year Healthy doesn’t interrogate reality. The huge magic cat that silently lopes through these pages undeniably is. Many texts that explore mental illness are built around the anxious question of what is or isn’t real; that tension, and when and if it’s resolved, is what drives the plot. Remarkably, First Year Healthy is not about mental fragility. It is, rather, the story of a woman whose mind takes on a life of its own. It stalks her, but then again it eats her enemies. Is it a hallucination? Supernatural? Scary? Protective? DeForge’s answer seems to be whatever, and his utter lack of judgment is one of the things that makes this story so great.

Not for nothing, First Year Healthy is not just a portrait of mental illness; it is also a portrait of faith. Technically, it is a Christmas story (and therein are some iinteresting parallels), but what I see above all is a woman who is herself the most real and palpable thing in her universe. Her connection to the external world, and the people in it, is tenuous at best. Her closest personal relationship is with her boyfriend, who she refers to as “the Turk” in lieu of a first name. Her anonymous neighbors and nameless brothers barely register as beings in the story at all.

First Year Healthy’s focus on the narrator’s complex interiority makes it an interesting companion piece to the relentless biology of Ant Colony, DeForge’s full-length graphic novel from last year. Ant Colony’s glowing critical reception paid a lot of lip service to the young cartoonist as the next Great Pumpkin, but evidence of his genius in that volume was, to my mind, scant; its fresh look and flashes of humor couldn’t mask its Flea-grade nihilism and fundamental lack of depth. First Year Healthy is much shorter and sweeter, but beneath those trappings are big thoughts and surprising sophistication. Put another way, are we all just insects, fucking and fighting and oblivious to our own insignificance? Or is there meaning and magic in this hostile world for those who seek it? Of course the honest answer is a bit of both, but the latter makes for a more compelling story.

DeForge’s worlds are always weird but recognizable. They’re universal in that you’re meant to see yourself in them, but they’re always also Other. By design, Ant Colony explores the human condition from a sort of cold and alien vantage. First Year Healthy, which is set in the world of actual humans, is more warm-blooded. While its narrator is in many ways a familiar folk heroine—willful and self-reliant in the face of constant peril—her emotional detachment has a thoroughly modern feel. She’s brave but never spirited. Melancholy. Awkward. Alone. The strangeness of her life, which escalates quickly over just 30 pages, never fails to resonate. Like David Bowie, DeForge takes every flicker of sadness, self-doubt, insanity and total fucking loserdom you’ve ever felt and turns it into something unassailably cool.

Last month I went to see a Bowie retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It was called David Bowie Is—a perfect title, I thought, until I came to understand that the organizers approached the artist’s identity as a construct to be deciphered and explained. In breaking down Bowie’s influences, his context, and his impact, the exhibit failed to find his human heart. He is this, they told me. He is that. But the entire point of Bowie is that he can’t be reduced to a series of personas. He has always transcended any label you might wish to apply. To some degree the same is true for the rest of us mere mortals, perhaps especially when it comes to mental illness.

It’s one thing to make an old idea look new, or to make a new idea look old. It’s another to craft something unique out of what has been there all along. From David Lynch to Haruki Murakami, the weirdos who mean the most to me transform everything into something else—something other—the whole of which is greater than the sum of its parts. After weeks of thinking about First Year Healthy, I’m still not so sure what it means. Whatever. Should I someday come face to face with my own magic cat, I can only hope my first instinct won’t be to dissect it.

Twined Weeds: Comics and the Gothic

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Ibrahim Ineke

Jeffrey Catherine Jones

Like the label of ‘Comics ,’ the designation ‘Gothic ‘can be a confusing one. The Gothic form shares its name with widely divergent forms of cultural expression, from which it takes inspiration and which it influences in turn. The term is used as the designation of a people; of a building style not originating with this people; of an expression of fashion; of the aesthetic of certain films; of a literary mode.

It is this last one, the literary mode, which has brought forth a direct progenitor to the North-american comic book periodical, in the form of the18th century Penny Dreadfuls or Bluebooks (chapbooks presenting illustrated and abbreviated versions of popular Gothic novels).There is, however, a deeper connexion between comics and the Gothic, beyond their aesthetic convergences and their overlap in the history of printed matter. At the level of their basic functioning, both the medium (comics) and the genre (the Gothic) exhibit characteristics that are not mere approaches or tactics but part and parcel of their nature.
Thus, due to certain shared essential qualities, comics and the Gothic, given the circumstances, can each serve as function of the other.

Building the Ruins

The Gothic is, not unsurprisingly, given its namesake, a highly architectural genre. Consider the centrality of The House: from Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto,’ to Danielewski’s ‘House of Leaves,’ the house exemplifies both the narrative’s maze and the monster awaiting at the center of that maze. As in the building style, there are serpentine arabesques that twine and link and uncross again. Folding both inward and outward, a Gothic narrative is never a focused one; nor is clarity its aim. Quite the contrary: showing the mental states of characters through the description of the environment, or conversely, showing the environment through the prism of the mental state, the genre utterly collapses the definitions of identity and environment. In effect, that arc of collapse is what the Gothic narrative is built of. The Gothic is an edifice in perpetual ruin: it rises, blasted, from the prefiguration of its own destruction. Like the house from (and into) the tarn of Poe’s Usher, its fall perfectly describes its rise.

Contortedly echoing the crucial trick of Gothic architecture (the use of mass and weight to suggest light and weightlessness), prose and narrative construction subservient to the demands of the literary Gothic are often dense, encrusted, layered and winding, to create the illusion of solidity, the suggestion of weight, mass – in short, of space.
What the Gothic needs, comics has got, in spades, by definition: in comics, relations between characters, even when expressed through dialogue, are read spatially (balloon placement), the illusion of the passage of time is effected through the laying out of events spatially. The declaration of space is an innate characteristic of the comic book page to such an extent that it can be said to define the medium. This characteristic in turn influences another of the medium´s traits: the embodiment of time.

Physical Demand

The Gothic house, especially the castle or mansion, serves another aim, and that is the making visible of age. The ancient rituals and traditions in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, the lineage that precedes its young heir Titus down the centuries, these are all embodied by the sprawling enormity of the castle Gormenghast itself.

Thus history acquires a massive physicality, an actual presence that can hold, and keep; can ask, and demand. The influence that the past will inevitably exert over the actors in all Gothic fiction (family curses, revenge for ancient misdeeds), is not the influence of a ghost. It is not even the hand of Time itself: it is the presence of the story itself, in time, as an encrustation of layers enveloping the characters in the stone embrace of actual hallways, real cellars and attics and drawing-rooms.

A pervading sense of imminent doom is thus conveyed by the continued working of the past within the skein of the present. Events are not merely foreshadowed but set in massive stone, not mirrored but duplicated as totemic effigies.

In comics, past and present exist simultaneously on the page; a ‘flashback’ on a comics page does not so much gaze at the past as embed the past firmly in the present. That very simultaneity gives the lie to the panel borders, which are made to seem feeble guardians indeed; like the past and present represented that they contain, they merely affirm, by their placement, the souvereignty of the Wall, of the House as Gothic Body.

Natural Born Meta

Finally, it is in confronting the individual with History embodied, the mortal with the Undying, the scientist with the Unthought-of, that the Gothic makes its well-known thrust for the Sublime, and exhibits its most essential trait, which is scale.

If, with Edmund Burke, we claim that the ruling principle of the sublime is terror, the terror of scale is the terror of consciousness shifting to accomodate a new perspective, a perspective that brings out the true proportion of things.
It is what the critic John Clute calls ‘Vastation,’ the “moment when the real world cannot any longer be apprehended as knowable.” It is the crumbling of the House of Usher, and thus of the Gothic Body in its entirety; a negation of all that was articulated before. The ghostliness, not just of the ghost, but of the whole narrative, stands revealed. “There was nothing there, all the time.”

In respect to this facet of the Gothic, comics can be said to offer such a realization continuously. The medium possesses an inherent weirdness, a wrongness if you will, that may serve as a perfect visual corollary of the effect of vastation actuated by scale.

Richard Sala

Because of the aforementioned simultaneity of depictions it can be argued that comics wears its artificiality on its sleeve. It only takes a glance further down or up the page to be reminded that time passing in the narrative was a mere illusion. With comics, it is far easier to ‘step out of” the narrative than it is while watching a film, say, and this enables, even subtly encourages, the reader to experience the differences in scale occasioned by the shuzhyet as differences of scale in the fabula; it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to read a close-up of a visage next to a long shot, as a huge face dwarfing a panorama. All this means there is probably no other medium which has such a power to jolt the reader out of the story, to the surface of its telling, to shift the perspective so radically.

Vastation is to comics what movement is to film.

This is not to declare the entirety of comics a purely Gothic medium, but the parity is strong enough to claim that comics are the medium- the mediating agent, the communicator- of the Gothic, par excellence. Any thorough reading of a work of comic art must necessarily take into account that the very medium slants the narrative, however slightly, towards the Gothic.

American Sniper’s Uniquely American Kitsch

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Michael Carson

Since the release of American Sniper, people I haven’t heard from in years have taken the time to text me and tell me I really needed to see this movie. They said: “you owe it to yourself to see this movie.” “I don’t really want to,” I responded. “Why don’t you want to?” they asked me archly, as if my refusal to see the movie hinted at some deeply-seated and conveniently unexamined perversion. “Well,” I said, “I guess I didn’t much like Chris Kyle’s book and his general attitudes about the Iraqi people.” “Watch the movie,” they said with all wisdom that comes with seeing a movie that someone else hasn’t, especially one of political and patriotic import: “It really makes you think.”

Maybe I was being unfair, I thought. Maybe I did it owe to someone – whom, I’m still not quite sure – to pay ten dollars and watch this story that had roused a nation from its intellectual lethargy and inspired old friends to start thinking about my movie-going patterns.

To my surprise, I did not hate the movie. I nodded off two or three times, wondering how old Clint Eastwood was exactly and whether or not he and Scorsese had reached some kind of artistic dementia unique to directors, but I did not hate the film, or even actively dislike it. If I saw it on Lifetime one afternoon, I would change the channel, but not out of spite, simply because it does not seem different than any other Lifetime special. Far from being authentic and gritty, the sentimentality in the film is perhaps only exceeded by that of Linklater’s Boyhood, its competition at this year’s Academy Awards. Both are drearily episodic American bildungsromans that manipulate the idea of authenticity to play on the audience’s mawkish assumptions and aspirations about history and art. Further, and not coincidentally, both are predictable and safe, working hard to ask uninteresting questions about once interesting subjects.

This boredom genuinely surprised me. I read countless reviews of American Sniper before seeing the movie. Almost unanimously, they took time to point out its essential authenticity, its suspense, the immersive immediacy of the action and the audience’s consequent titillation. Even those who hated it passionately did so with a fervor that suggested the movie annoyed them due to its undeniable cinematic excellence, whatever its ideological failings. For this reason, I had ceded its basic entertainment value going in. But I shouldn’t have. Despite all the violence – or, rather, precisely because of all the formulaic and orchestrated violence – the movie is boring and the movie is boring because everything in it from the love story, to the jokes, to the war story is pure unadulterated kitsch.

How best to describe kitsch? Milan Kundera, a man who endured a regime that used this aesthetic to propagate its peculiar sentimental balderdash, puts it this way in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”

At its most fundamental level, kitsch is a poorly constructed or mass produced object or work of art that elicits a predictable and abstracted emotional response, something like a Pavlovian bell that releases saccharine into the viewer’s gut while shutting down the brain. Yet, contrary to popular belief, kitsch does not only apply to the warm and fuzzy feeling we get when children run in the grass and play with dogs; it also applies to the warm fuzzy feeling when we watch children being gunned down by morally conflicted patriots. The first tear says: how nice it is to see this perfectly decent man wrestle with what it takes to protect his friends and countrymen. The second tear says: how nice it is to be moved, together with all mankind, by watching a perfectly decent man do whatever it takes to protect his friends and countrymen.

Never one for subtlety, Eastwood wants tears, lots of them. I feel Eastwood took bits and pieces of every American war movie since Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back, chose the most hackneyed moments and then tried to make them even more generic, sappy and palatable. Starting with, of course, a lovable loser looking for purpose in life, the movie proceeds to a training scene where people of different race and class backgrounds come together in harmony, the courting of a supposedly cynical girl just out of a break up (which of course turns out to be a girl in need of a real man), the initial battle enthusiasm (Yay! War! We’re going to win!), an evil super-enemy to provide some complexity to the countless legions of brown bullet fodder and a triumph somewhat (but not truly) diminished because of dead friends (whose names we forgot the moment we heard them).

If American Sniper wasn’t based on real events, we would likely laugh it off as a poor man’s Full Metal Jacket. Yet our uniquely modern kitsch privileges authenticity to such a degree that it mistakes authenticity for art; worse, it excuses bad art through the lie of authenticity. Our superficially ironic modern audience knows to feel warm and fuzzy about a girl running through a field (or a heroic marine-saving SEAL) is a little old fashioned and silly. But if the event really happened, the audience can feel warm and fuzzy (or angry and titillated) without any guilt for the obviously contrived sappiness. This child really does run through the grass just like my child so my feelings of joy and warmth at watching this child run through the grass are real and true and profound. This man really did kill 160 people and save soldiers and help veterans so my complete emotional investment and sense of solidarity with my fellow movie watchers is not only justified but an act of political courage. Right?

Not quite. Eastwood’s Kyle is nothing like the Kyle of the memoir – a person of infinitely more interest, an American gem, a fantastic and fascinating mass of contradiction, absurdities, and hypocrisy, worthy of much more than this movie gives him. Instead, this movie manipulates substandard genre tropes to produce an innocuous and utterly uninteresting character study, turning a once breathing man into a figment, an avatar of our lazy imaginations. All the characters beside Kyle are interchangeable – hard bodies and strong chins, except for the broken and mutilated men, with soft bodies and soft chins – which is impressive considering Kyle himself is but a shadow. The sentimentality in the film’s opening and final moments reaches near criminal proportions. The shootouts are loud and repetitive, the enemies cowardly, sadistic or – hold it – cowardly and sadistic. They and everyone else in the film are no more true to life than the targets Kyle practices on. It’s as if the fact that they existed gives the director the excuse to make them as uninteresting and stereotypical (or unreal) as possible.

I should say here that the problem of kitsch is not unique to war films, or films beloved by Red America. Boyhood, the Academy’s likely Best Picture winner, is nothing if not an egregious attempt to confuse an audience into accepting bad fiction as profound art through the sophistry of authenticity. It suffers from the same sense of confused profundity, and critics have fallen all over themselves to celebrate a movie that amounts to little more than a glorified reality TV show, replete with incredibly banal dialogue and moralistic tripe. We are supposed to celebrate this and shed tears because we lived it, but I’ll save my tears for a movie that give me more than pop-cultural touchstones, a face aging in real time and platitudinous white angst.

This is not to say there are not inspired moments in both movies. In American Sniper, most occur on Kyle’s return home. When he yells at the nurse to stop his baby from crying, I paid attention. There are times when his very obliviousness makes Kyle into a heroic sad sack, just way in over his head in a world that does not allow for heroes (Cooper is a superb actor). But, still, these were flashes, a few well-timed complexities in a movie of explosive sappiness. By the tenth gunfight and the slow build to the inevitable confrontation between the evil brown sniper and good white sniper, I looked around to see if anyone else was as bored as me. I wanted to ask someone if they realized the way in which every character seemed to be playing a part in a movie, and how nearly every one of them played it badly. But there were no takers. They all wanted to see what happened next.

Of course, these failures in themselves point to a reason to celebrate the movie, and Boyhood as well. Their unique kitsch corresponds perfectly with recent American history, which is essentially a series of moments where we let sentimentality drive our actions, all the while unaware of (or maybe just unconcerned with) how those in power manipulate our intellectual indolence to their perpetual advantage. The Iraq War was an absurd proposition from the start, whose disastrous prosecution and consequences should have been obvious to any country not driven nearly insane by saccharine nonsense fed to them in movies that informed American Sniper (Rambo, Saving Private Ryan and An Officer and a Gentlemen for example).

So while most of us do not live violent lives like Kyle, we do, like Kyle, live lives of violent sentimentalism. We do live in fogs like the characters in these movies – irresponsible, lost, and drunkenly emotional. But just because we live such lives, lives of exceptionally cartoonish renderings of reality, replete with stereotypes, racism and an absurdly simplistic and insidious sense of history, does not make an accurate recording of our human failure art; these movies are, in truth, only glorified documentaries, which serve their purpose and have their uses, but cease to do so as soon as they are considered sublime and magical, exciting and profound. At this point, they then become in many ways a gesture of collective despair, an implicit admission that we can no longer achieve anything but a fickle emotional bond in dark theaters, eyes rolling, tears dripping down our cheeks like Dollar Tree communicants.

But when it comes down to it, no one escapes kitsch. It is part of us – this substitute spirituality, a farcical aesthetic we live and breathe as pre-capitalist societies used to live and breathe God. But we can, as Milan Kundera, the author of the earlier quote, once argued, be at least open to the fact that we are indulging our maudlin fantasies. At least a movie like Nightcrawler has the courage to point out the obvious – to make us aware of what it is we do when it comes to violence and cinema – and to do so in an entertaining way. As for those who argue American Sniper is the only movie out there really tackling trauma: watch Babadook and tell me which of the two has something to say and which one just repeats what we want to believe in predictable and cowardly monotony

Towards the beginning of American Sniper, Kyle’s father tells him that there are three types of people in this world: wolves, sheep and sheepdogs. The sheepdogs, his father says, protect the sheep from the wolves. Kyle is supposed to be a sheepdog, protecting us. Maybe he was. Neither a Navy SEAL nor a think-tank fellow, I can’t really speak to the success of his guardianship. But I can say with some authority that it is the kitsch in movies like American Sniper and Boyhood that turn us into sheep, and no one will be happier to see the bleating masses fattened by this sentimental drivel than the wolves.

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Michael Carson deployed to Iraq in 2006. He now writes criticism at the Wrath Bearing Tree. Follow him @WrathBT on Twitter.

An Ambiguous Utopia: Science-Fiction and Fantasy as the Solution to our Problems?

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Sarah Shoker

Ursula K. Le Guin, giving her acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, stated that we needed writers who knew “the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies…is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.” Le Guin posited that Science Fiction and Fantasy (SF/F) were tools for imagining alternatives to capitalism.

A week prior to the National Book Awards, The Guardian published an article by Oscar Williams covering the Mindshare UK event, where Buzzfeed UK’s creative director and an event representative argued that Science Fiction over the last twenty years had become less imaginative. “[M]ore recent sci-fi film and literature has been less ambitious and…this could hamper future innovation.” They referenced 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Hal 9000 and compared him/it with Apple’s Siri, mentioned the touchscreens featured in Minority Report, and “the 70 predictions made in 1984 that have now been realised.”

A little over a month later, The Guardian published another article on the climate of SF/F, this time by Damien Walter, positively noting that 2014 was the year that the genre “woke up” to diversity, naming, amongst several titles, Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which reimagines the importance (or lack thereof) of gender. Leckie’s novel won the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke and BSFA awards and some of the best novels of 2014, Walter notes, were from the science-fiction and fantasy genres. Of course, awards organizations haven’t completely ignored diversity. I recently finished The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge, a science-fiction epic that contains substantial gender and racial diversity and that won the Hugo Award in 1981. However, Walter rightly points to the increasing volume and acceptance of these works by readers and publishers.

Within the span of one month, we have contradictory viewpoints about what makes “good” science-fiction and fantasy and apparent agreement that these genres should be instrumentalized to serve social purposes.

I read the comments by Buzzfeed’s creative director with irritation and wondered if he was blithely ignoring the tomes of interesting science-fiction literature being produced by authors like China Mieville, G. Willow Wilson, Kameron Hurley, Ken Liu, Cory Doctorow…and on and on and on I could go. However, his comments became more understandable upon realization that “good” science fiction was being defined as science-fiction-that-will-let-us-invest-in-more-gadgets. Using this reasoning, a time machine should be produced so a time traveler can invest in historically low-cost real estate. Good science-fiction becomes a mechanism which assists in the production of capitalist expansion, of “innovation.”

Despite Le Guin’s appeal that “[t]he profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art,” science fiction and fantasy is often complicit with the growth of private enterprise and with Le Guin’s other pet peeve, state-sanctioned militarism. The United States military provides material resources to Michael Bay. Newt Gingrich wrote the forward for William R. Forstchen’s One Second After, a novel that features an electromagnetic attack on the United States, which Gingrich argues that the country must be prepared to encounter. Both the American and Canadian militaries have recommended reading lists for their personnel that include several science-fiction titles like Starship Troopers, China Attacks, and The Third World War. Science Fiction and Fantasy have also been instrumentalized to serve the interests of a central authority that(allegedly) has a monopoly on legitimate political violence: the state.

In her acceptance speech, Le Guin framed science fiction and fantasy as potential disrupters to the status quo. From this lens, science-fiction and fantasy function as mechanisms that de-socialize readers from normalized assumptions about how the world should work. I’m very sympathetic to this view and at a conference I attended in November, I argued that SF/F was explicitly engaged in recreating normative standards.

By arguing that fantastical texts influence the social world, Le Guin invites the social sciences to meet with and consider fiction seriously. As a student of international relations (IR), I find that SF/F is particularly suitable for my discipline because of the genre’s emphasis on concise world-building. Consequently, I’m more than happy to include SF/F in my scholarly presentations and research–with the understanding that fiction shouldn’t be viewed as possessing a special monopoly on truth and fiction writers are not prophets whose visions have greater status than ordinary workers. Le Guin isn’t naïve about SF/F, though: the subtitle for The Dispossessed is An Ambiguous Utopia, after all.

Unfortunately, the kind of intellectual disruption advocated by Le Guin often comes at a cost. As Le Guin points to sales departments’ influence on book purchasing and publishing, researchers are also restricted by scholarly expectations; certain journals will only publish articles with specific theoretical orientations and scholars who challenge the limits of a particular discipline risk limiting their publication and employment opportunities. So too does the fiction industry prioritize certain trends over others, though perhaps SF/F publishers are more receptive to alternative realities, as long as the world-building is rigorous and systematic. Still, those researchers and authors who do not have social clout are more likely to tread cautiously and produce work that fits into already identifiable boundaries.

There are always exceptions, obviously, and the Guardian article on diversity in SF/F illustrates that the industry may be undergoing a transition. Notably though, even Le Guin had to stealthily insert that Ged, one of her most famous protagonists, was a person of colour later into the story than right at the outset of the novel. This writing decision wasn’t a result of publisher pressure, but because Le Guin feared that her readers may not “immediately identify with a brown kid.” Some of the early covers of the Earthsea series featured a white protagonist, and when the Sci Fi Channel televised the EarthSea series, Le Guin wrote in Slate that the channel “wrecked” her books by whitewashing her characters. SF/F’s influence on revolutionary change becomes slightly questionable in the context of gatekeepers who prioritize incrementalism. There is also the shadow of the reader hanging over the author’s head, where even writers like Le Guin have adjusted their writing to real-world constraints like racism. Hiding Ged’s skin colour could be interpreted charitably. By slowly introducing the idea that PoC characters can be likeable, Le Guin uses fiction as an emancipatory mechanism. This decision could also be less kindly described as a form of self-policing which compromises the radicalness of her project. SF/F can de-socialize readers, sure, but what happens when writers are socialized by their readers into writing more “palatable” literature?

Perhaps some would laugh at the idea that there’s any connection between elves and the social sciences. I once heard a professor express confusion at the popularity of fantasy fiction because “elves aren’t real.” But sovereignty, statehood, nationhood, and citizenship are constructed ideas (and still remain ideas; you certainly can’t touch sovereignty though we feel its effects) with very real material consequences. The boundaries between knowledge/practice and reality/fiction aren’t particularly clear, especially if we view texts, both realist and fantastical, as socializing forces. I would argue against positing a stark difference between an “idea” and an “action,” as most norms gain status as “common sense” through practice.

The selection process for deciding what is a “better” or “worse” text is valuable and eventually a judgment must occur on what works merit publication. This process involves a set of standards or codes that aspiring scholars and writers follow. But this process becomes problematic if the work that is selected for publication becomes repetitive and unquestioned, like a fantastical trope that becomes a sacred cow that prevents better stories from emerging (I’m looking at you, “hero’s journey.” You’re good, but we treat you like a rule instead of a suggestion.) Science Fiction and Fantasy have their own ontological starting points, their own boundaries, and prioritize certain ways of thinking. The very structure of a book is a boundary, and so places an actual physical limit on the author’s imagination. Fantastical fiction isn’t the holy grail and isn’t the answer to all of our problems. But as an exercise in deconstructing entrenched beliefs, SF/F can behave like a remedy to tired ways of thinking.

I do not want to turn science fiction and fantasy into a second-class citizen, where the purpose of the genre is to serve the interest of other disciplines or industries. I recognize that this article treats literature instrumentally and not as a good in its own right. My aim isn’t to oppose “literature for literature’s sake,” but to recognize that people will, inevitably, use texts to create personal meaning and to understand the world. Le Guin’s acceptance speech was too clean and employed a narrative that treated SF/F as a monolithic force for good, if only those pesky capitalists could leave art alone. Le Guin’s optimism is understandable as one is generally gracious when accepting an award, after all. However, as a graduate student, I am always troubled by optimism (kidding, maybe.) Still, the increasing diversity in SF/F is a positive sign that the industry is capable of self-criticism and adapting to new ideas. This change should render readers hopeful that SF/F can do what Le Guin promises: destabilize comfortable ideas.
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Sarah Shoker is a PhD student in Political Science at McMaster University, where she once used Lord of the Rings in a presentation to explain a Foreign Policy conundrum. She regularly quotes from Harry Potter to her more respectable colleagues. You can follow her on twitter @SarahShoker.

**I would like to thank my colleague, Ira Lewy, for first informing me about military reading lists and the navy’s rather unfortunate decision to assist Michael Bay in producing more movies.

Watchmen and Neoliberalism: An Interview with Andrew Hoberek

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

As I’ve said before, my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism, came out last week. It’s published in the Comics Culture series at Rutgers University Press. My book is the second volume to be published; the first, released in late 2014, was Andrew Hoberek’s Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics, focusing on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen.

Andrew’s book is appreciative but not reverent; he’s especially skeptical of the political stance in Watchmen. HU has talked a lot about Alan Moore’s politics over the years — so I thought it would be interesting to talk to Andrew about his take as the last post in my book release roundtable. Andrew and I spoke by email.
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Noah: Your central argument about Watchmen’s politics, as I understand it, is that Watchmen is based in Moore’s sweeping distrust of institutions. For Moore, that connects to 60s anarchism and progressivisim, but your point is that it’s also the basis for the neoliberal attack on government institutions. So when Moore rejects political collective action, he ends up on the side of Reagan and Thatcher, who he hates. Have I got the argument right there? And maybe you could talk a bit about where or how you see Moore rejecting collective politics?

Andrew: I think one example, perhaps relevant now, is the protest against Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre freeing Rorschach from prison that spills over into a group of skinheads killing the original Nite-Owl, whom they confuse with Dan Dreiberg.

Another way to think about it is the fact that Moore’s respect for individualism transcends actual political stances, to the extent that the rightwing Rorschach is a much more sympathetic character than the liberal Ozymandias. Ozymandias is a classic totalitarian figure, someone who (like Stalin) wants to impose plans from the top down and who doesn’t care if literally millions of people have to die in the process. This is very much the kind of figure that Reagan or Thatcher deployed to justify both their foreign policy and their domestic cuts, and that we still have with us in the form of the (absurd) assertions that Barack Obama is a socialist.

That said, I think “ends up on the side of Reagan and Thatcher is strong.” It’s probably more correct to say that he shares an anti-collective stance that hadn’t yet become totally the property of the neoliberal right at that point (It was still central to the sixties left from the Port Huron Statement to the anti-Vietnam movement), but was on its way to doing so.

Noah: So, do you think it’s possible to see Ozymandias as in some ways a critique of neoliberalism, or as trying to think through the connections between liberalism, capitalism, and authoritarianism? You say that Veidt is a classic totalitarian figure, but he’s awfully pro capitalism. And it’s not industrial Nazi-era capitalism either; it’s way more late capitalism, consumerism of the image, it seems like (part of his evil plot is essentially to make a movie.) Casting Veidt as the villain seems like it’s at least in part casting big business as the villain.

Andrew: That’s a good qualification. As I was writing the book I had my eye on the way that Veidt’s portrayal exemplifies a general distrust of institutions that has gone from being a shared feature of both the left and the right in the cold war period to a hallmark of neoliberalism. But another way to think of Veidt is as a figure who embodies Moore’s distrust of large-scale capitalism–a thing I associate in the book with the way he stands for the big comic book companies who exploit the intellectual property of work-for-hire creators. At the same time, it’s when Ozymandias steps outside the profit motive, and attempts to perform what he believes is an altruistic act, that he becomes the villain of the piece. Moore’s thinking about the comic book industry and his general politics remain entwined here, in that the celebration of individual comic book creators remains entwined with a kind of romantic ideology of small property ownership (in this case intellectual property) that’s long been central to American thought, and in some ways has facilitated or served as cover for the rise of neoliberalism. We think of Reagan and his successors as champions of small business–in part because they continuously tell us so–but their policies have largely benefited big capital.

Noah: Veidt’s capitalism doesn’t end though. And in fact he takes advantage of his knowledge of the change in the world situation to switch his investments around and make even more money. Liberal one-worldism and neoliberal corporation seem to fit together seamlessly.

I guess I wonder in part whether the critique of institutions you point to, or the sympathy for Rorschach and the distrust of Veidt — the assumption in your book seems to be that that’s politically retrograde or problematic. But— I mean, for myself at least…if the book is anti-Stalinist, and anti-violent revolution, which I think it is, I’m kind of on board with that. I feel like Moore points out that revolutions are really bloody, kill real people, and don’t necessarily actually change all that much, or can’t be counted on for real transformation. Those all seem like reasonable points — and stand in contrast to V for Vendetta, for example, where V seems infallible and revolutionary violence and torture result in Evey’s personal transformation rather than in the kind of pointless pile of corpses you see in Watchmen.

It also seems prescient in terms of our current political moment. Obama’s not Stalin, obviously, but like most of our Presidents he’s happy dropping bombs on people in the name of a better world. He really doesn’t look all that different from Veidt in a lot of ways (he’s even a successful creator of intellectual aesthetic content, right?)

Andrew: The Obama-Veidt comparison is a fascinating one, although I guess an even better comparison would be Veidt and Mitt Romney, since Romney too made a lot of money and now seeks to turn his attention to public service. (Of course he didn’t make it all on his own after starting from the bottom, the way Veidt and Drake did.) For my money, though, I think the things that are problematic about Obama actually have to do with his very Reaganesque dislike of large organization. For all the flak that he takes for his past as a “community organizer,” this is a figure whose commitment to ground up consensus building reflects a sixties left critique of big government in an era when anti-government sentiment has become a major tool of those in power. Obama’s missteps (including, one imagines, those with the security state, although we’ll probably never know the details there) seem to me to be a property of his desire to compromise and build consensus with everyone. To my mind I’d prefer a Lyndon Johnson who knows how to work within organizations and who isn’t afraid to strong arm opponents to get what he wants. I actually think Lyndon Johnson is–mistakes with Vietnam aside–an unacknowledged hero of the twentieth century. I’m getting a bit away from Watchmen here, but these days you don’t see too many celebrations of institutions on either side of the political fence: Spielberg’s Lincoln is one of the few I can think of, and a great, unheralded film for that fact.

Noah: Hah; I loathed Lincoln. Part of my broader loathing of all things Spielberg. I don’t think it does actually celebrate institutions, exactly. It celebrates Lincoln as white savior hero genius. Barf.

Andrew: My defense of Lincoln’s would be Adolph Reed’s, which is simply that it portrays politics and dealmaking as valuable and even dramatic activities, in contrast to a movie like Django Unchained which seems racially progressive but which actually personalizes both the critique of and solution to an institutional problem like slavery.

But to return to Watchmen in conclusion, I think this whole political question has a lot to do with the history of the superhero in which Moore and Gibbons play a key role. The pre-Watchmen history of the genre runs from 1938 or so to 1986, precisely the period in which Americans believed in the potential of government to make things better. In that respect, I tend to see the superhero as a figure for the New Deal state itself–a figure of extra-ordinary power committed to doing good in the world. The post-Watchmen idea of the superhero (in which Moore and Gibbons participate, even though they later come to bemoan it) as an obsessive or self-interested figure who claims to do good but in fact makes things worse nicely parallels, by the same token, neoliberal accounts of government.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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