Finding the Dynamic in the Still: Paul Klee as Comics Artist

Posted on December 26, 2014 by Adrielle Mitchell

N.B. This post is a modified and revised version of a paper delivered at the 2014 meeting of ICAF (the International Comic Arts Forum) in Columbus, Ohio.
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What interests me most about the urge to define and classify (What is and is not Comics? What is and is not Fine Art?) is never the end-points reached (determined criteria, essential characteristics, asserted and defended definitions) but, instead, how the process entails an ever-shifting set of priorities, and reveals, as much through its negations and dismissals as through its affirmations and acceptances, that the very act of classifying items—placing them here and not there—shapes the critical reception and the way that we see and read a work. Classify the 20th Century Swiss-German artist, Paul Klee, as a modern painter who experiments with color and line, and you will regard the 1938 painting, Insula Dulcamara, shown above, as a prime example of such experimentation. This will probably entail situating Klee’s paintings in certain early 20th Century movements, and engaging in comparisons to the work of other like-minded painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, and August Macke. But if you change context and ask whether his work shares any affinity with comics, you might find that new analytic approaches and comparisons become possible, and even valuable.

For me, an essential characteristic of comicsness is a certain kind of spareness; regardless of the degree of embellishment of figures and background, a good comic—through its non-realistic, two-dimensional representations—seems to offer “just enough” for me to regard, without delineating an object or a figure so particularly that its uniqueness overshadows its representative function.

Jordan Wellington Lint, in Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #20,

David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp,

and Daniel Clowes’ Wilson are distinct, but they can also easily be read as a type: the middle-aged man at odds with environment, self-satisfied and self-loathing, simultaneously in search of, and in ironic detachment from, pleasure. Sometimes, reducing a characterization down to its core elements—a few lines, the evocation of a body position and its carriage, a repeated facial expression—can convey a state of being to a reader/viewer more effectively than might a realistic depiction.

For Klee, paring down to these essences was a critical aspect of his work, particularly his studies of nature. He writes:

“[Graphic art] gives the schematic fairy-tale quality of the imaginary and expresses it with great precision. The purer the graphic work, that is, the more emphasis it puts on the basic formal elements, the less well-suited it will be to the realistic representation of visible things.” (The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee 76).

Freed from the demands of realism, Klee can consider how things work and of what they are composed (“The object,” he writes, “grows beyond its appearance through our knowledge that the thing is more than its outward aspect suggests” [63]), as he does here with a single leaf and a group of flowers.

Klee’s flowers have been called primitive and childlike (and, by the way, Klee would have taken no umbrage at these designations; he often argued for the merits of so-called primitive art, children’s art, and the work of the mentally ill and believed they should be exhibited more often), and these two examples should give you some sense of Klee’s commitment to the distilled object. I am reminded of “amplification through simplification”—a key trait of comics for Scott McCloud, but I am also reminded of these lines from Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West:”

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang.
And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.

“[Klee’s] flowers,” writes Richard Verdi in his essay, “Botanical Imagery in the Art of Klee,” “remain creatures of the imagination, calling to mind no known species and according instead with Klee’s preference for archetypal forms in nature – for images of organic life that are typical rather than individual and may thus evoke the patterns and principles that underlay much of natural creation.” (Paul Klee: Dialogue with Nature. Ernst-Gerhard Guse, ed. Prestel-Verlag, 1990: 25-26). Key to these principles is Klee’s understanding that dynamic movement and growth can be conveyed in still images, echoing the fact that our limited perception blocks us from seeing just how much may be happening under a seemingly still surface. “Pictorial art,” he writes, “springs from movement, is itself fixed movement, and is perceived through movements.” (“Creative Credo”) In his 1918 “Creative Credo,” Klee considers two examples from life: an apple tree in blossom and a sleeping person.

Though we see only stasis, each has multiple types of movement contained within: inside the tree, roots are drawing water and nutrients from the soil, xylem and phloem are circulating nutrients throughout the organism, reproduction is taking place in the flowers, trunk and bark and leaves are growing, photosynthesis is occurring… all at different rates and in different ways. Little of this is visible on the surface. Similarly, the sleeping person’s heart is pumping, blood is circulating, the digestive system is active, the lungs are expanding and contracting, the kidney is processing materials, and the mind is dreaming, but we see only a person who is not moving.

Comics recognize and exploit this notion of contained movement, hidden processes, and internal states. Obviously, the very nature of sequential art suggests this: carried from panel to panel, the reader experiences a dynamic narrative with spatiotemporal verisimilitude (time passing, action occurring, locations changing) despite the fact that the panels and pages are composed of still images. But there is more to this, as Sebastien Conard and Tom Lambeens argue in their 2012 article, “Duration in Comics” (European Comic Art 5:2 Winter 2012: 92-113). Taking Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth as their focal text, Conard and Lambeens explore the rhythm established by a particular page layout. Arguing that the rhythm of a work teaches “slow-down” to the reader, they write: “It is within the page space that musical repetition and alteration unfolds. As a result, there is the rhythm of the frames: small rectangles repeated and alternating with bigger ones. . . . In short, this page is a game of repetition and alteration of verbal, iconic, and spatiotopical elements. And so, the mechanics of the ‘slow down’ are clear.” (102)

Intriguingly, they posit that single panels—not just pages, or multiple non-contiguous panels linked by iconic solidarity, as Thierry Groensteen would offer– can do this too: “…[E]ven the frame can bulge with many micro-narratives. This means not only that a panel can contain many moments tangled up together, but also that it necessarily has a possible duration that each reader can unfold personally.” (105) It has always seemed clear to me that the panel is not the minimal grammatical unit of a comic, as many contain intra-panel elements that can be looked at independently of the panel, and certainly of the page. An eyebrow in Toufic El Rassi’s Arab in America, a brick in Herriman’s Krazy Kat, a shadow in David B.’s Epileptic or Aleksandar Zograf’s Regards to Serbia: each can be untethered from its panel for independent examination. But Conard and Lambeens are adding another dimension to this intra-panel scrutiny, and it accords with Klee’s sense that dynamism can be present in the still, or as Sarah Wyman puts it in “The Poem in the Painting: Roman Jakobson and the Pictorial Language of Paul Klee,”(Word and Image 20:2 2004: 138-154): “the crystallization of moments in motion.” (139) By suggesting that time—duration—is no more an inherent and fixed aspect of a panel as it is of a comic as a whole, Conard and Lambeens capture the special relationship between work and viewer, the unique and particular stretch of time that is simultaneously evinced by a particular image, and accorded by a viewer to that particular image.

For Klee, this same sense of duration maintains. Wyman continues: “Klee identifies time in his own paintings as implicit in the making and viewing of the works, as well as potential in the forms themselves.” (142)

So, when we look anew at Klee’s images of the natural world, we begin to see that it is not a single moment in time that is captured, but a complex interplay between the pictured elements and the viewer’s perception of both time and movement, just as takes places between comic and viewer.

Returning to Insula Dulcamara once more, we can ask a fresh set of questions of the painting. Might we have, as Conard and Lambeens notice in Jimmy Corrigan, “many moments tangled up together?” Perhaps we do; many art historians and critics have offered plausible connections between details within this painting such as the “steamer” in the upper-right corner, the autobiographical P (for Paul?) with a face in the center, the curve of lines that appear coast-like with key moments and aspects of Klee’s life, including an important trip to Tunisia in 1914, his intense study of Homeric tales during the last years of his life, and his excruciating condition of scleroderma. As recently as July, 2014, a persuasive theory for reading the seemingly pictorial elements of lines and dots as Arabic and Latinate letters cleverly distorted and resolving into the words “Paul Klee”—the artist’s signature– was put forth by Chris Pike in his article, “Signing Off: Paul Klee’s Insula Dulcamara” (Word and Image 30:2 2014: 117-130). Pike’s argument is particularly comics-affiliative in that it privileges verbal and visual interplay and notes a movement from letter to letter counter-clockwise through the pictorial space beginning at the central P. This movement must be initiated, traced, by a viewer who sustains his/her gaze for a period of time, just as a reader makes his/ her way around the panels and pages of Chris Ware’s work.

If comics theory can shed light on Klee’s work—and I’ve gestured at only a few of the many ways it does– it stands to reason that it may be profitably applied to other works of “fine art.” This could lead to an expanded notion of comics, yes, but it also might lead to something even more beneficial. If we practice looking at fine art – single works of art–through the lens of comics, we might return to individual comics panels and intra-panel elements with augmented attentiveness and some valuable resistance to the inexorable pull of narrative that drags us too quickly ever onward to the next panel and the next and the next.

Nightcrawler: The Holiday Season’s Best Violent Movie

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Michael Carson

Most people read or watch war stories not to peek into life but to get an intimate glimpse at death. The irony here is of course that the more anti-war a book or movie wants to be, the more likely it is that they it emphasize violence. It is almost as if a condition of a truly anti-war piece is that it provides voyeurs as much violence as they desire. So the honest war storywriter ends up creating excellent war porn for the would-be voyeur and directors as politically and aesthetically diverse as Stephen Spielberg, David Ayers and Clint Eastwood compete with each other to reveal war’s obscenity to an audience eager for the obscene.

Though not a war story, Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut, contemplates a problem central to war stories: namely, the cultural appeal of violence and the authorial exploitation of obscenity. And by subverting our expectations surrounding violence, art and success, Gilroy’s manages to successfully satirize both an audience that consumes violence and the people who orchestrate this consumption without – as is the case in some comparable projects – resorting to the same exploitation he decries. Would-be tellers of war stories could learn a lot from a movie like Nightcrawler.

The plot is simple enough: Louis Bloom – played by an emaciated and bug-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal – evolves from a Los Angeles bottom-feeder who steals copper to sell for a little money to a Los Angeles bottom-feeder who steals the last moments of people’s lives to sell for a little more money. It is a classic American success story, where a young man or woman harnesses a unique skill set to make friends and influence people. Except in this instance the hero succeeds by filming people in extremis, artfully recording hemorrhaging bodies and eventually arranging their deaths to keep up with the audience’s insatiable demand for such theater.

Many movies have explored the corrupting influence of money and violence and the way in which American culture uniquely intertwines the two (and not a few have used Los Angeles as their setting). The satire comes not in Bloom’s rise to prominence but in the very ridiculousness of his conquests. As opposed to movies like Wolf on Wall Street, where the rise and fall is dramatic enough to elicit envy in the audience, Gilroy scales Nightcrawler back to reflect the banality of Bloom’s efforts and achievements. Bloom counts himself a success because he owns a business with two trucks instead of one. He considers shaking hands with a third-rate newscaster tantamount to fame. He falls for a failed news producer twice as old as him who he has to blackmail into having sex with him. Bloom is a petite-bourgeois devil, one whose success is as pathetic as what he has to do to achieve it.

Neither does Bloom have any sense of having done wrong. Early on in the film Bloom sits alone in his empty yet tastefully furnished apartment and clicks through the morning TV news shows. He laughs at the newscaster’s corny jokes unaffectedly. In the film’s final moments, the detective investigating Bloom can’t get past the fact that Bloom filmed his friend dying. Bloom replies, “It’s my job. It’s what I do. I like to think if you’re seeing me you’re having the worst day of your life.” Bloom’s laughter remains the same – innocent as it is amoral. Here and elsewhere, the film lacks any dynamism, either into cynicism or away from it, and the static characterization, Bloom’s resolute innocence, survives his ethically questionable activities unscathed, even as the more and more people end up on the wrong side of his camera.

In the climax, we do learn something important about Bloom: it’s not that he doesn’t understand people, it’s that he understands them and discounts their reality. “Maybe I just don’t like people,” he tells his partner. Throughout the film he makes seemingly earnest attempts to mimic human emotion – patting his assistant’s shoulder after they see someone they know die, giving self-help talks to the people that he meets, “Who am I? I’m a hard worker…people say I am persistent” – and the sad fact of the movie, the central conceit, is not that Bloom is a joke but that everyone in the film ends up being like Bloom; ultimately, we must take him seriously, for this is what passes for seriousness in our society – his grotesque films and entrepreneurial optimism are the only art and hope in an artless (indeed kitsch and sentimental) world.

Gilroy seems to be saying that Bloom dislikes us, the people who watch his videos, who form the literal fodder for his ambitions, but we watch these videos because we dislike people as much as him. In this respect Nightcrawler is not quite like other satires of American masculinity, violence and terror (like say American Psycho or Fight Club). Nightcrawler satirizes these movies. It critiques our rabid consumption of violence in movies that seek to make an earnest commentary about violence in America. It mocks us for desiring this violence, for wanting to indulge in death while simultaneously acting sententious about those who indulge in death (tellingly, Gilroy gives us little actual obscenity in a movie about obscenity). At times the plot stumbles – Gilroy has too many targets for a single film – but the movie does better than most in capturing this curious tension between indulgence and opprobrium, between our own self-involved fears and nihilistic desires.

Now what does this have to do with war stories? Well, a lot actually. Most war stories over the last forty years have been obsessed with representing the true obscenity of war; they operate under the notion that realism – a faithfully rendered account of horror – somehow does justice to the conflict. Many of these stories try to abrogate politics through authenticity and eventually mistake obscenity for profundity. Bloom and the people around Bloom rationalize his snuff films in much the same way. In a way, Bloom gives the dying people dignity, by acting as a sort of witness to their final moments. The audience participates willingly, possessed by fear and hatred, projecting themselves on to the dead, forgiving this invasion of privacy and sadomasochistic prurience under the auspices of aesthetics.

Fury has been in theaters for about a month now. American Sniper will soon follow (timed perfectly to capture the coveted January demographic). These Christmas films have gone through great lengths to be accurate, to replicate the obscene violence of 1944 Europe and 2006 Iraq. Many will argue that it is possible to watch them simply out of respect for authentic death, not to find a sense of authenticity through this death. Yet after a movie like Nightcrawler, it is increasingly difficult to make the claim that we can do the former without also indulging in the latter, and perhaps this all movie about American violence can do – open us up to the nightcrawler in each of us, the ones making these films and the ones who keep going to see them.
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Michael Carson has written non-fiction about war and violence at Salon, the Daily Beast, The Hooded Utilitarian and Splice Today. He also attempts to write fiction that neither indulges in obscenity nor sanitizes the obscene. So far he has been unsuccessful. Check out his blog, the Wrath Bearing Tree, or follow him @WrathBT on Twitter.

“We have to go back!” Getting Lost in the Serial Podcast

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Osvaldo Oyola

This post is cross-posted from over at The Middle Spaces.
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Over the Thanksgiving Weekend, like a lot of people we know, my wife and I binge-listened to Serial. Serial is a podcast by the producers of This American Life, an episodic exploration of a murder case from 1999 that seems to have more questions than answers, but that is nonetheless addictive. So addictive, in fact, that Slate.com has its own podcast deconstructing each episode of the original podcast and indulging in a little speculation, because those folks couldn’t stop taking about it. We listened to those as well in order to bolster our own fodder for discussion. If you don’t know what Serial is, I highly recommend stopping whatever you are doing and going to go listen to it.

It bears mentioning that despite what is to follow in this post about Serial as a narrative, it nonetheless is a story about real people whose lives have been forever changed by that murder and the subsequent trial. As the folks on the Slate podcast have mentioned many times, there is a tension that a listener feels—or should feel if they have any hint of compassion and intelligence—between enjoying this story, getting sucked into the pleasures of a mystery, and understanding that this pleasure is at the expense of actual human lives.

And I think it is from that realness that the question that preoccupies many fans of the show seems to rise: how will it resolve? As a “real-life” story there is no promise of resolution. As an example of story-telling, we expect it to have one. Does Sarah Koenig (the reporter/narrator) already have an end in mind that she is tantalizingly building towards, or is this a serial the way serials have been most frequently and classically constructed: as it goes along—prolonging the narrative as long as it can be drawn out? Sure, in the case of a TV show or a comic book series, in other words, popular serialized fiction, longevity is determined by continued popularity, but in this case, the question is: how much evidence and human interest and non-litigious speculation can be drawn from the story of Adnan Syed and the murder of Hae Min Lee? And how can Koenig do this in as non-exploitative a way as possible, while still making a radio show that relies on the audience’s attraction to the sensationalism of murder and the intrigue of a painful mystery?

To further complicate things, the broadcast of the show itself can and has influenced the very investigation it enacts (and has inspired others to take up). The possibility for a so-called “satisfying ending” seems to be simultaneously becoming more possible and less likely.

What is brilliant and a bit subversive about Serial is that by putting a “real-life” story into the frame of a fictional serial, it is critiquing that desire for resolution, shining a light on it as a limitation, a need for artifice rather than simply a requirement of story-telling—framing your signs into a sequence to make them cohere and take a comprehensible shape.

Really, this obsession with the end of Serial (are there really only two episodes left?) has made me want to go back and watch Lost again.

When ABC’s Lost was at the height of its popularity there was a common mantra from its fans (and those who claimed to be fans), that the show had better wrap up all its many plotlines and mysteries, that there had better be answers to all our questions, an explanation for the strangeness and coincidences that drove what appeared to perhaps be a plot, but that was a really a study in characters.

Of course, by now Lost’s unsatisfying ending is kind of legendary. I made some excuses for it when it aired, but really I wasn’t trying to say it was actually good, but that it was as good as you could expect from a show for which the very idea of beginnings or endings were anathema.

Rather, it was my contention (and remains my contention) that the ending of Lost doesn’t matter. The characters on that show were lost when the show started, long before crash landing on that mysterious island, and regardless of the outcome would remain lost, because we are all lost. It is a condition of living.

At least, that was my assertion in a short essay I wrote about Lost at the opening of the 4^th season, when the flash-forwards were introduced. And I still agree with it, but the way in which Serial reminds me of Lost has forced me to stop and ask myself about endings again, their value and their artificiality.

The thing about Lost is that each episode and every arc of a season introduces more mysteries than it can solve. Lost takes place on an infinite nesting doll of an island.

I wrote,

“Let’s get this straight, if I were on that island, while I might not be as crazy and driven as Locke, I too would not want to leave. I would be happy to stay on that island with the polar bears, smoke monsters, mad scientists, crazy trap-laying French women, wild boars and electro-magnetic disturbances. When it comes down to it, I do not see how the world of LOST, the universe that is that island, is any different from the world they came from. While the mystery and convolution may be a little more condensed than we are used to. . . [in] our own lives, even without being survivors of plane wrecks on a (not-so) deserted island, have just as much mystery, craziness and convolution. . .It is just easier for us to pretend as if that is not the case, as if we have some kind of control over our environment, when in truth, control is an illusion.”

If there is one thing that represents that lack of control in the popular imagination it is the time-worn trope of the unjustly accused and jailed—the hope for redemption. As when the one-armed man is finally caught in the act and Dr. Richard Kimble gets to cease being a fugitive. Of course, it is a lot easier to get a prosecutor to believe your story when you are played by Harrison Ford. When you are in the role of Adnan Syed and you have to play yourself, a Pakistani-American Muslim teenager, it doesn’t work out that neatly.

Lost plays with that trope as well, in the form of Kate, except it upsets the pattern by making her actually guilty of her crime, building sympathy for her through flashbacks, but also undercutting that slightly by showing her ability to be cold and determined. Of course, she’s a pretty white woman, so we don’t begrudge her the deal she gets when the charges are dropped (or whatever it is that happens in Season 5 when she and Jack and a couple of others do succeed at leaving the island for a time), the way some listeners probably begrudge Serial’s Jay—a suburban black kid turned snitch (at best) and false accuser (at worst).

No, it is not through direct comparison of characters or elements of plot that Serial and Lost resonate with one another for me, but through the form—that narrative openness that develops when a serial curls back (and sometimes forward) on itself, expanding in all directions into Gordian knots that resist easy cutting. The latest episode, #10 “The Best Defense is a Good Defense,” just reinforced the comparison in my mind. The look back on Cristina Gutiérrez—Adnan’s defense counsel—played out like those interstitial flashbacks in the TV series, obscuring as much as it revealed and introducing more side characters that not only serve to develop the character in focus through their relation, but begin to take a shape and develop a gravity of their own in the narrative. In this episode, it was the poor Witmans who were taken advantage of by Gutiérrez, and who are embroiled in their own ongoing drama, involving their son being accused of murdering their other son. The case struck me as just sensational enough to qualify for Serial’s recently announced second season.

The audio recordings that Koenig and her producers use, from the court proceedings, police interviews, etc… from back in 1999 and the days of the trial, reinforce that feeling of being transported back in time—as do the more recent interviews with possible witnesses, friends and family. Interviews that despite being in the “present” of Serial‘s reportage, are nonetheless already nearly a year old, thus confusing the timeline even more. Hearing those voices is crucial to developing these characters. Those voices are so distinct and become more distinct each time we get to hear from them—Adnan’s sharp analysis of his situation and mastery of language tinged with occasional resentment, Jay’s alternately surly and obsequious good manners, Gutiérrez’s lilting aggression.

But there is also a sense of the imminent that has seeped into Serial—like bearded crying Jack begging Kate to go back to the island—the development around the podcast of things like the Slate Spoiler Special podcast about the podcast and the Serial subreddit (which I haven’t visited, because Reddit) is like a possible future reshaping our view of the present. The flash-forward feeling is present in Koenig having to momentarily pre-empt Episode #9 in order to discuss three developments in the investigation that stand adjacent to how the investigation is unfolding in the narrative as she is telling it.

When I wrote “Staying Lost” back in 2008, I said that “I not only don’t care if the mysteries are ‘answered,’ I don’t want them to be. At this point there is no way that any one ‘answer’ or set of “answers” is going to be satisfactory to all fans (or even most fans) of the show, so why bother trying to make one or give one?”

I essentially feel the same way about Serial, except that Serial is about real people, real suffering, and real—ultimately unanswerable—mysteries. It is harder to accept that unknowability when it is more immediate to our lives and not just philosophical musings. Even if Adnan Syed were to be exonerated and set free, it would not necessarily mean he didn’t murder Hae Min Lee, only that there was enough reasonable doubt about it to make it a travesty of justice for him to spend the rest of his life in jail. Even if Koenig could somehow prove that Jay’s lies are obscuring a greater lie about Adnan’s (lack of) involvement, it would not mean that we’d ever necessarily know and understand why he told those contradictory stories either. We’ll probably never know why Adnan’s defense counsel behaved how she did, seeming to botch the case, we can only speculate that it emerged from her illness and her knowledge of her own imminent death. Or, as David Haglund suggested on the Slate Spoiler Special for episode #10, that she was actually incompetent all along and other people enabled her success until her poor accounting and “pitbull” attitude went beyond what could be managed. No matter what happens, Hae Min Lee’s family will still have to live with the unknowability and confusion that surrounds any death, but especially a murder… What answer can effectively “wrap things up” for them?

Allow me to quote from “Staying Lost” one more time:

“I have given up looking for answers. Answers lead us astray. I don’t need, I don’t want Lost to try to answer anything for me, and the day the last episode airs I would be perfectly satisfied to be left with as many mysteries as the show has piled up over its four seasons…there will be no happy endings or easy wrap-ups to this show even if some people get off the island. Hurley will still struggle with madness and Jack will crumble, becoming a version of the wreck his father was when he first went searching for the elder Shepherd in Australia. I don’t know (and I don’t care) what the “secret” is that the Oceanic Six might carry about their “escape,” because there is no escaping (and now we know that what? The secret was that other people were still back on the island? Hardly mind-blowing to the viewers—just goes to show all escape is illusory)…we drift from mystery to mystery and from joyful cannonballs to confrontations with death and we make choices in the dark never sure of the outcome, and with the dread that even with the desired outcome come countless unforeseen consequences that undermine any success.”

I watched Lost like I read Mind MGMT, with a Sontagian resistance to interpretation.

But as I suggested above, it is a lot easier to say I like and want narratives that resist that urge to resolve and provide answers, when that narrative is a fictional one. The tension for Serial is the “true crime” reportage mashed up with the serialized fictional narrative format. It works because life becomes at least momentarily understandable when put into a narrative frame, but ultimately all narratives are fictional—and that hurts (or we can imagine that it hurts) when that narrative involves you and your loved ones.

In my dissertation project, I explore (among other things) the simultaneous spontaneity and serialized nature of identity work. Seriality is built on an on-goingness that is punctuated by spontaneous recalibration of identity based on, not only the accretion of new information revealed in that unfolding, but also in the re-structuring and re-imagining of what has come before, aided in large part by the positional erasure necessary to assert a coherent “I.” Just as Lost isn’t really about the mysteries of an uncharted island, Serial isn’t really about the mystery of Hae Min Lee’s death or the conviction of Adnan Syed, rather they are both about what can be revealed—what we can learn about these characters in the crucible of that setting. We can’t know these real-people-made-characters, but only hope to construct an identity for them that leads to our belief of guilt or innocence, involvement or victimhood, or both.

Back in 2008, I wrote that Lost is a perfectly apt name for the show, “not only because of the physical displacement, but because all the characters were already lost before they ever got on that plane, before they crashed on that island, just as they will be if they get off it, just like we all are.” Serial is also aptly (if a bit generically) named because in that tension between feeling like it could never end and that it must end and satisfyingly so, it has captured the essence of seriality’s appeal. The major difference for me is that it is much easier for me to express a desire to immerse myself in the idea of “lost-ness” when it manifests as a mysterious island with destructive electromagnetic devices, smoke monsters, ghosts and the remains of a cultish scientific agency, and think of the ways in which our lives parallel that strangeness, than it is when that lost-ness involves the intricacies of the criminal justice system, the insidiousness of racial and ethnic bias, the melodrama of teenagers turned deadly and the emotional harm inflicted on those who have to live that convoluted story. Nevertheless, I remain hooked, and when that final episode airs, no matter what it is like, I will treat it like any other episode, an artificial bracket on the messiness of experience lived and retold.

As an addendum, I would like to add that what is not subversive and brilliant about Serial is its handling of race. I know I am risking, taking away from my exploration of the narrative form of the show by ending on this note, but since most of my writing is about race in popular culture, it would not feel right to not at least comment on how it is handled on the podcast. While I do not find it to be as egregious as some online articles I’ve read and browsed (like this one and this one) make it out to be, the dozens of little assumptions and strange ways to frame people’s lives and characters are pernicious in how the typical discourse of race remains insidiously present despite Sarah Koenig’s obvious sympathy for the podcast’s players. When it comes down to it, I have to remember Anita Sarkeesian’s wise disclaimer at the beginning of her Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games videos, “that it’s both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy a piece of media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects” when it comes to all forms of media I enjoy. Let’s just hope that Koenig’s sympathy leads her to re-think the ways in which she represents these people and frame their situations as these final episodes are recording and moving into future season. The benefit of this being a “true crime” story, however—as a a similarly minded and Serial-obsessed friend said to me—is that unlike a fictional story that requires new canonical material or fan fiction (though I have no doubt there is some Hae Min Lee and Adnan Syed fan fiction out there) there are plenty of ways for listeners to seek out learn a lot more about these people in ways that do not reduce them—if inadvertently—to stereotypes.

Teaching the Invasion of Iraq 11 Years Out

Posted on November 25, 2014 by Kate Polak

What people forget, of course, when they’re confronted with a graphic novel about four lions who look suspiciously like the characters in Disney’s The Lion King is that Pride of Baghdad is indeed based on a true story. It is a comic relatively free of humans, following four lions who escape from the Baghdad Zoo after the initial U.S. bombing campaign, tracing how they evolve in their understandings of freedom, place, and community. Their escape is a surprise (they are released when U.S. bombs blow apart their cages), but each lion reacts to this new-found freedom differently. Noor is delighted—she has been planning an escape for months—but worries that freedom that one doesn’t work for isn’t truly freedom. Safa, on the other hand, was a victim of gang-rape while she was still in the wild, and has no interest in returning to the chaos she perceives as reigning beyond the walls of the zoo. Zill, while he tells nostalgic stories about the sunrises in the wild, largely seems ambivalent about the prospect of freedom; he would like more control, but he also likes being fed regularly. Ali, the cub, is largely unaffected as well. What follows is how I approach explaining to students the relative use of Pride of Baghdad in understanding the variety of positions one may take in regards to the Iraq War.

Zill and Noor both long to return to the freedom they had as cubs, although they approach this in different ways. While Zill indulges in nostalgia, he doesn’t seek freedom, and their liberation seems barely to affect his attitude. Noor, on the other hand, is actively attempting to craft an escape plan. However, once they are free, Noor shows herself to be capable as a huntress, but is psychologically ill-prepared for freedom. Safa, unlike the other two adult lions, appreciates the zoo for the safety and consistency it provides. After the escape, Safa adapts back to the unpredictability of the larger world swiftly, but she is physically no longer capable of being the huntress she once was.

Each lion approaches the question of freedom from a different angle. Noor, while still inside of the zoo, thinks primarily of the physical bars on the cages as limitations on her freedom. For her, liberty is freedom of movement. Safa, in contrast, does not see freedom in terms of the ability to make choices about where she is. Liberty for Safa is defined by safety from outside threat. She sees the cages as protection, and a regular feeding schedule as safety.

For example, Safa could represent “staying at home” (i.e. staying out of foreign wars) as a preferable political stance. However, she could also represent the idea that safety can only occur with the sacrifice of certain liberties. Furthermore, she could represent a recognition of the negative potential for foreign intervention, but through her actions, she nonetheless intervenes for the good of her pride.

When I teach Pride of Baghdad, I first approach it considering who the lions represent.

It’s worth considering how they might connect to Iraqi civilians. America was the force that came into the country. Saddam was a brutal dictator. However, under his leadership, there was relative peace and stability for the vast majority of Iraqi civilians. They may or may not have liked living under his regime, but they were relatively safe from threat—unless, of course, you were unlucky enough to draw Saddam’s attention or to be a member of a religious sect or ethnic group he despised.

Consider the lion that Safa and Noor find in the palace. In this scene, we see the lion in his death throes, wasting away while chained within a palatial estate. We of course come to find out that the bear had been stealing his food, but the bear isn’t the only bad guy here. What was removed from that lion that was a part of him?

Teeth and claws—the vehicles of a sort of natural violence, evolved in order to survive, to fight and to eat prey. The chain isn’t the only thing holding him to the wall. The chain signifies something much more basic that has been stripped from him: the right to feed himself and to defend himself. His calls for his Master, the man who did this to him (presumably Saddam or one of his sons), gestures towards the extent to which a dictatorship may remove the most basic freedoms from its citizenry in the name of a particular version of safety.

Noor is immediately willing to hypothesize that this is indeed the end result of their captivity: the removal of the ability to live without the master. Safa, however, emphasizes the distinction between the compassion that the keepers showed and the brutality with which this animal was treated.

But how do we understand the bear’s interruption here? “Ungrateful whores,” he says. What is a whore? Why would this particular insult be used? The bear draws a relationship between this insult and the distinction between a prisoner and a pet. His name, “fajer,” is probably a corruption of “fajr,” which means “dawn,” but also has a related term that means “whore.” Why would the bear have been allowed to keep his teeth and claws when they were removed from the lion? Think in relation to expressions of capriciousness, the whim of the master as a guiding principle, rather than a stable set of laws by which one abides.

In relation to Pride of Baghdad, the value most clearly explicated is freedom, but what does freedom mean in the context of war?

On the other hand, the lions could represent American civilians’ debates in the lead-up to the war. It’s worth thinking about the pro- and anti-war camps in relation to Safa, Noor, and Zill. When is Safa violent? When she is convinced that her family is under threat. Safa is mostly concerned with maintaining her own safety, particularly because of her past. However, she doesn’t shy away from the prospect of protecting those who are weaker. Safa can be regarded as a stand-in for the American public—horrified and traumatized by 9/11, needing to reassert control over their own bodies and on the world stage.

That said, Noor, our revolutionary who wanted nothing more than freedom, finds that to a great extent, the boundaries of the zoo are not that dissimilar to the boundaries of life in the wasteland of a bombed city. No freedom exists without responsibility and without personal sacrifice of safety. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act and other legal frameworks were established to “protect” American citizens, but did nothing so much as create a transparent cage.

When is Zill violent? Consider the page in which he attacks the bear—distinction between a hunter and a fighter. Hunting, as “women’s work” within the pride, denotes a division of labor. Hunting isn’t perceived as violence, but rather as the procurement of food—a simple necessity. Fighting is violence, but it also springs out of necessity for Zill, in reference to defending the females from the bear.

Of course, when we’re considering the causes for violence, we have to consider how we justify violence within our own lives. What is a “justified use of force”?

In general, we think of violence as being justified when it serves to protect. Violence used in the service of protecting the self or another is seen almost universally as a moral exertion of force. This leads us into the question of what constitutes a “just war.” Just wars are based on a set of criteria that must be established to prompt particular action, including a cause celebré of the protection of the self (the nation) or the protection of a significantly weaker force. Just war may be employed only when other avenues have been exhausted. Of course, a part of what this means is the protection of the ideals and values by which we live, and the ideals and values we believe are basic human rights.

Fables are remembered because they filter into our consciousness and give us a series of rules to follow. However, Pride of Baghdad takes the structure of a fable and breaks down the possibility of a particular rule. The lions are killed at the end. This would seem to suggest that, given our sympathetic engagement with the lions throughout the text, that the invasion was wrong, and that we should feel angry at our government for invading. But precisely what do we encounter along the way to that final scene that complicates our understanding?

When the lions are freed from the zoo, is that not (aside from Safa), what they most desire? Who frees them from the zoo? American bombs. Bombs, for Vaughan and Henrichon, have at least as much power to liberate as they do to destroy. However, the final scene shows a fundamental misunderstanding by the troops of the lions. Zill is simply sitting there, watching the horizon with his family, until he is suddenly killed.

The pride’s reaction is very understandable. They turn in anger at the enemy who has suddenly shattered this moment of calm. In the scene following the lions’ deaths, what don’t we see? Faces.

When you have an icon, the more abstracted it is from reality, the more opportunity you have to identify with it. The flag and the faceless soldiers both are icons through which we’re meant to identify—these are our troops, this is our war. When the soldier stutters that “It…it charged right at us, sir. I didn’t want to put ‘em down, but…” we may feel angry, or we may have a surge of sympathy for the young man suddenly thrust into the position of shooting these animals; we may feel his fear and confusion.

In regards to this, I also think of the lions. When we look at the lions, we see ourselves—they are mimicries of humanity —adjacent to us, but not precisely like us. They are like the Iraqi civilians, but so much closer to our experience through this metaphoric lens. While they have a different perception of the world based on their culture and their expectations about how the world works, they’re still excruciatingly present in their deaths, in a way that most casualties of war are not. When we look at a photograph of a crying mother or a dead man, we see them. But when we look through the prism of the fable, we see us. And in this reflection of ourselves, we see no easy answers as to right and wrong.

Only Connect

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Kim O'Connor

Before I read The Hospital Suite, I was only vaguely aware of John Porcellino as a sort of folk hero. He packed up and left Chicago near the turn of the century (around the time I moved here myself), and some 15 years on still seems to be the patron saint of comics in this city, or maybe the Midwest in general. Cartoonist laureate of a Carl Sandburg poem. Any place where folks work hard and make the best of it.

Paul Bunyan had an ox. John Porcellino, a cat. Her name was Maisie. She’s been memorialized in no less than three Sufjan Stevens songs—more if you count the b-sides. I recently learned that a cabal of suburban mail carriers named her a minor deity. They want to get her on a stamp. They say that on clear winter days, at first light, you can feel the spirit of the cat making copies of out-of-print comics at the Wicker Park Kinko’s. I met some guy at Quimby’s who claims he communed with her there. Three beers in he admitted she had to correct his pronunciation of Kukoc.

I don’t know, I guess you read comics. You probably know the lore. But all I really knew up until I read The Hospital Suite was that Porcellino has a pure punk heart and a 90s-era webstore, and I confess that my more cynical side wondered if that wasn’t, on some level, super fucking ridiculous. I’d like to be the kind of person who buys mail-order zines, but the truth of my life is that I read celebrity gossip magazines and persist in ordering almost everything from Amazon even though I know it’s evil. I truly wish I cared.

In any case, I’m grateful to the good people at Drawn & Quarterly for publishing this work in a format that feels accessible to jerks like me. While I could see Porcellino’s appeal from page one, there were moments early on when I worried The Hospital Suite was another “good patient” story. I also found the current of what I’d reluctantly call spiritual comics to be a bit much—not a deal breaker, but always off-putting. (I love Ron Regé Jr, but there is no plane to which I could ascend where I would be inured to the hilarity of his wizard robe.) Slowly, though, it dawned on me that I was reading something rare and real and special, and not at all ridiculous, and by the end of The Hospital Suite I felt for Porcellino a sort of affection that is a rare sensation in reading comics, or really all of literature, or maybe life. I’d compare it to how I feel about David Foster Wallace or Lynda Barry. I mean to say he shines a light.

Autobio is a crowded category, not just in its number of practitioners but also in its sensibility. It’s often a jaundiced genre—frenetic, claustrophobic, uncomfortable. Neurotic. Obsessive. Tortured. Overwrought. Within The Hospital Suite, there are traces of all the classic themes: ambivalence toward the responsibilities of adulthood, depression, masturbation, being broke. The chief difference is, despite a grueling fight for his life and nigh on a decade’s worth of catastrophic diarrhea, John Porcellino somehow seems to be the least miserable bastard in comics. Of course—and this is critical—he’s not quite happy, either. He’s something else. And whatever you want to call it, it’s a breath of fresh air.

There is a palpable sense of calm conveyed by Porcellino’s simple aesthetic. I gather that’s just how he draws, but it suits the subject matter here very well, offsetting the intense distress he depicts throughout The Hospital Suite. I’ve heard him say that his drawing is sometimes referred to as bad. I find that astonishing, but it certainly sounds like something my dad would say. Of course anyone who has aspired to minimalism in any area of life, artistic or otherwise, will recognize the sophistication required to draw stripped-down pictures like these. It’s advanced iconography—a very high level of graphic design—and that Porcellino manages to pack so much charm into drawings this spare is remarkable, if not unheard of (cf. Allie Brosh). Occasionally he flashes his chops in a cool composition, like this scene from his sickbed that captures the whole Starship Enterprise vibe of being in the hospital.

But I think Porcellino is at his best when he keeps things simple. He has developed an idiosyncratic shorthand to convey outsized feelings—the good, the bad, and even the ineffable. Probably my favorite thing about the book is the little hearts he draws to convey all the love he feels in the universe. He seems to tap into it almost everywhere, including the post office.

Reader, I don’t know about you, but this does not even remotely resemble any interaction I’ve ever had with USPS.

Or possums? ~~oO{:> ……..(/*o*/)

Structurally, The Hospital Suite isn’t quite sound. On one hand, Porcellino does an excellent job of distilling a narrative from an incredibly complex system of mental and physical illnesses that span a long period of time. On the other, we have the book’s clumsy division into three distinct, but overlapping, sections, plus several wholly unnecessary appendices. The central paradox of Porcellino is that his stories are very processed—aggressively reduced and refined—but feel entirely organic. Untouched. In sharp contrast, the section breaks feel artificial and distracting, and it messes with the magic just a little. One of the advantages of comics as a medium is the ease with which they can accommodate more than one timeline. These stories should have been stitched together with more care.

Overarching the structural concerns is the book’s lack of dramatic tension; the terror of the Mystery Illness is offset by the reader’s sure knowledge that Porcellino did in fact survive this experience. Even when emotions run high, the stakes feel low. Some stories are so engrossing that you feel “worried” even when you know the outcome, but The Hospital Suite never quite manages to transcend its own inevitability. I don’t know, it might be unfair to expect a Zen Buddhist to ratchet up the drama.

Admittedly, this is where we brush up against my limitations as a critic: the places in the text where I wondered if its “deficiencies” were areas in which there was real room for improvement, or just a different way of looking at the world. Often I admire Porcellino’s clear perspective. (Even when he’s talking about the shame spirals of obsessive-compulsive disorder, his gaze is cool and level.) But sometimes I get the sense that he simply hasn’t done the hard work of what Justin Green has described as presenting the self as a “specimen.” The world of The Hospital Suite is a place in which things happen to John Porcellino. There is no real sense that he assumes any agency in life.

Whether that lack of agency is a personal problem, a spiritual belief, or a syndrome borne of years coping with a debilitating, unpredictable illness is difficult to discern. (Maybe it’s all of those things.) I’ve read that the events in The Hospital Suite span two divorces and three relationships—something that wasn’t quite clear to me from reading the book. It’s understandable that Porcellino didn’t want to delve into the particulars; these are real women in the world, after all, and in some ways the dissolution of those relationships seems tangential to the story he’s trying to tell. But I found myself giving him the side eye, hard, in some of the sequences about his first wife.

I wonder if, as an autobiographer, the decision to do what was best for his cat instead of his relationship was something that Porcellino could have delved into more deeply.

But no one’s perfect, you know? And as much as I love autobiographical comics, they tend to celebrate imperfection in a way that’s slyly self-congratulatory. They relish rolling around in the shit. Whatever flaws are in The Hospital Suite, the author seems to come by them without ego or agenda. Which all sounds rather humorless, doesn’t it? He’s very funny, though.

I’m not a spiritual person, or the kind of girl who has easy access to all the love in the universe. Frankly, I’m more disdainful and suspicious of those things than I’d like. As much as I wish I were a special disgruntled snowflake, this perspective is, increasingly, a cultural norm. From the milieu of autobiographical comics to television’s recent obsession with antiheroes, drama isn’t really about Good People right now. It’s hard to make them seem compelling, or even believable. As a creator, it’s all too easy to explore the nuance of being a garbage person. It’s also easy, from a reader’s point of view, to sigh in relief that someone else in the world is just as bad (or, better, worse) than you are.

It’s more difficult and brave, I think, to make art that takes people outside themselves and shows them something larger. More than craft or even sheer likeability, it is that reach that makes John Porcellino’s comics remarkable. It’s a quality I can’t quite hope to convey in these 1,500 words. This is where I’d draw the heart.

Severed From Reality

Posted on November 21, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

This piece contains spoilers, although I do not reveal the ending of the movie.

Some stories seem too smart to be symptomatic. Rather than try to suppress or exorcise the fraught, irrational elements that inevitably bubble up through the floorboards, some stories court the absurd directly. This instinct is the one truly smart thing about the movie Snowpiercer, the summer’s critical dark horse, recently released to a very positive reception on Netflix. The world’s audiences and film critics can be forgiven for projecting this intelligence upon the rest of the film, which doesn’t deserve it.

In Snowpiercer, the world’s governments attempt an easy-fix to climate change, releasing a cooling agent into the atmosphere. While this addresses an overly simplistic understanding of ‘global warming,’ (adding particles would enhance the greenhouse effect, if anything,) in the world of Snowpiercer, the cooling agents actually work. In fact, they completely freeze the Earth. The final survivors of humanity exist on a train, reputedly the only shelter designed to withstand the freezing temperatures outside. The train runs nonstop on a track that spans all of the Earth’s continents. Over the course of eighteen years, the original passenger assignments– first class, economy class and stowaways– become abstracted into a brutal caste system. The first class passengers live in a steampunk wonderland of galleria cars, beauty salons, mini mall arcades, swimming pools, greenhouses and aquariums. They worship the train’s inventor and unseen tyrant, Wilford, and the ‘immortal engine’ he tends. The economy passengers are barely seen (perhaps they’ve become the soldier class that oppresses the residents of the tail section?) The tail enders live in a windowless slum in the back, abused and barely subsisting on grotesque, gelatinous protein blocks. People are harvested for mysterious uses by the first class passengers, never to be seen in the tail again. The story follows the uprising of these passengers, who break through to the front of the train, witnessing the extravaganza car by car. Their forward movement mirrors a reel of film itself, the protagonists jumping from cell to cell, from set-piece to set-piece. Snowpiercer gets to have its cake and eat it too, decrying the excesses of the wealthy while relishing them. Along these lines, its allegories sound smart on paper, yet bamboozle more than they enlighten.

The fun of the film lies in its rigorous application of the rules of the childhood ‘hot lava’ game, where the threat of ‘instant death’ confines pretend-play to a bed or jungle gym, which can then be re-imagined into a self-sufficient world. It also borrows from the nightmarish joys of Juan José Arreola’s The Switchman, an absurdist satire of the Mexican rail system from 1952. The Switchman smartly excuses itself of having a plot, and revels in its own bizarro world-building. Snowpiercer would have been a better film if it had done the same, perhaps witnessing the train through the eyes of the kidnapped children or violinist, spirited away into the forbidden first-class cars, than from the vantage of the ambitious revolutionary who forces his way into them. Snowpiercer-the-film stems from Snowpiercer-the-comic, yes, but as Ng Suat Tong shows in his earlier essay, Curtis’ rebellion dramatically diverges from Proloff’s misanthropic death-drive, and the film’s uprising is a invention of the director, Bong Joon Ho. Bong follows the accepted Hollywood wisdom that an epic setting deserves an epic storyline, yet to prioritize the absurdity and delicious visuals, this storyline must be kept as a barebones as possible. In the words of Jones of the Jones boys, commenting on Suat’s piece, “The script’s role in an action movie is to get the hell out of the way, and stay there.” I’d argue that Snowpiercer is a rather sloppy, if inventive, action movie: the choreography is unclear, the chain of action and reactions extremely garbled. Its not the action that pushes the script out of the way, but the insistence on dreamlike spectacle. The point is not the axe-fight, but that everyone pauses to celebrate New Years in the middle of it.

The characters rehash the most generic ‘motley band of heroes’ tropes. A bland, angst ridden woodsman named Curtis leads the revolt. Curtis is guided by Gilliam, aka Gandalf/Trotsky, the aged leader of the tail section, and followed around by an eager younger-brother figure, Edgar, who chiefly serves to open up giant plot holes. (He has an Irish accent and misses eating steak, yet is an orphan raised in the tail section from infancy.) Curtis’ plan relies on a enigmatic, manic Korean engineer, long imprisoned in a jail car, who tows along his doll-like and inexplicably psychic daughter, Yona, (essentially River from Firefly.)* The engineer knows how to open the doors between cars, but must be bribed with drugs. We’ve got a gutsy black mother, and a mute, ethnic, martial arts kid. Bong likely suspected that these empty shells couldn’t generate much emotional investment on their own, so he falls back on trite parent-and-child melodrama. Cue the wistful soliloquys of grown-up orphans, and the desperate plight of the parents of the kidnapped children.

When Curtis finally reaches Wilford in the final car, the inventor breaks and tempts him with a bland, 50s caricature of fatherhood, calling Curtis “My boy,” and promising to make Curtis heir to his hallowed position. This exchange contains the pessimistic, political twist so critically beloved. Gilliam and Wilford turn out to be co-conspirators, encouraging tail-end rebellions so as to ‘decrease the surplus population.’ This twist, and its corresponding political allegory, seems to be the one time where Bong really cares about the storyline, (it is his invention, after all.) Bong even leads the audience away from this suspicion early on, when Gilliam requests Wilford’s minister to relay the message that he and Wilford “need to talk.” Wilford’s sneering, flippant report of his and Gilliam’s intimacy, especially considering the inhumane conditions Gilliam suffered as part of the tail class, undermines the reveal. Wilford must still be lying on some level, as Bong never connects why Gilliam would endure what he did, and care for the tail enders as he did, under such false pretenses. It’s a twist alright, crossed off the list of what a good action movie plot should accomplish, but one that’s hardly believable. It counts as political allegory, but one deeply out of touch with its own humanity.

The character’s motivations and the political allegory must be dropped whenever they threaten to overshadow the dream-logic and dream-visuals themselves. For example, the tail-section people talk a lot about food, a basic necessity of which they are almost deprived. The revelation that their protein blocks are made of bugs is mined for horror, and ‘steak’ becomes a running symbol. When they first make it into the vacated economy class cars, a rebel protests that the residents had abandoned their food “on the table.” Most horrifically, Curtis confesses that in the first month onboard the Snowpiercer, the stowaways came so close to starving that they resorted to predatorily cannibalism– not just eating deceased humans, but hunting each other for food. Hunger, and outrage over hunger, is a useful and efficient way to flesh out these characters as oppressed and desperate people. Yet, this essential motivation must be dropped where it distracts from the film’s absurdist agenda. After sustaining massive losses of their people in battle, a small group of rebels finally makes it into the first-class section, and into a marvelous aquarium. At the end of the aquarium sits a sushi bar. The rebels sit down and begin to have sushi, which is prepared by a man in African dress. There’s no griping about the elitist luxury, the wait, the small portions. Tanya, the black woman, makes a quick jibe about their not being enough fish to have sushi all the time, but there’s no urgency in their hunger, or even to keep moving ahead. This is one of the strongest sequences of the film, where the dream logic completely dominates the action, and the disposability of the storytelling becomes most transparent. Its easy to miss Minister Mason’s explanation of the aquarium as a closed ecosystem, “where the number of individual units must be closely, precisely, controlled,” later reprised by Wilford in half-explaining why certain amounts of tail end people must be periodically slaughtered.

Deliberate absurdity, particularly in high budget films, communicates a kind of intelligence. The director and crew are “in” on the artificiality, the fictionality, the letter-box. They enjoy interrupting the audience members, who are busy putting together the pieces to understand what’s going on. Audiences enjoy these interruptions because they are surprising, and because it connects the audience and author, who can “secretly” recognize each other. (As long as the audience privileges aesthetic distance over emotional absorption in a film, something that is statistically more prevalent with the wealthy, and consciously resisted in working class audiences. Pierre Bourdieu covers this phenomena in his book, Distinction.) While absurdity, irrationality, and surreality are present in popular culture, they debuted as high brow developments in art and literature, and still carry a kind of ‘legitimizing’ earmark. “This action movie is smart, because it is so dream-like,” for example.

Frank Kermode, a scholar devoted to reading between the lines of popular and religious texts, finds high-brow literature to be less rife for analysis because of its intentional irrationality. ‘Weirdness’ arrives in the strictly popular text by accident, seeping through routine hackwork and cliché, and exposing period or authorial concerns. This weirdness often comes in the form of repetition and/or fetishization of inessential details or descriptions, or of strange sequences that have nothing to do with the plot, (called BLAMs on TV Tropes.) High-brow authors deliberately insert weirdness, largely to avert or disrupt literary formulas. Kermode writes that in high-brow literature, “there is much more material that is less manifestly under the control of authority, less easily subordinated to ‘clearness and effect’ more palpably the enemy of order, of interpretative consensus, of message.”

Bong repeatedly prioritizes surreality and effect over message and order in Snowpiercer, positioning it in Kermode’s reasoning as a high-brow text intended to be appreciated from a critical distance, (but still enjoyed for its tittilating battle scenes.) Yet Snowpiercer is not without its symptomatic fixations. Notably, it betrays a fascination with amputation. Just before Curtis meets Wilford, he confesses that the tail-enders initially cannibalized each other to survive, and he hates himself because he knows “that babies taste best.” Curtis killed a woman for a baby, but before he could eat it, he was stopped by Gilliam, who cut off his arm for Curtis to eat instead. “And then one by one, other people in the tail section started cutting off arms and legs and offering them. It was like a miracle. And I wanted to. I tried, it’s… A month later, Wilford’s soldiers brought those protein blocks. We’ve been eatin’ that shit ever since.”

Snowpiercer purports that the tail section became a kind of dystopic utopia, a situation so horrible it brought out ultimate selflessness. Gilliam’s response is the Eucharist made real, and was not only presumably repeated with his leg, but by a whole assembly of amputated elders, who limp notably in the film’s present on crutches. When Gilliam appoints Curtis as his successor, Curtis struggles, replying, “How can I lead if I have two good arms?” Gilliam then reveals the scar from when Curtis ‘tried.’ Curtis’ character arc isn’t completed until he loses his arm between the gears of the engine, in order to rescue a kidnapped child. As if released from his earthly limitations, he then instinctively sacrifices themselves to save Yona and the child from a fiery explosion.

The obsession with amputation is not limited to Curtis’ realization. When two children are kidnapped at the outset, a father lurches out in rage and throws his shoe at an elite. In punishment, his arm is shoved outside of the train for seven minutes, and then pulverized by a sledgehammer. In the opening scenes of the film, an old man is also abducted by soldiers to play violin for the first class. At first he volunteers, thinking that he and his wife, another violinist, will both be able to go. A soldier demands, “Show me your hands… you follow me. Leave your belongings. We just need your hands.” The man, realizing he must go without his wife, asks, “Not both?” The soldier sneers, “Yes, both hands.” When the man resists, the soldiers respond by knocking the woman unconscious, and crushing her exposed hand underfoot.

The lower classes have long been equated with their hands and manual labor. Its worth noting that the children are kidnapped because they are small enough to fit inside the train engine and remove grease by hand. According to Bourdieu’s ethnography of France in the 1960s, Distinction, this symbolism is understood at all levels of society, but, “At higher levels in the social hierarchy, the remarks become increasingly abstract, with (other people’s) hands, labour and old age functioning as allegories or symbols which serve as pretexts for general reflections on general problems.” When shown a picture of an old woman’s gnarled hands, working class respondents tended to respond to the picture intimately albeit conventionally, considering and personifying the photographed person, and the work she did. The middle class respondents are the first to routinely overlay ethical virtues and aesthetic comparisons onto this, and the highest classes tend to ‘amputate’ the woman entirely, with responses like “‘These two hands unquestionable evoke a poor and unhappy old age.’ (teacher, provinces.)” The upper classes also have a tendency to make highly aestheticizing references, such as in this representative remark from an engineer in Paris: “I find this a very beautiful photograph. Its the very symbol of toil. It puts me in mind of Flaubert’s old servant-woman… That woman’s gesture, at once very humble… It’s terrible that work and poverty are so deforming.” Its worth noting that Bourdieu’s class system is based more on educational level and inherited capital than earned capital, as these are not tendencies based as much on wealth as on the ability (both learned and afforded) to live abstractly.

Conflating the labor class with hands is so established that it can be found within Wikipedia’s basic definition of ‘synecdoche.’ This synecdoche also consists of the message and opening epigram of Metropolis, perhaps the most canonical caste-system dystopic film, when it says, “There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.” Snowpiercer reiterates this in a baser, more pessimistic form, in the Minister’s speech during a torture demonstration:

“Would you wear a shoe on your head? Of course you wouldn’t wear a shoe on your head. A shoe doesn’t belong on your head. A shoe belongs on your foot. A hat belongs on your head. I am a hat, you are a shoe. I belong on the head, you belong on the foot. Yes? So it is. In the beginning, order was prescribed by your ticket. First class, economy, and free-loaders, like you … Each in its own particular, preordained position. So it is. Now, as in the beginning, I belong to the front. You belong to the tail. When the foot seeks the place of the head, a sacred line is crossed. Know your place. Be your place. Be a shoe.”

If Bong were simply interested in amputations, visually or conceptually, they might appear more frequently in the graphic battle scenes. Instead, they are explicitly connected to anxieties about the tail end people, particularly in their functioning either as leaders or workers. Also, while the amputations discussed or shown on-screen almost exclusively pertain to arms and hands, Snowpiercer alters the standard synecdoche, assigning the base class to feet. More than that, the relationship of the elite and lower classes is further abstracted to clothing from anatomy, as if the parts of humanity no longer constituted the body of humankind, but served a greater reality that could exist without them. In Snowpiercer, a train’s engine is abstracted into a god, and the caste system into a holy order. Perhaps the greater reality is the train, which people serve but do not constitute. Perhaps it is abstracted Order itself.

In Snowpiercer, the lowest class is no longer a labor class. That may provide one answer to these questions. Hands work. Unlike Metropolis, or the grand body of film dystopias that followed, the tail enders are not shown toiling in factories or industrial wastelands. They are explicitly a welfare class. Only the kidnapped children have jobs maintaining the train, but they are slaves, and the one mentioned janitor died seventeen years ago. The tail enders did not have a fare when they boarded, and by the accepted logic of train travel, can be kicked off at any time. The fact that they aren’t is then an act of charity. The fact that the elites manufacture and provide them with food and water becomes an act of charity.

The tail enders can decry the insanity of prejudice and poverty in a post apocalyptic world, but the problem is, reality has been replaced with an insane, man-made system where economic class is not arbitrary. The rebels rarely appeal to concepts of ‘justice,’ or ‘human rights.’ They know their treatment is despicable, but their ability to express why, or imagine an alternative social order, has shrunk with their horizons. The tail enders never ask a question that Bong never has to answer– what more is demanded of Wilford and the elite passengers, who have ‘legitimate’ passage on this train? As long as they keep the tail-enders alive, they could be said to do more than enough. The protection of ‘a closed ecosystem’ where the stowaways are essentially parasites, make horrific, horrible sense. By avoiding the consequences of this logic, Bong made a movie that only falsely champions the human spirit. In truth, Snowpiercer participates in the same conservative media effort to reconfigure the ‘labor class’ into a ‘welfare class,’ and redefining social services into ‘entitlements.’

On a gut level, Bong may be uneasy with the severing of labor from the ‘labor class,’ although I won’t try to assume the level of his involvement or awareness of American politics or journalism. Amputation is a violent and disturbing image, and Bong does not shy away from its horror. It’s a fitting symbol, especially considering that conservative pundits sever labor from the labor class to drum up support and engagement from their political base, at the expense of real lives. Propoganda is entertainment. When Wilford discusses his perspective of the uprisings, he judges them based on their entertainment value, and the value of entertainment in quieting the masses. He says to Curtis, “We need to maintain a proper balance of anxiety and fear, chaos and horror, in order to keep life going. And if we don’t have that, we need to invent it. In that sense, the Great Curtis Revolution you invented was truly a masterpiece.” A military class seems like an unnecessary expense, unless it’s to give the paying passengers a living video game. All the first class passengers do is entertain themselves. The satire isn’t toothless, and the victimized tail-end have real-life counterparts in the working class. Still, the question stands– the logic that the tail-enders are parasites is never confronted, and thus never rebutted. The film envisions social service as dehumanizing, and the idleness of the base class as a given in an entertainment-based society. A labor-less lower class is the one great absurdity left unexplored. Violent entertainment may be an opiate, but the film itself is complicit in it. Which is fitting for a high-brow treatment of an indulgent action premise, which sidelines the struggles of oppressed people for frivolous absurdities.

Natural Snow Buildings

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Dana Schechter

This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of French duo Natural Snow Buildings. In fact, a lot of people haven’t. Stylistically, their music isn’t what you’d call the most “popular”
of genres, but even for those whose musical tastes fall far from center, the band is still largely unknown, and your average modern music fan – of any genre – would likely be surprised at the lack of information available about them.

Sometimes tagged as “Experimental Psychedelic Folk,” “Psych-Drone,” “Experimental,” “Acid Folk”, etc, Natural Snow Buildings defy simple classification. I think it sounds like fire and alchemy, like the churning of bones and rocks and sinew. Many of their strongest pieces are deeply repetitive, trance–inducing, and visual in an organic, hallucinatory way. Sonically they use texture, noise, drone, and melody in an almost raga-like form, utilizing instruments like guitars, percussion, woodwinds, strings, and any number of other mysterious sound-making devices. Some pieces are largely instrumental – others use vocals front and center. Individual songs sometimes reach well past the 20–, 30–, even 40– minute mark, allowing each song to grow and expand, to gain density and substance until the apex is churning and spinning, opaque, frenzied. Other works are delicate, rippling, and infused with a childlike fragility. It’s like watching wild nature growing in slow motion, sometimes violently, sometimes so gently it seems to stretch on for an eternity.

Despite the band’s impressive creative output – almost 40 albums, EPs, limited edition cassettes, compilations, and CDs – the vastness of Natural Snow Buildings’ discography lies in stark contrast to what we know about them personally, which reveals nothing about their inner workings. Perhaps this is by design: when you can’t talk about the artist, there is only the work itself to consider. Both the story and the music of Natural Snow Buildings are quite mysterious; you are required to fill in the blanks and make it your own. While I wholeheartedly respect (and envy) their decision to keep matters private, admittedly I too would like to know more about them. As humans we are by nature curious about the things we like; we define ourselves in part by the choices we make and our understanding of how things work. In this case, the lack of information itself is intriguing and becomes the story, almost mythically so. In 2008, they made over ten albums. How can this be possible?

Of the band members, we do know a few facts: the project consists of two people, one male and one female, Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte, respectively, both from France. They met in 1997 at university in Paris and began working together musically in 1998. In 2004 they relocated to Vitré (Brittany), in northwestern France, where they still live. In addition to working as a duo, both members have released solo works: Gularte’s under the name Isengrind; Mehdi’s under the moniker Twinsistermoon. The recordings are made at home, and their lo-fi nature further lends the sensation that we’re way beyond eras or earthly planes. Solange does the artwork for their releases, and her visions are as odd and gorgeous as the music itself, and a crucial part of each release. In earlier years, many of the releases were handmade and produced in very limited quantities (sometimes as few as fifteen copies), but over time the bands’ work has been reissued on established independent labels, helping bring their work to a somewhat larger audience.

2009’s triple LP “Shadow Kingdom” came out on the UK label Blackest Rainbow, and in 2013 Ba Da Bing reissued three records: the 2008 self-release, “Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches,” 2009’s “Daughter of Darkness,” and 2008’s “The Snowbringer Cult,” a 3X LP release which is in fact one solo record from each member, and one record as the duo. However, the bands’ most recent release – 2014’s “The Night Country” – is yet again a self-release.

In 2013, someone posted a large portion of the band’s music on YouTube for free (hopefully with the band’s approval). Here we can take our time exploring a large part of their catalog, as each album is provided in full with individual tracks indexed. The playlist starts with more recent releases and reaches back to 1999. Listening to it all can be a challenge, and sometimes exhausting. Some of the work is stronger than others, but that’s truly a matter of taste, as there’s a deep consistency in the music’s transformative and immersive nature.

We don’t know what makes these people tick, and why they choose to stay under the radar, but it doesn’t really matter. This is merely a personal feeling, but keeping to yourself helps your priorities remain intact, if making work on your own terms is more important than working towards a traditional, “successful” career. If an artist is released from the task of promoting their career, they have bypassed many of the distractions that damage focus, which runs the risk that the work (in quality, content, and output) may suffer. I truly don’t know if this is what’s behind the band’s ideals, but if this idea figures in at all, it’d make sense. These days, a great many independent artists spend a large part of their time on DIY efforts (via PR, social media, touring) to help expand awareness about their work, and increasingly less time on creating the music which inspired them in the first place.

Why do we want to know more and more about the people and the details when we love their work? Does it bring us closer to them, or is it a fluke, a mirage? We all face a lot of distractions in our daily lives, so let’s take pause. Sometimes, enjoying something in its purest form seems to be more than enough.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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