Prejudice and Exploitation

Posted on March 25, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

The most famous attack by a trans person on a woman in a bathroom occurred in 1960. Norman Bates, dressed as his mother, murdered Marion Crane in the shower.

That didn’t really happen of course. There aren’t any real incidents of trans women assaulting people in the bathroom. There’s only fictions—fictions which, as Psycho demonstrates, go back a long time.

The fiction is based, supposedly, in a need to protect women. North Carolina legislators insist that women are at risk from deceptive, sneaky rapist men in female garb. Psycho, though, suggests that it’s that narrative itself that’s deceptive. Hitchcock’s film famously leers at Marion, from its opening dramatic shot from the city skyline and into her apartment to view her afternoon tryst, all the way to the moment when Norman peeks at her undressing in her apartment through the hole in the office wall. The thrusting, stabbing shower scene is the climax of an overheated fantasy; voyeurism becomes imagination becomes sex becomes violence. Marion, the thief, the tease, gets what she deserves at the business end of the male gaze.

The brilliance of Psycho is that that male gaze isn’t male; Norman’s murderous impulses are because he’s a woman, not a man. The violence against women is blamed on femininity; a real man would not stare at Marion like that and then do what Norman does. Norman kills, but only because he’s really his mother. Women commit violence against women. They bring it on themselves.

The film itself claims that none of this has anything to do with trans people. The psychiatrist at the film’s conclusion carefully explains that Norman is not a real transvestite.But as Jos Truitt explains in her brilliant analysis of the Psycho-indebted Silence of the Lambs, the refusal to let Bill or Norman define their own gender identity is part and parcel of transphobia and transmisogyny. Psychiatrists and psychologists and scientists always take it upon themselves to decide who gets to be really trans, who gets to really be a woman, and who gets to really be a man. Bill and Norman are such deceivers that they deceive themselves; they are so twisted and monstrous they cannot even identify themselves. Only the objective observers—the legislators, the scientists, and alas, often, the feminist theorists—really know who is who and what is what. Norman identifies as a woman; woman are irrational and untrustworthy; therefore Norman is not really in a position to know whether she’s a woman, and is instead a man. Misogyny denies women the ability to claim their own identity. Only men, or femininity-rejecting TERFs, can do that for them.

Psycho isn’t real. Its hatred is directed at characters, not people; no actual women were harmed in the making of this film (as opposed to in The Birds.Psycho
is all in good fun—and it is fun. Sadistic fantasies are exciting and sexy; blaming women for what you want to do to them is clever and exhilarating; defining other people, bending them to your own prejudices and congratulating yourself on your perspicacity, is godlike and satisfying. The legislators in North Carolina get to revel in their fantasies of abusing women, while self-righteously saying the women they’re abusing are the abusers.

Prejudice functions as an exploitation film. People sometimes hate because they’re afraid, or because they’re misguided, or because there’s something to be gained politically. But they also hate, like Hitchcock, because hurting people is fun. There’s a rush in peeping into that secret space, and imagining, and committing, all those filthy acts in the name of someone else.

Internetsploitation

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on the Dissolve.
__________

Uwantme2killhim?
Director: Andrew Douglas (NR, 92 min.)
Screenwriter: Mike Walden
Cast: Jamie Blackley, Toby Regbo, Joanne Froggatt,
Distributor: Tribeca Films
Rating: 1.5 stars

Uwantme2killhim? opens with a police interrogation; Inspector Sarah Clayton (Joanne Froggatt) questions high school-aged boy Mark (Jamie Blackley) about why he stabbed his friend John (Toby Regbo). The scene is functional — it’s a teaser, drawing the audience in with the promise of excitement, blood, scandal, and mystery. But it’s also thematic, framing Mark as a clinical issue to be solved. He is presented, first of all, as deviant, and the rest of the film is devoted to investigating the root of the deviance. Mark isn’t, primarily, a person. He’s a scandal — an occasion for the audience to express both horrified titillation and titillated horror.

In short, this is an exploitation film. Where Anita, the Swedish Nymphet focused on the problem of “nymphomaia” and Reefer Madness focused on the problem of marijuana, the updated occasion for moral panic is the internet. Mark is a healthy, charismatic young British lad, good at football, popular with the girls (one of whom removes her shirt for him and the camera less than 10 minutes in — just in case there was any doubt about that exploitation film designation.) But he is obsessed with online chat partner Rachel (Jaime Winstone) — an obsession that quickly turns dark and then weird and then weirder. Rachel’s abusive boyfriend threatens Mark online, then murders Rachel…and then MI5 gets involved (online too, of course.)

All these internet interactions are presented as oddly hyper-real melodrama. Mark and his interlocutors talk out loud as they type, and the camera switches back and forth between them, so that, instead of one guy staring at the screen, you get a doubled drama. Mingus Johnston as the evil boyfriend, Kevin McNeil, is particularly over the top; mugging and snarling like a parody gangster. But MI5 agent Janet (Liz White) is also coldly ridiculous, somewhere between bland mannequin and buttoned up queen bitch noir temptress.

Offline, the main relationship of the film is between Mark and John, Rachel’s bullied brother. In its focus on this close, intimate, confused bond between two young people, not to mention in its based-on-a-true-story pedigree, uwantme2killhim? recalls Heavenly Creatures. But where Peter Jackson was fascinated with his female protagonists’ relationship first and the crime as an outgrowth of that, uwantme2killhim? doesn’t much care about how the boys feel about each other. Indeed, the mechanics of the film are devoted almost entirely to obscuring their interactions. Ostensibly this is because Mark doesn’t himself understand the relationship. But really, it seems like the confusion is meant to create plot surprises for their own sake. As in an Agatha Christie novel, the investigation must end with a twist — and, as with Agatha Christie, information is ruthlessly manipulated, without regard to character or probability in the interest of the final gasp of revelation.

Christie’s books make little pretense of being anything other than puzzles; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd doesn’t have any particular moral lesson besides “murder is wrong,” which presumably most readers knew going in. uwantme2killhim?, though, it trying for more than ingenuity. It’s trying, like an afterschool special, to tell us about the internet, about teen loneliness, about youth today. The pretense of concern combined with the cynical manipulation of the plot for cheap thrills is both transparently hypocritical and broadly repulsive. Too calculated for campy exploitation fun, it settles instead for the dreariness of shocked revelation, a kind of tabloid journalism on screen.

Interview with a Superhero?

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

“A lot of times your neighborhood, your town, your city is being invaded by people who you think are going to hurt your family, your society,” he says. “Well, then you have to act, because the government isn’t going to come help you.”

And there’s the premise of almost every superhero story ever written. Only the speaker isn’t from a comic book. He’s from Iguala, Mexico. Reporter E. Eduardo Castillo interviewed him for the Associated Press late last year (the article is here). “He would appear on camera wearing a ski mask,” explains Castillo, “and his voice would be distorted.” I can’t help but hear Stephen Amell’s distorted voice on Arrow. The set-up also reminds me of the Tom Bissell short story “My Interview with the Avenger” that appeared in the superhero issue of VQR a few years back (that’s Gary Panter’s drawing from the issue above).

Instead of a utility belt, Castillo’s interviewee “wears a bag with a strap over his chest in which he carries several walkie-talkies and cell phones, one of which he used to take calls and issue orders.” Instead of superpowers, “he usually carries a .38-caliber pistol and an AK-47 assault rifle.” He’s a killer—a trait that might put him in the same league as the Punisher or Steve Ditko’s The Question.

Here are more excerpts from Castillo’s article:

In recent years, residents of a number of towns and cities have taken up arms to protect themselves against drug cartels. “I can’t say I’m a vigilante,” says the killer, “but I am part of a group that protects people, an autonomous group of people who protect their town, their people.”

He says no one forced him to join his organization. His parents and siblings don’t know what he does. He raises cattle for a living. He isn’t married and has no children. Although he would like to have a family, he knows his future is uncertain. “I don’t really see anything,” he said. “I don’t think you can make plans for the future, because you don’t know what will happen tomorrow.”

“It’s not a pretty life,” he says. Life in an area torn by drug disputes is rarely pretty.

The killer has a grade-school education. He wanted to continue studying, but when he was a child there was no middle school in his town. “I would have liked to learn languages … to travel to other places or other countries. I would have liked that,” he said.

He acknowledges that what he does is illegal. He recognizes he would be punished if caught by the authorities. “For them, these (killings) are not justifiable under the laws we have, but my conscience – how can I put this – this is something that I can justify, because I am defending my family.”

He sometimes feels sorry about the work he does but has no regrets, he says, because he is providing a kind of public service, defending his community from outsiders.

If you take a standard definition of a superhero—I like Pete Coogan’s—Castillo’s interviewee seems to hit the mark. He uses his specialized skills to conduct a selfless, pro-social mission. Plus Castillo, like his reporter counterparts in so many comic book tales, provides his interviewee with a codename: The Killer. Though even with the mask, his “jeans and a camouflage T-shirt” aren’t your standard superhero costume, but he does wear a mission-defining iconic symbol on his forehead, the preferred placement before Joe Shuster drew an “S” on Superman’s chest. Castillo writes:

He wore a baseball cap with a badge bearing the face of Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and “prisoner 3578” – Guzman’s inmate number before he escaped through a tunnel from Mexico’s maximum-security prison in July, cementing his image as a folk hero.

Robin Hood was an outlaw folk hero too, but here things get a lot more complicated. Castillo’s killer works for a drug cartel.

Federal authorities told the AP that several drug gangs in Guerrero, including those that operate on the Costa Grande, act as self-defense groups to generate support from local residents.

“Of all the bad lot,” the killer said, Guzman “seems to be the least bad.”

In several cases, authorities have claimed these vigilantes are allied with rival gangs, and pass themselves off as self-defense groups to gain greater legitimacy.

He says he is defending his people against the violence of other cartels. Things would be much worse if rivals took over.

A rival gang, “would do worse damage.”

Superheroes tend to be more idealistic than that, but if the killer is looking at the big picture—like Ozymandias in Watchmen—is he still one of the pragmatic good guys? Since “violence spikes when cartels are fighting each other for control of territory,” is he making his community safer the only way he can?

Unfortunately, that way makes him “a man who kidnaps, tortures and kills for a drug cartel.”

The killer says he ‘disappeared’ a man for the first time at age 20. Nine years later, he says, he has eliminated 30 people – maybe three in error.

There are many reasons people are disappeared, the killer says. It may be for belonging to a rival gang, or for giving information to one. If a person is considered a security risk for any reason, he may be disappeared. Some are kidnapped for ransom, though he says he does not do this.

In fact, he maintains his own sense of morality in a variety of ways.

Some in his circumstances use drugs, but he says he doesn’t. “When people are on drugs, they’re not really themselves,” he says. “They lose control, their judgment.”

Unlike others, he says, he has standards: He doesn’t kill women or children. He doesn’t make his victims dig their own graves.

He doesn’t consider himself a drug trafficker or a professional killer, although he is paid for disappearing people. He does not see himself as bad.

He sometimes feels sorry about the work he does but has no regrets.

The problem is that people under torture sometimes admit to things that are not true: “They do it in hope that you will stop hurting them. They think it’s a way to get out of the situation.”

That may have happened to him three times, he says, leading him to kill the wrong men.

While Castillo’s interviewee provides a grotesque study in rationalization and self-deception, I’m equally disturbed by how well his tale parallels the tropes of superheroism and what those parallels suggest about the popularity of a genre about violent men who break the law while serving what they call the greater good.

(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

Who Cries When Lesser Rock Gods Die?

Posted on March 22, 2016 by Ben Saunders

Middle-aged white guys like me, I guess.

Several times in the past week I have found myself ruminating on Keith Emerson’s suicide.

It’s easy enough just to shrug and move on when an aging has-been rock star offs himself. The news cycle is so full of tragedy and madness that Emerson’s death could hardly be expected to register as more than a blip for anyone who was not a member of his shrinking fanbase.

Nevertheless, I find the thought of this once quite famous 71 year old shooting himself while alone in his home — apparently plagued by fears about his deteriorating ability to play — terribly sad and haunting. And learning that he had struggled with substance abuse — while no surprise for a 1970s era rock star — made this lonely, despairing death seem all the sadder. It set me pondering the vicissitudes of fame and taste, and the human cost of celebrity culture, and all that stuff …

And while I hadn’t actually sat down and played an ELP record in 20 years, I guess I have to admit — and it is a confession, given the degree to which ELP have been condemned by the critics — I have to admit that I am feeling all this because I was indeed once a fan of ELP.

When I was fifteen, like all my friends I wanted to be a rock star when I grew up. But I didn’t have the nerve to sing, my parents would never tolerate the drums, and everyone already seemed to play guitar.

So I became a nerdy keyboard player.

But keyboards seemed to be the one role you could have in a band that wasn’t automatically cool. I mean, when slapping became a thing, suddenly even bass players were cooler than keyboard players.

And looking back in pop history for a keys player that commanded the kind of admiration that the other rock gods inspired — well, there weren’t many. I now regard Jerry Lee Lewis as pretty damned awesome, but at the time, in the 1980s, it was too much like ancient history. Ray Manzarek of The Doors would get some props. But everyone knew who the sexy one in that band really was. (It didn’t help that Manzarek always struck me as a self-mythologizing bullshitter of epic proportions whenever he gave an interview.) And there were amazing jazz players, of course. But jazz was by comparison a niche interest, commanding none of the attention of rock and pop among my high school cohort.

And then there was Keith Emerson. A crazy showman with bags of talent — the “Jimi Hendrix of the keys”! Most people I knew did not give a crap about ELP in the early 80s, either, of course. But at some point I had caught a TV re-broadcast of a gig from the early 70s and was impressed. Wowed, even.

So this week I went back and had a look at some of that old footage. Here’s one of the moments I vividly remember from that old TV show — two minutes of inspired silliness.

Today, the antics with the daggers and the other forms of Hammond abuse strike me a bit differently. I took it all dead seriously when I was fifteen, in a way I just can’t now. But it still strikes me as a fascinating piece of rock theatre, falling somewhere between Spinal Tap (the scene where Nigel Tuffnell plays his guitar with a violin comes to mind) and Townshend smashing his SG, or Hendrix sacrificing his Strat at Monterey. It’s ridiculous — utterly — watching Emerson drag that massive bit of furniture around. But part of me still finds it awesome. Maybe it’s even slightly camp, in Sontag’s sense of the term — two contradictory things at once, both sublime and ridiculous!

Lost in all the theatrics, though, is the fact that this was a musician of great skill, able to play jazz and classical stylings with real fluidity — admired by such giants such as Oscar Peterson, and with a left hand technique that matches any concert pianist.

Just check out the first few minutes of this clip for an example of how dexterous and delightful his playing could be.

So … talent and showmanship … and yet, is the verdict ever since punk really true? Do ELP deserve their bad rep for rock excess, pretention and pointlessness? Were they really, frankly, just a bit shit?

It seems true that a lot of the material has aged badly.

But, but … at it’s best, I find there is still something in ELP for me. Something about the alchemy involved when those three individuals manage collectively to overcome their musical egotism just long enough to make an extraordinary thing. Something that does not sound quite like anything else. Something capable — if I let it — of inducing in me an experience close to rapture.

Witness: my single favorite ELP track:

The link is to the whole album — but just let the first track play. It’s called “The Barbarian” (I know, I know) and it’s an instrumental mini-epic, in three sections, all of which I find absurdly delightful. There’s the lumbering bass and Hammond of the first sequence, which closes out with a really cool little “call and response” part between the keyboards on one side and drums and bass on the other; then there’s the delicate jazzical Chopin-lite mid-section, with some lovely right hand flourishes from Emerson, and breathlessly rapid brushwork from Palmer; and then a third section that recapitulates the opening before taking off on the mad-as-fuck frenzy of the final 40 seconds.

I’d never heard anything like this when I first encountered it. I still can’t think of any thing else in the pop world that it resembles.

Critics are unkind. Hipsters are dismissive. And the crime of tastelessness was certainly one that ELP committed again and again.

But I think that sometimes they were actually pretty bloody good.

The Utility of Dimension

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Donovan Grant

When aspiring to seek racial harmony through media, a little bit seems to go a long way. Instead of adding one black character to a film’s cast, add two. It does not matter that in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Anthony Mackie’s Falcon never interacts with Don Cheadle’s War Machine, as they’re both appearing in the same scene. Captain America: The Winter Soldier went the extra mile by having Mackie’s Falcon and Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury exchange two scenes of dialogue. The fact that their characters’ personal investment centers on white Steve Rogers should not erase the fact that they are two black men interacting with each other, for however briefly.

But it can, and it does. Most narratives in film or television are willing to show some degree of racial representation, but generally speaking the central focus of said narratives tend to be on other things. This is where stereotypes bleed in, and the marker of authentic representation becomes blurred. Too often the black hero becomes a minstrel. As a result, POC tend to examine media closely for authenticity and veracity, often with a good degree of skepticism.

The quest for authenticity reaches great heights in the FX miniseries American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson. Based on the book “The Run of His Life: the People vs. OJ Simpson” by Jeffery Toobin, the series’ inherent attraction is that it retells one of the most famous murder trials in American history. American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson has thus far enjoyed critical success due in no small part to its near-slavish recreation and theatrical swelling of the facts and events of the case. The actors (headed up by a string of A-list talent including Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran and Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark) have arrested viewers with their multidimensional and powerful performances.

The show’s fifth episode “The Race Card” focuses, as the title suggests, on the racial tensions that squeezed the OJ trial so firmly. Written by Joe Robert Cole and directed by John Singleton, much of the focus of racial anxiety centers on Prosecutor Chris Darden (played by Sterling K. Brown) and his nightmarish experiences in going up against the defense team led by Johnnie Cochran. The tone is set by an opening scene in which Cochran is harassed by police while driving his daughters to dinner (he lectures his children not to use the word “nigger” when asked if he was called that by the policeman).

Cole and Singleton’s script sympathizes with Darden, beginning with a press event for Cochran in which he argues that the inclusion of Darden (who is African-American) on the prosecution is a cynical example of tokenism. As the trial begins, Darden makes a case to the court that the use of racial epithets by LAPD officer Mark Furman should be deemed inadmissible so as to not inflame passions of the majorly black jury. Cochran, passionately, responds by accusing Darden of belittling the morality and emotional capacity of African Americans, reminding the court that they “live with offensive looks, offensive words, offensive treatment every day.” “Who are any of us to testify as an expert as to what words black people can or cannot handle?!” It’s a roundhouse blow to the prosecution, particularly to Darden as Cochran turns back to his seat and whispers to him “Nigga please”.

It is here that the episode turns from a recapitulation of a real life court drama into a trial of black identity. The court plans to tour OJ Simpson’s house, so Johnnie Cochran re-styles it as a more recognizably black home, replete with photos of black people and socially conscious artwork such as “The Problem We All Live With”, replacing Simpson’s Patrick Naegel collection and photos of his white golfing friends. Cochran tells OJ that the redecorating will get the mostly black jury on his side, and that it will help to frame the narrative of the trial as a case of police harassment against an innocent black man.

OJ responds “What’re you trying to say about me Johnnie?” before defending his lifestyle, arguing that he earned his wealth himself, and rejecting the idea that he could have done more for the black community. Those who wanted money or aid from him, he says, were just looking for a handout.

Darden’s character is sympathetic. From scenes in which he vents frustration to his parents to his vexation when he tries to explain to Marcia Clark how people downplay their racial bias by being polite, Sterling K. Brown makes the character thoroughly understandable. But Johnnie Cochran, while theatrical and tenacious, also generates inevitable suspicion. The episode presents Cochran telling the other lawyers that their job is to present a better story of what happened on the night of the murders than the prosecution. He also tells Chris Darden that he is in the trial to win – not be professional. Cochran says he believes in Simpson’s innocence, but he comes across as a ruthless individual who is utilizing race to meet his own vindictive ends.

You could perhaps say the same of the show’s producers. The series was developed by writing duo Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who co-produce the show along with Brad Falchuk, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson and Ryan Murphy. All of these creators are white. Though current national polls show that the majority of both white and black Americans believe Simpson probably killed his ex-wife Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, there was a much sharper divide between the races twenty years ago.

The series does not demonize Simpson; it only presents evidence previously recorded or corroborated during the trial. But real-life overwhelming evidence employed by the show helps shape an argument for his guilt. Suddenly racial diversity becomes a tool for furthering a belief held disproportionately by white people who remember the Simpson trial. Thus, every detail and scene of sympathy and humanization of black people is used to advance a narrative congenial to white opinion.

And so one could argue that the use of people of color, and of real world people and events, becomes a sinister Trojan Horse, or at least it can. But must that be the case? Must white creators inevitably infect a work with prejudice? It’s a popular theory held in several arenas, particularly comic books.

The March 2^nd 2016 issue of Spider-Man, starring half-Black half-Hispanic Miles Morales, was met with controversy when writer Brian Michael Bendis had the character express negative emotions towards his ethnicity. In the issue, amateur footage from a fight involving a tattered clothed Spider-Man with his skin exposed results in an online blogger enthusiastically broadcasting that the new hero is a POC. Miles responds with feelings of discomfort and angst.

“I don’t want that.” Miles says.

“Want what?” his friend Ganke asks.

“The qualification.” Miles responds.

The scene has elicited a number of responses from various groups of people ranging from GamerGaters praising the book for its rejection of “SJW” agendas to reviewers criticizing the issue for its attack on female fans. Black Nerd Problems.com wrote that says that the scene “is classic white liberal rhetoric” which “paints a world in which there are no problems…it serves as a tool to maintain the status quo.”

Brian Michael Bendis took to Tumblr to address the negative reaction with a “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type of response.

“As I’ve said many times before I used to work at a major metropolitan newspaper and I learned there that anything you say about politics, religion, sex or race… No matter what you say… Half the people reading it will vehemently disagree. that’s just the way it is.

so some writers either decide they want or don’t want the conversation. sometimes it’s a conscious decision and sometimes it’s an unconscious decision.”

When I first read the scene, I immediately felt uneasy in recognizing that the words of a conflicted black kid were coming from the mind of a white writer. Whether or not the scene was written with any sort of liberality couldn’t escape those indicting facts. I took it upon myself to determine, with my own sense of blackness, if I felt this was or not authentic, and it was. It was not believable to me that a thirteen year old would have a fully rounded concept of his own racial identity juxtaposed with the cultural context of the modern world. Not to suggest that he would be completely unaware, but to me Miles Morales would not be as expressive with his blackness as John Stewart was in his first Green Lantern appearance.

The complexity is self-evident. Each POC will see different kinds of representation with each character, as such defines our individuality. It matters not than Bendis’ own children are African American, or that he created Miles Morales. There will always be that double consciousness that pervades every story and creeps into the minds of every POC.

So what is the solution? It would appear to be having more POC producing more of the consumer’s material. That’s not always a surefire way to make a coherent story, but it is a first step. Those are more valuable than failure because each step towards perfecting representation produces a normalizing effect. It also re-contextualizes missteps taken by white people as cautionary examples to learn from. Perhaps they were not so ruinous if evading their failures gets us to where we need to be. After all, Shaft was created by a white author. But not every black person in America likes Shaft.

No one person knows how to totally represent their minority status. Social constructs do not come with a “How-To” kit – the instructions manual only includes a lifetime of misunderstandings and imbalanced power structures, with varying degrees of oppression from person to person. Integration helps us deconstruct the construct. We need the successes and failures of others and our own internal vetting process to get to where we want to be.

Utilitarian Review 3/19/16

Posted on March 19, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

News

Robert Stanley Martin has decided to move his posts off the site. His chronicle of on sale dates for comics will continue at his new location. (Hopefully we’ll be able to link you there.)

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Andrea Tang on recent films and the yellow peril.

Eleanor Lockhart on trans themes in the work of the Wachowski sisters.

Lindsay George on Watchmen, The Handmaid’s Tale, and anti-dystopia.

Osvaldo Oyola on the Thing, Yancy Street, and superhero ethnic identity.

Me on Old Goats and buddy movies after 65.

Roy T. Cook on Hawkeye and what ASL tells us about the definition of comics.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Establishment I wrote about the film Creative Control and how the male gaze is about staring at men.

At Playboy I wrote about Anita Alvarez’s defeat and scaring US prosecutors straight.

In my first piece for Alternet I wrote about how the police kill disabled people.

At Quartz I wrote about

—how protestors in Chicago were working against Anita Alvarez as well as against Trump.

—Trump, the nadir and how racial progress can be undone.

At the Week I wrote about why Obama’s approval ratings are high.

At the Reader I wrote about a lovely exhibit of paintings on wood panels.

At Splice I wrote about how the protests against Trump got Chait and Yglesias off the fence.

Other Links

Eva Gantz on sex workers at tech conferences, and on why stigmatizing them is bad.

Jos Truitt on the damage caused by the transphobia in Silence of the Lambs.

Yasmin Nair with a great piece on the limits of feminist utopias that exclude women over 40.

Images, Text, ASL, and Hawkeye #19

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Roy T. Cook

A lot has been written about Matt Fraction et alia’s run on Hawkeye. For example, see here for a HU discussion of the early issues, and here for a discussion of its depiction of disability in comics. I want to focus on issue #19, which is often discussed for its depiction of disability. The depiction of disability (or lack thereof) is an extremely important issue in comics studies, and I highly recommend Jose Alaniz’s excellent Death, Disability, and the Superhero (2014) for the reader interested in this topic. But I want to use issue #19 to examine a different issue – one that won’t surprise those of you who have read my other posts on this site. What I want to suggest is that Hawkeye #19 challenges our conception of what a comic book is.

Hawkeye #19 is notable in that much of the communication in the comic occurs via pictorial representation of American Sign Language (ASL) rather than traditional speech balloons. Clint Barton is (once again) deaf due to an injury that occurred in the previous issue, and this is powerfully linked to his hearing impairment as a child – hearing impairment due to his father’s physical abuse. As a result, most of the communication in the comic (even in flashback scenes) is carried on via ASL, and language spoken by characters other than Clint is often depicted as empty speech balloons, with the shape or texture of the balloon itself roughly indicating emotion or emphasis, thus depicting this verbal communication (or lack thereof) from Clint’s perspective.

Now, in the academic and critical literature on comics, we are often told that one of the distinguishing features of comics is its unique combination of text and image. Of course, we know that there exist comics without any text – so called silent or mute comics. Marvel even had a special one-month ‘Nuff Said event in 2002 where many of their top titles published issues that contained no text. Nevertheless, textual information (in the form of dialogue, narration, SFX) is clearly a standard feature of comics. Furthermore, the special way that images and text interact, when both are present, is clearly an important feature of comics, since these two communicative modes interact differently in comics than they do elsewhere. Thus, explaining the way text and images interact within comics is (rightly, I think) taken to be one of the important outstanding problems in the academic study of comics.

Nevertheless, even if all of this is right, and understanding the image/text combination in comics is important for understanding traditional comics that limit themselves to images and text, Hawkeye #19 demonstrates that this way of understanding the nature of comics is artificially limited. Now, Hawkeye #19 does contain a bit of textual dialogue, but let’s ignore that – Fraction et alia were clearly attempting to make an interesting and challenging experimental comic within the confines of mainstream superhero media, but were not interested, we can assume, in satisfying some absolute “no dialogue whatsoever”, Dogme-style constraint. But we can easily imagine a very similar comic that only communicated via (1) representational pictorial images and (2) inset depictions of communication via ASL. The question then becomes: what would such a comic teach us about how stories are constructed in comics? Before attempting to answer this question, two observations are worth making.

First, the depictions of communication via ASL within the comic (and within our similar, imagined entirely text-free comic) are not presented as straightforward depictions of the characters as they appear to each other when actually communicating in this manner within the narrative. Sometimes these scenes are depicted in this manner, but in many other cases the ASL is presented within inset panels that much more resemble pictorial instructions regarding how to sign than they resemble depictions of superheroes and other characters actually signing. In other words, these depictions of ASL are as much, or even more so, conventionalized and stylized depictions of the relevant communicative mode as are speech balloons within less experimental comics.

Second, these depictions of ASL are not text. Both text and ASL are conventional, primarily word-based modes of communication. But static images of a character signing are not, nor do they contain, the relevant ASL signs in the sense that an image of words contain those very words. The reason is simple: signing is dynamic and temporal, and text is static and atemporal. Further, text is compositional, while images are not. Hence static atemporal images of ASL signs are neither ASL signs themselves nor are they some sort of text encoding ASL signs.

Now, what does all of this suggest about traditional ideas regarding the centrality of image and text, and the interaction between the two, in comics? Well, the most obvious thing to point to is that the traditional text+image account of the nature of comics is far too narrow, since it won’t address the equally interesting and fruitful role that (pictorial depictions of) ASL can play in a comic, as evidenced by Hawkeye #19. More generally, what it suggests to me is that comics are not characterized by the interaction between image and text, but rather by the interaction of any number of static (unless we want to complicate things by bringing motion comics and the like into the discussion) visual modes of communication, whether these be representational images, text, conventionalized and stylized instruction-book like images of American ASL, or any of a host of other visual modes of communication.

Of course, this should have already been obvious, if one pays close enough attention to comics. After all, there is another static visual mode of communication, distinct from both text and image, that occurs frequently in comics: musical notation. Note that musical notation is usually used in comics, not as an actual notation to indicate a particular work of music, but instead as an indication of the presence of music without indicating which work or sometimes even which style (counter-instances in Schulz’s Peanuts notwithstanding). And of course Mort Walker long ago published his compendium of similarly-functioning emanata titled The Lexicon of Comicana (2000). So the idea that comics involve other modes of visual communication beyond representational images and text (in narration, dialogue, or SFX form) is far from new.

Nevertheless, Fraction et alia do give us something new in Hawkeye #19: an experimental comic that demonstrates the wide range of visual communication strategies open to comics creators by utilizing a novel such strategy: visual depictions of ASL. Thus, although the theoretical point is not new, this comic does represent a new way of making it, and a new way of making comics.

I’ll conclude in the time-honored PencilPanelPage fashion, with a question. If Hawkeye #19 shows that pictorial depiction of ASL can be used as one of the multitude of visual depictive modes in comics storytelling, then does that mean that visual depictions of ASL are always comics? Note first that a similar inference doesn’t go through for text (on any but the most generous accounts of what, exactly makes something a comic): text is a much more familiar mode of visual communication in comics, but not all strings of text are comics (even if it seems to be at least theoretically possible to construct a comic that does consist solely of text – see my own “Do Comics Require Pictures? Or Why Batman #663 is a Comic” in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism). But a work that consisted solely of visual depictions of characters communicating with one another via ASL would, at the very least, look much more like a comic than a typical prose-only novel or short story would. So, if we were to take a short novel – Paul Auster’s City of Glass, say – and translate it into ASL, and then make an individual drawing of an anoymous narrator signing each word in turn, and then print the results – say, six such images per page, in the proper order – is the result a comic?

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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