When I Walk

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This first ran at The Dissolve.
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“We are all alone in this world, even though we have support systems,” Jason DaSilva’s mom tells him early on in the documentary When I Walk. It’s a harsh thing for a mom to say, and even harsher in context. DaSilva, the filmmaker, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2006, at age 25. MS is a degenerative disease that robs its victims of motor control, and often of vision. In the scene in question, Jason is telling his mom that he’s worried about how he’ll manage on his own. To which, again, her reply isn’t, “I’m here for you,” but more like, “We’re all alone anyway. Deal with it.”

His mother’s advice is typical of the first part of the movie, not because of its bleakness so much as because of the way it jars. As a filmmaker, DaSilva quickly decided to make a movie about his illness after he was diagnosed. But while the disease provides a topic, it doesn’t give the film a coherent narrative, or an emotional center. When Jason’s mom urges him to be positive, her advice rings hollow, but the documentary doesn’t seem to know how to question it. When Jason goes to India for a film project and tries various cures, from yoga to transcendental meditation, his investment in them, or his degree of hope, isn’t explored convincingly, either. At one point, he talks about how women aren’t as interested in him since he’s had MS, and then shows a number of pictures of “beautiful women” he has dated in the past, with their features blanked out. He’s erased their features for privacy reasons, but the result is awkwardly ghoulish. It feels as if who they are is less important than that he has pictures of them, or, more charitably, as if he isn’t sure what he wants to show, and is trying to get something on the screen even if it’s just a blank.

That all changes dramatically when Jason meets Alice Cook at an MS support group. Alice is at the meeting because her mother has MS, and soon she and Jason are dating. In one exhilarating scene, she gets on a scooter to see what life is like from his perspective, and the two of them go zipping gleefully around the Guggenheim.

As Alice and Jason’s relationship deepens, it quickly becomes apparent that the film isn’t about Jason’s illness, but about their love affair. Alice expresses some discomfort about being on film, but the movie’s most powerful moments are all hers. Jason’s loss comes through most vividly not through the deterioration in his condition, but through Alice’s desperate confession, “I don’t want Jason getting any worse. But it just keeps coming.” The day-to-day grind of the illness is brought home not through his difficulty in putting on his pants, but through Alice’s frustrated, guilty decision to go on a hiking trip alone in order to briefly escape the constant demands of being a caregiver.

Even on that hike, though, she’s taking footage for the film itself, both helping Jason with his project and sharing her experiences with him. She’s part of him, and vice versa—and again, in many ways viewers learn more about him, his illness, and what it costs him by listening to her than by listening to him. The film becomes more sure-footed, and more certain, as Jason loses control of his body, not because the disease gives the film meaning, but because Alice does. When I Walk makes it very clear that Jason isn’t all alone despite his support system. Rather, his support system, including his mom, makes him who he is, even more than his malfunctioning legs and hands. His life isn’t his disease, and neither, after an uncertain start, is his lovingly collaborative film.

Battle of the Corporate Training Exercise

This first ran at The Dissolve.
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Comedies’ goal is laughter above everything else, and in that pursuit, they’re sometimes allowed surprising leeway in terms of plot and tone. Welcome To The Jungle, about an ad-agency team-building exercise gone horribly wrong, takes that breathing room and runs with it. The film starts off as an office comedy with nods toward The Office and Dilbert, and feints toward Full Metal Jacket. Then, as the cast ends up on a remote island, it gleefully devolves into Lord Of The Flies. The archetypal moment may be the charmingly awkward, obviously fake battle between Jean-Claude Van Damme and a tiger—logic and suspension of disbelief casually defied in the name of high-camp vaudeville.

Van Damme, as team-building coach Storm, appears to be having the time of his life parodying every other role he’s ever played. The rest of the actors seem to enjoy the script’s loony opportunities as well: Rob Huebel as the evil VP Phil swings from corporate backstabber to lunatic Kurtz without ever losing touch with his oleaginous essence, while Kristen Schaal as Brenda gets to launch into discursive monologues about everything from bunny rabbits to the state of her bowels. Adam Brody as diffident beta-male hero Chris has less room for overacting, but he still manages to sell his role, remaining low-key and earnest in the face of escalating preposterousness.

In addition to the absurdist comedy, Welcome To The Jungle has a satiric edge. The movie is smart enough to make the connection between petty boardroom oneupmanship and action-movie tropes, and deft enough to ridicule them both for their panicked performance of testosterone. Chris’ boss (played by Dennis Haysbert) strokes his corporate awards suggestively. Van Damme emits crazed primal screams one moment and flinches from needles at the next, in an ecstasy of macho self-parody. Multiple onlookers comment on the homoeroticism of Chris and Phil’s final mud battle.

The film is hyper-aware of the ridiculousness of the patriarchal obsession with masculinity-as-penis-size—and yet, in the end, and rather helplessly, it’s still mired in a banal narrative of masculine self-actualization. The plot comes down to Chris trying not to be (as the film delicately puts it) “the world’s biggest pussy.” Since the focus is on Chris’ manliness or lack thereof, his romantic interest Lisa (Megan Boone) is, inevitably, the only character in the film who doesn’t have anything interesting to do. She looks attractive, she expresses sincere sympathy when Chris talks about how he’s just too darn nice, and she waits patiently for him to complete his narrative arc and become the kind of man who can sweep her off her feet. Comedy frees up the plot and allows even Van Damme to play against type, but there are limits. The leading lady still has to be dull.

So Welcome To The Jungle abandons its own doofy tiger in favor of Chris’ more conventional, generic inner beast. That’s disappointing, but not exactly surprising. As the film suggests, it’s hard to escape the corporate calculus, no matter how far from the office you try to travel.

The Visual Superhero (Analyzing Comics 101)

Having already talked about framing and layout and closure and abstraction, I’m backing up now to what should be square one for “Analyzing Comics 101.” Who are the creators doing all of this framing, etc.? Although Will Eisner’s 1940s Sunday newspaper section The Spirit is a significant exception, superhero comics are typically created by multiple authors, with production divided into five semi-independent roles.

Writer: Creator who conceives the story idea, plots the events, plans the content and sequence of panels typically through a written script, and/or composes the words that appear in caption boxes and word balloons. The various writing roles may involve more than one individual.

Penciler: Artist who sketches the pages, typically based on a writer’s script. A superhero comic typically has only one penciler.

Inker: Artist who finishes the pages by penning over the penciler’s breakdowns. More than one inker may be involved in a single issue, and a penciler sometimes inks her own pencils.

Colorist: Artist who designs or co-designs color or gray tones and adds them to the inked pages.

Letterer: Artist who draws the scripted words (but not sound effects) inside balloons and boxes.

The words and images in a comic book are the product a complex and sometimes overlapping creative process. Although rarely credited, a penciler often co-writes by making encapsulation and layout decisions and sometimes creating content based on the credited writer’s story summary. 1950s Marvelman writer Mick Anglo wrote no scripts, but “would instead suggest a basic plot outline to an artist, giving him a specific number of pages to fit the idea into. Once the art was complete, Mick would then write in the actual wording for the letterer” (“Miracleman Alias Marvelman”). Stan Lee followed the same process in the 60s, dubbing it the Marvel Method. Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko would also sometimes conceive and pencil stories independently, leaving margin notes for Lee to expand into dialogue and narration. Job applicants seeking writing positions were hired based on their ability to fill in four pages of empty talk balloons and caption boxes from Fantastic Four Annual #2, further suggesting that pencilers were often the primary “writers” at Marvel.

Even when working from full scripts, pencilers may exert a great deal of creative control. According to 90s Deathlok writer Dwayne McDuffie, penciler Denys Cowan “felt free to alter my panel breakdowns and shot descriptions whenever he had a better idea” (28).

Neil Gaiman even encouraged Andy Kubert to alter his 2003 scripts: “Feel free to ignore my suggestions if you can see a better way of doing it. (You are the artist.) … Also, there’s an awful lot to cram in here, so let me know if you need more room, and if I’m trying to jam in too much…” (Marvel 1602).

Penciler and inker relationships are complex too. Inker Eric Shanower was notorious for adding details to layouts, while Vince Colletta was notorious for eliminating them. John Byrne even voiced homophobic complaints about Bob Layton’s inking of his work:

I actually feel physically ill when I look at Bob’s stuff. […] It’s like everything is greasy and slimy. […] all his men are queer. They have these bouffant hairdos and heavy eye make-up and an upper lip with a little shadow in the corner which to me says lipstick. Even the Hulk. I will never forgive him for what he did to the Hulk’s face in the annual that we did together.

I remember my father looking at […] the finished inks […] and my father said, “Well this guy’s queer.” No, he didn’t look queer in the pencils, Dad.

When John Byrne inked Steve Ditko in the 80s, their styles clashed queerly too, creating Byrne-detailed figures arranged in signature Ditko poses.

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Unless the penciler is instead painting in a color medium—Alex Ross prefers gouache watercolors—color is added to comic pages last. Before Photoshop, this was accomplished during the printing process by overlaying color-separation boards and screening ink by percentages in dot patterns. The colorist would select color combinations for each discrete shape, and multiple assistants would cut the shapes from each board. Color decisions might also be indicated by the writer in a script or by the penciler in the margins of the layout. Because the artists’ boards remained black and white, colors can be altered with each publication. Alan Moore and Garry Leach’s first chapters of Marvelman originally appeared in black and white in Warrior magazine in 1982; the retitled Miracleman #1 was reprinted in color in 1985 by Eclipse Comics; and Marvel Comics reprinted it again in 2014 with a new color design by Steve Oliff. (Kevin Melrose discusses this in more detail here.)

  

The final product of a comic book consists entirely of ink on paper (originally the lowest grade, pulp paper), but the images are the result of multiple processes. At times it is useful to discuss each contribution independently, while at other times such divisions may be burdensome or indeterminable. Nathaniel Goldberg and I in “Economy of the Comic Book Author’s Soul” analyze contributors as a single, pluralistic author whose words and images display unified intentionality. We might also analyze a given comic as though it has agency itself. Unlike a traditional painting—which may be copied and mass distributed—a comic book is its multiple copies. The artboards may be considered works of art too, but the artboards are not the comic book produced from them. A comic book has no single original.

Superhero comics, because they tell stories through representational images, also create tensions between how a subject matter is depicted and the subject itself—in other words, between the story world of the characters (diegesis) and the physical comic book in the world of the reader (discourse). No tension between diegesis and discourse occurs in prose-only texts because the words on the page in no way resemble the world they linguistically evoke. But because comics discourse includes representational images, their diegetic content is ambiguous. Is a drawing of a superhero a photo-like document of the superhero as others in the story see him? Or is the drawing an interpretation of the character which may be in some way diegetically inaccurate?

This tension does not occur (or occurs much less) in the non-fiction of graphic memoirs and graphic journalism because the images represent real-world content and so are understood as interpretations. Graphic novels, because their content is fictional, create a greater tension, and superhero comics, because they are an amalgam genre that includes fantasy and science fiction, heighten it by depicting subject matter that both does not and often cannot exist. The diegesis-discourse tension poses a question: Do comic book superheroes exist as they are depicted, or do they exist independently from their depictions? This is a philosophical question I can’t resolve here, but the tension is a factor when analyzing superhero comics visually.

Utilitarian Review 2/6/16

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Emily Thomas on new text adventure games.

Ng Suat Tong on We Stand on Guard and Brian K. Vaughan’s hackishness.

David James reviews Rich Scranton’s book on global catastrophe.

Chris Gavaler on drawing words in comics.

Me with a review of the documentary Caucus.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates for comics from March/April 1952.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian I argued that aesthetics needs to consider racism.

At the Establishment I wrote about Orientalism, Beyonce, and that crappy Coldplay video.

At Playboy I wrote about DeRay Mckesson’s Baltimore mayoral bid and black lives matter’s willingness to try new tactics.

At Splice Today I wrote about

Be Steadwell’s Jaded Dark Love Songs and queer sadness.

—how the Republican establishment seems to be doing fine.
 
Other Links

Ta-Nehisi Coates on pragmatism and reparations.

Avital Norman Nathman and Deborah Wage on frightening expectant mothers for profit.

Santorum, the Last Time

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Since Rick Santorum just dropped out, it seemed like a good moment to reup this review, which first ran on the lamented Dissolve.
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“Game on,” Rick Santorum declares, as REO Speedwagon’s rock-schlock uplift blares earnestly from the soundtrack. That’s the end of Caucus, a documentary about the 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses that frames the political competition in the grand tradition of underdogs overcoming adversity; it’s Hoosiers with tour buses, pro-life rallies, and sweater vests. Santorum ran a scrappy campaign, with one guy and one car crisscrossing the state. Candidate after candidate surged ahead of him before he came roaring back in the last two days of the race, finally beating Mitt Romney by 34 votes. For this, REO Speedwagon signals, viewers are supposed to cheer.

Some of those cheers are no doubt intended to be ironic. On the one hand, Caucus is interested in the horse race. On the other hand, though, it’s dedicated to the painful and fairly humiliating spectacle of candidates dragging themselves across the cornfields from house party to rec center. In one scene, Michele Bachmann and the crowd around her stands silent in front of a television camera, waiting for a network cue, until eventually she asks the poor kid serving as her television prop if he’d like to talk to Wolf Blitzer. In another, a not especially enthusiastic Romney gamely tries to eat a vegetarian corn dog. In a third, Ron Paul struggles haplessly to close a van door.

Not all the candidates are laughable. Bachmann and Romney are consistently repulsive, but Herman Cain is charming, and has an amazing singing voice. Santorum is likable, especially when talking about his family—as in one emotional discussion of how he tried to keep from loving his very ill infant daughter, because he was afraid she would die. The guy even has the decency to look uncomfortable when voters on the trail start spouting bizarre, offensive anti-immigrant paranoia. He comes across as committed and decent enough that it’s hard to begrudge him his moment of triumph at the end, especially since it was fleeting, and didn’t actually lead to him imposing his particular style of intrusive morality on the rest of the country.

The difficulty is that that’s all the documentary really seems to have to say. The underdog won. Some candidates are likable, and some less so. When cameras follow people around all day, every day, they often catch them looking silly and stupid. Who out there doesn’t know all this already? Director AJ Schnack resolutely avoids voiceovers, expert talking heads, or anything that might be considered analysis or a point of view. Presumably this is meant to let the material speak for itself, to show the full, unfiltered strangeness, hilarity, and profundity of the campaign trail. Instead, it feels like 100 minutes of arch nudges, a highlight reel from Politicians Say The Darndest Things. Political junkies may find that appealing, but for more general viewers, the film—like Rick Santorum’s campaign—feels largely irrelevant.

Words ‘n Pictures

That title means both “words and pictures” and “words in pictures,” because both phrases describe comic books. Although not all comics include words, essentially all superhero comics do. (A near exception, the five-page “Young Miracleman” story in the back of Miracleman #6 includes two talk balloons each containing the transformation-triggering word “Miracleman!” and a range of sound effects, newspaper headlines, and signage.) How images and text work together is one of the most complex and distinctive qualities of the form.

Words in comics have their traditional linguistic meanings, but they are also drawn images that must be understood differently than words in prose-only works. Their line qualities and surroundings influence their meanings. Dialogue and narration are traditionally rendered at a later stage of production by a separate letterer, after the penciler and inker have completed their work. The size, shape, and color of lettering can denote volume, tone, or intensity, especially when representing speech. Bolding is especially common, typically multiple words per sentence. Sound effects, however, are drawn by primary artists as part of the images. These are onomatopoeic words or letters that represent sounds in the story world. Often the lettering style is so expressive it communicates more than the letters’ linguistic meaning.

Words are typically framed within a panel. Spoken dialogue appears in talk balloons (traditionally an oval frame with a white interior), internal monologues in thought balloons (traditionally a cloud-like frame with a white interior), and unspoken narration in caption boxes (traditionally rectangular and colored, though sometimes narration appears in separate caption panels or in white gutters). Adding a pointer to a word container and directing it at an image of a character turns the words into sound representations or, if a thought balloon, into representations of an unspoken but linguistic mental process, both linked to the specific place and time of the depiction.

The absence of a pointer on a caption box indicates that the words originate from outside of the depicted scene. First-person narration with no pointer may be linked to a remote setting if the words are composed by a character from some other, implied moment and location that is not visually depicted. Though the words in talk balloons are understood to be audible to characters, the drawn words and containers are not visible within the story world even when drawn blocking story elements. As with lettering, the size, shape, and color of containers communicate additional meanings about the words. For talk balloons, the graphic quality of the balloon edges denotes how the words are thought, spoken, whispered, shouted, etc. Finally, the containers create semantic units similar to line breaks or stanzas in poetry.

Words also influence and are influenced by surrounding images that are part of the subject content. Pioneering comics artist Will Eisner identifies two kinds of images: a “visual” is a “sequence of images that replace a descriptive passage told only in words,” and an “illustration” is an image that “reinforces (or decorates) a descriptive passage. It simply repeats the text” (132). Scott McCloud goes further, identifying seven “distinct categories for word/picture combinations” (). Two of McCloud’s categories, “word-specific” and “duo-specific,” correspond with Eisner’s “illustration,” while the other five (picture-specific, intersecting, parallel, independent, montage) fall under Eisner’s “visual,” which “seeks to employ a mix of letters and images as a language in dealing with narration” (139).

To indicate the level of image-text integration, we combine and arrange McCloud’s and Eisner’s categories in a spectrum, beginning with the highest level integration.

Montage visual: images include words as part of the depicted subject matter. This is the only instance in comics in which words are part of the story world. All other words are discourse only.

Interdependent visual: images and words communicate different information that combines.

Intersecting visual: images and words communicate some of the same information, while also communicating some information separately.

Image-specific visual: images communicate all information, while words repeat selected aspects.

Word-specific illustration: words communicate all information, while images repeat selected aspects.

McCloud also includes two categories that are not integrated, and we add two more.

Duo-specific illustration: images and words communicate the same information. Although this might appear to be the most integrated category, there is no integration if each element only duplicates the other so that no information is lost if either element is ignored. Words and images are independent.

Image-only visual: isolated images communicate all information. Since comics do not require words, this is the most fundamental aspect of the form.

Word-only text: isolated words communicate all information. This requires the highest level of reader visualization, an approach at odds with graphic narratives as a form.

Parallel visual: images and words communicate different information that do not combine. This requires the same level of reader visualization as word-only texts, but the presence of images complicates and potentially interferes with that visualization.

With the exception of the most integrated category, montage visuals, all combinations of words and pictures produce some level of image-text tension because words, unlike images, exist only as discourse. Though drawn on the page, words are not visually perceptible to the characters in the story. Images, however, depict content that is perceptible to characters, so drawn objects and actions appear as both discourse (ink on paper) and diegesis (the world of the story). A drawing of a superhero flying (discourse) communicates the fact that the superhero is flying in the story (diegesis). The words “the superhero is flying” communicate the same diegetic fact, but the ink-formed letterforms bear no resemblance to their subject matter. There is no overlap between diegesis and discourse. Since both words and images are made of ink lines on paper (because printed words are images), some lines in a comic exist only in the reader’s world and some appear to exist in both the reader’s and the characters’ worlds.

Graphic novels create further image-text tension by highlighting the potential gap between text-narration and image-narration. In graphic memoirs such as Art Spiegelman’s 1980-1991 Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s 2003 Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s 2006 Fun Home, the text-narrator and the image-narrator are understood to be the same person, the actual author. When a character in a graphic novel controls the first-person text-narration in caption boxes, it is not necessarily clear whether that character is also controlling the image-narration in panels. If the words are generated by an omniscient third-person text-narrator, does that same narrator generate the images, or are the images generated by a separate narrator?

Unintegrated image-texts imply a separate text-narrator and image-narrator. In the case of a duo-specific image-text, the two modes of narration duplicate information without any integration, as if two narrators are unaware of each other. Integrated image-texts, however, imply a single narrator controlling both words and images in order to combine them for a unified effect. At the center of the spectrum, a word-specific illustration implies an image-narrator aware of text but a text-narrator unaware of image. Similarly, an image-specific visual implies a text-narrator aware of images but an image-narrator unaware of text.

Parallel visuals are more complex; although the two narrations are independent and so seemingly unaware of each other at the level of the panel, the overarching effect is integrated. In such cases, the separate text- and image-narrations may create a double image-text referent, in which a word has one meaning according to its linguistic context but, when read in the context of the image, acquires a second meaning. Alan Moore is best known for this approach, having perfected it with Dave Gibbons in Watchmen.

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Not Quite Ready to Die in the Anthropocene

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The recent Paris Climate Conference has been called the last best chance for the leaders of the world, nations and multinational corporations, to agree upon a framework that can somewhat mitigate and limit the compounding effects of climate change. Some have commented that a best-case scenario for such an agreement would still not prevent a future of unbearable heat and widespread famine, drought, war, and mass migrations; a total failure to reach a feasible agreement, like the previous iteration in Copenhagen in 2009, would mean much, much worse: no less than the end of human civilization as we know it and the extinction of huge numbers of plant and animal species, possibly including homo sapiens. Roy Scranton, in his new book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, cleaves to the latter option as the most likely scenario, and this slim volume is dense with big history, scientific nitty-gritty, and philosophical reflections.

Scranton opens the book by invoking his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War, driving and patrolling through Baghdad and pondering the collapse of a once-bustling ancient city into chaos and violence. Back home in the States and safe once again, he witnessed the similar breakdown of order and imposition of martial law in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Scranton connects these localized disaster zones of social breakdown with the future fate of the planet and the human race when climate change accelerates and worsens. He cites a litany of military planners, economists, and scientists to draw his indisputable and alarming conclusion: “Global warming is not the latest version of a hoary fable of annihilation. It is not hysteria. It is a fact. And we have likely already passed the point where we could have done anything about it.” Sobering words.

Over the next four chapters, we are treated to a God’s eye view, in the style of Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis, of geological eras, the rise of homo sapiens, the evolution of energy and industry, the seemingly intractable conundrum of the greenhouse gas effect, the near impossibility that the nations and leaders of the world will come to a working solution that will fix things, and the universality of violence in our primate species. Scranton presents well-researched and argued points on an impressive range of topics with a concise and continually compelling sense of conviction.

The fifth and final chapter, entitled “A New Enlightenment”, is the most original, interesting, challenging, and vexing part of the book. Scranton opens with an epigram from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest pieces of literature on earth which was rediscovered by chance only 150 years ago. The epic tells of the adventures of the powerful king Gilgamesh and his wild companion, Enkidu, as they unite their opposing forces against the gods themselves, forcing the gods to strike down Enkidu. Gilgamesh becomes distraught over the death of his friend and wanders the earth seeking a way to conquer death. Frustrated in the end, Gilgamesh curses the futility of existence. His experience lives on, though, and offers, as Scranton says, “a lesson in the importance of sustaining and recuperating cultural heritage in the wake of climate change.” It also represents “not only the fragility of our deep cultural heritage, but its persistence.” For the author, the specter of climate change is such a monumental problem that we have no hope of solving it; rather, we should focus on maintaining and deepening our humanism and protecting our rich cultural legacy in order that we will both have a softer descent into the envisioned post-apocalyptic future, and that this rich heritage painstakingly accrued over millenia may be rediscovered one day by our survivors in order to rebuild a new civilization. Our study of philosophy, the ancient classics, and Shakespeare, as rewarding as it may be, creates something of a non sequitur when used as a transition to the idea that our unfortunate inheritors will be fighting for resources and survival in a post-apocalyptic world where life will revert to that pre-state existence invoked by Hobbes: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is a far-reaching, erudite, and cultured book with a bleak view of humanity and its future. The author draws upon a wide variety of philosophical ideas to make his point, from Heraclitus (“Life, whether for a mosquito, a person, or a civilization, is a constant process of becoming…Life is a flow.”), to Hegel (“The human being is this Night, this empty nothingness which contains everything in its simplicity.”), to Heidegger (“We fall into the world caught between two necessities, compelled to live, born to die, and reconciling them has forever been one of our most challenging puzzles.”). More than any schools of thought, though, it seems like the author subscribes on some level to the Stoicism of Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius when he says “Learning to die means learning to let go of the ego, the idea of the self, the future, certainty, attachment, the pursuit of pleasure, permanence, and stability. Learning to let go of salvation. Learning to let go of hope. Learning to let go of death.” This echoes once again the oft-repeated quote by Montaigne that “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” In both the title of this book and the many references to “learning to die”, I think we could easily substitute the phrase “philosophizing” without losing any significance; for Scranton envisions a dying world in which we will all need to become philosophers if we are to hold onto our humanity.

Fear of death is universal among humans and many of the higher mammals. It likely spawned our myths as well as our art. It is only the philosophers who do not avoid it or fear it, but look it clearly in the face. This is true of Democritus, Socrates, Epicurus, the Zen Masters, the Bodhisattvas, Hume, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, and many others who have spent their lives contemplating death not as a morbid fascination but as a means to improving and perfecting their own lives. If it is difficult for most people to attain such peacefulness of mind even after a lifetime of meditation, it is even more unfathomable to find any comfort in the inconvenient truth that the Earth will be rendered uninhabitable in a few million years, and that the cold death of the universe will follow in its wake a few billion years later. The cycle of life and death does not occur on an individual level, or even that of an entire species; it includes planets, stars, and the universe itself. Numerous other books, films, and stories, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, discuss this tragic reality in one way or another; Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, Asimov’s “The Last Question”, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Lars Trier’s Melancholia, Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, and the Samurai manual Hagakure, which Scranton read in Iraq as a way of dealing with the pervasive and daily dance of death.

Everything in the book springs from the idea that global warming is a problem too big for humans to deal with based on the total lack of realistic and practical alternatives we have to stop it. On this point, I fully understand the enormity of the problem, the almost complete lack of political and corporate will to change our entire world economic system and sacrifice short-term profit, and the bleakness of the future we therefore guarantee for ourselves; but I do not, and cannot, fully endorse the complete resignation of the search and struggle for solutions that the author advocates. On the merits, I have no issue with any of his conclusions except for his certainty of failure in the face of global warming. I am by no means hopeful about the state of the climate and the geopolitical effects that my children will witness, but I think that is exactly why pervading pessimism must give way to de rigueur active optimism for the sake of our survival. The current Paris Climate Conference will be not the last best chance, but the first great step to further increase momentum towards a global solution to the extremely daunting but not impossible crisis we face. If that means a change away from neoliberal capitalism towards a more sustainable future, as Scranton alludes to, so be it.

Overall, the book is exceedingly ambitious and almost too wide-ranging for its own good, and it feels like the solution offered by the author in the face of a crisis he goes to great lengths to explain renders the conclusion relatively feeble and unconvincing. It is not really a work of philosophy as much as a cri de coeur over the indispensability of philosophy and the humanities as a way of securing “the fate of humanity itself.” I do believe, along with the author, that a deep sense of compassion and humanism are necessary to continued civilization, but so are collective action. My grasp of philosophy helps me cope with the thought of my and the world’s eventual annihilation, but my appreciation of human craft, art, technology, and collective potential to solve problems tells me that we will not go gently into that good night.
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David James did two tours in Afghanistan with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and he now teaches English in Italy. He co-edits a website with other veterans at www.wrath-bearingtree.com and maintains a personal blog at www.tigerpapers.net.