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Wonder Woman in Batman vs. Superman

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There’s a new (new!) Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer. Watch it now!
 

 
Online reaction seems pretty skeptical, centering on Jesse Eisenberg’s jittery camp. People don’t want jittery camp from their supervillains anymore, I guess. No love for Frank Gorshin.

Anyway, as you’ll see if you can make it to the end, Gal Gadot shows up as Wonder Woman right at the close, in a moment also played for cutesy laughs. Doomsday (I guess that’s Doomsday) shoots some sort of special effect thing at Batman, and our dour hero is about to be incinerated, when Wonder Woman leaps in with her shield. “Is she with you?” Superman asks, with Henry Cavill demonstrating that he’s got nice comic timing. “I thought she was with you,” Batman replies in grim dark bat voice.

Part of the joke is about the wrong-footed testosterone. Wonder Woman, as a woman, should belong to either Superman or Batman. But (feminism!) she doesn’t. The conflicted bromance m/m romantic comedy (complete with meet cute at the trailer’s beginning) is interrupted; the gritty ballet of manly men thumping each other gives way to the sit-com shuffle of manly men belching in confusion as the woman of the house swoops in to be competent.

William Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator, would probably find a bit to like here; Wonder Woman as invader of man’s world (metaphorically and literally) resonates with his original themes to some degree, and of course it’s nice to have her saving the bat dude rather than the other way around. The perspective, though, is inevitably wrong way round. Wonder Woman, the original comic, started out after all with Steve Trevor invading Paradise Island, and even in Man’s World, Diana was surrounded by sorority girls and fellow Amazons, so that Steve was always the lone dude in a female community.

The whole point of the original Wonder Woman was that Wonder Woman was the standard; women were the normal thing, and men were the sometimes odd, sometimes sexy, but always secondary other. Wonder Woman in Dawn of Justice is heroic, but she’s heroic through the eyes, and from the perspective, of the two guys whose relationship is the title of the film. Which isn’t surprising, really, but does mean that, Supergirl, Jessica Jones, Buffy, or any superhero show where the woman is in the title, is going to be truer in many ways to Marston’s vision than the character called Wonder Woman in a film titled Batman vs. Superman.

Rogue Nation Makes Sense If You Just Hate Tom Cruise

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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Early on in the latest Mission Impossible film, Rogue Nation, the aging but not greying Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) meets a young female contact (Hermione Corfield) in a record store. After they exchange knowing quips about John Coltrane and Shadow Wilson, she hands him his secret message in the form of a vinyl record, and then, breathlessly, tells him how wonderful he is. “All the stories about you can’t be true…can they?” she stutters. Cruise-as-Hunt pauses without speaking, giving her a self-satisifed grin that says clearly, hey, I’m an awesome movie star and/or superspy. I am pleased that the script has recognized that women decades younger than me should fawn at my feet. All is right with the world.

And then that fawning record store clerk is murdered brutally in front of him while he watches helplessly. He’s not an awesome superspy. He’s just a smug twit whose unearned assurance results in death and bloodshed wherever he goes — while he himself is unscathed. Why doesn’t someone kill him already?

Of course, throughout Rogue Nation, and for that matter throughout the two decade long film series, people do try to kill Ethan. You’re supposed to root for them to fail…or are you? Rogue Nation makes you wonder. The plot pits the Impossible Missions Force, led by Hunt, against the Syndicate, an “anti-IMF” — a collection of agents disavowed from the world’s spy forces.

Throughout the film, the IMF and the Syndicate are presented as parallel and equivalent. That first vinyl message is from the Syndicate rather than the IMF, as it turns out. The characterization of the Syndicate as a “rogue nation” also, and deliberately, applies to the IMF, which continues to operate secretly within the IMF even after Congress closes it down. Agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) who may be working with the Syndicate or with the IMF or both, argues, convincingly, that there’s not much to choose between them. “They’re all the same,” she says of the vying secret agencies. “We only think we’re fighting on the right side because that’s what we choose to believe,” she’s right too. “There’s always people like [Syndicate-head] Lane (Sean Harris) and there’s always people like us to fight him.” What’s the difference? Lane used to blow people up in the name of the status quo; now he’s doing it, he says, in the name of “change”. Even if you do prefer the status quo to change, dead folks are dead; they don’t care in the name of what nebulous ideology they’ve been killed.

Other films in the series play with similar insights. Ethan is constantly fighting moles within his own agency, and/or disgusing himself as his villainous counterparts, or stealing the super deadly information from the government for the shadowy organization he plans to betray any moment now. In the secretive world of spies, the “good guys” are constantly threatening to turn into bad guys, so you wonder whether the world wouldn’t be better off without the good guys in the first place.

The thing that keeps you on the side of the good guys, the thing that distinguishes bad from good, isn’t so much motivation or methods as Cruise himself. He’s the star oozing action-hero charisma and boyish charm, even as a fifty year old. He’s the Hollywood protagonist — you’re supposed to love him, like that record clerk, and so end up rooting for the Western righteousness he represents.

But what if you don’t like Cruise? This is hardly an academic question; the world is filled with Cruise anti-fans. His manic self-regard, his creepy involvement in Scientology; the way he clenches his jaw to show earnest determination…he’s a hero you love to hate. In the second Mission Impossible, the evil villain rants at length about wanting to wipe the stupid grin off Ethan’s face. I related overly.

And that’s the brilliance of Rogue Nation, if brilliance is the word. The film is a passionate call for less supervision of spy networks. It lauds American hegemony, not just over imperial possessions, but over Britain and Europe. The Brits are responsible for the Synidcate; the Americans have to bail them out, even to the point of drugging the Prime Minister and framing a cabinet officer. Raffish Tom Cruise knows best for everyone; pledge allegiance to the smirking America, world, and all your problems will be solved.

But all that collapses in on itself if you just, for a moment, let yourself hate Tom Cruise. Suddenly, Ethan isn’t the hero — he (and the country he represents) is an out-of-control narcissist with limitless ammo and no accountability. When his teammates accuse him of turning his mission into a deranged personal vendetta — they’re not failing to see his greatness. They’re right!

From this perspective, Rogue Nation isn’t a standard action movie in which the good guys are challenged and struggle and eventually triumph for virtue and stability. Instead, it’s a dystopic vision. This evil, self-satisfied, unhinged superguy whooshes back and forth across the world, sowing chaos and insufferable cockiness in his wake, and no one can stop him. Bullets, bombs, Congressional subcommittees, common human decency—he ignores them all. Tom Cruise rules the world in the name of Hollywood stardom, self-regard, and the American way. Stopping him is a bleak, impossible mission. Look at that jaw clenching, filmgoers, and despair.

Alias vs. Jessica Jones

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Jessica Jones

The verdict is in—Jessica Jones is awesome. I’m sure you’ve read it all in various reviews littering the web. There’s the superb depiction of rape trauma and PTSD, the excellent depression, the fabulous sex, and the best portrayal of Luke Cage both inside and outside of comics. Kyrsten Ritter and the supporting cast—sublime!  And what about that snappy dialogue—not bad but maybe not as snappy as in that other show about a “rape” victim-superheroine, iZombie.

But there is one rather obvious problem with Jessica Jones. It’s stupid; massively dumb and bloated to boot. It’s the same old story, the desperation to love something, anything in this Golden Age of TV or at least find some reason to like the latest Hollywood craze—the superhero franchise. The publicity agents have urged us to like, nay love, sex and dragons, rotting flesh, and xenophobic paranoid CIA agents; and now they insist we venerate plain clothes superheroics.

Just like in the zombie apocalypse of The Walking Dead, Jessica Jones never lets logic get in the way of thrills, false dilemmas, and homilies about our decadent society. The remarkable zombie franchise embodies the deeply held American fantasy that the last will be first and they will need guns to accomplish this. It is the little people who will pull through and distill the human (let’s just call it the American) spirit to make the Fatherland great again (or least provide glorious entertainment). Certainly not the armed forces which are clearly the most poorly armed and least disciplined of all organizations

In his article at Quartz, Noah insists that Jessica Jones is (and I paraphrase here) a smart show but I think what he meant to say was that it’s a show with something (new?) to say which I guess is kind of an improvement over most things on TV which are generally vacuous, inane or some combination of both. So the “patriarchy” is violent, desirable, all consuming and almost irresistible—the hidden, unacknowledged evil running through society.  Does this mean that Jessica Jones is Pilgrim’s Progress for feminists, and frequently just as tedious? Why didn’t they just send me the 1000 word memo Noah wrote instead? It was  certainly more concise and less soporific. Oh, I know, it’s because Jessica Jones is meant to be an entertainment.

Noah has spent his binge watching hours screaming at poor Jessica to invest in noise cancelling ear phones or at least some thick cotton wool (answer in episode 10; it’s not the Killgrave of the comics we all know and love). He wonders why Daredevil or a hermetically-sealed Iron Man don’t come round to save the day. The answer to this last question, at least, is obvious. Marvel won’t let them. Or maybe this minor mass murderer is too insignificant for all the mutants, aliens, Inhumans, superheroes, or agents with futuristic weapons living in New York to bother with. And what about the mind control virus responsible for Killgrave’s powers? Probably a few steps down the Chain of Cretinousness from Midi-chlorians. The invention of Superman’s solar powered fuel cells seem like an act of prodigious sagacity by comparison.

Noah like so many others have wondered why it is so hard for people to believe in mind control in a world of galactic invasions and Asgardian Gods come to earth (with mind controlling abilities to boot)? Because if they did, we wouldn’t have this meaningful bash about rape trauma and violent revenge. Because it is all too clear that the makers of Jessica Jones have utter contempt for superheroics and the well tested internal logic which governs them. Which would be a most excellent thing if you weren’t accepting a paycheck from the overlords of the Marvel Universe.

Let’s be honest here—superhero comics are overwhelmingly idiotic. So utterly degraded that Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’ first run of Alias (the comic in which Jessica Jones is introduced) was greeted like manna from heaven when it first hit the stands. Make no mistake, Alias is largely the kind of superhero police procedural Bendis has been fond of since his halcyon days on Powers; instantly forgettable and considerably inferior in almost every respect to the television adaptation. It should be noted, however, that all the central relationships in the television adaptation have been cribbed (and fleshed out) from the comics (Alias #24 to #28, “Purple”  Parts 1 to 5).

One rather curious thing about Bendis’ Alias was his determination not to make Jessica Jones a rape victim. One suspects a half-conscious reaction to the plethora of female rape (and murder) victims in the 80s superhero renaissance initiated by Miller and Moore (see Watchmen, The Killing Joke, Born Again, The Dark Knight Returns et al). In fact, the Jessica Jones of the comics makes it a point to tell Luke Cage that she was not raped—in the traditional meaning of the word—though she was certainly made to watch rape and murder, and thoroughly mentally abused in more vivid terms than shown in its adaptation. I doubt if there is another “living” Marvel heroine who has undergone a more traumatic experience than Jessica Jones. The television adaptation is less interested in hideous spectacle and more focused on rehabilitation and recovery, and is much the better for it.

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The inconsistencies, incoherence, and tumescence of the television series are all there to provide recurrent inconclusive confrontations as we await Killgrave’s inevitable demise in the final episode (he doesn’t die in the comics). The texture of the cloth seems fine but the presentation is nonsensical and aggravating. You have to be in the mood to give the creators broad license to throw away good sense in the name of preaching for you to enjoy this.

There is, however, one thing to say in Bendis’ favor (I think)—he’s not ashamed of the form. He bloody loves it. Jessica’s first case involves being tricked into spying on Steve Rogers (aka Captain America), and when she gets into trouble it is Matt Murdoch (aka Daredevil) who pulls her out of an interrogation session. Bendis has no truck with inconsistent power levels and Jessica doesn’t suddenly lose her ability to dish out measured love taps to humans without abilities; something which occurs in every other episode of the television series. Killgrave is in jail with lots of other super criminals in the comics and his utter vulnerability to Daredevil made fun of. As for Jessica Jones, it is her shame and embarrassment which prevents her from seeking the help of the Avengers more often (long story) and when Killgrave finally escapes, the havoc he creates is met by a response from the same team. A psychic defense trigger provided by an X-Man (Jean Grey) helps Jones defeat Killgrave.

Now let’s just sit back and think about this for a while. Can you imagine how stupid (not to mention impractical from a commercial perspective) all this would be for a “serious” TV show? You’d need a Class A creative mind to make all this work and also be intellectually stimulating, which is why something like Watchmen has become the perennial bat used to whack all comers who would label it undoable. How do you make a story about “real” life if there are superheroes and vigilantes running amok throughout America? The answer to this is quite simple—you can’t. They why they call it fucking fantasy, an altered reality in which all commonsense reactions to and explanations for everyday trauma go out the door. Contrary to what Noah writes in his Splice article, superheroes do in fact “change the world;” in myriad ways both harebrained and inventive. They just don’t do it on Jessica Jones.

Melissa Rosenberg’s debilitated answer to all this is a tincture of powers, the spoonful of fantasy to help the hard medicine of psychological stress (and the sermon of the day) go down. Because no one is going to binge watch a 13 episode series about a rape survivor but superheroes—they’re hot. If only we could make them more “serious.”  The recipe involves choosing one or all from the following triumvirate, the foundation stone of this Golden Age of TV:

(1) sex (2) sexual violence (3) violence

We can forget about the superpowers and the superheroes whenever it becomes inconvenient for our agenda of earnest meditation on the unhumorous. Well, how about this for a  suggestion—why bother making the damn superhero show at all.

Supermen Before Superman, Vol. 1

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art by Sacha Goldberg

 
Superheroes didn’t begin in June 1938 with Action Comics #1.  They didn’t begin with Superman’s crime-busting predecessors of the 1930s pulps either.  Superheroes have a sprawling, action-packed history that predates the Man of Tomorrow by decades.

A century before Krypton exploded, the Grey Champion was confronting redcoats in the streets of colonial New England, while the monstrous Jibbenainosay scourged the Kentucky frontier.  Spring-Heeled Jack was leaping English stagecoaches in single bounds as Dr. Hesselius administered to the victims of vampire attacks. Add to this Victorian League of Justice the super-detective Nick Carter, a man with the strength of three, surpassed only by Tarzan’s jungle-perfected physique and the Night Wind’s preternatural speed and crowbar-knotting muscles.  While the Scarlet Pimpernel was assuming his thousand disguises, the reformed Grey Seal and Jimmy Valentine were turning their criminal prowess to good as modern Robin Hoods.

By 1914—the year Superman’s creators were born—the superhero’s most defining characteristics were already long-rehearsed standards.  Secret identities, costumes, iconic symbols, origin stories, superpowers, these are all the domain of the first superheroes. Some of these very earliest incarnations are startling full-blown, some reveal fragmentary foreshadowing, but all are essential to understanding the century-long evolution of the formula that did not begin with but culminated in Superman.

I cover this terrain in On the Origin of Superheroes, but readers should explore it for themselves. So here’s a tentative Table of Contents for “Supermen Before Superman, Vol. 1, (1816-1916)” a would-be collection of the original 19th and early 20th century essentials:

1. Manfred, Lord Byron 1816

Though the poetry-spouting “Magian” isn’t the first sorcerer of adventure lore, he is the first to embody the moral complexity of the post-Napoleonic anti-ish hero type (and, yes, he has sex with his sister).

2. “The Gray Champion,” Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835

An old, craggy-looking guy, but a great rabble-rouser. His superpower is inspiration! (Also, his literary sister, Hester Prynne, is the first character to sport an identity-defining letter on her chest.)

3. Sheppard Lee, Robert Montgomery Bird, 1836

The guy’s soul can change bodies. Just give him a non-moldy corpse and he’s good to go.

4. Nick of the Woods, Chapters III and IV, Robert M. Bird, 1837

A homicidal schizophrenic hell-bent on murdering Indians in the spirit of Manifest Destiny. He’s Batman in buckskins.

5. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Edgar Allan Poe, 1841

The proto-Sherlock and so the original super-detective.

6. The Count of Monte Cristo (excerpt), Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet, 1844

 A wrong-avenging master-of-disguise passing along the racial divide, what’s not to cheer?

7. Les Miserables (excerpt), Victor Hugo, 1862

The guy can pick-up a horse-cart single-handedly. I think it was radiation from the social Gamma bomb of the French Revolution.

8. Green Tea, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872

The original occult detective, with a lethal dose of Orientalism.

9. “How Robin Hood Came to Be an Outlaw,” from The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Howard Pyle, 1883

Yep, Robin Hood. The original noble outlaw.

10 .Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883

Nothing superheroic about the ubermensch, but he is the genre’s namesake.

11. Spring-Heeled Jack, the Terror of London, Alfred S. Burrage, 1885

The first Bat-Man, plus the guy has a magic boot and dresses like Mephistopheles.

12. Nick Carter, Detective: The Solution of a Remarkable Case, Frederic van Rennselaer Dey, 1891

Some Captain American level super-strength here, but mostly bare-knuckled detection. No sitting around solving crimes from your French hotel room.

13. “The Ides of March,” E. W. Hornung, 1891

The original Sherlock-flouting gentleman thief, whose spawned a legion of do-gooding imitators.

14. “A Retrieved Reformation,” O. Henry, 1903

More of a supervillain again, but check-out the tropes: alias, dual identity, self-sacrifice, signature skill.

15. “The Hunt for the Animal,” “The Fiery Cross,” from The Clansman, Thomas Dixon, 1904

Okay, this one I deeply apologize for, but (as I’ve discussed plenty elsewhere), he defines the genre.

16. Man and Superman, George Barnard Shaw, 1904

Again, can’t ignore the translated source of the genre namesake.

17. “Paris: September, 1792,” chapter from The Scarlet Pimpernel, Emmuska Orczy, 1905

Just another cross-dressing socialite secretly using his wealth for aristocratic good.

18. “The Nemesis of Fire,” Algernon Blackwood, from John Silence, Physician Extraordinary, 1908

The first occult detective with occult powers–even if he is more sympathetic to werewolves and Egyptian fire demons than the moronic Brits they haunt.

19. Under the Moons of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1912

Find yourself on a mysterious alien planet that gives you super-strength, sound familiar?

20. “The Height of Civilization,” chapter from Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1912

First pulp hero actually called a “superman.”

21. “A Midnight Incident,” “The Frame-up,” “A Law Unto Himself,” chapters from Alias the Night Wind, Frederic van Rennselaer Dey, 1913

The first mutant, a cross between Quicksilver and the crowbar-bender of your choice.

24. “The Gray Seal,” Frank L. Packard, 1914

His fingertips seem to have mutant sensitivity, but mostly he’s another urban Robin Hood.

25. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915

Paradise Island minus Wonder Woman (and the yellow wallpaper).

26. Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh, Russell Thorndike, 1915

A vicar by day, Scarecrow-costumed avenger by night, plus there’s that whole pirate backstory and prequels.

27. The Iron Claw, Arthur Stringer, 1916

The movie is lost, but the Laughing Mask still debuted in newspaper at the time, doing his mild-mannered routine with his boss and fiance while secretly fighting criminals at night.

Okay, so maybe that’s more one volume’s worth of texts, but this is still in the dream-book stage, and with the magic of  unpaperbound e-books, why not?

Utilitarian Review 11/28/15

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Kinukitty on writing Stevie Nicks fan fic as a nine year old.

Chris Gavaler on Frankenstein superheroes.

Me on Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It and the virtues of heterogenous apocalypse. (This was a Patreon supported post, so, if you like it, consider contributing.)

Me on the awesome doomy death and spiritual torment of Immolation.

We were off for pray for woodstock day.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates for comics from summer 1950 (lots of EC.)
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote about the documentary Killing Them Safely and how tasers escalate violence.

At the Establishment I wrote about how spewing racism isn’t braver than protesting it, and neither are part of a culture of fear.

At Ravishly I wrote about how Mockingjay can’t imagine non-violence.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

—Kelela, Girlyboi, and how R&B has always been everything.

—all the cultural journalists binge watching Jessica Jones.

—how Iron Man won’t save Jessica Jones.
 
Other Links

Terrell Jermaine Starr on how Ben Carson inspired him as a kid.

Mojo has the first year end best of list. Dylan, Keith Richards, Richard Thompson *and* David Gilmour? That’s a lot of fogeys on there.

And another example of political correctness run amok.
 

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Forgotten Spiritual Death

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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On the landscape of pop culture, death metal is an incongruous oozing spiky heap of torment. Too loud and abrasive to be popular; too formulaic and un-ironic to be avant-garde, it’s the exploitation cinema of music—except that folks like Ridley Scott and Paul Verhoeven long ago took exploitation cinema mainstream. Death metal, on the other hand, remains more or less what it always was; a hermetic low-brow underworld of regimented troll fury.

Even seminal death metal bands, then, are largely unknown to everyone but hardcore fans, and that’s certainly the case with Immolation. Hailing from Yonkers, Immolation was far removed from the central Florida death metal scene that nurtured acts like Deicide, Obituary and Malevolent Creation. Perhaps in part as a result, they’re somewhat unheralded even by hardened metalheads. They show up on “best of” lists now and then, and they’re certainly respected… but they don’t provoke the rabid partisanship of, say, Cannibal Corpse.

Which is a shame, because Immolation’s debut album, 1991’s Dawn of Possession is solidly, idiosyncratically ferocious, from its demons-raping-angels tacky airbrushed cover through its obsessively anti-Christian lyrics. While many death metal bands of its era, like Deicide, embraced propulsive speed and whiplash, Immolation took a slightly different approach. The percussion still sounds like someone is pouring amphetamines into the drummer with a funnel, and the arrangements are jittery and proggy and clearly thrash-ready. But the whole thing keeps downshifting, the guitars thick and minor key and clotted, like massive primeval roadrunners stumbling into viscous tar pits.

There are other doom-death bands, of course—the amazing Autopsy, most notably. But Immolation feels less like they’ve fused doom and death, and more like they’re trying for death but doom has come upon them. Parts of Dawn of Possession suggest a kind of bifurcated torment, in both lyrics and music. The five-minute long “Those Left Behind,” opens with a slow, screeching, painful dragging guitar figure, like a tomb rasping open. The band then kicks into a parody of high gear, a swollen swagger that suggests classic rock performed by corpses. And all the while they rasp out the praises of Jesus:

I lift my soul joyfully

If not, my life will end painfully

Extol He who rides above the clouds

Majestic and glorious

Reigning victorious

The song goes on like that, jerkily taking painful fight and then sinking under the gravity of coveted failure.

Jesus Christ

You are Lord

You are God

But have You won over sin and death

Victory’s crown shall be ours

For we are those

Those You’ve left behind

The singer lets out a distant shriek at the end, and the music cuts out to just the drum thunking emptily, until the next song, “Internal Decadence” comes in seamlessly with its despondent chorus “Twisted brain/Abstract world of pain/Anguish of the mind/Tortured afterlife.”

Obviously, Dawn of Possession is an atheist document, but the tormented weight with which the music is pulled agonizingly first towards heaven, then towards hell seems close to the experience of some of the great Christian doubters. Take Gerard Manley Hopkins’ terrible sonnets, for example: “Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse”—that’s totally a metal lyric.

In fact, listening to Immolation’s album full of prayers and sighs, wishes for hell and fears of heaven delivered against a backdrop of music constantly lumbering from defiance to crawling despair—listening to that, you start to wonder if it’s really the volume and the harshness which has sidelined death, or whether it might be something else. Neither pop nor the avant-garde has much room these days for spiritual torment, at least expressed in such an explicitly theological context. Maybe Dawn of Possession is forgotten not like a pop culture curiosity, but like a dark night of the soul.