He, She, and Apocalypse

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This post is my first Twisted Mass of Heterotopia column, supported by my Patreon subscribers. If you think it’s the sort of thing you’d like me to write more of, consider contributing (and thank you!)
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Marge Piercy’s 1991 novel He, She, and It isn’t exactly a post-apocalyptic novel; her future world doesn’t end, and doesn’t necessarily seem like it’s about to in the near term. Still, there are a lot of little apocalypses scattered around in it—small scale disasters, of perhaps mildly more intensity than those you can see anytime you turn on the news. The greenhouse effect has pushed temperatures up worldwide; the sky is no longer blue, and going out into daylight without protective gear is potentially fatal. Plagues, famine, and infertility caused by toxic waste and radiation has reduced the earth’s population by half. Most dramatically, a nuclear terrorist attack and subsequent war utterly destroyed Israel and most of the Middle East.

In a recent post on HU, Jimmy Johnson pointed out that most mainstream apocalyptic visions ignore the existence of indigenous people, and, therefore, the existence of prior apocalypses. From the perspective of Native Americans, the European invasion looks a lot like the end of the world—and not less so because that end, with all its violence and humiliations, has been grinding on for 500 years and counting. Fury Road, The Walking Dead, Y: The Last Man, and other big apocalyptic narratives often reference or nod to this colonial past—The War of the Worlds explicitly mentions England’s colonial adventures, for example. But indigenous peoples, or for that matter the oppression of marginalized peoples, is mostly ignored, erased by the giant whomp of one-size-fits-all-world’s-end. Everyone on earth is flattened in the same way; the earth becomes one, united in despair and disarray by an end that doesn’t play favorites, and so is unable to assimilate all those ends that did.

He and She and It‘s more heterogeneous apocalypse has a little more give. Most of the main characters are Jewish, and a parallel narrative about Prague in the 1600s links the city of Tikva, under siege from multinational corporations in the future, to the violence directed at Jewish ghettos in Europe in the past.

Less central to the story, but significant, is the fate of Israel itself. Though everyone assumes that the nation was utterly destroyed, it turns out a small group of people still live there. Nili, an assassin from the new Israel, explains:

We are a joint community of the descendants of Israeli and Palestinian women who survived. We each keep our religion, observe each other’s holidays and fast days .We have no men. We clone and engineer genes. After birth we undergo additional alteration. We have created ourselves to endure, to survive, to hold our land. Soon we will begin rebuilding Yerushalaim.

In his essay, Johnson suggested that an apocalypse for the colonizers might look like salvation for the colonized. That seems to be exactly what Piercy has imagined. The old order of occupied and occupier was wiped from the earth, and in its place there is, not a two state solution, but a single feminist utopia, obliterating the distinctions between Jews and Muslims, and obliterating too the hoary trope of indigenous misogyny. The mistreated women in their burqas who the west supposedly must save; they’re cloning themselves without men now in vats, and coming back, perhaps, to save you. More, many of the surviving Jews are dark-skinned, since, Malkah, a Jewish grandmother and cyberneticist explains “the black Jews from Ethiopia had a higher survival rate in the catastrophe than any other group. They remembered how to manage in utter disaster.”

Apocalypses are often about appropriation of indigenous experiences; the Martians invading England as England invaded America, the totalitarian nightmare of 1984, built, surely, from Orwell’s experiences being the totalitarian police in Burma. He and She and It, though, doesn’t appropriate other people’s experiences. Instead, it picks up the Jewish history of diaspora and oppression,and tries to imagine a future that honors that history rather than Israel’s current, ongoing colonial infliction of apocalypse.

Honoring the history of oppression means you have to remember the history as oppressor, too, though. Malkah talks about reading “a poem by Mara Shliemann that everybody but the Orthodox use these days, about the heritage we share now of having had a nation in our name as stupid and as violent as other nations: a lament for a lost chance, a botched redemption.” If the Holocaust was an apocalypse, echoing the pogroms in Prague, the Israeli occupation is another. Both are part of Jewish history now, the novel says, no matter what disaster befalls. And that means that any disaster for Jews has to be looked at in at least two ways, and any utopia does as well.

Malkeh journeys to Israel at the end of the novel in the hopes of having her sight restored; the Jewish/Palestinian Israel is behind the rest of the world in some things, but it has made great advancements in artificial enhancements, including eyes. After the apocalypse, we may see better what difference offers. One apocalypse is a disaster, but if you’ve got enough of them, some may be opportunities. As Karmia, a woman who may be Jewish or may be Palestinian, tells Malkeh, “If we can love a date palm or a puppy or a cyborg, perhaps we can love each other better also.”

Frankenstein Begins: The Dark Superhero Rises

Posted on November 23, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I used to be a lone voice in the pop culture wilderness crying that Frankenstein should be refitted with a cape, tights, and an “F” on his chest. More oddly, I think the wardrobe change would fit equally to the doctor, Victor Frankenstein, as his creation, the Frankenstein monster. But I’m no longer so lonely in my wailings. Opening November 25, Victor Frankenstein makes the case for me.

Personally, I would have called the prequel Igor—since that’s its hook. Former Harry Potter super-wizard Daniel Radcliffe plays the mad scientist’s hunchback lab assistant. You may or may not agree that Harry is himself a superhero (muggle by day, transformed by accident, etc.), but James McAvoy is a no-brainer: the titular Doctor shares bodies with the X-Men’s super-brained Professor Xavier. The young version. McAvoy retains his pre-Patrick Stewart scalp.

Attached to those superhero creds, director Paul McGuigan makes his leap to the big screen in a single bound from the BBC’s Sherlock. For his new dynamic duo, Igor plays Dr. Watson to Victor’s Holmes. Plus actress Jessica Brown Findlay had the power of mind-control on the British superhero show Misfits. If that’s not already a complete body of superhero parts, screenwriter Max Landis cut his teeth on 2012’s Chronicle and the 2011 comic short The Death and Return of Superman.

But how are Superman and (either) Frankenstein related?

Well, the creature did play a gig as a Marvel superhero in the 70s. He teamed-up with Spider-Man, Iron Man and She-Hulk—though the supervillain Kang the Conqueror used him as a mind-controlled minion too (perhaps both McAvoy and Findlay could help him with that?). But Frankenstein and Superman were stitched together before comics even existed. In the 1919 film serial The Master Mystery, Harry Houdini battles Q the Automaton, a robot described as a “Frankenstein” that “possesses a human brain which has been transplanted into it and made to guide it” as a “conscienceless inhuman superman.”

That man of steel wasn’t the Man of Steel, but a pop cultural version of Nietzsche’s ubermensch. The German philosopher prophesied in 1883 that a breed of superhumans would evolve and take the world away from Homo sapiens. Mary Shelley was decades ahead of him. The author of Frankenstein wrote in 1818 that “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.” That’s why Victor refuses to make a mate for his monster and why his monster declares himself his and humanity’s “arch-enemy.”

It’s the original Professor X vs. Magneto match-up. Or Superman vs. Lex Luthor, since Victor is also the original mad scientist, a character type so pervasive in comics it’s hard to keep track of them all. Like Victor, they’re usually a good guy who accidentally creates a monster—though, unlike Victor, the monster tends to be themselves.

The Dr. Jekyll/Frankenstein merger culminated with Reed Richards when he transformed himself and his pals into the Fantastic Four. The Thing was so popular, Marvel created the Hulk next—fulfilling the Shelley/Nietzsche prophesy of an expanding race of monstrous supermen. When Bruce Banner turned into the Hulk for the first, artist Jack Kirby drew a Boris Karloff knock-off with a flat head and grey skin (Marvel flipped to a green complexion the next issue because the ink looked better).

Karloff’s stitched corpse was never part of Shelley’s plan though. Her Victor doesn’t even know how to reanimate flesh: “I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.” His creature wasn’t human-sized either: “As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved . . . to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height.”

Early stage productions even draped him in a Greek toga—the first of a new god-like species. His “limbs were in proportion” (a big turn-on for early nineteenth-century readers) and the doctor “had selected his features as beautiful.” Sure, his skin was transparent yellow and his face a fit of twitching muscles, and next he’s serial murdering his creator’s loved ones—but, hey, when has a mad scientist’s scheme ever worked out exactly as planned?

Look at the twitching pile of recent superhero movies that include some nut job trying to take over the planet with a new species of devilishly superior uber-monsters:

Ian McKellen’s Magneto planned his mutant conquest, complaining that “nature is too slow” in the firstX-Men.
Michael Fassbender’s Magneto was still complaining in X-Men: First Class, but under the tutelage of Kevin Bacon: “We are the future of the human race. You and me, son. This world could be ours.”
A month later in the first Captain American film, Hugo Weaving’s Red Skull gave Cap the same lesson: “You pretend to be a simple soldier, but in reality you are just afraid to admit that we have left humanity behind. Unlike you, I embrace it proudly. You could have the power of the gods!”
Weaving’s Agent Smith had already explained to The Matrix fans: “As soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization. Which is of course what this is all about. Evolution. . . . The future is our world.”
Iron Man 3’s supergenius Aldrich Killian wanted to turn himself and his minions into the “new iteration of human evolution.”
Just like Dr. Connors, aka the Lizard, planned to “enhance humanity on an evolutionary scale” and “create a world without weakness.” “This is no longer about curing ills,” he said in The Amazing Spider-Man. “This is about finding perfection.” Unfortunately, “Human beings are weak, pathetic, feeble-minded creatures. Why be human at all when we can be so much more? Faster, stronger, smarter!”
And Dane DeHaan, reading from Max Landis’ Chronicle script, declared himself an “apex predator,” ready to wipe out humankind as Victor Frankenstein had feared his creature’s super-race would.

So who will save us from all these Frankenstein Supermen? Other Frankenstein Superman of course. Captain America, Spider-Man, Iron Man, even the X-Men’s radiation-saturated DNA, they all started as lab experiments. That’s the core of the Marvel superhero formula. Stitch a monster into tights and watch him save us from monsters just like him.

There’s a reason we confuse Victor and his creature. Superheroes are both kinds of Frankensteins.

Utilitarian Review 11/21/15

Posted on November 21, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Me on Love and Rockets and nostalgia.

Marguerite Dabaie on the Lebanese comics anthology Samandal, which has been almost put out of business by charges of insulting Christianity.

Chris Gavaler on whether superheroes should have a license to kill.

Me on how school reform can’t fix schools.

Jimmy Johnson on the pop apocalypse and indigenous genocides.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from the mid-1950s.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian I wondered what a Thelma and Louise cast with guys would look like.

At the Establishment I wrote about

—how trans women aren’t given a voice in the media on trans women’s issues.

—why we should consider Katniss a superhero.

At Ravishly I wrote about Lupita Nyong’o as CGI, and Star Wars’ history of not seeing blackness.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—how the artist’s identity is part of the art.

—how inflated military budgets make us less safe.

—how 538 bungled their piece on Jindal’s exit from the race.

Other Links

Anil Dash on Jindal and the South Asian community.

From a bit back, Tara Burns on Katha Pollitt telling her she wasn’t the right kind of sex trafficking victim.

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The Apocalypse’s Apocalypse and Post-Apocalyptic Visions of Sunshine and Blessings

Posted on November 19, 2015 by Jimmy Johnson

This first ran at CiCO3.
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This posts stems from a conversation with Kyle Johnson after we watched Mad Max: Fury Road together. Thanks to Linda Quiquivix , Zoé Samudzi and William Copeland for feedback on the idea and draft to help make it vaguely coherent. In thinking about worlds I leaned heavily on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Frank Wilderson’s Red, White and Black even where not cited directly. None of the above can be blamed for what follows. After completing the draft a couple of friends put me onto this great recent CBC conversation which also covers parts of what is below. Special thanks to Cass Chen who was a wonderful friend, host and conversationalist while I scribbled.

George Miller’s 2015 film Mad Max: Fury Road takes place in a post-apocalyptic Australia. Like most apocalypse/post-apocalyptic stories Fury Road comments on the present through envisioning a dystopic future. The film opens with news clips framing the violence to follow as descended from resource wars and global warming. Resource extraction and climate change are ready topics for exploring the end of the world and it is no surprise to find them as common topics for apocalyptic storytelling in cinema, novels, television and comic books. In settler colonies these stories comment upon today’s problems while neglecting to mention that another apocalypse, one suffered by the indigenous population, pre-dates the story. Exploring post-apocalyptic storytelling with this in mind challenges settler colonial normativity and further opens up the world’s end to decolonizing visions.

Ending Othered Worlds

>Fury Road, Brian K. Vaughn & Pia Guerra’s comic book Y: The Last Man and Robert Rodat’s tv series Falling Skies all offer different causes to the apocalypse. Fury Road is unspecific but points towards ecological destruction through climate change and resource wars. Y: The Last Man‘s apocalypse is an unspecified illness or curse that simultaneously kills all the mammals with a Y chromosome (in an unproduced script, Vaughn lays the blame with a U.S. biological weapons attack on China). Falling Skies‘s end of the world comes from extraterrestrial invasion.

Fury Road further comments on climate change and monopolization of resources as a means of centralizing authoritarian, patriarchal power. It follows a group of people through a mostly empty wasteland as they seek the “green place” while they are hunted by those who control the resources. Y: The Last Man narrates Agent 355 and Dr. Allison Mann as they seek to find a cause and cure for the plague that killed all terrestrial mammals with the Y chromosome but for Yorick Brown and his monkey Ampersand. The authors focus on patriarchy, Israeli militarism and market violence. While it is is a global story, it starts in the United States and most of its key plots points take place in three settler colonies, the United States, Israel and Australia, before departing to Japan and France later on. Falling Skies looks at the Second Massachusetts, an irregular militia comprised of survivors of the extraterrestrial Espheni conquest that killed 90% of Earth’s human population as they seek to overthrow Espheni rule and restore the United States. Falling Skies affirms American exceptionalism, laments how the U.S. strayed from the perceived ideals of early republic and takes a geocentric view of the universe in its firmly conservative critique of the present.

These stories offer three different critiques of the present from three different political views and are produced in three different mediums in two different settler colonies. Yet all are representative of a genre of post-apocalyptic storytelling that does not contemplate that the lost U.S. and Australian societies are premised upon settler genocides against the native populations. The closest any of the three comes and the closest the overwhelming preponderance of the genre come is when Y: The Last Man briefly discusses Israeli civil disobedience against Israeli bulldozing of Palestinian houses as part of developing the Israeli character Alter. One notable exception is Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto which engages a pending colonial apocalypse only to justify it. Another is District 9 where some references are made yet are mediated by the white South African hero.

Settler colonialism, the establishment of the stories’ lost worlds, is an anti-native apocalypse and, in the United States, Canada, South Africa, Brazil and Rhodesia, also an anti-Black apocalypse. The racializations of Black and native are mostly different but were simultaneously constructed through the same colonizing events. Both are products of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism builds the settler’s world – the anti-Black world – by destroying the native world and does so in a 1:1 ratio. Every acre created of coastal British/American Virginia is one acre less of Powhatan Tsenacommacah. Every dunam of Israel is one less dunam of Palestine. Settler colonialism through eliminating sovereignties and populations and creating regimes of gratuitous violence brings about the end of a world. It is sometimes even named as such as when Palestinians refer to the accelerated 1947-1949 period of Zionist ethnic cleansing and the establishment of the Israeli settler state as the Nakba (‘catastrophe’).

That we settlers comprise an anti-native apocalypse means that all our cultural production is apocalyptic, is the product of an ongoing apocalypse, including post-apocalyptic visions. John Grisham’s The Firm is an apocalyptic novel of legal corruption. Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” is an unrequited love anthem of the apocalypse. Strictly Ballroom is a film about apocalyptic cross-cultural and cross-class ballroom dancing and romance. Almost all of Danielle Steel’s opus are apocalyptic love story books. Only Miley Cyrus’ career of those four actually feels like a sign of the apocalypse but all are inherently apocalyptic as products of settler colonialism. What the intended post-apocalyptic stories Fury Road, Y: The Last Man and Falling Skies unknowingly narrate is a prior apocalypse experiencing an apocalypse itself, the apocalypse’s apocalypse. The destruction of the settler colony provides the post-apocalyptic wasteland the protagonists navigate.

Elizabeth Povinelli describes settler normativity as the “organization of sociality on the basis of the naturalness of a civilizational displacement.” Alternately put, anti-native genocide, quashing of native sovereignties and, in some settler colonies, African slavery are the fabrics that weave together and underline all settler colonial discourse and relations. Settler everyday life is the anti-native and anti-Black apocalypse but for we settlers, it is just life. In this read Furiosa and Max are settler revolutionaries fighting Immortan Joe and the settler capitalists over control of stolen Aborigine land and resources. This is why it is unsurprising that Falling Skies and Y: The Last Man both fail to engage the anti-native apocalypse despite making numerous references to the early U.S. republic, a time when even normative settler discourse knows (but always remembers to forget) that Indian Removal programs were aggressively underway in some way, shape or form.

It is hard to imagine dystopic settler stories being otherwise for settler colonialism, like all organizations of power, builds the world it inhabits. In settler colonialism’s world settler colonialism – the anti-native and anti-Black apocalypses – is near impossible to see as it is our very frame of reference. A challenging thing about normativity is it’s paradigm paradox: From what frame of reference can we observe our frame of reference? When settlers imagine the end of the world then, we imagine it as synonymous with the end of the planet or species and not the end of settler colonialism’s world. But stories consciously narrating the apocalypse’s apocalypse could describe the end of that world. They can offer a new frame of reference and play a role in subverting and disrupting settler colonial power and discourse.

The World is Ending! Hooray!

Settler storytellers explore all kinds of fascinating, entertaining and illuminating scenarios to describe the end of the world. The Terminator and The Matrix stories look to the artificial intelligence singularity. Deep Impact ends part of the world with a comet collision. The Walking Dead comic book, tv series and a long-running series of George Romero’s …of the Dead films narrate a zombie apocalypse. The Wayward Pines book trilogy and tv series look at apocalypse through divergent evolution and On the Beach‘s apocalypse happens through nuclear war. None of the above reflect on the anti-native and anti-Black apocalypses.

Potentially even non-anthropocentric ones can be told. For example there is Vitamin Z – a yet to be made film documenting the multiyear boon in slow-moving, uncoordinated, easily obtainable, though quite bitey, prey for carnivores and scavengers that follows the zombie apocalypse and restores their populations to pre-capitalist/pre-colonial population levels. I hope Keith David or David Attenborough is available to narrate!

But what about when the end of the world is the apocalypse’s apocalypse? Frank Wilderson notes that, “The Slave needs freedom from the Human race, freedom from the world. The Slave requires gratuitous freedom.” Indeed, settler colonialism’s world of dispossession and gratuitous violence not only can end, but should. Stories of the end of this particular world need not be burnt skies and genocide. In narrating the end of an apocalypse they may well tell the opposite: clean air, vitality and an end to gratuitous violence and suffering. The end of settler colonialism’s world can be sunshine and blessings, little children laughing and singing silly songs, lovers dancing or any other beautiful thing. These are legit post-apocalyptic visions when describing an apocalypse happening to a prior apocalypse when combined with Black and native liberation. So are ones less polarly optimistic or romantic.

The material world stories of the whole or partial end of settler rule in Zimbabwe, Liberia and South Africa are decidedly complicated and frequently tragic. Settler colonialism is not the only wronging world in play as Black feminism’s intersectional resistance teaches. Yet stories consciously telling the apocalypse’s apocalypse can offer a discursive break, a frame of reference separate from settler colonialism’s dispossession and gratuitous violence. As Frantz Fanon wrote, “To break up the colonial world does not mean that after the frontiers have been abolished lines of communication will be set up between the two [colonial and decolonized] zones. The destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less than the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth.” Stories telling the end of this world can be part of the shovel.

None of this is to argue that post-apocalyptic and apocalyptic stories cannot be robot apocalypses, nuclear holocausts or extraterrestrial invasions. They are frequently insightful, critical, imaginative and even beautiful. But such visions can still adopt a frame of reference not dependent upon settler colonialism’s dispossession and gratuitous violence and recognize that the anti-native and anti-Black apocalypses have long been happening. In doing so stories of the apocalypse’s apocalypse can obliterate a world that has it coming.

You Can’t Fix Schools By Fixing Schools

Posted on November 18, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, educational reformers have to recommend educational reforms. Even when educational reformers know for a surety that educational reform is not going to work, and won’t even address the problems at hand, they still have to recommend educational reform. It’s in their nature.

Kevin Drum provides a striking example of this in a post from last week. Drum is discussing M. Night Shyamalan’s recent book on education, I Got Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America’s Education Gap.

As Shyamalan discovered (and as Drum reiterates), the startling truth about the problem with our school system is that there isn’t any problem with our school system. Or, at least, there’s nothing wrong with our school system for white kids. In fact, as Drum says, “If you compare American white kids to, say, Finnish or Polish or German white kids, we do just as well.” Shyamalan goes further, and says ” Our white kids are getting taught the best public-school education on the planet. ” The entire reason we score low on national comparisons is because we do such a horrible job of educating inner city minority kids.

The issue, then, is not that we don’t know how to provide good schooling, or that we have bad teachers, or that our system isn’t rigorous enough. Rather, the problem is that we practice what Shyamalan calls “educational apartheid.” For some people, we provide schooling as good as anywhere in the world. And then, for some people, we don’t.

So, what is the solution to this problem? How can we start to give the best education in the world not just to the privileged few, but to everyone? Shyamalan provides a handful of suggestions, which Drum puts in a handy bulleted list.

Get rid of the bottom 2-3 percent of truly terrible teachers.
Make the principal the chief academic and head coach. Let another person handle school operations.
Constant feedback to teachers and students.
Small schools (not small classes).
Increased instructional time. Extend the school day and do away with summer vacation.

Drum says that these recommendations all sound reasonable, given his reading on the subject. But he doesn’t point out the most interesting thing about Shyamalan’s 5 points, which is that none of them address the problem he’s identified in any way shape or form.

Again, that problem, as defined by Shyamalan, and agreed to by Drum, is that we practice educational apartheid. Some people get resources and some people don’t. And yet, this list says nothing, zero, zilch, about trying to reallocate resources. It doesn’t talk about segregation. It doesn’t mention racism. It’s just a list of ways to improve education across the board. Get rid of bad teachers, it says. But there are good teachers and bad teachers everywhere, while low performance only occurs in some places. Change the role of the principal, it says. But principal’s jobs are more or less the same all over; how then will this address disparate outcomes? And so on. If there’s no problem in one place, and lots of problems in another place, addressing structural reforms that apply to everyone seems like a distraction from the main issue.

That issue being, again, that we don’t have any trouble educating wealthy white kids. We have trouble educating poor minority kids. And the cause of that trouble is not that the poor minority kids have worse teachers. It’s not that their principals’ job description needs to be tweaked. The cause of that trouble is that we have created communities that are systematically segregated for the express purpose of ignoring them and the children who live in them.

To see the extent of the disconnect between Shyamalan’s diagnosis and his prescription, consider Shyamalan’s suggestion that one way to improve education is with small schools. Small schools have been tried in Chicago. One of my friends worked as a teacher in a south side neighborhood where small schools were mandated. But the city was not interested in actually building more schools in these communities; that costs money, and the whole point of segregating the city is so that you don’t have to give money to the groups you have marginalized. So instead of building more small schools, the city simply kept the same building and declared that there were four small schools inside it, each with its own principal and administration. Instead of a smaller school, you got more bureaucracy — and a balkanized student body, set up to maximize bullying, inter-school animosity and violence.

In short, you can’t fix apartheid by mandating cleaner jails. You can only fix it with freedom and equality. As long as America is okay with segregation and racism, any educational reform policy (like small schools) will founder from lack of resources and thoroughgoing indifference. Shyamalan and Drum show us that the problem with schools has nothing to do with schools. Since they’re both ostensibly writing about education, though, they’re reluctant to take the next step, and admit that the solution to the problems with schools won’t have much to do with education reform.

Should a Superhero Have a License to Kill?

Posted on November 17, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

James Bond might not be a superhero, but he does dedicate his life to battling bad guys. Plus he has a codename: 007. Yeah, that means he’s just one guy in a league of 00s, so nothing unique—same as any Green Lantern in the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps. Maybe Earth-based agencies are different, but then that would strike Black Widow from the superhero census list too. Also, like Natasha, James has no superpowers, at least not compared to Thor or Superman. He’d make a pretty good match for Batman though. He even sports his own utility belt’s worth of Q-engineered supergadgets.

Mr. Bond also wields Dr. Who’s shapeshifting powers. I watched his edited-for-TV Sean Connery incarnation from my parents’ couch as a kid, and his Roger Moore from theater seats as an adolescent. I even witnessed his awkward Timothy Dalton stage while I was finishing college and his franchise was waiting for Pierce Brosnan to come-of-age too. But I have to admit Daniel Craig is the David Tennant of the Bond universe. I’m looking forward to seeing his current Spectre adventure.

The character struggled after losing his mission-defining Evil Empire, but Skyfall’s Judi Dench gave him back his raison d’être:

“I’m frightened because our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map. They’re not nations. They’re individuals. Look around you. Who do you fear? Do you see a face, a uniform, a flag? No. Our world is not more transparent now. It’s all opaque. It’s in the shadows. That’s where we must do battle.”

Batman is all about shadows too, turning the darkness of his parents’ murders against the shady elements of murky Gotham. But, unlike a trigger-happy 00 agent, Batman would never kill anyone on purpose, right?

Well, actually the unlicensed Dark Knight racked up a Bond-level body count during his first year in Detective Comics. Not only did a holster hang from his utility belt back then, the batplane included a mounted machinegun: “Much as I hate to take human life, I’m afraid this time it’s necessary!”

DC editors reined in his homicidal writing staff after Batman #1, but even the comparatively wholesome Superman had a killing streak then. In June 1939, same month Batman was kicking jewel thieves off skyscrapers, Superman was dropping a mobster to an identical death. Granted, it wasn’t Superman’s fault he lost his super grip: “If he hadn’t tried to stab me, he’d be alive now.—But the fate received was exactly what he deserved!” Though what did Superman think was going to happen when he destroyed the Ultra-Humanite’s propeller mid-flight? The supervillain somehow escaped the crash, but no thanks to the death-indifferent Man of Steel.

Comic books usually protect their heroes from having to kill directly. In that same Action Comics, a rotating blade shatters against Superman’s impervious skull and slices up a nearby thug. Or in another early Batman adventure, a “foreign agent” is accidentally impaled on his own sword, and Batman self-righteously declares: “It is better that he should die! He might have sent thousands of others to their death on a battlefield if his plans had been successful!”

If this makes your feel morally queasy, listen to Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko on superhero morality: superheroes are “moral avengers” who must kill criminals in order to show “a clear understanding of right and wrong,” even if that means violating the “pervading legal moral” code.

Mr. Ditko currently resides in the crazy-old-man dimension of the comics multiverse, because his Ann Rand philosophy isn’t a page in today’s superhero bible. Batman’s and Superman’s most recent film incarnations take little license with the Sixth Commandment. In fact, the plot of Christopher Nolan’s 2008 The Dark Knight pivots on Christian Bale’s Batman struggling not to kill the Joker—even though killing him is necessary to protect others and exactly “what he deserves.” And remember the fan outrage when Henry Cavill’s Superman snapped General Zod’s neck in Man of Steel? It was that or let the General’s laser vision slice up a family of cowering Metropolitans, but Superman’s super-wholesomeness got sliced up too.

Both Zod and Joker are weirdly suicidal supervillains, goading their arch-enemies into committing murder. But then that’s the point. Superheroes are supposed to oppose killing out of principle. So where’s that leave Mr. Bond?

We could say his license strikes the “super” from his heroness, maybe even replacing it with an “anti.” His comic book counterpart might be the Ditko-esque Punisher, a sometime supervillain depending on who’s penning the story. But in James’ defense, killing isn’t the core of his mission. It’s just the most efficient means for getting important jobs down. He’s paid to be indifferent to death.

And that’s the problem. I remember Roger Moore’s 007 dangling a “foreign agent” by his tie from the edge of a building. The thug had been gunning at him seconds earlier, so the scene meets the “what he deserved” test. But was it necessary? Couldn’t he have holstered his license and knocked the guy out instead of dropping him to his death? Sure, the guy was a cog in the Cold War wheel trying to squash Democracy, but did Roger Moore have to grin? Did the movie have to play the scene for laughs, toying with the villain’s tie as he quivered for life?

I don’t blame his character though. James Bond was designed to be a cold-blooded Cold Warrior. You could argue the hero type was a product of its times—and so a bad fit with ours. Connery, Moore, Dalton, they all performed indifference so their 60s, 70s and 80s audiences could forget about the nuclear arsenal aimed at their hometown theaters. Take Bond out of that context and he just seems callous. The same way the original Superman and Batman made more moral sense as their readers teetered on the brink of a Nazi-driven World War.

The current Daniel Craig incarnation fixes that. He still shows his killer license when needed, but he’s not indifferent about it. He understands what it means to take a life. Like the 2013 Superman, he only snaps a villainous neck when it means saving innocent ones. He takes no pleasure in it. If anything, that hint of inner turmoil makes him almost superheroic. He does the dirty work so no one else has to. He’s not a 00 by self-righteous nature, but by self-sacrificing choice.

Help Samandal Speak

Posted on November 16, 2015 by Marguerite Dabaie

We are all reeling from the recent, devastating attacks in Paris that claimed the lives of too many and changed the lives of many, many more. The attacks were carried out on behalf of Daesh (ISIS), the chaos being another stake to further drive away reasonable discourse and chances at real communication. A day before these attacks, Beirut—with only a whisper in the media—suffered a similar fate at the hands of Daesh.

In the middle of this, a comics anthology with roots in Beirut and many ties to French-speaking Europe fights to keep its doors open, its mission is to open worldwide communication without national borders. They may buckle under the weight of censorship.

The irony here is notable, to say the least.

Samandal is a French, English, and Arabic language international comics anthology, in production for a decade. It is funded by the Belgian publishing house L’employé du Moi, the French Cultural Center in Beirut and the Belgian Ministry of Culture in Brussels, but it is on the brink of collapse due to charges that it has contributed to sectarian strife.

Back in 2009, Samandal released its seventh issue, titled “Revenge.” In this particular issue were two comics that, according to the comic’s editors, were taken out of context and reported to the Lebanese authorities.

In the first comic in question, “Lebanese Recipes for Revenge,”—created by Lena Merhej, who is also one of Samandal’s editors—common Lebanese phrases (analogous to English phrases like “go eat shit” or “buying the farm”) are illustrated literally. The phrase “May [God] burn your religion” is portrayed with a Christian and a Muslim being doused with gasoline and lit with a match.

The second comic, created by Valfret, is titled “Ecce Homo.” It follows the story of a Roman centurion who has drunken sexual relations with a legionnaire. The legionnaire is killed by the centurion due to his own disgust, and the centurion then leads his army to a Christian sect in order to pin the murder on someone else. The very last page of this comic is a scene of a crucified member of that Christian sect, with the centurion thinking to himself, “It’s you who’s gay.”

These two pages were flagged and investigated due to complaints lodged by unknown Christian figures, “expressing their disapproval concerning the publication of some comics … that are offensive to the Christian religion.” In an unusual move, three of the four editors of Samandal—not the artists who created the comics—were accused of wrongdoing. Take into consideration that Merhej is an editor herself, and things seem even more puzzling.

After several years of court cases, the results are not good. Samandal has been found guilty and must pay 30 million liras ($20,000) in damages, wiping out their savings and threatening them with extinction. Unless they receive an infusion of cash, their next book, Geographia, is slated to be their last. In response to this, Samandal has launched an Indiegogo campaign to fund the publishing of two more books. As of this writing, there’s still time to contribute, and plenty of money needed.

Why is this important?

Samandal is truly a worldwide institution. How many comics anthologies have you seen that are in multiple languages? It’s a fantastic microcosm of the alternative comics trend outside of the tiny, tiny American market. In the “Revenge” issue alone, I see contributors hailing from France, Belgium, Quebec, Lebanon, the United States, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.

I’m a big believer in open communication. In the face of such travesty, the way to truly “win” is by talking more, opening more channels, being more in touch with the world. Samandal has always embodied that universal spirit to me. What better time is there to reinforce that speech should remain free?

Please consider donating to the Indiegogo campagn and check out their website for more information on the case.

Lastly, here’s Merhej’s comic describing the scandal, in her own words. Take it away, Lena:

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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