Utilitarian Review 10/17/15

The subtitle of this heavenly collection of 70s and early 80s singer-songwriter folk is a misnomer. The singers on these tracks aren’t weather-beaten Clint-Eastwoodesque fighters. The Vietnam War and the draft do hang over the album like a grey, dreamy shroud, but the response they elicit isn’t defiant so much as resigned, and vulnerable. When George Cromarty insists with a light Donovan quaver, “There’s always someone to pick up your toys…at the end of the day, little children,” it’s less reassurance than prayer. The performers here cling to childhood because they know that adulthood means an immediate confrontation with mortality — as in Jack Hardy’s “The Tailor,” where the titular seamster asserts “I am not a tailor, I’m a man,” before being dragged off to the gallows. More typical is John Villemonte’s “I Am the Moonlight,” where the singer sloughs off masculinity altogether in favor of a fey retreat into unbodied sensuality: “I am the watcher…I see both your bodies/your hands in her hair/I shine through your windows/silhouetting your forms/I’m soft and I’m fragile/to echo the warm.” This is Peter Pan music if Peter forswore fighting to play on his pipes while Hook bore down on him. It’s lilting and eerie and sad — and perhaps a little brave after all in the way it quietly trades heroism for beauty.

Comics and High Art: Not a Juxtaposition

Posted on October 14, 2015 by Anthony Easton

Sholem Krishtalka, Snax (detail), 2014

Sholem Krishtalka moved to Berlin a couple of years ago, and has been making visual and cultural representations of the city since May 2013. They are mostly online, scanned from analog sources. Looking at the work, with the pictures interlaced with text, they could be thought to be comics. Even talking to Krishtalka, he sees them as similar to Hogarth, the British painter and print artist from the 18th century. The two big books in the mid 1990s that tried to claim comic as art, or tried to talk about the semiotics of comics as their own thing, place Hogarth in their canon. For Scott McCloud, Hogarth is comics, because he fits their essential definition; namely, that they are “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud, Understanding Comics, 20). For Robert Girard, it is a possibility that Hogarth’s early work could be comics, and his entire first chapter is about the English tradition of printing, that reached its zenith in the 19th century.In this capacity, Hogarth and comics can be defined by “Skill for exaggeration and ironic juxtaposition of words and pictures…an aesthetic template” (12, Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novel)

From A Berlin Diary

Krishtalka work could be considered comics by Girard and McCloud–especially for the problems of (possibly ironic) juxtaposition of words and images. However, when he spoke to me he disputed this taxonomic claim: “It’s not created as a comic (this isn’t any form of snobbery, it’s just not constructed, laid out, etc etc the way a comic book is). If I have my way, it’ll look more like a monograph than a comic. Again, I’m interested in medium specificity — if it’s going to be a book, I want it to make sense as a book, i.e. I want the form of the book to impact the drawings and vice versa” Thinking about the art historical tradition in which Krishtalka works (the book and the print), the juxtaposition between words and text might not be the sole purview of comics or comix.

The art historical tradition could consist of the Los Angeles legend Ed Ruscha, who never claimed that his photographic work were works in themselves, but “pictures for a book”. By extension, Ruscha makes the point that his drawings are, in a similar fashion, just pictures in a book. But, this does not mean that pictures in a book cannot be juxtaposed.

Ruscha’s use of banal texts — or his absence of text — asserts that the mash up of words and pictures is not the most interesting juxtaposition, which can occur within a set of formal choices, within or at oblique angles to a larger tradition of image making. The tradition becomes a kind of moving target that never quite remains stable. In this sense, the media becomes the message. Ruscha’s use of banal forms, or pop’s use of banal forms, are as much of a figure of media choices than other formal problems. Thus, the comics are comics, because Hogarth turned paintings into cheap etchings, which were then made even cheaper by vernacular forms. The translation into vernacular forms are more important than either words or pictures. To read a tradition is not to just read words or pictures, but to place both into a social context, which pays attention to the methods of production.

Ed Ruscha, from The Seasons

So, the “the juxtaposition of pictures and words”, in Krishtalka’s context, must be considered in the media tradition of queer narrative artists, in Europe, at the beginning of the 21st century who have a tense relationship to digital methods of distribution. Within this media are very specific messages, even messages that connect to Hogarth, but elide either comix or comics. This tradition, a half century earlier, would include David Hockney, especially his illustrations of certain poems of Cavafy or his work on the Rake’s progress.

Cavafy was a cult poet–Greek, friendly with the novelist EM Forster, and known for hinting at desire without stating sexuality directly. Hockney’s illustrations of the poems of Cavafy, make explicit the homoeroticism implied in the text. Thus, in this act of translation, the work allows for an explicit overlap between text and image. The lack of contrasting effect in the work means there is no juxtaposition between word and image This appropriateness refuses one tradition of seeing pictures and words together (they do not startle).

Hockney illustration for Cavafy’s poems

There are other ways of images and words working together where Hockney playing with Cavafy would work perfectly. There have been private presses from the beginning, printing queer erotic work, and for the idea of queer erotic work being passed from hand to hand. Homerotic work has medium concerns, has a tradition that cannot be included in the problem of genre. That these works eventually become public, and that Hockney makes them more explicit than Cavafy’s hints, has a kind of intertextual narrative progression. Cavafy writes tight, heart breaking odes of masculine sex. In a couple of decades, using a media that is both attached to a tradition and a break of tradition, Hockney illustrates these odes. These illustrated odes are scanned because of Hockney, and through the problem of the net, finally develop a kind of fissure. This fissure, between image and text, allows for an unmooring of desire. This ambivalence of forms and history, also through the net, can be seen in the best of Krishtalka work. It has an embodied disembodiment, which is shared by Hockney. The juxtaposition is between reader, author, tradition, medium and heritage. The words and the pictures matter less than all of the other concerns.

If Hockney’s etchings around Cavafy are about intimacy of scale, than his stage designs for Stravinsky’s operatic adaptation of the Rake’s Progress fit within a tradition of printmaking. That the libretto of the Opera was written by the poet WH Auden and his partner Chester Kallman indicates a queer reclaiming of Hogarth’s work. If the sexual outlaw was subject in Hogarth’s work and if the juxtaposition at least partially was between who was being depicted, and the audience for those being depicted, the making queer underground tradition epically visual. When Hockney uses the form of etching, he also turns those etchings into opera curtains–adding the performative nature of time to this ongoing hand to hand playing of the homoerotic potential of English masculinities. Thus, the work he did for the Rake’s progress does not juxtapose words and pictures but juxtaposes the oral and written languages in ways that are within the tradition (the tradition of English music hall, but also the tradition of opera queens and another kind of performative queerness.) The refusal of juxtaposition, the sameness that occurs with the updating of the etchings, suggest that not all pictures with words are comics.

Hockney’s adaptation of Rake’s Progress functions as a formal act–where the medium becomes the message. It plays with the visual syntax of Hogarth but not the form. But then what to do with Cavafy’s etchings? As illustration, ephemeral, connecting perhaps to the cheap traditions of pornography and the expensive connections of private printed editions, but do they juxtapose? In Krishtalka’s depictions of the dance clubs of Berlin, is he functioning as an outside observer–juxtaposing audience and performer, or is he placing himself within a tradition of visual depictions–like Auden and Kallman writing an opera to make the visual queer? This is the ongoing problem of juxtaposition. It’s not a useful word for figuring out the complex lattice of forms that visual work constructs. The beginning assumption is that juxtaposition only exists within a context of high modernist shock. The integration of forms, and of medium, that rely on a familiarity of influences is not rewarded via juxtaposition. Outside of a comics context, the art historian Hal Foster writes about this on his introductory discussion of early pop. “Warhol and Lichtenstein’s ..juxtaposition of high and low registers might shock, but only in the first instance…it is the unexpected fit between tableau and its cultural others (cartoon, ad or comic) that counts…”(Foster, First Pop Age, 71)

David Hockney, The Rake’s Progress

How Hockney constructs his relationships to personal experiences, and selfhood is one unexpected fit. There are others. For example, Lichtenstein’s mirror paintings from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s, and how they both refuse a direct correlation between the narratives of self, and the medium of quoting, destabilizing forms. (They are pictures of mirrors that are literally unreflective). Even if Lichtenstein wasn’t queer– his work suggests that identity has become labile, more prone to failure, and less willing to endure the juxtaposed enjambment as the only way of moving forward. Krishtalka’s work approaches Pop’s move away from juxtaposition as a formalist identity, and towards a large series of unstable and negotiated allowances, not the usual beyond the fourth wall or the playing with panels, but with a recognition of multiplicities of media. Lichtenstein’s mirrors recognize the infidelity of the mirror’s ability to feed information back to the viewer. This tension between how something is represented, and what it shows, could be a continual central problem of contemporary aesthetics. Another example: Warhol was shit at silk screening, if he did it himself, it was splotchy, runny, the colors bleed. The formal instability of the silk screen medium, so close to the problems of painting, is a reminder of the continually instability of form, just as Lichtenstein’s mirrors which cannot see, resemble the idea of mirror, without embodiment. This is not to suggest that comics are incapable of this kind of reminder, but the juxtapositions that historians of comics keep trying to embody are not the only games that are being played. It might be useful to think of this as a number of spectrums: between future and past, between precedents, about identity (like queerness itself is a spectrum), between fidelity and infidelity to any of these problems–but also between soft introductions and hard shocks, between the primary shock and the continual renewal of problematic forms.

Roy Lichtenstein

Hogarth was straight and bourgeois, and Lichtenstein was as well, but the others we have mentioned had a queer heritage, and part of that problem of reproducibility has a queer energy. Part of the queerness is the ability of the private book, the broadsheet, the mimeograph, the computer, the smartphone, to allow for early adopters to invent and depict new sexual forms. Part of it is that queerness functions as a kind of paratextual interloper, it slides between genre or forms with some ease. Part of it is the artificial reproduction has a queer edge–eluding biology, eluding the ordinariness of how we usually create more things, the mechanical and later digital, allow for a wilderness of desire, that overwhelm simple understandings of one thing juxtaposing with another. This queerness then infects how narratives are constructed, but does not position a simple way of working through one form or one methodology.

These spectrums working with Krishtalka’s queer work and his historical canon, work out an ongoing problem of how to depict the visual impact of new reproductive media. One of the reasons why paintings become prints in Hogarth is because of the emergence of cheap and ready ways to do so. One of the reasons why Warhol worked in both film and in silk screens, was a way of finding his own identity in the history of mass production. The blankness of Ruscha is only possible because of the new interstate Highway system. The anxiety of Lichtenstein’s mirrors is about how to see in a new machine age. The ongoing problem of how to construct meaning in new narratives of image reproduction has a weird consistency.

This fraught relationship between how to see and what to see is not only visual. Krishtalka’s project is named the Berlin diaries. For most of Krishtalka’s audience, this brings to memory the novelist Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which gave birth to a stage production, which gave birth to a film, which gave birth to another stage production. The interplay between film, stage, and written text was introduced by one of last century’s definitive opening lines, recalling an ironic visual neutrality of new technology: “ “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”

Isherwood wanting to be an impersonal camera, and never succeeding at it, summarizes a history of a whole tradition of 20th century attempts to answer the problems of the reproducibility of technology. Thinking about the series that Krishtalka did before he worked on the Berlin Diaries, this problem of reproducibility has some definitive queer shades. The series is called Lurking, and it is beautiful depictions of mostly watercolour and pencil of youngish, cutish men. They translate a form that has been popular from the Mannerist era, but the formal translation has something to say about the distribution methodology of the form (from Facebook to analog media, to digitial scanning, to Tumblr.) Though, this translation is one that Krishtalka disputes: “On the other hand, you’re always a victim to the speed of people’s dashboard feeds, and the culture of image consumption on the internet in general. Which means that people don’t linger on the images on the net, or at least I assume they don’t. What was interesting about watching people consume the images live, i.e. during the run of my gallery show, was that people really did linger.”

Looking at Krishtalka’s Lurking Drawings on Tumblr, reinforces the desire to linger, just as the desire to cruise, the desire to form one’s singular narrative, is complicated when they are imbued by other creators and other forms. The Tumblr feed is a collective feed, and one whose narratives are out of the control of the artist. They become a monstrous problem of this reproduced form. But the formal component is still vital. Lurking is part of that talk about the internet’s return of the visual, the tension of the digital, formal juxtaposition, all become part of this self perpetuating traditional crisis of narrative making. But a formal crisis and one interlaced with the usual problems of aesthetics (maybe even a problem of beauty.) So though comics flirt with the edges of this problem of reproducibility, is the problem of formal reproducibility explicitly one of comics?

In the hi/lo tumblr everything is visual without being explicitly within the form of comics or watercolour or prints–the problems of transmuting that the Cavafy etchings in texts are part of this construction, and the form of Lurking is more suited to Tumblr. The work will shift meanings and culture, when they are taken out of the visual stream of the tumblr wall, and emerge into a written book. Just, as our understanding of Hogarth changes, when we see what Hockney has done with it.

In this sense, comics becomes one way of looking at the juxtaposition of word and text, one way to translate, but not the simplest or the only method. The book refuses the juxtaposition, and abstraction of the digital form, as Krishtalka allows: “My ultimate ambition for this project is that it be concrete, that it exist as a book. If this ever does see the light of day, it won’t look like a comic. It’s not created as a comic (this isn’t any form of snobbery, it’s just not constructed, laid out, etc etc the way a comic book is). If I have my way, it’ll look more like a monograph than a comic. Again, I’m interested in medium specificity — if it’s going to be a book, I want it to make sense as a book, i.e. I want the form of the book to impact the drawings and vice versa.”

The Berlin Diaries as they are working right now (as text, as writing, as a cohesive way of working through identity, as a piece aware of and working around these traditions, as a problem of desire, as a problem of medium, as an edited work, as a work of excess, as a print series, as a work of nostalgia, as a work that is unstable in a medium that is unstable, as queer–not in the subject matter, but as a formal problem) refuse juxtaposition in favour of more explicit forms (what Krishtalka calls “medium specificity” When they become a book, the concreteness of the form does not make them any more of a comic, just as when Hogarth moved from paintings to prints, they were the proto comics that we wish them to be.

The transformation is the key taxonomic category, but not the singular one.

The First Superhero?

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I’ve been assembling an ur-team of Avengers for my book On the Origin of Superheroes, and my first-ever superhero award goes to the Golem. He’s super-strong, impervious to pain, and, when made from clay, can even shapeshift a bit. On the downside, he’s dumb in both senses and so requires close supervision. Sorcerers and programmers beware.

“There is nothing more uncanny than something that is almost human,” says Margaret Atwood. “All our stories about robotics are stories like that. It’s what we have always worried about. It’s the sorcerer’s apprentice story: He learns how to do the charm; he doesn’t know how to turn it off. It’s the Golem story: You make the Golem, you activate it, it’s supposed to do your work for you, and then it runs amok.”

Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy features a genetically engineered species of designer humans, but they’re too mellow to cause the survivors of her apocalypse much trouble. When it comes to magic brooms and water buckets running amok, I picture Mickey Mouse, but Goethe published his poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” while Napoleon was still waging France’s Revolutionary Wars.

Apparently Goethe cribbed the tale from Lucian’s Philopseudes, c. 150 CE, though the word “golem” is even older. It means “shapeless mass” in Hebrew, which is the description of Ben Grimm that Stan Lee typed up for Jack Kirby in 1960: “He’s sort of shapeless—he’s become a THING.” Kirby drew a giant bumpy rock monster that turned orange at the printer’s. I don’t know if either had the Golem in mind, but Fantastic Four writer Karl Kesel did when he decided forty years later that Ben’s full name was Benjamin Jacob Grimm.

Benjamin grew up going to synagogue as a kid and could still recite Torah passages from memory, so he probably knows that “golem” first appears in Psalms 139:16 (“my substance, yet being unperfect”) when David praises God for creating him. The Talmud (c. 200 CE) uses the term to describe Adam’s creation too: “In the first hour, his dust was gathered; in the second, it was kneaded into a shapeless mass.” But jump forward another couple hundred years, and a passage mentions the first living golem: “Rabbah created a man, and sent him to Rabbi Zera. Rabbi Zera spoke to him, but received no answer. Thereupon he said unto him: ‘Thou art a creature of the magicians. Return to thy dust.’”

Apparently they weren’t all that hard to manufacture. All Pygmalion had to do was pray to Venus to bring his ivory statue Galatea to life. Daedalus soldered his golem Talos from bronze. If you’re up on your Kabbalistic techniques, Sefer Yetzirah (The Book of Formation) gives a how-to, but Aryeh Kaplan warns apprentices not to attempt it alone. Virgin dirt is also key. Marvel was still printing on pulp paper in 1974, which is why their Strange Tales Golem only ran three issues. Writer Len Wein gave the legend his best superheroic spin:

In centuries agon, they had called him a myth, a creature formed of stone and clay and the blood of a people’s oppression—a moving monolith who rose before the yoke of tyranny—shattered it in his monumental fists—then vanished into the sands of time—there to be almost forgotten—until today! Now once more he rises—summoned from his eons-long sleep to protect those he loves.

Marvel tries not to take sides in the Palestine-Israeli conflict, declaring it

a war of territory, of ideologies—fought with great fervor but with little gain—fought with loaned weaponry wielded by men—men charged with love of country and the courage of their convictions, but men nonetheless—aye, as in all wars before this, fought by men—imperfect, all-too-human men.

But those the Golem loves are the family of Jewish archeologists who dig him up, while General Omar leads an army of marauding rapists who pillage the archeological camp and machinegun the grandfather. Uncle Abraham’s dying tear reanimates the creature. “Eyes of a camel!” shouts one of the keffiyeh-wearing soldiers. “The statue—it lives!”

Michael Chabon’s golem surfaces for far less dramatic adventures. His amazing Kavalier and Clay find its coffin filled

to a depth of about seven inches, with a fine powder, pigeon-gray and opalescent, that Joe recognized at once from boyhood excursions as the silty bed of the Moldau . . . . The speculations of those who feared that the Golem, removed from the shores of the river that mothered it, might degrade had been proved correct.

My wife and I sat along the banks of the Moldau (AKA Vltava) sipping Budvar in a Prague café in 1996. The ground was too paved to be termed virginal, but the city has a legion of statues and tourist shop figurines already prepped for animation. Prague is to Golem as Metropolis is to Superman. The tales proliferated there like magic brooms in the 1800s. One named Josef protected Jews from a supervillainous Emperor with the additional superpower of invisibility—so basically half of the Fantastic Four. Benjamin Kuras, author of As Golems Go, explains why Golem still adventures in the Czech Republic:

After living through the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nazism and decades of communism, the Czechs are drawn to a character with supernatural powers that will help liberate them from oppression.

The Golem is also the original “robot,” a Czech word for “laborer” or “slave.” Karel ?apek’s play R.U.R. (AKA “Rossum’s Universal Robots”) unleashed them on the world, resulting in the extinction of the human race in 1920. Despite the nuts-and-bolts contraptions in promo shots, Kapek’s robots are the flesh-and-blood variety, more like clones or Philip Dick’s sheep-dreaming replicants. Carl Burgos had the same idea when he drew the Human Torch for Marvel Comics No. 1 in 1939. The flames were one of those unintended “run amok” side effects, but rather than burning Brooklyn to the ground, the almost human Torch gets his superpower under control (bringing our Fantastic Four tally to 75%) and vows to help humanity even though humanity tried to seal him in a steel and concrete cage.

The Human Torch fizzled in the forties and wandered out to the desert to die—the same fate Wein copied for his Golem. The evil robot Ultron rebuilt the Torch’s burnt-out corpse in 1968, and he was reborn as my favorite childhood superhero, the Vision. But then the original Torch erupted from a secret grave in the 80s, so the Vision was never really the Torch but a copy soldered from spare parts. Only, no wait, that’s not it either, because next it turns out the Vision and the Torch are in fact the same synthoid split in two when a time-traveling supervillain manipulated the timeline. Except then the Vision half was ripped apart by She-Hulk, and his identity may or may not inhabit the sentient armor of the time-traveler’s teen-age self, while his soul returned in a team of Dead Avengers before Tony Stark reassembled his body. And don’t even get me started whether that body is the kind with buzzing wires and clanking pistons or the kind with synthetic organs that gurgle and fart.

Human animation is simpler. My wife returned from Prague pregnant with our daughter. King David praises God for “cover[ing] me in my mother’s womb,” but we followed a very different nuts and bolts process. Though nothing like the Thing, my daughter has been running amok for eighteen years now. She looks a lot more like the clay statue Hippolyte sculpted and, with the help of her gods William Marston and Harry G. Peter, brought to life in 1941—making Wonder Woman the original comic book Golem. Sadly, she’s not available for my team of First Avengers.

(Non) Super (Non) Direction

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Superheroes are supposed to be amazing. They can leap tall buildings, run faster than a speeding whoosh, and see sights that no sighter has ever sighted.

And yet, on film, superheroes are, visually, banal.

That’s a little documentary about Kurosawa’s use of movement. At about 4:30, the video compares scenes from Joss Whedon’s the Avengers —and shows pretty definitively that Whedon does basically nothing with the camera, with his actors, or with his composition. The Avengers might be the world’s most powerful mortals, but Whedon films them with the dynamism of grey, flatulent paint (though I’m sure Kurosawa would film flatulent paint with panache, if he felt like it.)

Whedon is an unusually blah director, but superhero films in general aren’t known for their visual distinctiveness. Look at this sequence from Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man.

There’s some effort to promote visual interest there. The camera beings moving away from Ant-Man, and then flips so you’re moving towards Henry Pym and Hope. Once your close to Pym and Hope, the door slams, and then there’s a zoom towards the keyhole, followed by a shot back to Ant-Man, who races towards the door. The back and forth of the camera, from Scott to Pym to Scott to Pym, could be seen as mirroring the (humorously) repetitious failed attempts. And there’s a nice comic moment when you see him racing towards the door, and then the shot on the other side as he smashes against it, leaving his impact to your imagination.

But while the sequence is workmanlike enough, it’s not exactly impressive or memorable. The back and forth of the camera doesn’t feel especially regulated or meaningful. Notice the last shot of Ant-Man before we switch back to the door closing, for example. The camera is stationary; it’s no longer pulling away from him. the sense of motion is frittered away; the shot doesn’t add to the tension or the sense of motion. It just reminds you that Ant-Man is still standing there. Similarly, the first run at the door doesn’t really use the camera pacing to create suspense. Instead, after all the build-up, there are just a bunch of shots: moving in on the keyhole, cut to Ant-Man closing his mask with a flourish, then running, then watching him run through the keyhole, then a flash of blue, then the sound of impact. It’s haphazard and disjointed; there isn’t a clear rhythm or build, which means that there isn’t a sense of anticipation or failure. As a result, most of the work of the scene is up to the Foley artist, for the thud-into-the-door sound effect.

In contrast, the scene from Hitchock’s The Birds uses orchestrates shot/reverse shot movement to build suspense throughout. The cuts come quicker and quicker throughout the scene as the inevitable disaster looms, culminating in what are essentially freeze frame snapshots of Tippi Hedren’s horrified face as the explosion rips through Bodega Bay. And then of course there’s that marvelous move upwards to the bird’s eye view, looking down on the flames forming a slash across the city, with the bird’s squawking in triumph before they swoosh down to do more damage.

It’s kind of cruel to compare a couple of random big-budget hacks to Kurosawa and Hitchcock, obviously. But, on the other hand, Hitchcock, at least, was a Hollywood hack too; The Birds was a suspense picture that was meant for box office success (and did fairly well at that.) Given the buckets of money the studios throw at the Marvel films, it seems like they could find a director with rudimentary visual skill, if they wanted to.

Guy Ritchie’s not one of the all time greats of cinema or anything, but The Man from U.N.C.L.E. has some visual flair. I like the sequence at about :45 where the camera rushes in for a close up at the first car, then pulls back and in the same (presumably digitally enhanced take) rushes forward for a close up of the trailing car. It provides a nice sense of speed and urgency—again, not breathtaking, but fun—which is more than can be said for the direction in Avengers or Ant-Man.

Of course, Man From U.N.C.L.E. bombed, while Avengers and Ant-Man were mega-hits. The sameness of the Marvel films (and the fact that Daredevil, on television, is somewhat more visually adventurous) suggests deliberation. Marvel could have hired Guy Ritchie to direct one of their properties; they haven’t bothered because they figure boring is best. The direction is meant to be bland, because they figure (rightly or wrongly) that audiences wants superheroes who are bland. We want heroes, apparently, who are not too interesting, or surprising, or exciting. We want superadventures that keep to the superconventions.

Utilitarian Review 10/9/15

Posted on October 10, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Wonder Woman News

Nice piece at the History of BDSM site summarizing my arguments about WW and bondage.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Sarah Shoker on high fantasy as subversive literature.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from mid 1948.

Petar Duric on the Sly Cooper games and class hierarchy.

Chris Gavaler on comics inking and Henry James.

On Xasthur and the circle of metal.

A short piece on loving to hate/hating to love Mandy Moore.

Me on Stendahl Syndrome and never getting out of the patriarchy.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Slate I wrote about Jojo Moyes and romance with a sad ending (and a happy one.

At Playboy

—I interviewed Mistresse Matisse, about her work in sex work activism.

—I wrote about Meryl Streep’s T-shirt and suffragette’s history with racism.

—I wrote about the Kunduz hospital bombing and how atrocities are always going to be part of war (which is why you shouldn’t go to war.)

At Pacific Standard I wrote about Alison Bass’ book Getting Screwed and how laws against sex workers were less harsh in the past than they are now.

At the Rumpus I talked about Percival Everett’s new book and the good and bad of African-American literature’s marginalization.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—how Lawrence Lessig is an idiot.

—A.O. Scott and conventional snobbery.

Other Links

Justin Lehmiller on the relative health of people in monogamous and open relationships.

Tim Sommer on why Kraftwerk should be in the Rock and Roll hall of fame.

Rebecca Thorpe on how rural representatives vote against prison reform to keep jobs in their districts.

Patriarchy in You

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

According to Andrew Cooper, you can read the Stendahl Syndrome as a winking parody of critical fears of horror movies. In the film, Detective Anna Manni (Asia Argento) is violently raped by a serial predator. The rapist manages to capture her because she suffers from Stendahl Syndrome—a psychological condition which causes her to be overcome, and even experience hallucinations, when viewing art. Anna, then, is the incredibly overly receptive viewer of critics’ nightmares; her whole view of reality is transformed by aesthetic experience. Little wonder, then, that the rape/revenge plot of the film she is in leads her to perdition. Morally censorious critics imagine that watching films causes violence; Anna, the overly sensitive viewer, observes her rapist and becomes him. She does manage to take her revenge, but after doing so, she becomes psychotic herself. Through the power of art, the detective changes to the murderer. End of joke.

There’s another, less ironic way to take the film, though. Most rape/revenge films are narratively linear, and set. You start out with a healthy, unmarked woman; she is abused, suffers, strikes back, and destroys her tormenter.

The Stendahl Syndrome scrambles this—not with the rather obvious chronological trickery of Irreversible, but through more subtly letting the emotional and narrative components of the story shift out of true. Anna begins to experience trauma when she goes to an art gallery, before she is raped. And rather than a singular event, the rape is reenacted; first by Anna, who begins to dress as a man, and then molests her boyfriend, and then by the rapist, who attacks other women, and then re-kidnaps Anna. Finally, Anna murders the rapist in revenge—but that doesn’t end the story. Instead, the narrative grinds on, with the rapist apparently back from the dead—until it turns out it’s not the rapist, but Anna herself who is murdering her own lovers and friends. The rapist is inside her, she says; being violated, and then enacting violence herself, has turned her into him. She becomes the abusive patriarch who assaulted her.

Psycho, and Hitchcock in general, seem like an obvious touchstone here; as in Hitchcock’s films, the movie world seems to gleefully conspire against the beautiful protagonist, creating switchback complications to destroy and humiliate her. But unlike in Hitchcock, the film affect is always, firmly with Anna, which means the complications don’t seem like trickery, but like grotesque unfairness. The movie even says, just about outright, that it is rigged against Anna; it is art itself which disorients her and traumatizes her before the rapist can.

Again, Anna’s susceptibility to art could be a meta-comment that art doesn’t actually work like this; a painting doesn’t make you hallucinate, a film doesn’t make you a murderer. But the antipathy of art within the film could also be an acknowledgement of the antipathy of the film itself—and, metaphorically, of the antipathy of the world outside the film.

Sexual violence and patriarchy aren’t neatly contained in a narrative of (provisional) redemption. Instead, they leak out everywhere. Anna is traumatized before she is traumatized; her rapist continues to haunt her not only after the rape, but after his death. The violence to her is not only real, but symbolic—and is so overwhelming that she can’t even separate the violence from her self. Her relationship to her own sexuality, and her own violence, is inseparable from what has been done to her—and what has been done to her isn’t just the rape, but the vision in which the rape occurs, which precedes it and enables it.

One of many false climaxes in The Stendahl Syndrome occurs during Anna’s second rape. She has been tied down to a bed, and the rapist, having finished his work, leaves to amuse himself in some other way before coming back to finish her. There’s graffitti on the walls of the chamber, and her syndrome kicks in, causing her to hallucinate. Her powerful thrashing allows her to free herself. She kills her attacker when he returns in an extremely satisfying scene. Art serves as inspiration for empowerment — the message of many revenge films which seek to uplift, whether Fury Road or Ex Machina.

But Anna can’t get out of the film. Once she has tied herself to the tropes of suspense and violence and patriarchy, she can’t undo the knots. If Stendahl Syndrome is a parody of the idea that aesthetics can corrupt, it’s also a parody of the idea that aesthetics can save and liberate. Instead, in the Stendahl Syndrome, art and life collaborate together to create a hierarchy from which there is no escape, a dream of violence that doesn’t end.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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