Love to Hate/Hate to Love

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This ran at Madeloud way back when.
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Mandy Moore
Amanda Leigh
[Storefront]

Two Stars

Listen To: “Everblue,” “Song About Home,” “Merrimack River (Reprise)”

I was swept away by the first rapturous chords of Mandy Moore’s last album Wild Hope — and I’ve been more or less bitterly falling out of love with it ever since. I can’t resist those folk-pop tunes under the layers and layers of pristine production and the slightly hoarse vocals — but, gah, the remorselessly earnest phrasing…the self-help lyrics…and, for that matter, the saccharine folk-pop tunes under the layers and layers of pristine production. It’s like drifting off to sea in a romantic coracle with your one true love and then becoming desperately seasick and barfing over the side. And then you realize your true love is actually a rotting zombie mannequin — but jeez, she doesn’t look so bad, does she? And then, hey, it’s time to vomit over the side again. And then back to the not unpleasing zombie mannequin. And so on and on, over and over again. Oh god, make it stop.

Moore’s latest, Amanda Leigh, does nothing to free me from my painful and embarrassing dilemma. The album does head for a slightly different neck of the pop sugarscape : Moore has said she was inspired in part by Paul McCartney’s Ram, and as that would indicate, the languorous washes are leavened with a good bit more pep and fuss. But the basic algorithm remains the same: seduce, sucker punch, repeat — and not in a good way. “Song About Home” is a fine, jazzy Joni Mitchell impersonation; “Love to Love Me Back” on the other hand, demonstrates with a numbing finality that even mixing in Joni Mitchell can’t redeem crappy country radio tropes. “Merrimack River” is a pretty enough melody with an importunate and irritating waltz tempo; “Merrimack River (Reprise)”, though, resets the tune from guitar to piano and strings, adds some minor tunings and for a minute or so you’ve got a nice collision between Debussy and a carnival. “I Could Break Your Heart Any Day of the Week” is another absolutely egregious country radio clunker. “Those calendar girls, they got nothing on me!” Moore throbs, with a calculated spunk that she really seems to be clueless enough to have mistaken for sexy. The song is complete and utter crap…except for an odd dissonant bridge about 1:40 in, where the anthemic cheer shakes, stutters, and almost dissolves into something Syd Barrett could recognize. If only it would last…but no, our five seconds are up and we’re back to the shiny, happy people shit.

Amanda Leigh, in other words, is a fickle flirt. Avoid her siren song altogether and listen to something you can trust, like Linda Perhacs or, hell, Pat Benatar. But…if I have to pledge my troth to one track on this album, I guess it would be “Everblue,” an aching dirge soaked in amorphous longing and regret. Moore’s singing is her finest on the album. From the moment she comes in a perfect half-beat early, she emphasizes her breathing, and the heavy in-out seems to slow the pace even more, until even nonsense doggerel like “I have felt the ground, I’ve seen the seeds /Out of which grew golden wings” seems weighted down with meaningful melancholy.

Of course, some genius sprinkled in additional sighing wind effects, which are both dumb in their own right and tread dangerously close to self-parody. It’s probably just as well, though. If too much of my faith were restored, I might be tempted to buy her next album. No good could come of that.

Xasthur and the Circle of Metal

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This ran on Metropulse, way, way back.
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For centuries, scholars believed that metalness was a straight continuum, with bands like Slayer at the top end and performers like, oh, say…Debussy at the bottom. In recent years, though, researchers have discovered that the truth is somewhat different. Beyond St. Vitus, beyond Celtic Frost, out where the black dooms drone, we now know metal curves, and Stephen O’Mally, like a wily ourobourous, takes his tail in his teeth only to discover he’s chomping on the smiling visage of Danny Elfman.

Xasthur’s new album doesn’t sound like Danny Elfman at all, really. But on it, one-man-band Malefic maybe takes a step or two around the circle in that direction that I wish he hadn’t. At his spiky, buzzing best — as on 2002’s Nocturnal Poisoning — Malefic was right in the soul of black, with static and keyboards and shrieking vocals and drums all fusing in a single hissing howl of knives and hate. Xasthur was fierce, brutal, and unrelenting.

And then, on All Reflections Drained, Malefic relents. Oh sure, he breathes out something approaching his trademark evil at the beginning of “Inner Sanctum Surveillance,” or in the middle of “Masquerade of Incisions.” But for the most part, the album just backs off everything a bit — the buzz, the static the shrieks — and all of a sudden we’re listening to a soundtrack for the apocalypse rather than experiencing the apocalypse itself.

What’s even worse is that slowly, horribly, as you listen it becomes clear that Xasthur was always just an inch away from …restful. And…pleasant. Like Jesu, or…Sigur Ros. And, don’t get me wrong, I like Jesu and Sigur Ros. But I liked the old Xasthur more.

Henry James Inked Me

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

After reading The Time Machine in 1900, Henry James wrote to H. G. Wells: “You are very magnificent. . . . I rewrite you much, as I read—which is the highest praise my damned impertinence can pay to an author.” It’s a strange compliment, and he expanded it two years later: “my sole and single way of perusing the fiction of Another is to write it over—even when most immortal—as I go. Write it over, I mean, re-compose it, in the light of my own high sense of propriety and with immense refinements and embellishments. . . to take it over and make the best of it.”

James’s damned impertinence turned his highest praise into an actual invitation to collaborate with Wells on a science fiction novel: “Our mixture would, I think, be effective. I hope you are thinking of doing Mars—in some detail. Let me in there, at the right moment—or in other words at an early stage . . . .” The two authors shared a literary agent, James B. Pinker, and James wanted to take over and make the best of a Wells manuscript before Pinker saw it: “to secure an ideal collaboration . . . I should be put in possession of your work in its . . . pre-Pinkerite state. Then I should take it up and give it the benefit of my vision. After which, as post-Pinkerite—it would have nothing in common with the suggestive sheets received by me, and yet we should have labored in sweet unison.” He ends his letter “your faithful finisher.”

This is a bizarre request. Give me your rough draft to rework however I wish. Wells declined. Of course Wells declined. But first he tested whether the offer was one-sided, asking to peruse the notes to James’ next novel, The Ambassadors. Although James had a “carefully typed” 20,000-word prospectus, he did not share it with Wells. “A plan for myself, as copious and developed as possible, I always draw up,” he explained, but “such a preliminary private outpouring . . . isn’t a thing I would willingly expose to an eye but my own.” And he wouldn’t expose it to another’s over-writing hand either. He was his own finisher.

James’s notion of an “ideal collaboration” is laughably outside the norms of literary authorship, but it also reveals the damned impertinence of comic book production norms. Pencillers hand over “suggestive sheets” to inkers, or “finishers,” who literally draw over them, refining and embellishing according to their own sense of propriety. That includes erasing. It may be some lowly office helper—Stan Lee in his earliest days—holding the eraser, but it’s the inker who decides what stays and what goes. James’s final pages “would have nothing in common” with Wells’ erased and overwritten rough draft. And yet the plot, the chapter structure, the scene-by-scene movement—what comic book creator would call the layouts and breakdowns—they would still be Wells’. Reworking a sentence—adding flourishes, curving the grammar for new stylistic effects, while preserving and augmenting some paraphrasable meaning—that’s an inker’s job.

Four years later, after reading Wells’ The Future of America, James wrote again, revealing his inking style: “you tend always to simplify overmuch . . . But what am I talking about, when just this ability and impulse to simply—so vividly—is just what I all yearningly envy you?—I who was accursedly born to touch nothing save to complicate it.”

James would have added complexity to Wells’ overly simplified language—how Eric Shanower inked Curt Swan’s pencils for The Legend of Aquaman.

Swan was nearing the end of his career in 1989, but according to Mark Waid (via Eddy Zeno’s Curt Swan: A Life in Comics) Swan considered the special issues a personal high point. The face, the anatomy, the foreshortened movement, those are recognizably Swan, but look at the background, the clouds, the meticulously scalloped waves, that’s Shanower, an artist renown for his details. His Age of Bronze is almost calligraphic in its precision, each scallop of chain mail a painstaking wonder.

Would Wells have benefited from such a finish by James? Probably. But Swan wasn’t always grateful for Shanower’s efforts. During a visit to my campus, Shanower told a table of professors how he would erase Swan’s background buildings in order to correct all the perspectives errors. Swan didn’t thank him. He thought Shanower was wasting his time, but, like Wells in James’ “ideal collaboration,” his opinions were irrelevant once the sheets were in Shanower’s hands.

Compare Shanower’s chain mail and seas scallops to the inked versions of Swan by other artists, and you’ll see what Swan considered an appropriate attention to detail. Bob Hughes at Who Drew Superman? credits Swan for dominating Superman during that other Bronze Age while collaborating with a dozen different artists. Bob Oksner inked Superman No. 287 in 1975:

Vince Colletta inked Superman Spectacular in 1977:

And Al Williamson inked Superman No. 410 in 1985:

Look at the full-page layouts, and you’ll also see Swan’s signature breakdown: the top 2/3rds divided into 4-5 panels, anchored by a bottom rectangle featuring Superman flying toward the right margin:

The Swan-Oksner background buildings look pretty detailed to my eye–though some of those perspective lines might be a tad wonky beyond Superman’s right shoulder. The Swan-Colletta and Swan-Williamson backgrounds are comparatively sparse. In fact, sparseness was Vince Colletta’s signature “style.” Though his best work is revered for its own Shanower-esque precision, other artists dislike his high sense of propriety.

Editors kept Colletta employed because he got his work in on time, but pencillers, like Wells, avoided the sweet unison of collaboration. Joe Sinnott (who also inked plenty of Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four pages) said Colletta “wrecked” his romance stories because Colletta “would eliminate people from the strip and use silhouettes, everything to cut corners and make the work easier for himself.” Marvel writer Len Wein agreed that Colletta “ruined” art, and Steve Ditko and later Kirby refused to work with him.

Ditko, like Wells, preferred to ink himself. PencilInk documents a range of examples (Amazing Spider-man No. 3, 1963; Monster Hunters No. 8, 1976; Iron Man Annual No. 11, 1990):

But sometimes even Ditko would have to willingly expose his preliminary outpourings for the benefit of another artist’s vision. Wayne Howard, for example, inked House of Mystery No. 247 in 1976:

And Dan Adkins inked Superboy No. 257 in 1979:

But the most discordant of Ditko’s finishers was John Byrne. As an artist used to getting top-billing as both writer and penciller, he, like James, took possession of Ditko’s pages, applying his own immense refinements and embellishments. Look at Avengers Annual No. 13 from 1984:

The thug’s left foot–only Ditko would draw the impossibly upturned sole. But that’s a Byrne mouth on Captain America, the musculature too. When Mr. Fantastic appears, he seems to have beamed in from Byrne’s Fantastic Four run, but that’s a glaringly Ditko-esque face grinning open-mouthed beside him:

The mixture of the two is even stranger:

Is this what a Wells-James collaboration looks like? James would have placed his name first–though only because cutting Wells from the credit box entirely wouldn’t be an option too. That’s what Alexander Dumas did with his collaborators. Auguste Maquet co-authored both The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, but it’s only Dumas on the covers because Maquet was his employee, what Marvel calls “work for hire.” Maquet produced rough drafts for his boss to write-over. He later sued for co-credit, but the French courts ruled in favor of Dumas.

In comics, the prestige position is reversed. Swan and Kirby had so many inkers because their editors wanted them pencilling as many titles as possible. At Marvel, the penciller was the primary creator, laying out stories with empty captions and balloons for the so-called writers to fill-in. In Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy, Jason Lee plays Ben Afflleck’s inker and takes insult when called a “tracer.” Lee’s name also appears below Affleck’s in the actual credits. By the end of the film, Lee has ended their collaboration. H. G. Wells was wise never to begin one with Henry James.

[And if you’d like to read more about their correspondence, check out Nicholas Delbanco’s Group Portrait: Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James and H. G. Wells. ]

Sly Cooper, Preserver of Caste Hierarchy

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Petar Duric

The titular protagonist, posing as the Bogeyman

The Sly Cooper series is one of the most beloved games of the PS2 era, one of the so-called “Holy Trinity” of PS2 platformers. The series features a world full of anthropomorphized animals, where Sly Cooper, a roguish raccoon, and his friends have a series of globetrotting adventures pulling off heists in all sorts of exotic locales. The series is lovable, charming, and exciting, and the news that it’s getting a CGI movie release for 2016 has me overjoyed.

Oh, and it really, REALLY hates poor people.

Maybe I should start from the beginning…

Intro: The Basics

The narrative of the game revolves around Sly Cooper and his allies fending off threats to his family legacy. It positions the protagonist as a rightfully privileged hero, and the antagonists as nefarious class usurpers. At every turn, the series reinforces the idea that the Bad Guys are bad guys because they challenge social hierarchy, directly or otherwise, and that the Good Guys are good guys because they are defending Sly’s bloodline, which is presented as inherently good for arbitrary and never-questioned reasons.

Sly 1: F@$! The Haters

The whole series starts with you learning about Sly’s central motivating tragedy. He’s descended from a long line of master thieves that aggregated all of their thieving knowledge into a single book that has been passed down through the generations. This clan takes pride in only stealing from other thieves, as they consider it the ultimate test of skill to rip off another larcenist. The very night Sly’s father was going to give him the book, five mysterious strangers invaded and ransacked their home. These strangers, known as the Fiendish Five, murder Sly’s father and tear the book into several pieces, retreating to the far reaches of the earth with their respective parts. This brutal and bizarre crime lands little Sly in an orphanage with nothing but his father’s cane, where he meets Bentley (a turtle, and the brains of their gang) and Murray (a hippo, and the brawn of their outfit). They quickly become fast friends and start stealing stuff, honing their skills for the inevitable day when they would embark to recover Sly’s inheritance.

Why do Bentley and Murray agree to dedicate their lives to Sly’s inherently selfish revenge scheme? How did they end up in the orphanage and what are their backstories? Who knows? The answers to these questions are never provided. In fact, Sly is the only character in the whole series with a self-contained backstory. Bentley and Murray (and every other character you meet) seem to exist for the sole purpose of aiding, validating, and/or antagonizing Sly throughout his journey.

The first antagonist and member of the Fiendish Five, Raleigh, seems to contradict the thesis proposed above. He is the aristocratic British heir of a sizable fortune, turning to modern piracy out of boredom. Frankly, he’s a pretty straightforward jerk.

Not so with the second, Muggshott (a bulldog), or the third, Miz Ruby (an alligator). Both are bullied and ostracized as children. Muggshott pursues control of his social circumstances through bodybuilding, and Miz Ruby pursues control over her environment through her magical voodoo powers. Both turn to crime because…the story needs Bad Guys. There is never any clear motivation given for their choice to enter high-stakes crime. Instead, you are left to believe that in the process of overcoming their marginalization, they simply became evil.

Fear the victims of bullying. Feeeeeaaar theeeeeeeem.

The story of the fourth member, the Panda King, is even more absurd. He was born and raised poor in China. In order to escape poverty and indulge his love of the art of fireworks, he put together a display for some noblemen, who ridiculed him for his poverty. In response, he swears revenge on his critics and uses fireworks to pursue crime. But not only is this runaway poor person thin-skinned and uppity, he’s also a sociopath. In the first level of his portion of the game, you see him bury a village under an avalanche. No reason for this action is ever given (except for some vague line about extortion), and you only see this incident from afar. In fact, you never see any bystanders harmed by Sly’s enemies, although you are frequently told he is helping innocents. You never see their faces, and Sly keeps everything he steals. He’s not Robin Hood. Instead, you are led to believe that a process of competitive larceny, whereby Sly ruins somebody and Inspector Fox rushes in to mop up, is a virtuous, populist societal good, without ever seeing the populations being “saved.”

The Panda King calls Sly on this when they finally meet, rumbling, “You are a thief, just like me.” Sly scoffs back, “No, that’s only half right. I am a thief…from a long line of master thieves. Whereas you…you’re just a frustrated firework artist turned homicidal pyromaniac!” Not only does Sly specifically cite his bloodline and inheritance as evidence of his moral superiority over the King, he explicitly links his enemy’s failed attempts as an artist, and by extension, his failed attempt to exercise upward mobility, to his violent, evil tendencies.

The Big Bad of the game, Clockwerk (an owl), further validates Sly’s bloodline through contrast. Clockwerk shows up in virtually every image of a Cooper clan member that you see, but only as a shadowy silhouette in the background. He is an ancient nemesis of the Cooper clan, so envious of the Coopers’ thieving abilities that he mechanized his body to live until the day he destroys the Cooper line. His stated goal is to end the Cooper lineage, steal their relics, and make their name fade into obscurity, and his stated motivation is envy. That’s it. No other plans. He just hates the Cooper bloodline and inheritance so much that he founded the Fiendish Five solely to kill them all. Here, you, the viewer, are asked to accept some dizzying circular logic: the Cooper legacy is worth protecting because Clockwerk hates it and is evil. But why does he hate the Cooper legacy? Because the Cooper legacy is good and he is evil. He is so evil, in fact, that the whole second game is largely about stealing and destroying his mechanized corpse…

Sly 2: Return of the Haters

After the events of the first game, you learn that Clockwerk’s mechanized body parts are in a museum, oddly enough. Sly and his Super Friends attempt to steal the parts, because they believe that Clockwerk could be revived and threaten the Cooper line once again. Unfortunately, a new set of villains in the form of the Klaww Gang, have stolen the parts first, for nebulous and nefarious purposes. In order to protect the Cooper line from future threats from Clockwerk, Cooper and Co must steal them back.

The game wastes no time explaining how evil the new guys are. The first couple of criminals you go after follow now-familiar templates. Dimitri (a…newt, I guess?) is a failed artist who turned to forgery and racketeering after being laughed at by the art world, and Rajan (a tiger) escaped poverty in New Delhi by using drug trafficking to build up enormous wealth. In both cases, you see these formerly marginalized individuals showing off ostentatious wealth in the form of Dimitri’s nightclub and Rajan’s “ancestral palace.” In both cases, that wealth is accumulated through work, not inheritance. In both cases, the game constantly ridicules these men for being so egotistical as to show off their earned wealth, as well as demonizing them for threatening Sly’s bloodline without knowing.

Here we witness the repulsive spectacle of a poor person making money.

It is worth noting that in the process of taking down Dimitri and Rajan, the Cooper Gang are aided by a mysterious colleague of Inspector Fox named Constable Neyla (a panther). At the moment they nail Rajan, the Cooper Gang are betrayed by Neyla, who imprisons them. From this moment on, Neyla is a recurring enemy, whereas before, she served largely as a plot spur providing periodic missions. This role is taken over by Inspector Fox, who Sly refers to as the biggest reason “this is all fun.” Law enforcement serves as a game mechanic, contributing to the global adventurism of the protagonists. The moment the law enforcement become characters with personal motivations outside of Sly’s adventures, they become evil.

To illustrate the point, Sly and Murray are thrown in a prison operated by the Contessa (a black widow spider), a warden affiliated with Interpol. Bentley seeks to rescue his friends, and learns in the process that the Contessa is an expert in hypnotherapy, which she uses to rehabilitate her inmates. But (gasp) there is a nefarious catch. Her hypnotherapy erases her inmates’ criminal tendencies, allowing them to reintegrate into society, but she also uses hypnosis to force inmates to tell her where they have stashed their criminal fortunes. Upon learning this, Bentley gasps, “That dishonors thieving and law enforcement at the same time!!”

To restate that differently, the Contessa steals the fortunes of other criminals…which is exactly what the Cooper Gang does. It’s the whole point of the series. It is extremely hard to discern what nuance makes the Contessa’s way of doing it so much worse than Cooper’s. If it’s the hypnosis, the Cooper gang have drugged, beaten, blown up, and otherwise brutalized their opponents on a regular basis. If it’s that she utilizes the aid of law enforcement, the Cooper Gang used Neyla’s help to take down two prior marks. If it’s that she is evading detection, Bentley is actively trying to break his friends out of prison. And yet, the narrative supports Bentley’s gasping assertion, despite its utter hypocrisy and self-righteousness.

Perhaps it has to do with the Contessa’s background. The Contessa is a black widow, both literally and figuratively. he came into her own astounding fortune, including her ostentatious Gothic castle, by marrying a wealthy Czech nobleman and then poisoning him. The explicit reason for her evilness is her murder and deception, but the narrative precedent suggests it’s her inheritance by marriage that is more offensive, as opposed to Sly’s virtuous inheritance by birthright.

After steamrolling the Contessa, the Gang target Jean Bison, a Gold Rush-era prospector who was frozen in ice for roughly 150 years before thawing out and building a freight-and-timber empire in Canada (it’s a weird game). Jean Bison aspires to “taming the Wild North, damming every river, and chopping down every tree, with progress delivered at the sharp end of an axe.” Jean Bison’s criminal enterprises exist to “bankroll his one-man war against Nature.” The Cooper Gang steps in, not just to steal from Bison, but to, “save the environment from his twisted sense of progress.” In other words, it’s not corporate entities, or societal consumption habits that are to blame for environmental destruction. It’s the backwards, anachronistic, white working class, and that bloc is so powerful and intimidating that only a royal heir like Sly Cooper is capable of stopping them.

All Hail the unstoppable lumberjack overlord!!

The equation of marginalization to evil becomes most blatant with the boss of the Klaww, Arpeggio (a parrot). Arpeggio is a bird whose species should be able to fly, but his wings are stunted, and therefore, useless for flight; he’s effectively disabled, but the game has absolutely no sympathy. He pursues an education in engineering, taking inspiration from Leonardo Da Vinci in a quest to create prosthetic enhancements, which the game presents as a megalomaniacal pursuit that ultimately leads to his criminality. He also takes on Neyla as a protégé, who has been working with him under Interpol’s nose the whole time in an effort to reassemble Clockwerk’s body as an exoskeleton. Sly confronts them, Arpeggio rants, Neyla betrays them all and fuses with Clockwerk to become immortal, and the Gang has to stop her, or some such nonsense like that.

But if Neyla is a cop, an inherent authority figure and a powerful person in this world, isn’t the game saying that privilege and power are dangerous and corrupting? In answer, the game’s manual gives us Neyla’s backstory. She grew up poor in New Delhi and scammed her way into, and through, a prestigious British university. Interpol caught her, but was so impressed by her scam that they gave her a job (so she could “get into the criminal mind”). So the answer is that privilege and power do corrupt…if you weren’t born into them in the first place.

This monstrosity is what happens when you let poor people get an education.

After a big battle, the Cooper Gang takes down Clock-la, who now hates the Cooper lineage, despite a complete lack of narrative precedent. In the money-shot of the whole game, the Gang extract Clock-la’s “hate chip,” the source of Clockwerk’s immortality and power, and crush it underfoot, causing all the Clockwerk parts to rot. The triumphant finale of the whole game is Sly’s destruction of evil, which is almost exclusively a threat to his bloodline. Why should you want to save this bloodline? Because it’s the Good Guy’s bloodline and hating it is evil. Kumba-friggin’-ya.

Sly 3: In Defense of the Natural Hoarder of Things

It is a testament to human creativity that after all of the political mess in the first two games, the third game remixes the old garbage into something fresh. This time around, the Gang is on a mission to open the fabled Cooper Vault, a giant safe in the side of a mountain on an island in the South Pacific that stores the stolen riches accumulated by the Cooper Clan throughout history. The only obstacle is that the island in question is already inhabited by a madman, named Dr. M, who has built a well-staffed fortress in order to crack the impervious Cooper Vault. The Vault’s key is Sly’s cane, but the Cooper Gang need to go recruiting to assemble the talent necessary to infiltrate the fortress and get anywhere near the Vault. More globetrotting ensues.

The first two enemies Sly faces walk the trail blazed by Jean Bison in Sly 2, namely, that of the evil white working class.The first thug, Octavio, is an Italian opera singer who was rendered obsolete by the onset of rock ’n roll. He and all of his diehard Italian fans form a mafia that sets out on a dastardly plan to sink Venice into its own canals in a bid to get attention (seriously). In order to destabilize the Venetian foundations, Octavio pumps tar out from under the buildings and into the canals, which enrages Sly, Bentley, and Murray, as an example of environmental degradation. This absurd scenario uses vapid, misplaced environmentalism to laugh at a white working class losing cultural relevance and clout, setting up Octavio and his goons as a punch line, rather than real characters.

But if the game sneers at Octavio, it snarls at the Australian miners Sly goes up against next. Out in the Australian Outback, Sly and his friends decide that to recruit a local mystic, they must first help him drive off the miners ravaging the environment in search of precious gems. There are no corporate logos or managers anywhere, just a mass of wayward workers, and the game reserves particular viciousness for these nameless average Joes. In order to drive off the miners, the Gang incinerates them on electric fences, unleashes pickup truck-sized scorpions into their mineshafts to slaughter them, and feeds several of the miners to a local crocodile in an effort to get the croc to “develop a taste for miner.”

That miner is about to be fed to a crocodile…and he’s the bad guy.

All of this arbitrary retribution is exacted against the nameless working masses in the name of “the environment,” without ever showing the populations affected adversely by the miners. At the end of Sly’s conflict with the miners, a cut-scene shows the “rescued” Outback, an expansive open desert with little vegetation and no wildlife, for which you have slaughtered hundreds. But the game still presents this pointless violence as inherently good, for seemingly no other reason than that the protagonist “saved” something from the unwashed laborers.

But at this point, the game tires of pissing on labor, and instead pontificates on how terrible royal heirs who aren’t Sly can be. To illustrate, the narrative travels to China, where the Gang try to recruit the Panda King as a demolitions expert by agreeing to rescue his daughter from the ruthless General Tsao (a rooster). Tsao is the heir of a long royal line, and he kidnaps the Panda King’s daughter, Jing King, in order to marry her and augment his family line. Until the wedding, he imprisons Jing King and basks in his own image like a peacock. Like Rajan before him, he has the gall to show off his wealth in the form of an opulent mountain fortress/palace/monastery. But the way the game signals to you that he’s a Really Bad Dude is his insistence that his bloodline is better than Cooper’s. For some utterly unknown reason, Tsao is as obsessed with denigrating Sly as he is with preening himself.

While the game laughs at Tsao, it’s also desperately trying to convince you that bad guys can reform and become Good Guys by holding the Panda King up as an example. Sly is initially wary about the King (you know, because he helped murder Sly’s father). But the King slowly wins over various members of the team by helping them on missions. This all culminates in his mission helping Sly, before which he gives his reflection a pep talk. Here, the game sends you into a dialogue mini-game where the Panda King has to calm his fractured psyche by getting his Yin and Yang sides on the same page (it’s like the writers saw a NatGeo special on Taoism while high, and then insisted on plugging it here). Panda Yin wants to utilize Sly’s help to free their daughter, and thinks Sly is actually an ok dude. Panda Yang thinks Sly is an uppity jerk who disgraced them and that they don’t need his help. The game sides with Panda Yin, shockingly, and tasks you with convincing Panda Yang of Panda Yin’s point of view with preprogrammed options. The winning line of reasoning states that “Cooper is a teacher of humility” and that that quality is somehow spiritually useful to them for its own sake.

Just to recap, Sly is the kind of guy who cites his bloodline as evidence of his existential superiority over the Panda King, and pisses on him for being upwardly mobile. Sly is the kind of guy who routinely involves his best friends in harebrained schemes to achieve his inherently selfish ends, without ever really asking them how he could lend them a hand with their problems. Sly is the kind of guy who gets angry with cops when they put him in jail for breaking the law. If Sly taught anybody humility, it sure as hell wasn’t by example, and so Panda King’s insistence that he can learn humility from Sly reeks of kowtowing. The game says the Panda King can be a Good Guy…if only he learns his place and stays there, at the feet of Sly Cooper, thieving royalty.

All of this confused classist nonsense culminates in the heist, where the Gang not only rescue Jing King, but also seek to ruin Tsao by robbing him of his family treasures. In the process of doing this, the Gang destroy Tsao’s ancestral temple and take his most prized heirloom treasures, and the game portrays his justifiable outrage as evil and megalomaniacal. Remember, the first game had you traveling all over the globe to ruin and brutalize five people in order to recover one such prized heirloom of the Cooper family that was stolen. But doing the same thing to Tsao is all well and good, because he is a Bad Dude. In anger, he even yells at Cooper, “Hear me Cooper, my lineage surpasses yours in every way!” It is at this moment that the game, in an attempt to simultaneously erase and embrace its own blatant elitism, has its protagonist utter the single most inane line of the series, “It’s not about the family name pal…it’s what you do with it!”

Are you kidding me? That’s the best you can come up with?

What does Cooper mean by this statement, precisely? What should one do with his family name? How have Cooper and Tsao, respectively, measured up to that standard? Who knows? The game never answers any of these questions explicitly. In fact, there are only two explicit reasons we are given to hate Tsao, one of which is the kidnapping of women. But the reason that is placed front and center, that is repeated more often than anything else, is the fact that Tsao believes his lineage is superior to Cooper’s. It is this apparent megalomania that really shows that Tsao is evil. Tsao is a villain because he failed to learn his place, at Cooper’s feet, as the Panda King did.

All of the troubling politics thus far coalesce neatly into the final level of this game, when we return to Dr. M’s island. After many further hijinks, aimed at infiltrating M’s fortress, Cooper, Bentley, and Murray manage to crack open the heavily guarded door to the Cooper Vault, and Sly insists that the three enter the front door of the vault together, having gone on so many adventures. But the game treats this touching gesture of friendship with cold, hard cynicism. The very minute the three friends step into the Vault, there is another door that only Sly is agile enough to even access, and so he is rescued by circumstance from having to actually follow through on his offer to his friends. As if the narrative had to make it clearer that it didn’t think Sly’s friends are worth enough to access his heritage, Bentley voices the sentiment explicitly, “…this place was built for you [Sly]. We’ll hold down the fort here.”

While Sly is making his way through the caverns of the Cooper Vault, in which the Cooper Clan seems to have stored a non-negligible percentage of global GDP in the form of gold, jewels, and art, that second statement in the above quote proves prophetic. Bentley immediately doubles back on the sentiment he expressed by asking Murray, “Do you ever feel like you’re playing second fiddle to Sly? Like he treats us as sidekicks?” Murray doesn’t see it that way, responding, “…we’re all in it together!” And all at once, Bentley starts unraveling the games politics in one fell swoop, “Sure, we’re all here, but are we equal? Who went into the Vault? Sly. By himself.” But Bentley never gets to finish his point, because it is at that moment that the Vault, now opened, is invaded by Dr. M’s goons. Murray succinctly summarizes the situation and their options, “Think of it this way, Bentley. If it were you in that vault, and Sly and I were out here, what would he do?” Bentley responds with the only answer, “Stop these thugs and protect his friend.”

It’s as if the game only had Bentley raise these questions in order to swat them aside. The crushing thing is that Bentley had almost discerned the game’s politics from within the game itself. Bentley, the brains of the team, was approaching a fundamental truth in his world. Sly doesn’t treat Bentley and Murray as sidekicks…but the game sure does. The narrative certainly does not see Bentley and Murray, let alone any other characters, as equal to Sly. Sly went into the Vault, alone, because this is HIS story, and nobody else’s. And it’s the moment Bentley begins to realize and articulate this that the game puts him back in his place with a sentimental appeal to friendship. Besides, Bentley isn’t in the Vault to question the politics of the situation, he’s there to “hold down the fort.” This is Sly’s show after all, and Bentley’s not even on the fiddle. He’s on the drum set at the back of the stage.

You were SO CLOSE!!

And it turns out that the villainous Dr. M voices exactly the same critique Bentley just brushed up against. Dr. M follows his goons into the cave and reveals that he was the brains of Cooper’s father’s gang, much like Bentley is the brains for the modern Cooper Gang. Once you learn this information, Dr. M tries to build a bridge with Bentley, “…I know the pain you suffer working under your inferior.” The inferior in this sentence is Sly, and we know from Tsao’s example what that means about Dr. M’s character. Of course Bentley refutes this logic. It doesn’t matter that Bentley organizes the heists, does all the research, does his own R&D for the Gang, and in general vastly outstrips the rest of the Gang in terms of hours dedicated to the Gang’s success, because the Cooper Gang has one thing…”brotherhood.”

Dr. M scoffs at this, “Brotherhood? That’s just what he wants you to think. It’s a tool to keep you in line!” Dr. M is right about the nature of the tool, but he’s wrong about who’s holding it. It’s the narrative, not Sly, that insists on relegating Bentley to not-even-on-the-fiddle status. But Bentley has been blinded by his own vapid appeals to friendship. The game has decided he’s not worthy to bask in Sly’s heritage. Only His Highness the royal heir can do that. When Dr. M makes a move to enter the Vault proper, even Bentley says so, “That haul is for Coopers only!” Dr. M pragmatically replies, “Maybe it’s time for men such as you and I to change all that.” Dr. M insists that the work he put in as the brains of the old Cooper Gang make him worthy of the Cooper fortune his work contributed to…and the game, in it’s infinite wisdom, is absolutely certain that this basic act of self-respect makes him a megalomaniac. How dare he think he’s worthy of Sly’s fortune!? He’s not part of the bloodline!!

In the end, like every Big Bad before him, Dr. M tries to kill Sly because (SURPRISE!!) he hates Sly’s father, and by extension, Sly’s bloodline. After they fight, there’s a short scene where Sly and Dr. M discuss how, despite Sly’s maniacal obsession with his lineage, that he’s just an individual, and Dr. M can’t blame Sly for the fact that Sly’s father was, apparently, a dick. In the process of reminiscing, the comparisons between Dr. M/Sly’s father and Bentley/Sly come to a head, with Sly insisting that he would risk his life for his friends. The problem with that is that the game has rescued Sly from including his friends meaningfully as equal partners in the story. Saying he’d risk his life for them is just the game’s way of showing Sly is a good person without actually making him do anything to assert, by action, how much he values his friends.

And the game makes it known exactly how much Sly’s friends are worth without him after Dr. M is defeated. Sly manages, through faked amnesia (long story), to run away with Inspector Carmelita Fox, leaving his friends behind. In the aftermath of his escape, Bentley narrates the epilogue, explaining that, “Without Sly as our leader, for the first time we each had to step out on our own. A difficult thing, we’d been together ever since we met at the orphanage.” In other words, Bentley and Murray finally strike out on their own, as individuals separated from Sly’s legacy…except not at all. Murray goes into stocked-van racing, driving the Cooper van with Sly’s raccoon-faced logo on the side. The game refuses to let Murray have his own unique identity.

But what happens to Bentley is even more insulting. You see, Sly left Bentley and Murray an enormous trove of treasure he managed to evacuate from the Cooper Vault before leaving his friends behind. So what does Bentley do with their newfound wealth? Does he spend it on his own dreams? Not at all! Instead, he builds another, much higher tech Cooper Vault to bury the treasure in.

The treasure really only served to show how generous Sly was. The game never had any intention of validating Bentley’s worth by insisting he deserved a cut of Sly’s legacy. And the game makes this even clearer in the final frames of the epilogue, where you see Bentley writing his narrated words, “So while this might be the end of our adventures, it could be the start of something even bigger!” The hitch? He’s writing those words in Sly’s family book, from the first game! The game refuses to allow for any possibility that Sly’s friends might have any identity beyond upholding his royal legacy, or that they are worthy of being equal partners in that legacy. Even after Sly is gone, living his own life, his friends are not allowed to the same. The game won’t let them, because, as we’ve seen throughout this series, anybody who thinks they have an inherently meaningful identity outside of Cooper’s lineage, or who merely insists that they deserve more than they were born into, is a villain…and Sly Cooper will always be there to put them in their place.

Utilitarian Review 10/3/15

Posted on October 3, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Wonder Woman News

Nell Minow interviewed me at HuffPost about Wonder Woman and bondage.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: James Romberger on Sammy Harkham.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates for comics in early 1948.

Me on Foxy Brown, The Descent, rape, revenge, and race.

Chris Gavaler on the problems with superhero marriages.

Kim O’Connor on why Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther won’t save comics.

Me on Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, moral structure, and immoral style.

Me enthusing about Nirvana’s Freak Puke.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the New Republic I argued that liberals shouldn’t frame contraception as an anti-poverty measure.

At Playboy I wrote about how xkcd is awesome.

At Vice I wrote about the new Muppets and Meet the Feebles, and how viscerally disturbing muppet sex is.

At Quartz I asked, what would “Foucault” say about “first-person” essays.

At Splice Today

—I wrote about how everyone is wrong about Trump. Yes. Even you.

—I argued that the internet doesn’t care about harassment.

Other Links

Elizabeth Bruenig on why many unwed American teen girls want to have children.

Heidi MacDonald on harassment in the comics industry.

Ijeoma Oluo on women of color and the struggle for reproductive rights.

Less Real Than Nirvana, Thank Goodness

Posted on October 2, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This originally ran on Splice Today.
________

I’m one of those people who didn’t hear about the Melvins until after Nirvana had explained that they were the shit. As a result, the two bands are linked in my head. Kurt Cobain shot himself a good long time ago, and I overplayed his albums so thoroughly that I can’t even listen to them now. Still, when I think about the Melvin’s, I can’t help but get a little nostalgic for that other band I loved back there in the 90s when I was loving the same thing as everybody else.

None of which is really fair to the Melvins, who were always a much more creative outfit than Nirvana — as Cobain would be the first to acknowledge, I think. It’s also misleading since the Melvins were around well before Nirvana, and have persisted long after. The band was formed in 1983, which means that they’re almost three decades old now.

The Melvins’ latest, Freak Puke, doesn’t exactly break new ground for them — but it also doesn’t sound anything like a nostalgia act. Partially that’s because the Melvins were never big enough that theirmoves became a cliché. Their early albums are amazing, but they don’t show up on best of lists, which means that the band doesn’t have to fight their back catalogue the way indie giants like Sonic Youth or REM have had to. Partially, too, the Melvins have managed to avoid musical calcification because they always had more than one schtick. On Freak Puke, for example, they’re less full-on-doom-sludge, less avant-experimental-weirdness, and more dirty grungy rawk. Indeed, Freak Puke hearkens back to their one major label effort, 1993’s fantastic Houdini.

The main reason that the album doesn’t sound dated, though, is simply because it kicks ass. Longtime members guitarist Buzz Osborne and drummer Dale Crover and sometime bassist Trevor Dunn have put together an amazingly thick sludge of testicle-cleansing hooks. But while the Melvins are definitely riding in on the same brontosaurus as Sabbath or Aersosmith, they still manage to get that Saurian to stumble about to some bizarre bop heads. “Worm Farm Waltz” is Charlie Parker getting buried in cement — until the abstract, spacy bridge, which sounds like the Sun Ra orchestra if the Sun Ra orchestra had employed Dale Crover on drums. And yeah, I tried to think of another metaphor there, but the fact is, that nobody sounds like Dale Crover. Even John Bonham doesn’t pulverize the skins like he does.

Anyway, that’s basically the album; track after track mining the unexpectedly fertile ground between dirty 70s classic rock and avant jazz. “Mr. Rip Off,” the opening track, starts with quiet bowed bass and spooky chalk board squeaks before staggering seamlessly into a distorted trudge, as if Webern was always meant to play arenas. “Let Me Roll It,” on the other hand, is totally, gloriously sold out kitsch — the kind of trashy, self-parodic testosterone swagger that Gene Simmons lived for, complete with stoopid half-failed double entendres. “You gave me something that I understand/you gave me lovin’ in the palm of my hand!” Buzz Osborne bellows while Crover smashes a beat that’s just about two times too slow. When they declaim “Let me roll it to you,” it’s like watching the Hulk dressed as Vegas Elvis thrusting his crotch while he pushes a square boulder towards the massed groupies.

All of which suggests that the Melvins are the band Nirvana might have been if Nirvana was the sort of band that could name itself “The Melvins”. Kurt Cobain certainly had an irreverent sense of humor…but it was irreverent, not absurdist. When Nirvana moved away from its core pop-punk-metal remit, it did so by covering Leadbelly or singing about how Jesus didn’t want them for his sunbeam — a different take on angst and realness, in other words, but still angst, and still realness.

The Melvins, in contrast, were always already sold out —punks who spent all their time pretending to be doom metal or glam rock or some sort of jazz weirdos. They’re a gimmicky band — the cover of Houdini, with its adorable cartoon two-headed puppy, is a nice summation. But being true to your gimmicks can be its own kind of integrity. Thirty years on and you can still hear the Melvins giggling like fifteen year olds when they put “puke” in their title or end their album with a thoroughly annoying beeping sound-effect loop. Grunge came and grunge went, but the Melvins remain, still quietly making the best loud music on the planet.

Every Thing In Its Place

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible is one of those unusual rape/revenge films that has garnered more critical praise than condemnation. Roger Ebert, who typically is not a fan of exploitation sexual violence, gave the film four stars and actually called it “moral—at a structural level.”

What Ebert is referring to is the film’s high concept. Rather than the usual chronological treatment of rape/revenge—where the rape happens, precipitating vengeful violence—Irreversible turns things around. The film is presented in reverse chronological order; the last scene happens first, and the first scene last. Thus, you see the violent, bloody, confused (and as you later learn, mistaken) revenge first, scrolling backward through the exceedingly violent and horrible rape, and ending with a blissful morning as the loving protagonists awake, unaware of what the day holds in store.

The typical read on this seems to be that the film’s reversal undoes the immorality of the rape/revenge structure. Rape/revenge posits that violence is the natural, necessary response to sexual violence. Irreversible refutes that, by showing the horror of the murder first, without justification, and then the horror of the rape, which still occurs despite (inept) vengeance having been doled out. In fact, the vengeance seems to call the rape into being, as if violence echoes backwards, rather than forwards, in time.

There’s certainly a deliberate stance against violent retribution in Irreversible. The avenging boyfriend Marcus (Vincent Cassel) is presented (in the first structural half of the film at least) as a drugged up out of control idiot; he’s explicitly sneered at for imagining himself as a “B-movie hero.” And of course, he (and more effectively his friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel)) beat and perhaps kill the wrong dude.

But the claim that this is somehow pushing against rape/revenge tropes seems insufficiently attentive to the genre. It isn’t unusual for rape/revenge films to question the effectiveness of violence. It’s de rigeur. A Virgin Spring (1960), one of the genre’s founding texts, has the revenger kill an innocent child and then shout at God for his cruelty; there is no question of the vengeance being justified or beneficial. Deliverance, another important film in the genre’s development, uses the mistaken revenge trick itself, tied to a critique of machismo similar to Irreversible‘s. I Spit On Your Grave presents Jennifer as destroyed by her vengeance as much as by her rape; Ms. 45 presents its protagonist as a deranged killer, who has to be put down by another woman with a knife to the back for the good of everyone. Stendahl Syndrome has the revenge lead to further, helpless violence. And so forth. There are less ambivalent rape revenge films (like the sequence in Foxy Brown, for example) but based on the history of rape/revenge, you hardly need to run the plot in reverse to show that revenge isn’t especially fulfilling.

If the plot trick isn’t needed to tack on a moral (as Ebert suggests), then what precisely is it doing? Well, one thing it does is to foreground that this is not exploitation, but art cinema. The wildly lurching cinematography does the same, as does the insistently structureless and repetitive dialogue. In one sequence — which is as painful in its way as the rape— Pierre, who used to date Alex (Monica Bellucci), asks her over and over, as they catch a train, if she and Marcus orgasm during sex, and why she and he had less sexual success as a couple. It is an excruciating, endless discussion—made all the more gruesome when Alex explains to Pierre that his sexual problem is selflessness. He pays too much attention to his partner’s pleasure, she insists. Shortly before this, of course, we saw a rapist assault her. Hah hah, the film says. You think you like it when men don’t pay attention to your pleasure? You just wait.

Is that really what the film intends to be saying? Is it actually mocking Alex about her coming rape? It’s difficult to say—but this sort of intentional irony comes up again and again throughout the second structural half of the film. Alex tells Marcus that no one owns her, for example, which again seems like an ironized reference to her earlier/subsequent violation. And then there’s the moment where Marcus jokingly tells her he wants to fuck her ass, echoing the anal rape we saw half an hour before.

The reversal of time doesn’t so much add a moral dimension, then, as it allows the filmmakers to show their cleverness—not least through the manipulation of, and mocking of the characters who enact their trauma first as tragedy, then as farce. Breaking up the narrative also fractures the masochistic identification; usually in rape/revenge, you learn who the protagonist is, and then identify with her as she is raped. But in Irreversible, you meet Alex only with the rape, like her rapist (who is a complete stranger to her.) The fragmentation gives you a sense of control and power; you start off confused, perhaps, but soon you know more than the characters do; you are in a position of superiority. You are the director, the God, the one in control. The filmmakers call the ending into being, and then imposes it on the characters. Nor is it an accident that the ending/beginning is set in a gay BDSM club called the Rectum. The filmmakers couldn’t state much more clearly that they’re investment is sadistic.

The sadism most directly inflects, and infects, the critique of machismo. Again, Marcus is specifically upbraided for his obsession with the revenge narrative, and for his need to avenge “his” woman, rather than going to the hospital to be with her.

But how does the film criticize his machismo? By mocking his manliness. Through the first structural half of the film Marcus wanders around asking people to direct him to the Rectum, and desperately denying that he is gay. In the Rectum, itself, he is almost anally raped. The sexual assault on him then (via reverse chronology) foreshadows Alex’s anal rape at the hands of a gay man. More, Alex’s anal rape becomes Marcus’ fantasy/nightmare; she is a stand in for him and his terrorized masculinity. It’s significant too that the rapist’s previous victim is a trans woman; we see a glimpse of her penis as Marcus and Pierre interrogate her about the rapist’s whereabouts. That’s the only penis shown in the film, revealed like a secret key. The woman is the man, the man is the woman. Are Marcus and Pierre being chastised for their investment in machismo? Or is the film an elaborate sneer at them for being too effete?

Again, the ur-text here is Deliverance, which both critiqued urban dreams of machismo and set up elaborate humiliations to demonstrate that those urbanites were in fact sissy-boys. Noé has undoubtedly seen Deliverance, and he’s probably also read Carol Clover, whose Men, Women, and Chainsaws argues that in rape/revenge narratives, male viewers are encouraged to identify with the female victims, often via intertextual reference to Deliverance. The central rape in Irreversible, in which a gay man beats a trans woman, then anally rapes a cis woman while cursing her out for her wealth, in this context comes across as a deliberate, smug wink to theory heads.

In my discussion of Virgin Spring, I argued that Bergman’s art cinema profundities about faith and God, as expressed by Max Von Sydow, effectively erased the experience of the woman whose rape was the ostensible center of the story. Of course, a contemporary French art filmmaker isn’t going to present a disquisition on faith—but still, Noé’s film parallels Bergman’s in a number of respects. Most notably, they both foreground film style. And in doing so, they both perform different kinds of aesthetic masculine swagger in a way that resonates uncomfortably with the phallic content of their films.

In Noé’s case, the reverse chronology, the hand-held camera jerking, and the various portentous declarations about time (including a preposterous, clumsy reference to 2001) all tie the filmmaker, and the film, to the main character’s masculine panic—a panic triggered perhaps by Alex’s revelation (at the end/beginning) that she’s pregnant. The irony of the title is that time and generation are not set. Noé manipulates them, demonstrating his power as he illustrates the powerlessness, and cluelessness, of his characters. The words “Time destroys everything” appear at the beginning/end and end/beginning, a vaunting koan. For who, here, is master of time but Noé,the avant-garde daddy, whose moral structure knows all?

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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