On Marvel and Magical Thinking

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Kim O'Connor

Marvel Comics just managed an astonishing sleight of hand, reaping accolades for addressing a diversity problem it supposedly never had.

Last week, the world freaked out upon learning that Marvel has hired Ta-Nehisi Coates—foremost thinker on race in the U.S. and one of our best writers, period—to sell its comics. And also write one of its titles. You know, whatever. He’s hired.

It is no doubt an important moment in comics—a cool project that will have positive long-term effects for both the medium and the industry—but it strikes me as strange that Marvel, and not Coates, is the one receiving praise for it. Marvel has not enacted a vision; it has leveraged an opportunity. I’m sure if President Obama agreed to revamp X-Men tomorrow that Marvel would frame it in the same self-aggrandizing way.

It has been fascinating to watch the narrative around the news solidify. Curiously, part of it seems to be that Coates’ hire was in response to—or at least somehow in conversation with—the diversity-related critiques surrounding Marvel’s All-New, All-Different campaign, particularly people’s frustrations with its hip-hop variant covers. In a piece that delved into the significance of Marvel hiring an “activist writer,” for instance, The Beat asserted (and reasserted) that Marvel had taken that criticism into account as it made the hires for Black Panther.

From where I’m standing, Marvel hasn’t taken that criticism into account at all; if anything, it continues to revel in its own perfection. But impressions aside the timing is off. Though we don’t know precisely when the Black Panther project coalesced, we do know it stemmed from a conversation about diversity that Coates had with Marvel editor Sana Amanat in May. The variant covers conversation peaked in late July. Alonso’s response to it (“Our doors are open. Always have been.”) went live July 24—and he was already teasing Black Panther. Given how far along the concept seems to be now, you can bet that by late July, Coates’ Black Panther had been in the works for a while. Part of why Alonso could afford to be so smug and dismissive in that CBR interview was because he knew he had an ace up his sleeve—and that ace was Coates (or at least the firm-ish prospect of Coates).

In any case, it seems unlikely that the Coates/Stelfreeze team was conceived of as an emblem—sincere or otherwise—of Marvel’s commitment to inclusive hiring practices. It is a major marketing gimmick (Important Writer Does Comics) with a secondary marketing message (Marvel Is Very Good at Diversity). Note the way in which many major platforms (including, to some degree, Marvel itself, in a press release crowing about Coates’ erudition) gave the news a “You won’t believe what this Serious Man is writing next” treatment. The New York Times piece that announced the project led with that angle. Later in the article, when the author got around to mentioning diversity in corporate comics, it was presented as an industry trend, not a controversy. “Diversity — in characters and creators — is a drumbeat to which the comic book industry is increasingly trying to march.” (The militaristic metaphor is…interesting.) Marvel, we are meant to understand, is leading that march, and to untrained eyes, that’s been happening for a while. Quoth Time, for example: “Marvel has been undergoing its own diversity renaissance since Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso took over in 2011.”

Let’s take a moment to consider the phrase “diversity renaissance” in all its stupid glory. Diversity in comics is such a huge, multifaceted, and widely misunderstood topic that you can sorta-kinda gesture to it in one area and get your gold star. Thus the person on the street reading the New York Times or Time or whatever thinks of diversity in comics—if they think about it at all—as a positive trend instead of as a variety of ongoing, fraught conversations. They’re not savvy enough to distinguish between representation in Marvel’s fictional universe and its hiring practices, much less even subtler distinctions within editorial and other departments (editors versus writers, for example, or creating a one-off variant cover versus steady work).

Of course, there were plenty of writers with enough wits to describe Marvel’s approach to diversity as something closer to a shitshow than a renaissance. Vulture, for instance, provided a competent summary of recent critiques that have been leveled against the corporation. While that writer was careful to avoid assumptions about a causal relationship between the variant cover critique (and the critiques it dovetailed with) and the Black Panther project, the piece puts those events in conversation with each other in such a way that his caveats don’t count for much. Worse, the breathless awe and heavy hopes expressed in that piece and countless others like it contribute to this sort of nebulous presumption that Ta-Nehisi Coates will not only write a great comic, but also fix Marvel’s abysmal hiring practices, and maybe even Comics in general. And while it’s obviously true that there are ways in which his work for Marvel will help create more opportunities for writers of color, so far as I know, Coates isn’t in charge of hiring anybody. And hiring people (plural) is the quantifiable outcome that people are asking for when they complain about Marvel being too white, too male, and too straight.

“This is a period in superhero history where, more than ever, diversity is a clarion call for fans,” the Vulture piece concludes. “Coates is answering the call, and it will be fascinating to see what he has to say.” Cutting through the considerable buzz surrounding what Coates will say, critics like J.A. Micheline have rightfully emphasized what Marvel has yet to do. With the momentous hire of one (1) black writer, Marvel has been widely perceived as addressing—or at least beginning to address—the deficiencies pointed to by the hip-hop variant covers critique. But in my view, to even begin to address those deficiencies, Alonso or some other prominent person at Marvel must first acknowledge that they exist. Then there needs to be a plan of action—and here I mean a thoughtful, sustained effort towards inclusion, not a glorified product announcement or two—that addresses those deficiencies in a proactive, meaningful way. There should also be a moratorium on Marvel’s lip service to its milieu as a meritocracy, which is obviously a total fucking farce.

Based on Alonso’s statements in that July 24 CBR interview (“interview”), I see no indication that any of that will happen any time soon. What I do see is a man waving around Killer Mike’s approval like a talisman, using him and other people of color—well, men of color—who are icons in their (non-comics) field, hoping to make money off some of their smart thoughts on race by association. Never mind that those men were commenting on the covers themselves, not Marvel’s hiring practices, la-la-la, or that the critiques leveled against Marvel described systemic racism, not individual malice. Axel Alonso is a goddamn Mexican American who gets lots of compliments and he doesn’t intend to let a bunch of white college brats give him grief. No sir!

“Hey Comics, Axel here. If you want to level a critique against my company’s hiring practices I suggest you take a long hard look at my ~compliments collage~.”

The Coates hire is sort of Alonso’s “look better by association” strategy on steroids. This time he found a way to get more than just a blurb. Now he’s getting a whole comic. For that, I give Marvel no credit. (Or should I say points?) Where Marvel has positioned itself as bold, progressive, and innovative regardless of what happens next, Coates is the one who will do the work under the weight of watchful eyes. Let’s give him all the points. He’s the one who’s giving a gift to comics—a gift that Marvel, however unworthy a recipient, will incidentally benefit from.

And like a lot of people, I’m super excited about it, with reservations. Chief among them is my suspicion that Marvel is counting on one shining star to eclipse all critiques forever, or at least for the foreseeable future. Already, there’s this: In a week of countless Marvel-centric headlines, not one of them was that Val D’Orazio quit comics.

For every exceptional and uplifting story that Marvel promotes (and how many of those do we get?) there are the stories people swallow. And it’s really hard to write a headline about something or someone that can’t exist. For all intents and purposes, they were never there.

In an industry filled with men endlessly recycling other men’s stories, D’Orazio is another woman whose story is ash in her mouth—a love for comics that died in the spiritual equivalent of a garbage fire.

There’s a certain sense of satisfaction in discussing how dreams die at the hands of bigwigs at the Big Two, who are ready villains. But how many would-be creators have been repulsed by the Progressive Comics™ apparatus that quietly welcomed back Chris Sims after his self-imposed exile from the Internet? Though let it be said it was a torturous 30 days for all involved, I’m so sure.

How many stories were ushered out of this world by the likes of gross creators like Brian Wood? Rumor has it his industry newsletter about the connection between publicly discussing sexual harassment and male suicide went out to some of his female colleagues unsolicited—much like his predatory advances.

How many people have failed to be inspired by less gross creators like G. Willow Wilson, who is waging what must surely be one of the saddest wars in feminism?

How many people internalize the lazy punk rock ethos of well-meaning white men who routinely use conversations surrounding women and PoC in corporate comics to assert their paternalistic, off-topic “you’re so much better than the Big Two” opinions?

There are different degrees of complicity fueled by different motivations, including greed, desire, cronyism, and sheer oblivion. They’re not all bad in themselves, but the fact remains that collectively, they are a problem.

And we will fix it—if we fix it—by looking at those many, many motivations at both the individual and institutional levels. There are no shortcuts. The Reckoning will not be some tidy storyline about a savoir who fixes comics. No one, not even Ta-Nehisi Coates, can live up to that kind of hype.

About Last Night

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Superheroes just want to settle down and get married.

Or at least they used to. Spring-Heeled Jack, Night Wind, Gray Seal, Zorro, Blackshirt, most of the pre-Depression pulp crowd eventually hung up their masks and retired into the domestic oblivion of happily everafter.

Or tried to. Until their readers and publishers and writers demanded sequels. But once you’ve closed the marriage plot, it’s hard to pry it back open. Fortunately the early pulp writers invented a utility belt’s worth of solutions, all still in use:

1) Poker Night.

Yes, darling, we’re married now, but I still have my manly pastimes.

Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel kept it up for decades. Ditto for Graham Montague Jeffries’ Blackshirt. Just one problem though. No more titillating romantic subplot. The hero is domesticated, all that manly excess bunched neatly into his briefs. For Frederic van Rensselaer Dey’s Night Wind, that meant promising his new bride to stop breaking the arms of police officers who foolishly got in his way. By the second sequel, the speedster superman was barely using any of his mutant powers, and his series quietly petered away.

Domestication has proved equally disastrous for modern heroes. The mid-90’s Lois & Clark: the New Adventures of Superman enjoyed stellar ratings, right up to the wedding episode, after which viewership nosedived and the show was cancelled. Marriage is kryptonite. Even Orczy and Jeffries had to switch to other family members (sons and ancestors) to keep their plots going.

2) Dial M.

Wife holding you down? No problem. Just kill her.

Thanks so much, Louis Joseph Vance, for introducing this heartless trope in the first of your seven Lone Wolf sequels. Though his 1914 gentleman thief had happily settled down with the law enforcement agent who lovingly reformed him, Vance dispatches her between books, mentioning her death in passing chapter one dialogue. When Hollywood adapted Robert Ludlum’s first Bourne Identity sequel, they made sure we got to witness the girlfriend’s death (Ludlum, in chivalrous contrast, only sent her off to stay with relatives.)

It’s a grim choice, but one that acknowledges narrative logic. For the superhero to marry, he usually unmasks and retires, and so ending the retirement also ends the marriage. Happily everafter is also a hard place to scrape up plot conflict. In 1973, when Marvel could no longer write around Spider-Man’s eight years of romantic contentment, they shoved his girlfriend off a bridge. Gwen Stacy (and the Silver Age of comics) died with a SNAP! of her too happy neck. Gwen’s 2014 death had a similar effect on the Spider-Man film franchise.

3) Groundhog Day.

Marriage? What marriage?

Johnston McCulley is responsible for the first superhero reboot. When Douglass Fairbanks donned Zorro’s mask and turned an obscure vigilante hero into an international icon, McCulley simply ignored the ending of his own novel when he wrote his first sequel. Zorro did not unmask, he did not retire, and he certainly didn’t run off and get married.

This solution remains annoyingly common. After two decades of marital bliss between Peter Parker and Mary Jane, Marvel signed a deal with the devil (Mephisto in the comic) and rebooted an unmarried Spider-Man in 2008. Like Zorro, Peter had also unmasked publicly, an event erased from the minds of all onlookers (but not, alas, all readers). Lois and Clark, who were married (like their short-lived TV counterparts) in 1996, suffered the same fate when DC rebooted their entire, romantically-challenged universe in 2011. In fact, the very idea of the reboot came from the editorial staff’s frustration with the Lane-Kent status quo and how its innate dullness prevented them from cooking up a new Superman love triangle.

However you handle it, marriage is hell on a writer. But the last solution is my favorite:

4) Perpetual Foreplay.

Frank Packard ended his first Gray Seal book with an implied bang. His proto-Batman waltzes off-stage with his superheroine girlfriend, unmasked nuptials to follow. But when bad guys and good sales returned the hero to active duty in 1919, the door to their bedroom bliss slammed shut. Since the Gray Seal’s do-gooding adventures were motivated not by revenge or altruism but superheroic lust for his bride-to-be, Packard needed to stretch out their romance plot. His four sequels offer increasingly frustrating reasons for why the lovers must remain divided.

Awkward as it sounds, Packard’s approach became the strategy of choice among 1930s pulp writers facing the titillating prospect of unlimited sequels.

Starting in 1933, The Spider magazine published a novella every month for a decade. Wealthy socialite Richard Wentworth fights crime as a costumed vigilante while also courting (and putting off) fiancé Nita Van Sloan. Norvell Page (writing under the house name Grant Stockbridge) tells us Wentworth must “sacrifice his hopes of personal happiness” because “the Spider could never marry,” could never “take on the responsibilities of wife and children” while continuing his crime-fighting mission.” Fortunately, Nita, like the Gray Seal’s would-be wife, is endlessly patient.

When William Gibson and Edward Hale Bierstadt adapted Gibson’s The Shadow for radio, they decided the lonely-hearted hero could use a fiancé too. The 1937 premier introduces Lamont Cranston and Margo Lane sipping coffee in his private library, as she begs him to end his career as the Shadow. He’d promised her as much five years ago when their courtship began, but Lamont, like Richard, feels “there is still so much to do” before he can settle down and unmask. “No, Margo,” he explains, “no one must know, no one but you.” And Margo, the ever dutiful (though ever jilted) help-mate, agrees.

But these women aren’t dupes either. They keep their own keys to the batcave. Nita is the Spider’s “best alley in the battle against crime,” “the one woman in the world who knew his secrets.” And Lamont calls the good accomplished by the Shadow “our activities.” Without Margo’s leg work, half of Gibson’s radio plots would stall.

But what other shared “activities” are these couple up to?

Page seems straight-forward enough: “Greatly they loved.” Nita and Richard (would you believe she calls him “Dick”?) share “pleasurable moments together,” though of course “all too brief.” How pleasurable? Page never penned a sex scene, but it’s clear Nina has access to Richard’s bedroom when she leaves him notes while he’s sleeping off a night of adventuring. As far as the Shadow, Alan Moore says it best in Watchmen: “I’d never been entirely sure what Lamont Cranston was up to with Margo Lane, but I’d bet it wasn’t near as innocent and wholesome as Clark Kent’s relationship with her namesake Lois.”

Since unmasking is the climax of the superhero romance plot, these lovers know each other in every sense. The marriage plots never technically closes, but pulp readers knew what was happening between the covers.

Rape, Revenge, and Race

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Foxy Brown acquires a razor on her way to her revenge.

Jack Hill loved to interpolate other exploitation genres in his exploitation films. So while the 1974 blaxploitation classic Foxy Brown isn’t exactly a rape/revenge, it does have a rape/revenge set piece tucked away in the middle. Foxy Brown (Pam Grier) is caught by the evil drug pushers, and sent out to the Ranch. There, two beefy, chuckling white trash hillbillies hook her on heroin and rape her repeatedly—until (of course) she frees herself and inflicts a terrible revenge involving coat hangers, gasoline, and charred corpses.

Hill’s rape/revenge riff — like many a rape/revenge riff—is indebted to deliverance. The white trash rapists in the context of a blaxploitation film take on additional relevance, as they spit racial epithets and even use a whip on Foxy, nodding to slavery and the history of sexual violence against black women. In Deliverance, poor whites are presented as a debased, violent, but also victimized racial other, locked in conflict with effete urban gentrifiers. Foxy Brown deliberately reminds viewers that rural whites and urban whites aren’t always at each other throats, but have often made common cause against people who look like Pam Grier.

The Deliverance reference isn’t just about race, though. It’s also about gender. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover points out that the male rape in Deliverance serves as a prototype for many of the female rapes in exploitation cinema. That means that male viewers are not (or not just) supposed to identify with the male rapists; they’re supposed to identify (as they do in Deliverance) with the person being raped. In Foxy Brown, the imagined viewer is certainly mainly black. The Deliverance reference inscribes that viewer as not just black women, but black men as well, both of whom are encouraged to identify with Foxy as she is violated, and then takes violent revenge.

There are other indications in the film that rape in the film is about violation of black men, as well as violation of black women. In particular, the fate of the lead dope pusher Steve (Peter Brown) at the conclusion of the film is a collaborative male/female endeavor. Foxy allies herself with a black anti-drug, neighborhood watch coalition, and together they kill Steve’s bodyguards and capture Steve himself. The men hold Steve, and pull off his pants. Then they look to Foxy for the final order, and their leader castrates him. Finally, Foxy puts his genitals in a pickle jar and takes them to show his girlfriend, the evil Kathleen Wall (Kathryn Loder). Rape/revenge stereotypically uses castration as the recompense for rape—but in this case, that castration functions both as revenge for the sexual violence against Foxy, and as revenge for the way the heroin dealers have exploited the black community as a whole (and black men in particular.)

Even though the rape/revenge sequence only takes up 10-15 minutes in a 90 minute film, then, it is structurally and thematically central. First, it presents heroin pushing and sexual violence as parallel crimes, both used by white men (and white women) to humiliate and torture black people. Second, in doing so, and through the reference to Deliverance, it solidifies Foxy Brown’s position as a point of identification for black men as well as black women, both in her rape and in her revenge.

As Claire Henry points out, Foxy Brown, and other blaxploitation films, often aren’t included as part of the rape/revenge canon. Henry argues that this is because white society (and white critics) do not see black women’s rapes as important, or worthy of attention. Stephane Dunn notes, though, that the rape/revenge in Foxy Brown is in many ways downplayed; Foxy shows no ill-effects from sexual violence, nor for that matter from her forced heroin injections. Rape serves as a metaphor for white violence against blacks, but the specificity of the individual trauma of rape is lost — as well as the specificity of the historical sexual violence unleashed against black women.

The rape/revenge genre, then, focuses on white women, and has trouble thinking about the intersection of race and rape. Blaxploitation focuses on racial exploitation — and has trouble thinking about the intersection of race and rape. Foxy Brown doesn’t so much resolve the dialectic as illustrate it. Hill includes a rape/revenge skit in the middle of a blaxploitation revenge feature, and showing how the two parallel each other, but never, quite, manages to bring the two together into a whole that honors and sympathizes with black women’s historical, and ongoing, experience of sexual violence.
_____

One possible exception to the above is Talia Lugacy’s The Descent (2007). One of the few rape/revenge films with a female director, it also is unusual in featuring a woman of color; Rosario Dawson plays Maya, the lead.

As often happens with rape/revenge films, The Descent gets a worse rep than it deserves. This critic for example attacks it in part because he doesn’t understand why she refuses to go to the police (maybe women of color don’t share your faith in the cops, maybe?) and because the rape scene is insufficiently explicit (how can we care about sexual violence unless it’s really spectacular and gross?)

But while The Descent isn’t a disaster, it can’t be said to be a success, either. The film does confront race head on. Jared, the rapist football player jerk, uses racist insults as he date rapes Maya. More, his frat-boy persona and indeed the whole college milieu is figured as white; the best part of the film is the way that it functions as a kind of sickening send up of Dead Poets Society and the typical John Hughes rom com. Jared brags about seizing the day and takes Maya out to see the stars and keeps pushing at her and pushing at her boundaries, just the way you’re supposed to do, and isn’t that cute that he’s such a swoony deep romantic John Cusack lead— and then, whoops, it turns out that swoony deep romantic lead is in fact an awful priviliged racist raping shit.

The revenge part of the film seems to have racial overtones as well, though the handling of them is less sure. In reaction to the rape, Maya starts to take risks; she frequents a club where the clientele is black, Hispanic, and queer. Mya’s non-white identity becomes a kind of alternative to the square, college life with its hypocrisy and violence.

The solidarity in the face of oppression is never expressed unambituously as it is in Foxy Brown, though; instead of framing resistance to white supremacy as politics, it ends up being presented as titillating lifestyle choice, complete with BDSM games and foot fetishism. It’s not clear, either, what we’re to make of Maya in this setting. Has the rape degraded her and damaged her by pushing her into this more interracial milieu? Has the rape opened her up to sexual and communal possibilities (as she suggests at the end)? Neither of these seems like a very thoughtful takeaway, and, perhaps realizing as much, the film vacillates between them in confusion. As in Foxy Brown, rape/revenge doesn’t seem quite able to tie together its themes of sexual and racial violence. In these films not all women are white, and not all men are black, but while women of color exist, at least as far as rape/revenge has managed so far, their outlines remain blurry.

Utilitarian Review 9/26/15

Posted on September 26, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Robert Stanley Martin with on-sale dates of comics in late 1947.

On how Hitchcock is the Birds.

Chris Gavaler on the superheroes of Patricia Highsmith.

Little reviews of Legion of Two and Sonic Youth.

Phillip Smith on the morality, or lack therof, of the Lego concentration camp set.

On why exploitation rape/revenge is better than Bergman’s Virgin Spring.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Playboy I wrote about PBR&B and condescending to R&B.

At the Guardian I wrote about She Shred magazine, and fighting the erasure of women guitarists.

At the New Republic I wrote about The Intern, and Hollywood’s gross celebration of working without pay.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—the GOP’s inability to pander to women.

—Sonic Youth and Chuck D’s Kool Thing, and whether white people can make non-racist music videos.

—the first black Marvel superhero (not the Black Panther)

Other Links

Celebrate! Happy Birthday is in the public domain!

David Brothers on the importance of being careful in writing about race. It’s painful for me, since I’m one of his big negative examples, but he’s right. I should have been more careful.

Suffering With a Purpose

Posted on September 25, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

In the 70s, rape/revenge turned into a genre based on feministsploitation. Films like I Spit On Your Grave, Lipstick, and Ms. 45 presented rape as part of the structural oppression of women, and female revenge as a way to overthrow, and often literally castrate, the patriarchy. Even rape/revenge films that did not specifically use feminism as a lever, like Last House on the Left, spent significant time placing viewer identification with the women suffering violence. The film’s were certainly prurient and exploitive, but they also presented sexual violence as important,and its victims as not just sympathetic, but worthy of a privileged point of view and narrative place.

This is not the case for the Last House on the Left’s direct inspiration, The Virgin Spring. Ingmar Berman’s 1960 classic is a rape/revenge in terms of plot; set in medieval times, it is about a young girl who is raped and murdered by bandits on her way to church, and whose father then kills the murderers. But where the 70s rape/revenge films put feminism, Virgin Spring puts God.

Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) does get screentime in the first half of the film, it’s true—but her character amounts to little more than assurances that she is the perfect, perfectly innocent rape victim. She oversleeps and is a little spoiled, perhaps, but she is kind, loving, full of life, and trusting—she feeds the bandits her lunch because she wants to help strangers before she realizes they mean her ill.

All the depth, soul-searching, and internal conflict in the film is reserved for Karin’s friend and parents—and especially for her father, Tore, played by the even-then celebrated Max von Sydow. As far as the film is concerned, Karin’s assault is important less for its place in her life, than for its effect on her father and his relationship with God.

Since it’s a Bergman film, that relationship is fraught and dramatic. Tore chastises himself with branches before he goes forth to slay his daughter’s sleeping killers. In the final scene, after finding his child’s body, he staggers off to the side of the clearing, and looking away from the camera addresses the deity directly. “God, you saw it! God, you saw it!” he declares. An innocent died and God did nothing. Like Job’s, Tore’s loss is an object lesson in the problem of faith and evil. And then, after Tore pledges to build a church as expiation for his sin of violence, a spring miraculously begins to flow from the ground beneath Karin’s head. God did see, and Karin, we’re surely meant to believe, is in heaven. Karin’s death is first a dramatic moment in Tore’s internal life,and then a dramatic moment in God’s narrative of suffering and redemption.

The cinematography throughout emphasizes the sense of a cold, but beautiful order beneath, and gazing upon, the tragedy. The dramatic image of Sydow standing beside, and then wrestling, with the tree serves as a metaphor for Tore’s isolation—and for the fact that God (the tree, the eye watching the tree) is there even in the bleakest landscape.

There’s no question that Virgin Spring is a striking film to look at. And it deals with big, important themes—God, justice, mercy, violence, the place of man in the cosmos. But still, the very elevation of theme and vision can start to seem unseemly, built as it is on the torture and death of a person whose suffering is decidedly tangential. When Sydow goes the full ham Shakespeare route and gazes at his hands to let us know that he’s disturbed about murdering the thugs the staginess becomes almost insupportable. We get it Mr. Bergman. We are watching something profound. How can Karin have suffered in vain if she lets us contemplate the beauty that is Sydow in full stricken emoting?

In comparison, the later rape/revenge exploitation, acknowledging its prurient investment in both sex and violence, seems relatively honest—and certainly less grandly distanced from the trauma. In the 70s rape/revenge, the camera is not at some perfect remove, but often chaotically close to the action, trying to keep up, or get out of the way (as in the still below from Ms. 45).

Exploitation films are often criticized for having no higher purpose; for being exercises in sleaze, stimulation, and unpleasantness for their own sake. Virgin Spring makes me wonder, though, whether a higher purpose can in its own way be more indecent than sensationalism. Better to suffer for no reason, than so that God and dad and the filmmaker can be profound, and reconciled.

Lego System

Posted on September 24, 2015 by Philip Smith

I first encountered Zbigniew Libera’s LEGO concentration camp kits (1996) when I was writing on Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Both Libera and Spiegelman, famously, used a medium typically associated with children in a self-effacing attempt to depict the Holocaust. Libera’s work offered an interesting counterpoint to Maus because, despite the apparent conceptual similarities, while Spiegelman’s masterpiece has been almost universally celebrated, Libera has been called an anti-Semite, has been asked to withdraw his work from exhibitions, and has been accused (perhaps correctly) of offering a glib pop-culture commentary on the largest and genocide – the most terrible event – in human history. I wanted to examine the two texts beside one another in order to work out what made them different and how each reflected the politics of Holocaust representation. Ultimately, as inevitably happens, the work took a different shape and when the time came to submit the final draft of my manuscript I had said everything I wanted to say about Maus but Libera had been reduced to a footnote and, finally, removed entirely. The Lego System kits still bother me, though, and I would like to explore why they bother me here.

Libera worked with the LEGO Corporation of Denmark to produce three kits, each made up of seven boxes of Lego. Each box contains all of the materials needed to construct a Lego simulacra of some aspect of a Nazi death camp. Boxes include buildings, a gallows, inmates, guards, and barbed wire. The scenes depicted include a lynching, the beating of an inmate, medical experiments, and corpses being carried from the gas chambers.

One way we might read Libera’s work is as a hyperbolic form of historiographical metafiction, a term coined by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism to describe works which show ‘fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be discursively structured.’ By adopting an abstract form and a demonstrably impossible alternative history, certain texts, Hutcheon argues, point implicitly to the failure of any representation to capture the ineffable reality of historical events. The impossibility of articulation is doubly true of the Holocaust which, as many, many critics and writers have argued, defies our capacity for either imagination or expression. If we were to read Libera’s Lego System in such a vein then we would understand his use of a toy to depict the Holocaust as (like Spiegelman’s Maus) demonstrative of the failure of any means of articulation to approximate to the torture, humiliation, and murder of millions.

I understand this line of argument but I can not subscribe to it as a blanket excuse for every ironic or self-consciously inaccurate attempt to depict the Holocaust. Concessions made to the concept of historical accuracy with regards to the Nazi killing project are in danger of offering a degree of legitimacy to more extreme revisionist perspectives. Under the umbrella of representational impossibility Libera’s work unnecessarily distorts what occurred; his commandant, as Stephen C. Feinstein argues, bears more similarity to the Soviet gulag than the Nazi death camp and the entry gate lacks the well-known inscription. He appears to see the historiographical metafiction argument as license to abandon any form of historical accuracy.

Even if full representation is impossible, I can not help but feel that where we can offer accuracy we have a moral obligation to do so. The ‘how’ of the Holocaust, Robert Eaglestone argues, should never be neglected in favour of artistic license. Inaccuracies (of which there is a wide spectrum from allegory to outright lies and denial) are dangerous to understanding. To foreground a fundamental responsibility to historical truth in Shoah art and literature is to echo the final line of Levi’s introduction to If This Is A Man: ‘[i]t seems to me unnecessary to add that none of these facts are invented’. After the terror inflicted during the Holocaust, the Nazi’s attempts to destroy the camps and remove evidence of what had gone on, and subsequent attempts in some quarters at revisionism and denial, an earnest attempt at fidelity, even if true representation is impossible, is, I can not help but feel, imperative. It is here, incidentally, where Libera and Spiegelman part ways – while Maus articulates a failure to represent the Holocaust, Spiegelman went to great pains to research and, where possible, accurately depict his subject.

It would be easy, then, to simply dismiss Lebera’s Lego System as an ironic, transparently provocative, and deeply offensive play on, what is for others, an earnest and hard-fought attempt to bring some understanding to the worst event in human history. While I stand by my earlier assertions, I find it hard to dismiss the Lego kits as entirely vapid. I find the fact that the kits were built using existing Lego parts (modified slightly using paint in some cases) as an unsettling assertion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument that rather than being an aberration in an otherwise rational society, the anti-Semitism which informed the Shoah had roots in the pervading logic of pre-World War II European cultures. The component parts of genocide, the Lego kits could be read to assert, not only pre-date the Holocaust, but continue into modern society. The Holocaust did not occur in spite of, but relied upon the industrial model which built, and continues to build modern civilisation (the factory, trains, timekeeping, coordination, a drive toward efficiency). The reproducibility of the Lego medium (Libera made three sets but some people asked if they would become commercially available) suggests, terrifyingly, that the events (loosely) depicted can not be safely confined to history, but can easily be reconstructed from those apparently innocuous elements upon which modern society has been built. As Spiegelman asserts ‘Western Civilization ended at Auschwitz. And we still haven’t noticed.’

I am, of course, not the first writer to find myself grappling with these questions when it comes to Holocaust representation, and in many ways I find myself treading already well-worn pathways. I find myself simultaneously recoiling from the apparently glib treatment of the Holocaust in Libera’s Lego System, while simultaneously wondering if the confinement of the Nazi killing project to history (of which the argument for Holocaust exceptionalism is a component) is a way for us to avoid confronting the possibility of its reproducibility.

Legion of Two vs. Sonic Youth

Posted on September 23, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

These reviews ran way back when at Knoxville Metropulse; I think they’ve since gone off the web.
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Legion of Two
Riffs
Planet Mu

I have to admit that cranky, middle-aged rock-critic me is not completely up-to-the-minute on this dubstep stuff the kids are so crazy about. Still, as a fan of black and doom metal, I felt right at home in Alan O’ Boyle and David Lacey’s trudging apocalypse. Sure, here the zombie Vikings have been replaced by giant, digitally controlled cement mixers crushing you beneath their inevitable tread, while the gutteral squawls of tortured werewolves have given way to hissing jets of infernal steam and the occasional free jazz ensemble being quietly and painfully assimilated in the background. And, yes, I’ll admit that there are a couple of nods to electronica’s blissful leanings, as at the beginning of “Turning Point,” where the swirling synths head for lighter, more Enya-friendly territory and the live percussion loosens up into a funkier stut.

Not that I have anything against that sort of thing.

Still, I was pleased when the last track demonstrated once and for all that the duo really do have as bleak and blackened a pair of hearts as any metalhead could ask for — “Cast Out Your Demons” descends into a hissing, howling ambient sludge, where even the ominously heavy percussion is swallowed up by ghostly shrieks and gaping despair. It kind of brings a tear to my aging eyes to realize that, even after all this time, the youth today still want to drown the world in its own boiling filth.

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Sonic Youth
The Eternal

The last Sonic Youth album I spent any time at all with was Washing Machine from way, way back in 1995. The Eternal picks up exactly where we left off though…and that’s kind of a problem.

If any band was about sounding up to the minute, that band was the aptly named Sonic Youth. They were dissonant, they were cool as shit, and, most of all, they were surprising. Even on the post-classic period Washing Machine they seemed to be trying new things, as when they buried the album’s best pop hook in the 19 minute swathe of noise that was “The Diamond Sea.”

For an avant-band like Sonic Youth, that kind of “fuck-you” isn’t a bug; it’s the whole point. You’re there to have them set you back on your heels, either with the uncompromising but earthy squall of their early albums, or with the way they turned sneering political protest into breathy celebration and back again on Dirty’s “Swimsuit Issue.”

All of which is to say that The Eternal is the one thing that a Sonic Youth album should never be. It’s predictable. Not that it’s a Metallica-level embarrassment — “Leaky Lifeboat” has a pretty, almost classical picked motif; “Antenna” is catchy as hell. But the music doesn’t do anything the band wasn’t doing already fifteen years ago. Merle Haggard can get away with that sort of thing because his music is about tradition and fidelity. But Sonic Youth is about something else. And if you can’t stay young, “The Eternal” starts to sound like a very long and very tedious slog.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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