What’s Funny About This Picture?

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I was seven the first time I saw this illustration. I’d never heard of Frank Frazetta, but forty years later I still recognize the style. I assumed it was an Eerie or Creepy cover, but flipping through online databases and comic-con long boxes unearthed nothing. My memory had added a throne, so my description to vendors didn’t help either.

I knew it was early 70s because I’d seen it during a family vacation in Cape May, NJ. We went multiple years, but stayed only once in the Sea Mist Hotel–on the second or third floor, the right side, in what seemed like an improbably large open space.

An adult cousin–I don’t know which of my father’s nephews–was suddenly staying with us too. He’d arrived on a motorcycle and slept in a sleeping bag in his underwear on the floor. I slept in my briefs, but with pajamas over top, so his relative nakedness confused me, a change in the rules.

The magazine was his. It confused me too. It was sitting on a large table, more or less chin height, as I studied the cover at what must have been a distance of inches. It didn’t occur to me to open it or to pick it up. Though there was nothing taboo in its placement, no sudden parental shuffling of papers, I felt something transgressive. The breasts presumably. I’d seen my mother naked, but this was different, another shifting of known rules.

This was 1973, only months before my parents’ separation. I turned seven in June. Frazetta penned “72” next to his signature, but the magazine logo hides it. I had no idea he’d illustrated a National Lampoon until the cover popped up on my laptop during a recent Google search. No. 41, August, so on stands in July when my cousin grabbed his copy on the way to a beach getaway.

I’m still not sure what it’s doing on the front of “The Humor Magazine.” Frazetta drew the occasional Playboy-esque cartoon,

but “Ghoul Queen” is closer to the distortions of his fantasy style. Still, the ghouls are more comic than menacing,

and their queen’s hip-to-waist ratio exceeds even Frazetta’s usual idealized proportions.

An editor’s note claims he drew it for a previous “Tits ‘n’ Lizards” issue, but that’s just an example of the magazine’s “Humor.” Looking at the cover now, I’m still confused. Female nudity aside, the image seems to be about race. A white woman reigns over her dark-skinned minions. This could be the White Goddess and her African worshipers in 1931’s Trader Horn.

Instead of Aryan curls, Frazetta endows his goddess Asian overtones–or is that just make-up? This bejeweled yet rag-wearing Queen must spend a lot of time plucking her eyebrows.

Despite all the abundant white flesh glowing in front of them, the ghouls’ eyes are averted. The Queen is displayed for the viewer only. The image dramatizes the Mississippi racial rules that Emmett Till violated in 1955. A white woman’s body is always taboo to dark-skinned males, no matter how outlandishly posed.

Sculptor Tim Bruckner also suggests a homoerotic dimension to Frazetta’s sex fantasy: “having to decide what some of the ghoul pairs were doing behind her was something best left to the imagination.”

Are those expressions of monstrous pleasure? Are the obscured arms of the rear figures directed toward their crotches? Do the splayed fingers and curved wrists of the foregrounded hands denote submission? Does the apparent orgy explain their disinterest in the Queen’s body, or is this how dark males control their desire for white female flesh? And why the hell did Frazetta draw an extra left hand groping around her hip?

I see other anatomical issues (her face is too small, her breasts too round), but I’m more concerned with the ones I can’t see. Like her right leg. The pose suggests that the knee is bent so that the right calf is vertical, like so:

Except that space is occupied by a ghoul. The Queen’s leg isn’t hidden by his back–their bodies overlap as if collaged from separate planes. The two images don’t belong together. Maybe that’s why the ghouls aren’t ogling their queen, and why her gaze skirts past them too. It would also explain the floating hand. Frazetta was revising. The 3-D impossibility is further augmented by the two-dimensions of the image. It’s a painting, so obviously two-dimensional, but Frazetta emphasizes that fact by not filling the entire canvas. The sky behind the figures and the ground in front of them are the same continuous, unpainted space. He even flattens the vulture so its outlined body is almost as undifferentiated as the moon.

None of this struck my seven-year-old imagination. After an anxious glance at the Queen’s towering authority, my eyes dropped to the discordant subplot at the bottom of the page. The snake offers a range of mysteries (is it attached to the lizard’s head? what are those snail-like appendages?), but I was busy contemplating the two other figures.

I’m tempted to say this is the moment I first realized I was straight. But I didn’t realize anything. I just sensed something inexplicable. When I rediscovered the image online, I wasn’t sure it was the same–where was the throne?–until my eyes dropped to the skeleton’s hand again. I could feel it as if looking at a photograph of my younger self and remembering the sensations of the frozen moment. The dark-skinned ghouls and their domineering queen had nothing to do with me, but that skinless skeleton hungrily pawing an unconscious woman’s body, that’s who I identified with. That was me.

It’s not the cover image to my sexuality I would choose. It merges incompatible desires–is the skeleton’s mouth wide with arousal, or is he (“he”) anticipating a juicy meal? Either way, he’s a predator. Though not, apparently, a hunter. The woman is a discarded scrap, literally below the interest of the queen and her ghouls. Even the snake-lizard stares off indifferently as the woman’s face is obscured by its Freudian body. I understood her then and now to be unconscious, though she might as easily be dead. Perhaps her erect nipples signify living prey.

So my first inkling of sexuality was triggered by a fantastical representation of date rape. The girl’s been roofied. It’s a dire contrast to the Ghoul Queen–a woman commanding a gang of four grotesque but muscular males who have the physical ability to overpower her but instead bend and crawl at her feet (while possibly having anal intercourse). She is the painting’s largest figure, the tallest, spanning nearly the height of the frame, her figure embodying unchallenged authority. If not for the voyeuristic nudity, you might call her image feminist.

But then there’s the roofied girl, a depiction of abject weakness, the pose reducing her to a faceless and defenseless torso. The Queen’s power is positioned over this lower image, appears somehow predicated on it. While her impersonal eyes assess her ghouls, her imperial foot pins the unconscious girl’s hair. She is literally standing on her.

There’s a range of unstated narrative possibilities–does the Queen maintain power by sacrificing her Caucasian sisters to the dark horde? are only skinless and so racially unidentifiable ghouls allowed to fondle white flesh?–but the pose says enough. The girl is the Queen’s victim, not the other monsters’.

Why was my skeleton hand drawn to the unconscious girl’s breasts, but not the Queen’s? They’re smaller, so less intimidating? The Queen is equally exposed, but wholly in control of the fact. I can ogle her, but only because she seems to permit it, her chin angled invitingly away. But at any moment, those eyes could turn and gaze back at me. Did my seven-year-old bones inch across the roofied girl’s ribs because she has no eyes to see me? Did my memory fabricate a throne because a seated Queen is less horrifying?

Apparently Tim Bruckner was uncomfortable with these questions too. When he adapted “Ghoul Queen” into a 3-D miniature, he altered more than two dimensions. “It was important to pare down the composition to its essentials,” he said.

Non-essentials include ghoulish racism, slithering homophobia, and date-rape misogyny. But the skeleton remains–though not the nature of its now non-predatory hunger. “There’s nothing coy or retiring about a Frazetta woman,” explained Bruckner. “Even simply standing with a pike, her hand on her hip, being admired by one of the undead, she announces her presence with every sensuous curve of her body.” Bruckner literally turns my skull’s desire toward a stance of female power.

But I still wouldn’t choose the revised Ghoul Queen for my cover art. National Lampoon dubbed their issue “Strange Beliefs,” a better title for the painting too, though I doubt the editors knew they were lampooning American sex and racial norms. They presumably didn’t know they were lampooning me.

Utilitarian Review 9/12/15

Posted on September 12, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Ng Suat Tong on Daredevil and Bob Dylan.

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

Jimmy Johnson on how Narcos is an imperialist piece of crap.

Cord-Christian Casper on Enid Blyton, Spider-Man, and the illustion of change.

Osvaldo Oyola on an old advertisement and the history of sexism and insularity in gaming

Chris Gavaler on Superman and Leopole and Loeb.

Utilitarians Everywhere

On Quarts I wrote about Playboy’s history with jazz.

On Splice Today I wrote about:

—Muppet violence, and why we don’t care.

—rock, gender, and the bands Novella, Insect Ark, and Sewer Goddess.

—great music I missed in 2014, including Polly A, Cretin, and more.

— Bobby Jindal. the saddest Republican candidate.

Other Links

Yasmin Nair on why Kim Davis doesn’t deserve to be in jail.

Noah Davis on making a living freelancing.

On the ongoing fight for Dyett high school.

Superman on Trial

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Can reading detective fiction and Superman literature turn you into a supervillain? Super-lawyer Clarence Darrow says yes. He argued his case this week in 1924.

The facts were indisputable. His clients, Dickie Loeb and Babe Leopold rented a car, picked up Dickie’s fourteen-year-old cousin Bobby from school, and bludgeoned him with a chisel in the front seat. After stopping for sandwiches, they stripped the body, disfigured it with acid, and hid it below a railroad track. When they got home, they burnt their blood-spotted clothes and mailed the parents a ransom note. It was the perfect crime.

Dickie was nineteen, Babe twenty, but both had already completed undergraduate degrees and were enrolled in law schools. They were also both voracious readers. Darrow, their defense attorney, detailed Dickie’s literary tastes: “detective stories,” each one “a story of crime,” ones, he said, the state legislature had wisely “forbidden boys to read” for fear they would “produce criminal tendencies.” Dickie “devoured” them. “He read them day after day . . . and almost nothing else.”

Darrow didn’t mention any titles, but Dickie must have snuck stacks of Detective Story Magazine past his governess. The Street and Smith pulp doubled from a bi-monthly to a weekly the year he turned twelve. Johnston McCulley was a favorite with fans. His gentleman criminal the Black Star wears a cape and hood with an emblem on the forehead. So does his Thunderbolt. Darrow said Dickie’s pulps “all show how smart the detective is, and where the criminal himself falls down.” But the detectives chasing the Man in Purple, the Picaroon, the Gray Ghost, the Joker, the Scarlet Fox—they never catch their man. Those noble vigilantes remain safely outside the law. They are also all young men born into wealth who disguise their secret lives. So Dickie, the son of a corporate vice-president, learned to play detective, “shadowing people on the street,” as he fantasized “being the head of a band of criminals.” “Early in his life,” said Darrow, Dickie “conceived the idea of that there could be a perfect crime,” one he could himself “plan and accomplish.”

Babe was an impressionable reader too. He’d started speaking at four months and earned genius level IQ scores. Darrow called him “a boy obsessed of learning,” but one without an “emotional life.” He makes him sound like a renegade android, “an intellectual machine going without balance and without a governor.” Where Dickie transgressed through pulp fiction, “Babe took to philosophy.” Instead of McCulley, Nietzsche started “obsessing” Babe at sixteen. Darrow called Nietzsche’s doctrine “a species of insanity,” one “holding that the intelligent man is beyond good and evil, that the laws for good and the laws for evil do not apply to those who approach the superman.” Babe summed up Nietzsche the same way in a letter to Dickie: “In formulating a superman he is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern ordinary men.” A member of “the master class,” says Nietzsche himself, “may act to all of lower rank . . . as he pleases.” That includes murdering a fourteen-year-old neighbor as one “might kill a spider or a fly.”

So Babe considered Dickie a fellow superman. And Dickie considered Babe a perfect partner in crime. The two genres have one formula point in common: heroes are “above the law.” When Siegel and Shuster merged Beyond Good and Evil with Detective Story Magazine in 1938, they came up with Action Comics No. 1. Loeb and Leopold only got Life Plus 99 Years, the title of Babe’s autobiography. Prosecutors wanted to hear a death sentence, but Darrow wrote a modern law classic for his closing argument. It brought the judge to tears.

William Jennings Bryan liked it too. He quoted excerpts during the Scopes “Monkey” trial the following year. Bryan was prosecuting John Scopes for teaching the theory of evolution in a Tennessee high school, and Darrow was defending him. Scopes, a gym teacher subbing in science, used George William Hunter’s school board-approved Civil Biology, a standard textbook since 1914, and one that shocks my students when I assign it in my “Superheroes” course.

“If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved,” writes Hunter, “it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.” After describing families of “parasites” who spread “disease, immorality, and crime,” he argues: “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.”

This was one of Bryan’s main objections to evolution, a term he used interchangeably with eugenics: “Its only program for man is scientific breeding, a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind—an impossible system!”Bryan links eugenics to Nietzsche, as Darrow had the year before, saying Nietzsche believed “evolution was working toward the superman.” The claim is arguable, but the superman was “a damnable philosophy” to Bryan, a “flower that blooms on the stalk of evolution.”

“Would the State be blameless,” he asked, “if it permitted the universities under its control to be turned into training schools for murderers? When you get back to the root of this question, you will find that the Legislature not only had a right to protect the students from the evolutionary hypothesis, but was in duty bound to do so.”

Darrow declined to make a closing argument, preventing Bryan from making his before the judge too, so their final debate played out in newspapers. Either way, Darrow was talking from both ends of his ubermensch. “Loeb knew nothing of evolution or Nietzsche,” he told the Associated Press. “It is probable he never heard of either. But because Leopold had read Nietzsche, does that prove that this philosophy or education was responsible for the act of two crazy boys?”

Perhaps Darrow’s hypocrisy is an illustration of a superman only obeying his own laws. It didn’t matter though. Like Loeb and Leopold’s, Scopes’ guilt was never contested, and the court fined him $100 (later overturned on a technicality). That was 1925, the year the Fascist-inspired “super-criminal” Blackshirt joined Zorro and his merry band of pulp vigilantes, while Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf climbed the German best-seller list.

Superman was ascending.

“For a Good Time. . .” – Calling Up Sexist Impulses to Sell Video Games

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Osvaldo Oyola

This post originally appeared on The Middle Spaces.
___________
Long before the days of the internet and companies leveraging a fanbase willing to seek out commercials for their favorite properties and brands, TV spots and print ads were the only chance things had to catch on. By interrogating those old ads it is possible to uncover the strategies and cultural assumptions of those efforts to grab an audience. I recently came across an advertisement on the back cover of Power Pack #1 (1984) and it struck me as making an association that is simultaneously bizarre and prescient.

I remember the ad from my early teen years (I turned 13 the summer this comic came out), but I had never given much thought to what it offered and how it offered it. The ad is certainly slicker than most ads of the time. I am sure at the time it seemed like an extravagance. For 50 cents you could call a 900-number to learn about Parker Bros video games. My mom kept a strict eye on phone use in our house, and no attempts to use math to show her that regardless of how long I stayed on the phone, local calls cost a flat fee of 10.2 cents ever worked. Mami was wary of what seemed like confused and obscure systems that siphoned away money. I knew better than to risk an errant 50 cents showing up on the bill. But regardless of how strict (or not) moms might have been back in 1984, I can’t imagine that this effort by Parker Brothers video game division was very successful. I knew of no one who enthusiastically described a soon to be released game that they learned about by calling this hotline, or some strategy for Gyruss that had heretofore gone undiscovered. No kid even claimed that his “cousin” had called and learned some made-up-on the spot news about a new Star Wars game.

No. What is noteworthy about the advertisement itself, is not what it offered, but the banality of its fucked up normalizing of masculinist behavior to sell its products to kids.

The ad features the perspective of being inside a bathroom stall, with “For a Vid Time Call 1-900-720-1234.” Beneath it is a bunch of boastful video game-related graffiti. Instead of the usual puerile context of bathroom stall scrawl, we have a poem about Q-Bert, a drawing of a snake (a knowing phallic reference to the dongs common to bathroom stalls?), and some back and forth braggadocio about owning the James Bond 007 video game. Below the photo is some text ostensibly describing the service, but not really saying much—like calling a number you find in a bathroom stall, you never know what you’re gonna get.

Common bathroom graffiti. Big boobs. No head!

Think about it for a second…This ad is asking young, presumably male, readers to associate calling this number with calling a number scrawled on the door of a bathroom stall. Consider how bathroom graffiti of this type is mostly used to shame women (this in both men’s and women’s restrooms), make homophobic claims about other men, and for boasts about hypersexual pursuits. Putting a woman’s phone number in a stall is the analog version of internet slut-shaming and abusive social media commentary. “I fucked Stacy in this stall” is meant to give the current crapper a vicarious thrill, the suggestion that they too could have a quickie in a public bathroom—as a man they are entitled to it. (Though my estimation is that those who write that shit in bathrooms are the losers of the sexual world, just as studies show that online gamer abusers are the losers of their world).

So for this advertisement to entice young men (and remember, comic readers at this time were still assumed to be boys between the ages of 8 and 14) with an allusion to the dirty side of sexual politics is just weird. Weirder still is that there was no objection to this idea being used to advertise these games (that I know of), perhaps because the feature never took off, but also in part because doing that shit is considered normal “boy” behavior. The ad’s direct association of a potential wealth of video game information with the sexual discourse of the public bathroom is speaking directly to a young male market that has already absorbed American culture’s obsession with virility and competition, and women’s place in that obsession. It is selling the 80s video game equivalent to Pick-Up Artist “culture,” with its email newsletters, seminars and books with “tips and tricks” for success. As reviews of the recent Adam Sandler film Pixels and its sad nostalgia remind us, in games ranging from Double Dragon to Cruisin’ USA, in the 80s the promise of a girl could be the prize of a video game (something the film makes a literal reality). (Actually, this hasn’t really changed at all, and you should check out Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women: Video Games for her excellent analysis of this in “Women as Reward“). Writing a woman’s number on a bathroom wall represents a sick double-valence: the possibility of an easy lay or the opportunity to spout uninvited salacious and/or abusive comments anonymously to a stranger.

Given the association of video games with a male-dominated space hostile to women as early as 1984 then the negative reaction by a segment of male gamers to a critique of sexist tropes in video games and the impossible categories the games settings, plots and assumptions create for women in the games makes perfect sense. The reaction is an extension of that same frustrated entitlement that writes Stacy’s name and number in a public stall.

In other words, in a sort of obtuse way, this advertisement prefigures the attacks on Sarkeesian and “Gamergate” vitriol directed towards any woman that speaks up about this topic.

A strange mix of private/anonymous location (the stall or the seat in front of the game screen) and the public behavior that emerges from the discourse of those places, leads to the automatic id-driven lashing out at interlopers who “don’t understand.” Just as the comic ad promises access to special knowledge and thus video game success (leading to being a “real” or “hardcore” gamer), the cultural gate-keeping of the geek-o-sphere seeks to maintain an area of male power through leveraging media conspiracies (“it’s about ethics in journalism!”) and narratives of the “fake geek girl.” These, of course, are narratives constructed after the fact to make the abuse cohere with their self-image. Just like any other activity that becomes synecdoche for masculinity, maintaining a particular male video gaming in-group status appears predicated on treating women like shit (or condoning others doing so). This activity is reinforced as a “cultural” value virtually through game actions (women as prizes, women as props) and explicitly through abusive language and other online behavior (or even sometimes in person!). All the while, this attitude is exacerbated by an expectation that any women involved with video games must be sexually available to men. It seems about as healthy as trolling for dates in a bathroom stall.

I do want to pause for a moment, however, and make sure that I do not come off as being anti-graffiti. I love graffiti, have maintained a tumblr with graffiti on and off for a couple of years, and spent many a lunch hour at my old job wandering around lower Manhattan taking snapshots of stuff ranging from toy-ass tags to totally bombed out walls. Graffiti, even bathroom graffiti, can be wild and inventive, creative in ways that impress me more than a lot of contemporary art. Spend time going through a Google image search for “bathroom graffiti” (though that link comes with a possible trigger warning) and you’ll see it can be funny and just plain appealingly weird (like the weird and raunchy, but not necessarily sexist, “lobster cock”). There is something about its invisibility through its ubiquity and the palimpsest quality of years of going over each other that makes discovering it a thrill. Not all of it is in the tradition of “For a good time call…” or homophobic claims about the bartender. However, the particular context of the Parker Brothers ad connects their product to unwanted sexual solicitation and normalized notions of women’s sexuality and male entitlement. It was not simply jokey cartoons about poop or reminding us that Led Zeppelin Rocks!

Anyway, this is all to suggest that the ad is a signifier for the way masculinity is linked to presumably male-oriented (or at least the subject of male-focused marketing of) activities and thus makes the culture around those activities pretty insular. It’s synecdochal. The activity stands in for manhood and manhood for the activity, but you need only consider the arc of video games in our culture (from kiddy novelty or nerd-stuff to billion dollar movies and New York Times reviews) to understand the malleability of masculinity. Hard and fast ideas of what being a man means and what a man does are absurd. The very fluidity with which masculinity can be framed is a good thing though, because it also means there is a chance to imagine a masculinity that does not require an underbelly of anti-woman and homophobic ideals to exist. The pathologies of masculinity makes us suckers for capitalism. Advertisements like the Parker Brothers’ Video Hotline tap into young boys uncritical acceptance of patriarchal ideology to shill another layer of advertisement that they hope the consumer will pay for. But whether it flies or fails, ultimately we all pay for it in the ongoing reinforcement of toxic and unnecessary ideas of male entitlement.

Now-Time: Enid Blyton, Spider-Man and the Illusion of Change

Posted on September 9, 2015 by Cord-Christian Casper

In Enid Blyton’s novels, the time is always now. The sense of a peculiarly British, unending vacation transforms the literary space, whether the preteen Find-Outers stay in idyllic Peterswood or whether their counterparts from the Adventure series investigate smugglers of dangerous MacGuffins in distant, colonial climes. Nobody ever changes, past events are referred to with the most perfunctory of allusions and the future does not extend beyond the case to be solved. An evildoer painted the Siamese Cat! The butler is a smuggler! She was him all along! While the range of plot options is attenuated, this now-time is the main appeal of these YA ur-texts. The compact is a simple one, dutifully commented on by the protagonists: now-time will contain a mystery, but more importantly it will feature exhaustively described picnics, antics by animal companions, denigrated sidekicks from lower classes and a perennial movement away from home. Adults fade into the background, functioning mainly as the assurance that the status quo will, ultimately, be assured as a paternal deus ex machina swoops in to give legitimacy to the feats of detecting already accomplished. “MOTHER, have you heard about our summer holidays yet?” asks the Famous Five’s Julian at the beginning of their first literary outing. Yes, Mother has heard. So have the readers. Everyone knows what to expect.

There is no coming-of-age in these novels. They present readers with something akin to heterochrony. With this, the French philosopher Foucault designates other time, which “functions at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.” The terms of exchange for this break are simple: young readers do not expect the formula to progress, do not even (as the old defence of genre fiction would have it) expect a blues-like variation on a narrative standard. In Blytonland, readers demand to be released from time. Any break with now-time is swiftly passed by, anything that contains too much future has to be ignored. A protagonist’s assurance that they will all check in on the Indian helper figure in a couple of years is but a hitch in the suffocating comfort of a vacation that never ends.

When Stan Lee offers his own now-time for his expectant true believers, it comes with a well-known caveat: illusion of change. “Evolution, but 360 degrees’ worth. Same old Spider-Man, same old Peter Parker, same old problems at the core”, as Peter David puts it in the 1998 Comic Buyer’s Guide. Spider-Man will always return where he was. And why shouldn’t he? Why should we not grant Spidey and his readers the same now-time Blyton’s characters have been afforded with cosy abandon? After all, once readers catch on to the formula, they were expected to have already moved on to other cultural forms.

The current Marvel Behemoth (the company, not the character), however, will not allow us to abandon enthusiasm. Notably, the Disney-subsidiary has announced its filmic takeover as a succession of phases, a new one (Phase Three!) to receive its Cumberbatchian inauguration next year. And Spider-Man, too, has been recast for an intra-superheroic Civil Fistfight which will, once more, Change Everything. Now-time is dissolved in breathless development. This is not so much illusion of change as illusion of propulsion, of eternal growth, a movement from movie to movie and a universe steadily expanding from phase to phase. This self-replication is masked by dint of sheer forward momentum: How are we to notice that we are still in the same now-time, when we suddenly find our heroes in pursuit of magic (newly introduced to the shared universe) or, according to collective fingers-crossing, are finally graced with a celluloid superheroine? The films do not refute the recurrences of the same – it is half the fun. Critique is pre-empted by the movies themselves: the self-copying robot and the knowing, quippy subversion of tropes assure us that everyone is in on the joke. Corporation, fans, media – genre-savvily, we co-develop the illusion of change together. It is ours.

In contrast, Blyton’s heterochrony is a simple one. “’Ask her if we can go there!’” cries Famous Five’s Dick, “’I just feel as if it’s the right place somehow. It sounds sort of adventurous!’” It does and it will. The slightest twist of the plot-dynamic suffices. If there is an illusion of change, it is a flimsy one. That’s not what these texts and their perennial present are about. In a similarly straightforward way, comics used to embrace their stasis. Half the appeal of Silver-Age Superman is the staunch refusal of development: the details of the zany plot are less relevant than the fact that Lois, once more, tries to expose the Man of Steel’s secret identity. Jimmy has transformed into any number of other Jimmies and is dutifully restored. Superman had a son for a while, but he vanished. In genuine superheroic now-time, freed from illusions of change, reduplication in space replaces development in time.. Another Bizarro version. A superdog. A superhorse. Robotic doppelgangers. Krypton in a bottle. These are similar terms of exchange to the ones accepted by the Blyton-reader of yore: several groups of friends in several series. Remote places. Antagonists. Why should anything change? The next novel in the series is right there.

Foucault again: the role of heterochronies “is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.” The best thing about this non-place of the now? We can leave it behind. Doomed planet, desperate scientists, last hope, kindly couple: at some point we have seen it all, repetitions and reduplications notwithstanding. After a decade of superheroic cultural hegemony, this movement outwards, away from now-time, towards other unique temporalities, is more difficult as we are invited to partake in a trans-medial illusion of change. Which character have we glimpsed in the new teaser? More after the jump. Consider yourself teased. A new phase is about to begin.

Unabashed heterochrony is a thing of the past. “Have you heard about our summer holidays yet?” We used to. And no one expected us to pretend otherwise. Now, instead, we are invited (Summer 2016!) to anticipate a new era, a perennial movement forward. This breathless anticipation effaces the ways in which it is, after all, still the same summer, the same vacation, the same radioactive spider. Conventions are not to be leisurely accepted and abandoned but celebrated as blatant now-time has been recast as coming-soon-time. Blyton’s eternal present, as smug, self-satisfied (and, not to forget, insufferably racist) as it seems today, was, at least, much easier dismissed.

For Love of Cocaine and Empire: Narcos season 1

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Jimmy Johnson

The new Netflix series Narcos tells a story of Pablo Escobar’s construction of a gangster capitalist empire centered on the cocaine trade and the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) efforts to capture or kill him. Narcos opens with an uncredited quote from Matthew Strecher: “Magical realism is defined as what happens when a highly detailed realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.” Neither that the quote is wholly inapplicable to the story nor that it is uncredited and grabbed from Wikipedia’s introductory paragraphs on magical realism are surprising given the story that follows.

Wagner Moura plays Escobar, the Colombian narcotraficante par excellence who teams with his cousin Gustavo (Juan Pablo Raba) to found the anchor of what became the Medellín Cartel. The pair are hunted by DEA agents Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) and Javier Peña (Pedro Pascal) and Colombian cop Horatio Carrillo (Maurice Compte). How exactly that happens is the meat of the story. And despite a s a slew of fine performances, solid photography and high production values, the meat is rancid.

A Badly Drawn Story for White Americans

Chris Brancato and Paul Eckstein are the team behind Narcos and they previously collaborated on Hoodlum, a film notable for Laurence Fishburne’s performance and for the extreme divergence in its best concept/worst script pairing. Just as they poorly imagined the Harlem numbers game, so too do they mangle the Escobar story from every angle and do so to to tell an American story in Colombia for a white American audience. Empire’s subjects do not have a voice.

Narcos is one of few shows to have significant Spanish and English dialogue. In contrast to the wonderful Jane the Virgin however, Narcos is made first and foremost for English speakers. This is evident in the pan-American casting where all kinds of accents, frequently Mexican and surprisingly few Colombian, visit the screen as Colombians. What could be a partly redeeming feature of decent performances is undermined by bad accents, some worse than Keanu Reeves’ British turn in Dracula. In some cases they’re not even trying and in one particularly silly example, a Colombian nicknamed ‘The Mexican’ speaks with an obvious Puerto Rican accent. For an audience reading the middling quality subtitles the various accents are perhaps not an issue. A (possibly) positive result of mediocre translation is that ceaseless Colombian homophobic slang is infrequently translated as homophobic. Sometimes it is made into misogyny, which is a reasonable translation of meaning in some circumstances, and other times ungendered insults but most often it is not translated at all (this will be surprising to some given how much is translated).

The cumulative effect is not so much a bilingual program as an American English one with a preponderance of Spanish(es) in it. It does not help that the script includes groan inducing dialogue such as, “Like Goldilocks he had three options,” and confused phrasings like, “Escobar hadn’t built himself a prison at all. He’d built himself a fortress. But no matter how you decorate it, a cage is still a cage.” Nor that many characters are so shallowly drawn as to be two dimensional. The wide-eyed innocent plane bomber, for example, is less a character than baby-like naiveté given an adult body.

Empire’s Narrator

“Sometimes bad guys do good things” the narrator (Murphy) says in reference to mass executions of drug dealers carried out by Chilean dictator Pinochet. In what ethical universe are mass executions ok? In addition to the ‘heroic’ mass executions, the show doesn’t pause to reflect on the tremendous body count the DEA is directly and indirectly racking up in Colombia. All this is narrated with the ultimate hipster voiceover: an omniscient semi-folksy white guy with a ‘cynical above it all’ cadence that in the end is still deeply dedicated to hegemonic narratives. It sounds like nothing so much as Ray Liotta’s Goodfellas voiceover if it was instead narrated by one of the cops.

Narcos lays on thick an orientalist narrative of Colombia. The following exemplars all come from the shitty, ceaseless voiceover:

“And the best smugglers in the world were in Colombia”
“Emeralds are a pretty rough trade even by Colombian standards. If you make it to the top it means you’ve killed your enemies…and sometimes your partners.”
“The problem was Colombia itself. It was too small a country for a fortune that big.”
“A drug dealer running for president, it’s crazy right? Well not in Colombia.”
“There’s a reason magical realism was born in Colombia: It’s a country where dreams and reality are conflated, where in their heads people fly as high as Icarus.”
“But in Colombia, when money is involved, blood inevitably flows.”
“In Colombia, nothing goes down the way you think it will.”

Narcos narrates Colombia with explicit, condescending racism and is just as racist in its brief forays narrating the United States, albeit implicitly. The narrator asserts, “Back then [1979] Miami was a paradise.” For whom? Not for working class Black people, Haitians, Cubans, Jamaicans and Puerto Ricans. Equally absurd are declarations about U.S. prisons. Peña and Murphy aspire to have the various narcos extradited to the U.S. to rot in jail there. “Back home it was a whole different deal. Seventh richest man in the world? No one gives a shit. You still get a 6 x 8 cell like every other loser.” This bizarrely idealistic view of the carceral state, carceral empire really, is at complete odds with the supposedly worldly narration and reality. It shows how the narrator’s supposed cynicism about the status quo is actually deployed to affirm its mythos.

Racist and imperialist logics are normative throughout the story. Modest assertions of Colombian prerogatives are met with condescension and arrogance by the DEA agents and narrator. When Colombia temporarily suspends one kind of U.S. surveillance in Colombia the narrator declares, “We sat on the sidelines, hands tied by bureaucracy.”

What the writers show as necessary and virtuous furthers this. Agent Murphy heroically steals a Colombian baby and heroically interrogates a man by putting a gun in his mouth. The U.S. military engages in positively portrayed torture and constant interference in Colombian affairs is portrayed as a good thing.

Gangster capitalism vs. the Neoliberal capitalist state

Narcos posits narcotraficantes buying off Colombian politicians and bribing/sponsoring police forces as abnormal and corrupting when the real history of Colombian politics mirrors that of all capitalist states; the politicians are bought off by capital interests approved by the state. In the U.S. example this is called ‘campaign donations’, ‘lobbying trips’ and ‘corporate sponsorship’. Corruption is thus not the buying of politicians and media — corruption is (literal) gangster capitalists doing the buying. Alternately put, the gangster capitalists’ crime is trying to buy wholesale something that was already bought by the oligarchy. The closest Narcos comes to realizing this is when Escobar’s forces, in an attempt to sway policy, begin kidnapping the children of the rich and famous to replace the prior tactic of public bombings.

Narcos shares this analysis with the The Wire. When Lester Freamon follows the Barksdale outfit’s money through to lawyers and developers making campaign donations the problem identified is not that capitalists are buying policy and favor but that it is drug money used for the buying. Thus pharmaceutical companies producing legal addictive opiates and stimulants can give campaign donations and support police projects that purveyors of criminalized opiates and stimulants cannot. This isn’t just a case of missing the forest (capitalism) for the trees (the drug trade). The creators evidence no knowledge of forest or tree. Judging by the finished product their main source of analysis for the politics of narcotrafficking and counternarcotics is the same as their source for magical realism: the introductory paragraphs of a Wikipedia article.

All this supposedly has something to do with magical realism. It does not. There is nothing magical or fantastic about any of it. The writers mean surrealism but do not know it and that would still be a stretch as narcotrafficking is quite logical in its operations. Formal and informal capitalist markets have tremendous political consequences and frequently astonishing body counts. Hard, cruel logic is not surreal and certainly not magical. Only through a rigidly orthodox discourse of the capitalist state could informal markets seem surreal or magical.

In the end Narcos has some tremendous performances and terrific production value, all in the service of poorly drawn characters, bad dialogue from cliché scripts and imperialist politics. It is a well polished turd that mangles Colombian history and dialects and embraces racism and imperialism. In this way Narcos reminds me less of other televisions shows and more of Kermit Roosevelt and Larry Devlin’s autobiographical writings about their time with the CIA in Iran and the Congo. They narrate cynical, realpolitik histories where yeah, maybe a couple of things could’ve been done better, but the cause was just and their hands were clean. Narcos narrates the DEA and US military in Colombia this same nasty way and it leaves a bad taste made worse when combined with a crap story. A good cast, fascinating topic, high budget and fine production value should go a long way but Narcos only in brief moments rises to mediocrity and all the cocaine in the world couldn’t save it.

Utilitarian Review 9/5/15

Posted on September 5, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

From the archive: Anja Flower illustrates Wallace Stevens’ Earthy Anecdote.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from the end of 1946.

Charles Bell on Disney eating Star Wars.

Me on R. Crumb and how you can’t satirize racism by exaggerating it.

Chris Gavaler imagines a world in which all superhero movies aren’t the same.

Donovan Grant on Starfire’s supposedly sexy innocence.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian:

—I wrote about hating children and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. Good bye, Wes.

—I wrote about the joys of superheroes fighting superheroes.

—I contributed to an article about how hunger strikers in Chicago are trying to keep open Dyett high school.

At the New Republic I wrote about Miss Piggy and how we don’t think about domestic abuse of men.

At Playboy I interviewed erotic author Selena Kitt.

At Splice Today I wrote about Freddie deBoer and why the purity of one’s beliefs maybe doesn’t matter that much.

At Ravishly I talked about the raid on Rentboy.com, and how it shows anti-prostitution laws are based in prejudice.

At Broadly I wrote about She Shreds’ proposed SXSW panel on representations of women musicians.

Other Links

Sarah Nyberg on gamergate’s hate campaign against her. Reposting because said hate campaign has been intensified this week. I know Sarah only slightly, but she is a lovely person, and what is being done to her is evil.

Great piece on the mismanagement of Cooper’s Union (and how college presidents screw everyone else.)

C.T. May on how Ramesh Ponnuru is overconfident about Trump.

Katherine Cross on Ashley Madison and making up women for men.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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