Utilitarian Review 5/14/16

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

News

In very sad news, Consuela Francis, who wrote a couple of posts for HU over the years, died earlier this week. Details are here. Consuela was wonderfully smart, and I felt lucky to work with her and get her to write for us. We’ll miss her.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Darryl Ayo on Michael DeForge’s sketchbook.

Ng Suat Tong on the mediocrity of Max Landis’ Superman: American Alien.

Me on the documentary Nuclear Nation and the Fukushima tragedy.

Chris Gavaler on the difficulty of defining comics.

Me on how Merrick Garland’s unique merit lies in his being a white man.

Me on Air Supply and the virtues of inauthenticity.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Establishment I wrote about Mark Kirk and hating sex workers to make yourself look moderate.

At Random Nerds I wrote about how the definition of comics today is superhero film.

At Quartz I wrote about how Disney reboots may not be so bad.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—the continuing relevance of music labels and some great releases from Hausu Mountain.

—how Psycho is a vampire film for my weekly post on the Hammer dracula series (this one on Dracula: Prince of Darkness.)

—employment discrimination against women and that 77 cents statistic.

Other Links

Yasmin Nair with a nice profile of prison activist Mariame Kaba.

Jonathan Bernstein on what he got wrong about Trump.

Chloe Angyal on how anti abortion terrorism isolates women.

Out of Nothing At All

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.

What is good music? In America (and not just America) the answer often comes down to, what is authentic?

Bob Dylan is certainly a touchstone of authenticity. The roughness of his singing and the improvisatory almost/randomness of his lyrics signal honesty, down-home genius, and virile swagger; his is a world where you meet women working in topless places and stop in for a beer. His references to folk, blues, and country sources points to experiences of pain and loss. He knows about folks who are real, and so he’s real too.

Obviously, Air Supply is coming from a somewhat different place.

The reason Air Supply is a butt and a punch line is because it isn’t Bob Dylan. Instead of gritty amateurishness, Air Supply has that professionally slick piano tinkling along someplace that is absolutely not a cross roads and Russell Hitchcock emoting like a fruity castrati in too-tight pants. The winking reference to making the “stadiums rock” (emphatically in quotations) as a vivisected guitar pretends to be cock rock for a couple of bars just underlines the gratuitous lack of grit. Because there is no grit. There is only schmaltz.

So, yes, if you’re looking for authenticity, Air Supply is telling you right there in their name they are the wrong vendor. Instead, what Air Supply has to sell is their very inauthenticity; the transparent showmanship of bathos. Instead of knowing earthiness, you get that preposterously gifted voice soaring amidst lyrical puffery like “The beating of my heart is a drum and it’s lost and it’s looking for a rhythm like you.” It’s a towering cotton candy blank; emotions pinned, as the song says, to not much if anything. Rather than pretending to be real when you listen to Air Supply, you get to pretend to not be.

Air Supply isn’t a great band…but some inauthentic bands are.

The Carpenters are working the same sort of territory as Air Supply — you’ve got the tinkling piano, you’ve got music heading for the ramparts, you’ve got the voice heading up there with it. Karen Carpenter’s singing has a purity and expressiveness that Hitchcock’s helium novelty lacks, though, and Neil Sedaka’s lyrics manage sophisticated cheese that’s a significant improvement on Air Supply’s more lumpen brand. As a result, the smooth surface comes across not just as exuberant bombast, but as a kind of disavowed desperation. The smiling Disney mask gapes open, and inside is a bleak emptiness of soul.

That’s the appeal of Brian Wilson’s music as well. Why exactly the Beach Boys are critical darlings is a bit unclear; perhaps it’s just that they timed their careers right in the middle of boomer heaven, or maybe it’s the flashes of Chuck Berry-esque guitar on their early hits. But by the time of the 1968 Friends, such authenticity as there was is gone, and what you’re left with is the kind of fruity, neutered vocals that will later lift Air Supply aloft, and the funkless, polished plastic jazz arrangement that Richard Carpenter would clone. Even more than his successors, Wilson wallows in his inauthenticity — the vacuous space where a real self should be.

“I get a lot of thoughts in the morning
I write ’em all down
If it wasn’t for that
I’d forget ’em in a while.”

The next verse is him trying to remember a friend’s phone number and thinking about it and remembering it and calling, but then the friend isn’t home so he has to write a letter. No doubt consumption of weed (and other things) is in part responsible for this anti-narrative, but through whatever chemical combination, the song is about its lack of being about anything — it’s adrift in its own expansive hollowness. Proponents of authenticity often argue that you need to be real to be an individual, but in their different kinds of lacks, Air Supply, the Carpenters, and the Beach Boys show that you can be idiosyncratic and even occasionally beautiful and still be made out of nothing at all.

The Merit of Merrick

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

Merrick Garland’s cursed voyage in limbo continues; even the prospect of a Trump Supreme Court nominee hasn’t budged Senate Republicans, who care less about getting a qualified nominee than about the potential career consequences if a Supreme Court vote inspires a primary challenger. Merrick’s fate has been especially denigrated because he’s so clearly a qualified appointment. As Michael Gerhardt declared when the nomination was made at Slate, Gerhardt “the nomination of Judge Garland is therefore not a political statement but rather a bold effort to encourage everyone to recognize that if they ever want to see what a merit-based appointment looks like”, they need cast their gaze no further than Merrick Garland.

That formulation is interesting though. So, if you want to see a merit-based appointment, look at Garland. And what do you see when you look at Garland? You see a white guy.

Gerhardt makes this more or less explicit in his piece; Garland, he points out, is not a person of color, nor a woman. He graduated from Harvard Law, which is de rigeur on the court. His appointment does not make a political statement. If Obama had selected a woman, or a black person, it would have been in order to change the gender or racial balance of the court. Since Garland is a white guy, you can be sure his appointment was based, as Gerhardt says, “on merit, not anything else.”

But of course, the very fact that Garland’s white maleness is synonymous with merit is the tip off that “merit” is not, in fact, the only consideration. Or rather, choosing a white man is a deliberate sop. Obama is quite aware that the choice of a non white man would be seen as a provocation, both by Republicans and by neutral serious punditry. To be a woman, or to be a person of color, is to be unusual, special, marked; it means your identity is a statement in itself. White men, on the other hand, are the default; when you choose a white man, you are choosing someone who has no identity, and so can be judged solely on accomplishment and qualifications. It’s natural for white men to be Supreme Court justices; ergo, a Supreme Court justice who is a white man is not chosen for his identity, but for his merit.

There were other reasons to choose Merrick, of course—and they are also linked to his race and his gender. Obama wanted someone who was moderate, to disarm Republican opposition. White men tend to be more conservative than other folks, so looking for a conservative candidate was likely to lead to a white man. Obama also wanted someone older, again to placate conservatives who don’t want a liberal justice sitting for 30 years. Looking for older justices means seeking people from a time when women and people of color had fewer opportunities for career advancement than they do now. Again, that points disproportionately towards white guys.

This isn’t to say that Garland is unqualified. Rather, it’s to point out that his qualifications or lack thereof aren’t separable from his identity. When you want an appointment that says, “quality, and nothing else!” you pick a white guy.

What is a Comic?

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

I was just reading Amazon reviews for a collection of essays by philosophers on the topic of comics, and one disgruntled reader complained that the authors “spend most of their time simply trying to define precisely what comics are,” which felt to him like an “elitist” attempt “to justify the fact that one is writing an academic work on comics in the first place.”

Actually, analytical philosophers spend most of their time simply trying to define precisely what everything is. That’s where philosophy and genre theory happily collide. For me the collision took place in front of my English department’s photocopier. Nathaniel Goldberg had descended from the Philosophy floor because their machine was dead. A year later and he and I have drafted a book on superhero comics and philosophy together. In the process I learned what is now one of my favorite phrases, “necessary and sufficient,” as in “What are the necessary and sufficient qualities for something to be a comic?”

It sounds like an easy question. The above mentioned disgruntled reviewer answered in one sentence: “I think most people who are passionate about comics would define the medium (not to draw an exact equivalency) much like Justice Potter Steward defined pornography: They know a comic when they see it.”

Actually, defining porn is damn near impossible. What precisely is the difference between a Playgirl centerfold and Michelangelo’s David? They’re both representations of gorgeous naked guys. My friend Chris Matthews has a great story about bumbling into a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition with his father back in 80s. Which is to say, context seems to matter. The U.S. courts spent a lot of time changing their minds about the words “lust” and “obscene” and “importance” and “value” and how much of each is and isn’t enough to be or not be pornographic.

Comics should be easy in comparison. Except scholars keep changing their minds about the words “narrative” and “sequence” and “image” and “art” and, well, “words.” One-panel comic strips like Gary Larson’s The Far Side or Bill Keane’s The Family Circus present a particular brain teaser. Most definitions include something about pictures working in relation to each other, which means there’s got to be more than one picture. But then there’s The Family Circus right in the middle of the newspaper comics page, so it’s a comic in the seeing is knowing sense.

So maybe then it’s the combination of words and pictures? Philosopher David Carrier even includes word balloons in his “necessary and sufficient” list. So then Larson and Keane made comics because their cartoons include both an image and a caption–which, okay, a caption isn’t a word balloon, but close enough. Either way, the definition opens an unexpectedly large door. What precisely is the difference between a one-panel comic strip and, say, René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images?

Magritte is even making a joke, so it’s a comic in the “funny papers” sense too. And what about a one-panel comic that doesn’t have any words?

Dietrich Grünewald would call that Far Side an “autonomously narrative picture” because the single image prompts viewers to “create further images in our minds,” images he calls “ideal” or “non-material sequences.” So in that sense a single image can be multiple. But then comics suddenly include a massive array of representational paintings. What further images does Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp create in your mind?

And what about moving pictures? Why aren’t films comics? They’re art made of images viewed in sequence to create narratives. Silent ones even have word captions. Some animated films include not just any pictures, but the same specific pictures that appear in related comic books. Like those God awful Marvel cartoons from the 60s, those are the same Jack Kirby drawings on the screen as on the page. And yet seeing any animated film is knowing it’s not a comic book.

Roy T. Cook offered a definition last year that separates comics from films by adding: “The audience is able to control the pace at which they look at each of the parts.” I also control that pace I wander through an art gallery, so are exhibitions a comic book? Framed painting are a lot like panels, and how is the white wall visible between them not a gutter? Greg Hayman and Henry John Pratt define a comic as “as a sequence of discrete, juxtaposed pictures that comprise a narrative, either in their own right or when combined with text.” Plus “the visual images are distinct (paradigmatically side-by-side), and laid out in a way such that they could conceivably be seen all at once. Between each pictorial image is a perceptible space.” Thierry Groensteen agrees, since according to him a comic contains “always a space that has been divided up, compartmentalized, a collection of juxtaposed frames.”

Great, but have you ever seen an episode of 24? When my TV screen divides into four frames, does the show become a comic book? Even some seeing-is-knowing comic books aren’t comic books by those definitions. John Byrne’s Marvel Fanfare #29 (Marvel, 1986) is all splash pages, no compartmentalized panels, no gutters. Though maybe that’s why Marvel rejected it for The Incredible Hulk #320? Emma Rios’ 2014 Pretty Deadly includes at least one page with overlapping images that are not “discreet” or “distinct” and include no gutters, and even the sense of sequential order is questionable.

I like the term “graphic narratives” because it combines graphic novels and graphic memoirs into one category, but it’s got problems too. Like Hayman and Pratt, David Kunzle, Robert Harvey, and David Carrier all rely on “story” or “narrative” to unify what they call a “sequence,” but as Andrei Molotui shows with his 2007 collection Abstract Comics, comics don’t always tell stories. The images just have to relate in some way. That means any diptych, wordless or not, representational or not, might be a comic. So anything from Piero della Francesca’s Portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino to Roy Litchenstein’s WHAM! to Mark Yearwood’s Natural Ambiance Diptych.

Roy T. Cook challenges even the assumption that comics need to contain pictures–though his example of “a completely blank issue of a previously established series” would be a comic book only because the issues before it were. Context really is everything.

The bigger challenges are not thought experiments though, but works of art that already exist. Scott McCloud criticizes Will Eisner’s term “sequential art” for not separating comics from other art forms that might also be called sequential art, and Aaron Meskin in turn criticizes McCloud’s definition—“juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”—for the same reason.

Meskin also objects to the anachronistic use of “comics” to include artworks, such as the 9^th century Bayeaux Tapestry, that predate the term. But by that logic, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are not science fiction authors because “science fiction” was coined in 1929. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “chiaroscuro” dates to 1686, after the deaths of its exemplary artists, Rembrandt and Caravaggio, and the technique is commonly traced to Ancient Greece. Anachronistic terminology is a norm of categorization and analysis.

If comics are the art form of juxtaposed images, then a great many artworks not typically considered comics retroactively join the club–including the Bayeaux Tapestry, Matisse’s Jazz, the engraved poetry of William Blake, and the word and photography-combining art of Barbara Kruger. Lots of road signs and magazine ads creep in too–unless we limit the category to “art,” whatever that may be.

My course “Superhero Comics” makes my job a lot easier since that subgenre squats squarely in the middle of the definitional zone. My reading list includes only comic books–a term that used to mean a collection of reprinted newspaper comic strips. I know of no single-panel superhero comic strips, so Larson, Keane, Magritte, and Rembrandt are irrelevant. And superhero graphic novels all tell stories (though I asked my library to order a copy of Abstract Comics just because it’s really cool). Plus they’re filled with panels and gutters and word balloons, so every one of the above definitions applies.

But things get trickier the further you stray from Action Comics No. 1.

Nuclear Nation

Posted on May 10, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This piece first ran at the Dissolve.
_________

Nuclear Nation
Director: Atsushi Funahashi (Not Rated, 96 min.)
Distributor: Big River Films, Documentary Japan.
Documentary
In Japanese with English Subtitles
Three Stars

March 11, 2011 was a disaster of almost inconceivable proportions in Japan. A massive earthquake triggered tsunamis that reached more than 130 feet. Almost 16,000 people were killed, and the resulting devastation caused meltdowns at a number of nuclear reactors, releasing dangerous levels of radiation and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. There was $235 billion in damage, making the event the most costly natural disaster in recorded history.

Such an apocalyptic tragedy seems to call for apocalyptic representation, and indeed there’s plenty of oh-my-god footage of surging waters on YouTube for those who want to see it. Atsushi Funahashi’s Japanese documentary (with English subtitles) goes a different route, though. Nuclear Nation, despite the dramatic title, is a determinedly low-key, and even soporific, take on the aftermath of March 11. The documentary deals particularly with the residents of Futaba, the town that is home to the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

Radiation released from the reactors has made Futaba unlivable; everyone has had to leave. Refugees who couldn’t find another home were housed in a high school, living communally with their few rescued possessions. The film is mostly set in that high school, as the refugees wait and wait and wait for someone from the government or the power plants to find them new homes, or recompense them, or at least apologize.

If this does not sound like a particularly exciting premise for a film — well, yes. That’s kind of the point. The documentary is deliberately slow, and even deliberately bland. The camera lingers on people sleeping or people eating. Certain refugee’s lives are followed — one father and son lost their wife and mother in the tsunami; a family where the father is working back at the dangerous Futaba reactor; the embittered Futaba mayor. But the focus, and the narrative is diffuse. The stories don’t have a clear beginning, since the men and women are already homeless and adrift when they first appear onscreen. And they don’t have a clear ending; some refugees do move into new homes, but that feels less like closure or resolution than like the same slow-motion grinding on. They have to be somewhere, and so they are. But the past isn’t resolved.

“Not doing anything takes a lot out of you,” says one refugee, and that’s a good tagline for the film as a whole. Their town destroyed, the former residents of Futaba are suspended in a kind of anti-narrative. Stuff happens, but slowly, and without catharis or even impetus. The mayor goes to a meeting where various high-level officials apologize and bow and then scurry off on official business without taking questions. People go back to Futaba to gather some belongings and place flowers, all while dressed in radiation suits. The residents march demanding to return to Futaba, though, as they admit, they can’t return, and, maybe don’t even want to. A farmer explains that he’s determined to keep his cattle alive, even though he can’t sell them and they’re useless. The camera follows the irradiated animals about for a while. Later we see some cows that were abandoned by their owners; they’ve starved to death in their pens, and are now mummified corpses.

The mummified cows are certainly an arresting image, but, again, for the most part, the film eschews the gothic for the mundane, day to day weariness of displacement and uncertainty. Even the agitprop anti-nuclear message gets little traction; this isn’t Michael Moore, with his staged confrontations and clear villains. A couple residents curse at the television screen as officials blandly lie; the mayor talks sadly about the choice to bring in the nuclear plants and how they’ve been betrayed. The failure to pay compensation is numbly infuriating, but compensation isn’t going to give people back their homes anyway. The damage is done.

The result is not exactly riveting cinema. Nor is the documentary quite willing to embrace its anti-narrative elements; it often seems caught between trying to tell a story (about the evils of nuclear energy, or about particular families) and its recognition that the story it has to tell is no story. Still, despite its limitations, Nuclear Nation remains a quiet, painful reminder that disasters aren’t disasters because of the sound and excitement, but because of the blank spaces they leave in people’s lives.

Superman Rehashed

Posted on May 9, 2016 by Ng Suat Tong

On Superman: American Alien #1-6 (of 7) by Max Landis (writer), Nick Dragotta, Tommy Lee Edwards, Joelle Jones, Jae Lee, Francis Manapul, and Jonathan Case

“American Alien is the Best Superman Story In Ages” Evan Narcisse, Kotaku

“Max Landis is still batting a thousand with this Superman mini-series.” Jesse Schedeen, IGN

“Landis’ journey through Superman’s formative years aren’t just a love letter to a hero, but to the people who read him as well.” Richard Gray, Newsrama

“Superman: American Alien #6 is another strong installment in one of the best Superman stories published in quite a while…We’re six-for-six now, and all parties involved should be proud of what they’re delivering.” Greg McElhatton, CBR

“Superman doesn’t, to me, doesn’t exist — it’s just Clark in a costume choosing to try to help people…My comic…It’s just about how Clark Kent became Clark Kent.” Max Landis, Newsrama

“…a self-indulgent, derivative dumpster fire that borders on Smallville fan fiction…[…]…There are two different writers running around in the industry named Max Landis. The first one is the brilliant albeit intolerable douche who wrote Chronicle…The other one is the self indulgent man child who writes this good looking, visually charming drivel.” Oz Longworth, Black Nerd Problems

__________________________

My first impression on reading Superman: American Alien was that it seemed like a decently written television series. The kind you might find on a small cable channel littered with demographically targeted YA themes about young powerful people grappling with their powers.

The characters seemed like they were speaking normal American-style English as opposed to the curt expository superhero-ese of the average DC and Marvel comic. The writer appeared to have a firm grasp of the intertwining relationships of the DC universe with Oliver Queen and Bruce Wayne mixing it up with Clark Kent in encounters which delineate their motivations.

There’s little doubt that it’s a better comic structurally speaking than the new Black Panther. Max Landis has a better sense of how to fashion a story and to entice readers into his world. When Clark gets saved by a pair of Green Lanterns after trying to breach Earth’s atmosphere for the first time in issue 6, you don’t need to know how they fit into DC continuity or even who Abin Sur is. The continuity helps of course, but at that point, Clark just needs to see some extraterrestrials. And if you don’t know who the Green Lanterns are, then so much the better. If only every superhero comic reader could be faced with something new every time he opens a comics pamphlet.

I didn’t realize until after finishing issue 6 that American Alien was written by a semi-famous screenwriter—a familiar name which had come up in recent weeks because of some mildly ignorant comments concerning whitewashing in the new Ghost in the Shell movie (since vaguely retracted I understand). And just in case you’re wondering, it’s a really, really white world out there in the world of American Alien, and not just in Kansas. Save for the moment when Jae Lee takes over the art chores and everyone suddenly transforms into an East Asian, I count a black Jimmy Olsen as the only significant non-white cameo in the plot (he stays a bit longer on TV’s Supergirl).

You would think a DC comic with a conspicuous title like “American Alien” would attempt to address some of the issues surrounding the word “alien” in our immigration straitened times but as with the rest of the comic, the title is just a guileless play on words; Landis’ Superman is an alien less the controversy.

As with various other iterations of the Superman myth, the “alien-ness” that Clark Kent has to deal with amounts to navigating his superpowers, fine tuning his mission in Metropolis and coping with city life. Can you imagine what it would be like if music today was essentially a facsimile of the music of the Beatles and Rolling Stones? Well, look no further than one of the most acclaimed superhero titles of 2015-2016.

Of course, under any normal circumstances, the ability to write a Superman story based on time-tested elements and archetypal characters in the DC universe would be part of the basic toolkit of the average comics writer. But a small survey of the titles coming out each month should attest to the fact that the majority of these titles are in fact illiterate. Landis’ chief accomplishment as a writer is that the characters peopling his 6 issues (of 7 so far) seem to have the mannerisms and speech patterns of normal human beings. This isn’t the work of Eugene O’Neill or even his cut-rate twin, Louis CK, but it’s more than enough to make the average critic sputter in delight.

American Alien is laced with a familiar, anodyne nostalgia for a America that never was and which most Americans probably haven’t experienced at any point in their lives except through reruns of It’s a Wonderful Life and Little House on the Prairie. The only sweat and tears here are those experienced when Clark learns how to fly. Farming is boring. You can imagine everything being shot at magic hour like Nestor Alemendros’ work on Days of Heaven less the locusts, fires, and infidelity.

The pain in American Alien isn’t real—it’s meant to be beautiful; the kind of “pain” you want to remember for the rest of your life. The kind of pain that teaches you how wonderful and meaningful life is; the sorrow which makes you a better person. Smallville is the kind of place where morphine cabinets are left unlocked and undisturbed, an utterly denervated, virginal landscape.

Frankly, I’ve had enough heartwarming stories about Smallville to last me a lifetime though it’s clear that Superman devotees are a bottomless pit when it comes to this material. The Arcadian countryside of waving corn fields, understanding neighbors and crop dusters; here regurgitated once again but less the mastery for nostalgia seen in Dave Stevens’ The Rocketeer with nary a Betty in sight.

The entire bitter sweet history of the Kents recounted in the single page “The Castaways” is meant to mitigate this.

We have the college (?) sweethearts, a baby lost in a car accident, the depression (Prozac, Zoloft), the disastrous farm fire (an act of God) resulting from Clark’s arrival, the adoption, the noble professions in service of those less fortunate (she’s a vet, he’s a lawyer looking after the rights of the small and downtrodden). Partially told in epistolic form, you can see that it’s a half-hearted stew; the family memories strewn across a work shelf with lettering so uniform and done with such clarity of purpose that we instinctively know to care very little for these faux reminiscences of cardboard constructs.

Oh, there’s some violent murder in issue 2 when some villains rob a grocery store and nonchalantly knock off some insignificant classmates of Clark and his pals. We don’t know who they are but the dialogue deigns to tell us that they are of some consequence to the protagonists. You’d get more of a reaction by killing some puppies in print I think.

When Clark blasts off the murderer’s arms accidentally with his heat vision, it’s a comeuppance, not a real moment of horror. The violence is idyllic; accidental but noble, and judicially satisfying like I assume justice is in general in the United States. The Metropolis of American Alien is straight out of the child friendly era of Curt Swan et al. with polished streets, well scrubbed citizenry, playful billionaires and general happiness apart from the odd experiment gone wrong.

There is a streak of banality in the proceedings but the negative repercussions on the comic’s aesthetics are minor if only because it’s all too familiar. The superhero plane of existence is choked with unlived worlds, social blindness, and general self-centeredness; a genre seemingly tailor-made by Tony Robbins brimming with tales of self-fulfillment and self-actualization.

Alan Moore’s Miracleman was a real world reimagining of these themes and was choked with brutality and significant amounts of collateral damage—the pure arrogance and carelessness of power. This was once seen as a necessary corrective in the revisionist 80s but is now viewed as a stultifying and corrupt path for the genre. Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman tried to find the middle ground. If his Kryptonian gospel envisions Kal-El as the risen Christ it is because he is supposed to be an amalgam of absolute power and absolute good. The series is a hagiography, a religious undertaking, the euangélion after Siegel and Shuster,

Landis’ Superman is meant to be an everyman; a slightly underpowered Smallville Clark; the kind of person modern day readers expect Superman to be—an idealization of human power and its application. Nowhere is this better seen than in issue 5 of American Alien where Superman flys into combat with a tac team of heavily armored policemen (or maybe National Guardsmen) with assault rifles and laser scopes to fend off a monstrous human experiment created by Lex Luthor (they didn’t have the budget for an Abrams tank).

In Miller’s paramilitary fantasy of The Dark Knight Returns, Superman is part of the problem. Here he’s part of the solution, joining a flying squad armed with M4s; the “eagle” protecting American soil and integrity. There’s no irony at work here—this is America the beautiful in all its military might and machismo, like a giant phallus breaching a crevice, standing ready to rape the world.

And maybe this is how it always meant to be. In one of the greatest Superman stories ever told (“Superman in the Slums” from Action #8), the Champion of the Oppressed has to find a solution for the delinquents who have been cast into their criminal ways by the slums they live in. His solution is to turn into a living cyclone, destroying the slums so that “the government rebuilds destroyed areas with modern cheap-rental apartments.” Not even heavily armed troops and a fleet of bombers can stop this Social Anarchist (who seemed to have an odd faith in the powers that be to clean up after him).

In the penultimate panel of the story, an emergency squad erects huge apartment blocks (without the help of the caped one I should add). The Superman of Siegel and Shuster didn’t have time for laying bricks but saw himself as a destructive force of nature, the hand of divine justice. If he destroyed your home and slapped you around, he was doing it for your own good. In Landis’ version of Superman the purity remains without the social mission; the destructive frenzy held in check by the author’s pen; the fairy tale fascism allowing us to sleep soundly and comfortably in the innocence of our human power.

Utilitarian Review 5/7/16

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Ng Suat Tong on Frank Miller’s decaying art.

Ben Rietano on superhero parents.

Ng Suat Tong on the awfulness of Captain America: Civil War.

Me on how Frank Miller could be worse.

Me on why the white working class won’t save you.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian I wrote on Sly Stone, who is still alive, thank goodness. (This is unexpectedly one of my biggest stories ever in terms of traffic, I think.)

At the Week I wrote about why Hillary Clinton needs a wife.

At the Establishment I wrote about manly male book clubs for men and also tentacle sex.

At the Daily Dot I wrote about how Google’s lobbyists will save the public domain (maybe.)

At Splice Today:

—my second Hammer dracula post! This one on Brides of Dracula, and how the male gaze falls in a plothole.

—I encouraged people to fear not the Sanders/Trump supporters.

Other Links

Emily Bazelon with a NYT feature on whether sex work should be criminalized.

Julia Serano on why trans woman should play cis roles on film.

Aaron Bady on the badness of Daredevil.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon