reel gone: Matt Levin’s Walking Man Comics and Kelly Copper’s America

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(Some reflections on found art and the end of the Comics Buyer’s Guide)

Of all the things I discovered in the pages of the Comics Buyer’s Guide (CBG) during the 1980s and early 1990s, I still cherish Matt Levin’s Walking Man Comics, a series of minicomics the artist began producing in 1988.  I first read Levin’s work, which he creates with a variety of rubber stamps, in the anthology Oh, Comics! The Official Comic of the Mid-Ohio Con (1988).  I received a copy of Oh, Comics! from my friend S. Minstrel, a San Antonio-based zine maker who’d read a review of one my minicomics in CBG’s small press column.  Without CBG, I would never have begun my correspondence with Minstrel and the other zine makers in his circle, and I would never have discovered Matt Levin’s work, which remains a vital and idiosyncratic contribution to the art and history of the minicomic.

I began thinking again of Walking Man Comics while reading the many online essays and blog postings about the demise of CBG, which will come to an end with issue #1699 in March.  Other writers have already told the magazine’s history in far more detail than I could offer; see, for example, pieces by Rich Johnston, John Jackson Miller, long-time CBG columnist and comics writer Tony Isabella, and, of course, CBG editor Maggie Thompson .  I have decided, then, to offer a short reminiscence of the magazine in the form of a review of Levin’s work which, like the other zines and minicomics I discovered in the pages of CBG, prepared me for other works on the fringes of American popular culture which I now adore as a adult.

While those who enjoy John Porcellino’s King-Cat Comics and Carrie McNinch’s You Don’t Get There From Here will no doubt appreciate the do-it-yourself minimalism of Walking Man Comics, Levin also has affinities with New York City-based photographer and playwright Kelly Copper.  Her work with Pavol Liska and the Nature Theater of Oklahoma seeks to reassemble the fragments of the everyday—transcripts of mundane telephone conversations, for example—into epic works like Life and Times: Episodes 1—4, which has been popular in Europe and enjoyed a successful January 2013 run as part of the Under the Radar Festival at The Public Theater.

Masterpieces are beautiful, too, in a spectacular, Technicolor fashion.  But sometimes small, quiet works of art—covered in the smudges and fingerprints of their makers—are more lasting and precious.  I suspect if I had not read Walking Man Comics in 1988 I would not have fallen in love with Copper’s photographs in the late 1990s.

These notes, then, began as a documentary of the years I spent reading CBG—memories of Don Thompson’s reviews; Cat Yronwode’s “Fit to Print,” which featured a column heading drawn by a different amateur artist each week (including, in 1987 or so, ones from me and my younger sister Alison); Mark Martin’s “20 Nude Dancers 20” cartoons.  I also recall the letters from firebrand science fiction legend Harlan Ellison and pioneer comics scholar M. Thomas Inge.  When I needed information on a project on comics for one of my high school Spanish classes, I wrote a letter to CBG’s “Oh, So?” column asking for help and received a detailed, encouraging letter from Inge and a package of Condorito comics from a new pen pal in New York City.  I once received a phone call from Ellison regarding a letter I’d written on comics and censorship, but that is a story perhaps best left for another essay.

Writing a personal history of my relationship with CBG, I realized, would be impossible.  When I finished a first draft, I found myself with a shopping list of memories meaningful only to me.  I had fallen into the trap of nostalgia Alan Moore describes in his early 1980s Marvelman proposal: “Nostalgia, if handled wrong, can prove to be nothing better than sloppy and mawkish crap.  In my opinion, the central appeal of nostalgia is that all this stuff in the past has gone.  It’s finished.  We’ll never see it again…and this is where the incredible poignance of nostalgia comes from” (Moore 24).

How ironic, then, that, as a means of commemorating the passing of CBG, I should write instead about a series of minicomics which seek to evoke wistful feelings of some lost, idyllic world.  Like Copper’s photographs of stills from abandoned home movies, however, Walking Man Comics also seeks to discover an otherwise unspoken or unrealized present.    As Levin writes on the cover of a Walking Man Sampler from 2002, “I like / layout design, / words, / simplicity— / I like rubberstamps’ ability to mimic nature’s multiplicity…”

Levin continues to produce Walking Man Comics, which he describes on his Facebook page as “12-page mini-comics” filled with “rubber-stamp images combined with photographs and line-work in imaginative page layouts.”  In addition to “Imagination, brevity, elegance and wit,” Levin’s goals include “the promotion of mini-comics as an affordable, pocket-sized means of personal communication available to everyone regardless of age, education, and ‘professional ability,’ dedicated to the principle that one’s level of drawing ability should never discourage creators.”

Both Levin’s comics and Copper’s photographs might be understood as examples of “found art.”  Frank Bramlett has written about the relationship between found art and comics in a post to Pencil, Panel, Page in which he challenges us to open our eyes to the neglected visual narratives which surround us: “Do found comics qualify as a ‘legitimate’ (!?) genre, arising out of occasional and/or accidental use of comics conventions?  If so, where do you see found comics?”  With Bramlett’s questions in mind, we might read the following detail from Copper’s Untitled as a sequential narrative—a repetitive depiction of a quiet, intimate moment.

In her 2002 exhibit reel, Copper included a series of photographs based on images from abandoned home movies she had found at New York City flea markets and antique stores.  Untitled is an Andy Warhol-like grid featuring a blond, middle-aged woman’s face.  She is wearing sunglasses with cat’s-eye rims.  There is an expanse of sky behind her—first blue, then white.  The whiteness then meets a rim of trees.

The woman laughs, turns her head, looks over her right shoulder, stares at us, invites us to laugh with her.  We will never know her name.  Her pale shoulders shrug, then straighten again:
 

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Fig. 1: A detail from Kelly Copper’s Untitled (2002), an image from her 2002 show at An American Space Gallery in NYC.  Image courtesy of Kelly Copper.
 
Copper took each portrait from a film which presumably tells the story of this woman’s vacation.  Copper projected the film on the blank, white wall of her apartment, froze the images, and then photographed those still figures. What pleasure is there in these forgotten, neglected movies, blurry records of family vacations, 4th of July parades, high school graduations, and gaudy senior proms?

As Copper explains in a 2006/2007 interview with Amber Reed, home movies have a seductive power unlike other forms of cinema.  Watching these old films, Copper found a new confidence in her role as an artist, a sense of fun which “short-circuits the critical voice that says, ‘oh, that’s really dumb,’ because ultimately I’m just playing.  And I think that’s also been part of the aesthetic for the Nature Theater of Oklahoma—how do you get back to this feeling of theater as play?” (Copper qtd. in Reed).

Like the anonymous subject of Untitled, Copper is at play in a world notable for its simplicity—the sunlight, blue sky, and green trees of a family vacation.  Of course, it is a point in time which did not exist, at least not as figured in this image.  No lived moments have such clarity.  Only the eye of the artist can record such an image.  While joy such as this might be fleeting, the few minutes this woman spent with a Super-8 camera over half a century ago have made her ageless and eternal.

Is a rubber stamp itself a kind of found art like these stills?  Or is it a tool like a pen or a brush?  In his short piece in Oh, Comics!, Levin uses rubber stamps of clouds, a sun, fish, cattails, and trees.  Like Copper, he has recorded for us these quotidian moments:
 

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Fig. 2: The first page of a Walking Man Comics story in the anthology Oh, Comics!  The Official Comics of the Mid-Ohio Con (No. 1, 1988).  The following pages are also from Levin’s story in Oh, Comics!
 
Whereas Copper’s photo-collage is the record of a location, Levin’s story is the diary of a walk from “a place / of very old mountains”—the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts—to what the narrator later describes as “the geographic / and geopolitical / bullseye-center / of the buckeye state,” a place he maps for us on the final page of the story.  Our narrator eventually “came to see Ohio / from the lake to the / Indian mounds and / Yellow Springs—the / Old Man’s Cave and / the mountains” as locations which remind him “of home”:
 

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Levin uses his fingerprints in the final panel on the last page of the comic to create a pattern of shadows from which his hero, the Walking Man, emerges.  His story is as simple as these images.  It is the story of a journey:
 

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Levin’s use of rubber stamps, the repetition of the same fish, the same cattails, the same sun, the same trees, and the same clouds, has told us his story before we have time to read the narrator’s final thoughts: what this wanderer has been searching for he has carried with him.  This collection of rubber-stamped figures and panels becomes a map of Amherst, Massachusetts; of Yellow Springs, Ohio; and of his inner world, its silence broken only by his breath.

In his final public speech in 1992, novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison urged other American writers to see their work, whatever form it might take, as a means of manifesting a more just and democratic nation: “I’ll close by reminding my fellow writers, as I frequently remind myself, that you’re doing far more than creating interesting tales based on your individual view of the American experience.  Underneath your efforts you’re helping this country discover a fuller sense of itself as it goes about making its founders’ dream a reality” (Ellison 860).

I read Walking Man Comics and Copper’s Untitled as works by American artists who seek to map the United States not at its center but along its perimeter.  Copper locates meaning in those precious objects we discard—home movies, family photographs, jumbled cellphone conversations.  Levin conjures landscapes of New England and the Midwest from his box of rubber stamps.

Both Levin and Copper remind us that these fleeting, sometimes painful, often playful moments of existence only become real when transformed by art into objects or images which can be shared—the journals of a walking man and the photographs of a young woman.

Are these works of art glimpses of the“founders’ dream”?  Yes, each one: the black and white of a rubber-stamped tree, and the curve of a bare shoulder, and a cloudless summer-blue sky, and the red-lipped smile of a woman at play.
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Update: A follow up to this post is here.
 

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Fig. 3: A detail from the cover of Levin’s Musicomics #9 (March 2002; first edition March 1996).
 

References for Print Sources:

Ellison, Ralph.  “Address at the Whiting Foundation” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Ed. John F. Callahan).  New York: The Modern Library, 2003.  853—860.

Moore, Alan.  “Alan Moore Original Proposal to Warrior Magazine” in George Khoury (Ed.) Kimota! The Miracleman Companion.  Raleigh: TwoMorros Publishing, 2001: 24—29.

Voices From the Archive: Prose and Eddie Campbell’s Alec (and also Peanuts)

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So for a change I thought I’d highlight one of my own comments from way back when. This is in response to a piece by Caroline Small talking about the prose in Eddie Campbell’s Alec. Here’s what I said:

Ack! I’m reading along and grooving on Caro tossing around comics and space and time and then I get this [passage by Eddie Campbell] as an example of stellar prose:

“But hey! to cultivate a separate life from the one happening in front of you. There’s a thing to pursue. An inside life, where Fate talks to you, sometimes in the charming tones of a girl singer with old Jazz bands.
Othertimes in a naive wee voice in which all things are still possible.”

And I just want to bang my head against the wall.

I just…to me that’s such romanticized, sub-Beat, stentorian self-dramatizing bosh. If I never, ever, hear anyone reference girl singers in Jazz bands as some sort of ne plus ultra of authentic wonderfulness again, then I will have died only hearing it about fifty billion times too many. And “a naive wee voice in which all things are still possible.” Fucking gag me.

Really, I have a visceral loathing of that passage. It’s slam poetry crap.

And part of what I hate about it is exactly the time slips that Caro describes. Maybe I suffered too much damage from my youthful immersion in contemporary poetry, I dunno…but so many, many ungodly contemporary poems (and maybe not just contemporary, but…) end in this lyrical future tense. And it’s supposed to do exactly what Caro says here:

“This is the “potentiality of being” specific to the artistic mindset: “to cultivate a separate life from the one happening in front of you.” That describes an ecstasy of art, and part of the brilliance of this book is the recognition of that ecstatic potential in the mundane life story.”

The world is cut off from the world and made poetic; the mundane is made lyrical. Or, alternately, you could say that the world is picked up and dumped in the poetry machine and then you turn the crank. And out comes ecstasy, hoorah.

I don’t think there is an artistic mindset. I don’t think there should be. I don’t think artists are priests, who make the world ecstatic through their transcendent quiet inwardness; who cast a glamour on the earth through their numbing recitation of important aesthetic touchstones (girl singers! Krazy Kat!)

I think this quote points to what made this book so unpleasurable for me:

“Solipsism is alluring, but impossible. Art comes from other people, and other art, and from experiences in the world. ”

The thing that interferes with solipsism is that it doesn’t fit with art. You start with the need for art, and that leads you to realize that the world has to be there too. But the problem is…for me, in this book, the world is *always* there for the art. The experiences are all there to be chucked into the poetry machine. That’s what happens to his wife and his baby; new fatherhood gets transmuted into standard-issue poetry tropes. That’s what it’s there for. Which I find both, yes, solipsistic, and also really depressing.

Obviously that’s not what others are getting from this, and
I appreciate that, and I think this essay is lovely, but…man, it makes me like the book even less, not more.

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And just because this comment isn’t long enough…and I want to say something positive….I think the discussion of prose is really interesting…but I think that you’re kind of missing out on what Charles Schulz is doing if you’re arguing that he’s using condensed meaning in images as a substitute for prose. I think Peanuts is probably as prose the best-written comic, period — certainly better written than Alec, to my mind, though not as wordy obviously. Better written than Delillo too, by a long shot. Schulz had a really idiosyncratic ear for language and a love for words. Some of his strips are sight gags, but a lot of them would pretty much work without the pictures; they’re about puns and verbal dead ends and misunderstandings and different registers of language. He’s usually thought of as a minimalist because of the drawings obviously; but thinking about your essay, you could also see the sparseness of the drawings as a way to give room for the language; as you say, the drawings become a kind of rhythmic device rather than a meaning making one.

Waiting for the Revolution

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Switchblade Sisters (aka Jezebels) is the last major film of Jack Hill, one of the greatest and least known American directors. Hill worked almost entirely in exploitation film, toiling away mostly for the Corman studios on women-in-prison, blaxploitation, and other genre crap. Switchblade Sisters has everything you’d expect from such a director; there’s gratuitous violence, gratuitous sex, gratuitous T&A, and gratuitously preposterous acting. As Roger Ebert noted with a sniff, “this movie falls far below Pauline Kael’s notion of “great trash.”

And, indeed, this has been the consensus opinion. Switchblade Sisters bombed on its first release in 1975, and it’s re-release with much hoopla in 1996 by Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder Pictures didn’t exactly rehabilitate it. Tarantino’s DVD package has just been re-re-released, and I doubt that’ll change things much either. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a pretty rotten 53% fresh rating,, and the intensity of scorn on display from many of the critics is impressive. Stephen Holden of the New York Times sneers (http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/switchblade_sisters.html), “To watch “Switchblade Sisters” is to visit a never-never land of shopworn media images colliding in a tabloid high school of the mind.” Richard Harrington of The Washington Post fulminates inaccurately, “The acting is so bad that apparently none of the performers ever got another job in the movies.” He adds, with more justice that “the costumes in Ben Hur seem less dated that those on display here.”

Why exactly dated costumes would be a drawback is something I don’t entirely understand; the crazy retro-to-a-world-that-never-was wardrobe seems like a feature rather than a bug to me. My favorite stylistic choice is the gigantic ornate uber-tacky beret things that Lace (Robbie Lee) wears in her hair so she can look like Princess Lea (before there was a Princess Lea) while toting a machine gun in the climactic firefight. Props also to whoever decided that gangsters should wear day-glo patterned shirts.

As this suggests, the film has many defenders of the so-bad-it’s-good variety. And there’s no doubt that Switchblade Sisters is a delirious camp-fest from beginning to end. From the amped-up woman-in-prison juvie lesbian nightmare to the bloodbath at the roller rink to the macho black female revolutionaries quoting Mao, the film careens from one flamboyant set-piece to another. The dialogue is chock full of profane melodramatic quotables. For example:

”You know, sooner or later every woman’s bound to find out — the only thing a man’s got below his belt is clay feet.”

“My old man, God rest his ass, told me once, “Son, don’t ever let ‘em push you, because once they get you moving, it’s awful hard to stop.”

“Everybody knows your crank can hook a tuna.”

And, finally, there’s Robbie Lee as Lace — leader of the Dagger Deb girl gang — who speaks all her lines like her teeth have been epoxied together and she’s sucking helium through a straw. Her performance starts out outrageous and moves on up to utterly insane, culminating in a full-on wild-haired wild-eyed Shakespearean rage of jealousy and despair. Her deranged, “He was treating me like a little gutter cat!” has to be one of the most ludicrously bile-filled lines in film.

It’s also, counter-intuitively, one of the most poignant…which is why I’m not exactly comfortable with the so-bad-it’s-good reading here. As Quentin Tarantino points out in his commentary on the film, Switchblade Sisters for all its goofiness, is a film with some surprising depths.

As in many of Jack Hill’s films, those depths involve a sympathetic and unusually nuanced take on female-female friendships. The movie is about the relationship between Lace and Maggie, the newest, toughest girl in school. The two fall into a quick, intense, love-at-first-beatdown friendship. This quickly turns into a love triangle, as Patch (Monica Gayle), Lace’s former first lieutenant and best friend, tries to pry Lace and Maggie apart. And then that turns into a love quadrangle when Lace’s boyfriend Dominick, leader of the Silver Daggers boys’ gang, falls in lust with Maggie. Despite the fact that he sort of rapes her, she reciprocates his interest. (I discuss the rape at greater length here: http://hoodedutilitarian.blogspot.com/2008/03/jack-hill-and-rape.html)

So far that sounds a lot like YA teen girl melodrama, complete with crushes, jealous backbiting, and bitchy rivalry. And it is that in part. But the film balances this toxic view of women’s relationships with a more positive view. In the first place, Maggie and Lace really do care about each other. Lace goes out of her way to protect Maggie from a punitive cavity search in juvenile detention. For her part, Maggie reacts with rage when Dominic mocks Lace’s love letter in front of the rest of his gang. And even though Maggie is attracted to Dominic, she tells him repeatedly and convincingly that her primary loyalty is to Lace

Moreover, the film makes a thoroughgoing call for feminist revolution. The Dagger Debs are more or less the ladies’ auxiliary of the Silver Daggers…and they are mercilessly exploited. The boys’ literally pimp them out to other students, and force them to hold lit cigarettes in their hands so the men can bet on which of the girls will flinch first. Dom treats Lace like crap, sneering at her behind her back to his friends, sleeping with Maggie, and reacting with a torrent of abuse when Lace tells him she’s pregnant (“You think I’m ready to haul freight in some fucking warehouse for two dollars an hour so you can have a little brat suck on your tit? No thanks baby.”)

The solution to these myriad indignities, the film says, is feminism. Maggie’s courage and competence inspires the other girls to toss the boys out of the clubhouse and go it on their own, changing their name from “Dagger Debs” to “Jezebels” in the process. Instead of allying with white men, they then ally with a group of black women revolutionaries. In the triumphal apocalyptic showdown, the multiracial sisters sweep down with superior planning, courage, and firepower to kill the drug lords and politicians who oppress them. Death to the man!

If that was the end, we’d have an unambiguous but simplistic vision of feminist triumph. But Hill’s too clever for that. After the showdown with the man, there’s the showdown with the woman. Convinced that Dom was cheating with Maggie, Lace had betrayed the gang’s attack plans to their rivals. The hope was that Maggie would be offed; instead, Dominic is killed along with Lace’s unborn child. In one of the most painful scenes in the film she lies in her hospital bed and hysterically spins a fantasy of domestic bliss, pretending that Dominic had proposed to her rather than demanding she get an abortion. “Can you see me having a kid, hanging around some dumb house doing housework and dishes and diapers…,” she laughs in that helium-fueled whine, both pathetic and terrifying.

But the death of her man doesn’t free Lace. While the other girls throw off their false consciousness, Lace clings more tightly to hers, challenging Maggie to a knife fight over the dead jerk who was worthy of neither of them. Maggie’s victory, seen in silhouette, is a kind of exorcism, killing the part of herself that chose Dom over her sisters.

Again, though, this isn’t exactly a happy ending. Lace isn’t just a part of Maggie; she’s a sister herself. By combining the teen melodrama with the feminist parable, Hill complicates both. Maggie never would have joined the Debs without Lace; it’s their love for each other that makes the wider sisterhood possible. Until the moment that Lace calls her out to fight, Maggie insists that all she’s done has been for the other girl…and she’s not lying. Without the personal relationships, sisterhood isn’t possible — but those personal relationships are mired in poisonous sexism and jealousy. The society we’ve got furnishes the materials of the revolution; those are the only materials around. But that means that the revolution is inevitably tainted. Lace’s act of faith — her decision to befriend Maggie — makes sisterhood possible. But Lace’s weakness, and Maggie’s as well, means that Lace can’t stay true to her initial act. She doesn’t see the promised land, and as a result the promise is stained. By murdering Lace, Maggie gives the police the ammunition they need to put her away. The final scene shows her being shoved into the paddy-wagon covered in both Lace’s blood and her own. It’s not entirely defeat: the gang seems rededicated to each other, and Maggie is defiant and exuberant. But it’s not victory either.

Stephen Holden concludes his review of the movie by claiming that Switchblade Sisters is “a place where the only thing that really matters is holding onto your unworthy louse of a boyfriend.” This is such a thorough and obvious misreading of the film that it’s hard not to wonder what’s behind it. After all, this isn’t Pretty Woman, or Yes Man, or Boomerang, or any other of a billion Hollywood romantic comedies where the louse of a boyfriend gets the girl and that’s supposed to be a happy ending. In Switchblade Sisters, the fact that Lace holds onto her boyfriend is not romantic comedy. It’s hyperbolic, melodramatic tragedy.

Perhaps that’s precisely what makes Holden and other critics uncomfortable. Maybe the problem isn’t holding onto the lousy boyfriend, but portraying him as a louse in the first place — and suggesting that Lace’s love for him has not just personal, but social, and even apocalyptic consequences. For all its exploitation goofiness, Switchblade Sisters really believes that sisterhood matters more than men. Thirty-six years after it came out, that’s still an unsettling message.
 

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Utilitarian Review 2/2/13

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Ng Suat Tong on original comics art and a nostalgia for racism.

I talk about Irish music and authenticity.

Voices from the Archive: Matt Thorn on Kirby and the world outside his skull.

Bert Stabler on the new free Chicago comics issue of Lumpen.

Emma Vossen kicks off a short Twilight roundtable by explaining why you should hate Twilight hate memes.

I argue that Edward is a male variation on the manic pixie dream girl.

Peter Sattler wonders what reading influenced Kirby (Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and James Romberger weigh in, among many.)

Mette Ivie Harrison on Bella as a Mormon Goddess.

Charles Reece ends our twilight roundtable with a whimper, as he explains why he hated the series too much to write about it.

We had the first of what may be a regular music sharing post…so let us know what you’ve been listening to if that appeals.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I got to write about the great romance of Charlotte and Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice.

At the Atlantic I argue that geeks are not necessarily bullied for being geeks (but instead for reasons involving class and gender.)

At the Loyola Center for Digital Ethics I write about the ethics of scanlation.

At Splice Today I argue that US employers are crippled by their hatred of workers.

Also at Splice I talk about the great gospel duo The Consolers.
 
Other Links

Eleanor Barkhorn on not overselling marriage.

Amanda Marcotte argues that my feminist argument against women in combat is wrong.

The American Conservative on right-wing copyleft.

Miss Universe national costumes.

This story about being out with HIV made me cry.
 
This Week’s Reading

I finished Sense and Sensibility, read for review a preview copy of Alex Sayf Cummings’ book about the history of music piracy, Democracy of Sound, and started Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty…which is mediocre, but plugs along quickly. Also started Storms, Carol Ann Harris’ memoir of dating Lindsey Buckingham…which I may or may not finish….
 

Mexico

Why I Won’t Be Contributing to the Twilight Roundtable

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The entire Twilight Roundtable is here.
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Originally, I had intended on writing something about the fourth and final book in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, but I just couldn’t do it and wrote an email to Noah explaining why. He asked if I’d put the email up as a post, so here it is, slightly modified (but only slightly).

Oh Noah,

I’ve gotta bail on the Twilight roundtable. I have been dealing with a few extra things of late, but really it’s just because I don’t give enough of a shit to write anything on what was the most terrible book that I’ve ever finished (there’s been worse — e.g., Malazon book 1 — but I wisely quit them). At least I know what women, many of whom are my friends, are reading in their fixation on YA novels. Then again, maybe I wish I didn’t know. Reading the book only confirmed what I thought about the movies, but with a whole lot more repetitious moaning and anxiety thrown in. The filmmakers had the good sense, or were forced by the demands of their medium, to either throw a lot of that out or turn it into a ludicrous over-sexualized spectacle of yearning. The movies were fun, the books aren’t. But even regarding politics, there wasn’t much of a surprise for me: the Cullens are representative of realpolitik America, who use the threat of overwhelming power to keep the evil others, the Volturi, at bay. As Edward says, they’re cowards below the surface. And I really don’t disagree with the pop feminists out there about this book. The men and women take traditional roles: Alice likes clothing, Esme is a homemaker, Edward is the artist, Carlisle the intellectual, etc.. And then there’s Bella who finally achieves self satisfaction by being admired by Edward. She’ll never have to work for eternity. Her child is so perfect, as described on every page. What are her interests in music, books, or anything else? Meyer doesn’t know or care. What we do know is that Bella’s interested in babies and husbands. Of course, Meyer rigs all this with rules for her fantasy that make all this knuckledragging wish fulfillment seem okay. And it is in the diegesis, just like Dirty Harry‘s fascism, but not so much if one wants a life like this. A truly obnoxious read in just about every way: stylistically, ideologically … even plot-wise (the structure seemed to be made ad hoc without an editor).

Anyway, I just don’t want to spend any more time thinking about such idiocy. Sorry, man.

Bella As a Mormon Goddess In Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight

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250px-TwilightbookMuch has been made of the fact that Stephenie Meyer is a Mormon and that her wildly popular Twilight series contains a romance that demands no sex before marriage for fantastical reasons that at times stretch the bounds of credulity. Some have argued that this is a kind of proselytizing technique, a different version of the Mormon missionaries knocking on your door and converting your daughters to the bizarre religion. While I think that Meyer’s Mormonism deeply affects her writing, as religious beliefs and other worldviews necessarily affect any writer, the more interesting Mormon doctrine infusing Twilight is, in my opinion, the uniquely Mormon version of the Garden of Eden story. That apple on the front cover is not there for nothing. And it isn’t the temptation of sex at all that is at the heart of the controversial Mormon doctrine. It’s all about female power.

To begin with, I am going to admit that I am not a typical nor a conservative Mormon. My own beliefs are in process, so it is possible that I may end up distorting some doctrines without intending to. I will also try to point out what is doctrine and what is my own implications to be drawn from the doctrine. I also need to state up front that while I believe that understanding Mormonism is a useful way to understand some parts of Twilight, I do not by any means think that the series can be reduced to Mormonism. No writer of any interest simply parrots a religious belief, and I think Meyer has been extremely inventive in her retelling of this Mormon myth. I do not know if this was done consciously or not and it hardly matters.

In either case, there is no intention here to slam Meyer, her book, or to continue the rather disturbing trend of making a book written by a woman and loved by many women young and old into a point for denigrating women and their interests or achievements. I recently wrote an essay called In Defense of Twilight in which I reacted to a recent writing convention I had gone to where multiple panels ended up being “Twilight bashing.” The panelists openly admitted to never having read a single sentence of the series, but still felt perfectly well qualified to mock it and its proponents because it wasn’t “real literature” or because whatever version they had heard was “simply ridiculous.”

This reminded me too sharply of my years in graduate school at Princeton in the 1990s, when women students asked the all-male professors on staff why we had no female role models and we were told there were simply no women — on the planet —who were qualified to be hired at Princeton. In addition, when I asked a professor why, in a course of German Romanticism, there was not a single woman listed on the list of course materials, he replied that we simply had “no time” to study the “minor authors of Romanticism.” We were at Princeton, so of course, we were going to study all the “important” authors who were the men that had been venerated since Romanticism itself. We were certainly not going to investigate the patriarchy that had chosen those men as “most important” from the first.

After spending several years teaching German at a university, I eventually gave up academia in pursuit of a career as a young adult fantasy writer. In the past several years since I was published, I have become increasingly disturbed by the outcries (by men) in various news outlets since J.K. Rowling and Meyer have become both wealthy and powerful by writing children’s stories. What is the world coming to, if women writers (not to mention women editors) are taking control of the publishing industry? Where are the books for boys?

We are supposedly facing a national crisis because there are NO books written for boys and our poor young men will be forced to read that “icky” Twilight if there is nothing to counter this trend. Young men reading Twilight is surely the proof that our civilization has reached its nadir, because no one wants young men learning to have sexual self-control in a relationship with a woman, nor do we want them to be that dangerously “feminized” Edward Cullen who can read minds and has become a “vegetarian.” (Worse still would be women becoming used to the idea that attractive young men might rip off their shirts and display their washboard abs at every moment to the catcalls of the crowd, because only men should be able to demand a sexual display like that, yes?)
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The Mormon story of the Garden of Eden is a variant of the original. Adam and Eve were placed in the garden and were told not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree because it would mean their deaths. But Mormons do not believe in original sin. They call the choice Adam and Eve made a “transgression” rather than a “sin”. What this means is that they took the fruit knowing that it would make them mortal and send them out of God’s presence and into the world. They broke a law, but it was a law that they had to break. It was only by being forced out of the garden that the rest of the “Plan of Salvation” or “Plan of Happiness” could come to be. Mormon scholar Daniel Judd argues that the Fall was a step downward, but also a step “forward.”

Furthermore, Mormons do not believe that Adam and Eve were sent out of the garden because of a sexual transgression. Sex is, in Mormon theology, not an evil to be avoided by the most pure. Quite the contrary (despite what you may think, based on the accusations that Meyer is attempting to convert young readers to sexual abstinence), sex is considered a holy act. Dallin H. Oaks, one of the current “apostles” of the Mormon Church writes “The power to create mortal life is the most exalted power God has given his children”. Mormons insist on the use of sex only within the bonds of marriage, but there is no psychic spiritual guilt to be associated with the act itself. Mormon couples are generally assured that sex is good for their marriage and that it is not only because they are meant to multiple and replenish the Earth (a commandment that many Mormons take to heart), but also to build bonds of love and commitment between spouses.

Finally, instead of seeing Eve as a figure of hatred or blame, Mormons praise Eve for her decision to take the fruit first, because she saw more wisely than Adam did that living a life of joy would also entail experiencing pain. There are some Mormons who believe (and at this point I will say that this is not doctrine, but rather speculation I have heard repeated inside the church) that Adam and Eve engaged in a thousand year long debate on the topic of the fruit and whether or not to take it. Adam and Eve could not have children in the garden and therefore could not fulfill the other commandment which God had given them, in addition to not partaking of the fruit, which was to have children. Again, in Mormon theology this is not because they could not have sex, but only because their bodies were not mortal and were not fully capable of producing children. Speculation again is all I can use to answer why. Perhaps because having children inherently causes pain (in childbirth, but also in many other ways) and pain could not be part of the Garden of Eden.

I am not the first scholar to see Twilight through the lens of the Mormon creation story. Lisa Lampert-Weissing has written a fascinating study of Twilight as a retelling of Milton’s Paradise Lost. She sees Twilight in the long tradition of women writers following Mary Wollstonecraft-Shelley, who wrote about the “monster” in Frankenstein that is in many ways Eve’s side of the story of the creation and the Fall. Though Frankenstein’s monster is purportedly male, he enacts many female dilemmas, as being created second and seen as a dark creature, full of sin. Lampert-Weissing wisely sees the importance of free will and “agency” in Mormon doctrine and cleverly argues that Bella herself is engaged in a project of making herself an equal to Edward by becoming a vampire. She wants to not only be Lois Lane, but Superman. She wants to be able to protect herself and her child and not depend on Edward for that. She wants the power that becoming a vampire will give her, the eternal youth that will make her Edward’s equal in eternal beauty, and she wants to be god-like, as he is. In this way, Lampert-Weissig sees Bella as a feminist hero, demanding equality and making her own choices rather than allowing herself to be told what to do by the authoritarian Edward or the other god-like Cullens.

But the Mormon story of creation as it informs Twilight goes deeper than simply the story of Eve’s free will to choose to fall in taking the fruit. It is not only in becoming a vampire that Bella becomes god-like. She gains immortality, yes, but that is at the hands (or teeth) of Edward, the patriarch of all patriarchs here. She forces him to it by coming close to death in childbirth. And it is in childbirth that Mormon doctrine ennobles women. Thus, the argument that Meyer’s Twilight is all about keeping women in traditional roles is true. But it also has a powerful demand that women in these roles be seen as heroic, even as super-human. Immortality in Mormonism comes to women through their work as wives and mothers quite literally.

Mormons believe in a universal resurrection and in a nearly universal heaven. The only hell in Mormon theology is a waiting space like purgatory, but which Mormons call “spirit prison” where those who do not acknowledge Christ await missionaries to come to them and teach them. As soon as they are converted and have temple work done (thus the Mormon need to continually do ordinances for those who are dead), they can cross from “spirit prison” into “spirit paradise” where all the righteous converted dwell.

Once the final judgment happens, all will be allowed to choose a kingdom (celestial, telestial, terrestrial) depending on where they are most comfortable. Each kingdom will be ruled over by a member of the Godhead, and only a very small handful of God’s children will be sent to a place called “Outer Darkness” where they are forever cut off from the presence of God (and even these will be immortal in resurrected bodies). My understanding of this doctrine is that there is likely to be movement between the kingdoms in the eternities, and that ultimately, all will eventually complete the path to godhood. But this whole plan is dependent on women. Why? Because only women can give birth to bodies, and it is these bodies which are the stuff of immortality.

Mormons believe that God Himself has a body, that it is a necessary part of godhood to be flesh and blood (though exalted, immortal, resurrected flesh and blood). According to Joseph Smith, God was at one point a mortal man, and He became a god through the same process that will be open to all men. Women, on the other hand, may have a slightly different path to immortality and godhood, and that path demands becoming wives and mothers, because only through women can all of the waiting spirits of God’s children, begin the path to finding their own bodies which can be transformed into godly stuff.

In Twilight, Bella does not realize that she can get pregnant when she and Edward consummate their marriage. She assumes, in fact, that she can’t. Nonetheless, when she is given the choice between saving her own (physical, mortal) life and saving the life of her child, she chooses her child. Now, many read this as Meyer’s Mormonism stepping in to argue against abortion. I won’t say absolutely this isn’t true, but it is at the very least incomplete. For Bella to choose completing a pregnancy over saving her own life, is, in the Mormon view of women’s possible godhood, her choosing immortality over mortality.

In the final and fourth book of the series, Breaking Dawn, Edward has to bite Bella to make her a vampire, but it is her child through whom Bella saves the world. Even if Edward had let Bella die, the story of Twilight demands that we believe that Renee-esmee is the most important person ever born. Bella is, in this situation, a new Mary. She has given birth to a new Christ who will save the vampires (and possibly humans). Whether Bella lives or dies after that is almost insignificant. She has been elevated to godhood already, by making the god of all gods, the vampire of all vampires.

Valerie Hudson Cassler, a convert to Mormonism from Catholicism, argues passionately that of Christian religions, Mormonism is the most feminist because of the Mormon view of Eve as a wise woman who made the right choice to leave the paradise of Eden and accept the pain of mortality and motherhood. Cassler argues that other versions of Christianity teach “that a woman’s body is unclean, that God meant women to submit to their husbands and in general be subservient to men, and that divinity is male and male alone.” Mormons, by contrast, teach in their temples that women will becomes “priestesses” and “goddesses” alongside their husbands.

Cassler writes

It is through women that souls journey to mortality and gain their agency, and in general it is through the nurturing of women, their nurturing love of their children, that the light of Christ is awakened within each soul. And we should include in that list of souls Jesus the Christ. Even Christ our Lord was escorted to mortality and veiled in flesh through the gift of a woman, fed at his mother’s breast, and awakened to all that is good and sweet in the world. Women escort every soul through the veil to mortal life and full agency. It is interesting to think that even Adam, who was created before Eve, entered into full mortality and full agency by accepting the gift of the First Tree from the hand of a woman. In a sense, Adam himself was born of Eve.

Mormon men have the priesthood which allows them to seal families together, and in essence, to return these families to God, thus healing the wound that the Fall created. In a sense, the Mormon Edward officiates over Bella’s passage through death back to eternal life.

But Bella’s female and divine power is separate from Edward’s. She cannot make herself a vampire, true. But she has a far more important role. Within the Mormon context of male/female relationships, Bella is equal to and perhaps more powerful than Edward. Her female “sphere” of giving birth isn’t a “curse” that follows because of Eve’s choice to take the fruit in the Garden of Eden and thus ensure the suffering and death of all mankind. Rather, she clings to her own power despite the cost and the voices around her demanding that she cede all power to Edward. She makes the choice, and, as in the Mormon version of the Fall, the reluctant Adam/Edward follows after. Ultimately, Edward is forced to admit that this Fall was also a fortunate one, that all his years of debating with Bella, he was wrong and she was right. She was always meant to be a vampire at his side, a “monster” who has power over life and death in her femininity. Bella takes up the Mormon role of motherhood to become the divine path to birth and life on Earth, a role as important as Mormon priesthood, which rules over death and the final approach to immortality.

Twilight is by no means a typical feminist narrative. Instead of demanding that women are capable of taking over male roles (a vital part of Amerian political feminism), Twilight glorifies the traditional female roles of wife and motherhood and points out the power inherent in those. I don’t mean to argue that this point of view should be accepted without question. Certainly, within the Mormon Church and in plenty of other churches and cultures, women have been told that if they only accept their role, they will find power within the existing structure of patriarchy. I am suspicious of Mormonism’s exclusively male priesthood and the insistence that men and women are eternally different with different roles. But on the other hand, I am equally suspicious of being told that there is no power in motherhood, since as a mother, I have felt tremendous satisfaction and yes, even power. Twilight is a powerful story about a woman finding power in motherhood and if that seems regressive, I think that is not seeing the story deeply enough in its reconception of divine female power within the Mormon mythos.