Furries in the Now and the Future of Comics

Posted on February 17, 2016 by mouse

I was near felled by a pang of anxiety after my last column about Image’s Graham and Rios curated Island #6 went live and broadcast the nice things I felt about it. I had been thinking about my run as a furry culture columnist and decided to embark on a conscious exercise of positive reporting, because sniping at lazy culture writers was accomplishing little more than giving myself cerebral razor burn. I do actually love that cover and do not regret publicly describing it as “spectacular.” I love a furry reintroduction into mainstream comics being gay and horny, and I love the hot, bitter tears of the comixxx boys who are scandalized by it. I desperately hoped that my friends and loved ones could read between the lines of that last missive, where I was telegraphing that I did not actually love the comic between the covers. I was focusing on the positive, yes! I don’t want furry culture to disintegrate into microcosmic atomized camps, nor do I want a dossier of everything someone jerked it to in the last six months before I can regard their work, good or bad. When I said we don’t run in the same circles, I meant Onta and I have never interacted personally or online and also that the images and words he uses in his porn project attitudes about trans people that are repellent to me and we likely wouldn’t get along anyway. I think he did good work acclimating his storytelling for a mainstream audience without compromising its voice. But I also got to thinking about the furry artists whose everyday output is spectacular in its own context, even when making its den in our own online spaces, outside the vantage point of “alternative” comics. So here is a broken, incomplete, totally lost in the woods compilation of brilliant furry comics on the web that you should be reading right now. Also nominations for the Ursa Major awards are open until the end of Februrary. The nice folk at Dogpatch Press decided to encourage a nom for some of my writing on here. While the process is open, I would pass the same courtesy along to any of the authors listed below, as they’re all a reflection of anthropomorphic excellence.

(ED: As furries are a tight-nit community, many of these comics are made by people I am cordially acquainted with and some of them are close friends. Proceed with adequate caution and curiosity.)

On Yonder Lea, I’d Shelter Thee by Artdecade (author link NSFW) (content warning for child abuse) (completed)

A remarkable, meditative, self-consious turn by a world-class furry pornographer. Two lost, forgotten-about boys in 19th century Scotland seek in each other in the mouth of famine, a new life across the sea. On Yonder Lea is a devastating tale of life and love swallowed under crushing waves of systematic cruelty. Atrdecade’s milieu of dude porn has often traded in in a phantasmagoria of gay masculine desire with a knowing wink. This comic, with it’s gentle cool grey and white spectrum nuzzles the reader up to the horrors of the other side of the coin of masculine power and the tenderness subsumed under its weight. This is Artdecade’s best, most sophisticated work in the medium of comics.

Bright Night by Kiqoseven (violence) (ongoing)

Black and grey and red, Bright Night invokes the spirit of the work of contemporary supernatural/horror comics master Emily Carroll. Two friends hunt for the unknown, the unknowable, on the property of folks who struggle with the knowing. A stylish comic rooted in a sense of place, history and character, a proper haunted house story. I’m very excited to see where this one goes.

Thunderpaw: In the Ashes of Fire Mountain by Jen Lee (Epilepsy warning) (ongoing)

What seems like a post-apocalyptic adventure story is actually an intimate journey through personal trauma as two best friends have their whole world uprooted. Bruno and Ollie are raw nerves in a world of opportunistic lightning strikes and strange gnashing of teeth. Jen’s deep understanding of dog behavior informs this humane story about the anxieties that live under all of our skins. Possibly one of the best furry comics ever, Thuderpaw showcases the duel between the deepest compassion and cruelties of life under constant stress in a distinctive style that utilizes a confident color scheme and beautiful, fluid gif animation. This is a comic that lives its best life on the web.

Posibilia by Barroo (ongoing)

Posibilia engages directly with the furry internet culture, where we use the web to connect with or distance ourselves from each other under the auspices of a specific platform. This comic trains its eye on the ins and outs of furry Secondlife in the late aughts to tell a contemporary story about connection and self-definition in 2016. It’s very funny and is a fantastic meeting of experiences of being queer online and queer irl.

Night Physics by Austin Holcolmb (content warning for substance abuse) (ongoing)

What do you dream about? Austin asks this of a cast of furry strangers and himself in this handsome descent into the raw naked lizard brain. This comic reaches deep inside the grey matter to get to the animal within and the inexplicable motivations behind all our actions. The narrative floats in between on-the-spot one panel interviews with furries as they reveal their deepest secrets or offer a curt rebuff. Some people need to be known and some need to be unknowable. Night Physics is one of the prettiest, kindest, most thoughtful furry comics on the internet.

Computer Love by Ivy Jane (nudity) (ongoing)

A diverse group of immigrants and drop-outs navigate their fates in Antarctica, one of the last safe places for humans escaping a scourge of giant ratlike monsters that have ravaged the rest of civilization. Not necessarily a comic with furries, but one about furries who can explore their ideal selves in virtual reality. Even when the “civilized” world is falling down around your ears, you can define your own existence where you feel safe and can protect yourself and your friends in Ivy’s anime-inspired Antarctica. Computer Love is a story about queer people adapting, like we always have, to this or that mundane apocalypse.

Crossed Wires by I Jay (ongoing)

A free-wheeling adventure that blends a sophisticated take on post-furry transhumanism a-la Egypt Urnash with a genuine love for 90s hacker genre trash like Johnny Mnemonic. It’s another story on this list that engages with technology’s roll in how we navigate our identities and relate to each other. I Jay has a quick wit and a chunky, dynamic graphic style that propels this comic through the better parts of your brain.

Goodbye to Halos by Valerie Hallah (ongoing)

Fenic’s asshole dad seals her off in a parallel dimension where she now lives in Market Square. In her new dingy, impoverished little neighborhood far below the clouds, she learns how to chop onions and control her magic powers and flirt with the cute girls in her alien surroundings. Valerie’s smashing understanding of color and composition, along with her cute character moments really make this comic super special and a delight to read.

Boys are Slapstick by Rory Frances (content warning: BDSM) (completed)

A head-on collision between Loony Toons-style violent self-annihilation and gay ennui, this is my favorite of Rory’s work published by Aevee Bee’s great online publication ZEAL. It’s a brutal assessment of the characters we play and how we try and sometimes fail to live up to them, in queer spaces both public and private. What are your limits when your self is not tied to fragile human anatomy? Rory’s a creator who might (should) influence an entire generation of young gay furry cartoonists.

Critical Success by Roanoak (content warning: this is porn) (ongoing)

This is gorgeous furry-on-goo-creature fantasy roleplay. Cocks of varying viscosity all over the damned place. It’s the adventure zone for perverts. YOU HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED THAT THIS IS PORN. DON’T COME CRYIN’ AFTER YOU GET AN EYEFULL OF ALL THOSE PRISTINE GREEN JELLYWEINERS. Seriously though, this is a a cognizant flip of the very rape-reliant genre of tentacle/goo porn that uses the device of a Dungeons and Dragons session to demonstrate negotiated consent.

Carnivore Planet by Nero O’Reilly (author link NSFW) (ongoing).

Nero’s dense futuristic urban hellscape is like anything from the imagination of Moebius or Otomo, a rogues gallery pushed to their limit by their circumstances toward decisions they’ll (maybe) live to regret. His furry cartooning reaches back to the golden days of alternative publishing with a studied contemporary storytelling sensibility. Also look at those lines.

Crow Cillers by Cate Wurtz (ongoing)

One of the most ambitious projects from one of the most audacious minds in furry comics. Cate fuses intensely personal narratives with iconic cultural touchstones like the Simpsons with her arresting, hyper-colorful, deadpan while screaming-your-lungs-out visual sense. If you love our beautiful medium, you cannot sleep on this comic.

A&H Club by Rick Griffin (ongoing)

I might be biased in favor of this comic, having been raised in my early years on this earth by a single mom and in my adult life being into the idea of going about my day to day without wearing any trousers. Rick Griffin is one of the most prolific and influential furries making comics today and this is his most heartfelt project about women supporting each other.

Various comics in the Peaches and Cream universe by Michael Rey Vega (content warning: porn again) (ongoing)

Miu (Mike Vega) has long been the sweet candy center of a certain flourescent aesthetic style in furry pornography. He loves his characters and lets us see their lives unfold in comics for all ages and also for a more limited demographic. I love that no one character in Mike’s fruitiverse is exclusively in service of jerk purposes. Everyone has dignity and purpose and shops for muffin mix. I’m on pins and needles waiting for bi sexpot Jam to finally ask to go steady with her crush, Plum!
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Today’s furries grew up on the web, and even our off-line interactions are based on the community we formed in BBS logs, VCL streams, back-and-forths-on Furaffinity, twitter and tumblr. We care as deeply about comics as any joe bazooka cranking out tijunana bibles at the kinkos round the corner. Our culture is fundamentally informed by our interactions online, and some of our best art still lives in digital spaces. With webcomics, furries push the medium of comics to its limits every day, one page at a time, and we do it for our own pleasure, our own satisfaction and benefit. If you could lend us your time, attention and $$$, maybe we could reclaim our pace in the canon of alternative comics. But if you never showed up, we’d keep on keeping on, writing and drawing our fuzzy weirdo stories.

Black Bill Gates

Posted on February 16, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

“I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making,” Beyoncé declares in her new video “Formation.” It’s an unapologetic, swaggering declaration that she is a businesswoman and a power to be reckoned with. That’s not an unusual boast for the singer—her 2013 video for “Partition” opens with her languidly ordering about a (notably white) servant. But it does clash a little with “Hymn to the Weekend“, the video she released only a few weeks before in collaboration with Coldplay.

As I discussed last week, “Hymn to the Weekend” is set up as an Orientalist tourist video. Coldplay singer Chris Martin drives around in a cab, staring out at Mumbai, and relishing exotic displays of street art and the high spirits of street kids. India is figured as exotic and exciting. But it’s also presented as poor, earthy, real, visceral. For the video, the people of India are fun to stare at because they are not Bill Gates, and because they are outside the logic of the capitalist west. Here, the video proclaims, as Martin moans on about feeling drunk and high, is an ecstasy that isn’t about money and fame. It’s an experience you cannot purchase, even with your tourist dollars. It must be lived.

Though Beyoncé is dressed up as a glamorous Bollywood singer, she doesn’t change that narrative. She’s certainly opulent—but that’s figured as a mystic, distant opulence, set against spiritual landscapes, not as a wealth obtained through sweat and smarts. She exploits Orientalist tropes to make herself exotic and exicting, but those tropes end up defining and limiting her. In joining with Coldplay to make herself a Orientalist mystical totem, she gives up her role as entrepreneur.

She takes it back in “Formation,” though. In her own video, Beyoncé isn’t stuck in any one role. Instead, the video, set in New Orleans, puts her in a range of identities, from upscale buttoned up gentlewoman to street-level twerker, from historical to present-day. “Through this reckless country blackness, she becomes every black southern woman possible for her to reasonably inhabit, moving through time, class, and space,” Zandria Felice Robinson writes. Beyoncé is both marginal and empowered, both looker and spectacle.

It’s important that that the culture that inspires the video is treated with much more respect than in the Coldplay collaboration, in no small part because the community in question is one that Beyoncé identifies with. This isn’t just a matter of presenting herself as part of Southern black culture; it’s also about knowledge and respect. “Hymn to the Weekend” could have gotten a Bollywood star to appear alongside Beyoncé, but no one cared enough to bother making that happen. As a result, the video feels like something done to, rather than in collaboration with, Mumbai and its culture. In contrast, “Formation” includes New Orleans bounce performers Messy Mya and Big Freedia. It honors queer dancers and rappers whose style has been much imitated in the mainstream, but whose personal artistry is rarely acknowledged there.

“Formation” also differs from “Hymn to the Weekend” in that it presents marginalization not as exotic spectacle, but as struggle. The most instantaneously famous images from the video are of a black child dancing in front of an ominous line of police, and of Beyoncé lying on a sinking patrol car as the video’s close. The New Orleans presented in the video is not a tourist destination. It’s a city under siege, both by neglect in the wake of Katrina, and by state violence. There is joy there, but there’s also an insistence that the joy is not meant to be comfortably viewed from a cab. It’s an act of defiance.

And part of that defiance is the video’s deliberate, amused consumerism. “I’m so reckless when I rock my Givenchy dress/I’m so possessive so I rock his rock necklaces.” Beyoncé is Bill Gates; she wants, or already has, power, wealth, glamour, respect, and brains. She’s a businesswoman, which means she’s the entrepreneur making the video, not just the person the video is about.

Beyoncé’s been criticized at times for embracing capitalism and the iconography of wealth. But the “Hymn to the Weekend” video is a reminder that capitalism isn’t just about money. It’s about inequities of power, about who is owned, and about who gets to be the one who does the owning. The children Coldplay watches in Mumbai don’t get to say, with Beyoncé in “Formation”, “I’m so possessive,” because they aren’t seen as having their own desires. They are treated as the things to be consumed, not the consumers.

“Earned all this money, but they never take the country out me,” Beyoncé declares. Through double consciousness, she can be Bill Gates and herself at the same time. Poverty isn’t natural or fun. The people who don’t have power, want power, and are justified in wanting it. To tell them they should be different in kind from the capitalists is just what capitalism, and capitalism’s police force, always tells them. Beyoncé, at least in “Formation,” isn’t buying it.

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Posted on February 15, 2016 by Matthias Wivel

Daniel Clowes’ latest book, Patience, came out in Danish (and a few other languages, as far as I know) just before Christmas last year, as part of an effort by the publisher, Fantagraphics, to jump start international sales and avoid having them cannibalized by the American edition. Here’s a brief first take in anticipation of the discussion the book will hopefully elicit upon its official American release next month.

Patience is a love story dressed up as equal parts social realism and time travel adventure. It is also Clowes’ first unequivocally romantic work. Its protagonist, the self-described loser Jack Barlow, and his beloved wife Patience are expecting their first child. But one day he comes home to find her murdered on their living room floor. He spends the next seventeen years monomaniacally—and in vain—trying to find the murderer until, suddenly, he is given the chance to travel back in time, save Patience and make sure their child is born.

It does not quite go as planned. Jack is impulsive and possessed of a real temper, which time and again sends events careening out of control, crisscrossing the timeline. It is perhaps Clowes’ most entertaining work since the his early humor pieces, a real page turner with an unpredictably spontaneous, but predictably funny character at its center. Much like Clowes’ previous protagonist Wilson (2010), in fact—another self-sufficient yet hapless sap of the kind he so excels at.

Jack is in many ways a fleshed-out version of the censorious, self-delusional Wilson, who also seeks to restore his broken family. In spite of his many shortcomings, it was hard not to like him, and that goes double for Jack even though he is even more of a dubious acquaintance. Where Wilson studied rain drops, Jack stares at the wall, blinds drawn. And whether we are talking 2013 or 1985, the wall is full of holes—the result of off-panel tantrums or panic attacks, one senses.

Jack’s thought processes, ways or reasoning and, at times, actions border on the sociopathic, which calls to mind Clowes’ perhaps most disturbing character, the borderline superhero Andy from his masterful The Death Ray (2004), who lucidly assumed the role as supreme arbiter over other people’s life.

Yet we still like Jack because he is so unequivocally driven by love—a love which here literally transcends space and time. Actually, the time traveling brings out the oedipal undertones of it, not least clearly at the moment when he finds himself in front of his fatherless childhood home. The riddle of the Sphinx is here a murder mystery the solution to which depends on whether Jack is fundamentally subject to the same crushing predestination that brought King Oedipus low. Can we change the future?

Clowes transposes this struggle against determinism to Patience’s efforts to break with the social conditioning she has inherited as the child of a broken working class home in the Midwest. A large part of the story takes place in the small town in which she grew up, during the years immediately before she met Jack. Patience sometimes assumes the role of second narrator and her portrayal is the heart of the story. She is the whole person Jack aspires to be.

These passages are exemplary of how subtly and bracingly Clowes describes crushing social circumstances and thus recall earlier signature works such as the ensemble piece Ice Haven (2001), which also took place in a small American town, and the more intimate post-school comedy Ghost World (1997), which was fundamentally about transcending expectations.

Clowes’ well-known misanthropy is remarkable subdued in this story—even his Kubrick-like irony is downplayed. Only in the rather uninventive description of Jacks future in the year 2029 does his disinterested line come up short and resort to camp.

Clowes’ cartooning is here more nonchalant than usual. One gets the sense that he does not mind if his drawing comes across as inelegant. For the most part, however, this seems an entirely natural choice for this particular story—on paper his most fantastic. And even though Clowes is not possessed of the uncanny design genius of his paragon Steve Ditko, his surreal interludes in which he invokes the heady abstraction of prime Doctor Strange as well as the bizarrely loaded symbolism of Ditko’s objectivist comics seem perfectly calibrated and emotionally earned in this story about the order of things.

Utilitarian Review 2/13/16

Posted on February 13, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Emily Thomas on new text games.

Chris Gavaler meditates on auteurism in superhero comics.

Review of corporate training goof Welcome to the Jungle.

Review of Jason DaSilva’s doc about his ms, When I Walk.

Review of Gavin McInnes’ crappy How To Be a Man.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from May/June 1952.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote about:

—Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and how making your female characters stronger makes them weaker.

—how Silence of the Lambs is scared of Clarice. (it’s the 25th anniversary today.)

At the Guardian I wrote about:

—the Fifth Wave and colonialism against white people.

—Man in the High Castle, 11.22.63, and how we love counterfactual stories.

At Playboy I wrote about how cassette tapes never went away.

At the Establishment I wrote about:

—A.O. Scott and art as criticism as art as criticism.

—Trump, torture, and reparations.

At Splice today

—I wrote about what would happen if Rubio won NH. which didn’t happen, as it turns out.

—I asked Bernie Sanders, fool or liar?

Other Links

Parker Molloy on problems with Kenneth Zucker’s therapies for trans youth.

Juiia Serano on the same.

How to Be a Man

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on the Dissolve.
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Nothing about the description of How To Be A Man induces confidence. Mark (Gavin McInnes), an ex-comedian with a pregnant wife, discovers he has breast cancer and decides to record life lessons for his son-to-be, teaching him how to fight, drink, pick up girls, and otherwise do stereotypical man-things. He recruits Bryan (Liam Aiken), the 22-year-old son of an old flame, to videotape him. The two bond over guy humor and recreational drug use, eventually teaching each other—wait for it—how to be a man.

That sounds pretty dreadful in concept, but in execution, it’s worse. This film brings a resolute lack of wit and a numb stupidity to stereotypical concepts like mid-life crises and regressive gender stereotypes. For all its burble about toughness, How To Be A Man doesn’t even have the elementary courage of its own hackneyed formal conceit. The film is supposed to be structured around Mark’s video transmissions to his son, a concept that seems to call for a found-footage approach—or at least for some sort of play with the space between what Bryan records and what the audience sees. But the film within a film is all but ignored in the interest of running through a series of stupid setpieces: Mark quits his advertising job in an excess of egotistical bombast. Mark’s wife calls him a child. Mark picks up girls. All with a minimum of invention, and a maximum of banal crudity.

The crudity is supposed to be winning. A scene where Mark tells Bryan (loudly, with hand motions) how to perform oral sex gets a standing ovation from the assembled bar patrons, who are presumably meant to cue the viewing audience that this is some wild, awesome writing and acting. The truth, unfortunately, is that the writing is flabby and tedious, and McInnes’ delivery has little charisma or charm. The film is like being stuck in an elevator with a boorish drunk for an hour and a half. The fact that the boorish drunk gives a wink every so often to let viewers know that yes, boorish drunks are really irritating, doesn’t salvage it; it has the reverse effect.

Most of the boor’s spouting has to do, as the title says, with being a man—how to be tough, how to wow women, how to take risks and follow a dream. Much of Mark’s advice is patently poisonous, and he just about wrecks his life, which would seem to undercut his status as testosterone guru. But it doesn’t. Instead, the good things Mark does are part of being a man; the bad things are simply a failure to be manly enough. Thus, Mark’s advice to act like a dick and threaten people lets Bryan jettison his uptight roommate, whose main, unforgivable sin is being kind of freaked out that Bryan was using heroin in their apartment. Mark’s fashion advice leads Bryan to ditch his funky hat and appealingly schlubby clothes for bland preppy blah, à la Ally Sheedy’s transformation at the end of The Breakfast Club.

The path to being a man, then, is narrow and fraught: No silly hats, no expressing interest in astrology, no drinking wine instead of beer. Certainly, no homosexuality: The film’s one gay character is an abusive cocaine dealer, and physical affection between men is treated as a scandalous joke. How To Be A Man isn’t so much a how-to guide as a frightened list of anxious proscriptions.

The source of that anxiety isn’t hard to locate. Both Bryan and Mark at different points suffer humiliating beatings at women’s hands, and beyond that lingers Mark’s fear that the womanish illness of breast cancer has doomed him. Both the beatings and the breast cancer are played for laughs, not because the film sees fear of femininity as ridiculous, but because men with women’s diseases, or men beaten up by women, are feminized, and therefore funny. A morbid, snickering, terrified misogyny runs through the film like a sad trail of fart jokes. Toward the end, Bryan, following Mark’s dictates, imagines the girl he’s trying to pick up as disgusting and diseased; loathing women gets him sex, and makes him a man. Masculinity appears, for the filmmakers, to be based on fear, hate, intolerance, and mediocre bathroom humor. In short, How To Be A Man is an insult to men, to women, and to everyone else.

When I Walk

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran at The Dissolve.
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“We are all alone in this world, even though we have support systems,” Jason DaSilva’s mom tells him early on in the documentary When I Walk. It’s a harsh thing for a mom to say, and even harsher in context. DaSilva, the filmmaker, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2006, at age 25. MS is a degenerative disease that robs its victims of motor control, and often of vision. In the scene in question, Jason is telling his mom that he’s worried about how he’ll manage on his own. To which, again, her reply isn’t, “I’m here for you,” but more like, “We’re all alone anyway. Deal with it.”

His mother’s advice is typical of the first part of the movie, not because of its bleakness so much as because of the way it jars. As a filmmaker, DaSilva quickly decided to make a movie about his illness after he was diagnosed. But while the disease provides a topic, it doesn’t give the film a coherent narrative, or an emotional center. When Jason’s mom urges him to be positive, her advice rings hollow, but the documentary doesn’t seem to know how to question it. When Jason goes to India for a film project and tries various cures, from yoga to transcendental meditation, his investment in them, or his degree of hope, isn’t explored convincingly, either. At one point, he talks about how women aren’t as interested in him since he’s had MS, and then shows a number of pictures of “beautiful women” he has dated in the past, with their features blanked out. He’s erased their features for privacy reasons, but the result is awkwardly ghoulish. It feels as if who they are is less important than that he has pictures of them, or, more charitably, as if he isn’t sure what he wants to show, and is trying to get something on the screen even if it’s just a blank.

That all changes dramatically when Jason meets Alice Cook at an MS support group. Alice is at the meeting because her mother has MS, and soon she and Jason are dating. In one exhilarating scene, she gets on a scooter to see what life is like from his perspective, and the two of them go zipping gleefully around the Guggenheim.

As Alice and Jason’s relationship deepens, it quickly becomes apparent that the film isn’t about Jason’s illness, but about their love affair. Alice expresses some discomfort about being on film, but the movie’s most powerful moments are all hers. Jason’s loss comes through most vividly not through the deterioration in his condition, but through Alice’s desperate confession, “I don’t want Jason getting any worse. But it just keeps coming.” The day-to-day grind of the illness is brought home not through his difficulty in putting on his pants, but through Alice’s frustrated, guilty decision to go on a hiking trip alone in order to briefly escape the constant demands of being a caregiver.

Even on that hike, though, she’s taking footage for the film itself, both helping Jason with his project and sharing her experiences with him. She’s part of him, and vice versa—and again, in many ways viewers learn more about him, his illness, and what it costs him by listening to her than by listening to him. The film becomes more sure-footed, and more certain, as Jason loses control of his body, not because the disease gives the film meaning, but because Alice does. When I Walk makes it very clear that Jason isn’t all alone despite his support system. Rather, his support system, including his mom, makes him who he is, even more than his malfunctioning legs and hands. His life isn’t his disease, and neither, after an uncertain start, is his lovingly collaborative film.

Battle of the Corporate Training Exercise

Posted on February 9, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran at The Dissolve.
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Comedies’ goal is laughter above everything else, and in that pursuit, they’re sometimes allowed surprising leeway in terms of plot and tone. Welcome To The Jungle, about an ad-agency team-building exercise gone horribly wrong, takes that breathing room and runs with it. The film starts off as an office comedy with nods toward The Office and Dilbert, and feints toward Full Metal Jacket. Then, as the cast ends up on a remote island, it gleefully devolves into Lord Of The Flies. The archetypal moment may be the charmingly awkward, obviously fake battle between Jean-Claude Van Damme and a tiger—logic and suspension of disbelief casually defied in the name of high-camp vaudeville.

Van Damme, as team-building coach Storm, appears to be having the time of his life parodying every other role he’s ever played. The rest of the actors seem to enjoy the script’s loony opportunities as well: Rob Huebel as the evil VP Phil swings from corporate backstabber to lunatic Kurtz without ever losing touch with his oleaginous essence, while Kristen Schaal as Brenda gets to launch into discursive monologues about everything from bunny rabbits to the state of her bowels. Adam Brody as diffident beta-male hero Chris has less room for overacting, but he still manages to sell his role, remaining low-key and earnest in the face of escalating preposterousness.

In addition to the absurdist comedy, Welcome To The Jungle has a satiric edge. The movie is smart enough to make the connection between petty boardroom oneupmanship and action-movie tropes, and deft enough to ridicule them both for their panicked performance of testosterone. Chris’ boss (played by Dennis Haysbert) strokes his corporate awards suggestively. Van Damme emits crazed primal screams one moment and flinches from needles at the next, in an ecstasy of macho self-parody. Multiple onlookers comment on the homoeroticism of Chris and Phil’s final mud battle.

The film is hyper-aware of the ridiculousness of the patriarchal obsession with masculinity-as-penis-size—and yet, in the end, and rather helplessly, it’s still mired in a banal narrative of masculine self-actualization. The plot comes down to Chris trying not to be (as the film delicately puts it) “the world’s biggest pussy.” Since the focus is on Chris’ manliness or lack thereof, his romantic interest Lisa (Megan Boone) is, inevitably, the only character in the film who doesn’t have anything interesting to do. She looks attractive, she expresses sincere sympathy when Chris talks about how he’s just too darn nice, and she waits patiently for him to complete his narrative arc and become the kind of man who can sweep her off her feet. Comedy frees up the plot and allows even Van Damme to play against type, but there are limits. The leading lady still has to be dull.

So Welcome To The Jungle abandons its own doofy tiger in favor of Chris’ more conventional, generic inner beast. That’s disappointing, but not exactly surprising. As the film suggests, it’s hard to escape the corporate calculus, no matter how far from the office you try to travel.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Furries in the Now and the Future of Comics

Black Bill Gates

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Utilitarian Review 2/13/16

How to Be a Man

When I Walk

Battle of the Corporate Training Exercise