Utilitarian Review 10/3/15

I’m one of those people who didn’t hear about the Melvins until after Nirvana had explained that they were the shit. As a result, the two bands are linked in my head. Kurt Cobain shot himself a good long time ago, and I overplayed his albums so thoroughly that I can’t even listen to them now. Still, when I think about the Melvin’s, I can’t help but get a little nostalgic for that other band I loved back there in the 90s when I was loving the same thing as everybody else.

None of which is really fair to the Melvins, who were always a much more creative outfit than Nirvana — as Cobain would be the first to acknowledge, I think. It’s also misleading since the Melvins were around well before Nirvana, and have persisted long after. The band was formed in 1983, which means that they’re almost three decades old now.

The Melvins’ latest, Freak Puke, doesn’t exactly break new ground for them — but it also doesn’t sound anything like a nostalgia act. Partially that’s because the Melvins were never big enough that theirmoves became a cliché. Their early albums are amazing, but they don’t show up on best of lists, which means that the band doesn’t have to fight their back catalogue the way indie giants like Sonic Youth or REM have had to. Partially, too, the Melvins have managed to avoid musical calcification because they always had more than one schtick. On Freak Puke, for example, they’re less full-on-doom-sludge, less avant-experimental-weirdness, and more dirty grungy rawk. Indeed, Freak Puke hearkens back to their one major label effort, 1993’s fantastic Houdini.

The main reason that the album doesn’t sound dated, though, is simply because it kicks ass. Longtime members guitarist Buzz Osborne and drummer Dale Crover and sometime bassist Trevor Dunn have put together an amazingly thick sludge of testicle-cleansing hooks. But while the Melvins are definitely riding in on the same brontosaurus as Sabbath or Aersosmith, they still manage to get that Saurian to stumble about to some bizarre bop heads. “Worm Farm Waltz” is Charlie Parker getting buried in cement — until the abstract, spacy bridge, which sounds like the Sun Ra orchestra if the Sun Ra orchestra had employed Dale Crover on drums. And yeah, I tried to think of another metaphor there, but the fact is, that nobody sounds like Dale Crover. Even John Bonham doesn’t pulverize the skins like he does.

Anyway, that’s basically the album; track after track mining the unexpectedly fertile ground between dirty 70s classic rock and avant jazz. “Mr. Rip Off,” the opening track, starts with quiet bowed bass and spooky chalk board squeaks before staggering seamlessly into a distorted trudge, as if Webern was always meant to play arenas. “Let Me Roll It,” on the other hand, is totally, gloriously sold out kitsch — the kind of trashy, self-parodic testosterone swagger that Gene Simmons lived for, complete with stoopid half-failed double entendres. “You gave me something that I understand/you gave me lovin’ in the palm of my hand!” Buzz Osborne bellows while Crover smashes a beat that’s just about two times too slow. When they declaim “Let me roll it to you,” it’s like watching the Hulk dressed as Vegas Elvis thrusting his crotch while he pushes a square boulder towards the massed groupies.

All of which suggests that the Melvins are the band Nirvana might have been if Nirvana was the sort of band that could name itself “The Melvins”. Kurt Cobain certainly had an irreverent sense of humor…but it was irreverent, not absurdist. When Nirvana moved away from its core pop-punk-metal remit, it did so by covering Leadbelly or singing about how Jesus didn’t want them for his sunbeam — a different take on angst and realness, in other words, but still angst, and still realness.

The Melvins, in contrast, were always already sold out —punks who spent all their time pretending to be doom metal or glam rock or some sort of jazz weirdos. They’re a gimmicky band — the cover of Houdini, with its adorable cartoon two-headed puppy, is a nice summation. But being true to your gimmicks can be its own kind of integrity. Thirty years on and you can still hear the Melvins giggling like fifteen year olds when they put “puke” in their title or end their album with a thoroughly annoying beeping sound-effect loop. Grunge came and grunge went, but the Melvins remain, still quietly making the best loud music on the planet.

Every Thing In Its Place

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible is one of those unusual rape/revenge films that has garnered more critical praise than condemnation. Roger Ebert, who typically is not a fan of exploitation sexual violence, gave the film four stars and actually called it “moral—at a structural level.”

What Ebert is referring to is the film’s high concept. Rather than the usual chronological treatment of rape/revenge—where the rape happens, precipitating vengeful violence—Irreversible turns things around. The film is presented in reverse chronological order; the last scene happens first, and the first scene last. Thus, you see the violent, bloody, confused (and as you later learn, mistaken) revenge first, scrolling backward through the exceedingly violent and horrible rape, and ending with a blissful morning as the loving protagonists awake, unaware of what the day holds in store.

The typical read on this seems to be that the film’s reversal undoes the immorality of the rape/revenge structure. Rape/revenge posits that violence is the natural, necessary response to sexual violence. Irreversible refutes that, by showing the horror of the murder first, without justification, and then the horror of the rape, which still occurs despite (inept) vengeance having been doled out. In fact, the vengeance seems to call the rape into being, as if violence echoes backwards, rather than forwards, in time.

There’s certainly a deliberate stance against violent retribution in Irreversible. The avenging boyfriend Marcus (Vincent Cassel) is presented (in the first structural half of the film at least) as a drugged up out of control idiot; he’s explicitly sneered at for imagining himself as a “B-movie hero.” And of course, he (and more effectively his friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel)) beat and perhaps kill the wrong dude.

But the claim that this is somehow pushing against rape/revenge tropes seems insufficiently attentive to the genre. It isn’t unusual for rape/revenge films to question the effectiveness of violence. It’s de rigeur. A Virgin Spring (1960), one of the genre’s founding texts, has the revenger kill an innocent child and then shout at God for his cruelty; there is no question of the vengeance being justified or beneficial. Deliverance, another important film in the genre’s development, uses the mistaken revenge trick itself, tied to a critique of machismo similar to Irreversible‘s. I Spit On Your Grave presents Jennifer as destroyed by her vengeance as much as by her rape; Ms. 45 presents its protagonist as a deranged killer, who has to be put down by another woman with a knife to the back for the good of everyone. Stendahl Syndrome has the revenge lead to further, helpless violence. And so forth. There are less ambivalent rape revenge films (like the sequence in Foxy Brown, for example) but based on the history of rape/revenge, you hardly need to run the plot in reverse to show that revenge isn’t especially fulfilling.

If the plot trick isn’t needed to tack on a moral (as Ebert suggests), then what precisely is it doing? Well, one thing it does is to foreground that this is not exploitation, but art cinema. The wildly lurching cinematography does the same, as does the insistently structureless and repetitive dialogue. In one sequence — which is as painful in its way as the rape— Pierre, who used to date Alex (Monica Bellucci), asks her over and over, as they catch a train, if she and Marcus orgasm during sex, and why she and he had less sexual success as a couple. It is an excruciating, endless discussion—made all the more gruesome when Alex explains to Pierre that his sexual problem is selflessness. He pays too much attention to his partner’s pleasure, she insists. Shortly before this, of course, we saw a rapist assault her. Hah hah, the film says. You think you like it when men don’t pay attention to your pleasure? You just wait.

Is that really what the film intends to be saying? Is it actually mocking Alex about her coming rape? It’s difficult to say—but this sort of intentional irony comes up again and again throughout the second structural half of the film. Alex tells Marcus that no one owns her, for example, which again seems like an ironized reference to her earlier/subsequent violation. And then there’s the moment where Marcus jokingly tells her he wants to fuck her ass, echoing the anal rape we saw half an hour before.

The reversal of time doesn’t so much add a moral dimension, then, as it allows the filmmakers to show their cleverness—not least through the manipulation of, and mocking of the characters who enact their trauma first as tragedy, then as farce. Breaking up the narrative also fractures the masochistic identification; usually in rape/revenge, you learn who the protagonist is, and then identify with her as she is raped. But in Irreversible, you meet Alex only with the rape, like her rapist (who is a complete stranger to her.) The fragmentation gives you a sense of control and power; you start off confused, perhaps, but soon you know more than the characters do; you are in a position of superiority. You are the director, the God, the one in control. The filmmakers call the ending into being, and then imposes it on the characters. Nor is it an accident that the ending/beginning is set in a gay BDSM club called the Rectum. The filmmakers couldn’t state much more clearly that they’re investment is sadistic.

The sadism most directly inflects, and infects, the critique of machismo. Again, Marcus is specifically upbraided for his obsession with the revenge narrative, and for his need to avenge “his” woman, rather than going to the hospital to be with her.

But how does the film criticize his machismo? By mocking his manliness. Through the first structural half of the film Marcus wanders around asking people to direct him to the Rectum, and desperately denying that he is gay. In the Rectum, itself, he is almost anally raped. The sexual assault on him then (via reverse chronology) foreshadows Alex’s anal rape at the hands of a gay man. More, Alex’s anal rape becomes Marcus’ fantasy/nightmare; she is a stand in for him and his terrorized masculinity. It’s significant too that the rapist’s previous victim is a trans woman; we see a glimpse of her penis as Marcus and Pierre interrogate her about the rapist’s whereabouts. That’s the only penis shown in the film, revealed like a secret key. The woman is the man, the man is the woman. Are Marcus and Pierre being chastised for their investment in machismo? Or is the film an elaborate sneer at them for being too effete?

Again, the ur-text here is Deliverance, which both critiqued urban dreams of machismo and set up elaborate humiliations to demonstrate that those urbanites were in fact sissy-boys. Noé has undoubtedly seen Deliverance, and he’s probably also read Carol Clover, whose Men, Women, and Chainsaws argues that in rape/revenge narratives, male viewers are encouraged to identify with the female victims, often via intertextual reference to Deliverance. The central rape in Irreversible, in which a gay man beats a trans woman, then anally rapes a cis woman while cursing her out for her wealth, in this context comes across as a deliberate, smug wink to theory heads.

In my discussion of Virgin Spring, I argued that Bergman’s art cinema profundities about faith and God, as expressed by Max Von Sydow, effectively erased the experience of the woman whose rape was the ostensible center of the story. Of course, a contemporary French art filmmaker isn’t going to present a disquisition on faith—but still, Noé’s film parallels Bergman’s in a number of respects. Most notably, they both foreground film style. And in doing so, they both perform different kinds of aesthetic masculine swagger in a way that resonates uncomfortably with the phallic content of their films.

In Noé’s case, the reverse chronology, the hand-held camera jerking, and the various portentous declarations about time (including a preposterous, clumsy reference to 2001) all tie the filmmaker, and the film, to the main character’s masculine panic—a panic triggered perhaps by Alex’s revelation (at the end/beginning) that she’s pregnant. The irony of the title is that time and generation are not set. Noé manipulates them, demonstrating his power as he illustrates the powerlessness, and cluelessness, of his characters. The words “Time destroys everything” appear at the beginning/end and end/beginning, a vaunting koan. For who, here, is master of time but Noé,the avant-garde daddy, whose moral structure knows all?

On Marvel and Magical Thinking

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Kim O'Connor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Last Night

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Superheroes just want to settle down and get married.

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

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

1) Poker Night.

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

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

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

2) Dial M.

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

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

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

3) Groundhog Day.

Marriage? What marriage?

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

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

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

4) Perpetual Foreplay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rape, Revenge, and Race

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rape/revenge genre, then, focuses on white women, and has trouble thinking about the intersection of race and rape. Blaxploitation focuses on racial exploitation — and has trouble thinking about the intersection of race and rape. Foxy Brown doesn’t so much resolve the dialectic as illustrate it. Hill includes a rape/revenge skit in the middle of a blaxploitation revenge feature, and showing how the two parallel each other, but never, quite, manages to bring the two together into a whole that honors and sympathizes with black women’s historical, and ongoing, experience of sexual violence.
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One possible exception to the above is Talia Lugacy’s The Descent (2007). One of the few rape/revenge films with a female director, it also is unusual in featuring a woman of color; Rosario Dawson plays Maya, the lead.

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

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

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

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

Utilitarian Review 9/26/15

Posted on September 26, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

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

On how Hitchcock is the Birds.

Chris Gavaler on the superheroes of Patricia Highsmith.

Little reviews of Legion of Two and Sonic Youth.

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

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

Utilitarians Everywhere

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

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

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

At Splice Today I wrote about

—the GOP’s inability to pander to women.

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

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

Other Links

Celebrate! Happy Birthday is in the public domain!

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

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon