Tag Archives: Alyssa Rosenberg

Orange Is the New Black: Index for the Haters, and Response to Critics

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So I had a post on Orange Is the New Black become a viral hate read over at the Atlantic this week. In celebration (?) and as a low key way to post without posting on the fourth, I thought I’d provide an index of my writing on the show for those who are curious. The articles are arranged chronologically in the order they were published.
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At Public Books, Orange Is the New Caged, on how the first season picks up on tropes of femininity and lesbianism from the 1950 women-in-prison film Caged. (This is part of a roundtable at Public Books; lots of other good essays on the series by other folks there too if you want to browse around.)

At Splice Today, The Crassness of Orange Is the New Black, on how the first season adds sex and deviance to the memoir.

At the Atlantic, “A Lewd Reminder of How Tame Oranges Is the New Black Really Is”, in which I compare the first season to the 1974 film Caged Heat, and talk about political and sexual fantasies.

Right here at HU, Orange Is the New Black: Episode 7 Hate Blogging, in which I blog my way through a second season episode.

At Splice Today, Prison and White People, in which I talk about why focusing on Piper’s white privilege misses out on the way that institutional racism is not her friend.

And finally, the hate read at the Atlantic, Orange Is the New Black’s Irresponsible Portrayal of Men, in which I argue that the show’s relationship to male prisoners is problematic.

There were a number of online responses to the piece, most of them not really all that useful from my perspective. A couple of the more interesting ones were by Alyssa Rosenberg and Madeleine Davies. This piece by Sonny Bunch is probably the best though; mean-spirited and clever.
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What the hell; might as well respond briefly. Alyssa’s piece argues that it would be more strategic for me to criticize some show other than Orange Is the New Black. Her reasons are somewhat unclear; as far as I can tell, the argument is partially that OITNB is relatively good, and partially that it has a relatively small audience, so I’d be better criticizing NCIS, or whatever. To the first point, I’d say that whether the show is good or not is part of the question at issue; just because Alyssa thinks it is isn’t a reason for me to toss over my own opinion and write about something else. For the second…you don’t influence people based on what show you talk about, in any direct way. You influence people based on the reaction to what you, yourself, are writing. And as far as being strategic and getting my message out…this was one of the most popular things I’ve ever written (for better or worse.)

Alyssa concludes by saying, “If we want a culture that tells a wider variety of stories, we need to work on moving culture at the mainstream, rather than simply at the margins,” but that seems to assume that my criticism is going to move NCIS or OITNB in some direct way. I really doubt that that’s the way these things work, particularly. You move people through criticism the way you move people with any art; sporadically, confusedly, maybe if you’re lucky but generally not, depending on a lot of factors. The idea that you move the mainstream by talking about a mainstream show and move the margins by talking about a marginal show strikes me as really simplistic (not least because, for example, Alyssa probably wouldn’t even have written her post if I had been writing about something other than OITNB.)

Caroline Small on facebook also pointed out that culture often moves not by moving the mainstream, but by changing the margins, which then shifts the center. Which I think certainly can be the case, at least.

Sonny Bunch in his response to my piece sneers at the whole idea of thinking about representation in art, arguing that doing so isn’t criticism. He says that:

There’s also the obvious point to be made that this isn’t “criticism” in the traditional sense: there’s little discussion of craft or storytelling, no sense of how the authors of the program help us understand the world they’ve created. It’s a simple collection of grievances that can be summarized thusly: “Why aren’t you telling the story I think needs to be told and why have you portrayed a group I believe needs defending in an unflattering light?

What’s really funny about this is that it’s gloriously self-refuting, and utterly unaware of it. After all, Bunch isn’t looking at the craft of my essay; he’s not trying to figure out how my essay forms a coherent intellectual world. He’s just listing grievances, and asking, “why aren’t you writing the kind of criticism I want you to write?”

I’d argue (contra the somewhat confused Bunch) that Bunch’s criticism is entirely defensible as criticism, because engaging with the ideology and the preconceptions of the work you’re looking at is a legitimate critical project. The problem with Bunch’s view isn’t that he engages with my ideology and my preconceptions; the problem is that he’s not a very attentive reader, and so isn’t alert to the fact that I have quite a bit to say about craft, about storytelling, and about how the program creators help us understand the world they’ve created (hint; they do it in part through gender stereotypes.)
 
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Do You Have a Right to Piracy?

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Over the last week, a couple of twitterers I follow expressed the opinion that fans don’t have a right to the art they want. Alyssa Rosenberg said “You don’t have a right to HBO.” i.e., that you can’t just steal content because HBO won’t stream it on the internet. And Dan Kanemitsu, in reference to people creating unlicensed manga translations for the Kindle, said that “Having material available quickly & cheaply is not a right.”.

I understand where Alyssa and Dan are coming from, but I think the language of rights here is misleading. In this context, I think it’s worth remembering why we have copyright in the first place. According to the Constitution, copyright is established “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

In other words, the purpose of copyright is not to protect creators. It’s to encourage artistic creation.

One of the main ways it encourages artistic creation, of course, is by giving creators exclusive rights to their creations, so they are encouraged to create them. But it also gives society rights by limiting the extent of creator control. In other words, public domain and fair use and access to art are not just a gift; they’re central to how copyright is supposed to work.

Or let’s put this another way. Think about the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique”. The Dust Brothers jacked a lot of samples for that album, most of which they didn’t clear. Did they have the right to do that? Weren’t they just being entitled jerks, thinking they could just walk off with other people’s beats?

Of course, you could argue that having access to HBO or manga isn’t like having access to beats. After all, who’s going to make art out of HBO or manga?

The answer is that lots of people might. A video artist might want to use HBO clips in her piece; a writer might want to read a manga translation to inspire fan fiction. For that matter, reviewers or academics might want to write critical pieces about them. If critical writing is creative (and it is) then how philosophically are such writings different from Paul’s Boutique?

The issue here isn’t that all people have the right to steal any art they want. Rather, the point is, again, that the language of “rights” is a poor way to think about society’s investment in the availability of art.

I think it might be more useful to think of copyright in terms of competing interests. Society has an interest in protecting individual creator monopolies in copyright. It also has an interest in allowing other people access to those creations.

We try to balance those interests in various ways. Currently, we do it by having really restrictive copyright laws foisted on us by our corporate overlords…and rampant and easy piracy made available by the internets. This is not an ideal system in any sense and for many reasons. But would it really be improved if consumers all at once and instantly accepted that they had no right to art, and ceased their infernal piracy? If by “would it be improved?” you mean “would it encourage more creativity?” — then, no, I don’t think that the end of piracy, mash-ups, fan fiction, and more restricted access to art would give us a better, or for that matter a more moral, creative landscape.

I want artists to get compensated for their work. But I wish we could find a way to do that which recognized that society has an interest in making art available to everybody — not least because that “everybody” includes creators.
 

Tween Horror

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I had an article on the Atlantic a couple of days ago in which I talked about the Hunger Games and Twilight, comparing Bella and Katniss. I argue that Bella is in many ways stereotypically feminine (passive, focused on romance and motherhood) while Katniss is in many ways stereotypically masculine (competent, deadly, not focused on romance).

People have not been pleased with me. Specifically, Alyssa Rosenberg and Amber Taylor take me to task. Alyssa started out by calling me condescending and went on to say:

First, there’s something really profoundly weird and limited about this definition of femininity — and condescending in the piece’s sense that a totalizing devotion to motherhood, to relationships, to sex, to girliness is the only, or most worthy, definition of femininity. The second-wave feminists who produced Our Bodies, Ourselves may not have done the research into a groundbreaking medical text that changed the relationship between women and the medical establishment while wearing pretty dresses*, but that doesn’t mean that their work wasn’t deeply attuned to the feminine. Creating space for women’s voices in hip-hop, and suggesting that women have something specific to offer the form, may not be explicitly attuned to the state of romantic and sexual relationships, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an exploration and assertion of the feminine. Choosing to have a baby even if it means you have to be on bed rest or endanger your life might mean you’re devoted to motherhood, but it doesn’t actually make you more of a woman than casting off your cloak to duel the holy hell out of Bellatrix Lestrange or climbing into an exo-suit and doing battle for a little girl’s life — and by extension, the continued existence of the human race.

As is usually the case, Caroline Small is more eloquent than I am, so I’ll let her respond. This is a comment she left on the Atlantic site before Alyssa’s post went up, but I think it resonates.

The comments to this article are really pretty interesting. But pretty disheartening, really, too. A lot of popular feminism, which seems to be where some of the commenters are coming from, isn’t very attentive to the history of cultural gendering, where certain traits were indeed gendered “female” and certain “male”, and where the male traits were generally considered better and more worthwhile. Those preferences haven’t really gone away — the sets of traits and behaviors are still valued differently. They’re just more available to individual people of both genders now.

I’ve been seeing these “I’m glad I grew up with Buffy and not Bella” things too, so it’s not just Katniss. I sympathize; Bella doesn’t particularly appeal to me either. But it doesn’t take much insight to recognize that she aligns more closely with “traditional femininity” than Buffy and Katniss do.

Fortunately, there are lots of women today whose self-perception aligns with the masculine values, to the point that those women would never describe those traits as “masculine”. I think these comments reflect that. But being able to see them as non-gendered, or differently gendered, is something we have the luxury of doing because we were fortunate enough to have come up after feminism fought those hard battles, in an era where other people and society overall enforce those gendered norms on our individual bodies much, much less.

A lot of people seem to think that the point of feminism is making “masculine” behavior acceptable for women — or making no behavior unacceptable for women, that is, separating the behavior from the bodies of the people who perform the behavior and not judging women who prefer those historically masculine traits. And I agree that is one goal of feminism.

But feminism used to also be about recognizing the value and beauty of the way women historically did things, of women’s ways of knowing, of women’s unique experiences — of “femininity” as a counterweight to the excesses of “masculine” strength and authority and aggression. It used to be about valuing “femininity” as a place from which we could criticize and challenge the bad things in our world. A lot of the distaste for Bella is genuine distaste for the historically “feminine” categories and behaviors and values and aesthetics, but it’s generally expressed without even the slightest recognition of how problematic and limiting — and historically patriarchal — that attitude is.

So I’m hesitant that it’s a good thing to derogate traditional femininity, either in favor of traditional masculinity or even in favor of an individual woman’s right to behave however she pleases. A feminism that rejects the very notion that culture is gendered (in ways that have nothing to do with biology) is a feminism that’s amputated its best critique of power. It’s essentially co-opted by historically masculine cultural biases and preferences — including the ones for violence and strength. That’s tragic, if that’s where we are.

Part of the appeal of characters like Katniss is that they challenge conventional gender without completely eradicating it. Part of the appeal of characters like Bella is that they subvert conventional gender without really challenging it at all. I don’t much like either of them at a personal “do I want to hang out with these people” level — I’m with the person who prefers Hermione, although HP is almost as badly written as Twilight. But it strikes me that not being able — or willing — to think the difference is a problem.

Girl power is great — except when it moves beyond allowing people with female bodies to behave any way they like and becomes a new set of restrictive, normative, angry, prejudiced norms that bully people with female bodies into behaving a certain way. The widespread and almost-always knee-jerk “feminist” contempt for Bella, both in itself and in comparison with “tough” female characters like Katniss and Buffy, is a tremendous intellectual and social failure in that respect.

So I think it’s worth asking the defenders of Katniss — is there actually a feminist critique of the power structure that gets Katniss into the book’s defining life or death challenge, the kind of systematic feminist critique you get from, say, Joanna Russ or Erica Jong? I can be talked out of this position, but it doesn’t seem to me that there is. The same question could be asked of Buffy, and of any other girl power heroine. Twilight may actually have the edge on that one — there is a definite critique of the Volturi from Bella’s perspective that aligns nicely, yes, with Christian ideals, but also with traditionally feminine ones. (Although Bella is certainly no Alyx.)

Ignoring the seductiveness of those “masculine” characteristics, pretending their relationship to authority and strength and power and violence is transformed just because a woman engages in them — — that’s not feminist at all. And neither is perpetuating biases and prejudices against the historically gendered-feminine traits. A feminism that can’t make room for Bella is a feminism that’s going to have a lot of trouble getting purchase with women who like Bella, and that seems like a tremendous mistake to me.

To me it seems like Caroline has Alyssa pretty much dead to rights. Alyssa is basically insisting that the feminine be defined as, “anything that women do.” And that has been one goal of feminism. But another goal has been to champion those things traditionally associated with women. And you can’t champion those things if you feel it’s condescending to even suggest that they exist.

The difficulty with championing them if you refuse to admit they exist is perhaps best epitomized by another commenter on the Atlantic. This is Genevieve du Lac. Her comment has garnered 16 likes, so I don’t think she’s just speaking for herself here.

I’m really disgusted with these definitions of femininity and feminism. Why can’t a woman be competent and feminine at the same time? Femininity is not weak. And Bella is just retarded. The two neurons she’s got floating around in her cerebellum are drunk off too much estrogen… like most 16 year olds. So she’s got some feminine qualities – like following her feelings, etc. That does not make her the epitome of femininity.

I’d like to think a woman can be feminine and still be competent. I can wear my makeup and heels and take care of my hair just as well as I sky dive, shoot an arrow, shoot a pistol, finish my MBA, and have a career. Sheesh.

Like Alyssa, Genevieve wants the feminine to mean everything women do. But to get there, she has to call Bella “retarded” and sneer at her “estrogen.” Which, to me, seems like a problem.

Alyssa doesn’t lambast Bella in such offensive terms, of course, which I appreciate. But she is coming from at least a vaguely similar line of country.

And while those values are worth examining further, Twilight‘s also eminently critiqueable on narrative grounds, something Noah gives very little credence. Complexity is the stuff of genuinely compelling decision-making, as well as compelling storytelling. What’s troubling about Twilight is less the idea that Bella picks Edward and more the inevitability of their eventual union. Once Edward walks into Bella’s science class, she never really considers anything else, never gets presented with any other truly compelling options, she treats the humans in her life who are graduating and going off to their own adventures with dismissiveness and disinterest. Tough choices are fascinating. Defending the world’s kindest fate is rather dull.

And just as I’m bored by Bella’s certainty and dismissive attitudes towards people who set other priorities and take other paths, I don’t appreciate the idea that I don’t live up to Noah Berlatsky’s very particular standards of femininity, I’m doing it wrong. There may be effective arguments for a Christian focus on love rather than strength. But a strident and myopic lecture to women with a variety of priorities isn’t likely to be one of them.

Alyssa is arguing for narrative complexity — complexity involving action, politics, and suspense. She goes on to argue that the Hunger Games is interesting in part because it’s about how politics destroys families; how the public trumps the private and why that’s evil.

But…that’s not unique to the Hunger Games. It’s just how adventure stories work. You’re fighting for home and family; that’s the motivation, but it’s not the story. That’s why Amber Taylor is misleading when she says that Katniss’ actions are all about her family. Diagetically they are…but that isn’t what the books focus on. We hardly know Katniss’ sister, or her relationship to her; Pru really just exists as a kind of pure idol of goodness and innocence, a reason to keep fighting, like any number of pure-women-left-at-home in any number of adventure books. What Alyssa wants, and what adventure narratives want, isn’t the exploration of love and relationships…so they push those over to the side. And instead, you get violence and things blowing up.

I don’t have any problem with things blowing up in my entertainment. I don’t know that I seek that kind of thing out quite as much as my wife does, but I’m perfectly happy to go along for the ride. Enjoyable as those things-blowing-up are, though, I like other kinds of stories too. Such as, occasionally, romance. Which is what Twilight is.

As in most romances, narrative complexity, in terms of events and suspense, is not the point. You know Bella is going to get her guy, just like you know that Jane Austen’s heroines are going to end up happily married. That’s how romance works. People — often people known as “women” — read those books not because they’re idiots who don’t like complexity, but because they are interested in a different kind of complexity. Specifically, they’re interested in the ins and outs of love; not just whether people love each other, but how they do so; not who will live and who will die, but what will they say and how will they say it and how will their relationship develop?

For instance, there’s that scene in the Twilight series where Edward’s family is voting on whether to turn Bella into a vampire. Edward’s father votes yes, and his reason is that Edward has vowed to kill himself when Bella dies. For Edward’s father, his love for his son therefore means that Bella has to also live forever.

As a father, as a husband, as someone who has been thinking a lot recently about in-laws and what they mean for marriage and for love — I found, and find that scene really moving. And that’s where the suspense and surprise in Twilight comes from; from the explanation and exploration of love and intimacy, not just between Bella and Edward, but between Bella and Jacob, and Jacob and Edward, and Edward’s family — the entire cast of characters, in other words. It’s different than watching the nifty new way Katniss kills somebody, I’ll grant you. But it’s not worse. For me, anyway, I find it more compelling. Or, as Laura Blackwood says in a lovely recent essay, “The Twilight series challenges what I would call the “Buffy Summers Maxim”: that teen heroines be physically empowered, oftentimes at the expense of emotional clarity.”

None of which means that Katniss, or Alyssa, is “doing it wrong.” Even if the Hunger Games is (like Twilight) dreadfully written, I still like Katniss. I like watching her figure out how to kill people; I like her tomboyish competence; I like her butchness, I like her delight in dressing up, even if the series won’t really allow her to own it. I like the way she finds true love and family at the end. She’s not my favorite heroine in the world, and her whining (like Bella’s) gets pretty tedious, but overall, I enjoyed spending time with her. That’s why I went out of my way to say at the end of my essay at the Atlantic that Katniss and Bella aren’t opposed. As another writer notes here, it’s not an either/or choice. Lots of girls admire both characters. I think it’s possible to imagine that Twilight’s heroine and the Hunger Games’ heroine would find something in each other to love and admire as well.

Amber Taylor disagrees with me there, though:

The idea that there would be a fight is absurd, but the reason for peace is not that Bella and Katniss “might understand each other’s desires and each other’s strength” and walk away in mutual respect. Katniss wouldn’t fight Bella because Bella is not an autocratic totalitarian dictator. Bella threatens exactly nothing that Katniss values, and thus Katniss, a user of violence who is not inherently violent, would probably shrug. Katniss’s political consciousness and promotion of self-rule does not threaten Bella’s tiny microverse of loved ones and would likewise be a non-issue to Bella.

For Taylor, Katniss wouldn’t respect Bella. She’d just ignore her, because Bella is no threat. But I have to ask…if Bella “threatens exactly nothing” that Katniss or Taylor or Alyssa values, why then are so many writers so eager to attack her? If she’s not a danger, why call her a “retard” or deride her as dull or passive or sneer at her “tiny microverse of loved ones” — that thing that some of us of insufficient political consciousness refer to as our “family”? What, in other words, is so scary about Bella and the girls who love her? And could it, maybe, have something to do with our culture’s ambivalence about femininity?

I’ll let Sarah Blackwood have the last word.

Bella holds up a cracked mirror and shows us some things we don’t want to see. But she also reminds us that the imagination resists checklists of appropriate behavior. Teen girls resist checklists. The really interesting conversations start to happen when we stop circling the wagons against “bad examples” and “passivity” and start exploring not only what we want our heroines to be like, but why.

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle: Who’s Your Daddy?

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Alyssa Rosenberg had a post yesterday about the Azzarello/Chiang Wonder Woman reboot. For those not in the know, the new (new!) WW is no longer a clay statue come to life; instead she’s the illegitimate daughter of Zeus. Alyssa expressed some skepticism:

Similarly, in their quest for specificity, I wonder if Azzarello and Chiang are reducing Wonder Woman a bit. Her original story may not be plausible, or gritty, but it is about an expression of female will and independence. Not everything needs to be grounded in social realism. Some things can just be mysterious and strange. It’s yet another reason we’re far too consumed with origin stories. Trying to come up with a psychologically plausible explanation for the divine, or near-so, is a bit of a contradiction in terms.

Several commenters though were more positive about the Azzarello/Chiang version. Joe Pettinati, for example, said:

I think this origin story sounds way better and I disagree with your assertion about trying to come up with a psychological explanation for the divine. All Greek myths, including Zeus, are about putting human faces to divine phenomena in our world. Even Wonder Woman’s original origin story (which I confess I’ve never heard) speaks about the human desire for children, presumably when natural methods are not an option. The problem I have with that origin story is that it says a lot more about Aphrodite and Hippolyta then it does about Wonder Woman. Okay, this woman is brought to life, but why does she become a super hero?

Of course, I’m in Marston/Peter’s corner:

The original Marston/Peter Wonder Woman origin story is beautiful and weird and kind of makes me tear up. I compared it to the Winter’s Tale in that link, and I’ll stand by that. And I think your argument about a psychological explanation for the divine is right on the money; Marston and Peter had a divine that was actually mysterious and powerful, not just a bunch of ultra superhumans running around bashing each other.

I haven’t read the Azzarello/Chiang issues. They’re both competent creators, and I suspect they can tell a decent pulp adventure story. But the Marston/Peter WW was one of the great artistic achievements of comics, IMO. And it was ideologically committed to feminism — in the case of the origin story, specifically to the idea of the power of female creation and mother/daughter bonds — in a way that is very, very rare, in comics or in other art forms or anywhere.

Oh…and to Joe, who asks why WW becomes a superhero. She becomes a superhero basically because she’s strong and curious and courageous and wants to help people. Marston didn’t feel that you needed a tragic or sordid backstory to make you a hero. He thought strength comes out of being loved and happy, not out of being wounded. More power to him.

I just wanted to add…the Azzarello/Chiang version is of course an improvement…if you’re demographic is mostly adult men. If that’s the case, the illegitimate-daughter-of-Zeus is clearly superior; it’s got sex, conflict, and the possibility of lots of gratuitous angsting. On the other hand, if your audience is 8-10 year old girls and boys, an origin all about who slept with whom and strained family dynamics is probably going to have less appeal. Instead, you probably want something with room for magic and courage and adventure and love and giant kangaroos.

Myself, I am old, old, and in my second childhood, so I’m all for the magic and love and giant kangaroos…though angsting and sex and strained family dynamics can be okay too, in their place. Why exactly you would want talented creators like Azzarello and Chiang to take the magic and love and kangaroos of the 8 year olds and turn them into the sex and angst and family dynamics for the thirty year olds is, of course, an open question. I’ve discussed some answers elsewhere, and won’t repeat it here except to note that Marston/Peter’s Wonder Woman was by far the most popular iteration of the character, and to express my doubts that Azzarello/Chiang’s version will change that, whatever it’s other successes.

Update: The argument in the last part of this post is shredded, torn apart, and stomped upon by commenters. The Percy Jackson series and the Prydain chronicles are cited as painfully telling counter-examples.

Great Haircuts of Future Past: Stop Telling Me to Pay Attention to You, You Omnipotent Whiner

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This is the second in a blog crossover event with Tucker Stone of the Factual Opinion focusing on Darko Macan and Igor Kordey’s run on Soldier X. Tucker’s first post on the last issues of Cable is here. After some preamble below, I talk about the first four issues of Soldier X.
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A little while back, Alyssa Rosenberg posted a piece in which she argued that neither Harry Potter nor Katniss Everdeen (of the Hunger Games) are particularly special in themselves. Instead, Alyssa argues, Harry and Katniss are important because they are used as mascots for a larger cause; they inspire others.

The reason Harry Potter is the main character in the series isn’t that he’s awesome — to the contrary, he’s a fairly average kid, and Snape’s assessment of his overall abilities as a wizard is probably correct. The idea that he’s extraordinary — and really, that extraordinary things can happen in the cause of righteousness — inspires other people to rise to and above their potential. The most interesting moment in the entire series is when he’s presented as dead to the people who have been fighting for him — and they keep fighting, in particular Neville Longbottom, who exists as an illustration of the arbitrariness of Harry’s prestige, and who rises to the occasion, killing the hell out of Nagini even when he’s been set on fire. Ron dashes down to the Chamber of Secrets and just pretends he knows Parseltongue, and it works: again, Harry’s not magically special, but the special things he does inspire people to try crazy and unusual things.

I think Alyssa is right diagetically. Harry isn’t a great wizard; he isn’t presented as being especially strong or smart. He’s a great Quidditch player, and he’s kind and brave, but he’s not a super-hero in the usual sense. He’s more important because of what he symbolizes than because of what he can do physically.

But that somewhat begs the question — why is Harry so important symbolically? Of course, the narrative answer to that question is that Voldemort tried to kill him as a baby and failed. But there’s an extra-diegetic answer as well. And that answer is — Harry Potter is the inspiring symbol because his name is on the cover of the books. He’s the hero not because Rowling’s world has chosen him as a hero, but because Rowling has. Harry’s real super-power, the reason he is special, is that he’s got a direct line to God. It’s more than mere fame; it’s the fact that the universe is about him. It’s like that scene in the Hitchhiker’s Guide where Zaphod Beeblebrox sits down in that machine and discovers that, yep, just as he always thought, the universe was in fact constructed expressly for him. In book after book, it’s Harry who runs across Voldemort, Harry who just happens to be in a place where courage and luck can hand him victory, Harry who, despite not really being all that, gains more and more status through more and more convoluted plotting as he triumphs again and again not because he’s especially smart or powerful or clever, but simply because he’s the star.

The point here is that, contrary to Alyssa, Harry’s specialness has little to do with the workings of political movements, and a lot to do with the workings of serial fiction. In The Hunger Games, for example, which Alyssa also discusses, Katniss Everdeen is skillful and brave and resourceful — but her real importance is that she’s the narrator and star, and so Suzanne Collins keeps putting her in situations where her decisions have world-historical implications, because that’s what you do with your narrator and star.

Now, in light-hearted fare like Tintin or the How to Train Your Dragon books, the fact that the unassuming main character keeps stumbling into Very Important Situations is part of the lark. Harry Potter and the Hunger Games, though, both have pretensions — and thus, inevitably, both series struggle more and more under the weight of their own preposterousness as they go along. Voldemort’s elaborate plan to enmesh Harry in the tri-wizard tournament, or President Snow’s elaborate plan to enmesh Katniss in the Hunger Games again…they both make little sense from the perspective of an actual villain who wants the protagonist dead. You want to kill someone, you kill them; you don’t construct an elaborate game which takes a whole novel to elucidate.

But elaborate games make a lot of sense from the perspective of the watching demiurge who wants the protagonist to have a chance to demonstrate his or her glorious bravery and wit and angsting. Along those lines, when Ron gets all pissed at Harry because Harry is always in the thick of everything and it’s not fair, you can’t help but feel that the kid has a legitimate grievance. It really isn’t fair — and the fact that it’s such flagrant special pleading incidentally makes it a lot less fun to read. Harry doesn’t need superpowers because he’s got the greatest power of all — that of a rolling Mary Sue ex machina.
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And, in case you were wondering, that finally brings me to what I’m in theory supposed to be talking about.

Soldier X opens with a slapstick post-9/11 panic moment as artist Igor Kordey draws a gaggle of cartoonishly bulbish American bodies straining against the narrow panels of an in-flight airline. The bovine panic has been inspired by what the copilot exasperatedly refers to as “Another false shoe alarm.” As the sea of human idiocy flexes and dilates, one young woman types intensely away on her computer, undeterred by ricocheting flight attendants. Said young woman is, it turns out, writing a story at the last minute for the Daily Bugle about a copyright conference…a story she failed to write earlier because she was pursuing leads on Nathan Summers, aka Cable, aka our protagonist.

Thus, writer Darko Macan starts off, first page, first issue, by presenting his hero as a distraction from a distraction from the main action. The result is that you feel strongly that Macan and Korday would rather be focusing on ugly Americans and their cowardice, or even about a copyright conference, but instead are stuck writing about some idiotic super-hero with an incomprehensible backstory in order to pay their bills.

And so it goes throughout the first four issues, more or less. Incompetent agents of SHIELD show up tossing out lame puns and incompetently impersonating ninjas, only to be dispatched by a sumo wrestler in a Sailor Moon suit — and then it’s all spoiled when you have to go back to the superhero title and hear Nathan nattering on and on about how he hasn’t killed a man in two years and blah blah blah, here, let me drop trou so I can dump a giant pile of who-gives-a-shit on your doorstep, hokay? Or, alternately, we get gratuitous dwarf porn and ass-shots of bodacious Eastern European prostitutes, and you say, okay, this is clearly what Mr. Kordey wants to be drawing — but then it’s over and we’re back to some dumb noir patter and watching Cable throw people around with one of those powers and endangering the fabric of our shirts from the repetitive shrugging of compulsive indifference.

At its best, the effect here is one of conscious parody. Nobody but nobody actually cares about Cable the way millions of people care about Harry Potter, and the only one not in on his own utter insignificance is the big dumb ox himself. Cable acts as if he’s the star of the book and even of the universe; he assumes that his main power isn’t telekinesis or big bad guns, but rather the reader’s, and especially the author’s, attention. He thinks he’s Harry Potter, or Katniss, or Superman — that People in Charge care deeply about his angst and his running internal monologue. And, again and again, the People in Charge laugh at him for being a boring dimwitted narcissist, so involved in the endlessly fascinating genre conventions of his own omnipotent navel that he’s unable to notice that the groundlings just want him to fuck off so they can get on with their own crappy lives.

The problem, though, is that the book can’t ever actually tip over into parody; Macan can write insouciant recap pages upon which Kordey can draw gratuitous T&A, but the rest of the book has to at least pretend to be a mainstream Marvel title. And what that means is that Cable’s attention-whoring has to be validated. He not only thinks he’s the most important person in the universe — he actually is that person. That reporter at the beginning of the series is obsessed with him; the SHIELD agents are obsessed with him; various bad guys follow him around as if there’s no other superhero in the world for them to pledge their undying animosity to.

By the fourth issue, the tension between the impulse to cut the star down to size and the genre demands to puff him up seem to give the series something like a creative breakdown. Cable turns into a Christ figure, actually healing the dead, as his internal text blocks achieve an apotheosis of banality (“And this exhilarated me. Scared me. Made me think….This makes you really, really think.”) Macan’s leaping up and down in his underwear screeching, “Pay no attention to that Yahweh in the corner!” while Kordey draws the Resurrection as conducted by a deity whose jockey-shorts have risen up abruptly and uncomfortably high. Both of them seem more than a little desperate, like zombies staggering about in the post-apocalypse searching clumsily but earnestly for their own spilled brains.

Alas, grey matter in comicdom is apportioned out only in precise amounts. The name on the cover is not just a title; it’s a command. Those letters are as big as your world can be, and while Soldier X may not be able to turn your appendix to butterscotch, he can, like Harry Potter on a much smaller scale, do what is worse — whine and make you read it.
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Update: Alyssa has a fun response to this post here.

Update the second: you can now read the complete blog back and forth. Here’s my part. Here’s Tucker’s part.

Of Wires and Weeds

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I’ve been obsessed recently with the Showtime series Weeds, about soccer-mom-turned-pot-dealer Nancy Botwin. I’ve compulsively watched the first three and a half seasons in the last couple of weeks. Thanks a lot, Netflix instant.

Anyway, I had Weeds on the brain when I read this post by Alyssa Rosenberg about how the dealers on the Wire don’t get to have any romance.

But with the exception of D’Angelo Barksdale (who ends up as more of a neutral character), the main members of the drug crews either don’t have long-term relationships or those relationships aren’t a major way of exploring who they are as people (there are exceptions for minor characters, like Bernard, whose girlfriend Squeak leads him into trouble). Avon Barksdale has an ex-girlfriend who Wee-Bay kills, but we don’t see him in any sort of relationship with a woman — probably the most important woman in his life is his mother. Wee-Bay is explicitly non-monogamous, and what relationship he has with his son Namond’s mother mostly concerns Namond’s well-being. Chris Partlow and Michael Lee are both victims of sexual abuse, which motivates murders they commit, but isn’t something we see them work out in intimate relationships. There are interesting possibilities in Snoop’s gender expression, but the show only really explores her as a soldier. I don’t even want to think how Marlo Stanfield would treat a woman he actually dated, much less had sex with and then executed after she turned out to be a spy.

I’m not sure what this disparity means. Does running a drug crew mean folks have less time or inclination to pursue steady relationships? Is it commentary on the crews, suggesting that as they’re peddling one means of social dissolution, they’re engaging in others? Whatever Simon’s intentions, weighting relationship questions and subplots to the police means we get a smaller part of the human spectrum when we look at the crews.

I think Alyssa’s point is correct — the drug dealers are not granted romantic sub-plots. I think the reason is because, for Simon, drug-dealing is an intensely male world. There are some women involved, like Brianna and Snoop, but they’re obviously exceptions, and both have something of an asterix beside them (Brianna is involved because she’s Avon’s sister; Snoop is deviant in multiple ways, not least in her gender presentation.)

The maleness of the drug world means that romantic male-female relationships play a secondary role; the most intense focus of interest for the men is homosocial. For instance, we never see Bodie with a girlfriend — but we do see that he has a big old crush on Stringer Bell. The crush is tied up in Bodie’s ambition and in his desire to be a man; it’s composed of part admiration, part envy, part lust (for power, for money), and it’s the lever that impels Bodie to kill his friend Wallace. I don’t think it’s an accident either that Poot, who is defined in part by his interest in women, eventually gets out of the game.

The main focus of homosocial tension in the Wire, though, is between Avon and Stringer Bell. For both, their partnership is the defining relationship of their lives, and at several points that relationship is explored not just through business, but through sex. The clearest instance of this is when Avon gets out of jail. He’s interested in making time with an attractive woman at his coming home party, but Stringer keeps cornering him with business talk. Finally, Stringer drops a frustrated Avon in a luxury apartment. Avon stands and fumes for a couple of seconds…and then Stringer reappears, the attractive woman and a bonus attractive woman in tow. The whole sequence is a sexual tease, and the teaser is Stringer. He uses the women he’s bought for Avon to seal their partnership and friendship with sex.

The homosocial possibilities of Avon/Stringer slash are contrasted in the Wire with Omar’s much-more-than-possible homosexual relationships. Alyssa doesn’t mention Omar — but he’s a striking exception to her discussion of drug dealers and romance. Which is to say, Omar is very much defined by his serially monogamous romantic relationships. These relationships are all with men — and the suspicion is that they are possible because they are with men. Romance with women is not possible in this world; but men are a different story.

The parallels between Omar’s relationships and the other drug dealers’ relationships calls into question the heterosexuality of the entire milieu, a fact of which the other drug dealers seem nervously aware. Both Avon and Stringer initially want to kill Omar because he robbed them — but what really pisses them off is that he’s gay. Avon ups the bounty on Omar when he learns that he’s a “cock sucker”. And as for Stringer, while it’s never made explicit, it seems clear that part of the reason he uncharacteristically participates in the torture of Brandon, Omar’s lover, is because Brandon is gay. The killing of Brandon, and Omar’s reaction to it, ultimately ends in Stringer’s own murder. Male-male love is the only kind on offer in the world of the gangs — but it’s a love steeped in disavowal, which ultimately leads to tragedy and death.

Weeds presents a very different view of the drug trade. Where the Wire’s dealers are manly men thinking about other manly men with whom not to have sex, the world of Weeds is decidedly matriarchal and up to its orifices in intergender fornication. There are certainly a lot of men involved in dealing, from Nancy’s drop-out son Silas to the agressively psychotic thug U-turn to the more quietly psychotic DEA agent and thug Peter, to the quietly honorable grower Conrad. But they one and all — tough or weak, dumb or competent — drop to their knees if a pretty girl points at her bits. In this show, it’s the women who wear the phallus — sometimes literally, as when Nancy’s brother Andy finds himself unexpectedly sodomized with a large black dildo by one of his girlfriends.

Women make dumb choices out of lust in Weeds too — dealer Heylia James lets her iron competence slip for a few episodes when she falls for a Nation of Islam minister, for example, and Nancy’s increasingly compulsive sluttishness get her into trouble on more than one occasion (most flagrantly in the first couple of seasons when she mistakes scumbag Peter for a nice guy.) But overall, the women on the show are the ones who display a modicum of responsibility and resourcefulness, and who manage to use their sexuality rather than letting it use them. Heylia’s Nation of Islam minister helps her escape a drug bust; Nancy gets Peter to use his DEA office to protect her…and eventually it’s Peter who gets killed (set up by Heylia) not Nancy.

One of the more emblematic moments of Weeds occurs when Alejandro, a rival, violent pot dealer, demands to meet with Nancy after threatening her and her children. Nancy drives out to confront him in an alley, the two get in each other’s faces…and next moment Alejandro is (consensually) fucking Nancy on the hood of a car. Post-coitally, Nancy informs him that he was a good lay, and then sticks a B.B. gun to his dick and tells him to stay away from her or she’ll castrate him. Afterwards, Nancy is extremely upset (“What are you doing?” she asks herself)…but Alejandro turns into a puppy dog, sending her gifts and cheerfully becoming her minion in the drug business even though she tells him she’s not screwing him again.

It’s not entirely clear whether Nancy slept with Alejandro to get the upper hand or whether it was just a case of rampaging hormones. She does tell Alejandro the rutting was unexpected, but she’s certainly capable of lying, to others and to herself. In any case,the point, reiterated throughout the series is clear — men think with their dicks, and their dicks are a lot stupider than women’s cunts.

There’s a tendency to assume that because the Wire’s a gritty serial it must be more realistic than a situation comedy like Weeds. The Wire shows the drug business as a male world, so that’s the way it must be. I’m not so sure though. Weeds seems to get other things closer to right than the Wire does; for example, it’s more on target about police corruption. Moreover, in the freakonomics series where drug dealers commented on the Wire, one argued that the maleness of the show was one of its least convincing features.

“Women,” said Tony-T. “Where I come from, women run most of the things [that the show] talks about. It’s the women that have the power in the ghetto. This show totally got it wrong when they made it all about men. Women are the politicians; they can get you a gun, they got the cash, they can get you land to build something on.”

What’s perhaps more interesting than which is more true to life, though, is the fact that both the Wire and Weeds share the broad assumption that women in control is odd, unusual…or, in other words, funny. When Stringer Bell says something is “just business,” it’s chilling — a sign of his cold, calculating lack of emotion. When Nancy says that a relationship is just business (as when she declares that her relationship with Peter is just a business relationship) it’s generally at least half a joke — she’s covering her ass, or lying to herself, or otherwise shucking and jiving. Because, presumably, nothing with women is just business.

You can see this idea played through in the one woman in the Wire who tries to run a drug business: De’Londa. De’Londa is a controlling, castrating, shallow bitch, who treats her child with unfeeling ruthlessness. She’s a lot like Weeds’ Celia, in other words…and like Celia, the ruthless woman in control is played much more for laughs than are the ruthless men in control. De’Londa is wrong and ridiculed not because she’s evil (lots of people on the Wire are evil) but because she’s a woman and a mother.

In other words, Weeds is a comedy because it’s a matriarchy and a matriarchy because it’s a comedy, just as the Wire is a tragedy because it’s homosocial, and homosocial because it’s a tragedy. Man’s world is serious and scary; woman’s world is funny and sexy. Stringer Bell can no more fall in love than Nancy Botwin can be a tragic Shakespearean hero. Their genders put limits on their genres.
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Update: Alyssa points out that she did mention Omar; she attributes his romance to his neutrality, or as she says: “Characters who aren’t affiliated with the crews like Omar Little, who has multiple long-term relationships throughout the series, or Cutty Wise, who eventually begins dating a nurse, are allowed significant romantic attachments.” Sorry Alyssa!

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Alyssa Rosenberg on Pop Culture and Criticism

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Alyssa Rosenberg writes on pop culture for the Atlantic and at her own blog. We met a while back when she wrote an article on Twilight, to which I responded snarkily, and she responded to my response with much good grace. After that auspicious start, I asked her if she’d be willing to talk about criticism and art for this blog. In response she wrote the essay below.

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When I was in middle school, a prescient friend bought me Isaac Asimov’s Magic, a collection of the science-fiction author’s fantasy writing and essays. Some of that book’s lessons, have lasted with me for more than a decade: Overindustrialization is Mordor. Writing aliens is pretty hard. And perhaps I should have absorbed a third, delivered in the short story “The Critic on the Hearth”: “I have two of my own comments. The first is that every critic ought to become a garbage collector. He will be doing more useful work and he will have a higher social position. The second is that every critic ought to be thrown into the fireplace.”

But by the time I got to Magic, it was already too late. My first career as a pint-sized critic was already behind me–and unbeknownst to me, one of my future paths had been set.

To fill lingering hours after elementary school during a four-year stopover in Middlebury, Vt., my mother had convinced an editor at our local newspaper to give me space on the children’s page to write about books. The criticism, such as it was, that appeared next to a school picture of me in round glasses and a dress with an equally round lace collar wasn’t exactly sophisticated. At eight years old, I wasn’t up to doing much more than picking books that had something in common and explaining that I liked them. Or not.

The column ended when we moved away, and high school and college brought pleasures other than criticism: insanely competitive debate programs, hard-fought municipal elections, the ability to drink legally, writing classes, boys. Each time I felt as if I’d found the Next Thing. With the perpetual certainty of youth, I was alternately sure I was going to be the best high school debater ever, an activist professor, a local political fixer. There were a lot of possibilities that felt more important than journalism, much less something like writing about YA literature. And yet, by my senior year in college, I found myself sending off dozens of applications for journalism and publishing jobs, ending up at National Journal, a respectable and deadly-serious Washington, DC political weekly.

It wasn’t necessarily the platform from which to get back to criticism. But I arrived in Washington in a season when a thousand blogs weren’t just blooming, they were being transplanted into some of the best journalistic greenhouses in the city. And after several years at National Journal and then at Government Executive, a magazine for civil servants, I looked not to political bloggers, but to my eight-year-old self when I decided to start writing on the side and for fun, and wanted to find a meaningful subject. And after watching policy bloggers slug it out against the backdrop of an oft-deadlocked Congress, pop culture seemed more valuable than it had before, as both an escape, and as a field of play. I’ve become a somewhat more sophisticated consumer and observer of media in the last decade and a half. I can explain why I like or don’t like things now. But I’ve also found myself interested in a larger question: what does what we like say about us?

Noah and I met, in fact, because of a disagreement over what the Twilight phenomenon means for discussions about sexuality and gender. We never reached agreement on the merits, but it was clear we were working under the common assumption that culture, particularly popular culture, is a place where both creators and consumers work out real-life issues ranging from deciding whether to have sex before marriage to what would happen in a world with extremely large, well-equipped private armies.

Doing this kind of criticism doesn’t necessarily mean being deadly serious about things that are, after all, a lot of fun. Sometimes a Robyn song is just a Robyn song. But sometimes it’s also an argument for female artists about going independent rather than relying on and being shaped by a major label, just as the pop-rap fusions in collaborations between artists like Kanye West and Keri Hilson or B.o.B. and Janelle Monae are evidence for rap’s conquest and colonization of popular music. The Iron Man movies are fun because Robert Downey, Jr. is relaxed and having a great time playing a roguish industrialist, but they’re also action movies for people who feel ambivalent about the projection of American military power–even if it means they’re settling for an individual having tremendous power, fire- and otherwise, because he’s charming. Unlike in politics, in pop culture the choices don’t always have to be clear. Artists are blessedly free to explore gray areas without risking the career suicide that so often accompanies the impression that a government leader possesses less than crystalline moral clarity.

All pop culture might have larger implications, but that doesn’t mean that pop culture is weighed down or overwhelmed by its larger significance. That means that lots of Americans can murder prostitutes in video game worlds without feeling bad about it, but also that they can absorb relevant lessons about respecting the elderly along with a bunch of jokes about talking dogs. Critics are the people who can live in those tensions and contradictions, who interpret and clarify the meaning in jewels and in junk. Maybe for happily residing in the midst of those fractures, for seeing the value in a movie that involves a little girl beaten up, or a cowardly loan officer dragged to the netherworld by a demon, for balancing difficult aesthetic and political judgements, we still ought to be roasted. But I think in a world where culture has such freighted implications, there’s room for critics along with the garbage collectors.
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Many thanks to Alyssa for her guest post. Please visit her blog if you get the change; she writes on comics, hip hop, television, movies, and lots more.