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Fascism and Black Metal

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This piece originally appeared on Splice Today.
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If you know one thing about black metal, it’s probably that some performers are racist shitheads who burn churches. Jessica Hopper recently published yet another article retailing the various unpleasantnesses committed by Varg Vikernes of Burzum. She did vary the formula a little, though, by acknowledging that not all black metal performers are Nazis. Instead, she argued that all black metal performers have to deal with the fact that the music is originally, inevitably, associated with unpleasant ideologies.

“The genre’s reluctant fans can be divided into a few apologias. There are those who go for the sheepish “but it’s so good I can’t help it” (the artist is creepy, his work divine). And others subscribe to the fantasy that if you don’t cosign the artist’s belief, their platform, their perversion, if you don’t understand what they are singing about, if the song isn’t explicitly promoting an agenda, though the artist may be, that you are less of a participant. Another common excuse is that the lyrics are unintelligible (or not in English, so they don’t “count”), and they are listening to black metal just for the heavy atmospherics.”

As a casual fan of black metal myself, I don’t think I necessarily make any of these apologies. And that’s for the simple reason that there are just tons of black metal acts that aren’t any more ideologically noxious than any other music on my hard drive, and less ideologically noxious than some. Porter Wagoner singing murder ballad after murder ballad about how cool he is for shooting his cheating woman or Janis Joplin signing off on blackface iconography for her album cover seem significantly more dicey to me than listening to Katharsis theatrically shrieking about witches and satan.

It’s true that black metal is focused on evil and death and genocide. But being interested in those things doesn’t have to mean you’re a Nazi. It could mean that you’re Gorecki — whose droning ambience isn’t all that far removed from black metal’s aesthetics, as it happens. And if it sounds crazy to think that Gorecki’s explicitly anti-Holocaust message could find purchase in black metal, I would direct your attention to Pyha, an explicitly pacifist artist whose music sounds like tortured metal emitting a long, sustained groan of lament.

Pyha, a Korean who made his sole album when he was 14 years old, is obviously an oddball. But there are lots of oddballs in black metal. Another of my favorite performers, Botanist, plays hammered dulcimer and preaches plant supremacy and fealty to the forest. The band Frost Like Ashes is part of a small but non-negligible group of Christian unblack metal artists, who tend to sound exactly like black metal except that instead of talking about blood and the pit, they talk about blood and the cross, or about blood and the evils of abortion. And then there are folks like Enslaved who just like to pretend they’re Vikings. Or performers like the black/doom outfit Gallhammer who are dedicated to the proposition that Japanese women can make a noise as terrifying and evil as any Scandinavian dude.

There are also bands like Drudkh who (as the album title Blood in Our Wells indicates) are in fact anti-Semitic assholes. But the reason black metal is defined by anti-Semitic assholery isn’t because all black metal musicians are anti-Semitic, or even that there’s a preponderance of anti-Semitic facists in black metal. It’s because black metal isn’t all that popular, but anti-Semitic assholery makes a good story. Hopper argues that black metal fans have to face especially difficult questions about their music and aesthetic preferences. But it’s not black metal that’s obsessed with fascism; it’s Hopper and buzzfeed and mainstream venues in general. I tried to pitch a piece about how black metal isn’t fascist to a number of largish mainstream outlets. One editor said what I presume the rest of the editors were thinking: this is too niche. Or, translated, an article about how black metal isn’t fascist isn’t something anybody cares about. It’s the fascism our readers want to hear about; without that, you’ve got nothing.

Which isn’t to say that Hopper’s article is terrible, or that the issues she raises are completely irrelevant. How do listeners’ ethics interact with their aesthetics? Why do people like to pretend to be evil? Why are they fascinated by genocide? Those are all interesting questions. But they aren’t all the same question. Using black metal to treat them as such is more about demographics and hit counts than it is about looking for answers.

The Successful Fascism of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers

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Paul Verhoeven’s reputation as a visionary director took quite a hit after his 1995 Showgirls, and the release of Starship Troopers in 1997 only damaged it further. But twenty years have passed and the fickle tides of critical revilement have begun to turn. Adam Nayman’s new monograph on Showgirls, It Doesn’t Suck, argues, well, that Showgirls does not in fact suck. Meanwhile, at the Atlantic, Calum Marsh has been encouraging critics and fans to reexamine Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, pointing out that, contrary to what many critics previously thought, the movie “is satire, a ruthlessly funny and keenly self-aware sendup of right-wing militarism.” I’m all for critical reassessments. I think they can add much to our understanding of a work of art. But these particular reassessments fail to account for what was actually wrong with Verhoeven’s later American filmography. They fail to see that just because a movie imitates a terrible movie perfectly doesn’t make it satire – it just makes it a self-aware terrible movie.

Calum Marsh is not the first person to argue that Starship Troopers is a great movie masquerading as a bad movie. I had a college roommate who thought much the same thing. It is so awful, it is good, he would say, quoting the final line of Sontag’s “Notes of Camp” out of context like a good college student. It is also clearly bad on purpose, my roommate would say, which makes it really ironic, and hilarious. Moreover, my roommate would contend, more quietly now, as the conversation in the space of two sentences had turned deadly serious, it has a message – it is making fun of people who champion war and the effects of fascism.

“Really?” I asked as another bomb blew orange bug blood over the lead space marine.

“Yeah,” he said, “fascism.”

And then one of the characters would say, “do you want to live forever?” and the space marines would charge the bugs with their guns and their bombs and my roommate would laugh and cheer at the irony and the “awesome” CG special effects.

I get what Marsh (and my old roommate) is saying. It’s satire. It’s making fun of people who act like this and the propaganda that creates these situations through hyperbole. In this interpretation, Verhoeven went about with the fastidiousness found in a Borgesian narrator to recreate and caricature the world of fascist propaganda. The clumsiness of the plot, the wooden acting and the facile characterization represent what happens in a fascist society. “War,” Verhoeven himself argued when asked about the movie, “makes fascists of us all.” Elsewhere, he claims he played “with fascism or fascist imagery to point out certain aspects of American society.” By choosing the worst possible (but fantastic looking) actors and then making them naked and have sex and then die at the hands of giant bugs, Verhoeven, it seems to many, has made a teenage fantasy; but it’s okay, because it’s making fun of those teenagers (and their adolescent-minded parents) while it entertains and makes money off of them.

Having been swept into similarly disastrous martial project in real life, I am enormously sympathetic to Verhoeven’s critique of American society. What I find off-putting though is the way Verhoeven went about accomplishing this critique. I have no problem with irony if irony is understood to be – as Richard Rorty claimed – the constant search for more useful metaphors (rather than the search for things as they actually are). Likewise, I have no problem with using irony to effect satire. I do have a problem with people who fall back on irony in lieu of criticism and to escape criticism. Verhoeven and his fellow directors only play at the pretense of irony, an irony that wants to be ironic when it works in their favor to be ironic and obnoxiously moralistic – and decisively reductionist – when it wants to be so. The advantage of this peculiar variation is its utter abnegation of ownership and responsibility – one can enjoy (and market) horrible and exploitive experiences while simultaneously condemning them, a curious rhetorical trick that manages to be both sententious and prurient all at once.

If – in conversation with my roommate – I accused Starship Troopers of being almost nostalgic toward the idea of “a great war” and the propaganda surrounding fascism. He would say, no, the movie is a joke; it’s making fun of this propaganda. But if I accused him of treating it as a joke, he would say, no, it’s a serious commentary on fascism. This sounds a lot like camp, not satire, where the line between that being mocked and that doing the mocking is purposely blurred (check out Oscar Wilde for examples). But the problem with movies like Starship Troopers, which attempt to treat war and fascist ideologies similarly, is the fact that fascism is already a variety of camp. The fascist has, as Walter Benjamin famously pointed out, aestheticized politics. Fascist aesthetics are already achieved through ironic choice – in the idea you can create a new morality and new type of people through a carefully cultivated, exaggerated and self-aware aesthetic of violence and manhood. It is not simply reactionary, but reactionary modernism, part of the same aesthetic world of the surrealists and the “degenerates” they despised. Thus, when a director attempts to mock it through hyperbole, the director reproduces not only the image of fascism but its substance.

You could argue that this is Verhoeven’s point, I suppose, and this is why he did this, to teach us how fascism works by letting the audience stick their hand in the proverbial fire. Yet, I would argue, his source material, Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, is already fascist (in so far as it celebrates a cult and art of virility and war as an answer to social degeneracy), as opposed to faux-fascist, or camp-fascist, and does not need to be imitated through camp. If this is the joke, and the lesson, the book itself is sufficient. He could have used the 100 million he spent on CG effects toward making a movie that really tried to grapple with the dizzying refractions of aestheticized violence rather than imitating it and calling this laziness satire. And this brings me to another problem with the film: if Verhoeven’s project was indeed a straightforward satire, it lacks one important precondition of satire – namely, it isn’t in fact funny. Swift’s “Modest Proposal” is morally horrible and hilarious. Starship Troopers is just horrible, filled with hackneyed pop-cultural references to Vietnam movies as if written by a bunch of teenagers quoting Full Metal Jacket in funny voices. This is not satire, or even amusing, just sophomoric and stupid. At least, more often than not, the pulp violence of Tarantino – which also touches on the intimate and problematic connection between violence and representation – redeems itself by being genuinely clever. I can see parts where Verhoeven (or the screenwriter, Edward Neumeier) tries to be clever, but trying and being clever are two very different things.

In an article on Adam Nayman’s Showgirl’s revisionism, Noah Berlatsky identifies a “long and hypocritical tradition” where “earnest commenters enjoy the degradation of sex workers, and enjoy decrying that degradation, and decry the enjoyment of that degradation—all at the same time.” He suggests Showgirls – if truly a statement about sex workers in America – falls firmly within this prurient, confused and highly sententious tradition. I see no reason why Starship Troopers cannot be considered similarly; it is as a movie like say, Stone’s Natural Born Killers, where earnest commenters enjoy the degradation of violence, and enjoy decrying that degradation, and decry the enjoyment of that degradation. This has the appeal of looking very sophisticated, of having two opposing thoughts in the mind at once, while being, in practice, not only sophomoric and pornographic, but a travesty of self-criticism that strategically insulates itself from criticism.

After nearly twenty years, Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers does not look so original, just one more in a long line of alien invasion movies. It even has sequels, TV shows and video games, all hyperbolic replications like the movie that inspired them. The art, the symbol of war and alien invasion and the purging vision of apocalyptic violence still very much define our politics and culture. This is not Verhoeven’s fault of course, but Starship Troopers in no way contributes to the conversation substantively. At the end of his Atlantic article, Marsh argues that if you get what “was really going on. If you’re open and attuned to it – if you’re prepared for the rigor and intensity of Verhoeven’s approach – you’ll get the joke Starship Troopers is telling. And you’ll laugh.” I can personally attest in the real wars fought since his movie, soldiers honored one of their favorite movies by asking each other, “you going to live forever?” as they charged down hillsides and took pictures of themselves in the streets of Baghdad, Mosul and Kabul. They were being ironic of course, and this made them laugh because it was “self-aware.” Too bad this brand of self-critique looked a lot like fascistic self-indulgence to those not in on the joke.

Read more by Michael Carson at http://wrathbearingtree.wordpress.com/
 

The Basterds Defeat Fascism

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Last week I had a piece at Salon where I talked about fascism and the aestheticization of politics in Dead Poets Society. I’d originally intended to talk about Inglorious Basterds as well…but I ran out of space. So I thought I’d try to do it here.

Just to recap: the aestheticization of the political is a phrase coined by Walter Benjamin to describe one of the characteristics of fascism. Quoting trusty Wikipedia, “In this theory, life and the affairs of living are conceived of as innately artistic, and related to as such politically. Politics are in turn viewed as artistic, and structured like an art form which reciprocates the artistic conception of life being seen as art.” So fascism treats political issues as the occasion for pageantry ; differences in power or goals are all subsumed into symbolic unities — like the Nazi arm band or the mass meeting — or symbolic marginalization — like the scapegoating of Jews and blacks.

Inglorious Basterds is, like all of Quentin Tarantino’s films, so kinetic and pulpy that you don’t necessarily think of it as particularly thoughtful, about fascism or anything else. In fact, though, Tarantino seems almost to have made the movie specifically to illustrate Benjamin’s argument. The Nazi’s in Basterds are obsessed with image and aestheticization. The first scenes of Martin Wutke’s ridiciulously mugging Hitler, for example, are set against a backdrop of an artist working on a large, hyperbolically noble wall painting of the dictator. More, the Nazis in the film are presented as being obsessed with Nazis in film. The plot centers on a screening of a re-enactment of a German war triumph in which the hero, Private Zoller, plays himself. At the direction of propaganda minister Goebbels, Zoller the hero becomes Zoller the icon — a politicized propaganda image of himself. That image is so important that Hitler himself comes to the screening, giggling happily (like Tarantino himself?) as screen Zoller shoots dozens of men. Hitler compliments Goebbels enthusiastically on the screen carnage, at which Goebbels almost breaks down in tears — a propagandist who believes in his own imagined Fuhrer.

You could say that the aestheticization of politics dooms the Nazi’s in the film; they’re so obsessed with the propaganda image they’re creating that all of the Nazi brass decide to attend the opening of Zoller’s film, exposing themselves to not one, but several murderous plots. The image of Nazi victory turns into the reality of Nazi defeat — Zoller himself is shot by a French Jewish plotter even as his film self (played by his real self) kills enemy soldier after enemy soldier onscreen. And we get to see Hitler riddled with bullets by Jewish-American soldiers, doomed by his love of (his own) image.

Of course, Hitler wasn’t really killed by a Jewish-American soldier in a movie theater. That’s just a filmed fantasy of victory — a Western mirror image of the Zoller film. Hitler sits himself down to see an iconic, aestheticized encapsulation of his political prejudices, and we do exactly the same thing. Tarantino positions us, watching the Nazis die, in the same place as the Nazis watching their enemies die.

If the Nazis aestheticize the political, in other words, then so does Tarantino, and so, in the same way, do we watching Tarantino’s film. Inglorious Basterds is one suspense tour de force after another, with larger than life characters pirouetting virtuosically through breathtaking set pieces, punctuated with knowing flash-backs, ironic voice overs, and compulsive references to films, films, films, from spaghetti westerns to Triumph of the Will. The violence, the plotting, the revenge narrative and the sheer spectacle are so overwhelming and delightful that the occasional nos to political content is actually jarring. When Jew-Hunter Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) makes an offhand remark about how he can “think like a Jew,” and compares Jews to rats, it seems gauche, unnecessary. He’s just supposed to order that family shot in a blaze of choreographed violence; linking the bloodbath to some sort of ideological meaning seems wrong.

The implication here is that, in important ways, Western democracy isn’t all that much different than fascism. The politics of both are couched in aestheticized symbols and mass ideology as spectacle. Brad Pitt’s murderous American guerilla Aldo Raine operates on much the same principles as his Nazi enemies; just as they see the Jews as a species, so he sees them as subhuman, marked. As he says, the idea that a Nazi soldier might go home, take off his uniform, and return to civilian life is wrong and inconceivable. A Nazi is always a Nazi, and so Aldo carves a swastika onto the foreheads of his prisoners, to make sure that the categorical difference he sees, the clear division of the races, will remain symbolically visible — political demarkations given aesthetic form. (It’s worth noting too that Aldo is nicknamed the “Apache” for his habit of taking scalps. Tarantino may well be aware aware that the American Indian genocide was a direct source of inspiration for Hitler’s Holocaust.)

The last image of the film is Aldo and an associate looking out of the screen, supposedly at the swastika Aldo has just carved in Landa’s head. “I think this just might be my masterpiece,” Aldo says. It’s a self-reference; Aldo is a stand-in for Tarantino, who completes his film about Nazis at the same time as Aldo completes his Nazi symbol. But Aldo’s self-satisfied smirk is also (self-)deceptive. The Nazi here is not going to remain a Nazi; as soon as the film ends, in fact, Landa will go back to being Christoph Waltz, who (thankfully) has no swastika carved into his skull. Aldo’s dream of Nazis who are forever Nazi, like Tarantino’s dream of Hitler killed in a movie theater — they’re both just aesthetic fictions. Politics as symbol ultimately fails.

It’s true that part of the giddy rush of Inglorious Basterds is the sense that art can be politics; that we can make Jews take their revenge on Hitler just by representing it as truth. But part of the film’s power is also, contradictorily, the refusal of aestheticization; the insistent artificiality and theatricality remind you that the politics here are aesthetics, and so never allow the first to be subsumed by the second. Aldo can’t really reach out of the film and draw the swastika on our head. The symbol he wants to be totalizing isn’t — which means, maybe, that these bloody fantasies don’t have to control us forever. The real hope of Basterds isn’t that the Nazis will get theirs, but that, maybe, we can take off that uniform, and leave the theater.
 

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Liberal Fascism

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573Earlier this week, Brannon Costello suggested (with a hat tip to Walter Benjamin) that fascism could be seen “as the aestheticization of political life, the process by which a state-sponsored fantasy of heroic struggle overwrites and replaces real social, economic, and political anxieties.”

I was thinking about this definition in terms of C.S. Friedman’s novel “In Conquest Born.” The book is sci-fi space opera, but it functions in a lot of ways as a super-hero narrative. The main character, Zatar, is a Braxin, a warlike culture of distant human descendents who have been genetically manipulated to be superstrong and supertough. Zatar is strong and tough and cunning even by the strong, tough, cunning standards of Braxia, and much of the book is a series of vignettes designed to show just how damn awesome he is. He infiltrates the enemy Azeans and poisons a key figure; he goes on a one-person space ship and withstands high gravity pressures in a way no one has withstood high gravity pressure before, he machinates sneaky spy plots causing the death of his enemies, he wows women and has his way with them. He commits ultra-cool sneaky awesome genocide. And so forth.

Again, this fits pretty easily into superhero tropes — and/or supervillain tropes to the extent that they can be distinguished. What’s interesting, though, is that the superhero fascist undertones — the way in which aesthetics replaces politics — are here made thoroughly explicit. Braxia is fascist state. As I said, it’s a warrior empire; it just about worships war and battle. It’s organized along racial lines, too: the rulers (the Braxia) are a small minority of genetically enhanced humans. The regime is hyperbolically masculine; rape of women is legalized, and rule or subservience to women is seen as terrifying and evil.

The novel doesn’t exactly endorse the Braxian view of the world — it’s supposed to be a brutal, ugly culture. But that brutality and ugliness are in themselves an aesthetic attraction; a venue the main purpose of which is to set off Zatar’s charismatic brutality and ruthlessness all the more vividly, and therefore all the more sexily. There’s a sense in which the entire nasty race, complete with legalized rape and endless warfare, is there just so we can watch various brutal, hard warlike men and women fall to their knees (often literally) before Zatar’s bigger, badder warlike bits. The political/social trappings of a fascist state are all channeled into the aesthetic pleasure of the Mary Sue.

Zatar isn’t the only Mary Sue in “In Conquest Born.” Friedman has another; Zatar’s sworn enemy, Anzha, a member of the Azeans, a culture locked in an unending war with the Braxins. Anzha is a powerful telepath, and the part of the book that is not devoted to showcasing Zatar’s awesomeness is devoted to showcasing Anzha’s. The capstone of ridiculousness here is when Anzha, more or less at random, has to cross an ice planet and succeeds by telepathically bonding with intelligent extraterrestrial superwolves. “In Conquest Born” is from the 1980s, before fan-fic really took off, but that just shows that the tropes are of long-standing. And yes, after she succeeds, people kneel down to her too.

But despite that kneeling, Azea is a very different society from Braxin. It’s not a warrior culture. Women are equal to men. It arrives at decisions through a not-super-well-defined-but-still democratic process. It’s remarkably racially heterogeneous as well; the Anzha empire is based on equality, and many alien peoples are equal members. The society isn’t perfect by any means; Anzha faces discrimination because she doesn’t physically fit the genetic human Azea pattern, and the telepathic bureaucratic secret organization screws with her brain in unpleasant ways without her consent. But still, in its broad outlines and ideology, Anzha pursues a liberal policy of peace and inclusion, rather than a fascist policy of war and purity. Anzha, with her telepathy and her fierce love of war and killing all things Braxin (because Zatar poisoned her parents) could be seen as a Superman figure, a liberal, battling, anti-fascist fascist.

Siegel and Shuster didn’t monkey around with relativism; Superman may have been a kind of doppelganger of the Aryan Ubermensch, but that wasn’t meant to create an equivalent. Good was good, bad was bad; and if one was the mirror of the other, that emphasized the differences, not the similarities.

Friedman is less partisan. Ultimately, I think Anzha is supposed to be the force for good, not least because she wins in the end. But, again, the two characters work in almost exactly the same way — they’re both dark, heroic, angsty totems performing awesomeness in repetitive set pieces. Zatar replaces the fascist political system with the aesthetic iconicity of his coolness; Anzha replaces the liberal political system with the aesthetic iconicity of her coolness. And not just the political systems themselves, but the conflict between them, is turned into an individual matter of style, as Zatar and Anzha are enmeshed in a personal grudge feud/telepathic love thingee, which shakes the stars and keeps the pages turning, if you like that sort of thing.

You could see this as exposing the definition of fascism that we’re working with here as self-contradictory. Aestheticization of politics means that aesthetics overwrites politics — in which case the content of the politics doesn’t really matter. Fascism, liberalism — who cares? As long as you’ve got your anti-heroes, it’s trivial whether they run with wolves or commit genocide. It’s all the same marginally entertaining genre fiction, and it doesn’t need to mean anything more than that.

From a bleaker perspective, though, you could argue that the banality of the genre fiction, the emptiness of its political content, is a sign not of the irrelevance of fascism, but of its ubiquity as a kind of substrate in both mass culture and modernity. Those dreams of strong warriors to whom everyone kneels; they’re as native to Azea as to Braxin, it seems like. Victory of one over the other is a satisfying denoument, not for any ethical or political reason, but simply because the strong looks stronger when he, or she, subjugates the strong.If modernity overwrites all political systems with aesthetics, then fascism isn’t just one possible political system of our day, but the blueprint for them all.

“A Fantasy Solution to Real Problems” – Howard Chaykin and Superhero Fascism

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I’ve been reading the conversation about fascism and superheroes here at HU with a lot of interest. As I argue in my piece on Howard Chaykin’s Blackhawk revival that recently appeared in ImageTexT, a defining feature of Chaykin’s career is his sustained, thoughtful engagement of the relationship between fascism and comic books — including, but not limited to, superhero comics. Chaykin is matter-of-fact in acknowledging that the allure of fascism is at the heart of heroic-fantasy genre comics. As I discuss in that essay, he notes that “[Blackhawk is] clearly an important book in the memories of men my age, who remember the Blackhawks as flying fascists on our side” (Conversations 112-13). He puts it even more bluntly in another interview: “[Blackhawk was] a protofascist comic book. It is Nazis fighting for us – these guys in leather outfits, you know” (Conversations). OK, the Blackhawks are low-hanging fruit — even Will Eisner described them as “fascistic,” and he had a hand in creating them — but a cursory examination of superhero comics from nearly any era reveals a plethora of characters, imagery, and stories that resonate broadly with the ideals and aesthetics associated with historical fascist movements in the twentieth century, whatever the ideals or intentions of the writers and artists of those comics.(Please note that, like Noah in his post, I am not necessarily saying superheroes = fascist.)

Chaykin’s comics that focus on fascism tend to place the authoritarian, might-makes-right aspects of fascist ideology within a larger project of fascist aesthetics — what Walter Benjamin characterized as the aestheticization of political life, the process by which a state-sponsored fantasy of heroic struggle overwrites and replaces real social, economic, and political anxieties. Much like Frankfurt School critics such as Theodor Adorno, Chaykin’s work draws connections between the effects of fascist aesthetics and the effects of contemporary popular culture — though I wouldn’t say that Chaykin and Adorno are exactly marching in lockstep when it comes to the value of pop culture — including and especially superhero comics. As he remarked to one interviewer, “We live in a world that has been so completely filtered through filters of unreality because the real world is so much more difficult to deal with than a fantasy version of it” (Conversations 177). For Chaykin, superhero comics are a prime vehicle for this kind of fantasy. Of the typical comic book reader, he remarks, “They feel completely impotent, they feel completely unable to make any effect on their own world, and it’s easier to turn it over to a superhero” (Conversations 170).
 

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Blackhawk is maybe his best-realized take on the relationship between mass culture and fascist aesthetics, but that dynamic is at the heart of his most interesting superhero work, too. I wrote a bit about this topic in the context of Chaykin’s Batman comics here. His 1994 superhero satire Power & Glory (four-issues and a one-shot special) offers a slightly different spin on this theme, placing the ideal of the fascist superbody in the context of the critique of the pleasures and perils of mass culture that is at the heart of all his work (and that is the focus of my ongoing book project on Chaykin). Power & Glory is about what happens when the U.S. government decides to abandon its futile attempt to compete with China, Germany, and the rest of the world in the production of tangible consumer goods and to devote all its efforts to the one thing it’s always done well: the production of nationalist fantasy. To this end, government scientists create a new superhero called A-Pex to fill America’s hearts with pride through acts of (staged but spectacular) derring-do. Michael Gorski, the government operative assigned to be A-Pex’s handler, makes the connection between superheroes and fascism explicit when he complains to his bosses, “Face it — the real world isn’t a god damned comic book. But you had to make an ubermensch — a fantasy solution to real problems” (#3).

A-Pex proves initially to be a resounding success — his licensed image proliferates like a virus. But there’s trouble behind the scenes. Gorksi and Allan Powell, the man in the A-Pex suit, loathe each other. Gorski is another iteration of the familiar Chaykin protagonist — not just dark-haired, left-handed, and Jewish, as Chaykin likes to say (Conversations 21), but also self-righteous and a little romantic about his own ideals, if not totally above corruption. By contrast, Powell, blonde and blue-eyed, is an amoral, narcissistic sociopath who has volunteered to become A-Pex for very particular reasons having little to do with American greatness. Powell is terrified of contracting AIDS or any other STD; indeed, he has a downright horror of even being touched. (In the first issue we see him masturbating with gloved hands while two prostitutes frolic in front of him; when they attempt to draw him into the action, he panics — “Who knows where you’ve been?”) Powell is only attracted to the program because it renders him impervious to disease and bullets alike, safely protected by his “invulnerable body of throbbing pink steel” (Holiday Special). No matter how many times he is reassured of his invulnerability, his fears are so intense that Gorski ends up having to complete most of Powell’s missions from behind the scenes. (Chaykin has pointed to a documentary about puppeteering as an inspiration for the series, but you could make the case that there’s a riff on comics history here, with Gorski as a stand-in for Jewish creators from the superhero’s early days who struggled to maintain control — legal and financial but also maybe interpretive — over the Aryan overmen they created.)

It’s in the contrast between Powell’s hyper-masculine physique and his debilitating horror of infection that Chaykin develops his critique of the superhero’s superbody, an aspect of the genre that alarmed anti-fascist cultural watchdogs including Walter Ong, who disliked the way that the superhero genre combined a simple-minded nationalism with a celebration of the powerful male body — or, as Ong puts it, the “permanent orgy of muscularity” (39). Such super-men played an important role in the fascist aesthetics of Nazi Germany, of course. In his study Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit traces the veneration of the, steel-hard body of the soldier-male back to the proto-fascist Freikorps literature of the 1920s and 1930s. The writers of the Freikorps dealt with their anxiety over the dissolution of the body and the nation by valorizing the ideal of the armored soldier-male, repeatedly and insistently describing iron-hard, even mechanized bodies standing proud and erect against the floods, mires, and swamps (non-Aryans, communists, women) that threaten to engulf and penetrate them. As Theweleit writes, “The most urgent task of the man of steel is to pursue, to dam in, and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horrible disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines, and feelings that calls itself human” (160). He does so by “defend[ing] himself with a kind of sustained erection of his whole body, of whole cities, of whole troop units” (244).

As a steel-hard superhero shill for American exceptionalism whose image is endlessly replicated across popular culture, from movies to video games to fish-stick packaging, Powell is a perfect vehicle for Chaykin’s satire of the anxieties and neuroses that underlie fantasies such as the ones Theweleit describes. Despite his incredible power, he flees in panic whenever he perceives any threat of contagion or contamination, whenever he confronts anything that would threaten the ideal of masculinity that he literally embodies — especially more fluid notions of gender and sexuality. In fact, this is what his superhero image is founded on: the event that gets him over with the American public is when he flips his lid upon discovering that a suspected drug courier is a transvestite, shrieking “No touching!! Who knows where she’s been?” and snapping his victim’s neck when he flails his arms in panic (#3). His reflexive violence is spun as the utmost heroism by the government and a compliant media, and a superstar is born.

That tension between Powell’s invulnerability and his horror of contamination runs throughout the background of the main Power & Glory series, but it is central to the Power & Glory Holiday Special. In this final installment of the series, Powell and Gorski have severed their ties with the government and have separately ended up at work for a private corporation. Their new employer, PLEX/Biomatrix, is pioneering a new process to give ordinary people powers like Powell’s. P/B is promoting its brand through a lottery whose winner will receive a superbody for one week (after which point the nanobots that keep one’s body steel-hard will be turned off). But the lottery’s winner, an “infonet gospel guru” named Epiphany St. McMiracle, has other plans. Already infected with HIV by a philandering husband, St. McMiracle has decided to use her new powers to take the rest of the world down with her. Gorski and Powell think they’ve bested her at first, overloading the nanobots in her bloodstream until she explodes, spraying blood and tissue all over them, much to Powell’s dismay. But she quickly returns, this time as the embodiment of the fears that Theweleit described: a sentient, flowing mass of blood, capable of taking human form but also of extending its tendrils to wash over, penetrate, and absorb its victims. When St. McMiracle announces that she intends to slither up Gorski’s nose and make his body her own, Chaykin’s page layout drives home the radical nature of her threat. Chaykin divides the page into four narrow vertical panels, but in the second panel St. McMiracle grips Gorski by the front of his suit and thrusts him outward, toward the reader, violating the rigid borders of the other panels with his body and thus undermining the strict divisions on the page in the same way that she prepares to violate his body. The fact that she is planning literally to become a woman in a man’s body only underscores the way in which St. McMiracle threatens the fantasy of heroic masculinity that is so fundamental to the superhero ideal.
 

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It’s an interesting, potentially problematic moment for the series. On the one hand, Power and Glory is clearly a critique of the superbody ideal and holds Powell in contempt for his horror of being infected by women. Yet despite the series’ disdain for Powell, the villain here is literally a giant oozing blood woman who, ridiculous as it sounds, poses a real threat to the world within the context of the story. (Here I should probably stress that St. McMiracle and the prostitutes I mentioned earlier are not the only women in the series, which includes two female characters, Avis Catlett and Vanessa Cheng, who are well developed within the limitations of their supporting roles.) It’s the age-old tension inherent in parody, which inevitably reproduces the thing it wishes to mock.

It’s significant that Gorski and Powell don’t triumph over St. McMiracle through the virtue of their erect steeliness but through an alternative notion of the body that embraces the very truth that Theweleit claims the soldier-male stands against. At a crucial moment, Gorski recalls that the scientists who designed the nano-bots created a failsafe: the ‘bots will go inert at the eleven notes of “great gray gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts.” It’s an odd choice but thematically apt: the children’s song is all about humorously acknowledging and jokingly embracing the “disorganized jumble,” to use Theweleit’s phrase, of oozing, messy body parts.

The paradox of the book’s climax is that by singing the song and forcing St. McMiracle to discorporate while she holds him high above the ground, Gorski is forced to fall back on Powell and, implicitly, the superheroic fantasy he embodies. (Powell punches through a wall to catch him.) Thus, the Holiday Special ends on a curious note of reconciliation between two men who despise each other. Or maybe it’s just resignation. It’s tempting to read Gorski’s grudging rapprochement with Powell as reflecting Chaykin’s own resigned acceptance of the dominance of superhero narratives over the so-called mainstream comics marketplace. After all, Power & Glory came out in 1994, in the midst of the Image Boom. The Image books enjoyed massive commercial success based on speculation and a visual style that favored Awesomeness over draftsmanship or visual storytelling. At the time, Chaykin described them as “posing comics” and “trading-card comics” (Conversations 170). It was an ethos that couldn’t be further from that which informed the formally ambitious, narratively dense, deeply individual work that Chaykin produced throughout the 1980s. The fact that this work, while often critically acclaimed, didn’t lead to the kind of financial rewards that some of his peers enjoyed is part of what led Chaykin to shift his efforts away from comics and toward screenwriting throughout most of the 1990s.

The prospect of empty-headed, fascist-friendly superhero narratives taking over the marketplace where he spent most of his career to that point may have been frustrating to Chaykin. But Power & Glory — one of the very few comics that he produced as writer/artist in the 1990s — works as a way for Chaykin to redefine those narratives on his own terms. For Chaykin, what superhero comics are not about the insidious, sinister power of fascist fantasies; rather, they’re about the anxiety, weakness, and neurosis that underlie them.

—
Brannon Costello is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, where he teaches and writes about southern literature and comics. He is currently at work on Lost in the Futurama: The Comics Art of Howard Chaykin for LSU Press.

Costello, Brannon, ed. Howard Chaykin: Conversations. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2011.

Ong, Walter. “The Comics and the Super State.” Arizona Quarterly 1.3 (1945): 34-48.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Trans. Stephen Conway. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987

The Good, The Bad, and the Fascist

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Lots of folks have told me to read Mike Mignola, most recently Craig Fischer. So when I saw the second volume, “Wake the Devil”, at the library the other day I figured I’d give it a shot.

And the verdict is…eh. Either the hype is way out of proportion, or “Wake the Devil” isn’t the thing to read. For whatever reason, though, and however you look at it, volume 2 of Hellboy is a thoroughly mediocre piece of genre nothing. Characterization barely exists, while the plot mostly involves various monstrous super villains making ominous portentous speeches and then getting their slimy butts kicked as Hellboy cracks wise and talks tough. If you think Lee/Kirby were geniuses of pulp construction — then, yeah, this still wouldn’t be especially good.

For that matter, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, which is somewhat similar in its reliance on mythological baddies and in its video-game one big-boss-battle-after-another structure, is significantly wittier and more inventive — and, for that matter, more viscerally suspenseful. Riordan’s characters are kids; they’ve got great powers, but they’re not always sure how to use them, and when they fight monsters they’re scared. In Lost Hero, there’s a scene where one of the kids, Leo, has to rescue his friends from a bunch of cyclops, and finally lets loose with the fire powers he’s been afraid of, and he blasts them.
 

He pointed one finger in the air and summoned all his will. He’d never tried to do anything so focused and intense—but he shot a bolog of white-hot falmes at the chain suspending the enging block above the Cyclops’s head—aiming for the link that looked weaker than the rest.

The flames died. Nothing happened. Ma Gasket laughed. “An impressive try, son of Hephaestus. It’s been many centuries since I saw a fire user. You’ll make a spicy appetizer!”

The chian snapped — that single link heated beyond its tolerancepoint—and the engine block fell, deadly and silent.

“I don’t think so,” Leo said.

Ma Gasket didn’t even have time to look up.

Smash! No more Cyclops—just a pile of dust under a five-ton block.

I wouldn’t make any claims for that as great literature, but it’s exhilarating and awesome and fun, with a nice Looney Tunes timing, and you care because he was at risk and you’re rooting for him and then he triumphs.

But Hellboy is the impassive undefeatable gunslinger from the beginning. He never seems to doubt his ability to win, and the comic never doubts it either. He just blasts one baddy after another, be they vampire, lamia, or whatever. You never feel exhilarated or impressed, or even interested. The comic is one long crescendo, without any build-up or melody. It starts off irritating, and by the end you just wish it would shut the fuck up. Even the gratuitous deaths of some minor extra side-protagonists can’t elicit much more than a shrug. Some action movie cannon-fodder got offed. Might as well have killed a storm trooper. Ho-hum.

The utter lack of emotional resonance means that the good guys and bad guys become virtually interchangeable. It’s true that the bad guys are clearly labeled as Nazis — but even so, it wasn’t clear why I should root against them. They didn’t actually seem to care about Jews or racial purity from anything that they said; they just wanted to destroy the world. And halfway through, I wanted to destroy Mignola’s world too. If a dragon from the deep rose up and swallowed Hellboy and the earth as well, leaving the second half of the volume just big, blank, black pages, I would have said, hey, the story’s over, I don’t have to read anymore, cool. I’d even enjoy seeing Hellboy have his boasting and wisecracking shoved up his infernal and impassive ass-crack. It’s true that most of the villains were boring and stock too, but their constant defeat did lend them a kind of pathos. The one sad guy who reanimates his friend as a head in a jar only to have them both killed shortly thereafter; Rasputin (yes that Rasputin) whining to his mama at the end because Hellboy beat him again — I mean, I don’t want to read any more about either of them, really. They’re no rat creatures. They just have slightly more personality than Hellboy. It’s not a high bar, but better to clear it than not.
 

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Bad guy boasts. Hellboy boasts. Bad guy gets stomped. Repeat.

 
The clumsiness and the lack of inspiration in “Wake the Devil” does lead to a kind of brute, Neanderthal genre insight, though. The comic really isn’t about anything but good guys and bad guys hitting each other, those “good guys” and “bad guys” designated by arbitrary fiat. One side is good, the side you root for, which wins. The other is bad, the side you root against, which loses. That’s the algorithm — the ideologies (destroy the world! bathe in blood! whatever!) barely register as anything but an overheated garble of rhetoric. The cops stomp their hellboots on that whining, sneering face for all eternity — and who cares what the face tries to say before the boot comes down? Behold the Superman as anti-fascist fascism — the devil who beats the devil.

The Running Superhero

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stephen-king-the-running-manA few weeks back I reposted an essay on superhero and fascism. Somewhat to my surprise, it generated more than 150 comments, mostly from folks skeptical about my thesis.

That thesis was, to recap quickly, that superhero narratives are about fascism. That isn’t to say that superheroes are always fascist. On the contrary, there are a lot of superhero stories, like Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, or Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, or the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman, or Watchmen, which consciously work against the superhero-as-fascist trope, offering some combination of parody and critique. Those parodies and critiques go back to the beginning of the genre, just about. And, for that matter, Superman himself is a response to fascism, a kind of New Deal mirror image of the Nietzschean Nazi Superman, both embodiment and critique.

With that in mind, it’s maybe interesting to look at fascism in light of another typical male action hero narrative that is not a superhero story. In particular, Stephen King’s Running Man.

Running Man is a dystopic near-future reality show adventure from way back in 1982, long before Battle Royal or the Hunger Games (or the reality television craze, for that matter.) The story is set in 2025, and our hero, Ben Richards, is part of the mass of impoverished peons living in environmentally degraded inner cities. He’s out of work; his little girl is deathly ill with pneumonia, his wife turns tricks to try to get her crappy, black market medicine. In desperation, Richards decides to compete on one of the deadly reality television shows where proles are paid to get abused and killed for the entertainment of the masses. Richards ends up on the highest rated show, the Running Man, where he essentially becomes a fugitive, with the entire apparatus of the state hunting him down for a mass audience.

In a lot of ways, Richards is not unlike Batman or Daredevil, or any of a number of scrappy, ground level low-power superheroes. He’s extremely resourceful, cunning, and deadly, a master of both disguise and improvised violence. The scene where he rigs an explosion in the basement of the YMCA, killing at least five cops before making his escape through a sewer pipe, is reminiscent of Rorschach’s deadly fight with police involving kitchen products and a spear gun. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Moore had read The Running Man, though I doubt it was a direct influence.)

The surface similarities, though, just emphasize the differences. Rorschach fights the cops because his fight against crime is illegal — but he never actually tries to, or thinks about, fighting the cops because the system is corrupt. Superheroes fight bad guys; cops may be collateral damage, but the enemy is the criminals, not the state. The one hero who does launch an attack on the powers that be is Veidt — and in so doing, he demonstrates that he’s a (ironized, complicated, but still) super-villain.

In The Running Man, on the other hand, the state is the bad guy. Whereas in Watchmen, or in any random Bat-or Spider-title, the proliferating evidence of evil and corruption are low level street punks and thugs, in the Running Man the minions are the cops, who glower and lurk around every page, fat, dumb, menacing and dangerous, the toughest street gang around. The dastardly supervillains with their fiendish plots are the guys in suits, the executives and government manipulators who have let industrial by-products turn the air into a carcinogen and then refuse to distribute filters to the poor. Rorschach, or Batman, or Spider-man, fight for decency and justice, but in Richards’ world, decency and justice are just a ruse or brutality. “If you’re so decent,” as Richards says to a woman he kidnaps, “how come you have six thousand New Dollars to buy this fancy car while my little girl dies of the flu?”

You could argue that Richards is not a superhero because he doesn’t have superpowers or a costume or a secret identity. But all of those aspects of superherodom are really more or less optiona. What really makes Richards not a superhero is that he’s neither a fascist nor really troping against fascism. Heroes in this world don’t have the power. The guys with the power are villains.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that The Running Man, by virtue of separating power and goodness, is more moral than superhero narratives. In the midst of our perpetual recession, The Running Man does seem almost eerily relevant, but that doesn’t necessarily make Richards, or the novel, especially admirable. Just for starters, the book treats the injustice it documents as a crisis of masculinity; poverty has emasculated Richards, and the violence he perpetrates during the game is an extended demonstration that he’s retrieved his bits. In one particularly unpleasant scene, he undergoes psychological testing by a woman in improbably revealing clothing, and demonstrates what a bad ass he is by leering at her and then patting her rear. When she tearfully tells him he’ll get in trouble, he responds that she’ll lose her job if she reports him. Why she would isn’t very clear, but such logical hurdles are less important than making sure Richards can assert his manliness through the tried and true method of sexual harassment.

And if garden-variety misogyny isn’t enough for you, there’s the book’s denoument, in which Rogers flies a plane into the giant skyscraper housing the government bureaucracy that controls the games. King wrote this 20 years before 9/11, but looking back now from that vantage, it seems like an eerily precognitive endorsement of the attacks. Marginalized people with nothing to lose destroy the towering symbol of their oppression. It feels a lot less celebratory when you’ve had a chance to actually count the dead.

As this suggests, Running Man is as violent, or more violent, than most supehero narratives — but the violence is the violence of revolution, not law and order. Richards isn’t a glorified cop; he’s a glorified criminal. And not one of those patented superhero mistaken-for-a-criminal-but-still-fighting-for-order kind of things, a la Miller’s Daredevil or Dark Knight.

There is actually a moment towards the end of the book where Richards thinks about becoming a cop. He’s been so successful at the game that the powers that be offer to make him the chief Hunter; the head of the evil bastards who track down the running men. He’d be an uber-cop — or,if you will, a superhero. Maybe, then, Running Man is a kind of superhero narrative after all, at least in the sense that fascism, or superheroism, trail Richards like a shadow, both inescapable oppressor and dark double.