Meta-Crap

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

For God’s sake don’t make me watch any more.

We’re doing a Joss Whedon roundtable hopefully week after next. In preparation, I thought I would watch Dollhouse…but it’s so crappy I don’t think I’ll actually make it all the way through. I like Eliza Dushku; she’s charming, if not exactly talented. But charm can only take you so far.

Anyway, what’s interesting to me in the first few episodes is how they work as self-parody of television writ large. Echo (that’s Dushku) is a mind-wiped young woman who gets some new personality transferred into her in each episode, at the behest of some paying client who wants a customized toy human to play with. Each of the scenarios is basically a clichéd and indifferently realized genre exercise: Echo becomes a profiler and deals with kidnappers; echo goes into the woods with an outdoorsman and then it turns out he’s a psychopath and she’s in a slasher movie; Echo is programmed as a swaggering art thief in a caper gone wrong. The blips in echo’s program function as a kind of wink at televisions myriad plot-holes. In one episode Echo is programmed to protect a pop singer, and keeps protecting her because the programming/plot demands that she should, even when, as far as character consistency goes, it makes no sense. In that art thief ep, Echo is mind-wiped half way through, becoming completely useless—echoing, again, the erratic competence of tv characters, who are as hapless or as effective as the plot requires. The fact that Dollhouse is itself wretched television only makes its meta-commentary on the wretchedness of television more perfect. It is itself the slipshod awfulness it mimics; Whedon is a fool performing a perfectly brainless imitation of a fool.

Dollhouse isn’t just a parody of television, though; it’s a parody of Whedon himself—and particularly of his feminism. Each of the personalities injected into Echo is resourceful, intelligent, determined. They’re strong female characters all. But they’re strong female characters that are made up, and visibly hollow. More, they’re strong female characters who just about all seem designed to be raped. Echo is often programmed to have romantic and sexual encounters—and such encounters are of course not consented to by Echo’s original personality, wherever that may be. For that matter, the insertion of the personalities into a unwitting body is itself a kind of assault. The creation of strong female characters is conflated with skeevy, snickering, and generally horrible abuse. This juxtaposition fits rather too neatly onto, for example, Buffy, where the strong female lead is frequently punished and shamed for her strength, almost as if the whole point of creating strong women is to run them through a sadomasochistic fever dream.

I only made it through episode 5, and in theory 6 is where things start to somewhat improve. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there…but I guess I do grudgingly admire the start of the series for its unremittingly self-accusatory awfulness. It’s hard to think of another series that so self-consciously uses its own crappiness to indict its medium and its creator.

Announcing…the Next Roundtable!

Posted on April 26, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

So, we’ve had a ton of suggestions as to what to do for the next roundtable, from Roz Chast’s new book to the Claremont X-Men to Mad Men. I have considered all the suggestions carefully, weighed the pros and cons, and decided on the next one true roundtable topic.

(Drumroll.)

Joss Whedon!

Okay, so no one actually suggested that we do a roundtable on Joss Whedon. But! I am morally certain lots of folks are interested in him, and I would like a better sense of his virtues and weaknesses.

In short, I am a not especially benevolent dictator, and I say Joss Whedon it is.

Unless no one will write about Joss Whedon, in which case we’ll have to pick something else, or shutter the blog, or take drastic measures. So! If you would like to avoid that horrible fate, whatever it is, say you will write about Joss Whedon in the comments, or email me or contact me psychically if you are able to do that.

Update: There seems some interest in this from folks who haven’t written here before, so I should probably explain that HU is an all volunteer endeavor, alas; we have no ads, no funding, and no one gets paid. So, if that does not dissuade you, we’d love to hear from new folks!

Be White Or Explode

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Agents of SHIELD starts out as a black superhero story. Mike Peterson (J. August Richards), a laid-off factory worker, is on the street with his son when a building nearby explodes (as they do.) He hears someone screaming for help inside, and uses super strength to smash handholds in the wall, climb up, and save the damsel in distress. He then leaps to the ground and slinks away, covering his head with his hoodie. He’s soon being referred to as the Hooded Hero.

This seemed like an intriguing development. No one had told me that AoS was based around the adventures of a super-powered, single-dad, working-class black man. Even the hoodie — a reference, intentional or otherwise, to Trayvon Martin’s death the year before the pilot aired — seemed potentially positive. The symbol of supposed black criminality reversed and turned into a heroic icon; that could work, maybe. Maybe?

Or then again not so much. As you know if you’ve seen any of the series at all, the Hooded Hero is not the hero. He’s just some schlubby plot point. He never gets to save anyone else. He volunteered to be a guinea pig for an experimental treatment after he was hurt on the job, and his powers are unstable. Soon he’s experiencing uncontrollable rages, beating up his old factory boss, and engaging in kidnapping, assault, and other nefarious super-villainesque deeds. It turns out even the woman he saved wasn’t an innocent, but the evil scientist herself. At the end he gives a speech about how people like him don’t get a fair shake, etc. etc., and the white guy hero without superpowers listens to him sympathetically and calms him down to where he can be ignominiously shot with some sort of sedative for his own good. Yay.

It all seems wearisomely familiar, doesn’t it? For me I was reminded of one of the first comics I think I ever read; an old Flash story from way back in the 1970s. The comic is about Ms. Flash; Patty Spivot is standing in Barry Allen’s lab when (improbably) another bolt of lightning hits, electrifying the shelves of chemicals and giving her superspeed just like Barry Allen had. She too decides to fight crime with her super-speed…except there’s a catch. Her powers are (wait for it) unstable; whenever she runs anywhere, she causes poison gas to seep into the air, or fires to break out. She doesn’t believe that she’s causing the damage, so Barry has to contain her and eventually figure out a way to depower her. Only guys can be Flash; empowered women are too dangerous. End of moral. (It was all an imaginary story anyway, so I guess you could see it as some sort of critique of Barry’s paranoid misogyny, if you felt like being kind.)

Just as the female Flash is a danger to us all, so, in AoS, is the black supehero. The Hooded Hero talks throughout the episode of his desire to be good, and he’s supposed to be a good man confused by the treatment he’s undergone. But that just emphasizes the disconnect between power and blackness. Good white people who get superpowers go off to save the day; the Hooded Hero proves his goodness by recognizing that he can’t do anything but stand there and let the white super-espionage dudes get a clear shot at him with their magic depowering gun.

You could argue I guess that the Hooded Hero doesn’t need to stand in for all black superheroes ever; he’s just one guy, after all. But the show stacks the deck by, inevitably, presenting him as the only black character around. Other than the wearisomely obligatory Asian martial arts expert, the entire SHIELD team is white. (Update: Skye, the superhacker, is bi-racial, with Chinese ancestry.) The climactic surrender scene, then, takes on racial overtones that the show is clearly not prepared to handle. Peterson rails against the giants, the people putting him down — which diagetically are supposed to be the superheroes. But as a lone black man facing a sea of white agents, it reads as a lament about whiteness. In that context, the denoument, in which the solution is for the black guy to trust patiently that the white cops shooting him are beneficent, seems almost unbelievably callous — especially, again, in light of the perhaps accidental but unavoidable resonance with Trayvon Martin.

None of this is particularly surprising given the crappy record of the superhero genre on race…but still, the gratuitous stupidity of it make you shake your head a little. Joss Whedon, who’s supposed to have a brain, directed — and yet, the best he could come up with is a parable about how black men with power need white agents of the state to shoot them for their own good? If this is how the series handles race, maybe it’s just as well that there aren’t any black continuing characters. Erasure is bad, but condescending disempowerment may just be worse.

The Confederate Superheroes of America

Posted on February 28, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

A sure sign you’re running for President: firing your racist sidekick.

Last summer Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, by “mutual decision,” accepted the resignation of his aide Jack Hunter, AKA the Southern Avenger. Rand is having trouble climbing out of his father’s Libertarian shadow along with all those shadowy white supremacists the Libertarian brand attracts, so Hunter’s views on Southern succession, the Lincoln assassination, and whether “a non-white majority America would simply cease to be America” were declared a “distraction.”

Hunter also retired the Southern Avenger (he reportedly adopted his radio shock jock persona during a conversation with a bottle of Jim Bean), but not before co-writing Paul’s The Tea Party Goes to Washington. Hunter did not co-write the sequel, Government Bullies, which was an even bigger “distraction” because the Senator plagiarized it instead. That would get him expelled from my college, but the White House has different standards.

I teach at Washington & Lee University, in a smallville known as a War-Between-the-States tourist Mecca, so I’m familiar with all brands of Southern Avengers. The remains of not one but two Confederate generals rest within a half-mile stroll of my front door. Confederate flags are common—though, unlike Mr. Hunter, most folks don’t sport them on superhero-style masks. Even Captain Confederacy (a creation of comic book writer and former Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Will Shetterly) retired his mask when his series moved to Marvel’s Epic back in 1991. The comic was set in an alternate universe in which the Confederacy won the Civil War (apparently the same universe Newt Gingrich visited for his 2005 Gettysburg novel). After Shetterly retired his first Captain, he has a black woman take over the identity, draping Old Dixie across her breasts.

If that sounds implausible, then you didn’t attend my town’s council meeting in which Southern Avengers protested the banning of Confederate flags from city flagpoles. I can’t criticize since I used to wear the same image across the back of concert t-shirts, believing it represented nothing more than a subgenre of rock. I was sixteen and still preferred Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gimme Back My Bullets over R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction.

Civil War reenactors, another common spectacle in Lexington, VA, attended the council meeting too. W&L borders the Virginia Military Institute where I watched a legion of gray-clad and hoop-skirted extras cheer a regal Stonewall Jackson while shooting a scene for the 2003 Gods and Generals. W&L declined the film company’s request to shoot on our campus. For Somersby, crews shoveled the historic downtown streets with dirt and angled the Exxon station out of shots. I’ll watch Jodie Foster in anything, but I like Somersby for its time period. Reconstruction is way more interesting than the Civil War.

Marvel movie guru Joss Whedon agrees. He started writing his TV series Firefly after reading Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels. Whedon also took an undergraduate class from Richard Slotkin, author of Gunfighter Nation, a seminal study in American frontier mythology. Whedon sets his dystopic future six years after a Civil War with a dispossessed Confederate soldier (he sings “We shall rise again” in the premiere) for a space captain. “Mal’s politics,” says Whedon, “are very reactionary and ‘Big government is bad’ and ‘Don’t interfere with my life,’” attitudes Senator Rand and his former sidekick sing about too. But unlike the Tea Party, Whedon sees both sides: “sometimes he’s wrong—because sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful shining light of democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam: we have a lot of petty politics, we are way out of our league and we have no right to control these people. And yet! Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany. And Mal can’t see that, because he was a Vietnamese.”

Actually Mal is the very Caucasian Nathan Fillion, but his second in command, like the second Captain Confederacy and at least one of the flag-wearing protesters at the Lexington council meeting, is an African American woman (AKA, Gina Torres). Whedon’s Confederacy never had slavery. Which is why his take on the Reconstruction is both watchable and a complete cop-out. In some ways, I prefer Edgar Rice Burroughs’ dispossessed Confederate soldier, John Carter. He heads West to dig gold and fight Injuns but ends up on Mars instead—where, surprise surprise, he gains superpowers and champions a ruined race of aristocrats against four-armed apes and green heathens. The Princess of Mars gave me allegorical whiplash, but at least Burroughs’ politics aren’t hard to decode. The South is dead, long live the South.

John Carter and Mal Reynolds are both Reconstruction-fueled space cowboys, which makes them descendants of the real life Southern avenger Jesse James. During the war, James fought as a Missouri bushwhacker against local Union militias. After Richmond fell and General Lee surrendered, the pardoned general-in-chief served as president of my university. Jesse James kept fighting. He saw his campaign of train and bank robberies as resistance to Republican-led Reconstruction. After his murder in 1882, dime novelist converted him into a gunslinging Robin Hood. Like the more recent Southern Avenger, James was also a political columnist. Jack Hunter wrote for the Charleston City Paper, where his articles remain online because his editor refused his request to remove them. James wrote his diatribes for the Kansas City Times, where the owner was a fellow vet working to restore ousted successionists to office.

Missouri elected Democrat Senator Francis Cockrell in 1875, who went on to serve five terms before retiring. To the best of my knowledge, Jesse James was never his aide nor helped him plagiarize any books, but the senator was evidence that the Radical Republicans (their term) had lost control of Reconstruction. The era formerly ended in 1877 when President Hayes withdrew the last federal troops. Their departure also marks the end of the South’s most famous team of masked avengers, the Ku Klux Klan. They’d started as a social club of Confederate vets in Pulaski, Tennessee, but grew into paramilitary groups that openly murdered opponents and police.

Like the X-Men, the Klan also wore identical costumes while led by a man codenamed “Cyclops.” The X-Men attract an impressive range of southern mutants, including Rogue, Gambit, Cannonball and the Blob. Technically DC’s Swamp Thing is a Southerner too, since he crawled out of a Louisiana swamp, but he and his superhero kin are no Southern Avengers. Superman first battled the Klan on the radio 1946, and he’s been followed by the Defenders, Black Panther, Batman, and both the Justice League and the Justice Society.

Hell, even the Southern Avenger hates racists now. Hunter blames all those old slurs of his on that pesky mask: “Whenever I put on that wrestling mask, I took on a persona that was intentionally outrageous and provocative. I said many terrible things. I disavow them.” The unmasked Hunter now criticizes fellow Republicans who dismiss “the idea that racism is actually a problem. I used not to see it. For that, I am very sorry.”

That’s more of an apology than the Confederacy ever offered its African American population. I wouldn’t call it superheroic, but if the Southern Avenger can transform himself, maybe there’s hope for the rest of our disunited States too.

Any Body

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Kimball Anderson

When the topic of Dollhouse comes up it’s hard to avoid a feminist reading. It’s essentially a show about sex trafficking by Joss Whedon, who proclaimed to the world that he was a feminist with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And there is definitely a mess to untangle on the topic of Dollhouse. Its action elements, many of its ideas, and the fantasy of it all obscures the serious themes, so much so that it may reinforce the systems it is trying to decry. There is another essay to be written about all of that. But when viewed through a different lens, one that focuses more on the speculative and conceptual elements, it becomes a show about where identity lies, and how to access it.

The central conceit of the series is that a technology has been developed which allows you to “imprint” people with new memories, and take away their own memories. Brains become rewritable. Bodies and minds are separated. And in that separation, they are both commodified. There is no shortage of minds. They are able to be copied, and even created by amalgamation. The bodies are valued, but as an object to be used and manipulated. As a vessel for the exchangeable mind.

The central character in Dollhouse is Echo, who is one of the “dolls” whose mind is routinely altered. She has glitches, which lead to her retaining information between different identities. It’s something of a plot necessity, and a very literal interpretation of a standard way of making television. The viewer must feel like they have seen a self contained story, so that they can watch one episode in isolation and enjoy it, but it must have a continuing plot thread so that viewers are drawn back week after week. Echo is made into a self contained story herself, and glitches into continuity.

This glitching leads to another plot necessity: there needs to be a real Echo underneath it all. The body, or the brain, has to have an identity that is separate from the plastic and shifting mind. This self must have a strength or dignity that all of the other selves that enter and exit her body do not. The continuing plot thread must be of more importance than the episodic content, in order to keep the audience interested in what its small serial details are building to.

Dollhouse’s two seasons end with episodes about a dystopian future, where the technology that the series posits has led to widespread destruction. This dystopian, futuristic world is similar to the one seen in the Maasaki Yuasa anime Kaiba. Kaiba is built around a similar conceit to Dollhouse: minds can be taken out of bodies, and put into other bodies. In both, the rich hold the technology to take the bodies of others, so they do so. Bodies are routinely harvested or sold. Bodies and minds become matters of economic exchange.

In Kaiba nearly all of the characters have conical drives in the back of their heads that store their memories. Take it out, and you can put in your own. In the future of Dollhouse people can be rewritten wirelessly, but in Kaiba there is a visceral nature to the tearing out of identity. The rich constantly send drones to chase down people, take their bodies and leave their drives behind. The rich can even create artificial bodies, but living bodies are sought after for erotic appeal, fashion–whatever whim they have. And because bodies can be replaced, they are casually destroyed, while the minds of the less fortunate sit on shelves.

Kaiba is titled after it’s main character and also after a giant plant which eats memories, their shared name implying that they mirror each other. Kaiba as a character is much like Echo, a blank slate who is finding himself. His journey leads him through bodies, and through expectations. He moves through a silent doll, and the body of a girl whose memories were released from her body. Throughout this journey it is quietly suggested that he values the mind as well as the body. When inside the girl’s body he wonders to himself: what sort of a man did the girl like? Later, he is warned that if he stays inside a woman’s body he will lose himself. This suggests that the body is active in the creation of identity.

Kaiba’s plot is driven by much the same narrative necessity as in Dollhouse. In a world which devalues life so much and removes agency from so many, a writer feels pressure to show that someone has agency. A fantastical wasteland of hopelessness is useless to depict if the audience can feel no hope in it. If it is a rhetorical point showing that something is bad, some future is to be avoided, then it must suggest some alternative. If it does not, it becomes simply a nihilistic fantasy. Its very genre depends on the character having the power to change things.

Both shows devolve into a Chosen One myth, where the traits of the main character are world changing. Echo is able to help save the world because her body produces something that can combat the effects of imprinting identities. And when Kaiba re-enters his original body he is changed into a very different character. This body was the body of the king Warp, reborn again and again and imbued with all of the memories of his planet. Suddenly filled with these memories he becomes colder, crueler. It seems that it is this memory-filled body that is like the memory eating plant: consuming memories, containing memories, but acting and defining himself independent of them.

Dollhouse seems to suggest that there is some dignity and power inherent in the body. That the true identity rests inside of it. But when Kaiba returns to his body, his body changes the character entirely. In the end, it is suggested, it is his journey through those other bodies that allowed him to overcome all of the many memories of king Warp. It was not the possession of those memories, or the virtue of the original body, it was the movement between bodies that was valuable. In much the same way, as Echo finds herself she does not do it through the memories she is given. She finds herself through the process of traveling through other identities.

It is this that is interesting about these shows. They seem to espouse a path towards the authentic self, the self that is in some way truer and more permanent, through putting on different masks. The many bodies of Kaiba, and the many minds of Echo, both point towards the same conclusion. They found themselves through the process of existing within, and then exiting, selves. It is almost a metaphor for adolescence. Different clothes, different friends, different views–a movement through selves as a way to deal with the discovery and understanding of all of the terrifying aspects of the adult world.

There is a contradiction here, though. The constant sloughing off of people’s minds or bodies, the fetishization of one or the other: these are processes by which people are devalued. But by taking on multiple different identities, one can become a more whole person. How do those two things justify together? One is positive, one is negative, yet they describe the same phenomenon. I believe the distinction here is using the separation of mind and body as a tool for introspection rather than as a way of judging others. When looking internally, finding yourself through the facets of others is not just a positive method of self definition, it’s almost a necessity. When dealing with the outside world, viewing a person as simply a body that performs a task, or ignoring how their body informs who they are, is not going to allow you to fully relate to them. The separation of body and mind is invaluable from within a body, because the body and the mind never allow themselves to be ignored. From the outside, looking at someone else, you do not feel the limits of their body, or the emotions of their mind. If you look at only part of a person, it is much easier to dismiss them.

It all really comes down to fetishization; the separation of one trait from the others leads to the devaluing of the whole. And, I suppose if I am saying “fetishization” I haven’t gotten too far from a feminist lens. But it is an interesting detail that perhaps these shows indicate that fetishization is part of the way that we determine our own identity. That by separating identity from body, part from part, and feeling the tensions and pressures that come out of this, we are able to distinguish our own whole selves.

Joss Whedon’s original conception of Dollhouse was over a conversation with Eliza Dushku about her life, in which she discussed living as an actress, taking on different roles, and how the gaze of the camera determined who she is. This can lead to a very shallow reading of Dollhouse, where the whole metaphor becomes a show business commentary. But it can be viewed more broadly as about performance, about the way identity is communicated and policed.

Dollhouse is somewhat explicitly about the media, and while Kaiba is not, both come from cultural landscapes where new media are changing the way people relate drastically. Entertainment has become ever more unavoidable, showing lives and experiences we’ve never been a part of. The internet encourages separating the mind from the body, and TV and ads encourage separating actors’ and models’ bodies from who the are. The internet provides anonymity that allows many to explore different ways of being. It is hard to think that this is unrelated to the themes of series that explore taking on different experiences and performances.

Maasaki Yuasa as a creator is somewhere between an auteur and a class clown, stylistically eschewing the usual way things are done, for deep and silly purposes. Both require a subversion of norms, but together they lead to almost “take it or leave it” meanings. The worlds he creates often seem to be created for the joy of experimentation in itself. This can lead to wild storms of color and ugliness and beauty all amounting to no particularly discernible meaning. But Kaiba as a blank slate character brings out something different. He is the innocent core of the anime. When unable to speak in his doll body, he is established as the character who listens, who moves out of a general well-meaning nature. Indeed, throughout the show he generally embodies this empathetic role. He is brought to consider the life of the girl whose body he later possesses, and the needs of all of those around him.

Echo becomes different people, fully being those people and therefore of course completely understanding them. But Kaiba finds who people are through looking at the world from different perspectives. Both exhibit a movement through selves, but Kaiba’s position reveals that this movement through selves is movement through understanding selves. It is a compassionate, empathetic journey.

Both Echo and Kaiba face their supposed true selves. Kaiba becomes the king Warp, Echo must finally take on the guise of her original identity Caroline. And in both cases they reject these selves. These true selves can be taken as being their societal roles, as being who all of the pressures and expectations around them would mold them into.

This journey of introspective development into an authentic self, then, becomes a path toward the rejection of the societal roles that we are made to perform. This is done through the varied performance of other roles. But if it’s as radical an idea as that, then comparing it to adolescent development seems to not work. Trying on different selves as you grow up is a very common experience, and in those cases societal roles do generally win out more often than not.

When the empathy element that Kaiba reveals is included in the necessities for developing an authentic self, though, it starts to fit together a bit more. Understanding the emotions, the motivations of those around you is a sort of awareness of reality, of norms. But just being aware is being like Kaiba the memory consuming plant: it’s unthinking, unreflective, of static intention. It is the process of movement through selves that is necessary. It is the process of taking apart the experiences of others, respecting and empathizing with them, as steps in a progressing conception of self. Not as an adolescent self-protection from the terror of adult moralities and complexities. It is seeing the way things are, and then making an individual choice in how to react.

It seems that this path, this way towards an authentic self, involves a humanization of all that was fetishized and separated. The process of re-sorting the bodies and minds left strewn about the cultural landscape, using empathy to connect disconnected pieces of self, is an act that leads the one repairing it all to a more whole self. De-fetishizing what is depicted and communicated in culture is an activity that helps oneself not only because it creates a better culture, but because it actually helps the person doing it. But inherent in this is that the fracturing of cultural beings allows for this opportunity. Both series end with a vague resolution of the world into a more natural state. Minds in the bodies they came from. While this undoubtedly is good for the characters and the worlds, it is hard to not feel that some possibility was lost.

Whether this suggested path towards authenticity is able to be utilized in any real way is uncertain. Whether it is in any way preferable to the paths offered by religions, self help gurus, what-have-you is uncertain as well. But it’s origin is in the way plots are built, the logical structures of narrative. It is similar to a path of adolescent development that has helped many people adapt themselves into something new. Considering these, it seems to have validity and logical consistency to it. The way it interacts with new media and it’s murky effect on self identity shows it to have an immediate and modern function. It springs forth from a world where fetishization disconnects us, and finds in it empathy and wholeness.

Joss Whedon’s Next Project

Posted on September 25, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

Dear Joss,

Hey, I’m a big fan, seen all your stuff, love it all (except maybe season one of Dollhouse, though the unaired pilot was brilliant). So I’m embarrassed to confess I only streamed Cabin in the Woods on Amazon recently, and I have to say, yes, totally brilliant too. So much so I was thinking, since you’re Mr. Marvel now, why not a mash-up? I know, you’re way way too busy with Avengers 2 and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D to draft another script. So I’ve gone ahead and done it for you:

Cabin in the Superhero Origin Story

Open with a shot of a corporate building and pan down to an entrance sign, “Zarathustra Technologies,” with a yellow school bus parked in front. A guide leads a high school group through the complex as a nerdy kid peels away to investigate a temptingly open lab door: “Arachnid Gene Modification.” As he studies the array of weird, glowing spiders, one descends on a thread and bites him. He slaps it, but too late, he’s already pale and sweaty. Spider arms rip through his sides as he transforms into an enormous, harry spider. It stands there a moment, screeching in confusion, before rows of hidden machine guns pivot from the walls and blast it into twitching pulp.

Cut to Control Room monitor of same image. Three TECHS frown down at the mess as they argue: “Told you the DNA sequencing was off,” “You always say the DNA sequencing is off,” “So next time maybe listen,” etc.

Roll credits as we travel down the row of screens, each monitoring a different room in the complex with a different nerd suffering a different transformative accident: a shelf of chemicals tipping over, a slippery walkway above a vat of toxic waste, a massive machine whirring out of control, a metal door sealing shut beside a countdown clock, etc. The TECHS press buttons, sip coffee, and record data from the staged mayhem, while continuing to banter.

“Okay,” one asks, “who we got next?”

A new bus pulls up and exiting jocks and cheerleader types jostle aside the newest NERD. One of the techs is reading his file in a voice over, revealing their improbable depth of knowledge and so long-term monitoring and manipulation. He’s not a great candidate though, just barely made the cut, but what the hell. He enters the building last.

A female tour GUIDE in Clark Kentish glasses (she’s cute but bumbling) is describing an antique gamma cannon, now a harmless lobby display. Only wait, why did that light start glowing when she bumped against that button? It charges up as she strolls unknowingly in front of the massive barrel. The NERD, the only one aware of the impending disaster, shoves through the jocks and cheerleaders to push the GUIDE to safety as he’s soaked in a roar of distorted green light.

He stands there, shocked, but when nothing else happens, the crowd of teens cracks up. The TECHS, however, applaud (“Nobody ever saves the girl anymore!”) before readouts indicate no change in NERD’s gamma levels. Damn it! They must have fired a dud. GUIDE thanks him as she climbs to her feet and adjusts her glasses. They shake hands in an awkward moment of mutual romantic dizziness—interrupted by one of the TECHS talking through the bluetooth in her ear to keep the tour moving before they get bottlenecked.

The Arachnid room is ready for a reboot. GUIDE fumbles through her lines, distracted when she sees NERD lured by the open door. She’s torn between protecting him and doing her job. “Don’t!” she calls. “Don’t, um, stay behind too long. We’re stopping in the cafeteria next.” Jocks and cheerleaders cheer as the tour moves on and NERD enters the lab.

This time we see the TECHS orchestrating everything and the difficulty of lowering a spider on a puppet string. They miss twice before the spider grabs his arm. They applaud when he slaps it away, then freeze, waiting for the reaction. Except nothing happens. Readout scans show zero change. He must have slapped it away before it bit him. Man, this kid is lucky! When NERD catches up to the tour, GUIDE squeaks with surprise and pleasure, nearly hugging him then awkwardly stopping herself.

Meanwhile, someone very important in a black suit arrives in the Control Room. The TECHS snap to and give a progress report on the Zarathustra Project, which we glean is a secret, internationally funded R&D program designed to produce a Homo Superior, a literal Superman. BLACKSUIT is highly agitated at the lack of progress, watching as the TECHS narrate two, simultaneous events on the monitors.

A nerd is lead into the basement where a walkway “breaks” by remote control, dropping him into toxic sludge. Another nerd is lured into a lab where a shelving unit tips onto him as he stands on an exposed wire. The BLACKSUIT is thrilled, until TECHS report that the kid is dead. “Dead? What happened?” “We dropped a shelf of chemicals on him.” “While electrocuting him.” “It tends to kill people.” “98%.” “You have survivors then?” “Well, ‘survivor’ is a strong word.” “And not so much with the present tense really.” Discussion escalates until a TECH notices the other kid climbing out of the sludge—which, hey this looks promising. His vitals are stable, and, wow, the toxins are bonding to his cells. The kid slumps onto the walkway as his arm turns into a new swamp-like substance. The TECHS are cheering! Except, uh oh, the readouts. His arm is dripping away. They watch as he melts into a brackish puddle.

BLACKSUIT is hysterical with disappointment. TECHS try to calm him down, explaining this is how it works everyday here. “But today,” BLACKSUIT blurts, “is not every day! Today is surprise inspection day!” This hardly seems like news to the TECHS, since BLACKSUIT is there already. “No,” he continues, “not me. The Watcher is coming down.” This cracks up the TECHS. “The Watcher? Coming down from, what, his Fortress of Solitude on the moon? He’s going to visit us puny humans?” Actually. Yes. BLACKSUIT received a moon transmission this morning. TECHS are stunned. “The Watcher hasn’t come down to earth in decades, not since , since—” “1938. When we agreed to begin the Zarathustra Project or face his wrath. And today he wants results.” All look at the monitors. They’re blank except for GUIDE and her one remaining tour group.

GUIDE is explaining something, when she steps away to respond to her bluetooth. “The Venom Room? That’s crazy—we haven’t even finished preliminary—” She flinches from the shout in her ear, then tells the group they’ll need to take a little unscheduled break, please make your way back down to the cafeteria again. Everybody but NERD, who she leads down a restricted corridor. He looks nervous, especially when they end up alone in a dim lab—is she making a pass at him? She pockets her glasses and walks toward him sexily, but then stumbles on something. She puts the glasses back on, but tries to keep up the sexy thing—while behind his back a strange oily substance crawls from a centrifuge the TECHS have just switched off and unlocked. GUIDE continues to distract NERD as she watches it over his shoulder. Her lips approach his as the black goo nears his back.

But as it is about to engulf him, she can’t do it, and shoves him to safety. The substance strikes her hand, congealing around it. TECHS are cursing, “What the hell is she doing?” But then NERD dives full force at the black goo, until it releases her hand and swirls around him instead, coating him and slithering into his mouth and nostrils. BLACKSUIT nods. “Wow. She’s good. We could use her in ops.” “Nah,” says a TECH, “total klutz.” NERD is now lost in a black blob as TECHS study readouts. The symbiont is acclimating to the host. GUIDE stares, horrified at what she has done. Excitement builds in the Control Room—until the black goo pours from his body, inert. GUIDE rushes to his side, but can’t embrace him because he’s vomiting out the black remains. TECHS argue about what went wrong (“Told you it wasn’t stable!” “You always say it isn’t stable!”), until BLACKSUIT cuts them off. It doesn’t matter. He’s just received official word on his cell: The Watcher is on his way.

NERD and GUIDE have found a table in the cafeteria. He’s picking off the last of the black goop as she sits down with a tray, nearly dropping everything. She laughs. “I don’t know what it is about you, but I swear I go weak in the knees when I’m near you.”

Romantic interlude continues while behind them a new high school group arrives in the lobby. Another guide runs through the gamma cannon routine, only this time no one notices the warning light, so she just stands there waiting to be rescued. TECHS wait too, someone’s finger on the fire button. The guide gives up and moves on as a couple of goof-offs play with the cannon. When one sticks his face into the barrel, TECHS fire it. He staggers back as the group laughs. They stop laughing when his skin turns green and his muscles rip through his clothes. He’s turning into an incredible . . . BOOM! He explodes across the lobby.

More cursing in the Control Room. “Well, at least we know the cannon is working.” A TECH blinks, realizing something: “But that means—” She’s cut off by shouts that the Watcher is in radar range, he’s descending!

Outside a spaceship drops through the clouds to hover above the Zarathustra building.

GUIDE and NERD are talking at their table when she looks up, alarmed.

The ceiling of the Control Room peels back in the glow of a tractor beam as the WATCHER levitates through the opening. He’s pretty much Marlon Brando in his white Jor-El costume from the 1978 Superman.

GUIDE jumps up from the cafeteria table, leaving NERD as she shouts: “Sorry, gotta go!”

The WATCHER addresses the Control Room in pompous, alien-Brando speak. He is done waiting. The time for Earth to produce a specimen worthy of propagation is upon them. Report your results! TECHS and BLACKSUIT whisper-argue among themselves, until BLACKSUIT steps forward. “Although we have made tremendous progress, I am afraid that we have not yet achieved—”

WATCHER cuts him off. He’s not talking to the humans. He’s talking to the figure stepping into the Control Room behind them. It’s GUIDE. There’s no longer any klutziness to her. She discards her glasses and emits a cocoon of light. When the light recedes, she’s a Superwoman, complete with regal red cape. She reports: “Father, the humans have failed to evolve. I regret to report that I have encountered no genetically adequate mates on this planet.” WATCHER: “Then they have given us no choice.”

WATCHER looks up, and his ship begins to emit a column of light that penetrates the building. BLACKSUIT rushes forward, begging for more time, pleading to spare humanity—they can still produce a Superman! WATCHER smiles. He agrees. The cosmic rays bombarding the building will do exactly that. Sure enough, BLACKSUIT and TECHS are transforming: one’s skin begins to blister; another’s bones bend under his weight; a third shimmers in an invisible force field; the fourth grows orange and craggy. The transformations continue until a TECH self-immolates in a ball of flame; another oozes across the floor in an elastic puddle; the third claws at her face, unable to breathe through the invisible field; and BLACKSUIT expands into a giant orange rock.

BLACKSUIT’s body grows so big it crashes through the floor, smashing down level by level until landing on a cafeteria table as NERD jumps out of the way. WATCHER floats down afterwards, not bothering to pause over the transformations taking place. Each floor has its own flavor: X-men mutations, 50s scifi monsters, horror classics, etc. GUIDE follows him, but she looks upset at all the suffering.

When they arrive at the bottom, NERD is staring up at them, confused and horrified but not . . . transforming. WATCHER cocks his head. He asks his daughter why this one is immune to the rays, but she can only grin with relief that NERD is okay. Red rays shoots from the WATCHER’s eyes, allowing us to see NERD’s internal organs, his skeleton, even close-ups of his DNA. WATCHER raises a hand and the ship rays stop. The writhing bodies on each floor relax and begin to return to their human states. WATCHER is smiling now too. He has found a worthy mate for his daughter. The NERD is a spontaneous mutation, a being higher on the evolution scale than the mere humans that produced him.

NERD is trying to take this all in—the cute GUIDE is really a Superwoman from another planet whose father wants them to have babies together—when WATCHER gives the planetary extermination order.

Wait, what?

GUIDE explains: “Your planet has produced its superman, you. The rest are superfluous.”

“But you can’t!” NERD grabs her arm, and her knees go weak. Literally. She can’t stand. She’s collapsing. WATCHER looks alarmed for the first time. The NERD’s mutation doesn’t just make him immune; he’s kryptonite to them. And so he must be destroyed!

GUIDE shouts no! as her father turns his eye rays into lasers, blasting through tables and rubble as NERD leaps out of the way. Eventually NERD is downed and cornered and WATCHER steps up for the kill. GUIDE tries to stop him, but she’s too weak. He squints and his laser beams strike NERD in the chest. Nothing happens. He’s impervious to this too. WATCHER blinks, intensifying the rays, as NERD stands and walks toward him through the beams. They grapple, excess laser radiation flashing, until NERD grabs WATCHER’s head and forces him to shoot his eye rays straight up through the openings in the floors, straight up to the ship, which explodes. WATCHER collapses.

NERD pulls GUIDE out of the rubble, but can she really be redeemed after okaying the extermination of the human race? Maybe he finds her dying, her body no longer super after being exposed to him, and they kiss during her final breath. WATCHER should stagger to his feet behind them, bloodied and clearly no longer so super either, and just as he’s about to crack NERD’s head open with a piece of debris, BLACKSUIT clobbers him. Remember BLACKSUIT was the big orange rock that fell through the floors, and so he’s normal again, though almost naked in rags.

Should GUIDE and NERD have a happy ending? That’s your call. Seriously. Call me. I can dash out the rest of the dialogue and have this ready for production by, when are you free, 2019? You think J. J. Abrams is too busy to direct? We should talk about that too. I’m sitting by my phone right now.

Sincerely,

Chris

The Death of the Cartoonist: Simplistic Comics Econs Version

Posted on August 2, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

A fellow comic art collector sent me a link to an auction for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer cover a few days ago.

Cover to Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Oz #1 (without title overlay)

Autograph covered by title overlay

The drawing is by John Totleben and is, I presume, the image of a transformed Daniel “Oz” Osbourne who is played by Seth Green in the TV series.

Let me first state that I have very little interest in Buffy as a character though I have watched a sizable number (if not all) of the episodes of the TV series. I have never bought a Buffy comic nor do I have any intention of doing so. As for John Totleben, he was certainly one of the most skillful artists to have worked in comics during the 80s and 90s (when his output was at its height). It is clear that he lavishes a considerable amount of time on the projects that are bestowed on him by the movers and shakers of the industry, even those as slight and forgettable as Vermillion.

The first question we should ask of this object is if the autograph which reads “Joss Whedon” is genuine. If it is in fact a fake, all recriminations should fall to the forger.

If we assume the autograph is genuine, I think the best that can be said for this situation is that it is the result of ignorance (or perhaps genius?) on the part of the owner (if the autograph was done to his specifications) or Joss Whedon.

If we assume it was the owner’s choice to have Whedon scrawl his signature in the middle of the art work, one can only conclude that the decision was made on the basis of increasing the value of the art. The signature occupies an area comprising 1/8 of the image area and acts almost like a title in the absence of the acetate overlay. So what would seem like just another werewolf image (in the absence of the overlay) by a skilled but under appreciated comics artist is now brought firmly into the Buffy universe—thus improving its value considerably. Whether the art has been disturbed or even defaced is probably secondary to concerns about monetization. Such is the nature of the business of art in all its forms.

There are important examples of this in art history but few with as detailed a narrative as Chinese brush painting. Those viewing a Chinese painting for the first time might be surprised by the numerous red seals placed discretely or sometimes prominently within the area of the image.

Admonitions Scroll (attributed to Gu Kaizhi, probably a Tang Dynasty copy).

Seals on the Admonition Scroll. Orchid by the Qianlong emperor.

These were often placed by the artists themselves or collectors to denote ownership. As Yang Xin writes in Three Thousand years of Chinese Painting:

“Using seals, however practical, added aesthetic appeal to the paintings, as literati-painters realized. The scarlet stamp could enliven a picture otherwise dull in color, and the choice of seal indicated certain interests and values of the painter, often with subtle cultural, personal , or political implications….A painting is often the joint product of a painter, a poet, a calligrapher, and a seal maker.”

Later in the same book, James Cahill writes:

“…by identifying them [the seals] the knowledgeable viewer can ascertain which collections the painting has passed through. If these are well known and distinguished…the value of the work is correspondingly enhanced….Collectors of good taste kept their seals small and confined their use to the corners; arrogant collectors and emperors impressed large, showy seals in all the available spaces.”

How this applies to the considerably more humble art being discussed here is I think self-explanatory. There is every reason to believe that a tasteful autograph by Joss Whedon (like that placed by Totleben at the right bottom edge of the image; did you miss it?) would increase the value of this Buffy cover. Whether the more florid (almost titular) inscription would have a similar effect is anyone’s guess. I wouldn’t buy the art either way.

If the decision on the placement and size of the autograph was entirely Whedon’s, it might even speak to where he sees himself in relation to these comics interlopers—the artists and writers not only being completely interchangeable (if not irrelevant) but possibly beyond his control. He seems to have little say regarding all future film iterations of his creation as captured in this Guardian article from 2010:

“I always hoped that Buffy would live on even after my death. But, you know, AFTER. I don’t love the idea of my creation in other hands, but I’m also well aware that many more hands than mine went into making that show what it was. And there is no legal grounds for doing anything other than sighing audibly. I can’t wish people who are passionate about my little myth ill.”

This seems like a healthy attitude and no one doubts that this is the reality of working on a Buffy film (or comic; one should note that it appears that Whedon had nothing to do with writing these “Oz” comics beyond the creation of the original concepts).

This image presents itself as an adequate metaphor for the role of the hired hand in the comics business—even outside the remit of the larger comics companies among which Dark Horse (who published the Buffy comics) could certainly be counted. Even in this instance where Totleben did almost all of the work (I suppose a cover concept might have been communicated to him), Whedon’s signature is still five times larger than Totleben’s. Technique and Totleben’s “secondary” imagination (he didn’t create the character) has become superfluous. The idea that Totleben drew this or that it could be a piece of art doesn’t even enter into the equation (or the mind). An online image search suggests that the trade paperback edition dispenses almost entirely with drawn art and chooses to put images of Alyson Hannigan and Seth Green on the cover; the better to sell it one presumes.

Now some might see in this (and many other examples) an occasion for a small fit of pique quickly stifled. One might even interpret that large Whedon scrawl as just that—a moment of pique—because Whedon doesn’t actually own the rights to Buffy (they’re with Warner apparently). And who can begrudge them (and hired hands everywhere) those simple emotions? That quick stifling is probably of the essence—a necessary survival mechanism— for such stratifications and losses are as certain as getting wet in the rain. Parasols don’t seem particularly popular in the land of comics.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Joss Whedon