The Merit of Merrick

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

Merrick Garland’s cursed voyage in limbo continues; even the prospect of a Trump Supreme Court nominee hasn’t budged Senate Republicans, who care less about getting a qualified nominee than about the potential career consequences if a Supreme Court vote inspires a primary challenger. Merrick’s fate has been especially denigrated because he’s so clearly a qualified appointment. As Michael Gerhardt declared when the nomination was made at Slate, Gerhardt “the nomination of Judge Garland is therefore not a political statement but rather a bold effort to encourage everyone to recognize that if they ever want to see what a merit-based appointment looks like”, they need cast their gaze no further than Merrick Garland.

That formulation is interesting though. So, if you want to see a merit-based appointment, look at Garland. And what do you see when you look at Garland? You see a white guy.

Gerhardt makes this more or less explicit in his piece; Garland, he points out, is not a person of color, nor a woman. He graduated from Harvard Law, which is de rigeur on the court. His appointment does not make a political statement. If Obama had selected a woman, or a black person, it would have been in order to change the gender or racial balance of the court. Since Garland is a white guy, you can be sure his appointment was based, as Gerhardt says, “on merit, not anything else.”

But of course, the very fact that Garland’s white maleness is synonymous with merit is the tip off that “merit” is not, in fact, the only consideration. Or rather, choosing a white man is a deliberate sop. Obama is quite aware that the choice of a non white man would be seen as a provocation, both by Republicans and by neutral serious punditry. To be a woman, or to be a person of color, is to be unusual, special, marked; it means your identity is a statement in itself. White men, on the other hand, are the default; when you choose a white man, you are choosing someone who has no identity, and so can be judged solely on accomplishment and qualifications. It’s natural for white men to be Supreme Court justices; ergo, a Supreme Court justice who is a white man is not chosen for his identity, but for his merit.

There were other reasons to choose Merrick, of course—and they are also linked to his race and his gender. Obama wanted someone who was moderate, to disarm Republican opposition. White men tend to be more conservative than other folks, so looking for a conservative candidate was likely to lead to a white man. Obama also wanted someone older, again to placate conservatives who don’t want a liberal justice sitting for 30 years. Looking for older justices means seeking people from a time when women and people of color had fewer opportunities for career advancement than they do now. Again, that points disproportionately towards white guys.

This isn’t to say that Garland is unqualified. Rather, it’s to point out that his qualifications or lack thereof aren’t separable from his identity. When you want an appointment that says, “quality, and nothing else!” you pick a white guy.

Nuclear Nation

Posted on May 10, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This piece first ran at the Dissolve.
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Nuclear Nation
Director: Atsushi Funahashi (Not Rated, 96 min.)
Distributor: Big River Films, Documentary Japan.
Documentary
In Japanese with English Subtitles
Three Stars

March 11, 2011 was a disaster of almost inconceivable proportions in Japan. A massive earthquake triggered tsunamis that reached more than 130 feet. Almost 16,000 people were killed, and the resulting devastation caused meltdowns at a number of nuclear reactors, releasing dangerous levels of radiation and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. There was $235 billion in damage, making the event the most costly natural disaster in recorded history.

Such an apocalyptic tragedy seems to call for apocalyptic representation, and indeed there’s plenty of oh-my-god footage of surging waters on YouTube for those who want to see it. Atsushi Funahashi’s Japanese documentary (with English subtitles) goes a different route, though. Nuclear Nation, despite the dramatic title, is a determinedly low-key, and even soporific, take on the aftermath of March 11. The documentary deals particularly with the residents of Futaba, the town that is home to the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

Radiation released from the reactors has made Futaba unlivable; everyone has had to leave. Refugees who couldn’t find another home were housed in a high school, living communally with their few rescued possessions. The film is mostly set in that high school, as the refugees wait and wait and wait for someone from the government or the power plants to find them new homes, or recompense them, or at least apologize.

If this does not sound like a particularly exciting premise for a film — well, yes. That’s kind of the point. The documentary is deliberately slow, and even deliberately bland. The camera lingers on people sleeping or people eating. Certain refugee’s lives are followed — one father and son lost their wife and mother in the tsunami; a family where the father is working back at the dangerous Futaba reactor; the embittered Futaba mayor. But the focus, and the narrative is diffuse. The stories don’t have a clear beginning, since the men and women are already homeless and adrift when they first appear onscreen. And they don’t have a clear ending; some refugees do move into new homes, but that feels less like closure or resolution than like the same slow-motion grinding on. They have to be somewhere, and so they are. But the past isn’t resolved.

“Not doing anything takes a lot out of you,” says one refugee, and that’s a good tagline for the film as a whole. Their town destroyed, the former residents of Futaba are suspended in a kind of anti-narrative. Stuff happens, but slowly, and without catharis or even impetus. The mayor goes to a meeting where various high-level officials apologize and bow and then scurry off on official business without taking questions. People go back to Futaba to gather some belongings and place flowers, all while dressed in radiation suits. The residents march demanding to return to Futaba, though, as they admit, they can’t return, and, maybe don’t even want to. A farmer explains that he’s determined to keep his cattle alive, even though he can’t sell them and they’re useless. The camera follows the irradiated animals about for a while. Later we see some cows that were abandoned by their owners; they’ve starved to death in their pens, and are now mummified corpses.

The mummified cows are certainly an arresting image, but, again, for the most part, the film eschews the gothic for the mundane, day to day weariness of displacement and uncertainty. Even the agitprop anti-nuclear message gets little traction; this isn’t Michael Moore, with his staged confrontations and clear villains. A couple residents curse at the television screen as officials blandly lie; the mayor talks sadly about the choice to bring in the nuclear plants and how they’ve been betrayed. The failure to pay compensation is numbly infuriating, but compensation isn’t going to give people back their homes anyway. The damage is done.

The result is not exactly riveting cinema. Nor is the documentary quite willing to embrace its anti-narrative elements; it often seems caught between trying to tell a story (about the evils of nuclear energy, or about particular families) and its recognition that the story it has to tell is no story. Still, despite its limitations, Nuclear Nation remains a quiet, painful reminder that disasters aren’t disasters because of the sound and excitement, but because of the blank spaces they leave in people’s lives.

Utilitarian Review 5/7/16

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Ng Suat Tong on Frank Miller’s decaying art.

Ben Rietano on superhero parents.

Ng Suat Tong on the awfulness of Captain America: Civil War.

Me on how Frank Miller could be worse.

Me on why the white working class won’t save you.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian I wrote on Sly Stone, who is still alive, thank goodness. (This is unexpectedly one of my biggest stories ever in terms of traffic, I think.)

At the Week I wrote about why Hillary Clinton needs a wife.

At the Establishment I wrote about manly male book clubs for men and also tentacle sex.

At the Daily Dot I wrote about how Google’s lobbyists will save the public domain (maybe.)

At Splice Today:

—my second Hammer dracula post! This one on Brides of Dracula, and how the male gaze falls in a plothole.

—I encouraged people to fear not the Sanders/Trump supporters.

Other Links

Emily Bazelon with a NYT feature on whether sex work should be criminalized.

Julia Serano on why trans woman should play cis roles on film.

Aaron Bady on the badness of Daredevil.

The White Working Class Won’t Save You

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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“The white working class.” Those words send shivers through the hindbrain of the Democratic Party. If only poor white people would suddenly wake up and realize that the Republican Party hates them. If only working class whites would see the advantages of labor unions and sticking it to the rich; if only they’d shake off their false consciousness and vote with their pocketbooks. Then, finally, the Democrats would have a true, unbeatable majority, and would sweep the Republicans into the wilderness, there to wail and gnash their capital gains in despair forever more.

Robert Reich invoked this dream once more in a recent Salon article responding to Black Lives Matter protests directed at Bernie Sanders. “For decades Republicans have exploited the economic frustrations of the white working and middle class to drive a wedge between races,” Reich warns, “channeling those frustrations into bigotry and resentment.”

From Reich’s perspective, the Black Lives Matter protestors interrupting Sanders and other presidential candidates are divisive; they play into the hands of the Republicans. “Our only hope for genuine change is if poor, working class, middle class, black, Latino, and white come together in a powerful movement to take back our economy and democracy from the moneyed interests that now control both,” he insists. So, focusing on race, or emphasizing race, undermines the “only hope for genuine change.” To address racial inequities, to create “genuine change,” racial issues need to take a back seat to economic solidarity.

Reich is arguing against division and for solidarity. But it’s a solidarity that says, flat out, that getting the white working class in the Democratic coalition is the priority, and the only possible route to success. That’s why, from Reich’s perspective, Black Lives Matter is a danger. If unity is defined as the inclusion of the white working class first, last, and always, then a movement that focuses on race is at best a distraction. At worst, it may alienate those very working class whites saviors who will finally wake up and swoop in to save the Democratic Party… and America.

I’m all for economic populism and reaching out to poor people of every race. If the Democratic Party wants to soak the rich (a popular policy), I’m on board. But the fact remains that over the last 50 years, African-American support for the Democratic Party has been more consistent, and more sweeping, than working-class white support. Given the extent to which the GOP is built on white identity politics, that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

Black Lives Matter just underlines that Democratic grassroots energy is centered in the African-American community. You want angry white populism, you go to the Tea Party and white people confusedly demanding that the government take away their health care. The current movement in America against inequality, the current movement demanding a transformation in the landscape of poverty, is Black Lives Matter.

As Reich says, one of the main ways poverty is enforced and perpetuated in this country is through mass incarceration and the vicious policing of disadvantaged communities. So, if you’re an economic progressive, is BLM a distraction? Or is it the most energized, focused and effective grassroots movement out there? When BLM protests at Bernie Sanders rallies, is it hurting the movement for economic justice? Or is it showing that there is a huge appetite for and passion for justice? Why is it “unifying” to see it as the first, and “divisive” to see it as the second?

Reich argues, “Racial inequalities are baked into our political and economic system,” and that police brutality, mass incarceration, and housing discrimination “all reveal deep structures of discrimination that undermine economic inequality.” He’s right. And yet, somehow, the movement addressing those structures of discrimination is presented in his article as a threat to real change.

Maybe instead, as a counter-theory, Democrats might admit that economic populism hasn’t notably worked as a rallying cry on the left. You want change? Then get on board with the passionate grassroots movement you’ve got. And stop trying to divide the party in the name of a white working-class savior who, all the evidence suggests, is never going to show up.

Frank Miller, Could Be Worse

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

Earlier this week Suat wrote a post on Frank Miller’s recent artwork, which shows signs of steep technical decline. Miller’s draftsmanship was never stellar, but he had a strong, dramatic sense of design, and a consistent, idiosyncratic stylization that mixed Kirby, Frazetta, and manga in a way that wasn’t off-puttingly derivative of any of them.

As Suat says, Miller’s recent work shows a steep decent from this good-if-never-great peak.

Interestingly, Dan Nadel expressed some appreciation for this late Miller of the ugly Frankenstein zombie Elektra with arms taken from some other, bigger zombie woman.

I understand why people would dislike this new stuff. It’s ugly and incoherent, but coherent Miller isn’t that interesting to me, and I like ugly sometimes. Free of his obvious influences — Eisner, Adams, Moebius, Kojima — he just made weird work. Intentional? Maybe not. Maybe so. We’ll probably never know. It’s not genius or anything… just odd end-of-career work by a pulp artist, kinda like Lee Brown Coye’s late work. Consistent in its weirdness. Certainly the covers he’s drawn in the last year are all of a piece, and make sense as slightly deranged mark-making.

That’s an outsider art take; Miller gets more interesting as he gets less controlled and less coherent. As the control over the material disintegrates, you can appreciate the images not as representations of superpeople, but simply as lines on the page; “deranged mark-making”, which happens to look like zombie Elektra, but really could just as easily be something else for all Miller, or the viewer, cares.

I don’t know that I entirely buy Nadel’s take; Elektra is too obviously a struggling picture of Elektra to appreciate it as simply disincorporated pencil tracings,and the ugly isn’t quite weird enough to send me. This isn’t Harry Peter, where confused proportions and oddly defined composition create a vertiginous sense of spacelessness, with the figures hovering between characters and two-dimensional pen marks.

There’s incompetence and then there’s incompetence. Peter’s scattershot drafting and compositional skills resolve into an alienating, sublime effect. Miller’s ugliness just sits there, sadly, asking you to admire it as beauty.

Still, I don’t actually hate that Elektra drawing the way I hate, say, the art in Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, or for that matter the art in a lot of mainstream superhero books.

I guess that’s by Mike McKone. I guess this is the sort of thing that comics fans think is acceptable, as opposed to Miller, but…that’s pretty sorry shit, isn’t it? There’s something seriously wrong with the foreground character’s anatomy; her stomach seems to trying to escape through her backbone. The composition is static and awful; they’re all just standing there looking serious, thinking deep thoughts like, “wow, we’re really poorly drawn, aren’t we?” The coloring is slick and bland, they’re all thin and bland and straight; it’s a bunch of superbored supersticks. If you could pan down, you’d expect to see that they all have wooden feet hammered into the ground.

Miller’s Elektra isn’t cool as shit action art a la Frazetta, and it’s not outsider art interesting—but at least it’s trying something. Elektra is supposed to be sexy and badass, and she fails at that…but at least the failure registers as a failure. He tried something and it didn’t work, and it’s kind of funny and kind of sad. It doesn’t get to ugly enough to be good or interesting, but it’s got enough ambition to get to ugly. Mike McKone’s drawing, on the other hand, is so bland it makes no impression; like much superhero art, it might as well just be a scrawl declaring, “art needed here on deadline.”

Frank Miller is a big enough deal that when he turns in art, he actually turns in art. Not good art, necessarily, but not personalityless corporate default, either. You look at Elektra, and you feel like Miller put some of himself in there, even if that self is an indifferent draftsman far past his prime. I guess that’s what it is to be a mainstream superhero artist these days; you work and work in the hopes that you’ll become popular enough that someday, somehow, you’ll be allowed to make the crappy art you’re truly capable of.

Utilitarian Review 4/30/16

Posted on April 30, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Ng Suat Tong criticizes Dan Clowes on criticism.

Caroline Drennen on Turkish Airlines’ flights to Metropolis.

Ng Suat Tong on the theological confusion of Chester Brown’s May Wept.

Jimmy Johnson on what Aquaman’s ancestors were doing during the Middle Passage (and how slavery doesn’t exist in the DC/Marvel universes.)

Me on why it’s okay for artists and critics to know each other.

Chris Gavaler on Hamlet, superhero.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Daily Dot I wrote about

—how doxxing is abuse, not invasion of privacy.

—the upside of Google controlling everything.

At The Establishment I wrote about the virulent racism in Marston’s original Wonder Woman comics.

At PLayboy

—I interviewed Sara Benincasa about her new book, sex, art, and puppies.

—how Beyoncé is the most important pop musician ever.

At Splice I started a series on the Hammer Dracula films! I’ll be writing about all nine in chronological order; for this first one, I talked about how narrative sinks its teeth into you—with your help.

Also at Splice Today I wrote about

—how fame and money go together for writers less and less.

—being old and seeing old rockstars rock loudly.

At the Reader I wrote about La Sera, a band that’s a little bit country, a little bit the Smiths.

Other Links

Katherine Cross on male dreams of subservient female robots.

Nice Pitchfork write up of the new Dawn Richard track.

Andrew Wheeler explains that Frank Cho is an idiot.

Artists and Critics Sometimes Know Each Other

Posted on April 28, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today.
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As a critic, I not infrequently know the artists or writers whose work I write about.

If you’ve been following the #gamersgate controversy at all, you know that some people think that this is really wrong. “Journalistic ethics!” people shouted over and over on twitter. It wasn’t exactly clear what they meant by this, but critics knowing artists seemed to be at least one semi-inchoate focus of outrage.

To some degree, you can understand the concerns. There’s a vision of journalistic objectivity which involves a reviewer ruthlessly evaluating the work in front of him or her without any reference to, or knowledge of the creator. The critic, in this view, is supposed to be a completely impartial observer, affixing a stamp of quality or animadversion so that readers can know that they are spending their hard-earned dollars in the best of all possible ways.

The reality is a lot messier. In part, that’s because, if you review a work positively, one of the things that often happens is that the creator of the work gets in touch with you to say, hey, awesome, you liked my work! Often creators will write me just to say thank you (which is lovely). Sometimes, though, they’ll contact me in the hopes that I might review their next book or project, too.

So, is that unethical? Now that I’ve talked to them, am I supposed to never write about their work again? That seems silly; the only reason I know them, after all, is that I like their work. I guess you could argue for some sort of disclosure — but what would I say? “Fair warning: I really like this creator’s work; this creator likes that I like their work. Now on to the review, where I say I like their work!”

The thing is, when I do like somebody’s work, that can also open the way for other collaborations. Many writers and artists I admire, like Ariel Schrag, Edie Fake, and Stacey Donovan, have posted on my little, all volunteer blog at one point or another, because I love their work and when they appear in my inbox to say they liked a review, I’ll sometimes ask them if they would be interested in contributing. If you were determined to be offended by that sort of thing, you could argue it’s a quid pro quo, and that I’m receiving content (even if not money) for good reviews. Edie even designed the banner for my site (which I happily paid him for.) But again, the whole reason I find their contributions valuable is because I value their work — which is what I say whenever I write a review talking about how awesome Ariel Schrag and Edie Fake are.

The disconnect here isn’t just about ethics. It’s about the nature of criticism. A lot of the people posting to gamersgate seem to see reviews primarily as a way to make purchasing decisions. Reviews, from this perspective, are a buyer’s guide; it’s the equivalent of a consumer report. You don’t want the person who evaluates the gas mileage on your Prius to be buddies with the Prius manufacturers, because you’d worry that they might try to help their friend out by saying that the Prius gets better gas mileage than it does. You want an objective take on the value of that Prius.

But while objectivity makes sense as a goal in evaluating Priuses, it doesn’t as a goal for evaluating art. Criticism of art is always, by its nature subjective. And, at least for me, criticism tends to be less about saying, buy this or don’t buy this, and more about trying to engage with, and think about, what an artist is saying, or what a work is doing. A piece of criticism is as much about talking to, or with, the artist as it is providing a consumer report. On #gamersgate art is seen as a product, which is certainly one thing art can be. But art’s also a community. Which is why having actual conversations with the artist in question doesn’t seem like an ethical violation. Having conversations with the artist is my job.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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