Tag Archives: Noah

Marvel vs. Coates. Marvel wins.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run on Black Panther has been the most anticipated comics event in at least a decade. Coates is known far beyond the tiny world of comicdom; he’s a bona fide literary celebrity, of the sort that writes comics only very rarely. I’m hard-pressed to think of a writer of equal stature who has come up outside comics and entered the field. Neil Gaiman, who started in comics and left when he got big enough, is the counter-example that proves the rule.

On top of that, Coates is a black writer, entering comics at a time when there have been increasing calls for more representation of POC and women in both Marvel’s film properties and the comics themselves. By putting Coates and Brian Stelfreeze on Black Panther, Marvel is directly addressing its own often monochromatic history.

Black Panther, then, promises to be a new kind of flagship Marvel title—different in quality, different in publicity, different in importance, different in its thoughtfulness about, and approach to, issues of race. It’s an exciting promise—and issues were leaping off the rack like hotcakes at my own little comics shop on Chicago’s South Side.

So—many hopes. Were any of them met?

The answer to that is: no. Black Panther #1 is, unfortunately, not a good comic.

It’s not a terrible comic, either; I’ve read plenty worse. It’s simply a mediocre Marvel comic in the usual mediocre Marvel comic ways.

The main weakness, as ever, is continuity porn. The issue starts with a page of exposition detailing several previous preposterous storylines: there was some stupid plot by Dr. Doom; there was some other stupid plot by Thanos. But even that exposition dump isn’t sufficient; much of the rest of the comic paddles around haplessly in convoluted, tedious backstory. We learn about Black Panther’s female bodyguards, there are flashback dream sequences, there’s Black Panther moping around and brooding. There are some brief glimpses of potentially interesting characters, including two lesbian bodyguards who stage a jail break. But there isn’t enough development to make them, or anyone, engaging.

The hope is that after the first issue we’ll get up to speed. But this is a new introduction to the character for a, by comics standards, gigantic new readership. The failure to recognize the need for a streamlined story, and the inability to provide one, is ominous. You’ve got the biggest comic event in years; comics reboot every 15 months anyway. Why not just forget Thanos and Doom and whatever and let Coates, and all those new comics readers he’s attracted, start from scratch? This isn’t rocket science; it’s basic common sense. The fact that nobody involved in the project realized that this was the way to go doesn’t fill one with confidence.

There are other unsettling signs as well. Coates’ nonfiction style is heavy, but it’s a heaviness of thought and consideration; you can feel his mind moving deliberately, and that gives the moments of fire more power. That weight doesn’t translate particularly well to the comic book world, though. The story feels portentous and burdened with its own seriousness. The dialogue in particular reads as if the characters are writing essays in a parody of Coates’ style. “Does he even care, Aneka? Did he ever care?” Dora asks. “Does it even matter? Has it ever mattered?” Aneka replies. Do people really talk like that? Have they ever talked like that? Could someone make them stop talking like that?

Brian Stelfreeze’s art is…okay. There are certainly lots of worse mainstream artists, but there’s nothing especially distinctive about his style or composition. Action sequences are stiff, and often visually confusing. Again, this is all pretty standard for mainstream superhero comics, which impose both tight deadline pressure and fairly strict limits on artist style. It’s professional. It’s just not anything more than that.

From his other writing, and from the ending letters page column here, it’s clear that Coates is a Marvel comics fan. It shouldn’t really be a surprise, then, that he’s delivered a bog standard Marvel comic, complete with unfocused storytelling, impenetrable continuity, and art that is there. The comic is notable for having a main cast that is entirely black, and for its inclusion of a respectfully treated lesbian couple as primary protagonists. But that’s about the only thing that distinguishes Black Panther from many of its peer titles, at this point. It certainly doesn’t have the distinctive vision of G. Willow Wilson’s YA Ms. Marvel, with its deft, witty characterization, and its exploration of such unusual superhero themes as ethnic assimilation and nonviolence. Nor does it feel as focused and individual as Christopher Priest’s Black Panther run did, from the very beginning.

Maybe Coates and Stelfreeze will find their stride as the series goes on. But there’s an uncomfortable feeling here that they’ve made just exactly the uninspired comic that they, and Marvel, wanted to.

Maudlin Dreck, Worldwide

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This first appeared on The Dissolve.
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The Rocket is a fill-in-the-blank exercise in feel-good exotica. It features not one, but two wounded and spunky kids; a couple of colorful, albeit flawed adults; and careful dollops of tragedy and joy all tied together by the deeply human story of marginalized people—in this case, Laotians whose village is in the flood zone for a dam project. (The film is an Australian production, though filmed in Laos with Laotian actors.) Hardships are carefully calibrated to be worrisome and tear-jerking, but not so overwhelming as to put the happy ending out of reach, or for that matter, to mar the protagonists’ photogenic qualities.

The film has its merits: Writer-director Kim Mordaunt knows his genre; he lines the tropes up in order, and dispatches them with facility. He’s helped by generally high-quality acting. Alice Keohavong sparkles with charisma as the loving, stubborn mother Mali; her removal from the film comes with a brutal wrench, orchestrated with a virtuoso timing worthy of Spielberg. Character actors Bunsri Yindi (as cantankerous grandma Taitok) and Thep Phongam (as the unconventional, James Brown-obsessed Uncle Purple) mug effectively, while the child actors (Sitthiphon Disamoe as Ahlo and Loungnam Kaosainam as Kia) turn in professionally adorable performances. The plot flows smoothly but eventfully from tragedy and dispossession through salvation, achieved by a combination of personal achievement and cinematic pixie dust. Sumrit Warin as Toma has the range of a damp fish, but Mordaunt has cleverly cast him in a role in which that’s exactly what is called for.

In short, Mordaunt is a canny, intelligent filmmaker. He shows this not only by fulfilling genre expectations, but in his treatment of his material. A story about people forced off their land by a dam could easily turn into a rant against progress, but Mordaunt dodges that pitfall. Tradition in The Rocket has its virtues, but also its downsides. Ahlo was born with a stillborn baby sibling, and has to struggle for much of the film under traditional prejudices against twins. The problem with the dam isn’t so much that it’s “progress,” but rather that the corrupt, uncaring government doesn’t share its benefits (electricity, money) with the people it displaces. Ahlo gets money and food by robbing shrines, which suggests his rootlessness, but also raises questions about traditions that privilege the needs of the dead over those of the living. And Ahlo’s final, inevitable triumph involves mastering rockets, an old yet still up-to-date technology. Moreover, he relies for his success on the knowledge that Uncle Purple gained while fighting with American forces.

Ultimately, though, Mordaunt’s obvious intelligence, and the cast’s talent, just make The Rocket more frustrating. Difficult ambiguities are brought up only to be drowned by the remorseless imperative for Hollywood joy, showered upon the characters from above like the concluding miraculous rainfall, or like the waters that swamp their abandoned village. The Rocket is a well-constructed delivery system for sparkly cheer, but it lacks a more substantial payload.

Utilitarian Review 4/2/16

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Craig Fischer on why Stitches is the worst comic ever.

Jimmy Johnson on borders, imperialism, and Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders.

Chris Gavaler on creating a comic book page for his novel (drawing by Sean Michael Robinson.)

Me on Jose Antonio Vargas’ Documented, about his experience as an undocumented immigrant.

Me on Daredevil’s blind male gaze.

Kate Skow on how all fiction is fan fiction.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote about how superheroes don’t kill! in an excuse for killing.

At the Establishment I wrote about Superman vs. Batman, homoeroticism, and misogyny.

At the LA Times I wrote about hulk pooping, Kierkegaard, and fan fiction for all.

At Random Nerds I wrote about Superman 1978 and choosing supergood over superangst.

At the Week I wrote that everyone hates Congresspeople but still reelect their own Congresspeople.

At Splice Today I wrote about Steve Harvey’s dreadful dating advice book.

At the Chicago Reader I did a little review of the retro-retro-sixties band Quilt.
 
Other Links

CT May on Madonna and charges of sexism.

Kaleem Aftab on how BvS is an allegory of the Muslim experience.

Blind Gaze

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In the Netflix Daredevil series, Matt Murdock first meets Elektra when he’s crashing a faculty party. He walks across a crowded floor in search of booze, as his progress is intercut with glimpses of Elektra: her expensive bracelets, her lips on a wineglass. The back and forth between his face and the bits of her suggests we are seeing her through him, his gaze creating an erotic, impressionistic, portrait: sex as vivisection.

The director of the episode, I believe, is Floria Sigismondi, but even though she’s a woman, the framing here is a perfect encapsulation of Laura Mulvey’s male gaze tropes. Mulvey argued that women onscreen are turned into individual body parts, which then freeze the narrative in fetishistic contemplation. Elektra, as body, interrupts Matt’s progress; she is framed through his gaze, even as she immobilizes that gaze.

The caveat here is that there is no gaze; Matt is blind; he can’t see Elektra.

You might think Matt’s blindness would undermine the male gaze. But instead it perfects it. His super-senses are more male gaze than the male gaze itself. His hearing, his smell, mean that he does not see her all at once, as a person, but rather as bits and pieces. Through his blindness, he knows her and possesses her more completely than if he were sighted—as he demonstrates at the scenes end, when he gets the better of her in a battle of wits, and leaves with her, future intercourse heavily telegraphed.

Ever Oedipus and/or Freud blindness has been associated with castration. Daredevil’s disability carries with it the threat of unmanliness. One could, perhaps, imagine a Daredevil series which thought through that stereotype, and which thought about the ways that disability questions the necessity, or the righteousness, or the centrality, of strength, competence, virility.

That’s not the Daredevil series we’ve got though. Instead, Elektra is aroused and excited when she learns that Matt isn’t really blind. She wants a man who can fight her, and whose disability is only a show. Matt, for his part, is thrilled that she has found out his secret; he babbles about how she really “knows” him, which means in part that she knows he’s not actually disabled. The two eventually fall out over whether Matt should murder (Elektra feels he should) but her obvious contempt for his disability is never an issue. As far as the show is concerned, it’s natural for Elektra to prefer a sighted man to a blind one, and Matt (who is blind) is pleased that she does.

Similarly, Matt’s ability to sense Elektra, and to frame her in his gaze which is not a gaze, works as a deliberate assertion that he is not castrated. His disability is filmed in such a way that it makes him fit even more firmly into the tropes of manliness. The most striking thing about the Daredevil series is its utter disinterest in ever giving us a Daredevil-eye view of the world; we do not experience the world as Daredevil does. Instead, Daredevil’s vision is the traditional vision of film. Blind men, the film assures us eagerly, see with the same manly eyes as ever.

Documented

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This first appeared on the Dissolve.
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Autobiography can be an intensely politicized genre. Jose Antonio Vargas’ new documentary Documented shows he’s learned the lesson well. Vargas’ grandparents brought him to the United States from the Philippines when he was 12. His immigration, he discovered some years later, was illegal. He eventually became a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Washington Post and other outlets, all while hiding his status. Finally, in 2011, he came out as an undocumented immigrant in an article in the New York Times Magazine, hoping to raise awareness and to show Americans that the people sometimes called “illegal” aren’t some alien other, but their friends, neighbors, classmates, and (in this case) journalists. The documentary is a continuation of that project, simultaneously combining memoir and political advocacy.

The autobiography and the politics don’t always fit together perfectly. Vargas has been extremely successful in his profession by any standard, and that success can tend to push him into the foreground to such an extent that the collective issues he’s talking about get erased. Vargas is aware of this, and works against it to some degree. Rather than putting himself alone on the cover of Time, as the editors originally planned, for instance, he works to include 30 other people who came to the United States as children like him, but have no path to citizenship. Yet though they appear on the cover, and say their names and countries of origin for the documentary, the film doesn’t actually interview any of them, or tell their stories. Instead, they’re background for Vargas (literally, on the Time cover)—and the film quickly drops them and goes back to showing clips of its hero on various television programs, or speaking to rapt audiences.

Part of the reason this is problematic is, again, because Vargas has done so well in America. Looking at him alone, it’s easy to read the moral as a plea for clemency for the most successful—a kind of, “This one can stay, but the rest…” argument. Vargas certainly doesn’t endorse that view himself, but it’s articulated uncomfortably by a drunk, angry white dude in a Southern bar—a man who seems ready to make exceptions for his general anti-immigrant stance once he hears about Vargas’ credentials.

Still, while other people’s stories would have been welcome, Vargas makes a compelling central character, not least in his impressive, courageous willingness to reveal his own vulnerability. This includes coming out of the closet about his undocumented status in the first place, which causes him to lose his driver’s license, and could realistically have resulted in his deportation. But it goes well beyond that. He shows himself, for example, being escorted from a Romney rally and practically begging the cop not to deport him, his low-key obsequiousness painfully emphasizing how completely he is at the mercy of the state and its minions.

Even more brutal is the depiction of Vargas’ relationship with his mother, whom he hasn’t seen since he came to America 20 years ago. She hasn’t been able to get a travel visa to visit; he can’t return to the Philippines without risking exile. At first, as he was growing up, he wrote her long letters. But as he aged and realized he might well never see her again, his anger, confusion, and grief became overwhelming, and he ceased regular communication with her. The scene of her crying in her home in the Philippines because her son won’t accept her as a Facebook friend is humiliating and horribly sad, an object lesson in how the bland bureaucratic grinding of immigration policy is converted into misery, cruelty, and heartbreak.

By the end of the film, Vargas has managed to have a Skype session with his mother, and to tell her he loves her. But they still haven’t met in person, and can’t. Despite President Obama’s executive decision to allow a path to a modicum of security for some undocumented immigrants, Vargas was two years too old to be covered. His story can have no happy ending, absent from political change—which is why, whatever its faults, the documentary is so effective. Here’s hoping it’s distributed widely, not least within the walls of Congress.