Utilitarian Review 12/11/15

Posted on December 12, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Mahendra Singh on the draftsmanship of Jeffrey Catherine Jones.

Chris Gavaler on analyzing comics layout.

Me on why writing for hire isn’t spiritual debasement.

Me on Robocop 2 and the joy of hating children.

Roy T. Cook tries to tell Indiana Jones from Harrison Ford.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from the end of 1950, including the first graphic novel ever.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian I :

—interviewed William Richards on his new book about psychedlics and spiritual experience.

—wrote about Lex Luthor, Jr, and corporate fan fiction.

At the Establishment I wrote about my son’s acting career and the myth of meritocracy.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—Project Runway and how people suck and friends don’t win.

—why Trump is not the future.

Other Links

Mistress Matisse on the James Deen accusations and how the law doesn’t care about sex workers.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on hope, or lack thereof.

Neil Drumming on diversity on Project Runway.

Robocop vs. Your Offspring

Posted on December 9, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This post is one of my Twisted Mass of Heterotopia columns, supported by my Patreon subscribers. If you think it’s the sort of thing you’d like me to write more of, consider contributing (and thank you!)
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Robocop 2 was mostly, and not wrongly, ignored when it came out in 1990, but it did manage to spark a smidgen of controversy. One of its major villains was Hob, played by Gabriel Damon, who would have been 13 during filming and looked like he could easily have been a year or two younger. Hob curses foully, dispenses narcotics, attempts murder, and watched vicious bloodletting while barely blinking an eye. Then he dies in a sentimental, tearful scene clutching Robocops hand.

Critics were appalled. “The use of that killer child is beneath contempt,” Roger Ebert declared. David Nusair added, “That the film asks us to swallow a moment late in the story that features Robo taking pity on an injured Hob is heavy-handed and ridiculous (we should probably be thankful the screenwriters didn’t have Robocop say something like, “look at what these vile drugs have done to this innocent boy”).”

Ebert and Nusair aren’t exactly wrong. Robocop 2’s use of Hob is both gratuitous and cynical. Hob doesn’t need to be a child; everything he does could just as easily been given to an adult actor. There’s no effort to explain what a 13 year old is doing in the drug business, either. As far as the script is concerned, Hob is played by a 13 year old purely because it’s shocking to have him played by a 13 year old. It’s pure exploitation of a minor. Who can blame the critics for recoiling?

Still…I love Hob. I love him precisely because his presence in the film is so utterly, bracingly cynical. For most of the film, he embodies our hyperbolic fear and hatred of children; the preposterous inflated fear of a new generation of cynical pre-teen superpredators, the jaded youth terrifyingly familiar with vice. And then, in his death scene, when he’s no longer a threat, he becomes the perfect, heart-tugging victim. The film’s view of Hob turns on a needle from paranoia to pathos; from loathing to sentimental catharsis. There’s no attempt at connective tissue; no effort to make Hob a character beyond the tropes. He’s just Childhood Monster or Childhood Victim. There’s not even a pretense that he’s anything else.

I don’t know whether Hob is intentional satire, gleeful hyperbole, or sincere fever dream. Probably a little of all of those, if the scene with the pre-teen Little League team and their coach robbing a store is any indication. But whatever the motivation, the result comes across like a sardonic, giggling sneer at every Hollywood film that has ever whipped up moral panic about teens, or dropped a dead child onto its protagonist in the name of Real Emotion. From the bad news kids breaking jazz records in Blackboard Jungle to the kidnapped youngster motivating a tearful Tom Cruise in Minority Report, all the children on screen, everywhere, start to look like Hob. And suddenly you wonder, do we even care about these kids? Or do we just get our kicks by pretending that they’re nightmare demons, innocent angels, and/or both at once?

Roger Ebert adored Minority Report, dead kid and all, and Millenial think pieces continue to dot the Internet. If you use racial or gendered or homopohobic stereotypes, there’s at least a decent chance someone will point them out. But kids aren’t seen as a marginalized group, and tropes around them aren’t seen as invidious, or just aren’t seen at all. Kids really are innocent victims, right? Or else they really are dead-souled thugs in training who need to get off my lawn.

Robocop 2, though, takes up the difficult task of exploiting childhood so blatantly that you can’t look past it, even if you’re determined to set your eyeline a foot over Hob’s head. Robocop 2 presents a dystopic future in which we hate and fear and condescend to children, just like we do now, just with a little less hypocrisy.

Writing for Hire Is Not Spiritual Debasement

Posted on December 8, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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Writing gets demystified pretty quickly when you do it for a living. All the stuff you hear in creative writing programs about cultivating your own voice or writing what you know or making the familiar strange — pretty much nobody who will pay you actually gives a shit. Instead, the kind of things your clients are likely to focus on are, can you meet a deadline? Can you be just as entertaining and accessible as we’ve decided the audience would like you to be, without being so entertaining and accessible that someone gets offended? Can you figure out something to say about dietary supplements without instantly revealing that neither you, nor we, nor really anybody cares about dietary supplements? In short, can you competently jump through the hoops at your boring day job the way that everybody else has to jump through the boring hoops at their boring day jobs? And can you do it without too many glaring grammatical errors?

Like I said, you figure all this out fairly quick. Or, at least, it seems like you would. Not Anna Davies, though. Davies is, she tells us right at the beginning of her essay a “real writer” — and as proof, she says she’s ghost-written a massively popular YA series. She clearly intends for us to be impressed — and, hey, I can oblige happily enough. I was impressed. Ghost-writing a massively popular YA series— that sounds like a great, relatively enjoyable source of steady income. I’d do it if I had the chance.

Anna, though, doesn’ t present it as an enjoyable source of steady income. Instead, she makes it sound like some sort of Faustian bargain, in which she sold her inner glittery snowflake for ugly, mundane cash. She’d wanted to be a famous YA writer herself, but all she did was write other people’s series. She buried her muse so thoroughly that even her editor tells her, “You write well, but nothing has heart.” To which she replies, in a transcendent psalm of self-pity:

“Of course nothing did. I’d given it to them. I’d given them my time, my talent, my 20s. And that was the lesson that had somehow gotten buried as I learned to create characters, set scenes and turn around a revise in three days: Never give more than you’re prepared to lose. In the course of five years and approximately 600,000 words, I’d become so good at mimicking the voice of another author that I’d lost my own, and I’d failed to nurture my own career, not to mention well-being, as carefully as I had the lives of the characters that had never belonged to me.”

Davies has written for the New York Times and Marie Claire, and is making her declaration of failure from Salon. Clearly, she spent some time in there nurturing her career. But putting that aside, what exactly is she complaining about here? That all her dreams didn’t come true? That she had to work at a job that was occasionally unpleasant and felt like work? That after five years she’s only a quite remarkably successful writer rather than being J.K. Rowling? I don’t mean to be cruel, but, jeez, buck the fuck up.

To be fair, when you read the whole essay, you get the impression that there is more going on with Davies than she is quite willing or able to explain. She talks about her mother’s death; she talks about drinking too much; she talks about relationship failures. It doesn’t exactly add up, but for whatever reason, she’s obviously quite unhappy. I don’t think she’s lying about that, and I certainly don’t blame her for it.

Still, for a working writer, it is kind of irritating to see my profession presented as some sort of catastrophic self-betrayal, and/or as leading inevitably to a dark night of the soul. Reading it, I felt (presumptuously, but still) like I’d gotten a little glimpse of how sex workers feel when they have to sit through yet another documentary about how debased and miserable they are. Work for hire can be exploitive and depressing just like any other job, of course, and sometimes folks will treat you badly (or in the worst case not pay you.) But there’s nothing about it that’s inherently demeaning, or no more so than any other kind of employment.

Davies though, thinks there is. Work for hire function in her essay as a weight and a corruption, the thing that has prevented her from becoming a real writer, or even a real person. It’s like being a ghost writer has made her a real ghost; as if writing for someone else has turned her into no one. She seems, in other words, to have confused her job with her soul, and to have lost perspective in a catastrophic manner on the fact that being a ghost is just a gig. It’s not a sign that you are dying.

Utilitarian Review 12/4/15

Posted on December 5, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Jaime Green on how Clybourne Park is lying to you.

Chris Gavaler with a bibliography of superman before Superman.

Ng Suat Tong on why Jessica Jones is a poorly thought out mess.

Me on how Rogue Nation makes sense if you just hate Tom Cruise.

Me on Wonder Woman, the stranger in the new Batman vs. Superman trailer.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from fall 1950—lots of EC, plus Gasoline Alley.

Utilitarians Everyhwere

For Slates’ annual overlooked book list I got to recommend Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s Again.

At Quartz I wrote about

—Jessica Jones vs. the patriarchy.

—how conservatives police speech by don’t get called out for political correctness.

At Playboy I wrote about white paranoia and fear of crime.

At the Guardian I wrote about the Hunger Games’s dislike of femininity.

At the Establishment, I wrote about

—prejudice against young male Syrian refugees.

—the anti-gun control movement and apocalyptic fantasies of violence.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—free speech and my experiences with the editors at the Atlantic.

—why Project Runway is better than quality television.

Other Links

Joanna Angel describes her abusive relationship with porn star and accused rapist James Deen.

From a bit back, Alyssa Rosenberg on The Voice and LGBT contestants.

Lee Drutman with an excellent article on why gun control is so hard to past (and no, it’s not because the NRA bribes Congress.)

Wonder Woman in Batman vs. Superman

Posted on December 3, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

There’s a new (new!) Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer. Watch it now!

Online reaction seems pretty skeptical, centering on Jesse Eisenberg’s jittery camp. People don’t want jittery camp from their supervillains anymore, I guess. No love for Frank Gorshin.

Anyway, as you’ll see if you can make it to the end, Gal Gadot shows up as Wonder Woman right at the close, in a moment also played for cutesy laughs. Doomsday (I guess that’s Doomsday) shoots some sort of special effect thing at Batman, and our dour hero is about to be incinerated, when Wonder Woman leaps in with her shield. “Is she with you?” Superman asks, with Henry Cavill demonstrating that he’s got nice comic timing. “I thought she was with you,” Batman replies in grim dark bat voice.

Part of the joke is about the wrong-footed testosterone. Wonder Woman, as a woman, should belong to either Superman or Batman. But (feminism!) she doesn’t. The conflicted bromance m/m romantic comedy (complete with meet cute at the trailer’s beginning) is interrupted; the gritty ballet of manly men thumping each other gives way to the sit-com shuffle of manly men belching in confusion as the woman of the house swoops in to be competent.

William Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator, would probably find a bit to like here; Wonder Woman as invader of man’s world (metaphorically and literally) resonates with his original themes to some degree, and of course it’s nice to have her saving the bat dude rather than the other way around. The perspective, though, is inevitably wrong way round. Wonder Woman, the original comic, started out after all with Steve Trevor invading Paradise Island, and even in Man’s World, Diana was surrounded by sorority girls and fellow Amazons, so that Steve was always the lone dude in a female community.

The whole point of the original Wonder Woman was that Wonder Woman was the standard; women were the normal thing, and men were the sometimes odd, sometimes sexy, but always secondary other. Wonder Woman in Dawn of Justice is heroic, but she’s heroic through the eyes, and from the perspective, of the two guys whose relationship is the title of the film. Which isn’t surprising, really, but does mean that, Supergirl, Jessica Jones, Buffy, or any superhero show where the woman is in the title, is going to be truer in many ways to Marston’s vision than the character called Wonder Woman in a film titled Batman vs. Superman.

Rogue Nation Makes Sense If You Just Hate Tom Cruise

Posted on December 2, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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Early on in the latest Mission Impossible film, Rogue Nation, the aging but not greying Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) meets a young female contact (Hermione Corfield) in a record store. After they exchange knowing quips about John Coltrane and Shadow Wilson, she hands him his secret message in the form of a vinyl record, and then, breathlessly, tells him how wonderful he is. “All the stories about you can’t be true…can they?” she stutters. Cruise-as-Hunt pauses without speaking, giving her a self-satisifed grin that says clearly, hey, I’m an awesome movie star and/or superspy. I am pleased that the script has recognized that women decades younger than me should fawn at my feet. All is right with the world.

And then that fawning record store clerk is murdered brutally in front of him while he watches helplessly. He’s not an awesome superspy. He’s just a smug twit whose unearned assurance results in death and bloodshed wherever he goes — while he himself is unscathed. Why doesn’t someone kill him already?

Of course, throughout Rogue Nation, and for that matter throughout the two decade long film series, people do try to kill Ethan. You’re supposed to root for them to fail…or are you? Rogue Nation makes you wonder. The plot pits the Impossible Missions Force, led by Hunt, against the Syndicate, an “anti-IMF” — a collection of agents disavowed from the world’s spy forces.

Throughout the film, the IMF and the Syndicate are presented as parallel and equivalent. That first vinyl message is from the Syndicate rather than the IMF, as it turns out. The characterization of the Syndicate as a “rogue nation” also, and deliberately, applies to the IMF, which continues to operate secretly within the IMF even after Congress closes it down. Agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) who may be working with the Syndicate or with the IMF or both, argues, convincingly, that there’s not much to choose between them. “They’re all the same,” she says of the vying secret agencies. “We only think we’re fighting on the right side because that’s what we choose to believe,” she’s right too. “There’s always people like [Syndicate-head] Lane (Sean Harris) and there’s always people like us to fight him.” What’s the difference? Lane used to blow people up in the name of the status quo; now he’s doing it, he says, in the name of “change”. Even if you do prefer the status quo to change, dead folks are dead; they don’t care in the name of what nebulous ideology they’ve been killed.

Other films in the series play with similar insights. Ethan is constantly fighting moles within his own agency, and/or disgusing himself as his villainous counterparts, or stealing the super deadly information from the government for the shadowy organization he plans to betray any moment now. In the secretive world of spies, the “good guys” are constantly threatening to turn into bad guys, so you wonder whether the world wouldn’t be better off without the good guys in the first place.

The thing that keeps you on the side of the good guys, the thing that distinguishes bad from good, isn’t so much motivation or methods as Cruise himself. He’s the star oozing action-hero charisma and boyish charm, even as a fifty year old. He’s the Hollywood protagonist — you’re supposed to love him, like that record clerk, and so end up rooting for the Western righteousness he represents.

But what if you don’t like Cruise? This is hardly an academic question; the world is filled with Cruise anti-fans. His manic self-regard, his creepy involvement in Scientology; the way he clenches his jaw to show earnest determination…he’s a hero you love to hate. In the second Mission Impossible, the evil villain rants at length about wanting to wipe the stupid grin off Ethan’s face. I related overly.

And that’s the brilliance of Rogue Nation, if brilliance is the word. The film is a passionate call for less supervision of spy networks. It lauds American hegemony, not just over imperial possessions, but over Britain and Europe. The Brits are responsible for the Synidcate; the Americans have to bail them out, even to the point of drugging the Prime Minister and framing a cabinet officer. Raffish Tom Cruise knows best for everyone; pledge allegiance to the smirking America, world, and all your problems will be solved.

But all that collapses in on itself if you just, for a moment, let yourself hate Tom Cruise. Suddenly, Ethan isn’t the hero — he (and the country he represents) is an out-of-control narcissist with limitless ammo and no accountability. When his teammates accuse him of turning his mission into a deranged personal vendetta — they’re not failing to see his greatness. They’re right!

From this perspective, Rogue Nation isn’t a standard action movie in which the good guys are challenged and struggle and eventually triumph for virtue and stability. Instead, it’s a dystopic vision. This evil, self-satisfied, unhinged superguy whooshes back and forth across the world, sowing chaos and insufferable cockiness in his wake, and no one can stop him. Bullets, bombs, Congressional subcommittees, common human decency—he ignores them all. Tom Cruise rules the world in the name of Hollywood stardom, self-regard, and the American way. Stopping him is a bleak, impossible mission. Look at that jaw clenching, filmgoers, and despair.

Utilitarian Review 11/28/15

Posted on November 28, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Kinukitty on writing Stevie Nicks fan fic as a nine year old.

Chris Gavaler on Frankenstein superheroes.

Me on Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It and the virtues of heterogenous apocalypse. (This was a Patreon supported post, so, if you like it, consider contributing.)

Me on the awesome doomy death and spiritual torment of Immolation.

We were off for pray for woodstock day.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates for comics from summer 1950 (lots of EC.)

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote about the documentary Killing Them Safely and how tasers escalate violence.

At the Establishment I wrote about how spewing racism isn’t braver than protesting it, and neither are part of a culture of fear.

At Ravishly I wrote about how Mockingjay can’t imagine non-violence.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

—Kelela, Girlyboi, and how R&B has always been everything.

—all the cultural journalists binge watching Jessica Jones.

—how Iron Man won’t save Jessica Jones.

Other Links

Terrell Jermaine Starr on how Ben Carson inspired him as a kid.

Mojo has the first year end best of list. Dylan, Keith Richards, Richard Thompson *and* David Gilmour? That’s a lot of fogeys on there.