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Quentin Tarantino, Humanist

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Since we’re doing a Django Unchained roundtable I thought I’d republish this. It first appeared way back when in the Chicago Reader.
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It’s hard to believe the acclaim bestowed on this rip-off artist. Second-hand plots, second-hand characters, second-hand themes, all thrown together without regard to narrative probability, but with plenty of gratuitous violence to bring in the groundlings, and — ta daa! A marketing phenomenon is born.

But enough about Shakespeare. Kill Bill isn’t exactly Henry IV, but at least Quentin Tarantino’s two part epic is shallow and derivative. Even fast food commercials these days want you to believe in the sincere virtues of family, community, and up-to-date urban newness. Not Tarantino, thank God. Kill Bill is relentlessly, gloriously glacial — the ravishing Kung Fu battle in the first part unwinds endlessly without narrative function or even, really, suspense — we all know how this is going to turn out, after all. Its only raison d’etre is the choreography and the beauty of the shots. In “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Ang Lee tried to give martial arts films a soul. Fuck that, Tarantino seems to be saying — his version is all cold surface; blank stare as tribute. Empty? Why, yes. But, as it happens, it’s also more true to the source material, and a more thoughtful take on the depersonalized attraction of violence.

Kill Bill 1, like martial arts movies generally, is a mechanized ballet — even the out-of-sequence narrative feels, at this point in Tarantino’s career, more like a reflex than an innovation. Kill Bill 2, on the other hand, is not so much robotic as paralyzed. Everything is Sergio-Leone-extreme close-up and anticlimax. Bud (Michael Madsen), the ex-killer, working as a bouncer in a girlie bar, is painfully chewed out by his thoroughly despicable boss — we expect him to go ballistic and trash the place, but instead he just mumbles and goes off to clean the plugged toilet. The super-martial-arts-guru played by Gordon Liu dies from eating poisoned fish-heads. Our heroine, the great swordswoman, keeps gearing up for a awesome display of virtuosity and then getting shot — the first time with rock salt, the second, bizarrely, with a truth serum dart that forces her to confess absolutely nothing of consequence. David Denby in the New Yorker speaks for many critics when he claims that “such scenes don’t work,” but surely they’re not supposed to, any more than the Simpsons is intended to be dramatically intense. This isn’t homage — it’s slow-motion parody. Action-movie clichés — revenge, honor, violence — all end up looking not merely dumb, but boring.

Tarantino’s usually viewed as simply a fan of movies. His films are supposed to be giddy hipster pleasures; an excuse to show off, the accusation goes; at his best he merely reproduces the stylistic tics of his heroes. Thus, for Denby, the fact that Gordon Liu comes off as “a prancing little snit” is a mistake; martial-arts masters should be treated with respect, right?

On the contrary, Tarantino’s studied refusal to fulfill genre expectations is the reason to watch him. He doesn’t want to make a Hong Kong action movie, or a blaxploitation flick: he wants to have a conversation about one. And that’s what his movies seem like: long, dramatic arguments with other filmmakers and other films. Probably the most enjoyable part of Jackie Brown, for me, was the treatment of Robert DeNiro, whose portrayal of an utterly inept, hen-pecked wannabe bad-dude deftly upended decades of macho posturing — this guy, Tarantino seems to say, is just another honky who wants to be tough. Similarly, in Pulp Fiction, gangland thugs, so celebrated by Scorcese, Coppola, et. al., are presented as moronic sit-com buffoons.

It’s no accident that Tarantino seems most masterful when skewering the primal histrionics of a method-actor like DeNiro. The pulp movies Tarantino draws on are, as a rule, obsessed with visceral responses — sex, blood, suspense, shock. Tarantino is interested in these things too, but only second-hand, as odd collectables you might find on display in a museum. He doesn’t want to create excitement, but to take it apart and see what makes it tick. The famous torture scene in Reservoir Dogs, set to a feel-good seventies sound-track, was disturbing not because it was so immediate, but because it was distanced: Tarantino seems to be watching you with his head slightly to one-side, clipboard in hand, asking, “Well, now, how did you feel about that?” In Kill Bill 2, Elle (Daryl Hannah) sics a black mambo on Bud, then reads him pertinent facts about the snake as he lies paralyzed. That’s Tarantino all over; you can bet that if he were dying in horrible agony, he’d still want to know how many milliliters of venom had entered his bloodstream.

Every so often, though, Tarantino does attempt to generate the kind of catharsis that he usually makes it his business to mock. The results, needless to say, are not pretty — a vivisectionist may be good at taking the dog apart, but he’s not the person to go to if you want to buy a pet. Of all his movies, Kill Bill seems the one in which Tarantino has most consistently attempted earnestness and, as a result, it’s his weakest effort. The character of The Bride (Uma Thurman) is a case in point. She’s clearly patterned on Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name — an ectomorphic, blond, impassive killer. Fun could certainly be had with this character, and Tarantino indisputably hits some of the right notes; after digging herself out of her own coffin, for instance, The Bride, covered in dirt and looking like death, calmly walks into a diner and asks the startled counter-attendant for a glass of water.

Before being buried alive, however, The Bride totally loses her composure, weeping hysterically. This would be okay if Tarantino had actually cast Eastwood in the role. But Thurman is a woman, and seeing a woman fall apart in an action movie doesn’t tweak convention; it fulfills them. Of course, The Bride pulls herself together and escapes in an utterly preposterous and enjoyable sequence, but what’s the point of her outburst? To increase suspense? To make us identify with her? To make her more believable? Tarantino can be brilliant when he pushes ideas to their limits, or when he undercuts them. But here he’s doing neither; he’s using tired techniques to achieve tired ends. Thurman’s desperate emoting doesn’t comment on Sergio Leone — at best, it merely replicates the supposed “realism” of Bruce Willis’ average-joe action hero in Die Hard.

The misguided desire to turn Thurman’s character into an actual person is underlined by her christening; in the first movie, she’s nameless, in the second, we learn that she’s called “Beatrix.” But it’s her final appellation that really causes trouble. In the film’s last scene, we see a close-up of Thurman’s face and printed over it the information that she is now known as “Mommy.” Motherhood is, in fact, the central theme of Kill Bill. It’s also one of the most loaded and thorny topics in our culture, and by the end of the second part of the movie, its clear that Tarantino, in confronting it, has suffered a catastrophic failure of nerve.

Things start out all right. Many pulp movies center around plots involving brutality committed against or witnessed by children: “Once Upon a Time in the West,” for example, or, more recently, “Batman.” But in Kill Bill 1, Tarantino features not just one act of violence, but several. To open, Bill supposedly kills The Bride’s unborn child. Then, in an animated sequence we see a young girl literally covered in the blood of her murdered parents. This is O-ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) whose horrifying experience inevitably inspires her to become a ruthless assassin and the crime-lord of Tokyo.

And finally there’s the movie’s first extended sequence. The Bride has tracked ex-assassin Vernita Green (Vivica Fox) to the later’s suburban home; the two immediately begin an extended, violent kung-fu battle, complete with kitchen knives, but they are interrupted by the arrival of Green’s four-year old daughter Nikki (Ambrosia Kelley). The Bride, it turns out, doesn’t want to kill the child’s mother in front of her. Green pushes for more, suggesting that, for the sake of the child, the Bride should abandon her revenge. But the Bride is unconvinced, she refuses to let Green off the hook just for “getting knocked up.” In the end, she does murder the mother in front of the daughter, and then apologizes woodenly: “When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting.” There’s been much speculation on the net about a sequel starring a vengeful Nikki, and rightly so. After all, children in this world aren’t the innocent victims of violence — they’re excuses for it — convenient plot devices. Oren Ishi’s seventeen-year old, psychotic bodyguard Gogo (Chiaki Kuriyama) who wears school-girl outfits is emblematic; a kind of living fetish of blood and gore.

Kill Bill 1 suggests that we enjoy watching our children get hurt. In Kill Bill 2, Tarantino merely notes that children have aggressive impulses — a much less daring thesis. Certainly there’s nothing particularly daring about the portrayal of Beatrix’s four-year-old daughter B.B. (Perla Haney-Jardine), who, it turns out, did not die after all. Bill has raised her as a normal, upper-middle-class suburban youth who enjoys playing with toy guns. She also deliberately killed her pet goldfish, but her real function is to humanize her mother. After rediscovering the child, Beatrix kills Bill, ends her crusade of vengeance, and begins a new life as a loving mother –inaugurated by another extended crying jag. B.B. herself, however, barely exists; she’s little more than a stand-in for hundreds of redemptive movie children. Tarantino could have made her a hyperbolically saccharine sit-com clone; he could have made her a spunky bad seed like John Connor in James Cameron’s motherhood-obsessed Terminator 2; he could have made her a ninja-assassin hell-bent on avenging her father’s death. Instead, he gives her an obligatory quirk (she likes watching “Shogun Assassin” before bed) and otherwise treats her with an unbecoming reverence. It’s as if he’s afraid to touch her.

Tarantino isn’t usually considered a cautious director. But in his scenes about motherhood he is pulling his punches, and the strain eviscerates his writing. Thus the scene in which Beatrix discovers, using an over-the-counter test, that she’s pregnant. Moments later an assassin bursts into her hotel room. Hijinks ensue, but finally the assassin accepts that Beatrix is with child. This time the plea of “but the children!” which was so ineffective in the first part of the movie, works like a charm. Looking through the shotgun-hole she’s blasted in the door, the assassin intones “Congratulations,” a punchline predictable and saccharine enough to have come out of a third-rate, by-the-numbers Hollywood action-comedy like Police Academy.

Tarantino’s never going to make even a first-rate action comedy, of course; he’s simply too talented a craftsman to churn out a scattershot masterpiece like Airplane. But if he doesn’t take care, he could create something significantly worse. Kill Bill’s more maudlin moments queasily echo the efforts of Jim Jarmusch, a director who, instead of puncturing genre conventions, inflates them with pretentious philosophizing and waits for the critics to call it art. It would be a shame if Tarantino went further down this road. Truly talented satirists are few and far between, but film-schools are full of myopic white boys eager to tell the rest of us what it means to be human.
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Utilitarian Review 1/19/13

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On HU

Featured Archive Post Anja Flower on gender in Ghost in the Shell.

Me on the pernicious drivel of Jim Carrey’s Yes Man.

Me on Fredric Wertham and the Seduction of AbEx.

Matt Brady on Django vs. Lincoln.

Gail Carson Levine (author of Ella Enchanted) on Joan Abelove’s anthropological novel, Go and Come Back.

Robert Stanley Martin on Jim Shooter and Moonshadow.

Owen Alldritt on Lil B as God.

Watching Django on the southside of Chicago

Richard Cook with 8 reasons that the Hobbit sucks.

Me on Dr. Strange and Steve Ditko erasing himself.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talk about mamas in country music.

At Splice, I review the Future Sounds of Buenos Aires, and decide the future is exotica.

At Splice Today, I urge everyone to follow me on Twitter!
 
Other Links

David Brothers has been writing an interesting series on Django Unchained.

Amanda Marcotte on why rape is not an accident.

Alyssa Rosenberg on Beyonce’s compulsive self-documentation.

Brian Cremins on the queer joys of Black Cat and tiny Spider-man.
 
This Week’s Reading

I’m rereading Twilight for a piece. And rereading/editing my Wonder Woman book; hopefully I’ll finish up next week and can get it out to readers sometime soon after that.
 

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The Erasure of Steve Ditko

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I think I first read Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s story “The Challenge of Loki” in a black and white reprint edition when I was around 8 or so. It’s originally from Strange Tales #123, August 1964.
 

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It’s not exactly right to say that it hasn’t held up — I wasn’t necessarily all that into it even as a kid, though it does have its virtues. Chief among them is a kind of self-contained inevitability; plotting that opens and closes with a satisfying “click.” In the story, Loki decides to use Dr. Strange to destroy his old enemy, Thor. He convinces Strange to cast a spell to rob Thor of his hammer while Thor is in flight. Without the hammer, Thor starts to fall to his death. Dr. Strange realizes he’s been tricked, and he and Loki battle. Strange is losing, but manages to reverse his spell, winding time backwards and returning the hammer to Thor. His life and hammer restored, Thor sets out in search of Loki, arriving at Dr. Strange’s sanctum just in time to scare Loki off and save Strange. The end.

I guess it sounds convoluted in the telling, but, again, the thing I sort of liked about it, and still sort of like about it, is the neatness of it — the way the story so swiftly and so unapologetically sets itself in motion, and then resets, or erases itself. Loki has an evil plot; it is discovered; everything goes back to normal. It’s transparently unmotivated, and then gratuitously rubbed out — pulp piffle which revels in its own greasepaint-daubed inconsequence. The gaudiness of the lack of pretense is refreshing — though also, admittedly, a little unsettling.

That hint of wrongness, might, perhaps, be tied to some of the characteristic tensions in Ditko’s work. Specifically, Craig Fischer argues in this lovely essay, in which he connects Ditko’s obsession with eloquently gesturing hands to the anxiety and unease which pervades the artist’s oeuvre — and then (obliquely) connects both the hands and the anxieties to repressed themes of abuse.

Certainly, hands are very important in “The Challenge of Loki.” Dr. Strange steals Thor’s hammer from him by generating a giant, blue/black hand.
 

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In part, the hand can be seen as pointing directly to Ditko himself; the elaborate motion lines an excuse to show the squiggle of the pen line — the diegetic hand as artist’s hand drawing the diegetic hand. The comic is showing you its own grinding mechanisms; it’s showing you the man (and the hand) behind the curtain.

What the man behind the curtain is doing, of course, is wreaking havoc. Thor is sadistically thrown to his death by the mystic hand — or, if you’d prefer, by the hand of the artist. There’s no motivation, other than Loki’s almost pure malevolence — which both is a plot device, and can be seen as characterizing pulp plot itself. The narrative almost figures artist as supervillain.

But then, of course, the artist relents.

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It’s interesting that the hand does not return the hammer, but instead fades away. Time is wound backwards (though, again curiously, this is not really visualized). Thor’s hammer is returned to him; the supervillain artist erases his own work. Not only is recompense made, but, apparently, the evil was never done. It effervesces, like a dream — or an instantly forgettable chunk of pulp detritus. There’s almost a wistfulness there — a fantasy that those hands (my hands? whose hands?) had never been or done; that they could just vanish with a wave of (the same?) hand.

I’m sure some folks will say that it’s a stretch to read into this story trauma or guilt or a confused identification/repudiation of an abuser. And I’d actually agree with that. “The Challenge of Loki” isn’t about abuse. It’s not about anything. It’s a stupid little story about Dr. Strange fighting Loki, with Thor thrown in for cross-promotional purposes. It’s well-constructed, and mildly entertaining, and that’s all that can be said for it, really. It’s inconsequential genre product. If there was ever anything more there, it has been scoured out by some violent or gentle hand.

Django, Southside

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Movie theater, South Side of Chicago: photo by Russell Lee, April 1941, from this site.

 

So there’s been some discussion in comments on various bits of our Django Unchained roundtable about how African-American audiences have reacted to the film.

The obvious answer to this question is, of course, that different black folks have reacted differently to the film, just as different white folks have reacted differently to it. There’s no monolithic black community response any more than there’s a monolithic white community response.

With that said…I did see Django Unchained on the south side of Chicago, with an audience that was basically entirely black (I think I may have glimpsed one other white guy there, but that was pretty much it.) The reaction to the film was, as far as I could tell, pretty enthusiastic; the little old lady sitting next to me kept loudly finishing punch lines and seemed particularly stoked by Stephen’s ignominious end.

When I was leaving the theater, I did overhear an interesting conversation, in which two men were discussing the way that “we undermine ourselves,” (to quote loosely.) I assumed they were referring to the character of Stephen — the black slave who aids his white master and effectively becomes (as Charles Reece points out) the film’s main antagonist. The idea that blacks are at least partially responsible for their own oppression is a well-established discourse in the black community, of course, from Bill Cosby and Barack Obama on down.

Still, it made me a little queasy to hear it deployed in this context, inasmuch as Stephen really is not, as far as I could tell, an accurate representation of anything. Uncle Tom really is a caricature, and looking to Stephen for straightforward lessons on slavery or racial politics really seems like a bad idea.

Anyway…while writing this, I actually started to wonder how white audiences reacted to the film. So, anybody see the film with a primarily white audience? Was there discomfort? Enthusiasm? Or what?

AbEx vs. Comics: Which Is More American?

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I’ve done a ton of post about Bart Beaty’s writing — but I think this will be the last. No promises though!

Anyway, I read Beaty’s book Frederic Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture recently. In general I found his argument quite convincing — that argument being that,

(a) Wertham was not a monster, and that his good works — such as providing clinical services in Harlem and providing key evidence to support Brown v Board of Education — more than outweighed his negative impact on the comic industry, and

(b) that negative impact has been seriously overstated anyway, and has been used as an excuse to neglect other more important reasons for comics decline — like television.

Anyway, as I said, Beaty largely convinced me. I was interested, though, in one paragraph towards the end of the book in which he is actually criticizing Wertham. Beaty says he disagrees with Wertham about the divide between high culture and low culture, and about the clear superiority of high culture. He argues that the privileging of high culture has hurt America — and he adds that “it is high culture that has most aggressively championed the conservative culture of individualism — often through the figure of the artistic “genius”— against more inclusive and progressive social possibilities.”

To back up this claim, Beaty says this:

It is no coincidence that at the time of the comic book controversy the Central Intelligence Agency was funding international touring exhibitions of American modernist art that had been championed by conservative critics such as Clement Greenberg and Dwight MacDonald. Art, the product of a individual creative expression, existed in the postwar period in opposition to mass cultural kitsch, and the celebration of art acted as a hegemonic force in American culture. Wertham did not recognize this fact, and consequently his writings played into the burgeoning ideology of individualism that he otherwise rejected.

Sounds reasonable. Except…well, I just recently read Justin Hart’s Empire of Ideas, about US efforts to influence foreign public opinion. I’ve got a forthcoming review of Hart’s book, so I’m not going to discuss it at any length here, but I did want to highlight a passage about the State Department’s support for abstract expressionism. As you’ll see, Hart’s take is pretty different from Beaty’s.

Stefan then flashed up slides of paintings from a well-reviewed, but highly abstract, show of modern art the State Department had put together for an international tour. “Mr. Benton, what is this?” Stefan barked out. “I can’t tell you,” Benton replied. Stefan continued: “I am putting it just about a foot from your eyes. Do you know what it is?” After Benton repeated that he would not even “hazard a guess of what that picture is,” Stefan scolded him: “You paid $700 for it and you can’t identify it.” Stefan closed his examination of Benton by quoting from a letter he had solicited from one of his constituents, a mural painter from Shelby, Nebraska. The artist from Shelby called the exhibit the “product of a tight little group in New York,” neither “sane” nor “American in spirit.” When Stefan asked Benton whether the exhibit depicted “America as it is,” Benton responded: “that was not the purpose of the art.”

Benton’s rejoinder entirely missed the most important point. The State Department, playing its role in supplementing private cultural exchanges and conversations, put together an art show to counteract what policymakers perceived as the contemptuous attitude of foreigners toward American culture. In so doing, they emphasized certain aspects of American art (abstract expressionism), while largely ignoring others (folk art and mural painting). Benton and his staff made a calculated, strategic judgment about how best to capitalize on American culture to
enhance the nation’s image, but this was an inherently political activity, subject to endless debate about who should speak for America and what they should say. In this particular case, Stefan had the last word when the House voted to slash all funds for public diplomacy from the State Department budget.”

For Beaty, high art was a conservative hegemonic discourse, supported by the US government, which contributed to the dominant American discourse of individualism. But Hart calls virtually all those assumptions into question. The US government did support AbEx — but it did so not to impose hegemony on the US, but rather to impress other nations. Moreover, it was attacked for so doing by conservatives, who successfully (hegemonically?) torpedoed future efforts in this direction. The reason they did so was precisely because of the discourse of individualism — to them, in fact, “individualism” of this sort seemed insane and foreign — or, if you will, un-American. The conservatives probably, Hart suggests, would have preferred folk art (though probably not mass culture art like comics.)

This doesn’t mean that Beaty is wrong, of course. Power and ideology are complicated things; there could easily have been contexts in which AbEx proponents were hegemonic, just as there are perspectives from which a classic liberal like Dwight MacDonald could be seen as conservative.

My point though is that, as I’ve mentioned before, I think Beaty — and comicdom in general, to the extent that there is such a thing — can overlook the extent to which relationship between comics and high art is not antagonistic, but parallel — or, rather, perhaps, the extent to which is it antagonistic because it is parallel.

That is, Beaty is certainly correct that AbEx enthusiastically promoted the ideal of individualism and the unique genius. But I think he misses the extent to which it promoted that ideology not out of untrammeled hegemonic power, but rather as a reaction to it’s own unstable and nervous position — an unstable and nervous position not that far divorced from comics’ own. The cult of individualism in AbEx is a way to justify the painting’s worth..and that justification was needed precisely because a lot of Americans viewed AbEx with a lot of suspicion. That suspicion was different in specifics than the suspicion directed at comics (i.e., arty farty nonsense vs. a danger to children) but I think you could argue that in many respects it was similar in structure and in effect.

If this is the case, Wertham’s assault on comics wasn’t because he failed to see the hegemonic power of high art. It was because he knew well that high art was not hegemonic. He was championing high art because he felt that it needed champions — and one way to so champion it was to point out its distance from bad art (just as comic strip creators distanced themselves from comic books.)

This discussion also, maybe, calls into question some of Beaty’s discussion of individualism. I actually agree that the cult of the genius is deployed against more inclusive social responsibilities in art. But it’s useful to realize that those more inclusive social responsibilities vary widely depending on where you’re looking. They could mean helping the poor and creating a more equitable society. But they could also mean — as just one for instance — a loud and intolerant xenophobia. Or they could mean denouncing homosexuals, which Wertham certainly did. Getting rid of the high/low binary doesn’t necessarily lead to progressive results, and it certainly wouldn’t necessarily lead to artists, high or low, throwing off hegemony, and/or hegemonies. Individualism shouldn’t be trusted, but social responsibility has its downsides as well.
 

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Painting attributed to Irv Novick

I’m OK, You’re Not There

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Self-help is about helping yourself to great whopping heaps of stuff . Money, wives, prestige, adoration, a perfect body to house your pristine ego — it’s all yours for the asking if you’ll just turn your frown inside out, let a smile be your bludgeon, and follow our twelve simple steps!

Or, if twelve steps seem too complicated, you can always go see Yes Man and learn how to do it in one. Carl (Jim Carey) is a sad, sad, and lonely guy; his wife Stephanie (Molly Sims) ditched him after six months, and he has responded by going fetal. He is stuck in a boring dead-end job at a bank, won’t answer his phone, barely leaves his house, and spends most nights at home watching rented DVDs by himself, too bored (we learn) to even masturbate. Finally, he admits he has a problem, and goes to a self-help revival meeting of the “Yes-Men” led by one Terrence Bundley (Terrence Stamp). Terrence claims that “when you say yes…you embrace the possible!” Armed with this singular, and indeed, single, philosophy, Carey heads off determined to say yes every time the opportunity presents itself . Soon he’s giving rides to homeless people, learning Korean, sucking up to his apocalyptically nerdy boss, approving dicey loans, and — most satisfyingly — canoodling with the yummy Alison (Zooey Deschanel) who looks (and indeed, in real life, actually is) about two decades younger than him. Who wouldn’t say yes to that?

Indeed, the whole Yes Man concept is charged with a kind of lobotomized libidinousness. Saying “yes” to everything allows Carl to absolve himself of all personal responsibility. By replacing his conscience with an arbitrary shibboleth, Carl escapes from Adam’s curse. He no longer knows good from evil; he now literally knows only what he says. Liberated from moral choice, he is invested with an irresistible prelapsarian glamour. He charms his immediate supervisor, Norm (Rhys Darby) by attending his Harry Potter costume parties; he charms his best friend’s fiancée by agreeing to host her bridal shower; he charms a jumper back from the ledge by leading the onlookers in a rousing singalong. Moroever, Carl’s newfound charisma has a definite erotic edge. Women in bars and in bridal stores swoon and giggle when he flirts, his toothless septuagenarian landlady neighbor gives him a surprisingly skillful blowjob; Alison falls seamlessly in love with him. Even his ex-wife wants to get back in his bed.

Of course, there are some downsides to the yes-man program. If you never say no, people are going to take advantage of you — and, indeed, Carl’s home is virtually taken over by the parasitic Rooney (Danny Masterton.) More importantly, abdicating personal responsibility isn’t much different than abandoning personhood altogether; Carl sets no boundaries on his self, and therefore, his self basically disappears. His appeal is that he is all things to all people — a nerd to Norm; a daring adventurer to Alison; a drinking buddy to his friend Peter (Bradley Cooper); and so forth. The effect is magical, but it’s neither trustworthy nor exactly human; and when Alison figures out what’s going on, she’s repulsed. “How do I know if anything you did was really true?” she asks him in horror before dumping his bony ass.

It is at this point that the movie really reveals its diabolical genius. Losing Alison makes Carl realize that saying “yes” is not in itself a sufficient philosophy. There’s something else…something missing. But what is it? Confused, he seeks out guru Terence again, who obligingly explains that he must continue to say yes…but only when he actually, really want to! “Yes” is simply a step along the way to the goal of a new, exciting, and fully functional self.

But what kind of functional self is this, anyway? Both Peter and Alison mock the “say yes because you really want to” philosophy as an over-obvious tautology — you need a guru to tell you that? When you start to think about it, though, the philosophy is far from obvious. In fact, it’s the opposite of obvious. It’s flat-out stupid. In the first place, there are some things you simply can’t afford to say yes to, no matter how much you want to — Carl and Alison have mysteriously bottomless reserves of cash with which to indulge their consumer flights of fancy, but that’s hardly true for everyone. And in the second place — well, you don’t have to be a Kantian to realize that even the more complicated Yes Man philosophy presents certain moral problems. Even if you really, really want to do so, there are many things you just shouldn’t say yes to — unprotected sex with a stranger, for example, or murdering your boss, or invading Iraq. It is possible to deeply desire to do things that are harmful to others. Because you’re not the only one in the world, you have an obligation not to fuck your neighbors over just because you feel like it.

Of course, Yes Man pretends that it is about reaching out; helping homeless people, organizing bridal showers for friends, being truthful with your lover. Saying “yes” is supposed to be a way to open yourself to life. In fact, though, the opposite is the case: it is not the universe which fills Carl, but Carl who fills the universe. There he is saving the jumper; there he is match-making; there he is on television at a football game; there he is climbing the corporate ladder, there he is romancing a woman who, by all normal standards, is a good bit out of his league. His inner drama, his healing, is the focus of the narrative, and everyone revolves around it. Carl starts out as a failed narcissist; he ends as a successful one.

This is perhaps most clear in the scene in which Carl’s ex-wife asks him to come to her house. She has just broken up with her lover, and is horribly distraught. Weeping, she comes on to Carl, asking him to stay the night. Trapped by his “yes” pledge, he almost agrees — but then he says “no”. Undoubtedly this is the right thing to do for both of them…but Carl doesn’t explain this, or try to comfort her, or show any especial sympathy for a woman who he claims to have loved. Instead, his voice, when he utters the crucial negative, is both triumphal and somewhat sneering. She made him suffer, and now he doesn’t need her.

Carl’s new self-confidence, his new self-identity, is, in other words, built on the most puerile kind of revenge fantasy. He gets to humiliate the woman who broke his heart. And, of course, the best part is that, once he’s free of her, she ceases to matter. We never see her again — she’s out of his life and now he can concentrate on what’s best for him and him alone. Her pain and sadness aren’t real, because nobody is real; they’re all just small cogs in the blandly improbable wish fulfillment that Carey and company have concocted. In this daydream, all that truly exists is Carl, the self he’s helped, and his own oblivious, ravenous chant — “yes, no, yes, no, yes, no” — spoken not to communicate with others, but to efface them.

Utilitarian Review 1/12/13

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On HU

I’m really pretty thrilled with everything we got to post this week on the blog. Just thought I’d mention that.

Featured Archive Post: Kinukitty on Joann Safar’s Le Petit Vampire.

I wrote on Nicki Minaj and the pros and cons of multiple personalities.

I wrote about Django Unchained and what black people know about violence in America.

Robert Stanley Martin with the first part of his massive reconsideration of Jim Shooter’s tenure as editor-in-chief at Marvel.

Charles Reece on Django Unchained and white folks watching black folks fight.

Katherine Wirick on Kent State, the docudrama, and the obscenity and allure of fiction as history.

Domingos Isabelinho on Fred’s Le Petit Cirque, with tons of gorgeous images from the comics.

Qiana Whitted on moral freedmen and dangerous slaves in Django Unchained.

 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I reviewed Alisa Valdes memoir The Feminist and The Cowboy, in which she talks about the joys of traditional gender roles.

Later in the week Valdes revealed that the cowboy had abused her, so I wrote a follow up piece.

Also at the Atlantic I wrote about how Jeffrey Eugenides’ advice to write like you’re dead is stupid.

At Splice Today I demand filibuster reform now!

Also at Splice I argue that writers should sometimes take no for an answer.
 
Other Links

James Romberger interviewed about his comic Post York.

James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook discuss their work on 7 Miles a Second, the comic they did with David Wojnarowicz which is being re-released by Fantagraphics.

Tucker Stone on the best comics of 2012.

Feministing on Dear Prudence and rape denial.

Amanda Marcotte on why a viral rape infographic is misleading.

A detailed and depressing explanation of why Congress sucks and will always suck.

Amanda Hess defends Zooey Deschenal.
 
This Week’s Reading

Finished The Feminist and The Cowboy. Also finished 50 Shades of Grey, thank god — possibly the worst 1600+ pages I have ever read in my life. Also read Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, which is pretty great.