Tag Archives: Noah

Utilitarian Review 11/23/12

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On HU

Shortened week due to the holidays this time out.

Featured Archive Post: Ariel Kahn on subversion of authority in Salem Brownstone and Skim.

I expressed skepticism about the supernatural manga Natsume’s Book of Friends.

I talked about race or the lack thereof in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows.

Isaac Butler talks about memory and his father’s illness.

Richard Cook talks about preparing food with his girlfriend.

I talked about morality and other people.

And I compared comics sales to sales of other media.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talk about Twilight and abortion.

At Reason I review Jason Dittmer’s new book on nationalist superheroes.

At Splice Today I talk about filibuster reform and Democratic revenge fantasies.

 
Other Links

Christopher M. Jones on why worrying about fake geek girls is stupid.

The Republicans were for sensible copyright reform before they were against it.

Sean Michael Robinson interviews David Lasky.
 
This Week’s Reading

I finished Stanley Hauerwas’ “God, Medicine, and Miracles” read Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise,” reread “The Hobbit” and read Alun Llewellyn’s “The Strange Invaders.”
 

Morality and Other People

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Is this man an autonomous moral actor?

 
A few days back I had an entertaining discussion with Mori Theil on Twitter about morality, individuals, and the public. Mori’s basic argument, as I understand it (and hopefully he’ll correct me if I’m wrong), is that ethics and morality are based in individual autonomy. Here’s a bit of his twitter discussion:

Moral decisions arise from principles. Other people should not be your morality; that is slapdash. w/others, you’re not dealing with morality at all, just feelings and goodwill – politics. If, say, I should have to justify my morality to you, that is a tool of societal control.

In what was perhaps his clearest statement of principle, he said, “…morality is the application of ideals to reality. You seem to say that we should twist our morality around to serve reality. That’s backwards.

Like I said, I enjoyed this conversation — and part of the reason I enjoyed it is that Mori so clearly and forthrightly states the basic Enlightenment presuppositions and beliefs about moral experience. For Mori, morality involves an almost Cartesian process. You do not listen to others; you do not learn from others. Instead, you turn inward, discovering there pure ideals beyond the reach of a corrupting and confusing society. Once you have found them, you apply those ideals to reality. Morality, then, is an essentially imperial endeavor. Ethics conquers the world. If the world conquers ethics — or even, it sounds like, if the world affects ethics — then you are doing it wrong.

Obviously, Mori’s vision of morality resonates to some extent. Our touchstones for moral worth, I think, are often people who go against social consensus or social norms; who do the right thing despite pressure to do the wrong. So, for example, Galileo’s commitment to truth despite the opposition of the Church is seen as a quintessential moral moment. Conscientious objectors refusing to fight during the Vietnam War despite the coercion of the state might be another example. Or, to cite one of my personal heroes, Khruschev’s decision to expose Stalin’s crimes despite massive opposition within the Soviet bureaucracy, and indeed arguably despite his own Communist ideological commitments, seems like one of the bravest and most moral acts of a world leader in the last 100 years — certainly braver than anything I can think of any American president doing in my lifetime.

The question is, though: are these examples of moral ideals imposed upon the world? Were these people autonomous moral actors? If they weren’t, does that make them less moral?

I would say that the answers in each case I give above are pretty complicated. Galileo, of course, actually renounced his findings; he caved to social pressure. Conscientious objectors, on the other hand, are not in many cases autonomous actors. They certainly are placing themselves against the broader society — but many of them do so because of their communal commitments to peace churches. They certainly have ideals, but those ideals are not autonomous or generated outside of a social context. And as for Khruschev — his indictment of Stalin was done in the name of ideals, certainly — but those ideals were specifically Communist, and therefore by definition communal and social. From the accounts I’ve read, he was most angry at Stalin for his failures of courage and leadership during World War II — for failures to Russia specifically, in other words, rather than for failures to live up to a particular abstract vision.

Mori might say that each of these instances is, in fact, a poor example — that none of them are adequate examples of true morality. None, he might argue, show a moral actor as sufficiently autonomous; none are sufficiently pure. To which I guess my response would be that I can’t think of any moral situations which are not complicated like this. Martin Luther King drew his ideals from his church and his community. So did Gandhi. Matilde de la Sierra‘s activism against torture is based in her own personal experience of torture — but it’s sustained by her relationship with her husband and her work with other activists, not by some isolated commitment.

Moral actions are never autonomous — which makes sense, I think, because morality is mostly about how you treat other creatures. If you’re stranded on a desert island all alone, without even any animals in sight, morality is going to be largely beside the point. Rather than an ideal we impose on the world, morality, then, is an experience that the presence of others imposes on us. Morality doesn’t occur despite society; it occurs only because of society. Which means that, if our moral selves are our truest selves, then in a real sense our truest selves are other people.

That may seem counter-intuitive but, for me, at least, it fits my moral experience much better than Mori’s account does. Morality for me isn’t formulating abstract principles and then following them. Instead, it’s, say, volunteering when my son’s school needs volunteers, or giving a friend a ride when he needs a ride, or even (as happened last week) taking down inappropriate scanlated images when a colleague tells me I should.

At one point Mori asked “do you think the Internet should perch like an angel of conscience on your shoulder?” My response is — sure, why not? The internet is just other people — and, like most folks, I’ve relied on other people to teach me to be a good person since my parents first started telling me to say “please”. Morality isn’t something I was born with. Rather, it’s a gift, granted by those I love, or respect, or live with. And the gift is, precisely, to teach me to love, to respect, and to live. If we are ethical, or human, it’s by each other’s grace — and if we’re unworthy of it, that’s all the more reason to be thankful when it is granted.
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Update: Mori replies here. I understand where he’s coming from much more clearly now, I think. Just quickly I’d say that when I talk about morality coming from communities, I don’t necessarily mean states or the law (I’m not ruling those out, but I wouldn’t see those as the only or best sources in every circumstance.)

I’d also just point out quickly that it wasn’t just society which saw slavery as acceptable for hundreds and hundreds of years (at least) — it was individuals who saw it that way too. Nor was the change against slavery a matter of lone individuals standing up against society; abolitionism was a movement and a community (composed of individuals, of course.)

Pale in the 70s

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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My wife and I took my eight-year-old son to see Dark Shadows this weekend, and thereby discovered that PG-13 covers a lot of territory.  The last Harry Potter films were PG-13, for example, and that meant kind of scary and some people die.  Dark Shadows, though, is PG-13 and that apparently meant not-nearly-elliptical-enough references to oral sex.  Which luckily my son is too young to get, but my wife and I got them and we were sitting there with our son and so were able to contemplate just how unfit we are to be parents.  Which is not a new revelation or anything, but it’s always painful to have it brought home to you like that.  Luckily there were no DCFS agents in the theater.

What there were in the theater instead were a lot of black people.  In fact, I’m pretty sure we were the only whites there.  In one sense, this is not particularly surprising — we saw the film on the south side of Chicago in an African-American neighborhood.  I’ve been to the theater a number of times, and the audience is always heavily black.

Still, it was a little weird in this case because, despite its name, Dark Shadows has a remarkably pale cast.  And I’m not just referring to the make-up Johnny Depp dons as the vampire Barnabus.  No, what I’m talking about is the fact that everyone in the cast was white.  And I do mean everyone.  Yes, of course, white people get all the speaking parts.  But unless I missed an extra hidden behind a gargoyle or obscured by the exploding canning factory, even the bit players here were impressive in their studious eschewal of diversity.  No blacks.  No Hispanics.  Not even any Asians, as far as I could tell.  Hollywood’s fictional 1970s Collinsport, Maine is white, white, and also white.  Unless you count some Curtis Mayfield on the soundtrack, I suppose.  Which I don’t.

Of course, you could argue that the actual Collinsport, Maine, in the 1970s would have been racially homogenous. And that’s true — Maine even today is 94% white, and a small seaport town like Collinsport would be a few percentage points higher than 94%, I’m sure.

Still…the vampire/witch/werewolf population of Maine is significantly less than 6%, and yet somehow the film found room to represent this minority group.  Moreover, while pervasive segregation (https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/01/sundown-towns/) has meant that parts of the country have no African-Americans living in them, there is no section of the country that has been untouched by African-American culture.  A good deal of Dark Shadows is devoted to the fish-out-of-its-coffin humor of the 18th-century-born-Barnabas struggling to deal with the brave new world of 1972.  His reaction to changing gender roles (women doctors!) is mined for laughs, as is hippie culture and changing musical tastes (Alice Cooper makes an enjoyable guest appearance.)  But the vast changes in style and consciousness caused by the Civil Rights movement are never addressed.  Surely Barnabas trying to parse Black Power — or even the Electric Company — would have been worth a laugh or two.  But nope.  It’s hard to imagine a 1970s without soul, even in Maine, but Dark Shadows pulls it off.

Of course, the African-American audience I watched with didn’t seem to be especially disturbed by the lack of diversity.  On the contrary, for the most part they seemed to enjoy the film, oral sex jokes and all.  No doubt they long ago accepted that Caucasians were going to dominate their Cineplexes. As my wife’s been known to say when challenged about her love of eighties hair metal, “If I only liked pop culture that wasn’t sexist, then there’d be no pop culture to like, would there?”  Still, after a couple of hours of ghosts, vampires, and witches, the creepiest moment of the afternoon was leaving the theater and realizing that, as far as the film was concerned, the people around me barely existed even as dark shadows.

Book of Friends

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This first ran in the Comics Journal.
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I haven’t read a ton of manga, but it seems lately that every one I do read involves someone who is able to see ghosts and spirits. Dokebi Bride; xxxholic, and now this. I have to say, it somewhat undercuts the pathos that Midorikawa wants me to feel. She keeps insisting that her main character, Natsume, has led a life of loneliness because he can see Yokai and no one else can. But, come on. Everyone can see them. They probably have endorsement deals. “Do you know me? I died and now roam the earth in disembodied agony. But I still get turned away at inns for some reason. That’s why I carry….”

It’s not hard to imagine these particular ghosts in advertisements, actually, because they, and the manga they inhabit, are so thematically generic. Dokebi Bride uses its ghosts as a metaphor for grief and loss; xxxholic uses its ghosts as a metaphor for karma. The first is one of the most beautiful comics narratives I’ve ever read; the second is not especially good, but at least has the virtue of being somewhat ruthless.

Book of Friends, though, is ghost story as after-school special. Natsume is gentle and kind and good, and also gentle and kind. He finds a book that allows him to control spirits, and instead of using it to control spirits he decides to seek out all the ghosts and free them, because he is pure of heart and has the blandness of ten. Presumably his niceness is supposed to be endearing, but its achieved with so little effort that it just makes him vague. His moony sad memories float by in the requisite shojo drifting-panels-of-white-space-with-petals-falling and you say to yourself, yep, there are those petals, I am supposed to feel sad now. But who can give a crap about this nonentity and his drearily unfocused self-pity? Occasionally a ghost threatens to eat him or pull his tongue out, and you almost wish one of them would do it just to see if that might infuse him with some spunk. I mean, hideous trauma — it gave Batman character, right? But alas; no one ever really hurts Natsume, and if they did, you’d figure he’d go along just the same, turning every encounter into a parable about the meaning of friendship. Awww…the poor ghost was sad, and I helped her, and now the world is just a little bit brighter. I am shojo Michael Landon!

Not that it’s all bad. Though, as I already mentioned, the art is largely by-the-numbers, the Yokai themselves look great. Based visually on ghosts and demons from Japanese prints, they’re all one-eyed with gaping maws, or horned and neckless, with weird skinny limbs that don’t bend quite right.
 

The inevitable cat familiar is lovely too — cute and majestic and ominous all at once.
 

 
Those two images are uncanny and weird; they use the distortion of scale to suggest Natsume’s powerlessness before a malleable world that he is prepared to casually devour him. If that was what the story was about, I’d want to keep following this series. But it isn’t, and I don’t.

Utilitarian Review 11/16/12

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HU News

I’m pleased to announce that Isaac Butler is joining the regular HU roster as a contributing writer. Welcome aboard Isaac!

In other news…next week is Thanksgiving, and I’m traveling, so HU will have a shortened schedule. Not sure exactly how it’ll work, but probably we’ll be off Thursday and Friday and possible Wednesday, Saturday, and/or Sunday as well. Whatever happens, though, have a good holiday if your celebrating it, and we’ll be back to normal the Monday after, if the good lord is willing and the creek doesn’t rise.
 
On HU

Featured Archive Post: I talk about Wonder Woman vs. Twilight and vampires vs. seal men.

Me on the film I found more terrifying and repulsive than Audition or Hostel.

Me reviewing the Twilight Graphic novel (which sparks a long thread contrasting Bella and James Bond, of all things.)

Me on Junji Ito’s Tomie stories and the feminine proliferation of capitalism.

Rober Stanley Martin reviews Sean Howe’s “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

Kinukitty on Heart’s biography, “Kicking and Dreaming.”

Nicolas Labarre on Descent and choosing the horror road more traveled.

Jason Thompson and me talk about Junji Ito’s Tomie stories, progressive horror, and misogyny.

Subdee on Saiunkoku Monogatari and feminist fantasy.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I reviewed Skyfall (and pissed people off in comments.)

At Splice I note that the GOP is considering maybe treating Hispanics like human beings.

At Splice I wrote about Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage. I was pretty happy with this one.

At Splice I am surprised and heartened by the apparent existence of GOP moderates.
 
Other Links

Bert Stabler on Chris Hedges and moral climbing.

Glenn Greenwald on out of control government invasions of privacy and the Petraeus scandal.

DG Myers,who I had a really nice interaction with once, was shockingly fired from Commentary, apparently for supporting gay marriage.

Nicky Smith rags on my alma mater.

Monika Bartyzel compares Hunger Games and Twilight, being a hero first or last.

Alyssa Rosenberg on geek sexism.
 
This Week’s Reading

Not sure I remember everything, but…I finished Junji Ito’s first volume of Tomie stories, and read Lilli Carre’s Heads or Tails, and the fourth volume of Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit. Also read my friend Ilana Gershon’s book The Break-up 2.0 about new media and relationship break-ups, and started Stanley Hauerwas’ book God, Medicine, and Suffering.
 

Jason Thompson on Junji Ito’s Tomie Stories

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I had a pretty interesting conversation with Jason Thompson about Junji Ito’s Tomie stories and related matters on Twitter. Seemed a shame to just let it disappear into the twitter-hole, so I thought I’d reprint it over here.

Jason started out:

Nice article on Junji Ito’s Tomie. While it’s always interesting to analyze undercurrents in horror fiction, I’m resigned that these currents are usually reactionary. In real horror, there IS no role for any character, male or female, other than villain or victim. Horror which has any kind of positive or empowering message to any group isn’t really horror. Action-horror, maybe. ‘Aliens’, thus, is action-horror, not horror, because Sigourney Weaver kicks ass at the end. Contrarily, Night of the Living Dead is horror because the heroine is catatonic/useless and the hero gets killed pointlessly. The ‘update’ of Romero’s catatonic heroine, I guess, is Tobe Hooper’s heroine in Chainsaw 2, who ends up a manic/deranged killer. But any horror story which ends with the protagonist in a better space than they started isn’t much of a horror story, IMHO.

I replied:

Glad you liked the piece! I’m always pretty leery of defining “real” horror. Genres are arbitrary demarcations, and designed to crossbreed. In any case, I don’t think “progressive” means “uplifting.” Presenting a bleak worldview can easily have progressive overtones (as in the Stepford Wives.) I’d agree that Ito is fairly regressive…but that’s because of how he deals with gender, not because the stories are bleak. Not even clear they are bleak, exactly; you never care about the characters; the whole point is to kill them off. It’s gruesome…but not sad. Probably meant to be exhilarating/funny/cool more than anything.

And Jason finished up:

Very true, Stepford Wives is a good example! You reminded me, Ito also did an (untranslated) 1-shot graphic novel about a beautiful bishonen who ensnares’ women’s souls. Yet even in that story, it’s the women zombies eternally following the ghostly bishonen who are the true sources of disgust. ;) That said, I think if Tomie were sorta the ‘heroine’ avenging herself on men the stories wouldn’t be very scary/very good horror. Tomie is definitely about men’s fascination/disgust with the female body. Tomie’s personality attributes are all stereotypes of the femme fatale, including her obliviousness/shallowness. Tomie’s shallowness is such she doesn’t even seem ‘aware’ she’s a monster in most stories. This must be meant as a comedy element.. …while sort of reinforcing her as an inhuman ‘thing’ that doesn’t really act, it just reacts. Dave Sim could get with that idea. So yeah, it’s pretty sexist (or self-consciously plays with sexist imagery? Who knows). But I wouldn’t be a HP Lovecraft fan if I couldn’t stand seeing offensive ideas played out in genre form to their logical extreme.

Now I’m thinking of “The Iron Dream”, Norman Spinrad’s exploration of ‘what if Hitler were a genre author’…

Pardon the ramble! It’d be interesting to see an essay on the depiction of women throughout Ito’s work… The ‘heroine’ of Uzumaki is pretty much a reactive figure too (though so is every character in that story of predestination).

The Horror! The Horror!

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I recently watched Audition and Hostel, films famous for their viscerally graphic depictions of torture. I don’t think I flinched once during either of them; I didn’t look away, I wasn’t freaked out, I was unfazed and untrammeled. Needles through the eyes, feet hacked off, genitals severed — go ahead. Doesn’t bother me.

But I did watch one film recently that traumatized me so thoroughly that I almost couldn’t finish it. I covered my eyes; I stopped the playback; I walked away, ejected the disk, and promised myself I wasn’t going to finish it (though I eventually did.)

What was this terrifying, gruesome film you ask?
 

 
Would you believe Rob Reinter’s 1985 romantic comedy, The Sure Thing?

At least since I got through adolescence, I’ve always found sit-com style social embarrassment porn a lot more difficult to watch than anything having to do blood or horror. Watching Walter Gibson (John Cusack) squirm while his writing teacher reads out loud his roommate’s Penthouse Forum letter which he has mistakenly submitted for his composition assignment, or watching Alison (Daphne Zuniga) let herself be goaded into leaning out of a moving car topless — Eli Roth and Miike dream about attaining that level of sadistic ruthlessness.

Romantic comedies aren’t usually seen as sadistic of course. But The Sure Thing makes a good case that they are — or at least that this one is. Part of what’s so painful about watching it is the manifest contempt Reiner has for his characters. In “Say Anything”, Cameron Crowe presents his mismatched pair as lovable and natural — the female overachiever is cool and smart and funny and to be honored for her work ethic; the doofy kickboxing oddball is respected for his sweetness and his humor and his gallantry.

Reiner uses a similar smart girl/comic guy dynamic, but for him it’s an excuse for sneering rather than sympathy. Allison’s intelligence and focus are a constant cause for scorn; even her writing teacher tells her she needs to “live life to the fullest” — i.e., drink more beer and fuck more often. Walt, meanwhile, is given a completely standar-issue fascination with the stars to show that beneath the shallow, callous, frat boy alcoholic there lurk depths. Despite heroic efforts by Cusack and Zuniga, neither of their characters is remotely likable nor, for that matter, even provisionally believable. They fill the space labeled, “romantic lead here”, spouting more or less funny one-liners and/or engaging in cringe-worthy set-pieces, as the script moves them.

With the rise of reality television, I guess everybody now is more or less aware that people love to watch each other suffer extremes of humiliation. I don’t think folks usually connect those paroxysms of delightful social contempt with the pleasures of horror (or for that matter action) movie violence and revenge. But to me they don’t seem all that different — except, of course, that, compared to the gore and gouts of blood, the sit-com embarrassment is a lot more visceral.