Tag Archives: Phillip Smith

‘Playing On’ Shakespeare

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Edwin Landseer,(1848)

 
 
I spend a lot of time thinking about Shakespeare.

One of the reasons I spend a lot of time thinking about Shakespeare is that, like everything I enjoy, Shakespeare, or, to be more precise, the things we do with Shakespeare, often pulls me in conflicting directions. Attending a performance of Elizabethan or Jacobean theatre brings me genuine pleasure. At the same time, however, I also recognise that the cult of Shakespeare arose in concert with the colonial agenda of the British Empire. Today Shakespeare remains the archetypal dead white man who continues to dominate the literary canon and the reverence with which he is routinely treated, I believe, is less to do with his literary brilliance and more to do with the repackaging of the colonial myth of Western artistic dominance. I love watching Shakespeare, but I also love seeing people thumb their nose at Shakespeare in clever ways.

I do not like to see Shakespeare reduced. When I encounter Shakespeare adaptations or reinterpretations in the wild I recognise that the fact that I am familiar with something does not give me any authority over how it is used. Shakespeare belongs to everyone equally and I have no right to tell someone else what to do with his works. At the same time, I do not like the idea that Shakespeare needs to be reinvented, particularly when the reinvention occurs on the ground of ‘accessibility’.

One of the reasons why making Shakespeare ‘accessible’ irks me is that I feel it demeans the audience. Last year, while living in Indonesia, I taught A Midsummer Night’s Dream to both of my English Literature classes. Most of my students were born and raised in Jakarta and spoke Indonesian (or in a small minority of cases Dutch or Chinese) at home. They were all in their mid-teens. We spent several months working our way through the play. We stomped our way around the classroom to understand meter, we wrote messages to each other in early modern English, we performed short scenes, memorised monologues, watched sections from films, summarised readings of the play, wrote essays, flew to Singapore to watch Shakespeare’s Globe perform and, finally, performed a full version of the play as our annual school production. (Over the course of the year I made sure we challenged the myth of Shakespeare as being without peer, and I also made sure that female authors and writers of colour were well-represented in the rest of the syllabus.)

They loved it. In fact, they loved Dream more than any other text we looked at. They struggled with the language but they were up to the challenge. I was extremely proud of all they accomplished. The experience left me convinced that my love of Shakespeare was transmissible, and that teenagers are often a lot smarter than some would give them credit for.

It is because of this experience that I can empathise with those such as James Shapiro, Bitter Gertrude, or the numerous scholars on the listservs to which I subscribe, who have voiced concerns over the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On project to ‘translate’ all of Shakespeare’s plays (at least, all which are available and currently considered a part of the canon) into modern English. The grounds for this reinvention, it seems, is to make the works more readily understandable for actors and audiences. The idea that Shakespeare needs to be ‘translated’ conjures for me images of audiences who want to feel cultured, but also don’t want to have to work as hard as my students and I did.

My objections are, of course, horribly presentist. Those who, like me, hold that OFS are giving in to lazy audiences tend to see this as a departure from the ways in which we have always approached Shakespeare. We are wrong. There is good reason to assume that, during his lifetime and beyond, Shakespeare’s plays have been subject to revision, rewriting, and shifting fashions in theatre based upon audience tastes. Until the early eighteenth century the idea of textual fidelity as we understand it today simply did not exist. Companies frequently added to, edited, and completely reinvented Shakespeare’s plays. During a large part of its performance history, King Lear, for example, was played with a happy ending. Our modern way of giving Shakespeare (even with Elizabethan dress on the stage at The Globe and with original pronunciation) is not a pure transmission from the Elizabethan stage, but the product of editing, shifting fashions in performance, convention, and guesswork. So much of Elizabethan and Jacobean stagecraft has been lost to history that even when we deliberately seek to present ‘authentic’ Shakespeare today, we are at a loss as to what, exactly, that would look like.

Historically Shakespeare’s editors have altered the plays in ways which would seem somewhat daring, if not profane, today. To cite just a few pertinent examples, in 1807 James Bowlder published the first volume of The Family Shakespeare which omitted and rewrote words and passages which, in Bowlder’s view, were unsuitable for young minds. In the same year Charles and Mary Lamb published Tales from Shakespeare which used very little language from Shakespeare and, similarly, was aimed at children. Significantly, both of these volumes were instrumental in disseminating Shakespeare and elevating him to his modern standing. Modernising and rewriting Shakespeare in print, clearly, is not a new phenomena. In modern times Shakespeare-inspired films such as Scotland PA, and the No Fear Shakespeare study texts have continued to be popular. Indeed, the possibility of adapting Shakespeare has given rise to texts which seek to challenge the myth of Anglophone cultural dominance perpetuated through Shakespeare. Suzuki Tadashi’s King Lear, for example, forges an intercultural space which draws liberally upon both Shakespeare and Asian theatrical traditions without feeling the need to adhere completely to either. We might also note Inoue Hidenori’s overtly irreverent pop adaptations of Shakespeare or the intercultural texts Kathkali King Lear or Welcome Msomi’s uMabatha.

I would argue, then, that the question is not why we (I) do not like to see Shakespeare being ‘translated’ to suit audience tastes, but why now? What makes OFS’s departure from modern conventions around Shakespeare particularly repugnant? When we consider all that has been done to Shakespeare over the centuries we have had his works, the idea that a particular fashion of modern performance needs to be protected is, if anything, an aberration. After centuries of reinvention, we can safely assume that Shakespeare and Shakespeare adaptation is not a zero sum game.

If my apparently ill-founded annoyance at the idea of Shakespeare being adapted to suit audience tastes is to hold any legitimacy then perhaps the question I need to ask, then, is not if we should rewrite Shakespeare, but why? OFS write ‘[i]t is our hope and expectation that these translations will inspire audience members to return to Shakespeare’s original words, ideally with even greater understanding and enjoyment’ and as I read these words, even with history against me, I cannot help but feel uncomfortable. Will these modern translations be a bridge to the ‘original’? Or will they, for certain audience members, be a substitute? Will OFS deprive audiences of the pleasure and sense of accomplishment my tenth and eleventh graders felt? Given that Shakespeare’s plots were, themselves, almost entirely borrowed, if we take away his language then what we are left with is not what he created but what he preserved. OFS’s Play On project might, then, be effectively described using Dennis Kennedy’s eminently applicable term ‘Shakespeare without Shakespeare’; the final version of the Play On plays may be infused with the plots that made Shakespeare famous but empty of his language to the point that they constitute little more than an extended Shakespeare reference. To rid Shakespeare of Shakespeare for the sake of ‘understanding and enjoyment’, I still think, is an insult to one’s audience.

Lego System

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I first encountered Zbigniew Libera’s LEGO concentration camp kits (1996) when I was writing on Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Both Libera and Spiegelman, famously, used a medium typically associated with children in a self-effacing attempt to depict the Holocaust. Libera’s work offered an interesting counterpoint to Maus because, despite the apparent conceptual similarities, while Spiegelman’s masterpiece has been almost universally celebrated, Libera has been called an anti-Semite, has been asked to withdraw his work from exhibitions, and has been accused (perhaps correctly) of offering a glib pop-culture commentary on the largest and genocide – the most terrible event – in human history. I wanted to examine the two texts beside one another in order to work out what made them different and how each reflected the politics of Holocaust representation. Ultimately, as inevitably happens, the work took a different shape and when the time came to submit the final draft of my manuscript I had said everything I wanted to say about Maus but Libera had been reduced to a footnote and, finally, removed entirely. The Lego System kits still bother me, though, and I would like to explore why they bother me here.

Libera worked with the LEGO Corporation of Denmark to produce three kits, each made up of seven boxes of Lego. Each box contains all of the materials needed to construct a Lego simulacra of some aspect of a Nazi death camp. Boxes include buildings, a gallows, inmates, guards, and barbed wire. The scenes depicted include a lynching, the beating of an inmate, medical experiments, and corpses being carried from the gas chambers.

One way we might read Libera’s work is as a hyperbolic form of historiographical metafiction, a term coined by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism to describe works which show ‘fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be discursively structured.’ By adopting an abstract form and a demonstrably impossible alternative history, certain texts, Hutcheon argues, point implicitly to the failure of any representation to capture the ineffable reality of historical events. The impossibility of articulation is doubly true of the Holocaust which, as many, many critics and writers have argued, defies our capacity for either imagination or expression. If we were to read Libera’s Lego System in such a vein then we would understand his use of a toy to depict the Holocaust as (like Spiegelman’s Maus) demonstrative of the failure of any means of articulation to approximate to the torture, humiliation, and murder of millions.

I understand this line of argument but I can not subscribe to it as a blanket excuse for every ironic or self-consciously inaccurate attempt to depict the Holocaust. Concessions made to the concept of historical accuracy with regards to the Nazi killing project are in danger of offering a degree of legitimacy to more extreme revisionist perspectives. Under the umbrella of representational impossibility Libera’s work unnecessarily distorts what occurred; his commandant, as Stephen C. Feinstein argues, bears more similarity to the Soviet gulag than the Nazi death camp and the entry gate lacks the well-known inscription. He appears to see the historiographical metafiction argument as license to abandon any form of historical accuracy.

Even if full representation is impossible, I can not help but feel that where we can offer accuracy we have a moral obligation to do so. The ‘how’ of the Holocaust, Robert Eaglestone argues, should never be neglected in favour of artistic license. Inaccuracies (of which there is a wide spectrum from allegory to outright lies and denial) are dangerous to understanding. To foreground a fundamental responsibility to historical truth in Shoah art and literature is to echo the final line of Levi’s introduction to If This Is A Man: ‘[i]t seems to me unnecessary to add that none of these facts are invented’. After the terror inflicted during the Holocaust, the Nazi’s attempts to destroy the camps and remove evidence of what had gone on, and subsequent attempts in some quarters at revisionism and denial, an earnest attempt at fidelity, even if true representation is impossible, is, I can not help but feel, imperative. It is here, incidentally, where Libera and Spiegelman part ways – while Maus articulates a failure to represent the Holocaust, Spiegelman went to great pains to research and, where possible, accurately depict his subject.

It would be easy, then, to simply dismiss Lebera’s Lego System as an ironic, transparently provocative, and deeply offensive play on, what is for others, an earnest and hard-fought attempt to bring some understanding to the worst event in human history. While I stand by my earlier assertions, I find it hard to dismiss the Lego kits as entirely vapid. I find the fact that the kits were built using existing Lego parts (modified slightly using paint in some cases) as an unsettling assertion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument that rather than being an aberration in an otherwise rational society, the anti-Semitism which informed the Shoah had roots in the pervading logic of pre-World War II European cultures. The component parts of genocide, the Lego kits could be read to assert, not only pre-date the Holocaust, but continue into modern society. The Holocaust did not occur in spite of, but relied upon the industrial model which built, and continues to build modern civilisation (the factory, trains, timekeeping, coordination, a drive toward efficiency). The reproducibility of the Lego medium (Libera made three sets but some people asked if they would become commercially available) suggests, terrifyingly, that the events (loosely) depicted can not be safely confined to history, but can easily be reconstructed from those apparently innocuous elements upon which modern society has been built. As Spiegelman asserts ‘Western Civilization ended at Auschwitz. And we still haven’t noticed.’

I am, of course, not the first writer to find myself grappling with these questions when it comes to Holocaust representation, and in many ways I find myself treading already well-worn pathways. I find myself simultaneously recoiling from the apparently glib treatment of the Holocaust in Libera’s Lego System, while simultaneously wondering if the confinement of the Nazi killing project to history (of which the argument for Holocaust exceptionalism is a component) is a way for us to avoid confronting the possibility of its reproducibility.

Sex Comics and 9/11 in Multiple Warheads

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I came to Brandon Graham’s Multiple Warheads by way of the Best American Comics 2014 collection and so I was unaware, when I began reading, that it had started life as a sex comic. It came as some surprise, then, when, after around 200 pages of visually packed images, surreal Soviet landscapes and cheap but charming puns, I turned the page to find images of the main protagonist, Sexica, having a large phallic object inserted into her anus, attaching a werewolf penis to her boyfriend, and then having sex with him while he transforms into a wolf.

None of this was entirely without precedent in the chronology of the collected edition – that the main characters enjoy an active sexual relationship is apparent throughout the story. On several occasions they are shown either in bed or lounging around in states of undress and on two other occasions we see the main couple engage in sexual activity.
 

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However, on these occasions, as Eric Mesa argues, Sexia is not drawn as unrealistically proportioned, and the sexual acts depicted (including cunnilinguis) are as much to do with female pleasure as male desire. I would not describe the comic as a shining, or even good, example of pro-sex feminism (if such an ideal even exists) because Graham also consciously presents Sexica as erotic spectacle (at one point he reflects on a 2007 comic ‘I sure drew a lot of butts’). I don’t see the comic as particularly feminist, but I can at least understand Eric Mesa’s argument.

The sex comic, therefore, was not a complete thematic break, but it did run counter to many of the representations of sex and gender in other episodes of the comic. It reverses all of the points Mesa raises. Sexica is drawn with exaggerated proportions. She expresses her discomfort at being anally penetrated and is told that this course of action is better because her unnamed smuggling contact gets to ‘shove it up your butt’. The smuggling contact gives a satisfied ‘Heh’ upon successfully penetrating her. The following series of panels seem to take gleeful delight in depicting her walking with discomfort.

The male gaze is also given more explicit form; when Sexica passes through the security scanner the x-ray labels her body parts ‘tits … ass … leg… leg’ and informs anyone looking at the scanner that her breasts are unevenly sized. This image breaks a female character into parts and presents the male gaze as objective. In sum, the sex comic is problematic not only because of its use of the female body, because it undermines the potentially positive readings which rest of the comic might elicit.

This mix of misogynistic humor and cartoonish eroticism was punctuated, bizarrely, by several overt references to the September 11th terrorist attacks. As the object is fully inserted into Sexica’s anus the sound she makes is represented by an image of the second plane about to hit the Twin Towers.
 

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Later, two security officers monitoring an x-ray scanner are too busy sharing jokes to notice, first, that Sexica is smuggling an illegal item inside her body and, second, two men carrying a comically large explosive device labelled ‘blow yer ass*up’.
 

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I understand what misogynistic erotica was doing in the comic, but why the references to 9/11?

I really don’t know what is happening here, but I have a few ideas. My first thought is that the (perhaps inappropriate) connection between sexual and territorial violation with regard to the September 11th terrorist attacks is well-trodden ground. In Sam Glanzman’s short comic ‘There Were Tears In Her Eyes’ for the collection 9-11: Artists Respond, one character (problematically) compares the destruction of the Twin Towers to the Statue of Liberty being raped. Tonally, however, Multiple Warheads has little in common with the theme of mourning in the 9-11 collection. If anything, Graham seems to engage with what occurred using a discordantly light-hearted register.

This, in itself, could be read as a way to manage one’s fears by parodying them. Graham is a New York resident and, while we cannot presume to know how he was personally affected, I think it is reasonable to assume that it had some impact on him. Perhaps transforming trauma into something visual and tangible, even darkly humorous, is a way to reduce and contain it?

Conversely, the handling of the September 11th terrorist attacks might be read as a tribute to the taboo-breaking which characterised the Underground Comix movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Underground Comix were, broadly speaking, designed, among other things, to offend the sensibilities of white, hawkish, church-going Americans. Many artists used their medium as a means to give shape to their darker fantasies simply to draw the most violent and depraved acts they could imagine. No topic, however taboo, was off limits. As Sabin argues ‘the comix revelled in every kind of sex imaginable [and] took bloodshed to extremes’ This openness, inevitably, spilled over into misogyny as the genre’s commitment to bearing all positively embraced political insensitivity – if you were offended, Comix declared, that was your problem.

If read as a stylist continuation of the Underground Comix genre, we might therefore understand this episode of Multiple Warheads as designed primarily to test and outright violate boundaries of good taste. The taboos of crypto-beastiality, sexual violence, and of making light of national tragedy seem all to exist within a continuum.

These are all just guesses, though. I am still baffled by the mix of cartoonish eroticism, grotesque and misogynistic humour, and national trauma, and perhaps my theories are just me trying to make sense of something which was never meant to bear analysis. I would be interested to know how others read this.

1998 in Indonesian Comics

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‘And through the breach did march into the streets,
Where, meeting the rest, ‘Kill, kill’ they cried.
Frighted with this confused noise, I rose,
And, looking from a turret, might behold
Young infants swimming in their parent’s blood,
Headless carcasses piled up in heaps,
Virgins, half-dead, dragg’d by their golden hair,
And with main force flung on a ring of pikes,
Old men with swords thrust through their aged sides,
Kneeing for mercy to a Greekish lad,
Who, with steel pole-axes dash’d out their brains’
(Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage 2.1.189-200)

1998 is a significant year in Indonesia’s political history. After a 32 year rule characterised by economic prosperity and an authoritarian regime, the Asian financial crisis had weakened the rule of then-President Suharto. In May 1998 riots broke out in several Indonesian cities. The estimated death toll from the days that followed varies wildly. Jemma Purdey, perhaps one of the most reliable sources, suggests that around 1,000 people died, many of them beaten, shot, or burned alive. Women were raped and then thrown out of windows, shops were looted and then burned to the ground with their owner’s still inside. Calls to the police went unanswered. For some time the army stood by without intervening. Colleagues of mine who were in Jakarta at the time saw people stripped naked and left by the side of the road on the way to the airport. One described the bizarre scene of soldiers breaking away from a gunfight in order to ask her and the other expatriates she was with to pose for a photograph. People stayed in their homes and listened to screams and gunfire on the streets outside.

For many of the perpetrators of violence in 1998 the riots offered a fresh opportunity to target Chinese Indonesians. Historically, Chinese Indonesians acted as middle-men between the native Indonesian population and the Dutch. Both during and after Dutch rule they have been subject to periodic outbursts of wide-scale violence including not only massacres but mass-expulsions from Indonesian cities. During the decades under Suharto many Chinese Indonesians were killed under the guise of wiping out communist activity. During the 1998 riots, in many cases the violence toward Chinese Indonesians was misplaced – it was those Chinese Indonesians who were least wealthy who were most vulnerable to attacks. Chinese Indonesians were not the only victims of violence during the riots, but they were certainly singled out as targets.

On May 21 1998 Suharto was removed from power. The era which has followed has been characterised by a movement from dictatorship to democracy, with greater recognition of Indonesia’s multi-racial and multi-religious status. While these changes have largely been beneficial for Indonesia as a whole they have also, as several commentators have argued, been accompanied by an unwillingness to examine what took place during the May riots. This is true in a legal sense – attempts to bring suspects to court were unsuccessful, and those rape victims who did come forward have failed to have their rapists identified or convicted. It is also true in a cultural sense. As Abidin Kusno persuasively demonstrates, the building of the Glodok Plaza Mall at the site of one of the major massacres is emblematic of the cultural work which took place after the riots; it prioritises progress over commemoration in the hope that the spectacle of the new will distract people from the violence of the past. Despite its pervasiveness in Indonesian consciousness, literary and artistic responses to what went on seem, surprisingly, to be few and far between. I have written elsewhere on the work of artist FX Harsono, but in what follows I want to look at some of the comic books created in the aftermath of the violence.

In Tita Larasati’s comic Bloemen Blij, Plukken Wij which appears in the volume Liquid City: Volume 3, the protagonist learns that she has Chinese Indonesian ancestors. The riots, in contrast to the predominantly green and yellow pastel panels elsewhere in the comic, are represented as a blood-red band cutting across one page.
 

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This image, I feel, comes close to representing what 1998 meant, or has come to mean, for Chinese Indonesian communities. Buildings are burning, busses are being pushed over, bodies are lying in the street. Each figure is captured in just a few lines. The image focuses less on the individual acts of violence than the scale of the event. Indonesia is ablaze.

Muhammad Mice Misrad (Mice Cartoon)’s Indonesia 1998 offers a very different vision of what occurred. It is a collection of single-page comics drawn between 1998 and 1999. The collection was published last year. They document the conditions which led up to the May riots, most significantly the crippling effects of inflation during the late 1990s. One series of panels shows people trying to buy basic necessities only to discover that prices have increased dramatically in just a few days. The author reports that publishers are closing down, he attempts to buy paper to document the problems himself, only to discover that paper, too, has rocketed in price. He is only able to draw because his brother can steal paper for him from his workplace. In the panel below he tightens his belt while a child warns ‘Don’t pull to hard, sir, or you’ll sever it! Belts are expensive now too!’
 

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The May riots are, in this context, presented as the inevitable result of a starved and impoverished population trying to feed themselves. In comparison to the several pages describing the economic conditions which anticipated the violence, the riots themselves occupy just one page. In the image below one looter is excited to have stolen a gift for his mother, who then scolds him for bringing illegally-acquired goods into her home. Another family is excited at having acquired a two-month supply of Indomie instant noodles. One remarks, ironically, how lucky they are in such a crisis. In the final panel a woman, presumably a maid for a Chinese Indonesian household talks to a friend on the phone – her boss has fled the country and so the domestic staff (Muchilis – most likely the family’s driver) is watching soccer on television. The absent family’s portrait, characterised by round cheeks and squinty eyes, hangs on the wall.
 

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What strikes me about these images is the absence of any reference to the acts of murder and sexual assault which sit at the heart of Chinese Indonesian and other victims’ accounts of 1998. The goofy characters and cartoon violence belie the very real bloodshed which occurred. The Chinese Indonesian family we see in the picture, we are assured, have left town.

Mice Cartoon’s comics are cheeky, iconoclastic, and witty. This charm, in this case, disguises the wilful marginalisation of the victim’s experience. This is far from trivial – the unwillingness to recognise the suffering of Chinese Indonesians and other victims in Indonesian discourse after 1998 is a necessary prerequisite to the lack of public recognition of what occurred. Chinese Indonesians are rich, popular discourse seems to declare. They can take it.

One image from the comic which I find captivating is the visualisation of the new era of free speech. A government minister tentatively removes the padlock which has closed the mouth of Indonesia’s press, revealing a sharp-toothed monster ready to bite into politicians.
 

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I find the image less interesting for the way in which it attests to the status of the modern Indonesian press – it simplifies a movement away from the prohibition of the Suharto era to modern Indonesia. In reality, as the wildly varying 2014 election result announcements demonstrated, Indonesia’s press continues to be controlled by those in power (even if that power is now primarily financial rather than political). The internet is censored and Indonesia currently boasts an unimpressive rank of 138 out of 180 countries in the Press Freedom Index. What I find captivating about the image is its representation of violence unleashed. This gleeful creature with a giant mouth and razor-sharp teeth, set to chew all in its path, I think, approximates what 1998 must have looked like for those who lived during and after the violence.

Is a Feminist Wonder Woman a Defeminized Wonder Woman?

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I have been reading a lot about Wonder Woman recently. Actually, I have been reading a lot about Darna recently, but it is very difficult to theorise Darna without turning to theories about Wonder Woman because, as readers of this blog are no doubt aware, the Wonder Woman comics can often seem to be to the study of superhero comics as gravity is to physics; they were there (almost) from the beginning of the genre, they have been at the center of many important debates, and, despite being the subject of work by some of our best minds, one has the sense that we have barely scratched the surface of all there is to be said about them.

I would like to center this discussion on an incarnation of Wonder Woman who exists only in a single image (discussed in two separate posts), created by one Aaron Diaz, proprietor of the webcomic Dresden Codak and blog Indistinguishable from Magic. This incarnation of Wonder Woman is noteworthy, I believe, because Diaz is highly engaged in issues of gender representation in popular culture and one finds in his work a palpable feminist agenda (I should probably add, in the interest of full disclosure, that I am a long-time fan and supporter of Diaz’s work). While, in my argument below, I read Diaz’s work as a compelling intervention, I nonetheless believe that his Wonder Woman creates problems with regard to gender even as she solves others, thereby opening up interesting questions with regard to female superherodom.

Diaz’s Wonder Woman was created in direct response to DC’s New 52, but also provided an opportunity for him to address some long-standing characters who he finds to have historically suffered from poor design. He chose Wonder Woman on the grounds that ‘[a]lthough a feminist pop icon, her origins are too tied up with creator William Marston’s obsession with bondage. Because of this (and an all-too-frequent parade of poor or sexist writing), she’s never had a solid, progressive design.’ As other contributors to this blog have shown, the (to put it mildly) recurring bondage theme Marston’s Wonder Woman comics need not be read as anti-feminist. Diaz is not entirely incorrect, however; as many have argued, Wonder Woman’s apparent status as em(super)powered woman and feminist icon has historically been undercut by images of her as erotic spectacle (these links are work safe this one is not). One may not agree with his dismissal of the Marston/Peter run, but can at least understand his desire to reinvent Wonder Woman in light of the New 52 and other incarnations.

Diaz does not dispose of Wonder Woman’s swimsuit, but covers it with a ‘more conservative’ mid-thigh Greek-style dress, thereby moving away from the overtly sexualised Wonder Women. Diaz’s Wonder Woman is, in accordance with her origin story, made from clay. Where, in other incarnations of the character, this statue then became flesh, Diaz’s Wonder Woman remains a ‘statue come to life.’ Diaz thus draws a link between sculpture and superhero comics as two mediums which have historically fixated on bodily perfection. Because she is made from hardened clay, Diaz’s Wonder Woman resonates with the ‘metalisation’ of the male body one encounters in films during the 1980s when, in light of the AIDS crisis, cinema sought to enforce masculine bodily boundaries. This tradition certainly continues in superhero comics today, where characters such as Colossus play out the fantasy of impenetrable metallic bodies.

Diaz also replaces Wonder Woman’s lasso with a sword ‘that contains the lightning of Zeus.’ Given that Wonder Woman’s lasso is, as Berlatsky contends, ‘a vagina as surely as James Bond’s gun is a phallus’, Diaz thus symbolically makes Wonder Woman a man or, at least, equips her with the idealised hyper-male attributes of an impenetrable body and impressive phallus. The powers of her lasso are transferred to a shield ‘containing the wisdom of Athena (which, when using its reflection, can reveal a person’s inner self and compel them to tell the truth)’. Where the lasso contains her enemies, the shield repels them, further enforcing the impenetrability of Wonder Woman’s metallised body.

Clearly, Diaz’s work is motivated by a strong feminist agenda. His Wonder Woman is deliberately drawn against the eroticisation of the female superbody. She also continues the appropriation of (super)male attributes begun in her inception; she not only possesses the strength and invulnerability of Superman, but has been given the hardened body and phallus traditionally reserved for other male superheroes. One might ask, however, if the accruing of (super)male signifiers is truly a step-forward, or if it requires the evacuation of that which makes Wonder Woman such a powerful feminist icon? One might argue that the appropriation of the phallus serves, ultimately, only to reiterate its primacy. The loss of the lasso (which ends violence) in favour of a sword (which is a tool of violence) removes her capacity for pacifism. Has Diaz’s Wonder Woman been denied the opportunity to create alternative, feminised forms of power? If Wonder Woman is, effectively, transformed into a man, what becomes of her pacifism, her feminism, and her queerness? Is the equipping of female characters with a phallus an effective answer to the male gaze?

To reiterate, in the battle over the representation of gender in comics, Diaz is inarguably one of the good guys, and his Wonder Woman addresses many of the problems which typically plague female characters in superhero comics. His answers, however, present certain problems which, I believe, highlight many of the flaws which surround the place for gender in the superhero genre – that, in order to avoid eroticisation or negative signifiers of femininity, Diaz’s Wonder Woman must cast aside the very things which make her a woman.

Is Fury Road Really All That Feminist?

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I read a few reviews of Fury Road, then, with my expectations set suitably high, I went to watch it. The main point that struck me as I sought to reconcile what I had read with what I was seeing, was how readily some seem to be to award the title ‘feminist’. Men’s rights activist Aaron Clarey called the film ‘Feminist Propaganda’ (I am not linking to his review because I don’t want to give him the hits, but go ahead and google him if you must). Kyle Pinion of The Beat described the film as a ‘feminist blockbuster’. His review went on:

[I]t’s one of the most feminist action films in recent memory. Fury Road centers on a group of women taking their own agency and pushing against patriarchal rule. While this franchise has always had an undercurrent of pacifist themes, Miller has laser-focused his message, to a point where one interaction at the midway point of the film ends up stating the obvious: this is what happens when old white men run the world unchecked. That may rankle some feathers in the audience, but this is an action movie that isn’t just empty spectacle or aiming for the lowest common denominator. This is a motion picture that’s actually about something with a strong point of view, and that’s worth standing up and applauding for. It’s basically the film equivalent of an album by The Clash dropping in the middle of a sea of bad arena rock.

Furiosa (Theron) is, indeed, a strong female character leading freed female slaves (who we see symbolically stepping out from the jagged chastity belt of male power) to what she heavily implies will be an Amazon-style eco-feminist utopia. She shoots better than Max, is as tough as he is, and makes many of the major decisions in the film. Even her apparent breakdown is brief and expressed not through uncontrollable sobbing but by falling to the knees Platoon-style. She does not become embroiled in a romance plot and, at the end of the film, appears set to lead a large group of people.

The film does, further, suggest that patriarchal dictatorships are a bad thing – Furiosa has liberated the harem of an altogether despicable warlord named Joe. The all-female group who the characters later encounter are Amazon warriors in the sense that they are competent, comparatively democratic, mutually-supportive, and (perhaps) ecologically-minded. So far, so laudable.

The feminist reading collapses there, however. The mcguffin of the film is a group of five women (what NY Daily News calls ‘the beauties’) who spend the majority of the story being beautiful, inept, and providing reaction shots for explosive spectacle. Rescuing the women (and the death of one of the women) serve as the primary motivation for the male characters and one female outlier. These women are not people in any meaningful sense – they are in equal parts prop and chorus for the main actors in the story. The first time we see them proper they are hosing one another with water. They are pictured in parts rather than as a whole, scantily-clad, nipples erect, and apparently unaware of the camera’s presence. The sequence is a depressingly textbook example of Mulvey’s male gaze theory. This is disappointing but hardly surprising. It is, if anything, par for the course for a blockbuster action film.
 

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What concerns me is that one is presented as though it excuses the other – that once the film has established its feminist credentials it feels that it has a free pass to indulge the male gaze and present certain female characters as the prize in a wholly phallic contest between male agents.

The central slogan of the women’s escape is that women should not be kept as slaves. They make sure we get this point by painting it on the walls of their cell before they depart. Female slavery is, of course, a very real problem. Even if we set aside imprisonment through economic and social systems, there are women today who are literally kept as slaves. I am not sure that Fury Road is quite the venue to address this issue, though. The majority of the audience for this film, I would hope, are not in a position where they are undecided whether or not the trafficking of women is a bad thing. As a feminist assertion, therefore, the statement that women are people and that people are not property is something of a low bar, and an argument, one would hope, that only has relevance to human traffickers and wavering sociopaths.

An argument could be made, however, that raising awareness of these issues (albeit very indirectly) is important and if this were the central message of the film, even as a relatively uncontroversial assertion, I would still read it as largely positive. The presence of a group of women, however, who lack agency and, to all intents and purposes, are treated as objects in the context of the film, undermines the message. What we are left with is a movie which alternately gestures toward a feminist message while simultaneously offering the female body as erotic spectacle. It tells us that women are people while simultaneously treating the majority of the female cast as objects.

Darna: ‘The Filipino Wonder Woman’

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Darna by Ghettobrigante

 
Darna is often described as ‘The Filipino Wonder Woman’ and there are many persuasive reasons why such a comparison might be made. In the 1951 comic Darna is described as having ‘kisig ni Apolo at lakas ni Samson’ (which I translate as ‘the elegance of Apollo and the strength of Samson’ – Tagalog speakers, please correct me – I am still learning), which almost directly quotes Wonder Woman who was described in 1944 is ‘as beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, stronger than Hercules and swifter than Mercury’ (issue 38, 1944 quoted in Berlatsky’s book on Wonder Woman, page 139). Darna was later seen as a Wonder Woman clone when, in 1991, a film version showed her blocking bullets with bracelets. This became a key aspect of the character and was repeated in the 2009 television show.

Darna paratexts have encouraged the comparison; in 2013 Marianne Riviera, the current most recent Darna, posed in Wonder Woman cosplay for a magazine shoot.  The comparison between the two is almost inevitable, and is dramatised in fan art such as that by Glee Chan.
 

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Darna/Wonder Woman fan art by Glee Chan and Marian Rivera as Wonder Woman

Darna clearly borrows tropes from other American characters. Her powers are similar to those possessed by Superman. She transforms from her non-hero incarnation Narda into Darna by saying ‘Darna’, in a manner very similar to Captain Marvel saying ‘Shazam!’ That she is derivative is hardly surprising – many superheroes in the 1940s were variations on a well-established formula and the industry at the time did not particularly reward originality.

Conversely, there are those who maintain that Mars Ravelo, Darna’s creator, was pitching the idea of a female superhero in 1939, two years before Wonder Woman’s first comic book appearance. In such a timeline Darna is not a Wonder Woman clone, but a character who emerged independently around the same time.

I am not particularly interested in answering the question of which character came first. What does interest me is the question of why it matters. I believe that this is important because it is rooted in the artistic relationship between the Philippines and the U.S. Filipino comics. Both Filipino superhero comics and Pinoy Manga have often had to fight accusations of being derivative with the implication that Filipino comic book creators simply recycle the cultural work done elsewhere. If Darna is nothing more than the Filipino Wonder Woman, then, it follows, she has little value alone and can be subsumed into Wonder Woman studies. The argument that she exists independent to Wonder Woman, then, can be read as an assertion of Filipino national identity through comics.

One of the reasons why I find this interesting is that different incarnations of Darna seem to cycle between being an icon of Filipino identity and an outward-looking international figure. We have had English-speaking Darnas whose identity and attitudes are largely indistinguishable from an American equivalent, and we have had Tagalog-speaking Catholic Darnas whose enemies draw heavily from Filipino folk-law – see, for example, Roberto Feleo’s ‘Darna’s Fortress of Solitude’ (1987). It is noteworthy in this regard that in the original comics Darna looks distinctly Western, and the first actress to play Darna, Rosa Del Rosario, was biracial, as was Nanette Medved, who played her in 1991 and Anjanette Abayari who played Darna in two films in 1994.

So, is Darna more than a Wonder Woman clone? And, more importantly, does it matter?