Noah: Not Drowning, Just Waving

Posted on April 2, 2014 by subdee

I saw this with a co-worker at the end of a long work week (I’m now working 8-4 every weekday and 10-5 every Saturday, plus commuting time, which is why I haven’t been posting here much). I thought it was going to be a stupid three-hour blockbuster, like Apocalypto or 10,000 B.C., and it was in a way, but it was also WAY weirder, so when Darren Aronofsky’s name came up in the credits I was like oh yeah that explains it.

The main thing that makes the movie weird is that it completely lacks the three-act structure of a modern blockbuster movie, or really any sense of cinematic pacing at all. Many individual scenes do have a dramatic build, especially the ones that develop Russel Crowe/Noah’s puritanical zealotry*, but there was also a tendency after about the halfway point to try to wring maximum melodrama out of EVERY domestic scene, which leaves you-the-viewer with no sense of which scene is a “climax” and therefore no sense of when the movie is going to end.

(After the Ark reaches land, presumably – but then the movie continues for another half-hour, RoTK style.)

Spoilers ahead!

Overall the old-school chronological pacing style makes an already long movie seem even longer, but personally I’m glad that Aronofsky didn’t attempt to fit a biblical epic into a structure that couldn’t have fit it. It’s not that he lacks a sense of how long each scene should be – the opening voiceover about The Fall of Man and The Curse of Cain is mercifully short, about the length of the opening of the Avatar TV series, for instance, because we already know how those stories go. But the movie is faithful to its source material in this way: it follows all the events and doesn’t leave anything out, not even the genealogy bits. Biblical epics are SUPPOSED to seem long because the idea is that we should get to enjoy them for the maximum length of time – sort of like how you might prefer American comics over Japanese ones because the dense writing and lack of visual flow means they take longer to read. I’m completely sick of Saves the Cat style blockbuster pacing so I thought this was a nice change.

In other ways Noah is not faithful at all, LOL, and personally I really enjoyed all of the movie’s attempts to take a story that doesn’t make sense (it rains so much that the world floods instantly, the Ark is big enough to house two of every animal, five adults build the whole thing, etc) and to invent ways to MAKE it make sense. It was kind of like Chris Nolan’s Batman in that way (and just like Batman, there’s still that one thing the movie doesn’t even attempt to explain). The stop-motion-ish Guardians were cute, and the human King was a good foil.

Personally, though, my favorite change was the thematic shift from ALL DESCENDANTS OF CAIN MUST DIE BECAUSE THEY ARE IMPURE – ONLY SETH’S LINE IS WORTHY (ugh) to ALL OF HUMANITY, INCLUDING OUR OWN LINE, MUST DIE BECAUSE WE AREN’T ANY BETTER. By making that change, in a single stroke you remove the racism/tribalism/determinism/whatever you want to call it of the original story, turn Noah into a more interesting character, and provide the drama that powers the rest of the movie.

Though speaking of drama, as a gay person the emphasis on how Noah’s kids HAD to find a Faithful Wife and Have Kids to be happy seemed kind of misplaced to me, like for instance a lot of the conflict in this movie could have been averted if Shem and Ham had only shared the barren Emma Watson** between them. The film’s unquestioned assumption that heterosexual monogamy is The Way Things Are seemed odd especially considering the incest themes in the biblical Noah story, which the movie didn’t get into, but did kind of imply (Emma has twin girls, Mom says Hurrah The Creator has given us what we need for our other two sons!). But I’m sure for many people this wouldn’t even have pinged.

There’s a scene of doomed humans dying on a rocky outcropping as the stormwaters raged on that I thought was a nice touch, like something out of a Goya painting. Apart from that one (brief) scene, Russell Crowe’s visions of death and destruction were probably the most visually interesting part of the movie, which for a “blockbuster” action movie looked pretty shockingly low budget at times (for instance it’s hard to make a couple of raggedy actors in a totally barren, untouched-by-human-hands landscape look like anything but a way to keep costs down). But since I thought I was watching a popcorn-blockbuster for a Christian audience, I kind of enjoyed that cheapness too. I’m easy, I guess.

*Russell Crowe is not only starting to get typecast as a zealot after his role as Javert in Le Mis, he also sings (badly!) in this movie, too! I personally was happy to see him characterized as a zealot – one of the frissons of “Noah” is that Noah is clearly not wrong that humans are going to mess up the planet again and therefore the only permanent solution is to wipe us out – the radical environmentalism of some Japanese anime directors – but at the same time, his horror at humanity is clearly also at least partially psychological, f’rinstance when he visits the human camps outside his own settlement and decides humans are venal and weak based on a half-real-and-half-dream interpretation of what he sees there.

**Emma Watson is too good-looking and too charismatic and has too much chemistry with everyone, including Russell Crowe. In fact she might have MORE chemistry with Russell Crowe than with the actor who plays Shem, although we could also put that down to the fact that her scenes with Noah are a lot more emotionally intense. The chemistry between her and Crowe reminds me of how John Cusack is drawn to teen-popstar Hillary Duff in War, Inc, resists because he’s old enough to be her father, and later finds out that he really *is* her father! The moral of the story: don’t sleep with anyone who’s young enough to be your own daughter because you just never know. Anyway, Russell Crowe is working with Jennifer Connelly again in this movie, whom he also worked with in A Beautiful Mind, and would (probably) never go there.

***

To sum up, I personally enjoyed this movie, despite all its shortcomings. It made a well-known story from the Hebrew Bible seem bizarre, which as a Jew I’ve also felt was the case. Maybe my expectations were low, maybe the movie was just stupid enough at the end of a long work week, maybe I’m so sick of formulaic dreck that I’ll happily take idiosyncratic dreck instead, but I’d say it’s worth seeing.

A Short Interlude

Posted on October 1, 2013 by subdee

When popular webcomic/sprawling trans-media megatext Homestuck last appeared on this website, we* talked about the enshrinement of internet memes and other pop culture ephemera, the love-hate relationship with low culture, the large and active fandom that sometimes found itself reflected back in an epic narrative. We* also talked Homestuck’s strong logical structure – in which computer and card games, programming logic, and light-dark dualities, among other things, propel a story that’s largely about creation and destruction. (The creative process, in other words.)

All of those things are as true as they ever were, and, in a recent arc, you can see them play out – without knowing anything about the larger story! I thought I’d highlight this arc for you guys because I enjoyed it a lot. It starts here and ends here, so it’s about 55 pages (or panels) long.

First, some shots of the protagonist looking skeptical and offering skeptical commentary on the on-screen action:

The main thing you have to know to make sense of this is that a major series villain is the creator of the story you are reading on your screen. He turns out to embody a lot of the worst fannish impulses – and what’s even worse, to make bad, clichéd fanart.

And on top of all that, he’s a lazy artist – maybe even a plagiarist!

The original protagonist of the series, meanwhile – the guy in blue – has developed the superpower of being able to pop in and out of the narrative, disrupting the logic of inevitable doom I talked about in my last post. Since he exists outside of the framework of the story, he’s able to offer on-screen commentary on the action. Somehow or other, thanks to his powers, he’s found himself in this parody comic the villain is creating. (Don’t ask me how, I don’t know either.)

So far, so not-so-unusual-for-snarky-webcomics. This kind of meta-commentary isn’t even unusual for Homestuck, which divides its narrative arcs using images of screens and curtains and has several characters that exist “on the other side of the screen” and “behind the curtain” (including the author himself).

For that matter, the purposefully bad art isn’t new to Homestuck either: there’s already an absurdist comic-within-the-comic drawn “ironically” by one of the characters… which you can purchase it in a deluxe limited-edition hardcover here.

Another way you can tell John is outside the narrative, however, is through the shift into three-dimensional perspective, through which we can directly observe the crude artificiality and flimsiness of the (literally) two-dimensional story being created by the series villain.

And so on, with apologies to Andrew Hussie for pulling out so many images in a row.

Appropriately for a meta and self-referential comic, we also get some explicit commentary on the way some fans take an interesting piece of art and make it less interesting through their own (gross) interpretations.

Really, with stuff like this on the page, there’s not much left for critics to do.

But on the subject of female characters – and before you start to think that the author-fan relationship has gone irrevocably south – rest assured: the evil villain character responsible for the art in this section – who on top of all his other faults, is a bad artist – has a twin sister who represents everything that is good, or at least harmless, about fannish participation. (She’s a cosplaying fanwriter who just wants to meet the people she’s been reading (and writing) so much about, befriend them, and help them towards a better ending.)

Sadly, compared to her evil somehow-competent-despite-his-stupidity brother, she’s not very effective… but who knows how the comic will play out.

I believe in you, dude!

*”We” meaning me, of course, since as far as I know I’m the only fan around here. Actually, I want to ask: Did any of you guys reading this website take the plunge and start in on Homestuck?

Attack on Pacific Rim

Posted on August 28, 2013 by subdee

Editor’s Note by Noah: Attack on Titan is currently being serialized in English, by Kodansha USA. You can purchase it from Amazon here

_____

I’m starting to feel alone in my disappointment with Pacific Rim. I mean, I know the critics agree with me – even the ones who liked the movie admit it lacks psychological complexity, is full of one-dimensional stock characters, and often drags. But somehow gentle criticism doesn’t seem like enough when Pacific Rim is – really – the best example yet of why screenwriters shouldn’t force every blockbuster into the Save the Cat! mold.

I mean, my friends liked – no, loved – this movie. They loved the Kaiju designs, cast, and art direction. They’ll defend the movie against people who point out that there didn’t need to be four – count ’em, four – “plot twists” or reversals, mostly all predictable. (The first twist is the exception – that one was surprising and quite moving.) Or that there didn’t need to be a 15-minute narrated prologue that boiled down to “monsters appeared so we built giant robots to fight them, P.S. I am your obligatory knucklehead fly-boy protagonist”. Or that between the big set pieces, the movie was mostly one long planning or training sequence.

They’ll even defend the fact that nearly every character is a walking cliche. Or, if they are less passionate in their opinions, they’ll say what everyone says: that it’s just a mindless summer blockbuster, so really, what were you expecting? Don’t you know that all of these big-budget action movies are being made for an overseas audience, anyway?

So maybe my problem with Pacific Rim isn’t that the movie was awful, but that I went into it with the wrong mindset – because truthfully I was expecting something much, much better.

Described to me as “Guillermo del Toro makes a live-action Evangelion“, I was expecting a very different movie: not Evangelion, obviously, but something with at least a little bit of the psychological depth and roller-coaster pacing of that anime. Instead I found a movie built for defense, not suspense: it’s armor-coated against anyone’s possible complaint that it didn’t hit the right note at the right time. (Headstrong protagonist check, strong female love interest check, stern commanding officer check, eccentric scientist double-check, minorities in non-speaking roles, check).

Some plot points are similar to Evangelion’s – the monsters that suddenly appear from a portal over Antarctica/the Arctic, the shadowy global organization that requires pilots to mind-meld in giant robots to fight them, the pilot-pilot romance – but those are pretty superficial similarities, really. Pacific Rim is a very different, and far less cynical, beast – which is fair enough, considering that Guillermo del Toro’s most popular movies have generally been made for children.

Anyway, I was wrong to expect classic cult-hit anime Evangelion. What I should have expected was current cult-hit anime Attack on Titan.

So let’s not talk about Pacific Rim. It’s a monster movie made for an international audience; it hits all the right notes; it looks great. There are even one or two genuinely moving scenes. It’s kid-friendly and has positive, uplifting messages about humanity. (In short, it’s boring.) Let’s not even talk about Evangelion, since Pacific Rim has very little in common with that anime.

Instead, let’s talk about Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan.

In the world of Attack on Titan, humanity has retreated behind three colossal walls. (In Pacific Rim, there is a plan to build a colossal wall, but it fails right away.) The wealthy and politically powerful live in the innermost ring, where they barely worry about being attacked by human-eating monsters. The hard done-by live in cities projecting from the wall of the outermost ring, where their main purpose is to attract Titans. It’s not economical to defend the whole wall, you see, so concentrating people as bait in small areas reduces the area that needs to be defended.

From the set-up alone, you can feel the cynicism, right? Attack on Titan is a fairly cynical – or you could say realistic about the failings of large-scale social structures – series. Pacific Rim supports the well-worn, slightly unfashionable trope of humanity banding together when faced with a common threat; Attack on Titan, on the other hand, interrogates it:

The source of horror is different, too: more threatening, more personal, and harder to fight. In Pacific Rim, the monsters are absolutely victorious for a short time… but only before the movie starts, and only offscreen. For 90% of Pacific Rim’s running time, barring one or two on-screen causalities, humanity is containing the threat.

In Attack on Titan, however, just when it seems that people finally have the upper hand, the monsters evolve intelligence – or armor – or kung-fu – or even more monstrous size, and whatever advantage humanity might have had is taken away. And then it’s back to being chased, trapped, overcome, and eaten, by horrible monsters that are impossibly bigger and stronger than you.

The Titans… why do they exist? Why do they eat people? Why are they sometimes only 9 feet tall, and sometimes over 50 feet tall? Why are some unclothed and some armored? Why are some mindless and some intelligent? Why do some behavior predictably and others unpredictably?

It’s all a mystery. Each time humanity makes some progress toward understanding the Titans, the Titans become that much more horrible and unstoppable in response. The logic here is the logic of nightmares – that you can’t escape, that you’ll always be devoured in the end. It is the horror-movie logic of absolute powerlessness.

The mysteriousness of the Titans is a big part of what makes them horrible. That’s because once you know what something is – once you know how it can be defeated – you have already taken the first step on the path from powerless victim to crafty survivor. Knowledge is the difference between an existentialist horror movie like The Grudge – where the only way to win against the haunted house is to not enter it in the first place – and a survivalist horror movie like the American remake of The Grudge. There are moments of hope in Attack on Titan, but the overall tone is bleak: when the monsters outnumber the humans and are practically impossible to kill, what can be done?

The Kaiju attacks in Pacific Rim are quite different – they only appear to be random, but are in fact highly regular, to the point that they can be predicted mathematically. As explained by Eccentric Scientist#2, the kaiju appear first in an uninhabited place and then head for major population centers, where they primarily damage infrastructure. At first they appear singly, with long gaps in between, allowing humanity plenty of time to regroup. As the movie progresses, they show up more frequently. The fights between the monsters and the robots are destructive – we see Hong Kong basically leveled – but due to this attack pattern they are also clean, with minimal casualties.

In Attack on Titan, the action is smaller-scale and messier. The monsters look like us – like nude people, but bigger and uglier, with sharper teeth. Regular humanity doesn’t have giant robots, or even tanks or guns: only canons, swords, “gas packs” and climbing hooks. The fights are up close and personal… and so are the losses.

You see, the Titans have no interest in property damage. They exist only to eat people. They don’t need to eat people – they don’t have stomachs, are hollow inside.

So why do they eat people? Because eating people is horrible.

But don’t get me wrong: Attack on Titan isn’t purely a horror series. At first it seems that way: in a prologue from the point of view of the three main characters as children, the Titans can’t be resisted, and so everyone who doesn’t escape from them is eaten. Once the main characters grow up and join the army, however, the tone changes. We find out that the military Scouts – who seemed incompetent from the outside – actually do know a thing or two about fighting Titans. In fact, they know quite a lot! Occasionally they are even able, with the skills and knowledge they have painstakingly acquired, to temporarily win against the Titans.

The protagonists constantly learn and adapt, but it’s never enough. The manga is a push and pull between gaining power to venture out into the unknown; and finding out that the world is more even more unpredictably cruel than you had imagined. That kind of push-pull, between power and powerlessness, is similar to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, and indeed you can see a kind of homage in one sequence involving an intelligent, sadistic giant monkey.

Jojo fans who’ve read Part 3: Stardust Crusaders will know what I’m talking about here.

In the world of Attack on Titan, people are sometimes good, but just as often they are weak or venal. Additionally – and this can’t be said enough – the world is a cruel place. However, the cruelty of the world is no reason to stop fighting – if anything, it’s a reason to keep fighting:

And yet, within this cruel world, people do their jobs quite well. Even more than Pacific Rim, with its ex-marine protagonist, Attack on Titan is oriented toward military values. The chain of command should be followed at all times; commanders are competent most of the time; to die for no reason is ignoble but death in service of the greater good is honorable; in order to make sure that death is not pointless, further deaths are required.

It seems obvious to me that this set-up – although it leans further toward the Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here end of the horror-movie spectrum, and although it is far more pro-military than anything del Toro has ever made – would appeal to the guy who made Pan’s Labyrinth: fundamentally it’s a story of overcoming childhood trauma, and banding together to defeat nightmarish monsters who are almost, but not quite, human.

Because adult humans who are bigger and stronger than you are fucking scary when you’re a child, am I right?

It’s also clear why del Toro, with some very popular children’s movies to his name, would want to tell a more optimistic and less depressing version of this story about transcending abuse.

And while this might be a stretch, honestly the two series seem to have enough specific similarities that I’d bank on Attack on Titan being one of the properties that went into del Toro’s Japanese-monster-movie stew. It’s not even much of a secret, really: when the main character of Attack on Titan is Eren JAEGER and the robots that fight monsters in Pacific Rim are JAEGERS, surely we can acknowledge the possibility of a connection?

And that’s just to start with. This scene might be a bit familiar to anyone who’s seen Pacific Rim:

In Pacific Rim, Mako is a Strong Female Character: the only one to best the main character in a physical fight. She’s also the only Asian character with a speaking role, in a movie that owes an obvious and explicit debt to Japanese anime and monster movies.

One could argue that she is interesting because of her hand-to-hand combat skills; because her backstory is the best and most moving scene in the movie; because the actress who plays her is charismatic; because she occupies both the Strong Female Character role and the Properly Respectful Japanese Person role, as if to say that one can uphold the cultural role expected of one and yet still be a strong person at the same time.

In Attack on Titan, the equivalent character is Mikasa. She is not just the only “Oriental” in the script, but in the whole world:

Given that both properties have an “the Asian bad-ass fighter chick” character, and given that I’m writing an article arguing for the superiority of Attack on Titan, and I don’t want to make it solely about the fact that I prefer thornier, more cynical and scarier stories, let’s talk about the treatment of female characters in each. Pacific Rim doesn’t only suffer from having a single female character with speaking lines; it suffers from the role that character plays in the story. Mako is attached to the commander of the Jaeger program because he saved her as a child; so is Mikasa is attached to Eren Jaeger. Looking similar so far – but why must Mako “belong” either to one man or another? Can’t she leave the protective custody of the father-figure without entering the protective custody of the suitor? Must women be passed from one man to another?

This isn’t a problem in Attack on Titan, not because Matsuko isn’t devoted to Eren – she is, pathologically so – but because there’s a diverse cast of female characters who are not all like her. In fact, the eccentric scientist who is a little too into the monsters is a woman – and not only a woman, but a female commanding officer!

The diverse cast of women belong to themselves, not to fathers or lovers. They’re explicitly on the same level as the male cast, fighters in the same unit of the army. The whole cast, male and female alike, share a comradely bond.

Speaking of comradely bonds, at first I thought that this series – humanity confined behind walls, lacking any way to proactively engage the enemy – might be a metaphor for a non-militarized Japan. It is, definitely, very pro-military, very pro-intervention, and very pro-violence. There are other hints of conservative thought, as well, starting from the author’s fundamentally mistrustful view of human nature.

Even disregarding the difference in worldview between Pacific Rim and Attack on Titan, though – because there are perfectly good reasons to prefer more a more optimistic narrative – Attack on Titan is the more thoughtful series, as well as the one that offers a more powerful social critique, despite being set in a stacked-deck fantasy world. The author of Attack on Titan is interested – not only in the mechanics of the fight or how the protagonists resolve their personal differences and come together to face an alien enemy – but also in the structure of the world. How do ordinary citizens feel about their taxes going towards a (seemingly useless) military? What is the incentive structure of the military, and how does it cause the best and brightest to avoid posts where they would do the most good? Is it always necessary for the minority to adapt to the needs of the majority? How does one bring about the social change one wishes to see in the world?

Of course, the series has flaws. It’s by no means trope-free, for one thing: from the dumb/suicidal shonen hero who is totally average except for his determination (to murder Titans); to the strong, silent warrior character who ensures that the main character can uphold his ideals; to the physically weak character who is nevertheless a genius strategist; there are plenty of stock characters here, too. Attack on Titan as well as Pacific Rim takes advantage of the hero’s fundamental vanilla-ness to give more spotlight to generally sidelined – but more competent! – supporting characters, which is a good and worthwhile trend I support (see also: Teen Wolf Season One), but why not take that extra step and remove the bland main character entirely?

So it’s not all gravy. And in some ways, the comparison is apples (Hollywood summer blockbuster) to oranges (Japanese manga and anime). But I’ll say it again: Attack on Titan is the stronger work.

Am I just a cynic? Do I prefer Attack on Titan because it is “darker” and (therefore) more “realistic” (as if there is anything realistic about giant monsters who eat people)? Or do I prefer it because it is, in my view, more complex, both in its characters and in the social structures they inhabit?

Maybe. I might be alone – at least among my friends – in my almost total disappointment with Pacific Rim. When even the positive reviews come with caveats that you shouldn’t “think too hard”, that you should “just enjoy the movie”, that monster movies “all about explosions”, that only “snobs” expect engaging characters alongside engaging fight scenes, however… it’s a sign that there is something amiss. I’ll stick with Attack on Titan, downer worldview, flaws, and all: at least it’s obviously the product of one person’s idiosyncratic worldview.

There’s something to be said for that downer worldview, anyway: when your protagonists are losing the battle at least half the time, their occasionally victories feel that much more earned, and sweeter.

_____
Again, Attack on Titan is available here

Saint Young Freeter

Posted on June 27, 2013 by subdee

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

Jesus and Buddha are best friends vacationing on earth incognito, in a cheap apartment in Japan.

Thanks to the scanlation team for all translations and images

That’s the basic premise and entire joke behind Saint Young Men, a Japanese comic written and drawn by Hikaru Nakamura, serialized by Kodansha and recently adapted into an anime (although not licensed in the US). While kicking back on Earth, the two “young” men live ordinary lives as unemployed twenty-somethings in the Tokyo neighborhood equivalent of Brooklyn Bed-Stuy. They worry about making rent, try to hide their employment status from their landlady and their celestial status from everyone else, attend local festivals and – very rarely – take trips outside their neighborhood. They might have esoteric worries (when Buddha is too agitated, he glows with an otherworldly light; when Jesus is too agitated, his crown of thorns starts to bleed), but for the most part they have the same worries as the rest of us.

They have the same worries, but with the ultimate out: to quote Jarvis Cocker, “When you’re laid in bed at night watching roaches climb the wall/If you call your Dad he could stop it all”.

Why the Gods don’t worry about employment security

In fact, even the Saints’ worries about rent money are of the privileged sort: Jesus has a tendency to impulse-buy expensive frivolities online; Buddha, normally the pragmatic and rational half of their odd couple, can be similarly swayed out of fondness for Jesus or by fancy cooking equipment. The comic doesn’t tell us where the Saints are getting their money from, or what they do to resolve these situations – Wire to Heaven for extra cash? Take part-time jobs? – but in general this is a gentle, humorous comic, free of desperate situations and/or depressing current events. The Gods have seen the Earth – at least one neighborhood of it in Tokyo – and declared it is Good.

Indeed, when money gets tight, Buddha can meditate and Jesus can transmute stones into bread, eliminating the need for a food budget:

The monetary benefits of an aesthetic lifestyle

The premise of this series — that if these particular holy men lived on Earth in the present day, they’d be hipsters/herbivore men — is charming and makes a lot of sense. Think on Jesus’ stance against moneylenders, or Buddha’s transcendence of material desire, and the conclusions draw themselves. Even beyond moral(?) arguments, though, it’s easy to see that the two live comfortable lives as slackers on Earth. That’s because they have chosen a life of frugality and under-employment, not been forced into it by a lack of other options. As celestial beings, they avoid the tribulations of the precariat.

A taxonomy of Japanese freeter – portmanteau of “freelance” and “labourer” which also has connotations of “freedom from the onerous demands of full-time employment” – includes a distinction between those who choose to work and spend less, and those who have no choice. Jesus and Buddha fall squarely into the first category, choosing not to take on full-time jobs even though they are available, thus leaving more time for hobbies and relaxation.

Indeed, they are perfect candidates for the happily-underachieving stereotype: as God’s only son, Jesus is the ultimate trustifarian; as an aesthetic who has strong connections with nature, Buddha is perfectly adapted to the slow living, under-consuming lifestyle.

In fact, if Buddha were in charge of this manga they’d never consume anything at all. Also: awwwww.

Does it really make sense to lump those who choose to have leisure from those who are denied full-time work? Over at Neojaponisme, evolving discussion of freeter will ring true to anyone who has been following parallel developments in talk about Williamsburg Hipsters(TM):

Freeter are only freeter if their parents were white collar employees. Kids from poor families who become convenience store clerks are just “poor.” So, this “fun” of being in the lower classes — the holidays! the beef bowls! — is praising a false kind of poverty where kids know their parents can bail them out if the hairstylist gig can’t pay for the insurance bills. Rest assured, freeter will be authentically poor in about ten to twenty years, but right now, they aren’t so much “lower class and lovin’ it” as enjoying the ride down the socioeconomic fun slide.
-From Japan discovers poor people, and they are awesome, December 2005

According to a 2003 survey, 70% of freeters would happily take a full-time white collar job if offered one. So, they’re not exactly ideological rebels — just simply “unemployable.” This other 30%, however, may be the proto-bohemians that everyone from “Slow Life”-advocates to David Brooks-followers are searching for. But if you’ve ever seen the lifestyle of workers in Japan’s hipster cultural industry, you’ll notice that even without the dark suits and cherei morning exercises, these “cool kids” have just replicated the work-style and values of the salaryman life within the magazine/music making process: long hours and expectations of total-dedication to the job.
-From A No-Tenko Japanese Youth, May 2005

The happiness factor is the interesting twist to this rise in class consciousness. Middle-class kids are indeed dropping out of the rigid employment system, living a comfortable, inexpensive lifestyle, and identifying themselves as “lower class,” but they are far from angry about their diminished position… But here’s where my perverse sense of conspiratorial over-analysis kicks in: The future structure of global capitalism needs fewer and fewer people to actually man the posts at the white-collar firms, and this will result in an overwhelmingly large amount of people kicked out of the economic system. In the United States, the lower classes are angrier and angrier about their loss of stature and respectable employment, and while they may not be channeling their anger into the right places (Down with Gay Cowboys!), no one is actually happy to work at McDonalds to support their punk band. In Japan, they have found the perfect solution to the natural bifurcation of labor in 21st century capitalism. The trade offs for money are so high that you have a large section of population voluntarily dropping out and feeling relieved to be out of the rat race. Perhaps this “happiness” of the lower classes is only a myth to protect the hegemony, but at the worm’s eye view, the story seems to check out. Everyone wins: The system no longer has to pay the masses decent wages, and the masses feel lucky to have so much free time.
-From The Rise of Social Class in Japan, Part 1.5, January 2006

Kids these days are not even “up to no good” — just up to very, very little. I never thought I would ever see grown-ups pulling their hair over the fact that kids aren’t smoking and drinking enough. They don’t have a new and mysterious pharmacopeia of illicit drugs. (How naïve and unaware is this article on the current “rise” of amphetamines in Japan, as if speed was not the single government-condoned way to get high for the last 50 years.) Japanese youth aren’t having crazy orgies, and you hear less about strings of “sex friends.” Their preferred style of music is the highly-formulaic seishun punk and ska (or judging from declining music sales, silence). Youth are obsessed with “feel good” banter with friends, the act of communicating on phones without much emphasis on the content and building fragile communities of electronically-mediated acquaintances. They are not even destructive — just retracting into their shells and failing to report for the single pre-determined path into the social hierarchy.
-From The Kids Are All Wrong, January 2008

I have bolded a section in the second quote, above, about employment at “cool” companies because I feel it also matches expectations for how the Saint Young Men ought to act when they are on the job: being celestial might be the ultimate alternate career path, but when these guys are working, they work all the time. After all, what could be more full-time than 24/7 across all time and space?

Even when they’re not working, they’re still working

I’ve bolded a section in the third quote, above, about the American working-class poor for reasons I will discuss at the end of the article. In the meantime, speaking of cross-national comparisons: the term NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) originated in the UK, but has spread to Japan, South Korea, and China, reflecting realities of globalized labor in which more people compete for less work. The result – obviously in Japan, and less obviously in other places – is a split of the job market into a core of stable, well compensated jobs with stringent entry requirements; and a larger set of precarious, dangerous, dead-end, boring, unpleasant, and/or badly compensated work.

NEET, famously, has negative connotations – these are people who have removed themselves from a competitive environment. As they don’t compete, they can never succeed. Jesus and Buddha don’t belong in this category – they have already succeeded at founding major world religions! – so when the series opens they are only taking what is, explicitly in the comic, a well-earned break from their jobs (says Jesus to Buddha: “We’ve been working too much – we ended up being busy with the end of the Millennium, and all”). They don’t quite fit the analysis, in other words. That’s understandable: all of the economic and cultural critique I’m quoting is a bit heavy for a low-stakes slice of life comedy.

Nevertheless, if I can be allowed to extrapolate: the fact that these two holy beings are essentially bumming around surely lends moral weight to the position that there’s nothing wrong with bumming around. Or, as Neojaponisme has it: “Saint Young Men follows the adventures of divine slackers Jesus and Buddha, taking a well deserved break from the holy. Scenes of school girls mistaking Jesus for Johnny Depp set the tone, and the series continues as a silly and laid back paean to everyday routine. As decline narratives proliferate inside and outside Japan, [this series offers] a charming look at the rich patchwork of plebian culture that Japan can still count on.”

Kicking it with local mafia at a local public bath: a humorous take on Japanese plebian culture

Now that we’ve established that this is a gentle, humorous comic that touches on modern economic conditions without making a big deal out of them – centered around the general premise What if God was one of us?/Just a slob like one of us?/Forced to squeeze onto an overly crowded subway car like one of us? – it’s time to evaluate Saint Young Men on what can really be the only determinant of success or failure on the comic’s own terms.

Is it funny?

A pun on “Hottoke” (= leave me alone) and “Hotoke” (= Buddha) which I’m sure you’ll all agree is hysterical…

The comic takes a while to find itself. It seems that for the first couple chapters, the premise is the thing: the mere fact of Jesus and Buddha on Earth, being Japanese freeter together, is thought to be hilarious enough in its own right. No religious knowledge is required to understand the simple jokes in these chapters, which is surely a goal of the author; on the flipside, the jokes aren’t very funny, even on a “dumb slapstick” level. The beginning of the comic focuses on simple humor based around the Saints’ appearance (Buddha looks like a Buddha statue! Jesus has long hair!) and puns on their names. Even if you happen to like puns, it’s clear that more than one panel dedicated to setting up these jokes is more than one panel too many; pun-humor is later — and more appropriately — relegated to “ironic” homemade silk-screened t-shirts (and how hipster is that?).

In these early chapters, Saint Young Men feels less like a comic about Jesus and the Buddha and more like a comic about two characters who happen to resemble the most common physical representations of Jesus and the Buddha and to share their names, in other words.

Although, admittedly, the series premise does take you pretty far.

Fortunately, the comic improves: in keeping with the series premise of Jesus and the Buddha as voluntary freeter, their formerly cardboard characters are brought to life when the author takes the time to develop their personalities, preferences, and probably most importantly…hobbies.

So without further ado:

MEET THE SAINT YOUNG MEN: JESUS

Jesus is a sweet-natured, compassionate, impulsive and irresponsible character. He has a personality like a puppy’s, always caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment. Confronted with obvious suffering, he always wants to help; confronted with a Shinsengumi cosplay or fancy new laptop, he always wants to buy it. Jesus does no cooking or cleaning, but contributes in his own way to the comic, usually suggesting all of their outings and livening up the atmosphere.

Also, he’s a dedicated blogger who immediately turns to the internet following each of the pair’s adventures, mining all of their experiences for material for his online diary. In fact, it was Jesus’s friends online who first convinced him that it would be fun to live on earth for a while.

Jesus, the blogging and Japanese drama addict

MEET THE SAINT YOUNG MEN: THE BUDDHA

The Buddha is the more outwardly serious character here. He enjoys meditation, gardening, cooking, and cleaning. He is responsible, generally, for the household budget and for vetoing Jesus’s impulse spending. In one of the funnier mini-arcs of the manga, Jesus and Buddha make a pilgrimage to the holy land – I mean Akibhara, the electronics capital of Japan, of course – where Jesus excitedly anticipates a new laptop or smart phone, only to learn that Buddha has something far more domestic in mind: a new, state-of-the-art rice cooker.

The dynamic works well, but if the Hotoke Buddha were only the straight man to Jesus’s gag man, the series would be unfair to Buddhists. So Buddha has quirks, too: for one, he’s unexpectedly sensitive about his appearance. Much like you would feel if you were constantly confronted with unflattering pictures of yourself after you’d gained weight following a bad breakup, the Buddha would prefer a world where sculptors liked his chubby phase less. He also wishes he could, just once, be treated badly by an animal – as a change from all the times his life has resembled a scene from the Disney version of Snow White.

Oh, and inspired by the classic Tezuma manga “Buddha”, he draws manga.

I mean really draws, not just draws with sand; although a sand mandala comic is pretty funny. See also “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonseki

Probably appropriately for a nominally Buddhist country, the Buddha is the more serious character here; but it’s hard to argue with the author’s comic-yet-sympathetic take on Jesus and his Guardian Angels. (Or at least that’s how I personally feel, speaking as an atheist Jew.) Jesus is a silly character, but not a malicious one; overall the comic is non-controversial.

Actually, Saint Young Men’s approach — avoid controversy by focusing on well-known stories and inventing new personalities — reminds me of Hetalia: Axis Powers more than anything else — a more compassionate and less slapstick version.

Finally, the comic has local color. Saint Young Men could be set anywhere, but it is definitely set in a Tokyo neighborhood. Going all the way back to that section I bolded, above, about the American working poor, one notable thing about Japan as compared to America is that it has a well-established low-income culture. There are lots of things you can do in public in Japan that are free or don’t cost very much money. Local festivals. Shopping for bargains at traditional markets — or just looking. Free public parks and trails that are reachable by foot. Local public baths and shrines, and manga-and-video rental cafes that don’t have time limits on how long you can stay.

The grass is always greener, and there are plenty of advantages to being poor in the US, like cheaper mass-media (movies, music, video games) and food, including fresh fruit and sit-down fast food. But generally Japan, like the UK and parts of Europe, is a place where you can meaningfully belong even if you aren’t able to buy your way into the dominant consumer culture.

Or maybe that’s not true at all, and is part of the reason people turn to the Internet for social meaning. Also, LOL.

Saying that, I’ll end this essay with my version of Saint Young Men set in New York (Brooklyn Bed-Stuy):

-Jesus and Buddha have a rent-subsidized apartment in the East Village; when their lease runs out, they are unable to find another apartment in their budget and wind up moving to Brooklyn, where Jesus has online friends thanks to his TV-show review blog.

-In Brooklyn, Buddha joins a coop network of local rooftop gardeners who all exchange recipes and fresh ingredients

-Jesus branches out from TV reviews to food writing, highlighting Buddha’s recipes in months when the budget is too tight for them to eat out

-Jesus indulges in his love of cosplay by attending many themed costume parties. His most popular costume is of course Johnny Depp from Pirates of the Carribbean.

-When Buddha is concerned about his appearance, Jesus suggests that they both lose weight by signing up to work as bike messengers. This works until Jesus is hit by a car; Buddha narrowly manages to convince the entire cohort of Angels not to descend on earth blowing trumpets heralding the apocalypse. The pair realize they don’t have health insurance. Fortunately the accident isn’t serious and Jesus recovers on this own.

-Jesus enjoys attending weekly bar showings of popular television dramas.

-Jesus and Buddha enjoy local parades such as the Irish Parade, the Italian Parade, and the Pueto Rican parade; and picnicking in local parks. However, they avoid big parks like Central Park and Prospect park because the animals there congregate around Buddha.

-Buddha does not become a manga-ka but appreciates art “events” like subway graffiti or the sand paintings in Washington Square Park. He mostly sticks to the “art” of cooking.

-Everyone assumes that Jesus is in a band and he eventually buys a second-hand guitar and half-heartedly tries to learn. He gives up pretty quickly but Buddha takes an interest and masters ukulele.

-Jesus gets a part-time job with Midtown Comics, but is too laid-back about it and is eventually let go. All the customers miss him, though, so he’s rehired (but decides he’d rather have time to watch TV shows).

And so on; really this stuff writes itself.

Phonogram 2: The Breakfast Club

Posted on April 30, 2013 by subdee

The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
______________________

A return to the world of Kieron McGillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Phonogram: Rue Britania, which I reviewed previously here.

TO RECAP: When we last met our hero, he was a judgmental dickhead (and indie music snob) – the kind of asshole who thinks he knows more than you, on the one hand, and may be ultimately out to sleep with you, on the other. Perhaps there were glimmers of a kinder, less arrogant jerk buried deep within, but they were overshadowed by the self-involved nature of the narrative: Rue Britania chronicled one man’s odyssey to salvage the worthwhile parts of a youthful passion for music from the cynicism that develops after heartbreak; and to recover personal meaning from an opportunistic media narrative. By the end of the story, we’d learned that 1) bands that present themselves as the “saviours” of British guitar pop are the worst, especially if they believe it themselves; 2) most music “journalism” is hype after the fact and shockingly unconcerned with facts; but then again 3) your personal reality is, at base, probably not more real anyone else’s. This isn’t a “personal taste is subjective therefore all bands are equally worthy of fans’ love” argument, but an “everyone is entitled to feel passionately about the things they feel passionate about and to develop as fans and human beings in their own time” argument.

Not the narrator of Rue Britannia, but I think we all know a guy like this. Don’t be this guy! He is wrong about the Pipettes, by the way.

Fast forward to the Singles Club, and some of those glimmerings of decency and tolerance have blossomed. This “sequel” to Rue Britannia is less self-involved by design: there are six chapters following six different characters over the course of one night; and not one of those characters is the author. It’s more explicitly feminist than Rue Britania, too, because the first character we are introduced to –- our guide — is a perfectly nice, if somewhat naïve, young girl who loves to dance. And she, too, is a Phonomancer: a passionate fan of music able to magically channel that passion in a way that enhances her personal powers.

“Etc”

This happens to be the comics and music roundtable at HU: not just the music roundtable, and not just the comics roundtable. So I can proudly report that Phonomancer isn’t a story that happens to be about music and happens to be in the form of a comic, but is a series that draws from the energies of both. In the first volume, we spent a lot of time with a character whose “type” we recognize from both music and comics: the music snob type, always willing to tell you (or just privately think) why and how you are wrong; and the semi-autobiographical indie-comic-narrator type, out to involve the reader in his personal internal journey. The art, in black and white, with cleanly-drawn and laid-out panels ala Chris Ware or Harvey Pekar, and lots of space given over to text detailing the author’s thoughts on everything from Manic Street Preachers to NME, fits in with the style of semi-autobiographical indie comics, too.

At the same time, Kieron McGillen is now writing, and Jamie McKelvie is now illustrating, for superhero comics. And some of the more action-oriented aesthetics of superhero comics have been present from the beginning, too: from the centrality of (not well defined) superpowers to the narrative; to the narrator’s final not-so-climatic final showdown with the zombie ghost of Britannia, Avatar of British Guitar Pop; to the paneling, which breaks out of the equally-sized-boxes mold of indie comics to hew closer to the dynamic style of manga, with frequent splash pages, pages laid out with an eye toward the overall balance of blacks and whites, and flow designed to draw the eye onward from panel to panel.

Cinematic pacing also very manga-like

The Singles Club moves further toward superhero comics with the addition of VIVID! FULL! COLOR! And also by going into more detail on Phonomancers powers, which were underexplored in the previous volume.

This splash page is, like, totally superhero-ish

Like superpowers, Phonomancer powers are presumably unique to individuals. However, since we mostly only dealt with the author and his powers in the first volume, it wasn’t too clear what the range these music-related superpowers might be. The narrator’s power was very intellectual: he dissected pop songs in arcane rituals in order understand their totemic powers. Although there were other Phonomancers in the picture – like his friend Emily, who also appears in this volume – they were off to the side, sidelined to the narrator’s quest.

Here, too, the powers are off to the side: the comic follows an “off” day, or what Phonomancers do for fun when they’re not actively practicing magic (naturally, music is still involved). Even with that, though, there’s still more about magic powers than before. There’s the girl we met already, who uses her love of music to enhance her charisma when she dances; and her friend, who uses psychological insight gleaned from well-written songs to cloak her own personality and tear others down. And there’s the weird guy who channels obsessive creativity into a homebrew music zine:

“Mr. Logos” is, definitely, a super-villain name (not a super-hero name)

Are these characters music fan archetypes – like a music fan version of The Breakfast Club? Maybe, but those archetypes exist because they’re (often) true. In any case, what was true of the The Breakfast Club is also true of this comic: the pleasure comes from seeing all of these different types of music fan gathered together in one place and interacting with each other, rather than cordoned off into their own separate spheres of music appreciation. In this case, they haven’t been forced together by chance (assigned detention, trapped in a cabin during a snowstorm): instead, they mostly know each other, and have willingly come together at an indie dance club night.

Last time I promised a sociological explanation of music board ILX (ilxor.com). I don’t think I can really do that, but I can say that “different types of music fans bond over shared love of music, overlooking differences in style and opinion” is a basic premise of the site. Loving music as a whole more than you love any single band is a sort of defining feature of ILX, and it’s also a defining feature of this comic. At the club, everyone has different sensibilities and baggage – some relate to music in a more intellectual way and others in a more intuitive way – but they are all united by their passionate love of music, which, the comic implies, makes them more similar than different.

Another defining feature of ILX, meanwhile, is that even frequently maligned genres like chart pop and chart RnB (beloved by “nonserious” music fans like women and gay men) also have their share of supporters. It’s a male-dominated space, like most online bulletin boards – or actually most online spaces where contributors exchange strongly worded opinions on topics not solely of interest to women – but it’s a male space well-schooled in the politics of marginalization and oppression, and trained away from knee-jerk put downs. And that political focus shows up in The Singles Club too, coded into the rules of the club night:

The first rule of Fight Club, etc. Hover for alt-text if text is too small to read.

In previous entries to the roundtable, several authors brought up questions about how music can be visually depicted in comics. Well, for one, you can show the effects of music on bodies, as in the splash page above. And, for two, you can make sure enough of your references are to well-known songs by well-known artists. Compared to the indie namedropping of Rue Britania, the music in The Singles Club is a lot more mainstream… and even if there are a few artists you’ve never heard of, the authors helpfully publish a playlist at the back of the volume so you go can follow along. Some amount of accessibility is a virtue at club night, after all, as demonstrated by this scene:

Always have a secret weapon

While the previous comic explored the music snob/intelligent person’s sense of exclusion even from supposed “mass events” like summer music festivals, the ideological drive of The Singles Club is toward inclusiveness. Otherwise “normal” women who just happen to really really love music are included, but also other marginalized groups like the psychologically damaged and the just plain weird. Even pop music – music for the masses – can be a place for the excluded to find each other, the comic says: it’s the depth of their commitment to music that identifies them to each other, not their tribal affiliation to a particular band or genre. In fact, music is so much the domain of the weird that it’s the more “normal” people who find themselves left out:

Lloyd should be proud of himself for delivering that zinger at such an appropriate moment

Another guy I haven’t talked about much: more “chewed up” than “left out”

Speaking of tribal affiliation, though – and here I go with the sociopolitical examination of ILX, after all – in a capitalist landscape where the relationship between an artist capable of inspiring deep passion and his/her fans is, not just monetized, but aggressively monetized – thanks to a combination of declining disposable income and increased competition for the limited pool of obsessive-fan-types who will actually spend money on music – does it make sense to replace a deep love of one group with a kind of grazing behavior appreciative of many? When you learn to value songs for what you can get out of them, without allowing yourself to be too deeply drawn into a single artistic vision – if you can even find an artist with an encompassing vision, in these days of quick media exposure – you learn to fulfill your role as a consumer and, thereby, enter the capitalist landscape of music groups as commodities. Once there, you are in accordance with the realities of your environment, and friction between yourself and your environment disappears… no?

Perhaps this is a logical move for fans of music who have to live with the logic of capitalism, in other words? In an artist-fan relationship based around idolization, the artist holds the power (but only as long as they continue to play the role allowed to them by their fans: leadership is a two-way street). In an object-consumer relationship, on the other hand, the consumer occupies a position of power over the object of consumption. From a song, we can take certain ritualistic elements – a baseline, an attitude, a well-written line – while discarding the parts we don’t care for… and in that way, avoid being hurt by them. Perhaps?

On the one hand, pop music isn’t immerse yourself in your bedroom music, or even immerse yourself with fans of the same group at intimate club shows music. It is immerse yourself in beats in a collective setting music. Wide knowledge is better than deep knowledge for this purpose. But on the other hand, you could argue that deep knowledge is a prerequisite to understanding the power music can have at its most potent. Perhaps you have to be a passionate dedicated fan before you can be a passionate casual fan? Anyway, I’m just talking out loud, here.

Wide-ranging consumption is the path forward out of obsession, as demonstrated by the narrator of the previous volume of Phonogram

Passion isn’t just about knowledge, either. Half the characters are still the intellectualizing sort, but who gets the last laugh at the end?

The non-Phonomancer, that’s who

It’s okay to think these things through, but we shouldn’t forget the functions they serve, the comic suggests. The purpose of a dance night is to drink, dance, and maybe end up in bed with a stranger by the end of the night. And that’s true, even when the dance night is as explicitly intellectual and political as the one in this comic. Pop music can be smart as well as catchy; intellectual types have emotional needs too. But just because the pleasures are simple doesn’t mean they can’t also be deep; and vice versa. See also Poptimism, a London club night.

In summary: if you recognize the character archetypes, that’s good. If you like the songs, that’s good. If you enjoy the characters as people, without recognizing them as archetypes, that’s good. If you enjoy interlocking narratives, that’s good. If you agree with the politics of the author… well, you probably didn’t need to read this comic, but probably did and enjoyed it anyway.

To summarize the summary: it’s all good.

Phonogram: Journey to the Past

Posted on February 25, 2013 by subdee

This is an excellent comic. Let’s get that out of the way first.

Next: Kieron Gillen, author of highly-regarded Thor reboot, Brit, music nerd, all-around good guy. He’s friends with Tom Ewing, of Freaky Trigger and Poptimist fame. And since I spend a lot of time lurking ILM, the message board that started out as a discussion page for Freaky Trigger – and is now a hotbed of professional music writers – and since I was once an obsessive Libertines fan – dubbed “the saviors of British guitar pop” by a certain segment of the British music press – I feel as qualified as (mostly) anyone to discuss the intricacies of his and Jamie McKelvie’s two-volume comic Phonogram, which is, basically, a passionate and detailed criticism of British music criticism. And there’s a third volume due out soon, so this is even kind of timely!

By the time the first volume of this series, Rue Britania, concludes, the music critic whose POV we inhabit – who might or might not be closely modeled after the author – has confronted his post-teenage disillusionment and bitterness and become a stronger, less douchebaggy person.

As heartwarming as this is, it doesn’t quite erase the sting of many pages that first establish the character as an asshole – or the fact that this asshole character’s pronouncements on music are, for the most part, the final word within the comic on tons of indie bands you’ve probably never heard of (although the sting is somewhat lessened by the inclusion, at the end of the book, of a much less self-important glossary of terms and bands).

That, and the fact that Rue Britania is well-written, well-paneled and well-drawn, more than justifies its sequel, which not only sees the return of the narrator as an older, wiser, and more feminist person, but also foregrounds the series premise that there are many different ways to be a passionate fan of pop music. Plus, half the viewpoint characters are women! And it’s in color! No wonder The Singles Club sold way better than Rue Britannia (see comments for author correction).

What we can look forward to

In order to fully appreciate the narrator’s personal growth by the time of The Singles Club, it’s necessary to first start with the egotistical dick of Rue Britania. So that’s what I will be doing in this post. My next post will focus on The Singles Club, and when Volume 3 comes out, I’ll review that one too. Without further ado:

PHONOGRAM: RUE BRITAINIA

Is a comic about the damage music critics do to young impressionable teenagers when they overhype acts as “the saviors of British guitar rock.” Alternately, it’s about the damage specific rock acts do to impressionable young fans when they overhype themselves as the saviors of British guitar rock, even if – especially if – they believe it.

At this point I should probably explain this whole “saviors of British guitar rock” thing. It’s a long story, going back to Beatles and the Stones. Since then there have been many mutations – the Kinks and Small Faces and the rest back home in England in the 60s; Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello and their Stiff Records cohort in the 70s; the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays and other Madchester acts in the 80s; and then Britpop bands like Blur and Oasis, who saved England from the twin evils of Americanization and grunge in the 90s. Of course this is a gross simplification, but that’s kind of the point.

The aughts version of this cyclical narrative is tied up with the Libertines, according to some, or is a shameless and transparent attempt on the part of the music weeklies to pretend that they are still relevant, according to others – including, more than likely, the narrator of Rue Britania. Anyway, suffice to say that there is a long lineage of (mostly) two-songwriter bands in England that are somehow uniquely homegrown; and there’s also a British music press hungry to find the next group it can slot into this lineage (for ease of hype).

Our Hero can’t get over the narrative that has coalesced around a scene he was intimately involved in – he’s incensed that the bands he remembers as being actually central to Britpop – especially the female-fronted indie band Kenicke – have been forgotten in favor of a more convenient media narrative that it was really all about Blur, the snotty middle class art school savants, vs. Oasis, the rags-to-riches working class dreamers. His pain is twofold: one, that the press is trampling all over what actually happened; and two, that he can’t seem to shrug off his massive personal investment in what is – more and more obviously – a dead scene, and move on.

His pain is the pain of any very serious music fan who cares a great deal about the ways in which words and music construct reality, only to wake up to the laziness and willful misrepresentation of most music journalism. It’s also, although this has not quite formulated itself in the mind of the asshole protagonist, a kind of proto-feminist rage. Why are so many of the female-fronted groups being written out of the narrative?

In The XY Factor, Rhian Jones discusses the gender gap in professional music criticism. And in the comments, I drag my friend Sabina into an argument that the Rock Critic Establishment’s love of making lists and ranking things so as to determine their absolute universal worth tends to work against female-fronted bands, as the female fans who might have pressed for their inclusion in the “canon” tend not to relate to music in the same list-making way. It’s worth reading the original comment thread for Sabina’s take, which is much more nuanced than mine.

In any case, I bring this up not to fire another shot in the endless war of men and women, but to show that Gillen’s arguments, as ridiculously over-invested as they might seem, do have real-world consequences. Maybe Britania, the spirit of English Guitar Music, won’t actually fall down dead if culture warriors like the narrator cease to defend her. But these narratives do have power.

Going back to Kieron Gillen’s proto-feminism, though, here is the opening sequence of Rue Britania:

The narrator introduces himself as a toxic, noxious, assholish… man! With a bonus nod toward comics, the medium being used to tell his story.

As you guys know, it’s very important when attending a show to dress right for the occasion. You wouldn’t haul out the indie regalia for a Kings of Leon concert, but probably just show up in jeans and a t-shirt. By the same token, if you went to see Patrick Wolfe without glitter eyeshadow, you’d probably be underdressed. Our Protagonist, in this case, is very aware of this, and is putting a lot of thought and effort into his outfit: but towards precisely the wrong ends. He wants everyone at “Ladyfest” to know exactly how much he does not belong.

In other words, this guy is a huge dick! And not only is he a dick, he’s a self-constructed dick – which is even worse!

It’s not only that, though. His costume marks him out as a recognizable “type” – not just within hardcore music fandom, but as the protagonist of countless indie comics. His role in the comic, in other words, is not just to be there, but to explicitly display and acknowledge his obnoxiousness – and in the process, maybe, to reveal to the reader his own obnoxiousness.

That’s if the reader catches on. This is a fairly subtle comic – unlike, say, Scott Pilgrim, where Bryan Lee O’Malley starts out subtle but later aims with increasing unsubtlety to show the reader exactly how much damage well-meaning but willfully “clueless” guys can do to the girls they don’t care enough to work on their relationships with – so there is a chance that the reader won’t get it. Bryan Lee O’Malley has a whole series to make his points in, though, while Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvin have only this one volume of a trade publication they don’t expect to make money from, and they want to actually talk about the music, too. So perhaps this comparison is unfair.

Also, though, this guy is just such an asshole!! He’s way more of a jerk than Scott Pilgrim ever was. He understands pain, loneliness, and the female-fronted rock outfit Kenicke; but instead of using that knowledge for good, he uses it to sleep with vulnerable scene girls. Meanwhile, the girls he is friends with are those kind of ‘cool’ girls who will put girl-groups down with him and interrupt sex with their girlfriends for him.

It is somewhat satisfying and fitting, then, that for the sin of being a huge dick, the narrator is cursed in a very feminine way:

Of course, this guy isn’t a Standard Edition Asshole Dick. He knows better, that’s the whole point. He might be using his love of Kenicke to pick up girls, but he also genuinely loves Kenicke. Summing up this contradiction, the essence of his fandom – the passion that defines him as a person and grants him music-related superpowers (more on this later) – is Britannia, a female avatar of British guitar rock. Not only that, but in a key scene we find out that in a contest between his girlfriend and Kenicke – sleep with the girlfriend, or get up to reset the needle on a Kenicke record? – Kenicke wins every time.

Let’s back up for a minute and talk about magic. In this metaphorical book, being a passionate fan of music gives you superpowers. So what’s the main character’s superpower? Well, he does “intricate vivisection rituals on pop songs to understand their totemic powers” (and then uses his powers for evil to seduce young girls, because he is a dick!!!) Beyond that, he can use Jedi mind tricks to get into shows for free

Let’s be real here – this is a much more useful and practical magic power than “flying” or “X-ray vision”, right?

In this book, we spend most of our time with Mr. Charming, so we never really see the other ways that “Phonomancers” channel pop music to enhance their personal power. That will be left until the next, more accessible book (in full color!), which I have already promised to discuss in the next article.

I’m not trying to say I have a unique insight on this comic, by the way. Any good ILM-er or diligent reader of British weekly music ‘zines would tell you the same, and the author does make many of these points for you. The feeling that I have unique insight is actually exactly what I share with the noxious asshole narrator. It’s this feeling of superiority and specialness, among other things, that he will have to kill to progress as a person.

To show the seriousness of the situation, as the music press rewrites the past, the narrator’s memories actually start to shift. (The first clue that he is in an alternate, unacceptable universe? He is in the habit of listening to Echobelly records.) Besides the narrator’s personal hangups, we’re introduced to another character who was, at one point, heavily invested in a particular group, the Manic Street Preachers. While the narrator struggles to hold on to his sense of self, this Manics fan has actually split herself into two selves: a self that waits, wraithlike, for disappeared guitarist and lyricist Richey Edwards to return and reclaim his position as pop-music prophet. And another self, a “real” self, who no longer cares about music.

If you don’t know the specific groups under discussion, the scenes lose some of their power. There’s something universal about the idea that someone else is rewriting your past, though, and about investing so much of yourself in one thing, and being so badly hurt as a result, that you are never willing to invest so much or to care so much about any other thing again. And maybe Britpop club scene –> massive arena and festival tours is something any former indie kid – like for instance Hipster Runnoff‘s Carles – can relate to. Specific references, universal themes, in other words.

The rest of the volume is similarly metaphoric. The narrator goes on a spirit quest to save “the universe” (probably only his own universe) from the debasement of the discourse around Britpop. Some of these metaphors are clever:

Retromancers as gollums, Gollum as junkie scum.

Throwing a vinyl record on the fire, and a discussion of “memory kingdoms” you can only enter if you’re not personally invested in them.

Knebworth Park in 1996, the huge festival headlined by Oasis, where – according to the press – countless individual fans lose all their distinguishing features and are transformed into just a mass, a crowd, a sales figure.

Sometimes, though, the pursuit of symbols and metaphors leads the author to strange places. An easy way to see this is to consider what happens when the “symbols” in his book are – not just real people – but still alive and working.

I don’t know that much about Blur, but I know enough to know that the automaton in these panels is not even close to being anything like the real Damon Albarn – either the person or the performer. How can you write about real people and not even care that you are completely misrepresenting them?

Kieron Gillen sidesteps this issue, somewhat, by setting all these scenes in a dream landscape. In his own mental cartography, which has been weirdly influenced by the media narrative around Britpop, Damon Albarn and Oasis are figureheads who are notable mainly for the roles they play in the media narrative. It’s the roles he’s interested in exploring, not the actual or perceived personalities of the performers.

Still, the author’s choice to focus only on roles is an odd one: if he cut his teeth as a music fan at small club shows, he must have met some of these people at some point, right? Is it because he’s a pop fan – in other words a fan of a genre in which the main relationship between fan and performer is necessarily mediated – that he thinks this way? Or is it just that Kieron Gillen has no interest in personalities outside of music (putting him in the minority of Britpop fans)?

But also, you know, the creator is dead, and all that.

And if you think about it, this privileging of the fan/critic perspective over the author/artist perspective is clear even in the premise (and title!) of the series: that being a passionate fan of music endows you with special powers. It was Sabina (once again) who pointed out that while you do see, by the end of The Singles Club, many different ways of being a listener-Phonomancer, what you don’t see are any musicians who are also Phonomancers. Can an artist be a Phonomancer in Kieron Gillon’s universe? Perhaps this question will be addressed in the forthcoming third volume of the series.

Speaking of dead authors, though – and those of you who would rather not know how the volume ends, please look away – it turns out that – shocker! – Britania has been dead the whole time. The retromancers feeding off manufactured nostalgia, the fans who arrived too late to be a part of the original scene (and probably wouldn’t have been cool enough to be there, anyway) – all of her later-day worshippers – are worshipping a corpse.

Was she dead all along – during Britpop as well? I honestly hope so. Otherwise, this whole narrative stinks a bit too much of pulling-the-ladder-up-after-you’ve-had-your-own-fun.

And this is where where I come in. Just before the narrator heads off on his final, quixotic quest to defeat the zombie ghost of Britpop and save the sanctity of his youthful soul from the cruel realities of crass commercialism, he meets a Libertines fan on a hill:

Click through for dialog if the text is too small too read.

Just like when he met the young Kenicke fan, he’s pretty sure that he understands The Libertines better than the Libs fan does. Unlike when he met the young Kenicke fan, though, he is now old, wise, and mature enough not to clutch this knowledge to his chest, as if his experience is the only valid one, and sneer down at the young fan. Instead he decides to fight for the fan’s right to keep his delusions.

I’m just kidding. This is more about the narrator, an Old, making a conscious decision to relinquish his generation’s claim on the cultural cutting edge. The pop music zeitgeist belongs to the young, passionate, and idealistic.

It’s not a bad story to want to try to tell. After all, it’s not every day that you see this kind of “old must step aside to make space for the young” selflessness being valorized when it comes to pop culture. I think the last place I saw it was Les Mis, based on a story from the 1860s. At least in the US, the Baby Boomers seem to be too large, rich, and powerful of a marketing demographic for the culture industries to suggest that they should step out of the limelight.

While it’s awful nice of the narrator to make this gesture, it is weird that he doesn’t seem to consider that maybe the Libertines and their ilk – Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Kooks, Razorlight – do deserve to be considered Avatars of Britania’s Nth Coming. The Libertines, including Pete Doherty and Carl Barat (that co-frontman thing again), certainly thought of themselves that way.

But then you think: maybe Dude does have a point that each iteration of this meme will be more desperate and sadder than the last – as Sabina says, at least in Britpop Version 1.0 there were actual girls on stage, stepping out from their traditional roles as girlfriends and mothers and photographers and forum mods.

For the record, though, the Libertines were aware of the futility of reviving the past. “Queen Bodacea is long dead and gone/yet still the spirit of her children’s children children lives on” goes one of their most famous lyrics, about an ancient Celtic queen who lead a resistance against Roman invaders. (This line is second in notoriety only to their save-England-from-creeping-Americanization refrain, “No sadder sight than that/of an Englishman in a baseball cap”.) It’s a total fan cliché for me to quote lyrics, by the way, but I do it not to share a moto I ever adopted as my own – I’m American! How could I! – but as a way of demonstrating that Pete Doherty totally read the British weekly music ‘zines as a teenager, too.

The idea of taking up a spot in a lineage that is already gone is baked right into the premise of the band, in other words. So who’s to say that they are not an actual, authentic entry in that lineage – if you want to see it that way? And not just because the kids are passionate and naïve – as we all were once – and it therefore behooves the older, more jaded generation to step aside and to allow them to explore their romantic notions in peace. Rather, the reason they belong is that there’s no particular reason that dead-and-we-already-know-it-Britania can’t be every bit as real to the people who worship her as dead-and-we-have-yet-to-realize-it-Britania.

In fact, by assuming that the kids believe essentially the same thing he did – that they are participating in a vibrant underground scene not-yet-tainted by media narratives – the narrator proves, essentially, his own myopia. Even in the end.

This concludes Part 1 of my essay on Phonogram. Part 2 – featuring a sociological examination of pan-music-fandom message board ILM – to follow. I promise to talk more about Jamie McKelvie’s awesome art in the next post, too.

Django: Back to Basics

Posted on January 22, 2013 by subdee

Coming in at the tail end of the Django Unchained roundtable, it transpires that I’ve already shared a lot of my thoughts about Django in comments. In this post, then, I’ll mainly be expanding on those ideas + quoting excessively from David Graeber’s doorstop work of economic anthropology, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

First, I want bring up some ideas about slavery, morality, and legal systems that Graeber talks about and that I think Tarantino illustrates in Django in a smart way. In Debt, Graeber starts by looking at what he calls “human economies” – that is, economies where people are the main unit of account, and money is only used to smooth over social relationships. In these societies, “social currency” was used for weddings and funerals, to settle disputes, and to acquire wives. However, even in societies that recognized slavery and brideprice, this money was not actually used to buy people. And certainly, the same money that was part and parcel of deals between people was not also used to buy things. Graeber argues that two factors enable chattel slavery, a system in which people are equated with things: one, the removal of the slave-to-be from “the web of mutual obligations” that defines him as a human being. And two, violence.

Already, this is looking like a promising lens for the analysis of a Tarantino movie!

In Graeber’s account of traditional societies, slaves are people who have been removed from their context, so that they no longer have mothers, fathers, siblings, and so on to protect them. Only after this removal has been accomplished can they be bought, sold, or killed, because this is when “the only relation they had was to their owners”.

Looking at things this way, the logic of Samuel Jackson’s character Stephen becomes clear. As Noah pointed out, he really doesn’t have anyone else besides Candi. While Noah saw this de-contextualization as a weakness of the character – what real person doesn’t have relatives? – I think it’s an important point. Stephen is an edge case that shows the way the system works more clearly.

It’s pretty clear in Django that slavery is a dehumanizing institution that actively seeks to prevent slaves from forming connections to each other. Think about the extraordinary force used to separate Django and his wife Hilde: when it’s discovered that they have run away together, they are beaten and sold separately. Hilde is then additionally punished by being branded, which forces her out of the role of the house slave and into the role of comfort girl, a prostitute for every low-level foreman and fighting slave on the estate. Forget about marriage: for the sin of calling herself a married woman, Hilde is to be denied even the right to choose her own sexual partners.

Schultz’ actions in the movie take on even more meaning against this background of depersonalization. As the new owner of Django, Schultz is lenient and tolerant, allowing Django to choose his own dress, to exact his own revenge, and to carry a gun. However, all these are acts of charity as long as Schultz owns Django in the eyes of the law. The movie completely understands this point, because what does Schultz do as soon as he frees Django? He offers him a deal: Django’s help over the winter in exchange for Schultz’ help rescuing Hilde. This offer is symbolically important because as long as Django is a slave, he has no power to agree to deals. That’s because only people can make deals, and Django, as a slave, is not a person. By offering Django a deal, Schultz is acknowledging that he is a person and not a thing; in some sense he is acknowledging that the two of them, as fellow human beings, are in some way equals before God.

So that’s kinship networks and personhood. What about violence? Graeber observes that most of us don’t like to think about violence. Tarantino, clearly, is an exception: his work is largely an exploration of the charisma of violence, of individuals with personal charisma (who are almost invariably violent), and of the power of filmic violence to evoke a visceral response in the audience. Think about that however you like; but if Tarantino is going to work through the power and appeal of violence, one of the best “good” uses for his skills as a filmmaker is in an exploration of a society in which violence plays a crucial, obvious role.

To remove people from their networks of mutual obligation requires enormous force. They have to be taken as prisoners of war, or forcibly abducted, or sentenced to punishment for a crime, or sold by someone who has the “right” to be so under what are frequently desperate circumstances. After sale, they have to be transported somewhere else. According to Graeber, a common theme of the laws (Islamic and Roman) of the period is that people become slaves in situations in which they otherwise would have died. They are, in some sense, living dead.

Furthermore, once African people have been forcibly ripped from their contexts and transported to the New World, a system of enormous violence is required to keep them as slaves. This is the violence Tarantino shows directed against black slaves as a matter of course in Django – the brutal beatings given to runaways, the sadistic punishments by foremen, the laws prohibiting black men from riding horses, and the mobs that form to uphold those laws – in contrast to the more cathartic or cartoon violence he shows directed against the people upholding the slave system.

Schultz’ introduction to the audience takes on another meaning when examined in this way. It establishes a kind of moral rightness to the character that would not have been present if he had simply bought Django at the market. Of course, Schultz could have done this: he could have followed the slave-trader brothers until they arrived at their destination and then purchased Django in front of witnesses. He could even have killed them afterward. But wouldn’t we have resented him if he did it that way? He would have been involved in the whole dirty business of buying and selling slaves. Instead, Schultz goes back to first principles and takes a war captive. We can understand the logic of a man of honor who saves someone who otherwise would have died (if only from his own gun).

Concepts of honor and violence are, of course, entwined. On the one hand, violent men are invariably obsessed with honor. On the other hand, honor is “something that exists in the eyes of others. To be able to recover it… a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the institutions that deprived him of his honor in the first place” (emphasis mine). Graeber is speaking about The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oladudah Equiano: or, Gustavas Vassa, the African, here, by the way – probably the inspiration for MT Anderson’s great YA novel series The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.

Tarantino, while perhaps not obsessed with ideas of patriarchal honor having to do with control over women, is obsessed with “cool” – with the personal honor codes of violent people. He’s put in a tricky situation in this movie, where he needs his protagonists to be cool and honorable, but is shooting an historical movie at a time when they could not, in practice, both reject the system and remain honorably within it. “In practice” becomes the key phrase, here. Because Quentin Tarantino is filming a movie and not directing an historical event, he has other value systems besides the society his characters operate in at his disposal.

Django and Schultz don’t need society’s approval because they have their own audience. Sometimes their audience exists within the movie: when Schultz frees the slaves in the woods, he has an audience of surprised and shocked black men; when Django turns the tables on the slavers bringing him to the mines, he has an audience of black men in the transport wagon; at the final shootout at the mansion, all the house slaves are on hand. Just as important as the on-screen audience is, however, of course, the audience in the movie theater.

This is a crucial point. It’s important in a Tarantino movie for the audience to side with the “heroes” on screen, however questionable, and to cheer at the end. He uses filmmaker’s tricks to achieve that end – makes the heroes competent and the villains incompetent or crazy, uses close-up reaction shots, slowly escalates the violence. They are tricks, but they are fairly transparent tricks. There’s very little in the way of misdirection: it’s not as if the audience does not realize that they are being led to think a certain way.

And anyway, is this identification automatic, even for an audience in the 21st century confronted with a major star like Jamie Foxx in an obviously heroic role – as both a Western and a Blaxploitation hero? I don’t think this hurdle is at all easy for some members of the audience. I remember having trouble with Kevin Boyle’s historical novel Arc of Justice, about racial violence in Detroit, an obsessively footnoted work of historical fiction that is not even fictional. The moment of realization – oh, if I just identify with the clear victims in this situation, I can forget about trying to justify the unjustifiable – was a huge relief, and I remember it vividly. While hopefully everyone has either had, or never had to have, that moment, I can’t fault Tarantino for taking so much care to keep his entire audience on board.

Anyway, is it a sin for a movie to be a movie? I know this is a sticking point for lots of people – the unsettling collision between historic violence and genre tropes – but personally I find it to be a strength. Or, quoting myself again: “In Django, it’s not just violence per se that’s the subject, but depictions of violence, or filmic violence. Filmic violence can be funnier than real violence, but because it’s funny, it can also be more affecting – you remember the unpleasant things along with the funny things instead of throwing the whole movie out of your brain the second it’s over (because, no matter how much you want to be a Good and Serious person, it’s too upsetting to keep thinking about).”

But getting back to honor: the ability to strip others of their dignity becomes, for the master, the foundation of his honor. Those with “surplus dignity” surround themselves with slaves not out of any kind of economic necessity, but for reasons of status. DiCaprio’s Southern gentlemen is exactly one such man of honor. I think his character is a great subversion of previous portrayals of “Southern gentlemen” like Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. It’s not that some bad apples ruined the system for the respectable plantation owners, Tarantino is saying. Rather, it’s that those who are the most entrenched within the system, and the most active in upholding its abuses, are, by the logic of the system, the most respectable. In other words, Candi is what a respectable southern gentlemen looks like: a sadist surrounded by “things” (people) over which he has ultimate power, who stages displays of that power for his own glorification; but who is however unnaturally obsessed with the virtue of his (full-blood white) relation.

It’s exactly Candi’s status as one of these “surplus dignity” owners which requires Schultz and Django’s elaborate deception (in addition to other, character based explanations). Calvin Candi is rich and masterful. He doesn’t need the extra $300 for Hilde.

So far all of this might seem a little basic, or simplistic, even. Everything I have discussed has been theoretical, with little in the way of nuanced psychology or a complex moral worldview. This is not to say that there is no complexity in Django. For me, personally though, the strength of the movie lies in the way that these conceptual points about what it means to be enslaved – about what a slave society must be like – are presented without explicit comment, in the way the characters relate to each other and in the events shown on screen – in wordless reaction shots, rather than in speeches.

One final theoretical note, then, to close out the post. Graber discusses how “freedom” as a concept developed alongside slavery; as well as how personal (Roman) property law developed in response to people-as-things. The concept of freedom, the ability to do whatever you want with yourself (except for the things you can’t do), follows on from the concept of slavery, the ability to do whatever you like with your human property. Here’s the quote:

“Freedom is the natural faculty to do whatever one wishes that is not prevented by force or law. Slavery is an institution according to the law of nations whereby one person becomes the absolute private property of another, contrary to nature.”

Contrary to nature! You gotta love details like this. Theories of phrenology espoused by Calvin Candi, the whole (once)science of racial inferiority, clearly must have developed to fix this otherwise beautiful theoretical framing.

It does point toward an important question, though. If the main distinguishing feature of freedom is that one is not a slave, what does it mean to “own” yourself and to “own” your freedom? How can the same person be both the master, and the slave?

According to Graeber, it’s this question that necessitates the division of the self into two selves: a mind which “owns” the body, over which it has absolute power. It’s a division Tarantino supports in his movie, to an extent. Put simply, it’s a big problem for Tarantino that he only has one hero in his movie. What is he saying about all the other black bodies – that lacking Django’s luck and skill with a gun, they simply accepted their fate?

Here, again, the reaction shots are important. The reaction of Schultz, the bartender, the saloon mistress, to two black brothers made to fight to the death is hate and disgust (and queasiness, in Schultz’ case). The reaction of Candi’s other slaves to Django, a free black slaver, is hate and disgust (and confusion, on the part of the head maid). The reaction of Stephen, on the other hand, to the sight of a free black man on a horse, is hate… and resentment.

It’s been mentioned before that Stephen is the movie’s final villain because he is Django’s doppelganger. They contrast each other in nearly every way: Django fights for his connection with his wife, while Stephen’s only connection is with his master; Django is young and fit, while Stephen is old and has a bad leg; Foxx plays Django with restrained dignity while Jackson plays Stephen as loud comic relief. At the same time, though, they are bound together: first as the two largest black roles, played by the two biggest black stars. But secondly, because they are both given these closeups where they show the “wrong” reaction, even if Foxx’s Django is playing a role at the time.

It’s that moment of doubt, as well as all the other indignities up until that point, that forces the movie’s explosive conclusion. Of course, Django has to strike against the entire system, because the entire system is responsible for what he and every other enslaved person has suffered. But also, this is a scene of putting right: the better ending than the one where he pretended, even for a moment, that he liked or was indifferent to what he’d seen.

We can’t always act, the movie says. But we can always wish, fantasize, about the way we would like to act. When we are able to counteract the violence and indifference of the unjust society we live in, and bring about a reality that accords with our wishes, we are heroes. But even when we are not able to change anything about our external reality, the simple act of wishing and fantasizing itself has power.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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