Revenge of the Giant Face

Ah, let's indulge in some time travel shall we? Let's go all the way back to September 2009, when Sean Collins had this to say about Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds:

It is, in other words, a deliberate assault on the facts surrounding the deaths of millions and millions of people, including the systematic genocide of six million Jews in the Holocaust... It's morally monstrous and its practitioners are moral monsters.

Oh, wait, shit. That's not quite right. That's what Sean C. had to say about Nazi-sympathizing turd-monger Pat Buchanan. Sorry everyone, but problems like this tend to occur when you start to mess around with history, you know?

In order to find what Sean actually thought of Inglourious Basterds we have to go back even further, to August 2009 no less! It was a kinder time, a gentler time, a time where a man could read an essay on the cathartic, history rupturing violence of Tarantino's latest picture without any danger of stumbling onto this long winded response.

Here's what Sean actually said about the film:

...Inglourious Basterds may be the punkest movie I've seen in I can't even think how long. Maybe ever. It's about nothing less than the power of art to destroy evil. It's about how important it is to love film more than the likes of Hitler hate life. It's about how movie violence, art violence, art designed as a FUCK YOU, can help you deal with the violence that so terrified Chamberlain's cohorts and to which Hitler and his cohorts were so indifferent. It's Woody Guthrie's "THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS" guitar slogan made literal. It's a lingering closeup on the bloodlust-saturated eyes of Eli Roth, the beautiful Jewish torture-porn poster boy and enemy of good taste, as he empties a machine gun into the bodies of members of the Third Reich. And it's a total fucking fantasy. Yet that's what makes it so vital.

Collins then went on to compare the release he finds in Inglourious Basterds with the traumatized euphoria of a Nine Inch Nails concert. It's a good essay -- so good, in fact, that it almost had me convinced that I felt the same way. Except that if I'm honest, I didn't find any release in Tarantino's spaghetti-western-war-punk-fantasy.

That said, Inglourious Basterds didn't bother me the way it bothered David Fiore! Still, I get where Dave's coming from, because it's a deeply strange movie -- the mix of stomach wrenching tension, goofy comedy, expressive violence and defiantly "Tarantino-esque" banter makes it hard for the viewer to know how they're supposed to react. Even the film's first chapter, which Sean correctly describes as being loaded with real danger, has at least one absurd laugh in it. It's not easy to keep a straight face when Landa pulls out his massive comedy pipe, is it?


Well, somehow he manages, but I couldn't help myself. My laughter was absurd and inappropriate, but then so was that fucking pipe!

The difference between my take on the movie and David Fiore's would be that I'm happier to take this uncertainty as part of the ride. Dave suggests that Inglourious Basterds allows us to think about the way political perspectives are formed in an "unusually visceral" way, and I think he's absolutely right! Tarantino's movie circles around a series of overlapping schemers before plunging into the heart of the venn diagram -- which, of course, happens to be located in a cinema! This is where my reading starts to look a lot like Sean's, because the unreality of the film is key to its success. Tarantino isn't exactly shy about the fact that this is a fantasy -- after all, Inglourious Basterds starts with a title card that reads "Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France" and peaks with a scene of ghostly revenge that's straight out of a Hammer horror movie. The fact that this climax is explicitly linked to the use of film as a weapon is just so much metafictional gravy, really.

So why can't I find catharsis in this process? Because as good old Dave Fiore noted in another Basterdly post, "if the movie works at all, it works in the reverse direction–as a statement about the inability of art to do anything but respond to other art..."

It should be clear by now that the differences between my take on the movie and those of my fellow bloggers are actually pretty small, but I'm going to keep on blowing them up into something big anyway. Why? Because it's more fun!

So: Dave's right, Inglourious Basterds is about art vs. art, and that's why it's so fucking good! Again, none of this is hidden -- the movie's finale sees all of its characters collide at the premier of a Nazi propaganda film, which makes the messy, blood-drenched ending seem like a triumph of aesthetics over agitprop. This is a shot to the face of those who would wield art like a cudgel, and if that seems like a paradox to you then that just means you're still awake.

All of this points to why my opening Pat Buchanan joke doesn't really work, because while Tarantino messes around with history here, he makes damned sure you know exactly what he's doing! He also takes pains to show that this is violent, bracing business, but that might just be because his movies are all about violent, bracing business. So as a whole war's worth of plots and schemes crash into each other, the blood starts to flow and you start to count the casualties start to stack up. Tellingly, the characters who survive the climactic carnage do so by pushing their stories harder than the rest. For example, in the movie's first chapter, Landa acts as though he is comfortable being the "Jew Hunter"; in its last, he makes a fairly audacious play to find a new narrative for himself, and with it a pivotal role in history. And he gets all of that, but when Pitt's Lieutenant Aldo Raine carves a swastika into Landa's head he adds a little something extra to the Nazi's story. Which is oddly fitting, given that Landa adds a little something to the movie every time he wanders into a scene (seriously, every single mannerism is a like a comedy pipe pulled out at just the wrong occasion).

If you find yourself asking whether this jumble of cinematic pleasures is enough to justify a fully-fledged assault on history, well -- isn't that an interesting conversation to have? Inglourious Basterds doesn't open a can of worms, it machetes the fucker to pieces and then shouts "HEY LOOK, MORE WORMS!!"

Which is probably why Mike Barthel's take on the movie is my favourite so far. Using Inglourious Basterds as a jump-off point to discuss the US Constitution, Barthel waxes euphoric on the power of art as interpretation. He also comes out with this beauty of a paragraph:

The unfortunate reality of American political discourse is that people don’t really understand how the government works, and because of that, the smooth functioning of the government actively requires hiding certain things from the public. This is not to say these things are wrong; at least a few people in the government are smart, moral people who care about the Constitution, and they have thought through these complex issues and given them the thumbs-up. But they are complex issues, and getting through them requires several years of careful study and an ability to listen to arguments you don’t immediately agree with, all of which it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get people whose first impulse is to draw a Hitler mustache on something (anything! a butternut squash! whatever’s closest at hand!) to do.

When he starts to talk about Hitler moustaches, Barthel accidentally echoes David Fiore's point about America's obsession with swastika branding, framing it as an impediment to honest and open political process. So what's the solution? I don't have it, and Tarantino probably wouldn't care about it if he did, but I'm starting to think that this man might be on to something:

Yes, that's right, it's pedantic British comedian Richard Herring, getting his Mein Kampf on. I saw Herring's Hitler Moustache show at the Fringe in August, and while I won't subject Herring's routines to excessive paraphrase here (that dubious pleasure is reserved for my "real life" friends!), I will say that it was one of the best shows I've seen this decade. By branding himself with the Hitler moustache, Herring becomes a comedy villain. He becomes an uneasy joke, but as a joke he's free to question every statement that comes out of his mouth without ever giving up on meaning or morality.

The best example of this effect comes when Herring stops trying to provoke laughter and starts to berate members of the audience who didn't vote in this year's European elections. His rhetoric in this part of the show is as sincere as it is scathing, but there's an implicit irony at work that stops it from being overbearing. No matter how agreeable the sentiments Herring expresses are, you're still being lectured on politics by a man with a Hitler moustache. That small clump of hair, boldly brandished, becomes an invitation to not take what its wearer is saying at face value. It's a fuzzy reminder that there's always room for argument and debate, and as such it serves much the same function as Inglourious Basterds' "Once upon a time..." introduction.

In stark contrast to Inglourious Basterds, though, Hitler Moustache has an overt political agenda. Starting from the proposition that the toothbrush moustache can be reclaimed for comedy, it quickly becomes a rallying cry against prejudice and complacency. In a routine that was very poorly represented in this Guardian article, Herring uses crass racial stereotyping as a jump-off point for an absurdly clever examination of conflicted liberal attitudes to cultural differences. This isn't blank irony of the kind that gave David Foster Wallace nightmares, because Herring doesn't use comedy to disavow meaning. Instead, he uses it to reaffirm the fact that our opinions have to be tested if they're to be truly useful. Of course, being the man who got a forty minute comedy skit out of a yogurt-heavy trip to the supermarket, Herring is an expert at attacking a proposition from every possible perspective. That he manages to do so while taking on contentious subject matter, and that he creates constant laughter in the process, is what makes this show a triumph.

Plus, Herring also takes care of the nasty argument closing/moustache drawing trick in a silly and novel way. Or so you'd think, but it seems that some people still want to draw the 'tache on, even when it's already there! But hey, even that weird bit of graffiti-artistry is fitting when you look at it from the right perspective. Hitler Moustache is nothing less than a weaponisation of irony, and it's made me want to try to be smarter, funnier and more active in local politics all at once.

As for Inglourious Basterds, I'm not going to pretend that my take on the movie is anywhere near definitive. For one thing, I've not even touched upon how great Melanie Laurent is as Shosanna Dreyfus:


Seriously, some of the things Laurent does with her face warrant a separate two thousand word essay!

Still, I've got a big enough ego to think that if you read this essay alongside Sean's, and Dave's and Mike's and Geoff's etc, then you might just start to get an idea of what Inglourious Basterds is actually all about. Most likely you'll get a hint of it in the places where these pieces clash or blur into each other or seem wildly divergent. If Sean Witzke ever gets around to writing a full blog post on the film I think he'll probably get closer to the spirit of the thing than anyone else, but this post of mine? If you just read it on its own, and if you give it just a little bit too much of your time, you might just start to see a face staring up at you through the screen. It might look like Hitler's face, or it might look like Herring's, but if you look closer you'll realise that it's not really either of their faces. No, if anyone's face is peering out at you through these words then it's a blank parody of my face, beady eyes peering out from a queasy void:



And what should you do when you see this face? Well, like I said, you should probably move on to other blog posts, or better yet, turn the computer off and go out for a walk or something. Still, if you wanted to pause for a moment and graffiti my face I wouldn't be too sad. Just so long as you try to be a bit more imaginative than I've been here, which shouldn't be too hard. After all, I'm sure you can do better than this:



Well... can't you?

Growing Flowers in the Outer Church

I didn't have time to get into this in my Adam Curtis post, but while Jebni was talking about the narrative possibilities of blogging he also came up with this stunning interpretation of The Filth:

Another way of illustrating the “neveryday” imaginary of blogging is through an allegory: Grant Morrison and Chris Weston’s comic book, The Filth (Morrison and Weston, 2004). Their (anti-)hero is Greg Feely, an ordinary, “sentimental” cat-lover who leads a double life as Ned Slade, a transdimensional agent for the psychic police-cum-waste-disposal agency of the world, known as The Filth....

While he’s battling giant flying spermatozoa or navigating the sewer of the world, Greg/Ned will wonder out loud if he’s forgotten to feed the cat. It is truly touching, and not pathetic. What Morrison’s narrative achieves is the realisation that in the middle of struggles over the fate of life itself, “I Love My Cat” narratives are amongst the best narratives there are. And yet this touchy-feely mundanity of cat-love is neither an authentic origin for Feely, nor just a “fake” but necessary refuge for the “real” Slade, despite its proven worth. As the book progresses, it becomes clearer that the cat scenario is neither the “real” story, nor even just one valid segment amongst several, but one of several occult media dialects: the killer sperm, the cat and the zombie “anti-persons” all enunciate or channel through each other. In the end, we learn that cat-love can be generated by a sentient nanotech infestation, but is still valid.

Jebni then goes on to draw connections between his concept of blogging and the Filthy neverworld known as The Crack, which apparently "runs through everything and everyone." This is pretty fitting really, because both The Filth and the Internet are perfect conduits for the crap that runs through our lives. As two of Greg's superiors (Man Green/Man Yellow) tell him: "The rubbish has to go somewhere. And where there's brass, there's muck, they say, don't they?"

Talking about crap: at one point, I considered relaunching this blog as a static wordpress site. The ideas was to upload a series of interconnected essays which the reader would have to navigate by following embedded links to other pages. I wrote a lot of material for this version of the site before deciding that it was too gimmicky, too hard to navigate and not nearly as flashy as it should be, but I might come back to the idea one day. [1]

Anyway, one of the essays was going to use the idea of The Crack as a jump-off point to discuss the integration of social realism, fantasy, music, pulp fiction and psychology in Dennis Potter's work. I was going to focus on Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, with a particular emphasis on the way that Potter's disregard for realist unity allowed him to examine the best and worst aspects of his protagonists freely.

This sounds a little dry in the abstract, and maybe it would have been. But hey, at least when I was talking about how the Crack obliterates the distinctions between rage and embarrassment/escape and collapse/fact and fiction/body and mind, I could have shown you clips like this to liven things up:

That's Michael Gambon in the original BBC production of The Singing Detective -- none of that Mel Gibson pish for me thanks!

(And don't you just hate it when waiters offer you Gibson Pish in a restaurant? "Does sir wish any Gibson Pish with his scampi?" And they're always so snooty when you turn it down! [3])

As it was conceived, my wordpress blog would've fitted in nicely with Jebni's interpretation of The Crack. It would've been a place where my various different interests could have channeled through each other, but it would also have been a bit too "about" itself for my liking. And while I'm still fascinated by the many metaphorical possibilities of The Crack, I'm more interested in The Ink right now. Greg Feely learns about The Ink in issue #9 of The Filth, in which he's put through what amounts to a delayed induction day for his "job" as Ned Slade. True to form, this induction is not only eight months late but it also serves to make things even less clear than they were before. For example, while he's getting sailed around The Crack, Greg is introduced to the giant pen hand from which all of The Filth flows:


"The Ink brings things to life, you see," we're told, which is obviously true since without the lines on the page there'd be no comic!

We also lean that The Hand harvest The Ink for their own purposes, which echoes the Paperverse plot from issue #3 nicely, but there's more to The Ink than raw power. It's the stuff of life itself, remember, and in its own way it's as unfathomable as anything else in The Crack.

You see, as Greg's colleagues struggle to explain, there's a horrible ambiguity as to what the hand actually is:

[4]

Ah, there's the important bit: "AW WE KERR ABOOT'S THE INK." That's all I care about too, though possibly in a different way. Because while I'm all about theorising and criticising and trying to combine different kinds of discourse, all of that is meaningless unless it's an attempt to get at the un-gettable - which is to say the slippery substance of all this fiction. The raw stuff. The Ink. [5]

Like Andrew Hickey recently suggested, we might not be able to hold a complete working map of the universe in our heads, but there are many ways to bring elements of the big picture into focus. For example, the crude interactive technology of the modern comic book can make life very vivid if it's used correctly, as it is in The Filth. Many Most of the things that we see in The Crack are horrible, of course, but still -- The Filth is not, in the final analysis, a depressing book. In fact, it's almost sweet in its own way.

I think that this is possible precisely because The Filth doesn't hold back in its exploration of the more horrible side of the human psyche. Looking over the pages of the comic right now, I'm reminded of scenes from an earlier Morrison/Weston collaboration, The Invisibles:



There was always something slightly off about Weston's art on The Invisibles, a sense that his versions of the characters were less naturally stylish than usual. This is used to good effect in the scene I've excerpted above, in which two of our usually glamorous heroes end up coming into contact with the banal horrors in their heads. Here the lumpy everymanish quality that had previously been jarring serves to emphasise the despair that the characters find in the idea of being normal.

The shorthand used in these scenes functional if a bit obvious. Reading these pages, we understand that our protagonists (particularly vain super-assassin King Mob) can find hell in the idea of staring dependently at a TV screen that watches back. We might find this to be a dull and superficial concept of hell, but we can take this as a being a piece of snippy characterisation of King Mob if we want. The only real problem is that the imagery Morrison and Weston use in this scene is a little underdeveloped -- you can see the influence of William Burroughs and David Cronenberg in the fleshy lampshades and cyclopean bugs that populate these fantasies, but when compared to the putrid horror of those artists at their best the images we see here seem a little bit tame. [6]

When Morrison and Weston worked together again on The Filth, they easily surpass their previous attempts at horror. In addition to hiding this creepy little observer in Feely's TV...


...they also plant ears in the walls of his house, effectively turning Feely's home into an inverted skull:


Not only does that TV monster look far more convincing than anything in that Invisibles scene (it's the little scrotal brain sacks that take it over the edge, I think), it's also got a better context. By literally giving the house eyes and ears, Morrison and Weston neatly blur the different interpretations of Feely's situation. Is he being observed by his bosses at The Crack or is he just a lump of sick flesh trying to work itself out, like Michael Gambon's character in The Singing Detective?

And... oh god, I've got to be careful or I'm going to end up flapping around in circles about how attention to context and attention to detail go together like chips and cheese, but this really is a perfect example of The Crack serving as a perfect place for The Ink to flow. Greg Feely is sort of like King Mob from The Invisibles gone to seed. Feely's life would seem like a cruel punishment to King Mob, but while Greg never exactly shakes off this feeling himself, he does at least achieve a sort of battered understanding of his existence by facing up to all of its contradictions. It might all just be in his head, but even if its not then Greg's double life see's him escape from mundane "reality" into... a job. A horrible job, in which he has to deal with all the piss and shit and brutality in the world while wearing a goofy uniform, which... really, kind of escape is that? What kind of understanding could anyone find here? Well, how about the understanding of how to go on living in a world this horrific and confused? Wouldn't that be worth something?


In my last essay on The Filth I talked about how Greg ends up lashing out against his role as a Hand Officer, but I was a little shy about discussing what comes next. That's because "what comes next" is at the heart of this essay series, and it's so absurdly goofy that I don't know if I can explain it without making a dick of myself. [7] "What comes next" is realising that, like Jebni says, sometimes "I Love My Cat" narratives are the best narratives. [8] What does this mean? It means facing up to all the shit in the world, acknowledging it for what it is, and realising that if you can find it in yourself to care about something then there might be some hope after all. Like I said, this sounds stupid and soppy and banal, and that's because it is all of these things, but that's not all it is. It's a form of genuine love and appreciation, born out of the realisation that everything and everyone around you is part of the same stupid toxicoloured mess of a story -- that it's all Ink, basically!

In its own crude way, this beleaguered revelation reminds me of the incandescent poetry that Alan Moore throws out in Snakes and Ladders:

We are insensate molecules, assembled from the accidental code engraved upon our genes. Mud that sat up.

Chemicals mingle in our sediment and in their interactions and combustions we suppose we feel, suppose we love. We reproduce, mathematically predictable as spores within a petri dish. We function briefly, then subside once more to the unknowing silt.

We are a blind contingency, an unimportant restlessness of dirt and yet Rosseti paints his dead Elizabeth, head tilted back on her impossibly slim throat, eyes closed against the golden light surrounding her.

Clay looks on clay, and understands that it is beautiful.

Through us, the cosmos gazes on itself, adores itself, breaks its own heart.

Through us, matter stares slack-jawed at its own star-dusted countenance and knows, incredulously, that it knows. And knows that it is universe. [9]

In both Snakes and Ladders and The Filth, hope and self-awareness are linked, with the idea being that only by recognising the full horror of our situation are we able to work to change it. [10] This is what I meant when I said (almost 1,000 words ago now, jesus!) that The Filth is actually pretty sweet. After thirteen issues full of violence, broken dreams and grotty pornographic horror, Morrison and Weston still manages to find hope in the form of one man's love for his cat. The Invisibles found a similar value in all of our Inky little lives at the end, but The Filth manages to find hope in the life of a sad, lonely working man, which makes it kick harder for me. Possibly because I feel like a lumpy Chris Weston character called David Allison instead of the Philip Bond caricature that was bigsunnyd.

Thinking back to Snakes and Ladders for a minute, I'm drawn to the image of an Imperial Crown tumbling off George the Fifth's coffin and into the soot and spit of the street. In Alan Moore's hands, this becomes a symbol of the unification of the sacred and the profane, an indication that where there's shit there's spirit. The Filth makes this thought even more forcefully because it's far happier being part of the endless detritus of our culture. There's no real treasure here, no gold crosses mixed in with the muck, just dirty brass ones that can be polished off to reveal a faint gleam, a little light to help you find your way home:


And yes, I do consider that to be a strong enough thought to end a gazillion word essay series on!

Thanks for reading everyone.

FUCK YOU AND GOODNIGHT!

***

And now the Endnotes:

[1] And if you're wondering what kind of shit I came up with for that abandoned website idea, here's one of the pages in its entirety:

Fantastically Damaged: Mickey Rourke as Man-Made God

Don’t delude yourself, and don’t believe the hype - Darren Aronofsky is a manipulative motherfucker.

He’s never been deep. In fact, like Jarvis Cocker, he’s almost profoundly shallow. Whether he's making a movie about drug addiction, advanced mathematics, wrestling or mortality, Aronofsky's focus is always on that cut, that shot, that piece of music. What's more, on the strength of The Wrestler, this definitely isn’t a bad thing.

A lot of the early press chatter around the film homed in on its supposed naturalism, with the subtext being that it was more mature than his previous hyper-orchestrated works, because it was less fussy/more manful/more real.

Which is bollocks, of course, as Aronofsky the filmmaker must surely have known, even if Aronofsky the interview subject towed the party line. [2] The realism of The Wrestler is Oscar realism, but Aronofsky dispatches with the tragic back-story of Randy the Ram with brutal efficiency. It’s all there – the broken marriage, the non-existent relationship with his only child, the mundane day-job in a supermarket – and it’s all treated very seriously, but Aronofsky knows that this isn’t the show. It’s just a framing device, something to get you interested in that body, that performance, that face:

Who’s the good guy? Who’s the villain?

Who cares!

As soon as you’ve started to consider these questions, you’ve opened yourself up to the spectacle. And as soon as you’ve started to watch the spectacle, you can’t help but notice that body, struggling to keep the illusion alive.
And hey, some of that hyped-up orchestration is still evident! You can see it in those extended shots where the camera follows Randy from behind as he walks into the arena/the supermarket (DO YOU SEE?!). You can also see it in the way Aronofsky works the comparison between Randy and his love interest, Cassidy. She's a stripper (DO YOU SEE?!) who's struggling to keep up with the younger girls, and so she serves as both a cracked mirror for Randy and as a possible escape route -- she's there at the sidelines of his big match during the climax of the movie, but by the time she arrives he's already surrendered himself to the fantasy.Cassidy's role is slightly offensive in the standard Hollywood way, but Aronofsky's direction and Marissa Tomei's performance make this obvious manipulation work for the movie rather than against it. Here Aronofsky's focus is on his body, her body, their bodies and the mess of their lives. He shows us self-made goddesses and gods, but in doing so he can't help but show us how much damage has been done to these deities, both by the characters they've created and by the audiences these fictions attract.

The moment where Randy cries about being a "broken down piece of meat" is pure sentimental trash, but it gets to you all the same, because that mass of ragged flesh is on display. You can't ignore the meat on Randy's bones -- it's horrible, and it's magnificent, and it could break you down. What's more, looking at it for too long could break your heart.

This is manipulation that, by virtue of its sheer force, makes us question what we're being manipulated into watching, and why.

Still, if this connection -- this genuine empathy born out of showy physicality -- isn't enough to create a happy ending between Randy and Cassidy, then what does that say to the audience?

You've watched them bleed, you've found yourself moved by this, but in the end you're still just a spectator, still just part of the audience, never part of the show.

I'm just trying to give you some idea of what it's going to be like to be me as I finally go public and change the destiny of humankind forever. I'm going to expose your secret conspiracies in the name of freedom. And when I'm done, I'll step up to the microphone and say "you too can be like me: Max Thunderstone -- Man-Made God." And they'll all cheer like children, you watch...

(Max Thunderstone in The Filth #10, 'Man-Made God')

[2] On reflection, I'm actually being slightly unfair to Darren Aronofsky here. In this Slashfilm interview he makes several intelligent distinctions between the attempts at objectivity in The Wrestler and the wholehearted subjectivity his previous works. In fact, I like his comments so much that I'll quote them at length here:

I think the first two films were exercises in subjective filmmaking and pushing that to the extreme, trying to figure out every possible technique to put an audience member into the characters’ heads. Pi was constructed that way because I had a limited budget and that became kind of the strategy of how to turn that limited budget into a strength. It was to really cut back on cutting away to the bad guys and really making a whole visual language that was all about pushing the audience into Max Cohen’s head. Requiem, a big reason that I was attracted to it is when I read the novel, I realized that Selby’s a very subjective writer and constantly going into fantasy and to dream. It would allow me to kind of expand on the thing I was doing in Pi, but with a bigger budget and color and with more time and with four characters. So when I read that opening scene of the novel and I saw the mom locked in the closet and the kid stealing the TV, I instantly had this idea of a split screen sort of showing the audience, “Oh, we’re going to see two very personal stories here from two different perspectives.” Then eventually it opened up into four perspectives. They were really exercises and really pushing subjective filmmaking. When I got to The Fountain, it was kind of a transition. I was definitely done with that as an exploration and also the subject matter of The Fountain was much more– It was a romance and it allowed me to move more towards the objective, although I still kind of played a little bit with getting into Tommy’s head and into his reality. It was kind of a transition and kind of expanding my style, I guess. I think getting to The Wrestler was really just going in the completely opposite direction. Basically, the film is 98 percent objective. It’s like a documentary. I call it proactive documentary, because I think in a real documentary everything is reactive. If you’re watching Cops and a guy runs away and then a second later the camera chases after the guy and goes after him, we didn’t have that second delay. We kind of knew what the scene was about and we knew where Mickey or Marisa was going to go. So we were able to choreograph that. We kind of had this proactive style where we were working with the actor to give a documentary feeling, allow realism to happen, but we were ready for it. There’s no really internal sound stuff, except for maybe two or three times I used it, which was like during the heart attacks and when he’s walking to the deli counter and the crowd comes up. Otherwise, besides that, there’s never a personal sound beat. I kind of really didn’t want to do that, but I couldn’t resist. It’s actually a little weak. People responded to those moments, I think.

Of course, this "proactive documentary" style is still a style, but I think Aronofsky is aware of that. Besides, if I start to quibble on this point any further I might as well just reprint Roland Barthes' Writing Degree Zero, right?

[3] No, I have no idea what I'm talking about here either. Here's a wee Mitchell and Webb sketch about a snooty waiter to justify the digression:

[4] Of course issue #12 of The Filth makes it pretty obvious that the hand is Greg's own, but by the time the series has wrapped up Grant Morrison has been sure to render that reading as unlikely as any other, bless him.

[5] I'm reminded here of David Fiore's claim that:

"Life" is an uninhabitable planet. Narrative is artificial atmosphere that enables us to walk upon its surface. That's why Grant Morrison's concept of the "fiction suit" (from The Filth) is so apt.

Which sounds dead on to me. The only problem is that sometimes expeditions out into the farther reaches of the planet "Life" can scramble your perceptions. Sometimes it feels like the closer you get to your intended destination, the further away from it you seem to be. That's what happens to Greg Feely throughout The Filth, which is probably why some readers find it hard to get to grips with.

Issue #9, 'Inside The Hand', is probably the best example of this. If The Filth is Chris Weston's masterpiece (and I think it is!), then the four page sequence in which Feely meets Man Green/Man Yellow is a mini-masterpiece within the bigger one.

While Feely is being grilled by his superiors the art shifts into a dazed Gilbert & George pastiche. Weston's linework, normally expressive of crude biology, is boxed in by stark, repetitive abstraction. Instead of the usual abundant absurdities, we're left a battered close-up of Feely's face, which has been drained of colour and walled in by disinterested faces of his employers:

Being typical members of the management class, Man Green/Man Yellow explain Greg's role in short, cryptic sentences which always seem to arrive in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is as close as Greg gets to a simple explanation of what his purpose is, and he's still left with his brow furrowed and his questions unanswered:


Since you're currently reading this essay, I'm sure you've got some idea of how Greg feels. The closer I get to The Filth, the further away from it my thoughts go. All I want to do is write about The Ink, about the lines on the page and what they do to me, but I can't. As soon as I start typing my mind wanders to Dennis Potter plays and Darren Aronofsky movies.

Despite my earlier protestations to the contrary, every line of this essay is about itself and nothing else. Every paragraph is a textual representation of my bright green/bright yellow face; I keep straining to match the expressive ruffles of Greg Feely's face, but I keep falling short. Still, I'll try again and fail better, and if I'm lucky maybe I'll come up with something that's almost as expressive as the pages I've sampled above.

[6] In fairness, there aren't many people who can beat Cronenberg and Burroughs at their own game. And if you disagree, hey, don't argue with me! Argue with these guys:

[7] Thankfully the creators of The Filth were less scared of making dicks out of themselves than I am. Jebni wasn't lying about the sentient nano-tech cat love that's being spread about at the end of the series -- that shit really happens in the comic!

And you know what? I'm glad that it does. It's a perfect use of the biological motifs that have run through the whole series. If, in the world of The Filth, everything repeats from the macro scale down to the micro ("As above, so below" and all that shit), then surely it can work the other way? If we're all part of the same cross-contaminating gunk, why can't positive narratives spread out from the smallest scale to the largest?

[8] Cat haters of the world, relax, I've got your backs too! Or at least, Adam Roberts does. Just check out this quote, from his review of Charles Stross' Accelerando:

Now it may be that Stross is a cat-lover; that many of his readers will be cat-lovers; and that they will coo over this fictional cat and indulge Stross in his conceit. It so happens that I am not a cat-lover. It happens to be the case that, in addition to suffering allergic asthma when exposed to the foul polluting fur of these quadruped Nazis purrers, I find it morally inconceivable that any human could waste their affection on a creature that takes such delight in torture and selfishness -- that it takes a self-deluding anthropomorphisation and a soppy moral indolence to afford these parasites space in a person's heart.

Ouch! I'm a pet person myself, but that's some harsh, funny shit! (Link via David Golding.)

[9] If you haven't read Eddie Campbell's comic book adaptation of Snakes and Ladders I'd recommend you do so as soon as possible, because it's an absolute treasure of a comic! Go buy A Disease of Language, which collects it along with another Moore/Campbell collaboration, The Birth Caul and all sorts of other goodies. These two performance pieces turned art comics compliment each other nicelt -- The Birth Caul is a thorough deconstruction of human language and perception, while Snakes and Ladders takes human cruelty and suffering as its starting place, and proceeds to literally shoot for the moon. Moore's words are mighty, as is to be expected, and Campbell matches him at every turn. He provides lived-in textures to the various scenes conjoured in The Birth Caul, and in Snakes and Ladders he comes up with page after page of beautifully startling visuals, which... actually, you know what? Forget matching Moore, I think Campbell actually beats him on his own turf in that comic!

[10] It should be noted that seeking to strip people of their own delusions is pretty much always a dick move, since delusions and fantasies are all part of the shit we breath. It's sometimes necessary, but it's almost never going to be painless, as Greg Feely discovers when he reveals LaPen's "true" nature in issue #13:

Knowing How the World Works/Is Not Knowing How to Work the World!

Oooh, my last post went a bit wonky in the middle didn't it? I really like the piece as a whole, and both Sean Wizke and Andrew Hickey have linked to it, but... yeah, I think I've just proved that insomnia and clarity are not friends!

I've re-written a handful of horrible sentences and taken out a few others that were simply too wretched to salvage. I think it reads much better now, but if anyone thinks I've committed an act of hideous violence please let me know and I'll put some of those clunkers back in.

Also: you should all read Andrew's latest/final entry in his Hyperpost series if you haven't already. In fact, you should read the whole damned thing from start to end, even if you have read it before! These posts are a beautiful tangle of physics, liberal politics and metafictional musings, and taken as a whole they form a playfully knotty protest against the idea of canonical storytelling. Which, really, how often do you get to read or type a sentence like that? Not often enough, I would guess, unless your life is far weirder than mine. And if is then, hey -- well done you!

Some of Andrew's closing sentiments echo the themes of my Adam Curtis post rather nicely:

The craving for order, for simplicity, to get everything in little boxes, is a very, very, very dangerous one, because sometimes – often – the things you want to put in those little boxes are people, and then you have to cut parts off them to fit, and saying sorry afterward doesn’t really help…

I’m not saying that retconning away Superman’s time as Superboy, or not counting both versions of Shada, are motivated by fascism – that would be a reductio ad absurdem of my argument. What I *AM* saying is that the world itself is a miraculous, complex, multiplex place, and none of us little monkeys really have a clue how it really works. We should expect nothing less from the stories we tell each other – be they stories about Superman, or stories about how the economy responds to an increase in lending to the banks.

Of course, the big difference here is that Andrew can just say this stuff instead of doing a stupidly elaborate dance around it, but that's just how I work so fuck it!

In the comments to one of Andrew's Hyperposts I indicated that I might write about "the difference between The Invisibles as an interactive experience (The Bomb, the Barbelith site, the lettercols, etc) and 52/Mozbats RIP/Final Crisis as an interactive experience (the blog chatter, the Dibny diaries, the Remixes, etc)."

I started writing an essay on this topic, but I don't think I'll finish it because it was coming out dumb. You see, it looked like I was going to start making some snippy comments about how Grant Morrison used to try to change the way we think about the world, but now he just tries to change the way we think about the DC Comics Universe. Which is total bullshit, really -- just look at all the thoughtful writing Morrison's work still generates, from Andrew's posts to the Mindless Ones' annocomentations to David Fiore on Seaguy for proof!

Beyond that, look at how much good writing there is on this little corner of the Internet! Honestly, I know that there are some unforgivably stupid stories on the web -- one glance at any random YouTube comment is enough to prove this, should you need it reconfirmed -- but the good stuff almost makes up for it. Almost! And hey, you can (and should!) shout the idiots down if something important's at stake, or you can turn their stupidity into a joke if you prefer, but it's important to keep all of this in perspective. There are other, better stories out there, and it's crazy easy to find them these days.

And hey, if you read this blog, I'd just like to take the time to say thanks. I don't think I've got many readers, but the ones I do have are worryingly smart, and I'm glad that they want to make me a part of their stories, however small.

Coming soon -- more Filth!

Take care out there.

David

What's Inside Adam Curtis' Blue Box?

A two part reaction to Adam Curtis' new documentary It Felt Like a Kiss, by way of the Blue Box from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

Part 1: Preliminary Results

Adam Curtis: Where people do set out to have conspiracies, they don’t ever end up like they're supposed to. History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think they're taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended. For example, you could say the Gulf of Tonkin was a conspiratorial action to accelerate entry into war, yes?

Errol Morris: Here’s the conspiracy argument. The Johnson administration wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam. But they needed a pretext. And so they provoked these two incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin in order to get Congressional approval for escalation. The claim is: they had a grand plan. And the plan was war. I’ve never had much of an appetite for conspiracy theories. Here's my argument in a nutshell. People are too much at cross purposes with each other, too stupid, too self absorbed to ever effectively conspire to do anything.

Adam Curtis: “Just too self-absorbed” is the key element. To make a conspiracy work, you have to see it from all different angles to make sure the plan works. They don’t. Every time you ever read transcripts or detailed descriptions of what goes on at high level policy decisions - I'm sure it’s true of the Kennedy administration, I'm sure it’s true today in the Bush administration - The arguments, the self-absorption, the disagreements and the narcissism are incredible. And I'm sure the Gulf of Tonkin thing probably emerged as a compromise between lots of different people arguing as much as from a single, clear principle.

('Adam Curtis talks with Errol Morris' - link via Tom Ewing.)



Adam Curtis: I'm very suspicious of this idea of a balanced version of history, All history is a construction – often by the powerful. What I do is construct an imaginative interpretation of history to make people look again at what they think they know. I like to ask people, “Have you thought of this?” Like zooming up in a helicopter and looking at the ground, looking at the world in a new way. Because I think that so much of this interpretation of events is a deadening repetition agreed upon by certain people, a sort of collectivity of news reports. And often it’s completely wrong. But somehow, they all agree on it. People criticized my film by saying things like, “Why aren’t you balanced? What aren’t you putting in the other views?” And my response was, “What if the other view is wrong?” That’s the real problem of the balanced view - what's called ‘perceived wisdom.’ What if perceived wisdom’s wrong? What if – when you go and look at the evidence for sleeper cells in America – there doesn’t appear to be anything there? You know, that's the difficult area. And so it becomes up to you to judge whether to go against perceived wisdom or not.

('Adam Curtis talks with Errol Morris'.)

I think my jaw dropped permanently during the wordless encounter at the studio between "Betty", Adam, and "pseudo-Camilla", who is auditioning for the role of "love interest". The scene is dominated by crazy Old Hollywood closeups of intense longing and Linda Scott's maudlin/profound bubblegum version of one of my favourite Jerome Kern songs--"I've Told Every Little Star" (why haven't I told you?). But you can't tell the Other how you feel about her/him/it, and you can't even express these feelings very accurately to yourself.

So "opening the box" isn't just "waking from a dream"--it is, literally, death. Whatever's in there cannot even be thought by human beings--despite the fact that getting in there is pretty much all we think about! The way of "optimism" and the way of "despair" intersect at the abyss (although, as Camila notes, the second way is a "short-cut"!), and Lynch's vertiginous transition between narratives at the Utopian moment of expected fulfillment (after Betty and Rita have found the box together) is one of the most incredibly affecting evocations of the Sublime in the history of cinema. Without all of this preparation, the Diane scenes (masturbating, deliberating in the darkness about whether to accept Camilla's purred invitation, the walk from the car to the party, her quiet breakdown at the dinner table, and her suicide: the nightmare counterpart of Betty/Rita's lovemaking--both are the logical climaxes of their respective narratives, and neither succeeds in rescuing the dreamer from the necessity of dreaming!) wouldn't have nearly the impact that they do

(David Fiore's Ultimate Mulholland Drive Round-Up)

The Real of Mulholland Dr is not Diane’s supposedly waking world, but the paradoxically entrancing insomniac realm of Club Silencio (which, in acting as the gateway from the first section of the film to the second is like the ‘cut’ of the moebian band that when sutured together, transforms the two sides of the piece of paper into a single strip). I say ‘paradoxically entrancing’ because the scene is ostensibly demystifying. Yet only ostensibly so; like Magritte’s ‘This Is Not a Pipe’, Club Silencio, reminiscent of the Black/White Lodge in the first and final episodes of Twin Peaks and as intensely charged as anything in Lynch’s oeuvre, demonstrates film – and art’s - irreducible sorcery. Club Silencio’s scenario is thoroughly Potteresque. The entertainment is provided by perfomers who mime onstage to a pre-recorded soundtrack, much in the way that Potter had the characters in The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven lip sync to thirties’ pop. Despite the complete ingenuousness of the magician-compere’s words – ‘There is no band. What you will hear are recordings.’- we (the audience) are nevertheless unable to resist the seduction of the spectacle. So when the apparent singer, Rebeka Del Rio, collapses but the music continues, we are shocked. Something in us compels us to treat the performance as if real.

(K-Punk - 'THIS IS (NOT) THE GIRL'.)

In 2004 I coordinated Storybox, a small writing project for young refugees, using blogging as a medium. The Storyboxers experimented with ways to write about listening to dancehall pop star Sean Paul, for example, or growing up dealing with systematic abuse in a refugee camp — both types of experience were “everyday” ones for many of these people. It was a rewarding experiment, which I hope contributed a little to the participants’ capacities for autonomous expression. But when I tried to bypass the affective nature of their involvement in my first attempt to write this paper (which was originally going to be more about design and political theory), I found myself blocked. In the language of “trauma studies”, it was as if I myself faced an impossible task of representation. But following Giorgio Agamben’s insistence that just going along with the “unsayable” character of Auschwitz simply puts it on a pedestal as an object of worship (Agamben 2002: 32), I realised that rather than let my dilemma of representation freeze me in an act of genuflection, I’d have to grapple with what I’d put in the “too-hard basket”. I knew that these experiences weren’t ready to conveniently instrumentalised without a difficult kind of “accounting”— not in a way that attempted closure, but through a fragmentary, allegorical kind labour that makes suggestions.

(Antipopper - 'What's in the Box?')

The most “coherent" reading of Mulholland Drive identifies the narrative up to that point as a desperate fantasy of the mundane Diane, the “real” “Betty”, who has actually murdered her girlfriend Camilla, the “real” “Rita”. It is this violent act of sexual jealousy which apparently lies in the (vaginal?) box of repression, which resurfaces at the moment of confrontation with loss in Club Silencio. Not the most promising connotations for Storybox. But I chose the name partly because of the whiff of trauma. And what if there is another way to approach it? What if the blue box is indeed an allegorical symbol for trauma, but one which operates as a nexus for the different narratives of the film, which do not have to be organised hierarchically in such a boringly classical psychoanalytic scenario because they are actually vocabularies of a neveryday imaginary? What if the shift from Betty and Rita’s story to that of Diane and Camilla is analogous to what happens when NaturallySweet describes life at school in Sydney or under the Taliban as “soooooooooo boring” and “soooooooooo devastating”?

(Antipopper - 'What's in the Box?')

Adam Curtis has gone a bit mad. The insultingly gifted documentary maker behind The Century Of The Self and The Power Of Nightmares seemed rather quiet of late. In fact, since his 2007 BBC2 series The Trap, his only visible pieces of work were two short (and superb) mini-documentaries he created for my BBC4 series Screenwipe and Newswipe. People kept asking me what he was up to. I assumed he was chipping away at some new documentary which would be announced when he was ready.

He's ready now. He's made a new documentary called It Felt Like A Kiss. Except it isn't just a documentary. It's also a piece of interactive theatre, with music composed by Damon Albarn and performed by the Kronos Quartet. And it doesn't take place in a cinema or concert hall, but across five floors of a deserted office block in Manchester.

About now a sizable percentage of you will be thinking "that sounds wanky", and starting to back away. Don't. Because it's also ... well, it's also a funhouse. To be honest, no one really knows what it is. After a struggle, Curtis himself says it's "a psycho-political theme experience in which you become a central character. It's going to be frightening. A walk of enchantment and menace." On the official website, viewers are advised that it's "not suitable for those of a nervous disposition". "Please wear suitable footwear," it adds, ominously.

(Charlie Brooker on Adam Curtis' new documentary experience.)

Part 2: Myth or Anti-Myth?

I didn’t make it down to Manchester in time to immerse myself in Adam Curtis’ It Felt Like a Kiss, so like most of you, I’ve only got the documentary to go on.

This is a shame, because even the negative reviews of the full theatrical experience can’t help but make it sound terrifyingly brilliant:

But there was too much of the smell of conspiracy in the air, splicing together patterns of meaning with a simplistic political intent. When our descent of the five floors began the enterprise descended into melodrama with heavy-handed references to Hidden Persuaders who, having failed to sell us dreams, are now offering us nightmares from which only they can now rescue us: Pick up the phone, Don't press the red button, Take the pill, Pick up the gun, Start the chain saw.

It was like being trapped inside the set of the Sixties cult show The Prisoner with surplus fake blood supplied by Hammer Horror.

Readers, I have to confess -- I've often wanted to visit the set of The Prisoner! Which is odd, given the nature of that series, but then again this blurring of dreamlike promise and real horror is part of the substance of It Felt Like a Kiss.

It's easy to dismiss Curtis' work as having a conspiracy theory-ish vibe, because he tends to chase one idea through recent history with bloody minded determination. This concern is normally alleviated by the dryly cutting humour of Curtis' narration, which serves to remind us that we are watching a man (de)constructing history. Curtis' voice provokes laughter and invites argument, and the effect its absence has on the way It Felt Like a Kiss plays cannot be underestimated.

Stripped of voice over, It Felt Like a Kiss makes its argument using Curtis' other tools, a mix of endlessly enchanting pop music, collaged footage from the BBC news archive and bold textual statements:


It's these statements, as clear to the eye as they are in their implications, that make this feel like a conspiratorial work. In as much as it has a clear argument, It Felt Like a Kiss is an examination of the story that America tried to tell about itself in 20th Century. Naturally, Curtis includes military coups and barbaric shock treatments as part of this vision, but as his narrative charges towards September 11th 2001 and the current financial crisis it becomes obvious that he isn't going to spend too much time elaborating on the links he makes. Scenes of real life terror and fabricated wonder blend into each other, becoming one with the words that flit across the screen. This effect reaches its delirious peak in the section that deals with the movie that was made about Saddam Hussein's time as a CIA agent -- this passage plays like the brilliant dream of a madman, but its logic is irresistible and its poetry hard to deny.

Curtis layers fragmented connections upon fragmented connections, which makes It Felt Like a Kiss seem both more and less open to argument than Curtis' other works. Less open to argument because words, sounds and pictures achieve a purity of composition here that matches that of a great pop song, or perhaps even a great advert. More open to argument because, well, who takes a pop song or advert at face value?

And so, tempting as it is to treat this beautiful film like a transmission from beyond, you can't help but find yourself thinking "Is that really all there is to the story of Brian Wilson, or 'River Deep Mountain High', or Saddam?" Where works like The Century of the Self or The Trap slowly and methodically deconstruct social theories, It Felt Like a Kiss is more like a dream on the verge of becoming a nightmare.

I keep mentioning dreams here, but that's only because It Felt Like a Kiss makes its status as a dreamscape obvious from the beginning. The movie starts with a series of clean white lines on black background. The movie starts with these words:

When a nation is powerful it tells the world confident stories about its future.

The stories can be enchanting or frightening but they make sense of the world.

But when that power begins to ebb the stories fall apart and all that is left are fragments which haunt you like a half-forgotten dream.

Like I said above, It Felt Like a Kiss plays out the moment where the dream starts to forget itself, where doubt has crept in but the sense of wonder has yet to fade. It foregrounds the rhetorical power of Curtis' collaged film fragments, which condemn the senselessness of our stories while being far too inviting in their own right. You might find yourself thinking that Curtis is overselling his own narrative here, but to do so is to accept the basic argument of the piece: that all of our explanations are mostly inadequate as either blueprints or records. This is why you can't really accuse Curtis of being a conspiracy theorist -- his recent work has been staunchly anti-mythological, and It Felt Like a Kiss is no exception. It demolishes certainty, but it's too weirdly emotional to salt the ground in the process, at least not if the rapidly flowering thoughts it left in my brain are anything to go by.

This is why I can't help of thinking of Mulholland Drive when I think about It Felt Like a Kiss. As the various clever bastards I quoted at the start of this post indicate, the Blue Box at the heart of Mulholland Drive exists as more than a route from dream to reality. For me, it's the point where conflicting stories and modes of interpretation bleed into each other, the disorientating heart of a disorientated movie. Watching It Felt Like a Kiss I feel like I'm just about to slip into the Blue Box, or at least I feel like I'm staring into the box and watching conflicting stories blur out into strange new shapes. I can see Doris Day and Saddam Hussein waiting inside, and I don't know what sort of room I'm supposed to find this box in (maybe I will if the full production goes to London), and I don't know what to do next but I can't stop staring.

What's inside the box? Maybe, like David Fiore suggests, it's something far too huge for the human mind to understand, something too big for any one narrative to contain. Maybe it's too much for us to question and contextualise all the stories we hear without succumbing to nihilism, but as always I can't help but feel that it's worth a try.

Beyond the Garish Bed Sheet

Ok, so let's take the theme of Saturday's post a little further. If, as I claimed in a fit of hyperbolic madness, a set of patterned bed sheets that appear on one page of Batman -- Year One suggests other stories that could happen in Gotham, what would these stories be like?

Well, I think they'd look a little bit like this:

(The above images are from: Barton Fink, by the Coen brothers and various; Ai Yazawa's Nana; Batman - Year One by David Mazzucchelli, Richmond Lewis and Frank Miller; and The Birth Caul, adapted by Eddie Campbell from a performance by Alan Moore.)

Of course just last week two Batman comics came out that made Gotham City seem like a freakishly exciting theater of the mind, which is how I normally like to imagine it. First, there was Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's Batman and Robin #3, in which two young men escaped a ride through a Lynchian fairground and one young woman wasn't so lucky:


Then there was the third issue of J.H. Williams III and Greg Rucka's run on Detective Comics, which showed how easy it is to mix baroque, monstrous horror...


...with scenes of dancefloor romance that suggest a particularly goth-friendly Disney movie:


So it's not like I'm actually desperate for DC to start publishing comedy-romance-horror stories about young people trying to make a mark on that particular fictional city, because honestly, those stories would probably be better without the constant threat of wonky Bat-cameos. But still, the pleasure of finding such ideas suggested (however obliquely or implicitly) in a Batman comic is one of the reasons I still bother to read comics. Quitely and Williams aren't quite doing that in their respective works, but I still love the way they amp up the theatrical madness implicit in the best Batman stories.

Hmmm... you know, looking back over this post it occurs to me that Sean Witzke really is a lot better at this sort of thing than I am. If I had the skills I'd make him the Liquid Swords/There Will Be Blood mashup album he imagines here, because (A) the battered hubris of Daniel Plainview's "I have a competition in me" speech makes perfect sense in the 'Cold World' that Liquid Swords documents, and (B) Sean's There Will Be Blood: Babycart to Hades post demonstrates just how fitting the substitution of Daniel Plainview for Ogami Ittō actually is.

Will There Be Blood on the Sheets?

The first thing I think of when I see the cover for Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter...


...is this page from Frank Miller, David Mazzuchelli and Richmond Lewis' Batman - Year One:


The scene is nothing new in itself -- you've got the lonely noir hero and the inert woman, trapped in the space between domesticity and dark adventure -- but the difference in staging makes me think of something Dan Nadel said while he was tearing The Hunter to pieces:

When I think of this work I think of what Mort Meskin would have done, with his vibrant, almost ecstatic brush marks; what Toth might have done with his sense of page design and the figure in space; or what the younger Mazzucchelli might have done with his figures weighted in space and rooted in fully imagined environments. I think of all that and wonder at such a missed opportunity. Those guys used cinematic set-ups, but they never allowed style to overtake content. Krigstein, for example, was a master of adapting filmic rhythms into comics. But at the heart of his experimentalism is a drive for clarity.

Now I enjoyed Parker: The Hunter way more than Nadel, but I can't deny that he has a point. While I like Darwyn Cooke's work, I've never enjoyed it on anything other than a surface level. When David Fiore panned New Frontier, some people reacted like he was crazy (hi ADD!), but you know what? I think he was on to something!

For me, New Frontier was pretty but boring. The Hunter is more exciting, but it's still a brutally functional work. Which is fitting, given that the title character is basically revenge machine. Tucker Stone riffed on this in his review of the piece:

Feelings--unpredictable, messy and useless when it comes to control fantasies--wouldn't it be nice if one could just turn them off when they get in the way? For Parker, the answer resounds as an unequivocal "yes", and that's what The Hunter circles around. A man who can do anything, as long as he doesn't make the mistake of loving a woman ever again. He tried it out. Didn't fit.

This nicely captures the thrill of reading the book while underlining its essential emptiness. As Stone notes, Parker spends most of the book in action, off-panel and in the shadows. Where Dan Nadel finds the character's generic blankness disappointing, Stone seems to perceive it as another indication of the character's brute efficiency, as encapsulated in this image:

All of which makes Parker: The Hunter sound like a Frank Miller story with a veneer of smoothness and sophistication, which seems about right to me.

Since it's scripted by Frank Miller, Batman - Year One is every bit as obsessed with tough men and tough choices as The Hunter. It's the art team of David Mazzuchelli and Richmond Lewis who provide the book with its extra luster, and the reasons for this can be found in that picture of Detective Jim Gordon perched on the end of his bed.

Both pictures set up varying levels of reality -- on Cooke's cover you've got Parker in the foreground, solid and real, and the dead woman beside him. The two characters seem to exist under spotlights, but while this makes Parker and everything around him seem darker and more defined, the light that bounces off of the corpse's head whites everything out into nothingness. The page from Batman - Year One establishes a similar dichotomy - you've got the bed, with its preposterously textured patterns, and the darkness outside of the bed, in which only tough-guy noir talk can exist.

It's the otherworldly weirdness of the Year One bed sheet that really takes that image over the edge though:


The situation is cliched, but the Gordon family bed is of another order to anything else in the comic. Sure, there are moments where Richmond Lewis leavens the purply black hues with dazzling hints of yellow and orange, or where one or two dashes of Mazzuchelli's linework give his characters a battered flexibility that's unmatched in Cooke or Miller's work (his Jim Gordon in this image approaches this state without quite reaching it). But seriously, what the hell is going on with that bed pattern?

According to Dave B Cooper in this dusty old Barbelith thread, this effect wasn't present in the comic when it was originally serialised:

The colouring’s probably a subject of some variation – as Dan says, the subtle colouring’d be lost on newsprint, and indeed there was some recolouring done for the collected version, I believe – I don’t think it was entirely redone, but (for example) the bedsheets at the end of (I think) chapter three (Gordon sitting on the edge of the bed while Barbara sleeps, the gun heavier in his hands etc) was just a solid colour in issue 407 of the comic, but becomes a rather nicely painted patterned set of bedclothes in the book. Not knocking at all, but there were some changes made, IIRC – possibly to play on the upgraded paper stock and production values of the TPB, I guess.

This is amazing to me, and I'd really love to see a scan of the original page since I can't imagine the page (or, indeed, the comic) without this image as I know it. Which is interesting, because I think that this scene shows Gordon struggling to keep the family bed in mind, and tending away from it, towards the harsh action his story demands from him:


But -- maybe he should have paid more attention to the bed he was sitting on, in the collected edition at least...

But -- this page, like the comic it exists in, isn't built that way. The narration tips towards the bed and then slides right back off it again, returning to the hard black that makes up the rest of the page, just as Gordon's mind slips back into the noir stuff, the dark stuff, the words themselves becoming less important than their direction:

But -- still, for a moment that's either long or short depending on how long you spend looking at that page, that image, Mazzucchelli and Lewis open up the possibility of other stories happening in Gotham. The Gordons' bed is strange enough to survive and to generate its own narratives without the help of Batman or his enemies and derivatives.

But -- truthfully, I'm not sure how much of this work is done by Lewis and how much of it is done by Mazzuchelli. The shifting haze of greens is Lewis' work, and the body language of the two main characters is Mazzuchelli, but who's responsible for the patterns on the bed? I'll take a guess that it's Lewis and let a more technically astute commentator correct me, but even if that's the case I wouldn't downplay Mazzuchelli's contribution. Just look at the way the covers twist through Barbara Gordon's legs and back under her arm an over her chest:


She's not just a part of the scenery, but she is tangled up in these patterns, rather than the ones that her husband is currently debating as he sits on the edge of the bed.

But -- you might fairly object that I've just spent a thousand-odd words comparing a piece of sequential storytelling, a mix of words and text, to an image that was intended to work as a cover and nothing else. And you'd be right, up to a point. Because there aren't any pages in Parker: The Hunter that I would want to write about to this extent, while there are many panels and pages in Batman - Year One that point me in this direction. And I like that Darywn Cooke cover, as much as I like anything in the book -- it expresses everything it needs to express via starkly defined iconography, and I enjoy that, but I enjoy what Mazzucchelli and Lewis do with Frank Miller's work more.

But -- it would probably be fair to say that I'm just re-writing my Panel Madness essay on Criminal here, and what can I say, I've got a thing for these sort of moments. I like to get caught up in the crushing gravity of a good crime story, but I also like to get hints that this gravity might not be as indisputable as it initially seems. Speaking of that old Panel Madness piece, let's compare Sean Phillips' lively city streets...

With Cooke's equivalent:

But -- again, you might say that this is an unfair comparison, or that we're looking at two different types of intent here. Which we are, but that's exactly my point -- the image from The Hunter serves to break up the narrative, while that Criminal panel does the same thing while also suggesting a variety of other narratives, stories that we'll never get to see. The page from Batman - Year One has the same sense of added life to it, and it's this life that Mazzucchelli has taken to exploring on the page since he abandoned the world of corporate comics.

(A page from the Mazzuchelli/Karasik adaptation of City of Glass, chosen for the most highbrow of reasons)

I've not read Asterios Polyp yet, but I'm about to order it, and I can't wait for it to arrive!

Still, much as I love the mature Mazzuchelli, there's something to be said for the strange thrill involved in finding a page like this in a macho adventure comic. Maybe it replicates the excitement of hearing a pleasantly discordant note in a piece of music, or maybe it's got something to do with stumbling into a moment that seems ripe with forgotten possibilities. Maybe it's got nothing to do with anything! I don't know, the only thing I'm sure of is that it's moments like this/images like this/stories like this that keep me reading, watching, looking, listening. Ridiculous as it might seem, I might even go so far as to say that it's unexpected pleasures like this that keep me living, and as long as I keep finding these feelings I know I'll never want to stop.

But -- there's always another page to turn, isn't there? And who knows what that's going to lead to: new richness or mechanical precision or both or neither? Only one way to find out -- stop talking -- stop narrating -- stop rationalising. Just flip forward -- to here knows when!

"In my day, if a cat tried be a doctor we'd have had it shot...."

Off the back of yesterday's Bruno post, here's a very balanced and insightful Stewart Lee essay on political correctness in comedy.

If you'd rather watch Lee tackle the subject on his home turf while attacking Richard Littlejohn, please check this youtube clip:



Me and my pals are going to see Stewart Lee at the Fringe on the 27th August. The blurb for the gig is a little vague, but as this clip shows, Lee's a master at circling round a point until it collapses in on itself so I'm sure it'll be good. My friends and I are also going to see Lee's former comedy partner Richard Herring this Sunday. The theme of Herring's Hitler Moustache show is hard to ignore -- it's sitting there, right in the middle of the comedian's face, just daring you to look:

Reclaiming Chaplin's moustache for comedy, 'Headmaster's Son' star muses on iconography, the positive side of racism and why an innocent square inch of facial hair took the blame for Nazism.

Interestingly, Herring ended up having to defend himself in the Guardian recently, after an article on "the new offensiveness" in comedy made his current routine sound like a cheap shlock-fest. "You're taking what I said out of context!" is often the first defense of the weasel, but Herring makes a convincing case for himself:

I think that most reasonable people might assume from the article that I am racist, or at least pathetically confrontational. Indeed, some reasonable people did assume that. One blogger wrote: "Richard Herring is currently putting on a show called Hitler Moustache, where (and I haven't seen the show) he apparently dishes up straight-faced endorsements of racist ideas."

It is true that the phrase "maybe racists have a point" is in the show. It's an interesting moment: the awkwardness in the room is palpable; a core belief has been challenged (by a man with a Hitler moustache) and people are uncomfortable about where this might be leading. But the statement is followed by what is possibly the standup routine I am most proud of, one which examines our attitudes to ethnicity and questions whether the way humans choose to divide themselves is obfuscating their essential similarity. It challenges racism, but also liberal assumptions about cultural identity. It's funny, too. Comedy, it seems, can cover some complex issues much more effectively than someone blankly stating these truths.

Sounds good to me! I can't wait to see how it comes off on stage, because I have faith in Herring's ability to make something out of these questions instead of simply saying something "shocking" and chuckling away in (relatively) safe company.

Clown Autopsy #435 -- This One Just Won't Shut Up!

Or: This essay is so 1998!

Hey, I've just figured something out!

Bear with me while I do the maths:

Sacha Baron Cohen

(EQUALS)

Cady from mean Girls (aka Li-Lo at her best)

No but seriously, let's check my working here.

When he's trying to pretend he's an actual comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen is one of the least funny human beings on the planet. I don't want to start a clown autopsy here, but seriously -- if you can watch him ham it up in either Talladega Nights or Sweeney Todd without throwing up in your popcorn then you've got a stronger stomach than me!

The bits of Brüno that are obviously staged generate a similar response: BRUNO'S SO GAY HE FUCKS MEN! HE'S SO AUSTRIAN HE LIKES HITLER! AND BY THE WAY, DID YOU KNOW THAT THE FASHION WORLD IS, LIKE, TOTALLY SILLY AND SUPERFICIAL?!

Fuck me! It's not that I'm particularly offended by Cohen's shtick, it's just that I have no idea how a supposedly hot shit comedian gets away with peddling this fifth rate 'Allo 'Allo nonsense in 2009. The only explanation I can see is that we're all stuck in a high school neverland where gay people and foreigners are so implicitly funny that merely exemplifying cliched assumptions about "those people" will earn you a round of applause.

This high school humour is Part (1) of the Mean Girls connection, though I should point out that Mean Girls is significantly funnier than any of SBC's attempts at conventional humour -- it's the teen comedy that looks like candyfloss and tastes like barbed wire, you know?

Also: "Danny DeVito I love your work!"

Part (2) of the Mean Girls connection comes through in the parts of Brüno that are actually funny (or at least half-funny), i.e. the bits where Sacha Baron Cohen stays in character and annoys or tricks people into amusing situations. Now sometimes this ends up being so "what the fuck?" that you can't help but laugh, like when SBC/Brüno tries to come on to Republican Congressman Ron Paul, but as Tucker Stone said in his review of the movie:

...it seems like a waste of Sacha Baron Cohen's time considering that any of the reactions he got out of his dopey victims could have been just as easily achieved by running up to them and screaming "fuck you stupid asshole fuck you fuck you" while somebody else pointed a camera out them.

Which is where my dopey Mean Girls comparison comes in. By infiltrating a series of traditionally masculine settings and camping it up within them, Sacha Baron Cohen ends up looking like a shrill asshole amongst shrill assholes. His broad humour draws its power from the very attitudes it seeks to mock and expose, and watching him can't help but make me think of Cady in the middle section of Mean Girls. For those of you who aren't familiar with the movie, it's all about a previously home schooled girl who is dropped into an American high school full of all the usual cliches. Oblivious to teen relationship dynamics, Cady finds herself both befriending the "freaks" and becoming a pet project for the popular "plastics". After being burned by the head plastic, Cady agrees to embed herself in their group in order to destroy it. Of course, Brüno style, she ends up embodying most of the things she's out to undermine, but... actually, I've just spotted a couple of places where my points don't quite add up.

Firstly there's the fact that Cady is subject to the moral mechanics of Hollywood film making, in this case embodied by a big yellow school bus:


The vague gestures towards story that punctuate Brüno are so perfunctory as to be completely ignorable. Mean Girls, while snarky enough to literalise its machinations for all to see, still obeys the Hollywood laws that state that lessons must be learned and characters must grow.

Secondly, there's the fact that -- in Brüno, anyway -- Sacha Baron Cohen is a far less efficient operator than Cady. Sure, he convinces people that he is Bruno rather than Sacha, but what does he do once he's pulled this off? He crouches outside a hunter's tend with some condoms and pretends that he's covertly trying to sleep with the guy.

One of my favourite writers, Mike Barthel, wrote an excellent essay on Borat from which the following paragraph is taken:

This is why it's such a perfect political movie. Instead of creating fictional scenarios in which he can insert himself and create a comic meaning--which would of course be too easy, and make the meaning seem unreal itself--Borat is thrust into these real situations where he has to either work with their rules or ignore them completely. The process of finding out those rules is, of course, what produces the comedy. Borat--and please note here that I am explicitly talking about Borat the character, not any motivations that Cohen the creator might have had--genuinely thinks he is being as respectful as he should be with the feminists, and when he's at the rodeo, his escalating rhetoric about Bush and Iraq isn't a satirical attempt to provoke, but actually a rather careful probing of exactly what it is and isn't polite to say in praise of the President, whose power and strength Borat really respects. All in all, it's not so much the wrong way to go about it, it's just that Borat's image of America is so off-kilter that he fails to become part of it. Still, he's getting inside the joke and rooting around, trying to find a place where he fits, and it's that willingness to engage with his subjects rather than yell at them from outside that gives the film its power.

Now I'm no Sacha Baron Cohen fan, as is surely obvious by now, but could anyone honestly make any of these claims for Brüno? Seems to me that all Cohen does in this movie is stand outside and yell.

So, with these minor mathematical faults corrected, I once more present you with my findings:

Sacha Baron Cohen

(EQUALS)

Cady from mean Girls, only slightly less efficient and without the ability to learn

And now we say the forbidden sentence: Ah, isn't maths fun? Well, maybe not, but blathering on about Mean Girls in public is a laugh, for me anyway.

Your Hypothetical Questions, Answered

Q: Given a relatively level playing field -- i.e. an environment spooky and harrowing enough for a ghost writer to operate in but not so creepy as to cause a comics critic to freak/geek out -- who would win in a fight between Abhay Khosla and Bram Stoker?

A: Well, thanks to the wonders of modern science, we're finally close to obtaining an answer to this ancient brain-boggler:

ABHAY KHOSLA'S BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA!!!

Frightenend? Intrigued? You bloody well should be!

Go check it out:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

The fifth and final part of this epic saga is still to come. Maybe Stoker will bounce back to shock victory, but right now Khosla's got him on the ropes and he doesn't look like he's going to let up...

Would you believe...

...I'm still just clearing my throat right now?

With any luck I should be able keep posting regularly for the rest of the week. After that I'm going to slow it up a little in order to finish a couple of bigger pieces. Hopefully you'll stick around to see what's coming, but if not then please take the time to enjoy Marnie Stern and her band blasting the hell out of 'Steely' live:



"I'm hoping it's true/ I'm hoping for you, you you!"

A Real Deep Peek Into One Man's Crack...

If anyone was wondering what the hell I was blathering on about at the end of last Thursday's post, I bring you a very inward-looking kind of hell: Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.

(David Allison, looking at his notes for his next Filth essay)

Kaufman's scripts have always tended towards solipsism, but before Synecdoche this had always been partially offset by the showmanship of his director-collaborators Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. Allowed to direct his own material, Kaufman plunges deeper and deeper into his protagonist's decaying mind and body with little regard for either plot or audience.

("What's this say? 'Self disgust is self-obsession honey and I do as I please' -- what does that even mean?")

This is a good thing, in some ways. I've never seen a movie which takes you quite so far up one man's back passage, which... wait, was I supposed to be complimenting the movie here?


Seriously though, it works, or it worked for me anyway. It's the kind of project that'll either win you over on the strength of its details or completely alienate you on the same terms. The high concept is very high concepty, as has always been the case with Kaufman's films -- Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a hypochondriac theater director whose sense of hearing/reality might be slightly suspect. He wins a massive wad of grant money and sets about losing himself in an ever-expanding and perpetually untitled play, a mini city full of muted drama and decay. As in Morrison/Weston's The Filth, the decomposition of mind and body are linked in this environment, which ends up functioning as a sort of Ballardian inner space.

What's the point of all of this? Well it's all about death, innit, or at least that's what Cotard says:

I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That's what I want to explore. We're all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we're going to die, each of us secretly believing we won't.

I realised that I was genuinely enjoying the picture, as opposed to just appreciating it, when Caden's mother turned to him at her husband's funeral and said: "There was so little left of him, they had to fill the coffin with cotton balls to keep him from rattling around." Did I say that Kaufman showed no regard for plot or audience? Maybe I overstated a little. There's a lot of dark humour on display, and the movie is deliberately constructed to take the viewer down the rabbit hole with Cotard, which is why it sometimes seems like it has no regard for time or causality.


Like I said, if it works for you it really works, as Jog noted in his review of the movie:

It seemed to work on the audience I was with. By the time the city-within-a-city becomes a ruined wasteland, as a metaphor for an old man (so worried about an early death!) outliving all his friends and acquaintances, left with nothing but memories and shadows of old loves, actors playing people, don't ya know, and Wiest, now likely dead and fused completely with Caden's soul, launches into another knock 'em out monologue about how we're all essentially the same useless, ineffective bits of walking nonsense in the face of universal time, the crowd became totally rapt, sitting in shock through the closing credits.

So, if it's good movie why have I been circling round it like I want to take a piece out of it? Well, I guess I feel like Kaufman has taken us down this rabbit hole in pretty much every script he's ever written, and I was hoping that he'd do something beyond show us quite how far into ourselves we can go.



On that note, I can't help but think that the ending of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind was a lot more cutting than Synecdoche's finale precisely because it pushed its protagonist out of his solipsistic panic and back out into a more socialised reality. Here's what I said about Eternal Sunshine back in 2004:

The final section of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is nothing short of spectacular. It's a headlong rush of uncomfortable awareness for the two main characters, and, in an odd way, what it reminds me of more than anything else is Donnie Darko. Now, before anyone shouts "what the fuck", let me unpack that one a little. While I know that stylistically and thematically there's a lot separating the two movies, what it seems to me that Donnie Darko captured so well was a feeling of confusion that gradually transformed into some sort of weird mixture of knowledge and acceptance in the face of overwhelmingly deterministic forces. Something similar happens at the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with Joel and Clementine facing up to the reality of how their relationship is likely to work out, and deciding to go with it anyway.

It occurs to me that the garbled theories I've just spent several paragraphs constructing may not immediately seem like the best argument in favor of the idea that this is, above all, a simple movie. But... well, lets just put it this way; the ability every one of us has to accept the distance between what we feel we need and what we know that we will end up getting from any given person is both sad and wonderful, and I can think of no more eloquent and poetic expression of this than the final looping segment of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

If I remember correctly, quite a few people found the Donnie Darko reference in that post a bit confusing at the time, but I stand by it. The movies are miles apart in terms of subject matter and theme, but I made the comparison because the last act of ESotSM had a Darko-esque sense of bewildered discovery to it. Anyway, what makes Eternal Sunshine more engaging than either Donnie Darko or Synecdoche, New York is the fact that it applies its mopey philosophy to a "real" human relationship. Also, Michel Fucking Gondry, but we'll come back to that another day. Synecdoche, New York makes a good case for us being a species of lonely, disconnected minds trying to make sense of the chaos around us; Eternal Sunshine shows two people trying to maintain a relationship in full knowledge of the fact that they'll never truly get it to work like either of them want it to. Like the honorable Mr Attack said to me in a 2004 email:

In some ways, I can't help shake the feeling that they've managed a brilliant job of making everyone think it's this sweet, romantic movie, and it's actually this terrifying psychological horror movie. Job's a good un!

And like I said response: actually, it's a sweetly terrifying romantic horror movie, and that's why I love it!


Because seriously? Sometimes this relationship shit is scary hard work, but I still think that it's worth every brain-frazzling second -- or at least, it bloody well can be!

Let's Call it Love

Amazing footage of Sleater-Kinney playing at the Big Day Out festival in 2006:

Sleater-Kinney -- 'Jumpers' (live at the Big Day Out 2006)

Sleater-Kinney -- 'Wilderness' (live at the Big Day Out 2006)

Sleater-Kinney -- 'Rollercoaster' (live at the Big Day Out 2006)

Sleater-Kinney -- 'What's Mine Is Yours' (live at the Big Day Out 2006)

While we're talking about Sleater-Kinney, I really should point you all in the direction of Tim O'Neil's epic posts on Sleater-Kinney's last album, The Woods. You can read part 1 here, but it's the 2nd essay, with its copious samples from Jack Kirby's New Gods that's really got me excited. This is exactly the kind of silly/wonderful juxtaposition that this blog is built for, and I truly wish that I'd got there first!

Now, thinking about it, the pre-Woods Sleater-Kinney strike me as more of an old-school Marvel comics proposition -- their songs were sometimes bombastic, sometimes angsty, frequently agitated and often humorous, but they always felt like part of an ongoing indie punk story. The Woods, meanwhile, is definitely more like a solo Kirby comic -- the drums and guitars and vocals all rumble and howl with the brute force of a pure Kirby creation:

(Big Barda in action in Mister Miracle. Is Barda the only person other than Janet Weiss who could have played drums on The Woods? I think so.)

That said, I wouldn't have invoked quite the same Fourth World material that O'Neil does in his piece -- instead of the apocalyptic cleansing of the New Gods story O'Neil riffs on, I would have probably went for something from Mister Miracle. I think the root of this (minor) disagreement can be found in the penultimate paragraph of O'Neil's second post:

Even after everything has fallen apart, there is still life enough to fill a universe, hope enough to rage forever against the brutality and ignorance of the worst evils. The Woods is both life and anti-life, the will to fight and the desire to die. It's everything nasty and gorgeous, beautiful and scarred. You can't hope to escape unscathed, but you can't escape without feeling wonderfully alive for every harrowing minute.

Now this is stirring stuff, and it's almost right, but it doesn't quite match what I get from the record. The stuff about harrowing escape is dead on, but I just don't hear "the desire to die" anywhere on The Woods. Even when the band channel Black Sabbath via Joy Division in the brutalised rumble of 'Steep Air', I can't hear anything in the music which makes me think that the band actively desire this state.

O'Neil discussed this song back in his first post on this album, and here's what he had to say about it:

...unlike most examples of dark pop music, there's nothing theatrical or histrionic on display here. It's real, it's earned, it's heartbreaking.

I booked my ticked
Packed my bags
Flight is leaving
Our time has passed.
I'm tired of knocking on a door that just won't budge,
Locked out of the engine, It's a wheel that you have spun
But who's to say I don't have wings?

The problem is that the "wings" which present the only glimpse of hope at the end of "Steep Air" fly for the briefest of durations - that is, the four seconds it takes to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge in "Jumpers".

What O'Neil fails to take into account is that sometime four seconds of hope is enough. Sure, it's the time it takes for the speaker in 'Jumpers' to hit the ground, but in that song as in 'Steep Air' the vocals strain towards the escape O'Neil mentioned, towards something better than the world they exist in. Anti-life is invoked constantly, but only so the band can show how to beat it, which is why Carrie's frantic screams of "You're not the only one" in the middle of 'Jumpers' are more important than either the blanked-out devastation of that song's verses or its final destination.

The desire for death? Creation through destruction? Nah, that's not what The Woods is all about, not for me anyway.

(A young Mister Miracle escapes anti-life to "find the universe!!!" Sorry for the crappy scan -- those big Fourth World books like to play rough, you know?)

What is it all about then? What do I hear in the mighty fucking racket of 'Let's Call it Love' if I don't hear universes collapsing? Well, it's a raw/sweaty/exhausting celebration of life, isn't it? It's all about working up the desire to face the horrors of your political, personal and musical history and live to do so again another day. That's what The Woods sounds like to me, and that's what Mr Miracle's all about, one ridiculous escape at a time:

(Ah, now that's romance! Image via Chris's Invincible Super-Blog.)

Strange Transmissions from Planet X

Weird -- I woke up this morning and found the following mini-essay blinking away on the computer screen, just waiting for me to find it:

In/on Planet X, Grant Morrison began his work on Wildcats, The Authority, 52, All Star Superman, Batman and Final Crisis, but never managed to complete any of these projects for reasons both personal and editorial. The Planet X Morrison completed one issue of Wildcats, two issues of The Authority, eight issues of All Star Superman (four of them set on Bizarro world), thirteen issues of Batman (ten of which starred the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh), and five issues of Final Crisis. The book reports that Morrison used these works to explore his obsession with creating a “state of permanent crisis” in which everything and nothing mattered all the time — a striking if unsubtle comment on the nature of modern living.

The book on Planet X describes how this style was so unpopular that it led to the Morrison being kicked off of 52 after twenty issues, though it also concedes that his contributions to that title were maybe a little too obviously disruptive. Apparently, in every issue of Planet X’s hypothetical 52, Morrison asked the artists to draw Animal Man ogling Starfire and mumbling on about “groovy space tofu” while Adam Strange pondered some sort of cosmic absurdity in the background. Strange’s dialogue was largely interminable, apparently, but book notes that this very quality occasionally hinted at a queer sort of transcendence: "The glazed melons of Yeown5: how ripe they smell… how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe…” being one of the stranger examples cited.

Planet X’s author remains highly enthusiastic about these indulgences, however clumsy they might seem. The book’s final chapter focuses in on the last page of Final Crisis #4 (which is, of course, the same final page that graced issues #2 and #3 of the title, though most fans agreed that it felt much more poignant on the third time round). With the multiverse in ruins, the golden Superman at the heart of the sun blows his noses, blasting what’s left of “reality” to pieces in the process. Looking at the abyss and feeling its non-existent eyes staring back at him, Superman forces his body to explode, restarting the universe in his own image. The problem being that the “better yesterday” he imagines ends up being much the same as the one he’s just destroyed. Indeed, Planet X explains that issues #2-4 of Final Crisis are almost-indistinguishable — apparently this gave the series an “uncomfortable sort of zen glamour which the fanboys hated and the comix fans loved”.

Looks like we've got a mild Borges infestation round my way. The question is do I call in pest control or let the little buggers be?

Your Weekly "What The Fuck?!"

* Ever wanted to see the lyrics to Frankie Goes to Hollywood's 'Two Tribes' framed in Jack Kirby-style text boxes? Me neither, but I'm glad that these pictures exist anyway (images created by Al Ewing and brought to my attention by Tom Ewing):

* Related: Tom Ewing covers 'Two Tribes' as part of his ongoing attempt every UK number #1 since 1952.

* Meanwhile, over on This Recording, Brian Deleeuw writes a nippy wee piece on Vibrational Match's favourite satirist, Chris Morris. While he's at it he also brings this bit of immortal tabloid hypocrisy to the Internet:


That's the Daily Star at its finest, folks, reacting to Morris' 2001 Brass Eye 'Paedogeddon!' special and underlining Morris' point in fine style.

* Anyone who hasn't already checked out David Fiore's new fiction blog really should do so as soon as possible. My favourite story so far is 'Le-charme-discret-de-Madame-Bourgeois', which erupts off the screen in a haze of champagne bubbles that dissapate before you have the time to taste them:

“The world is so beautifully mysterious,” Madame Bourgeois sighed.

Yes, I thought to myself, and mysteries are so much more beautiful when the plumbing works.

The other stories on the site are pretty great too -- there are no little epiphanies here, just brief but vivid accounts of Montreal life from a narrator who's apparently not Dave.

* Have you ever wanted to watch Radiohead cover Joy Division's 'Ceremony'? Well now you can:

(Thanks Sean!)

* Your crazy Quentin Tarantion quote/pic for today:

"Suddenly it was like, what the fuck? Am I too big for movies now? Are movies too small for me? I mean, what's that about?"

That's old QT there talking about his post Jackie Brown hiatus with the Observer magazine, which... is it just me or does this seem like a strange comment for a man's who spent the past decade publicly exploring his own trashy genre-fetishism? Please bear in mind that I ask this as a man who has a lot of love for Death Proof.

* Did you ever wish you could watch Marnie Stern and her bass player talk about John Cusack, Kill Rock Stars, AC/DC, coffee and romance while they do their laundry? Well now you can, through the magic of the Internet:

Oh yes!

Déjà Vu

If I was going to write another one of my Filth essays, it would start like this:

Issues #7-8 of Grant Morrison and Chris Weston's deranged sci-fi series The Filth don’t tell a story so much as they show one wearing itself out. Events from the first two issues recur on a different scale and no one seems particularly unsettled by this queasy, stuttering duplication. Let's watch the gears grind down: Spartacus Hughes hijacks a pocket utopia and subjects it to his kinky shock doctrine... Greg Feely is dragged from his shameful little life to stop his former co-worker... Comrade Dmitri 9 ends the show by blowing Hughes’ head smooth off... Yeah, we’ve been here before.

The problem is that, yeah, we have been here before – as anyone who's read my first six essays on the topic would surely have noticed. The repetition in the story was provoking laziness in my writing, with each echo suggesting its own shortcut. I managed to incorporate this into the end of my essay on issue #6, but when I started writing about issues #7-8 the temptation to say the same damned things over and over again became a little too powerful.

Know that I can't get over you
'Cause everything I see is you
And I don't want no substitute
Baby I swear it's Déjà Vu
Know that I can't get over you
'Cause everything I see is you
And I don't want no substitute
Baby I swear it's Déjà Vu

(Beyonce, ‘Déjà Vu’)

So I've chosen to do something different, as you already know. I'm sorry if this has disappointed anyone, since these essays were always one of the most popular features on my blog, but much as I love The Filth I needed to get away from it for a while. I’ve definitely typed my way to a much better perspective on Grant Morrison’s comics, but that issue by issue thing? It certainly works, but that's the problem – there was no excitement in it for me anymore, just a slow, semi-analytical slog. It had started to feel like a job to me, basically, and a pretty goofy one at that.

That’s enough about me for now though -- let’s get back to The Filth, for the last time until the next time!

Repetition haunts the book, particularly in its middle section. As the checklist of replayed moments starts to stretch out, the dialogue draws red circles around these blatant repetitions (‘Bastard! He always deliberately misses first time.’) – just in case you thought that this breakdown signaled a failure of the imagination. That said, even once you accept that this is deliberate, you’ve still got to work out what Morrison and Weston are actually doing with this technique. It isn’t an attempt to take the reader down the information saturated autobahn with Kylie and Kraftwerk, though anyone who’s read Paul Morley’s Words and Music could probably create an alternate history in which Grant Morrison’s comics explore the degradation of pop culture by breaking up an recombining pop icons over and over again in the same but different ways. [1]

It's not repetition like Beckett used it either, though there’s something of Beckett’s sensibility in the sense of exhaustion that permeates the story from the start. [2] Which is unsurprising, really -- The Filth is all about the shit and waste of our lives, so it makes sense that it would have a sirt of bloodied weariness about it.

What stops The Filth from being an example/full-blown examination of cultural decay is the effect that this repetition has on the story. Greg Feely spends the first half of the series stumbling through a hall of mirrors, but when it becomes obvious that the mirrors are reflecting themselves, he bugs out and smashes the whole thing. [3]

For the reader, the sheer brazenness of Morrison and Weston's recycling is jarring enough to make you want Feely to trash the mirrors. Superhero readers are used to following formulaic stories, but even the most addled fanboy would do a double take at the start of issue #7, in which we watch a young woman buy tampons in a convenience store. The context and characters are different, but it’s such an overt replay of Greg’s embarrassing attempts to buy “specialist” magazines in issue #1 that you find yourself jarred right out of the narrative -- in a good way! [4]


As is made clear in 'SCHIZOTYPE' (aka issue #12 of The Filth), there's every chance that Greg's fantasy adventures are exactly that -- Greg's fantasy! Of course, Morrison being Morrison, this "twist" is instantly undermined by the last and final issue -- or is it?!

Either way, the sense that we've just watched Greg Feely spend far too much time staring at his own filth is hard to shake, particularly when artist Chris Weston literally rubs your face in it:

("Oh my god... it's full of shit!" You really need to click this one to see it at full size!)

Just before Feely falls over into a pile of rubbish, he writes a suicide note of sorts which includes the following passage of extreme self-doubt:

...they're coming to have me sectioned now.

I tried to explain about The Hand but all I got were blank stares and frantic scribbles in Department-issue notebooks.

They've got psychiatrists to say I'm the type who turns violent at the drop of a hat and I have to admit that, following the incident with the firearm at the chemists, they might be right.

They say I killed Tony with neglect and came up with the hand as an excuse for being an alcoholic pervert deep inside. I couldn't stand it if that were true... I'd be so ashamed of myself...

If Greg Feely's eye really has been so distant and inward turning (and seriously, just look at that fucking image, just look at that fucking eye!), isn't it a good thing that he starts to rage against Status Q, and that we're there with him?

Imagine if Beyonce finished singing 'Déjà Vu' only to realise that it wasn't about Jay-Z or anyone else except her. [5] What do you think she'd do then? She could Sasha Fierce it, of course, and she's certainly got the right a(r)mour to make a go of it (that glove!). But sometimes that's not enough (see lena on Beyonce in this post), and sometimes your 'Freakum Dress' is no good either, so you've got to try something a little bit different.

What does this mean for Greg Feely, given that even his best armour turns rotten against his skin? Well, it means kicking against the pricks, for better or worse. It's only a start, but that counts for something, because the alternative -- continuing to stare at your own shit for all eternity -- is a particularly ugly way to let the fear win.

[1] This attentive reader of Morrison and Morley would write a book on the subject, which they would call Planet X. This book would imagine a Grant Morrison very similar to the one we know, except that once he’d completed Seven Soldiers of Victory, this fictionalised Grant Morrison would never complete another comic book story again. Weirdly, this means that the Planet X Morrison never wrote Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye, which is a shame because it has a lot of that Grant Morrison's key themes in it.

[2] You know, I really can't pass up this opportunity to ask you all to watch Beckett's Play again and again and again and again and again and again.

[3] For all my bluster, I'm still repeating myself here. I started talking about The Filth using broken mirror metaphors in a post I wrote back in December, where I said:

Why put the reader through the hall of mirrors at all?

Preparing possible answers, dot dot dot:

* Because there's always a bigger, stranger picture hidden somewhere in the smaller one.
* Because there's always a mundane root to even the craziest fantasy.
* Because escapism is always tainted by the exact things it seeks to escape from.
* Because it's not always about us, you, him or even her.
* Because something is wrong with all of this.
* Because none of this is true, except when it is.

Sometimes it's easy not to see any of this, to get stuck in one (un)reality. That's why you need to read something like The Filth every now and again... to see clearer, creepier and more unlikely truths, even as the possibilities narrow down around you. What do you do with this vision? Well, I don't know about you, but most likely I'd feel the urge to start smashing some mirrors. And what do you do with all that broken glass? Well, that's a question that's half-answered in the latter parts of this series.

My justification for this? Well, you've got to set the mirrors up just right to get the most out of trashing them! Why else would issues #9 and #10 of The Filth take such strange diversions before the full-on assault on Status Q that is issues #11-#13?

[4] Thankfully, artist Weston always keeps his eye on the needs of the story, so you don't have to.

Seriously though -- for all its occasional stiffness Weston’s work is full of the right details, the artist’s efforts well applied rather than squandered on meaningless squiggles. Take, for example, the two corner shop scenes I previously mentioned. The first one introduces us to Greg, the main character of the piece, but it paints and uncomfortably creepy picture in which our protagonist is more of a suspect than a hero:

The scene which mirrors this introduction is carefully constructed to align our sympathies with a doomed background character called Peri:


The contrast in the staging is simple but effective, from the choice to frame Feely in CCTV-vision onwards. Instead of tittering school children, you’ve got masked men in the doorway. Instead of pornographic “essentials”, you’ve got basic sanitary products. And instead of an almost archetypal creepy, middle-aged bachelor, you've vague but inoffensive young woman.

Still, this vagueness is the key to the real distinction that’s being set up here: no matter how much effort has been put into making Greg look gross, even more effort has been put into defining him. Those thick, inky crags on his face are practically half the story, and not matter how dodgy the story makes him look, Weston never stops inhabiting every line of Greg’s face:


The importance of this sort of basic attachment can’t be understated. Morrison’s fantasies trend to overwhelm the reader with quick changes of perspective and wonderfully absurd details, but when he's on form he never takes his eye off of the emotional details. It helps when the artists help the reader do the same, instead of hindering the process like some of Morrison’s lesser collaborators do.

[5] If you're wondering why the hell I keep mentioning hyped up pop starlets, try thinking about it this way: a little bit of Kylie, a little bit of Beyonce and a whole lot of alcohol and I'm convinced that I'm invincible until my body decides to remind me that I'm not.

Required Reading: Andrew Hickey on the NHS

Because someone needed to make these points and Andrew Hickey has made them very well:

An Open Letter To My American Friends About The NHS

By Andrew Hickey

...

Many of your politicians and journalists have been saying things like “Ted Kennedy wouldn’t get treatment for his brain tumour in the UK because of his age” (a Republican senator called Chuck Grassley said that). Sarah Palin said that in the UK babies with Down’s Syndrome would have to go before a ‘death panel’. And so on. I’m sure you’ve all heard many claims like this yourself.

These claims are lies, pure and simple. They’re not ‘opinions’ that people can disagree about, they’re not things that can be debated, they’re not honest mistakes, they’re out-and-out lies.

Please go read the whole thing if you haven't already. Unlike most of the things I talk about here this issue is actually important.

"Oh shut up Owen, you hot mess..."

Final Fantasy live @ the Classic Grand, Glasgow, Wednesday 5th August 2009

Ten steps to achieving Final Fantasy with Owen Pallett:

1. Accept that these things take time. Like Pallett says, his one man + violin + keyboard + looping pedals show is “50% preparation, and then 50% money shot; just one of the ways it’s like a porno.”
2. Understand that the build-up is often every bit as good as the payoff, which is why Pallett’s joke doesn’t quite ring true.
3. Acknowledge the fact that, actually, Pallett is a bit of a tease, and that his habit of cutting off his songs just as they peak is cheeky but cute.
4. Watch ‘He Poos Clouds’ come together in front of you and realise that Mike Barthel severely underrated Pallet’s music in his otherwise excellent review(s) of the second Final Fantasy album.
5. Hear the connection between the sawing climax of 'This Lamb Sells Condos' and the overwhelmingly specific combination of arrangement and emotion that characterises songs by artists like Joanna Newsom and Marnie Stern.
6. Stop yourself from thinking about how the He Poos Clouds material is all about the way we use pop trash to understand our lives. Stop comparing Pallet's obliquely literary treatment of this theme to the relative naturalism of Scott Pilgrim or the more bullish approach of Phonogram. Music is magic, just like Jem said, but this ritual won't work without an attentive audience.
7. Appreciate the many new songs that Pallett performs, which are “Experiments in extreme polyphony,” apparently.
8. Laugh when a violin loop recorded during one song is accidentally activated during the next.
9. Understand that chaos is part of the magic tonight, as Pallett all but admits when he jokes that his ultimate fantasy is to be described as "hot mess" on stage.
10. Watch a member of the audience jokingly throw Pallett's words back at him (see: the title of this post); watch him request suggestions for an encore only to debate the quality of his own songs with a woman in the front row ("I actually think that 'The Butcher' is secretly a terrible song," he claims); watch all of this and realise that Pallett has made his low-key geek music seem far sexier and sillier and more charming than you would ever have imagined possible.

If you want you can even watch some videos of the performance in glorious side-on-vision afterwards, but don't mistake that for part of the ritual. You really did have to be there to get the full effect, as is so often the case with these things...

Dirty Thoughts from Plok's Comments Section

Okay, so I've not quite got back into the swing of this whole blogging thing yet. Right now I'm still clearing my throat, so when Plok put out a call, I just had to respond!

Trouble is, I ended up singing along to a slightly different tune! Plok imagined a bunch of comic book collaborations made possible by sinister technology and asked people to fill in the details; my response was sort of in line with the premise, except when it wasn't:

I was going to hold off from doing this, but it’s too much fun!

Let’s take this too far, shall we?

Ditko/Morrison – a psychotic early 60s New York period piece starring a lousy, fourth rate Jackson Pollok rip-off artist. Ditko would think of it as being a brutal morality tale wherein his protagonist’s gloopy, technicolour amorality is crushed by a series of encounters with the AA-Agents, who break him down and make him see the world AS IT REALLY IS (i.e. in harsh, jagged black & white). Morrison’s scripting would subtly amplify the horrific absurdity implicit in this premise — the queasy nature of which is already clear in every line of the artwork.

Unfortunately, Ditko would soon clock Morrison’s agenda, and the work would most likely remain unfinished, never to be reprinted again.

Gaiman/Kochalka – this requires a little bit of that “what if?” flavour, I think.

What if Gaiman’s post Sandman career had been one slow trip round the u-bend?

What if his attempts at becoming Neil Gaiman: Gentleman Novelist had been if not a complete disaster then something close to one? And what if his return to comics had been even less successful, to the extent that Marvel and DC were unsure if they wanted to touch his work, Image were weary of him, and even Avatar were starting to feel burned after a couple of quiet failures.

This is fantastical stuff, I know, but bear with me while I make it even more fantastical!

Let’s say that while all of this has been going on, James Kochalka has become a genuine, massively unlikely SUPERSTAR, and that his TV show (James Kochalka Superstar) is pulling in Hannah Montana numbers. Yeah, madness, I know, but let’s all just keep going and see where it takes us. (Count yourselves lucky that I’ve not described the Richard Linklater directed feature movie — which would be the missing link between School of Rock and Waking Life, naturally!)

Despite his newfound fame, Kochalka’s still churning out those sketchbook diaries, and he still has some pals in the comics world, including Eddie Campbell, who lets him know about Neil’s plight.

Kochalka’s sympathetic, but there’s an evil whimsy in him, so this is what he proposes: Marvel will publish a comic written by Gaiman and drawn by him: this comic will be a potential big seller, due to his name and fame, but it will also be a hard sell, because Kochalka will insist that it’s called CUNTS!.

The story itself will be pretty fucking Gaiman, but with a twist: it takes place in a city within a glass bottle that’s tucked into the back pocket of a Glasgow youth, a magical world of freedom and possibility, where everyone poos out sentient clouds of purest hate. It will star George Bush and Tony Blair in exile, but will eschew direct political satire in favour of scatological excess.

Every issue will end with one of the two exiles saying of the other: “Fuck me, what a CUNT!”

Biggest comic of all time? I think so.

Shame I needed to push past the guidelines to make it happen!

These next few are a little less filled out, because my batteries are draining fast today:

Veitch/Steranko – these chaps could collaborate on creepy modern spy story called Ghost World, in which a cute, disaffected young woman carries out vicious, horrible acts in the name of her masters and tries (half-successfully) to stave off the rapprochements offered by friends and family members from her previous civilian life. Think Grosse Pointe Blank crossed with Spook Country, but with lots of unnecessary formal pyrotechnics going off all over the page.

Byrne/Sim — yeah, I think this pair could have a blast disrespectfully adapting China Mieville’s Iron Council. Or, shit… could I handle their version of The Left Hand of Darkness? Could I handle Dave Sim’s post-comic essays on the topic? Probably not, but the evil part of me would like to see how it turned out.

Englehart/Adams — I’ve got to admit, this one has me stumped, probably because I’m not too familiar with their work.

Can I suggest that Steve Aylett and Duncan Fegredo’s Kafka biography instead? Or how about Mike Allred and Ursula LeGuin’s Wonder Woman? Too obvious? Maybe, but I’d still read ‘em!

Miller/McCarthy/Conway — this trio could happily butcher Moorcock’s multiverse of fantasy characters, I’m sure. It’d be a mess, naturally, but it would have waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more life in it than any comic book universe out there at the moment.

Plus the existence of a Miller/McCarthy Elric would echo back through time and make an eleven-year-old David very, very happy indeed!

There are lots of other good responses in that comments thread -- go check it out, if you haven't already.