“…Upon Your Mystery Ship”

HA!

Bet you thought I’d never get back to this one.

(I no longer like “the oughties”, by the way…)

Well, neither did I.  But then Ed brought over the Watchmen movie, so I figured “what the hell”…and who knew this extremely late review would turn out to be at all topical?  Huh.  Well, it’s probably just that the DVD came out, so that’s what’s driving rumours, possibly even will drive soul-chilling announcements, who knows?  But so anyway I am trying to watch it a second time now, and let me tell you it is slow going.  For the life of me, I can’t understand how non-comics people could’ve been interested in this, why they didn’t run screaming from it.  I mean, “realistic superheroes”, okay, that pump’s been primed already — in an obvious, if roundabout, way by Watchmen itself — but did anyone watching this really get a head rush from Dr. Manhattan’s history?  Weren’t all the “head rush” parts mostly taken out?  And so it seems too lackluster to really reach out and grab anyone by the throat, not just in the critical “Watchmaker” section, but in various bits and pieces throughout the movie that should have shone even with no polish on them whatsoever, but somehow didn’t.  Meanwhile most of these “realistic” things have probably been seen before, so what else gets added?  The best dialogue in the movie is still Alan Moore’s, but the worst thing that happens to it sometimes is that it doesn’t get changed when it oughtta, and (astonishingly!) it does get changed when it doesn’t need changing…with the result that many points of tension simply fall right out of the thing, along with the supersymmetry.  Which of course isn’t just about the way Dr. Manhattan sees things, but about the way all the other characters don’t see things.  When Laurie and Dan fight the muggers in the alley (and believe me, I’ll get back to that!) it has nothing to do with Jon’s TV interview, because words and pictures don’t synch up…which is fair enough, you can’t have everything, and as has been noted many of Watchmen’s coolest bits on the page would turn to trite conventionality on the screen, so there can’t be anything sacred about saving them.  Even the matter of supersymmetry isn’t absolutely essential, I guess.  From a certain perspective.  On the other hand, though:  tension.  Without the supersymmetry, there are so many ways in which it fails to be built.  Did anyone honestly not get the memo about who Laurie’s father was, when they saw this?  Did anyone not come away from that scene with Adrian and Dan, you know the one where Adrian looks out the window and says “by the way, it was me”, and not realize that, by the way, it was him?  Already in my head is a voice screeching that at some point you’re going to know it’s Adrian anyway, that it’s just the nature of the moviemaking beast…and that’s the same voice that says Watchmen always did show blood, gore, dirt, sex…that Moore is always toying with the darker notes hidden away in characters like these, that he wants you to see them…

…But this voice is an asshole, I think.  Hey, remember last week or something there was some fuss made over the Fantastic Four comic where Valeria calls her brother a “retard”?  The thing is, the casual use of this word offended some people.  In case you missed it, other people (including the writer) defended the word choice by saying “that’s just how kids talk”.  But if you boil it down, that’s the same sort of bullshit argument I outline above.  And don’t get me wrong, if I wanted to weigh in on how cautious we should be with potentially offensive language, I would have — that isn’t the part I’m identifying as bullshit.  But the suggestion that any writer of Fantastic Four, or Spider-Man, or Batman or whatever has some kind of artistic obligation to be real with his language is clearly bullshit, I think.  Because it isn’t society that’s on trial, here:  most of the words spoken in superhero comics are outrageously not-how-real-people-talk, never are going to be how real people talk…these aren’t documentaries, and it’s damned rare that controversial or realistic language does much for a story in this mode, but it’s even rarer still that a controversy completely unintended, that doesn’t even have a point it wants to make, can pull off claims of story-based value in “realism”.  And so it makes me laugh to think how little would be lost, if the writer had said something more like “jeez, I guess I didn’t think about that very carefully;  you’re right, it was unnecessary.”  I mean, people make mistakes all the time, right?  Sometimes they are small mistakes.

Other times, they’re bigger.  Now what I was thinking about, was how amazing it is that Dan and Laurie graphically kill and maim a few people in Watchmen, and then discuss going for a beer.  I laughed when the first bloody bone came shooting out of an arm, and I was kind of thinking “wow, just imagine if this was in 3D”.  It might as well have been.  And of course the whole movie is loaded up with gratuitously violent money-shots such as this, stuff that is just simply over the top, hard sells, hammer-blows, visual amphetamine.  Crank?  Crank.  But it’s not exactly a good sympathy-engine.  Meanwhile the little voice in my head says “it’s just explodey fun, why get uptight about it, hey you liked Crank, I thought!”  But that voice only finds it convenient to call me a hypocrite because misery loves company:  that voice wouldn’t care if it was Watchmen I was watching or it was Transformers 2, because that’s the voice that says “Oh, take it easy, personally I’m looking forward to reading Mark Millar’s adaptation of Pale Fire, just to see the trainwreck.”  But as I mentioned:  that voice is an asshole.  And furthermore, be it known:  trainwrecks aren’t really that much fun to watch.

Not really.

I liked Crank.  In contrast, I don’t think the voice ever genuinely likes anything.  So there’s that “retard” thing, I want to get back to that…because if the word-choice doesn’t flow from a commitment to “provoke” the reader by being unflinchingly honest, it certainly comes from somewhere, because word-choices don’t really just “happen”.  So, where does it come from?  I think it’d be uncontroversial for me to suggest that it doesn’t come from what kids say, but what adults say — hip language, pop culture, the zone of hyperactive inter-geek storytelling.  The shared frontier patois of we who accept our inner adolescents, our own shared experience/observational comedy stuff.  We don’t just pick it up out of our environment as kids do, we choose it:  the cheap thrills of lovingly-shot slo-mo mayhem, kickass show-off moments studded with (to paraphrase a friend’s recent comment about what twelve-year-old boys like) non-threatening action spandex girls with huge tits.  And so we should know better than anyone:  character really isn’t a major concern in this sort of thing, no more than being a veridical observer of How Things Are is a major concern.  So there’s nothing to defend, here;  the energy spent on this defence is wasted.  Concession costs nothing, because there’s nothing at stake.

Or…maybe there is?

Maybe there is just a little something at stake.  This movie’s got a shitload of little problems, that aren’t really “little” at all:  they’re basic problems, that range all over the map of “basic”.  But the voice wants me to know that none of this really matters, because if I think it does then it also means I think the voice is an idiot grazer whose only artistic criterion is whether or not its belly is full.  The “retard” thing, I think it’s safe to say, was just a mistake.  Dan and Laurie in the alley, slaughtering muggers:  oh, come on, that was a mistake too.  There’s a thing about this movie, that it makes a lot of mistakes — mostly you wonder why, you wonder how the mistakes came to happen.  Some of them are the result of Snyder ramping things up into the stratosphere, and that’s easy to see.  You want to know why, when Dr. Manhattan points his finger at somebody, they pop like balloons full of meat salad?  But the movie is full of such things, for heaven’s sake this is practically its sentimentality at work!  To the extent Snyder has an auteur-ish vision, here it is.  The SFX track is pumped way up for a reason.  Rorschach only kills the dogs incidentally, for a reason.

And it’s in the reason, that one discovers the nature of the more obvious errors.  Look, from the opening fight in Eddie Blake’s apartment, things start to shoot themselves in the foot:  these people have some kinda extreme super-strength and resistance to injury, this isn’t Batman, not even Jet Li, this is Superman II.  And me, I think that was a dumb idea, but I understand the rationale.  Even if the rationale was sort of not quite right.  Still, it’s a little dicier when Dan and Laurie kill some ordinary people on the street and then smile about it though, eh?  They’re not even the right kind of nervous with one another.  One is concerned for the point, as one rationale necessitates another, and the whole thing picks up speed unrestrained.  Blake’s scar doesn’t figure into the symbolism, neither does Laurie’s finger on the dust of Dan’s equipment.  Of course these things could’ve been left alone about as easily as they were changed, but I think it is fair to ask:  left alone to what end, when the supersymmetry isn’t there anyway?  By comparison, the long shot of the Argyre Planitia — I can only image what the non-comics moviegoing public made of that.  Did they think it just came in from out of left field, did the words “as if” cross their minds?  The supersymmetry is not really there!

These are little things, but they do add up, and most of them aren’t just me nitpicking.  Me nitpicking would be like:  wow, Adrian’s personal worth is enough to buy Chrysler, Ford, and GM a couple times over?  It isn’t impossible — this could easily be a world without Microsoft or Apple, and APPARENTLY he’s some kind of whiz at genetic engineering — ha, maybe they left Bubastis in this movie because they’re planning of making her into an action figure? — but I’ve got to say, it was a bit jarring to hear him threaten to buy the entire North American auto industry.

Nitpicking!

But here’s some not-nitpicking.  The sex scene in the owlship is crazy over the top, don’t you think?  When Rorschach disposes of Big Figure, that just seems kind of laboured, doesn’t it?  But then there are things that aren’t over the top, they’re just sort of…huh?  Rorschach’s dialogue in the cell is changed just slightly, for hard-to-understand reasons — the method by which he kills Big Figure’s remaining goon is sort of repetitive.  Is that guy even supposed to be alive after having his head smashed through a toilet?

Can the psychiatrist really not recommend Rorschach being committed after hearing his story?

That in particular is kind of a Dark Knight level of inconsistency…so let’s just leave it to one side for a second, and concentrate on the day what was left of Walter Kovacs died.  This is a straight-up fumble, isn’t it?  Honestly I’m coming to really enjoy the Rorschach guy’s acting effort in this thing, and he knows how to read Moore’s words…but the killing of the dogs is the part where Kovacs finally checks out, isn’t it?  Well, it is;  but that dark moment — as dark as it gets! — is inexplicably undersold in favour of the bad guy’s punishment.  And it’s tempting to chalk that up to somebody’s misreading of the original text, except…come on, did anybody misread that part of the original comic?  So, no:  the guilty party here is the crazy ramping-up of spectacle, the adrenaline.  Rorschach breaking down and butchering the dogs isn’t any adrenaline-junkie’s idea of a fist-pumpingly good revenge trip.  Dan and Laurie’s porno-gone-wrong music video starts with Dan feeling impotent standing naked before his owlsuit (which doesn’t really look like an owl at all, but — nitpicking!), however the bit where he’s wearing the glasses is carefully omitted, right?  And anyway they’re the wrong kind of glasses, and come to think of it that doesn’t make sense — he’d look a lot more like an owl if the glasses were like Archie’s windshie…oh never mind, there’s so much to say it almost isn’t worth getting bogged down in every little specific.  We’ll be here all night.  Speaking of which, crazy to think poor old dead Jon still possessed vanity enough to reconstruct himself with both a steroidal physique and a huge schlong (superpowers!) — and yet the key is right here, eh?  The key to everything is that the world is no more ready for a superman with a tiny dick, than it is for a masked avenger of the night with real feelings like the kind we’ve got.

“Mommy, is that Jesus?”

Snyder unwisely lets the moment stand.  Though at least Mommy says “no”.

But the point remains:  this isn’t nostalgia, it’s mawkishness.  And the violence is the most mawkish of all.

Christ, I feel a little bit like I’m picking on a little kid, though.  Does the world really need another excoriation of the Watchmen movie?  I mean I want to make my point, but I don’t want to be an asshole about it myself, you know?  There are just lots of little mistakes in this movie, that’s all.  But it isn’t more deserving of scorn than other Moore-derived movies.  “From Hell” was actually far more shortsighted than this is.  The Watchmen motion comic was far more horrendous.  So, this hasn’t ruined the original experience for me like seeing the Star Wars Special Editions did.  Good God, but in the age of computers haven’t we been well enough educated to know that “Special Edition” is the mark of death?  I’m through with Star Wars now, man.  Star Wars and I are done, finished.  But Watchmen and I are fine.  So what am I saying, it wasn’t as good as the comic?  Well, I never thought it would be.  Am I accusing Snyder of hubris or something, is that my point?

Am I saying it was shitty?

It wasn’t exactly shitty, but it was a bit WEIRD.  If I had to think of a recent superfolks movie to compare it to, I’d probably pick the first Fantastic Four movie, honestly.  Which makes sense:  because I had the same sort of feeling of aversion to seeing it, as I did with that one.  It wasn’t hate.  It wasn’t fear.  Maybe it was embarrassment?  Or more likely it was a kind of sympathy after all.  Christ, I couldn’t even make a Watchmen movie that I’d like, you know?  In the end, the squid didn’t matter as much as Dan telling people he’d be seeing them all the goddamned time.  That was one of the inexplicable mistakes.  The ludicrous gore was more understandable, as was the loss of the supersymmetry.  But it was the B-grade “understandables” that were really frustrating.  Most of Rorschach’s journal came across like the Architect’s speechifyin’ in the second Matrix movie:  as text, totally fine, but as spoken dialogue WHAT?  I do understand the necessity of having the journal end up in Seymour’s hands, with us knowing what it is, but…seriously, someone says “abattoir of retarded children” aloud, that’s not arresting, that’s either hilarious or it’s disturbing as shit, or it’s both.  But are we supposed to think of Rorschach that way, really?  Well, I think it was not really considered, I think the question never came up in a serious way…like I said, it’s a bit weird.  Do we need to have the name of the military base that houses Jon and Laurie narrated to us, after seeing the sign almost a whole minute before the voiceover gets around to it?  In the comics, lots of things can be made to work, that are radically superfluous in film.  “Obsolete Models A Specialty” is not necessary in film — and stripped of supersymmetry it looks ham-fisted.  Listen, here’s the absolutely AMAZING thing, okay?  Movies already trade on supersymmetry. Nobody in a movie ever has a dream that isn’t prophetic.  Movies put the foreshadowing in your face ten times a minute.  All this shit’s completely normal to movies.  Which is why Hollis’ sign is something that won’t make anyone go “ahhh! how clever!” in a movie — in a movie, no one will see the places the camera goes as anything but totally intentional.  Hollis’ sign isn’t brilliant decoration in the movie as it was in the comic, “In Gratitude” would be grating even if it were set up properly, there is nothing brilliant about filling spaces in a movie with movie-type-stuff, no one looks at Orson Welles movies and says “that’s so innovative how he has the actors scold the camera like they can see us”, they just DON’T.

And so this may be another key to this movie, specifically to its weirdness:  that the comic already looked like a movie, just not enough.  Or occasionally:  just a little too much.  So much hammering, but somehow — somehow — we lose the details of “Watchmaker” that attach us most powerfully to Jon’s experience of time.  Little trivial pieces of nothing, they’re just words, so easily replaced…yet without them something’s lost.  And why are they not there, if they’re so trivial?  I’m not saying we need whole scenes back, although I don’t think it’s very hard to see that Billy Crudup would’ve hit the “photograph lies at my feet” business right out of the park, I mean look what he accomplished just with “perhaps nothing is made” and “it’s too late” — as Jackie Earle Haley would’ve crushed the audience to tears, no doubt, with the dogs — but I love it when he scratches his head later on, you know? — I mean I’m not asking for the whole wide world, but where is the sense that Jon is reassuring Janey in one room, can hear her swearing at him in another?  Not all of Moore’s prose is deathless, but the technical fine-tuning is fairly impeccable, and doesn’t take any more time than anything else…that someone made the choice to get rid of it astounds me.  Did the non-comics folk in the audience really get Jon’s perspective?

But maybe they weren’t really supposed to — maybe they weren’t supposed to dwell on it that much.  Rorschach with the dogs, that would’ve stuck in the mind like a splinter.  Could I have appreciated him scratching his head, after that?  The movie’s only so long.  Jon’s story could fill twice the space it took up, and probably more.  I saw the Director’s Cut, it was skinny at a hundred and sixty-eight minutes.  In the theatrical release, you wouldn’t want people just zoning out thinking about Dr. Manhattan, would you?  And as for Laurie’s parentage, my goodness.  It isn’t pretty, the way we get to it.  But at least I saw the snowglobe.  And you can’t have everything.  You can’t have all of it.

And it’s too late now, anyway.

But there are definitely some negative things to say about it all, that deserve saying, deserve hearing, deserve something anyway.  Because I may’ve said that nothing really needed to be held sacred in this movie, but then again the movie itself is all about what needs to be held sacred and what doesn’t…and I, myself, am actually so very fondly attached to the book that if given the chance to make this movie I probably wouldn’t've.  Sacred, I dunno.  It’s funny what cooks down as essential, here.  It’s very wobbly.  The logic of physical damage, punishment both dished out and taken, is tough to make work…if you care about that sort of thing.  It’s so exclusively tonal:  Dan pounds on Adrian’s face and makes a little scratch.  I have to tell you, it set me back a little:  earlier we saw teeth floating in a bloody mouth.  This is the logic of bodies and how they work, what they can endure, what they symbolize, how they suffer and why.  Adrian’s little drop of blood is meant to touch us.  His fight with the Comedian is supposed to fill us with desperate urgency.  The violence is the music, here:  emotional texture.  Watchmen needs a lot of it.  Well, that’s what realism is, for heaven’s sake!  Dan’s gawping after Laurie is so empty that it needs something, and it was either brutal over-the-top ultraviolence, or it was gonna be “Oh Yeah” by Yello…

Oh yes, folks, don’t kid yourselves!  These same choices could’ve been made much, much more poorly!

As for the Comedian himself, his funeral is confusing;  camera looks down as rain falls on the mourners, we’ve seen this before, okay, it’s not exactly pure genius but it isn’t unendurable…still, if they’re gonna do that, why didn’t they do the bit where the mourners’ posture at the grave recalls their posture when the Comedian messed with their heads?  I mean, I don’t really care a whole lot, but I also don’t understand the choice.  Not when Rorschach gets to play with the “fine like this” callback-dialogue thing, and my GOD when did that shit become so de rigeur in American movies, I really really really would like to know.  I’d like to have someone to blame for it.  I mean if they can do that stuff, why couldn’t they do any of the other stuff, that’s better and less hackneyed?

Although I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like how he delivered the line…heck, the way it ended up, I didn’t even mind the song.  But you know, this is like “The Golden Army”, this is just somebody’s fan-fic, like a backhanded review of the source material rather than an adaptation of it.  There really are music-video parts — like those long-form videos people used to do, it’s sort of like six or seven of those strung together, with bridges made of “movie”.  I’m going to say this is not the most heinous thing there ever was:  music does indeed add texture to poses and shots, possibly is the only thing that might add back tension that script revisions removed.  The score, the shots, the dialogue in voiceover…that’s the symphonic aspect of film, and it isn’t forceless, it isn’t valueless.  Maybe it’s even where the seeds of adaptations take root, translating something difficult from another medium into a kind of Universal Donor form of artistic dynamic, a plug that fits all sockets…”music video”, I mean how did anybody ever even come up with this idea?  I remember reading X-Men comics while listening to the Red Album, and it fit weirdly, just as all this does.  In the old mixed-tape days, I wrote down themes I was trying to get across, flows for a rainy day, a bad breakup, a party.  On to the sampling and mixing of today, and even I, Mr. Old-And-Tired, have just plugged part of the opening of “Ziggy Stardust” into a song’s middle-eight like an insane person, to switch the “logic” track over from Words to Music, a temporary inversion of how meaning is delivered in an ordinary song.  We shouldn’t just discount this.  This is how we make our own personal fan-fic in our heads, isn’t it?  How we play our games of “what would I do”, “what would I match”…

It’s sort of a kink, you see.  “Oh, if I could do whatever I pleased, I’d do this…!“  Hmm…something to be said for a job where all you do is cross your own boundaries, make illicit fantasies into normative behaviour…

Let’s see…what else?  It is of course nice to see drinking buddies and old professors getting work.  What else?  Under The Hood is absolutely awful.  SURPRISE!  Bet you expected it to be good, huh?  Me too.  But it really wasn’t.  The Black Freighter made me laugh, though.

What else.

God, I don’t even know.  The Nixon is like a Sin-City Nixon, remarkably like a Nixon in a comic-book…for some reason I grew not to mind this.

Ah.  And of course, there’s the matter of “was it worth it” and “was it enjoyable to watch” and so on and so forth.  You do have to be happy for Dave Gibbons, who got to see some of his masterful artwork diligently recreated by someone who obviously understood just how good it was.  How many comics artists get that kind of compliment?  How many, who’ve accomplished something as stunning as what Gibbons did in Watchmen, have been so ignored and denigrated by the very people who claim to love his work the most?  On the higher plane of human beings getting the respect they deserve, Watchmen’s a success in this sense:  Dave Gibbons is in every scene, his name is on it and he got paid for it and people went out and bought his book because of it.  And he was happy with it.  Good for him.  So does it matter if it was any good, if I thought it was “worth it”?

Well, sure it does.  I just don’t know if I do think that, because my “review” of the source material is considerably different from the one Snyder’s given me to chew over.  Watchmen the book and Watchmen the movie were always going to be miles apart from one another in terms of content — no one thought we were going to get the Gordian Knot, surely?  The inside of the Bestiary?  The Black Freighter?  Blood From The Shoulder Of Pallas?  Even the outstanding colouring.  Watchmen doesn’t even mean the same thing to me as it did back in ‘86 — like me, it’s aged well, but it’s aged nonetheless.  The movie, by contrast, is never going to age at all — it’s going to be stuck in the summer of 2009 for all eternity, pinned ruthlessly to the corkboard of this time, this place, this cultural concern.  The special effects will one day look primitive.  The politics will look as glued-on as the costumes.  The story will stay pretty much linear.  The particular humour and particular seriousness of Moore and Gibbons will always be absent, as will the true character of their accomplishment.  What we were always looking for here was an interesting failure;  that really was all we were ever going to get, that really was the best we were ever going to get.

So…was it interesting?

Dave Fiore thought it was.  Focussing on the political dialogue between the comic and the movie, he thought it was worth it to consider an Adrian who was more than just an extradimensional-squid inventing madman.  And he has a point:  in the comic, Adrian’s far madder than Rorschach, more inhuman than Jon, more pathetic than Dan…his life more damagingly composed of lies than Laurie’s.  Of course it’s just this that causes the Comedian’s sense of humour to shatter, in the end — a fucking space squid!? — and as Jog noted at the time, Veidt’s apocalyptic landscape is a pretty sanitized one in the film.  Very little horror, very little blood.  He says he’s made himself feel every death, but in the comic you know he hasn’t;  you know he couldn’t.  Whereas in the movie he’s allowed to get away with saying this — well, he is the smartest man in the world, after all!  Maybe he knows something we don’t!  Because we can’t make ourselves feel every death, can we?

So, is it deck-stacking?  In the comic we know something Adrian never will, because we’ve been to the bloody Lovecraftian deathscape of New York with Jon and Laurie — so “smartest man in the world” won’t cover anything, for us.  It just won’t wash.  In the movie we aren’t confronted with this sort of perspective, though, so we do get Dave’s interesting political dialogue coming at us in a more unforced way…the only question is, what should we say about the difference?  In the dialogue between movie and comic, a principal difference becomes how much judgement of himself Adrian is permitted — how much certainty he can afford, or manufacture.  In the comic he yells “I DID IT!” in childish triumph, but then looks to Jon to solve his dreams of the Black Freighter…and finds no solution forthcoming.  One in three go mad, in the new Millenium.  However in the movie there is no triumphant schoolboy shout, but there’s no madness either, so…I don’t know, is it enough?  True, we can grapple with the same problem Adrian grapples with, using the same tools, and decide for ourselves if his results are reproducible…or worth reproducing…but it’s only Adrian’s tools we’re given, and not (as the fellow named Kieran points out in that long-ago comments thread of mine), Moore’s.  Which is to say:  our own.  We are not really shown anything but what Adrian can see on his TV screens, so naturally we, like him, think the tools he’s got are up to the job.  And for myself, I think this constitutes a shortfall in meaning…

…But, yeah:  it’s probably interesting enough to argue about, anyway!

And anyway, as I said, we knew we wouldn’t really be getting Watchmen.  So maybe the argument is all there is?

I don’t know.  There are few scenes that don’t have something to quibble with in them.  It’s hard to get around Adrian having an Egyptian statue standing there with Yeats’ lines scribbled beneath it, even though at this point one pretty much expects it.  It’s tough to feel bad for Laurie when she could’ve just taken the cab and not killed that guy.  The little voice argues that this is just how kids talk, this is just how real-world superheroes would be:  they’d be horrors, they’d be fascists, I mean look at their suits.  It says:  hasn’t Moore made a big enough meal of this in his other comics, for you to accept seeing it here?  And yet I did not think Dan was such a big hypocrite in the comic, so…was I supposed to?

Was that the message I missed?

Was it all just a big joke, from the beginning?

Nah.  All that hyperviolence stuff, y’know…that’s new.  They stuck it in there on purpose, because they needed it.  Dan and Laurie in the alley?  You think of all the things that sequence was for in the comic;  it isn’t for any of that here.  It’s for quite another sense of proportion.  Nothing “sacred” about it!  And so that explains why the defence of this movie seems not to have been centred around the question “did they hold it as sacred”, but around the question “did they blaspheme against it” instead…with the corollary question being “is it even possible to blaspheme against it?”  So we’re into the Frankenstein questions here, appropriately enough:  is it just a matter of reassembling the pieces in the correct order?

Perhaps Dave is right, and the dialogue between movie and comic is interesting enough in itself, to make the movie worthwhile.  I only wish I knew if he saw it a second time, though!  Because when I finished my second viewing of it, all these words just about went flying out the window.  Depressing?  It surely was:  largely empty-hearted, dripping crocodile tears, a series of nods to scenes that were presumed to have something in them just because they were there.  Snyder drops most of what is in Watchmen, to show us what is on it:  owlship crashes spectacularly on Antarctic cliffs, ACTION sequence!  But where’s the meaning in it?  Dan and Laurie lose my sympathy in the alley, but for what?

Here is a thing about meaning:  it’s about thinking globally, and acting locally.  One scene doesn’t mean all by its lonesome, but it’s part of a tapestry of cause and effect — a cause and effect whose nature the scene reveals, through being a part of it.  So by themselves — and even together! — the scenes in Watchmen might mean anything, you see?  And so it always is, with superficial copies — their perceived faithfulness depends on how low they can set the value of faithfulness.  Is Watchmen, the comic, any good?  Why do we even like it so much?  After all, it’s just a bunch of scenes of people doing stuff and saying things, hell I can get that out my front street…so what’s the difference?  Thus from Mary Shelley we move off further back in time, to Rene Descartes…

What is “mind”, anyway?

You can’t touch it, or taste it!

And don’t a live body and a dead one have the same number of particles in them?

Structurally, there’s no difference…right?

Well…maybe there’s just a little bit of difference.  Mark Kardwell told me, in the last comments thread, that it would be awful and that I would complain bitterly, but that I would still wind up enjoying it…because at the end of the day it is Watchmen.  I think he was probably right, when it came to my first viewing:  for all sorts of reasons, I felt involved and invested in what would happen, what Snyder would do…how I myself would respond, and what I’d discover from that response.  The second viewing absolutely swept all that excitement away, however;  as I began to realize that the movie was actually mostly crap.  And yet, you know, Mark’s still right.  I didn’t enjoy it on second viewing.  Quite the opposite.  But somehow I have still wound up having something to say about it…because at the end of the day, it was Watchmen.

By which I mean:  the comic was.

And of course, it still is.

…But I think that’s all the time we’ve got for today, to talk about it.

Wow, That Was Insanely Easy

So I decided to back up all my Blogger entries on a WordPress blog that I made special for the purpose…

And wow, it just happened, it just went there, and I’m totally thrilled.  Two clicks, and it was done.

Easy.

So, just to say…I’m very happy with my WordPress service.

Never leaving you, Wordie.  Mwah mwah mwah.  Let’s stay together forever.

Used To Be Glorious Black And White

You know, I still have that post about the Moench/Sienkiewicz Fantastic Four hanging…

But screw it.  At least for now.

I want to write about Moon Knight.

Although Jonathan Burns would do this far better than I can:  this business of the Return Of The Pulps.  I suppose people look at Moon Knight today and just see Batman…do they just see Batman?  But he’s only partly Batman;  and he’s only about as much Batman as he’s also Dr. Fate.  And much more importantly he’s also the Phantom, the Shadow, Doc Savage…really, this disquisition’s gonna be a bit disorganized, but I may not be able to pull myself more than three steps away from Moon Knight’s assault on pulp at any point in any case, so stirring and sensible is the way Moench and Sienkiewicz show off the knowledge of there inheritance of the pulps, their membership in those old ways of telling a particular sort of story.

But it’s hard to know just where to start, with all that. Going over the art alone could take a while: because we won’t get the Sienkiewicz we know today ’til almost two years of Moon Knight have passed. Mind you, when we do it will FREAK YOU OUT, SONNY…but it’ll take a while, is what I’m saying. You expect to open page one of issue #1 and see the peer of Ploog, Rogers, Miller and all, but you don’t, or at any rate you don’t think you do: instead you see their student. Mind you a lot of the latter-day Sienkiewicz’s craft is right there in front of your eyes anyway, breaking up pages into lean strips and little stamps, populated by distorted figures and scratchy lines — and I’m not enough of a comics scholar to explain it, it does seem fairly squeezed until about the sixth or seventh issue, and it’s about another six or seven (or eight if we’re heading for my favourite, issue #15 — also the first direct-market issue, perhaps not coincidentally) before it really starts to breathe whole breaths, but there is something pulpy about that, too…so I’m not sure how to discount it, or even if it ought to be discounted at all. What we have here, on occasion, is something that verges on a Lee Falk style, something raw and speedy made to get the job done…and yet what we also have is a style in which different angles and perspectives are slammed together quite artfully in order to propel the eye across the page, and in which the compositional space does a lot of extremely fancy things in order to get you from one word-balloon to the next on time and in good order. And in this particularly — at least, so far as my untutored eye can tell — the Moench and Sienkiewicz team are creating something unusual: a largely effortless read, but also one that’s slyly reflective of a slightly less obvious purpose. It probably goes without saying that Doug Moench hardly ever gets the credit he deserves as a writer, much less as an innovator; though his credentials are as solid as any of the Seventies Marvel “superstar” writers who made their fame on style, that he seems to prefer clarity of intention over style has (I think) given him the status of a utility player in most readers’ eyes.  Because he can do the florid, cheaply programmatic “symphonic” emotional Eighties Marvel prose as easily as he can the more “psychological” stuff it developed from, the stuff more rooted in Raymond Chandler knock-offs than in Tolkien knock-offs  — and why not, since in superhero comics the latter style flows out of the former anyway? — and indeed in the Eighties mode (as we’ll see in the Fantastic Four post) he can be as guilty of sententious overreach as any Chris Claremont…but as you read him through you can see a certain kind of studious deliberation behind the styles, an interest in other things past and above “narrative voice”.  Sometimes the captioning is relatively terse, relatively tough-nosed and poetic; other times it’s relatively flowery, or it’s pushy, or it seems unnecessary. But no matter how ornamental the captioning seems at its most extreme, it evidences a certain sort of restraint, that flows from purpose — one senses that Moench could go any old way with this stuff, if he wanted to, so just because he’s going this particular way it doesn’t mean he’s willing to abandon his objectives for the objectives of the tools he’s using.  You wouldn’t really call it spare in most places, and you wouldn’t call it lean in most others, but with one notably teeth-grinding exception I think a reasonable person would have to call it impressively self-aware.

Which is what the placement of the word-balloons helps to suggest: because, is Moench genuinely aping the going Marvel style, here?  After a time, and mostly because of the resolutely intentional character of the dialogue, the weird lucidity that pokes its head up even through the most turgid bits of seeming duckspeak and filler — in fact, hardly a soul opens their mouths without rendering valuable practical information to the reader! — it starts to look a lot more likely that what he’s playing with is the old language of pulpiness that both the Seventies and Eighties Marvel styles drew their power from:  looks a lot more likely that he’s trying to get back to the ruthlessly pragmatic roots of style that he always loved the best, and not only that but trying to tap them more directly than his colleagues.  And when you look at what he doesn’t do, the picture comes even clearer:  because he doesn’t wink at us while he’s doing it.

Despite the constant captions, he really just lets the story tell itself.  Look at everything that’s packed into Moon Knight, all unselfconsciously, without any nervous ankle-scratching:  the callback to Forties movies like Casablanca and Rope Of Sand, the callback to Golden Age origins based on animal-spirits and Egyptian tombs;  Batman’s playboy mansion, the Phantom’s “living ghost” shtick, the Shadow’s and Doc Savage’s crew of helpers…well, Moon Knight is his own crew of helpers, he’s even his own faithful chauffeur at times, and as for the superhero stuff about “you’d have to be crazy to dress up like a bat and fight crime”…well, he is crazy, at least in part.  The resurrection to a new life before the god of the moon…that might not have actually happened.  “Bruce Wayne” being a disguise for Batman in the metaphorical sense…well, Steven Grant is a disguise for Moon Knight, and there’s nothing metaphorical about it!

And yet there’s hardly a time when the complex interleaving of all that stuff is thrust in your face, and you never have to think about it if you don’t want to, even though it all mounts up and up:  because it isn’t the main point, even though it’s by far the cleverest point.  If it were me, I can tell you I would’ve made a great big deal about it in every issue…but Moench makes a far bigger deal of reminding us that Moon Knight has a microphone concealed in his cowl that enables him to talk to his helicopter pilot, and a far bigger deal of reminding us that the copter is silent, the crescent-darts are really throwing stars, and that each phase (each phase…now what could be kinder, than never hammering that point home to the reader?  What could be less necessary than to harp on it?) of Moon Knight’s personality has its own crew of friendly helpers it can call on.  Well, these are the things that should be the biggest deal, since these are the things that allow us to parse the story — that Moon Knight checks to see that the cowl-mike is working properly is maybe something that you could, in fact, call a little bit spare and lean, since it at once gives us the opportunity to cut to Frenchie in the copter (and being able to cut away to Frenchie in the copter is actually very important in terms of the book’s fusion of styles, even when all he says is “oui, Marc“!), and less importantly it eliminates the need for big thought-balloons needlessly explaining who the hell Frenchie is.  And, maybe it does something else, too, in that it accentuates the idea that Moon Knight isn’t quite that crazy after all:  I mean, look, he makes sure shit is working correctly before he swoops down on the criminal element.  You never see Batman doing that.  Batman, especially today’s Batman, just has an assload of incomprehensibly high-tech stuff that all works perfectly all the time, when he wants to talk to Alfred there is never any doubt he can do it, it all just happens and it makes him look a bit insane all by itself.  Modern Batman has so many technological dependencies that never betray him that he’s basically godlike, so totally sane in every way that even his equipment is totally sane, and never has a doubt about itself.  Moon Knight’s a lot more chaotic:  a handful of fancy shuriken, a stick, and a rope ladder hanging from a helicopter is just about all he can handle.  Throw in a cape and a cowl-mike and a dark past and he’s full to capacity.

For some bizarre reason, it’s almost believable.  And you know what it all reminds me of?  Jack Staff.

But more on that in a minute, I guess.  Let’s get back to the pulps, first, and their remarkable “updating” in the Moon Knight mag.  You know what, it actually turns out to be not that hard to pull off! To the Golden Age motivations you simply add the existence of an interior state for your main character — just its existence is enough, about six small thought-balloons an issue is all you need! — and then you drop the other characters a thought-bubble or two, usually just something like “I hope he knows what he’s doing”, and away you go. Some ultraviolet prose in the captions, and it’s superficially indistinguishable from any Very Special Episode Of The Uncanny X-Men you’d care to pick up…but it feels different. The story, whatever story it happens to be, pushes forward in a simple way, “refreshingly psychotic” as Moon Knight says of his third-issue art-thief villain: the captioning seems to nod to the typical moral message one finds in any standard superhero book that deals with anything like the seamy, the social, the evil, the racist, the crazy — always something cloying about making things better one day at a time, taking your solace where you can find it and all that crap, darkest before the dawn, there but for the grace of God, etc. — but whatever sincerity’s to be found in this stuff only comes out of the juxtaposition with action, which is its payoff. I mean the poetry is nice, but on its own it doesn’t mean a thing, does it? It doesn’t really mean a goddamn thing. It’s just texture. As the soul-searching, the navel-gazing, the ruminations are all texture — and we know they are, because they are always cut off by action before they even get to the posing of the Big Philosophical Questions! You read it all through and you start to love Moench for that, love him for not just beating on you with Moon Knight’s interior monologue. Instead he just sort of of gestures airily to the part of the house where the big questions are located, “bathroom’s down the hall to the left”, and leaves it to your imagination. Consequently the pages of Moon Knight continue to be all about the action, and there are few ameliorating complexities at issue:  the crazy people are fucking crazy, even if the story has an earnest line of patter about them…the evil people are evil as shit, even if they’re just cardboard cut-outs we see for three panels, even if they’re nine-tenths cliche in the first place. As early as issue #5, the book starts to externalize Moon Knight’s ongoing identity crisis in the tried-and-true formula of the superhero comic, but only by doing something rather more adventurous and pure than we’re used to even in a superhero horror comic: which is, the horror starts to get funny. Well, okay, maybe not “funny”, exactly…”humourous”, maybe?

Ludicrous, perhaps. And as time goes on, what’s funny and what’s chilling, what’s cute and what’s ugly, starts to get all mixed up. By the time we reach #15, “Ruling The World From His Basement”, we’ll get used to encountering just the damnedest things as equal moments of humour and horror, delight and disgust, in something like the principle of the uncanny — where things that aren’t alive behave as though they were, and things that live practice being inanimate when they shouldn’t. “Refreshingly psychotic”?  Hey, a lot of Moon Knight’s stories are kind of derivative in that old “topical comics” way, but that’s not the point:  you see everything coming anyway, and the characters mostly see them coming too, and there are no shocks or twists, not really…but there is drama, and there is activity, and there’s a certain amount of character development and study, and mood to spare as Moench makes contact with his men’s magazine background, and Sienkiewicz cranks up the speed.  Why Moon Knight does what he does isn’t even a question;  the way things are arranged, he just finds out he has to go from A to B, and then he quite logically proceeds to go there.  Purposes bubble up from wherever they need to.  You love to ponder the backstory in your idle moments, but you come for the action and you stay for the art.

And, oh, “who is Moon Knight”?

Excellent question, but hold on for a minute:  gotta check this cowl-mike is working properly.  Okay, now Sienkiewicz is drawing that Mardi Gras parade, but hold that thought…it’s a good thought, but just hold it for a minute…

Really a lot of the stuff we’re given to know in today’s comics, isn’t stuff we really need to know.  The stuff that gets resolved, a lot of it doesn’t really need to get resolved.  Just find out where you’re starting from, figure out where you’re going, and the question isn’t how soon you can get it all broken down, but how far you can take it.  And there’s no reason not to just keep taking it further, is there, when it isn’t dark secrets but only dark pasts that people have in this book. Which is an important distinction, in that it shows how the one thing gives you something to spoil, and the other one doesn’t.  Years from now, when William Messner-Loebs is writing Flash, again possibly when James Robinson is writing Starman, we’ll see how the Moon Knight Method can rehabilitate even an ordinary superhero-type character completely: why keep doing the same old thing, why keep trying to breed this mutant strain of the Silver Age true? When it’s so easy to get back to the original influences, and mutate them some other way. After all sometimes shit just happens, and that’s a good thing:  you should let it happen. This ain’t Dostoeyevsky, you know.  Nothing’s at stake here, we are not reaching for the timeless themes of respectable literature;  this is the pulps, man.  This is the pulps.  And you thought they were kind of stupid, well they’re not…or at any rate, they don’t have to be.  And don’t you want to see something you haven’t seen before?  Don’t you believe that the old can be made new?

You have to do it the right way, though.

Let’s have a short digression about Jack Staff, I think the first new character of this type since Moon Knight.  Who is he?  What’s his deal?  Well, it’s simple, really;  the last thing any of it is, is secret.  For secret you should go to Harold Pinter or Tennessee Williams, maybe — they can set you up, they’re not serial entertainment, they can afford to give you one big revelation that pays off everything, changes everything, and even ruins everything.  These adventure stories of ours, though…they’re not really set up very well for that sort of thing, it takes an enormous talent to make them traffic profitably in such secrets, and to make them capable of continuing afterwards is even tougher.  Jack Staff is all about the dark past, however, so it doesn’t look (from my cursory survey of it, and God I hope I’m right) much like it can really run out of things to be about.  And when’s the last time we saw that, in our superheroey fiction?  Of course you like Jack Staff:  he gets on with it.  So what’s not to like?

After all, you get on with it too, don’t you?

Ahh, men’s magazines.  I’ve got a copy of the cover of one stuck on my fridge, about the size of a magnet.  “I Battled A Giant Otter!” reads the title of the main story to be found inside, with the illustration of a man in a tent thrashing a big Amazonian furry creature with his lantern, its teeth buried in his forearm…as his square-jawed buddy pokes his head in with a gun.  Moon Knight’s just like that, only with an intense identity crisis;  Jack Staff’s like that, only with humourous world-weariness. One’s punchy, one’s languid, but they’re both drawn to say “hey, look, over here!”

Here’s something that’s not boring to read, even though you’ve basically seen it before. Action, again: to read it is not boring, it is not boring to read.

That, too, is an important distinction.

Of course now that I’ve made it, I don’t know if I can think of much more to say.  I used to say, parroting what they all said in the letters pages at the time, that Moon Knight was like the perfect superhero for the Eighties, the perfect Eighties superhero.  And I guess that wasn’t exactly the right way to put it, but it was true enough for my purposes at the time…maybe even true enough for my purposes today.  Frickin’ Moon Knight, man.  It was so cool.

Although reading these issues again, they’re full of those ads for the Roger Stern/Frank Miller Dr. Strange, and I have to tell you that as much as I loved the Stern/Rogers Doc, I am still waiting for the Miller book to come out…somewhere deep down in the feverish fourteen-year-old core of my comics-lovin’ brain.

…And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve been saving the re-reading of Moon Knight #25 as a special treat for myself, for when I finally finished this tangled mess.  It’s got a little essay by Sienkiewicz in it, it’s got three pages of letter column, it’s a Special Double-Sized Issue!!!

And the art’s completely insane.  Moon Knight.  Moon Knight, Moon Knight, Moon Knight.  MOON KNIGHT.

You should probably read it, if you haven’t already.

And I should probably go get some more Jack Staff.

Just to keep up with the times, you know!

Last Homely House Before The Mountains

String Theory

Magic Mirror II

Magic Mirror I

Vancouver When It Stumbles

Topics In Fantasy: Terminal, Discotheque, Apocalypse

Welcome folks; this way in, okay?

It’s something I keep saying (and why I keep linking to the most incoherent and longwinded shit I ever wrote is beyond me, honestly, but there it is once again) about the SF staple we call “the post-apocalyptic world”, because it’s both obvious and overlooked: that after the Apocalypse, we survivors are living in its world, and not our own. Though naturally it used to be ours.

And all science fiction is about the present, not the future, but…

…But you know, I think it’s possible we say that a little too much. Say it too much, and as a result we think too little about what it means. “Science fiction’s about the present, not the future”, so okay…

What’s it saying, then?

Here’s a thing I noticed recently, in the dark days of the Exploded Computer that saw me write half-a-dozen posts I may never get to, before finally posting one that probably was never going to be much more than half-baked at best…although, you know, now the deed’s been done I feel I ought to try to find the method in my own madness…

…Which is — uh, the thing I noticed, I mean — that I noticed that there was a new bar down the street. Or rather, an old bar under new ownership, now trumpeting its “New Pub Concept”. This, for those of you who may not be familiar with the syndrome, is basically a combination of fancier food, a more impressive arsenal of liquors at the high edge of possible spending, some distressed “old-timey” accoutrements lying around, “modern” music, and most importantly FLATSCREENS EVERYWHERE. Man, I’ve just never seen such a high flatscreen-to-square-footage ratio, you know. They had a Cray in the basement of the place running them all, a clean room with retina scans and chin-tilt biometrics accurate to within a picometer, webs of blue light everywhere. The very highest of high, high New Pub Concept technology.

And over the bar, a red LED news-scroller announcing “New Pub Concept! We Want To Be Your New Neighbourhood Watering-Hole, A Place To Chill Out And Relax!” While the modern music blasted, the UFC matches filled the air with blazing light, and the repros of old newspapers nodded knowingly from the walls. Ab-so-lutely schiztastic!

But it was that LED scroller that was the damnedest thing of all.

It didn’t say anything as interesting as I’ve given it to say here, actually; truth be told, it was not much of a conversational entre that it was scrolling out. I can’t really even remember what it said. The name of the place, sure; maybe something faintly non-sequitur-ish about the burgers and the beer, or the music. In my memory the approximate content was a lot like:

…New Pub Concept…What’s Happening!…New Pub Concept…What’s Happening!…

Yeah, that’s a lot closer.

Anyway…

It’s a funny thing about that LED scroller. Given the colossal amounts of cash and semiconductors thrown at every other aspect of the place, I had to wonder what it was doing there. Was it really an old-fashioned LED scroller, or was it just made to look like one? It did seem slightly technologically incompatible with the rest of the place, like everything else was James Cameron and it was Ralph Bakshi…but then, if it was just a simulation, then what on Earth was it simulating? And if it was real, then why was it real?

Why was it this real thing, instead of some other real thing?

I think this history of it’s all pretty straightforward. As we all know, once upon a time the LED scroller was the very reeking essence of What Is High Tech, or what looks like the Future…this was a time just after that cool old “computer font” disappeared, that thing that sort of looked like the kind of graffiti Mr. Spock might have left on the walls of Vulcan’s subway system, probably a thing worth investigating in its own right in the history of pop typography…and is there any other kind of typography, really…?

But it was part of a different design era, I think. This kind of iconography was just “finding” itself in the real world, finding itself in the hands of people who made real devices and real places for real people, rather than suggestive sigils for science-fictional scenarios that were based on real devices, that were extrapolated from real human uses, and so the aims of things like the LED scroller were a bit different from the aims of all the crap Rudy Wells had in his lab. By the late Seventies even the more nouveau TV computers, all slanted banks of skittering lights rather than boxy tape-containers with big fat bulbs on ‘em, were starting to look more like kitsch than conjecture…because as electronic gear moved more steadily into the hands of real people, the look of their fictional counterparts started to become more irrelevant. Something perhaps a bit similar can be gleaned from looking at past design era’s conceptions of what space-suits “of the future” might look like; many of them still look charming today, but hardly cutting-edge. In fact we can barely remember a time when technology was quite so neutral as to produce future-visions such as those simple, voiceless, soulless “suits”. In the Eighties things took a sharp turn toward the interactive, the interfunctional and interpenetrated, the “hi-touch”, and it wasn’t by accident then any more than it’s by accident now — because it was always the world we inhabited, that shaped the design of the futures we imagined. So, that LED scroller…the thing about it was, it was supposed to be friendly. Obedient, inviting, comforting.

But…

The real question, again, is why. What was it about that device’s use that made it important to be seen as possessing such qualities? I mean…was it just random typography, or what?

Well, clearly it was not. Here’s where I first saw the stuff, and you can tell me if this is where you saw it too: large public buildings.

Large public buildings.

This doesn’t really crack the nut yet, either. Are there just things called “large public buildings”? No; there are always reasons for each one of them, and the reasons usually have to do with governments. Bridges and tunnels and ferries and airports and train stations: the large public buildings are always signs of large public expenditures on large public projects. People-moving, mostly; as one of government’s biggest jobs is finding ways to move larger and larger of numbers of people around from place to place. From home to work, from work to school, on time and on schedule and above all on-message. Taxpayer dollars and public relations, megaprojects and elections: at a certain very base level it’s about pure mechanical efficiency. You build a large industrial environment out of concrete and steel, put a funnel at one end and a spout at the other. But you don’t just do that; to do that and no more would be suicide. You need a few potted plants in there, too. You need some nice chrome for people to see their reflections in, like you need some soft corners and dark carpets here and there to blunt echoes too. They used to do it with brass and marble and stained-glass windows, but as time moves on so does efficiency, of course — and you find ways and ways to make the bearability of the big industrial intake valves easier to clean, maintain, replace. Sometimes efficiency means hiding a lot of things in plain sight, hanging lanterns and drawing shades. We people are always all in this together, after all; and steps must be taken to ensure that where we meet, and get moved, our moods can be managed.

None of this is exactly conspiracy-theory stuff, you understand. It’s just a matter of learning the lessons of history. Or rather, of architecture.

Or rather, of literature.

The anxieties that modernity brings are hardly new, hardly obscure. The cautionary tales of science fiction in particular have given us a nice hundred-year-deep examination of those problems and pressures, and not only that but they’ve indicated ways to alleviate modernity’s stress, precisely by sketching out exactly what it is and exactly how it works. Oh, you’ll find it in Angel Pavement too, but not as clearly schematized as it is in The Machine Stops; and you’ll certainly be conscious of its presence in The Grapes Of Wrath, but if you’re looking for a prescription rather than a mere diagnosis, then you’ll probably be a bit more interested in 1984. Possibly Brave New World on the side, just to round things out. Lord Of The Flies? Oh, absolutely; but don’t neglect the somewhat less Nobel-worthy charms of Foundation while you’re browsing around…

The point being: that we do, actually, know how to do all this. How to warm the textures and cool the exhausts. It is, of course, not at all an easy job: who among us can look on rush hour in a major city and think “nope, no lemmings here!” But people are good at adapting, too, if you just give them something to rally around inside their heads. Often it doesn’t take much. For goodness’ sake, potted plants at the ferry terminal! It’s next door to totally stupid, but it does work if you just let it.

And by now you’re probably wondering where I’m going with all this. Okay, fair enough.

Those LED scrollers…they were for telling you when your boat, train, plane, whatever was coming in. So you could go home, you know? A welcome announcement, a mass relief…if you look at them carefully, and consider what they might have been, you’ll see the letters that spell out the happy news are surprisingly polite and reassuring. Somewhere along the line, it went from angular bars spelling out least-energy impossible-to-read digits on your wrist, to domesticated dots marching in order to form smooth-ish curves, legible fonts…fantastically expensive, surely! And yet there it is, our ultra-modern system: working properly. Serving our needs, with no expense spared. Oh, except it is spared, but never mind that right now, the illusion’s more important than the reality anyway. Isn’t it? Buckets of gigabytes at our disposal, I like to swim in them, dive into them, throw them up into the air and let them hit me on the head…! It’s sort of the same thing that happens when Regis Philbin addresses the empty air on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, saying:

“Computer, please take away two of the wrong answers.”

There’s a certain reassuring level of performance on display, there. A certain reassuring display of wealth, that’s big enough to free us from reality’s pesky details. “Say, computer, hand me the sports section, wouldja pal?” How polite Regis is, to his obviously non-existent friend the computer! His perfect servant/master, his all-seeing Jeeves or Spock: thus the modernistic dichotomy becomes the modernistic harmony, easy as that….at least, in our minds it becomes that, whether or not it happens to be true.

You may think I’m reaching a little. But believe me, you don’t know from reaching…

…And anyway, yeah. Because the fact remains: this is what I’m saying the LED scroller is at the airport, the bank, the ferry terminal.

But what the hell is it at the New Pub Concept?

Maybe I’ve dragged this out a little too much, because I’m sure you can clearly see: the LED scroller didn’t stay in the big industrial spaces. It didn’t just sit there kind of “humanizing them somewhat”. But as time passed, it got picked up and turned around, and also used for other purposes. Subversive purposes.

Consider the club, more precisely the discotheque: where before long you found the wilder people of the culture inhabiting, once again, a giant population intake valve. Only this time, it need not have been that, but it was chosen to be that — to look like that and to feel like that. Insouciant post-punk nihilism, narcissism, whatever you want to call it if there’s even any difference: obviously I am not speaking against it, but it’s the Berlin-style club, the “New York-style” club as they used to call it here in my backwards, soggy little home town, and it is an identifiable thing. Well, people will whoop it up anywhere, in any surroundings, but a party can also be a statement, and since the problems of modernity never can get fixed…

…Because like bone, our culture’s macroscopic resilience is based on the flex and snap of a million invisible microfractures…

…But only addressed, is it really surprising that it was really easy for a while there to find demimondean environments of consumption and abandon that embraced the identity of the Big Industrial Throughput Engine? Through which tides of people ebb and flow, ebb and flow, anonymously: the very picture of modernity’s big bugaboo. But, fuck it, say the young: we’ll just take this off your hands, you’re so damn scared of it. And just then, just there, look up to the DJ booth:

Hey, there it is!

Our old friend the LED scroller. Now Playing…Some Band…Now Playing…Some Band…

No, we haven’t reached the New Pub Concept yet, but we’re getting closer. And this is interesting too: the club is a station, the club is a vessel, the club is essntially nowhere and noplace, caught-between. Marvellous stuff, eh? There you are, stuck halfway between Denmark and Finland, when suddenly Eliot’s old air-raid siren goes off. So what better time to drop everything and dance, and drink, and screw? ‘Cause there’s nothing left to do, natch.

Ah, you have to love a rebellious spirit.

But note that as what was once the softener of alienation becomes the marker of it, suddenly it takes on a vast new life in the sea of associations. The post-apocalyptic world is where we survivors live, but it isn’t ours — it belongs to what was destroyed, it belongs to what destroyed it. All those great big public structures, the agents of alienation, we’re alienated from them again, alienated twice over: Grand Central Station goes back to the birds and the foxes, but not to us, even though we live there…’cause there’s nothing left to do…and the LED scroller outside the stock market chimes out our solitude and essential foreignness to ourselves, in abbreviations and fractions we can no longer decipher as anything but funereal runes, leftover readouts on the reactor long since gone supercritical. Science fiction, I tellya: it’s great, isn’t it? The toppled buildings and empty freeways. No wonder we keep going back to that shit. It is not predicting anything; because it is not predicting anything. The conversation is not new, and it isn’t particularly obscure either. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be about collapse. Or, you know…at least not exactly about collapse…

Microfractures, remember?

We have American Flagg, a series that often seemed almost to be based around the lettering, based around the reassuring/ironic/sinister texture of mood-managing surfaces, a neat and rather prescient screencap of what the idea of a post-apocalyptic world would eventually turn into. Well, sure! With the world decentred, all the announcements, all the lettering, all the textural softening is ludicrously, satirically untrustworthy; and the airports and train stations really are abandoned, as the Plex stops people-moving — wants no more to do with people-moving! — outside the corrupt and chaos-making media channels, which don’t push anyone from place to place, so much as they simply push them around. Because the lettering’s all that’s left. However, it’s a dystopia with a difference, because it’s so very up-to-date: and as a result this post-apocalytic landscape fails to alienate anything except what came before it, what destroyed it, what all its world supposedly belongs to. All that stuff instead getting disenfranchised itself, as the mood of the people waiting for the subway changes. Sours: as vitality fruits in the blasted plazas and the mixed messages, and once again the world’s copyright is returned to the survivors.

And we will get right into this pretty darn soon, as soon as Paul Verhoeven starts to make movies…“Would You Like To Know More?”…but we should also remember this stuff isn’t even original to Flagg, as fantastic as Flagg is at carrying it forward. The corrupt, dying society with absent and decentred authority sources, mysterious directives from space or who-knows-where that are no longer interested in control for anything but control’s own sake…a world of lies, unsustainable: there are so many places to find it. Certainly it was chief among the interests of SF writers of the Sixties, as a generational elaboration on, and reaction to, the warnings of 1984 and Brave New World…but now it gets more personal, as the post-apocalyptic landscape gets bigger and woolier, and the need for cosmic vengeance, scale-balancing, gets more and more urgent. The individual, always important for understanding the post-apocalyptic times in which we live, now becomes an instrument of Fate as well: agent of a new world, a neo-post-apocalypse if you will. And you could trace that stuff a LONG way back if you wanted to, as far as the Elder Edda and farther, but since in this essay we are focussing on the meaning of the present, we might as well concentrate on what happens to that old stuff in the present’s own Era. In movies, I guess I first became aware of it when I saw Logan’s Run, but soon there were movies that brought a lot more of it to the surface, made it all more immediate and visceral. The Warriors, and then Escape From New York: this is where the rebellious spirit grows teeth. Screw your vast impersonal industrial throughput spaces; we’re taking ‘em back from you. It’s just what’s going on in the clubs, in the music, in the books and the comics.

But…

Wait, I think I may have gotten a little off-topic, somewhere around here…

Oh, yeah. The lettering. The scrolling.

Hey…now that I think of it, just what is that damn LED scroller doing in the New Pub Concept place?

What I think it’s doing is this: trying to exploit its own associations.  But unfortunately for it, the river of association only flows one way:  and the only way to exploit associations is to try to create distance between them, that makes them weaker.

Let’s look at The Matrix for a minute: ostensibly just the same sort of business as all that fluff above, and indeed very much classically in line with the general discussion. Well turned-out, to say the least…and yet there’s something a little too pat about it. Don’t get me wrong, I love The Matrix too! “There Is No Spoon” and so forth…the guns and the violence, the technology and the environments, the temptation and the escape…but it’s no Diamond Dogs or Heroes, exactly. Is it? No, not exactly; the mood’s changed. To fight the machines, after all…that trick was looking a bit shopworn back when Steve Austin had his red tracksuit on. Not to mention, something the casual reader of even 1984 might be persuaded to find a little dishonest. Because, after all, who are the machines? What are the machines? Science fiction isn’t about the future, but the present, so the machines are always just figures, or when mishandled just excuses, because the technology and the people are inseperable: in fact, they stand for exactly what they are, and no more. The spectre of the machines “taking over” is practically Victorian, well out of date as a speculative nightmare by the time a concept of “neutral” technology is so dead it can’t even sponsor a believable spacesuit, fuck where are the scrolling letters at least, for heaven’s sake, you know?…and so it’s rather too pat, even if to the Wachowski’s credit the mysterious promise of the Oracle in the first movie is soon made good on, as it turns out there are all kinds of machines, just as there are all kinds of people. “Love is an emotion.” “No; love is a word.” There’s the only philosophy the Matrix movies contain, and it’s more than most movies ever contain, so you really do have to give them a little credit for that…however at the same time it’s hard to argue this philosophical point doesn’t get a little bit lost after a while, if only through being abandoned: as at least on the surface, the Matrix movies continue to separate out human agency from human machinery.

Which is not very “hi-touch” of them!

And so it’s a bit out of step with the times. One might even say: oddly so, given the great successes of SF movies that incorporate the interpenetrating, interfunctional nature of our own real-life relationship with technology into their decentred, surreally-fragmented futurescapes. We could start with Blade Runner and move up even to Minority Report: your Sixties fascinations, post-apocalyptic landscapes as psychological as they are technical — living simulacra, self-aware landscapes; dead and plastic people, touchable lies. And nowadays, of course, even that can’t help but look just the tiniest bit worn-out: because it isn’t American Flagg we’re dealing with anymore, it’s The Intimates. Even the unspeakably hideous modern captions in crap Marvel comics practically scream it out — an awareness of how to handle the reader, how to manage the reader as they stream them through these huge and empty rooms, although in the case of The Intimates it’s to direct your attention to something, and in the case of New Avengers it’s to direct it away. But in any case the typography’s more important than ever, because it’s more pop than ever: of all the things you might see in a comic book, pencils, inks, and colours — even paper quality — it’s the one that most clearly announces to you where and when you are, how you are interacting with your mass media and why. Well, McLuhan I ain’t, but even I can make it out at this kind of distance: every era gets its own flavour of meltdown, as the medium messages you its massage. And this time around it’s all about selling you the same thing twice, that you already own.

That you already lived through, and survived.

So in the New Pub Concept, things are all wrong because they’re just the same as they always were, only upside-down and distorted: the dancefloor’s on the walls, making the room’s floor and ceilings alarmingly small and close, but the “old-timey” typography comforts and reassures you, leaving room for the LED scroller…

…To get you excited, is the idea I think. But of course here again is the big why of it all: why is that its function, and not something else’s?

Finally we come around to it: it’s control, again. Management and massage. Well, naturally it is, eh? I mean, don’t we all know that large corporate entities never balk at recycling the recycled? “Oh, you took that thing we used to bullshit you with, and repurposed it to indicate our bullshitty nature…wow, thanks for giving us a new way to sell you your own bullshit!” Not that I’m saying we’re stupid, after all it isn’t our fault that modernity’s essence is economic…!

Hey, I think the Enlightenment went thataway, Sheriff…!

But in the era of the present, this kind of winking-at-you-winking-at-me thing gets less useful, and more Steve Austin, all the time. “Hey,” says the LED-scroller. “Hey buddy. Hey, buddy.”

Yeah?

“Hey, we’re really going somewhere now, eh? I guess we made it. Together.”

Yeah, well…I guess we kind of did…

…Whoever you are.

Thus it is revealed, that those who do not learn the lessons of pop iconography, will be forced to repeat the class.

...This way out, Bloggers…Do Come Again…

“Nature Is Orderly, Regular, And Has Patternedness”

Wow.

Dear Internet Search Person:

Thank you for visiting my blog.  It is not a very good one as far as discussing these deep questions goes — at least, its proprietor is not particularly qualified for such discussions.

However.

I do believe that Nature is patterned;  the question is, can its patternedness survive for long in our minds if crammed into a conception of order and regularity?  I would guess not;  and I think that to be alive to the patterned nature of our existence is far more important than establishing an ordered regularity to our thoughts about Nature.  We are always learning things that put our previous physical, cosmological, even chemical certainties into a precarious position…order is something we impose on the world through theorizing, and that order is useful to us just until it ceases to be useful.  But “regularity” kills every theory deader than a doornail with some speed, I think.  I believe we’re entering into a time when, merely due to our increasing observational acuity, we can have no theories about the world that don’t incorporate a bit of “wiggle room”…room for atypical observations.  We used to argue about epicycles.

Now, it’s all epicycles anyway.

The only question is:  are they the right epicycles?

I thank you, and Thomas Kuhn thanks you, for your interest.  We all have some catching-up to do.  Some jumping-on to do, I think.

Our telescopes won’t wait for us, to show what’s been captured in their lenses.

That, anyway, is my preliminary answer to your implied question.

I may have more later, when I know more later.