Project Blue Box, Part One

That wise editor Zom of the Mindless picked up on one, Bloggers;  but he passed on one, too.

Which is unfortunate for you lot, because it only gives me the opportunity to bloat the thing up a little, droning on and on in my customary way about a topic hardly anyone was clamouring to hear about…maybe not even me.  Yes:  Zom got the bit about Kirby!

…And so we get the bit about Werthem.

In one-two-three-four installments, no less.

And here’s the first.

***

Mystery Machines:  Trash Culture, Cargo Cults, and the Escape from Participation Mystique

Part One:  “Aqua Regia”

Ah, comic books and cartoons.  Once, they were comfortably labelled “kid stuff”.  But now it seems we’re not so sure what they are.

But maybe…that’s because we can no longer see what they were.

Over the years, much has been made of Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s study of “primitive” cultures, and the miasma of participation mystique in which he concluded they must wallow: this being the developmental stage in which the subject/object dichotomy hasn’t yet been fully realized. Man is enmeshed in his environment so thoroughly that he cannot conceive of being apart from it — he cannot achieve objectivity enough, even to conceive of his own subjectivity. And so science is a foreign country to him, in this state: he can perceive and even imagine effects, but cannot quite work out the mystery of causes. And so it is that he discovers the cultural practice known as magic, which gets all that business backwards: whose chief laws are those of proximity and similarity, perhaps otherwise known to us as the principle that Lesser affects Greater.

Of course the big question is how we are to define “primitive”: because in the year 2009, the idea that there’s a qualitative difference between the reasoning powers of pre-industrial and post-industrial people must give us at least a mild shiver of cognitive distress — before we, you know, toss the fucker. But there are other ways of parsing this, that don’t make the old sociologist look so bad. Carl Jung, for example, proposed that participation mystique was less problematically observed in the stages of an individual’s development than in a society’s — as the child moves up from irrational to rational cognition with advancing age. And we will take yet a different approach to the matter, ourselves, but for now we might as well do at least this to salvage Levy-Bruhl’s reputation: by admitting that if Jung was on to something, then so was he. And if you remember your Frosty The Snowman, you’ll quickly see that yes, he was, and they were, for sure — because young children really do think, sometimes, that when the thermometer gets red that means the temperature’s going up, even if their parents know that the thermometer gets red because the temperature’s gone up. And the difference between those two knowledges (ouch! pomo word!) is, indeed, the difference between magical and scientific thinking. And as we age we do, indeed, give up the former to acquire the latter. Thus it is that we achieve full membership in our culture, whatever culture it may happen to be.

And yet a technical, scientific culture remains different from a hunter-gatherer or even an agrarian culture, and thus we should expect that even if the bridge to adulthood always starts from the same basic magical shore, it doesn’t always touch down on exactly the same sort of further shore of particular knowledge…to exactly the same, identical, form of conceptual destination. Because the transition doesn’t just happen — it isn’t just “development” — but it’s a matter of deliberate education too, and the technical culture has a didactic apparatus of its own, that’s distinct from the pedagogy found in other milieux. For one thing, it educates in the same bureaucratic mode that it does its adult business in: formalized settings, formalized curricula, formalized attire and social roles and achievement criteria and selection-processes and rewards and punishments…

…And for another thing, it has cartoons.

Found quoted online by Karen Green, out of the Columbia Spectator’s arts section:

“Bulliet has a theory that posits comic books as keenly accurate depictions of the inner lives and imaginations of the teenage boys of that particular era. “What distinguished the comic book industry of the 1960s and ’70s from the book publishing industry was that it was more demand-driven than supply-driven,” he says. “Stores were very cautious about what they stocked. Owners knew their stock very well, and they paid attention to what boys were buying.” The output of the industry became totally reflective of the desires, fears, and dreams of the boys who were fueling it. “You can watch, in the comics of the era, the evolution of a sensibility that is specific to a demographic,” continues Bulliet. In Bulliet’s view, comics provide a window onto an otherwise undocumented history.”

We might consider this evidence of the (perhaps unique!) “informal” pedagogy of the technical culture, that parallels its more legitimate system of education: “trash” culture, kid stuff, is rank magical thinking recast as easy wish-fulfillment, a substitute-world that gains depth, texture, and popularity through being the very site in which childish mental competencies are reconstructed as equal to (and frequently, even triumphant over) adult ones. Left ungoverned by official authority-sources, the appeal of this magical alter-didacticism simply grows and grows, piggybacking on the commercial interests of mass communication; and yet in this apparently-subversive body of counterinstructional literature (we shall soon see real subversiveness in it, but not yet), is the very substance of the bridge to adult thinking: the Trojan Horse of rationality, as it were. Fredric Werthem probably wouldn’t agree, but I hope the rest of us can unanimously assent to the idea that we’d have some mighty stultified adult thinking around here, if we had missed that avalanche of essentially anti-bureaucratic science-fantasy and adventure fiction in our formative years. And that’s not just because the value of a creative imagination is nowhere more exalted than in children’s literature, “kid’s stuff”. But it’s because hidden inside the role of low-down, subversive social trash cartoonist is the role of teacher; as hidden inside a child’s fantasy of efficacy and empowerment is always a tinker-toy model of alternative logic, part of whose enjoyment is the process of learning to perceive its intersection with reality. Robin the Boy Wonder is trapped by the Joker and must build a crystal radio set to alert Batman — for those of us whose parents couldn’t afford to put us in Scout Camp or buy us an Electronics Kit, this unexpected access to the world of adult knowledge and powers is a marvellously democratic compensation: it will be years yet, if we are the children this comic is aimed at, before we’ll be introduced to the practical nature of these mysteries in a more properly-licensed environment. Yes, there’s a good reason why Jimmy is wrong, and Superman can’t run for President…but can YOU guess it, Reader…?

So just from this, I would hope anyone (saving Fredric Werthem, naturally: but SHIT! He was actually RIGHT! Just sort of misguided, and swimming against the good flow he thought he was aiding) can see that the “subversive” nature of a child’s entertainment has a vital preparatory function; and if there’s anyone who can’t see this, might I just point out that I still meet people who are convinced I must be a genius, merely because I know that aqua regia is the only acid that can dissolve gold? And yet I got this knowledge from Green Lantern comics, as I learned what I know of dirigibles from “boy’s adventure” stories, as I learned how to pronounce “Vercingetorix” from Goscinny and Uderzo. And it isn’t that I’m claiming there’s nothing to be learned from The Iliad or from Robinson Crusoe. But I am saying that these informal, illegitimate, superficially “subversive” stories have been considered “kid stuff” for a reason. Because that’s very properly what they are.

Except, that isn’t really what I’m saying. Or, at least not all of what I’m saying.

Because merely to acknowledge the existence of the bridge to adult thinking still won’t adequately describe what it’s made out of. Not when Green Lantern’s ring, though nominally a product of some other world’s super-science, is really a crystalline example of our own world’s “rules of magic”; nor when Robin the Boy Wonder doesn’t go to school, never gets any sleep, and ought to dislocate a shoulder a night fighting the nightmare-glyphs of dream-logic, but doesn’t. Scooby-Doo’s aphasic gang of skeptical teens may do a great job of debunking the supernatural, but never seem to notice their dog can talk — and that they themselves have no visible means of support, logical or otherwise* — and this is really quite a fascinating conjunction, a fascinating play, wherein magical entity fights magical entity less in the name of Good, than in the name of a social order practically indistinguishable from the values of science and rationality. “Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot”, Batman reminds us, as he prepares his vampiric costume; in the first issue of the Fantastic Four, the denizens of Monster Isle (“But there’s no such place!” protests the golem-like Thing) are defeated by “an enemy whose every cell is charged with cosmic rays…an enemy who can’t be stopped!…”

So where in older fairy-tale adventures the wild places of the world held special meaning, as the spots in which mundane people went out to encounter the hidden magical forces that ruled their lives, here they are the places where magic fights its last battle, in its last redoubt, and loses. But! As mentioned, it doesn’t actually lose to “science”; it only succumbs to the values of “science”, in such a way that the traditional ethicity of supernatural fist-fights is reconstructed as a specific kind of psychosocial maturation. Because of course the alien technology isn’t real, and the supercharged individuals have no genuinely rational mechanisms behind their powers; it’s all magic anyway, and largely it’s all equipotent, and in a way that’s precisely the point. Because even in the oldest folk-stories, in the oldest parts of human culture, the hero’s success is gained not by natural superiority (in which he is frequently outmatched) but by cleverness, sometimes little more than cunning, in many cases superior (even if surprising) spiritual commitment; and regardless of the form these triumphs take, or whether the heroes are people or godlings (usually they are the latter: the people’s representatives or advocates in the supernatural realm), what all these personal virtues boil down to is a demonstration of the value of human-style ratiocination over mere magical, powerful, symbolic assertion.

But in the folk-wisdom of the technical society, that’s manufactured by technical means, this moral naturally assumes a technical expression: the magic power of the supernatural enemy is not just defeated by cleverness — not simply deceived by it! — but it’s actively denatured by it. Thus, in the world of the superheroes especially, it is more usually human beings themselves who stand as their own representatives against “higher powers”, because the moral of the story includes the reduction of all magical agencies and arenas to scientific ones: as, typically, the conflict of eerie magical power vs. other eerie magical power happens to be decided (just as in the Green Lantern story!) by the application of some technical fact found in the high-school curriculum — in other words, some building-block or other of the technosocial worldview. Thus the superhero’s own power might be outclassed by a more cosmic one, or his own magic power might have an Achilles’ heel, but so long as he wields the irresistible metaphors of magnetism or chemistry, or even optics, even a fictional world of supernatural powers (in at least a superheroic comic-book adventure or a Saturday-morning cartoon) must at least yield to a grade-schooler’s idea of what science is like…if not what science itself actually is.

Which is an extremely important instruction, one might even say critical: because these building blocks do not simply stack themselves up for our benefit out of pure necessity, they are not “just” facts — they don’t just “happen”! — but also in themselves they are part of the contextualization of facts, through which facts are permitted legitimacy in the first place. After all, what is magnetism to a child but a law of proximal attraction, repulsion, and cause? It is nothing less than pure magic itself, until it’s fitted into the puzzle of our culture’s technosocial awareness. And yet this fitting-in is a far more complex activity than it seems. General science education in a technical culture is of necessity very widespread, but it is also (again, of necessity) very thin by its own standards: the summit of knowledge is so far away that full membership in the culture comes not from having mastered all there is to know, but simply from having absorbed the atmosphere of the scientific well enough to recognize it by odour. That the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection is a gross simplification in the eyes of a physicist; but as an example of what scientific and rational principles are supposed to look like it is absolutely immaculate, and so it’s an immaculate exemplar of the kind of knowledge that wins heroic success in the modern fable, the technical folktale’s aqua regia, if you will. The true acid test. Even if it’s, you know…

Kind of wrong.

But again: that’s the point. Robin is the Boy Wonder because he has more general knowledge than you do, but also he is the Boy Wonder because in gathering such a precocious store of general knowledge he has successfully taken the general technosocial worldview completely on board, right or wrong: he’s never frightened by ghosts or vampires, and himself can prey on the “cowardly, superstitious lot” because he’s escaped the cowardice that superstition breeds. Similarly, the more cowardly (and just incidentally, younger-pitched) Mystery Machine crew constantly declare that “there must be some logical explanation for it all!” because this is precisely their credo: that so long as the explanation is “logical” the facts may, and must, stand…but without that logic they can’t, and mustn’t, no matter how they appear. Well, truthfully it is also my credo, and yours, and everybody’s if they happen to be operating outside of the specific deep knowledge of their field — facts without “logical” explanations are as uncanny to us as zombies, and so we reject their existence: we will reject what we see right in front of our eyes, if we have to, just waiting for the logical explanation to swoop down and save us…!

As it always does — dramatically, too — because that’s its job. Or, to put it another way: our job, because these building blocks won’t stack themselves, as uncanny facts are just opportunities to build a better context, and as noted the modern, youthful, technical reader is always crucially involved in a “trash” cultural form. Doctor Doom tells the Fantastic Four that if he uses his shrinking ray on them for a few minutes, when he restores them to normal size they’ll be even more powerful than they were before, because if the dinosaurs had been smaller their brains would’ve been bigger in proportion to their bodies, and so they might not have died out — the implication being that a shrunk-down FF would have powers in “greater proportion” as well, and once they were un-shrunk they’d retain them. Which is, you know, crazy; but the FF fall for it since it’s couched in scientific terms. Hey, it sounds all right to them! However then Reed Richards swoops down to save the day, saying that it wasn’t really a scientific explanation at all, but just a trick, that the real science is thus-and-such, and thus-and-such, and if you were shrunk down to ant-size it wouldn’t change anything except you’d be smaller.

Naturally, we accept his explanation as true within the context of the story. However! We shouldn’t forget that it is only true within the context of the story because he says it is, and because we choose to accept it! Because of course there are no such things as “shrinking rays”, and if there were they wouldn’t work as Doctor Doom’s shrinking ray does, because the facts of real science make that utterly impossible. Or: “crazy”. In fact if you think about it long enough and hard enough, it might even be easier to believe that a “real” shrinking ray would work in the way Doom describes, because of what it would have to be able to do!** And so “the context of the story” is an illusion we accept largely because the alternative model of logic that’s enforced in it isn’t entirely introspective: and also, importantly, because it so happens that we aren’t entirely introspective, either. Both of us, the story and the reader, are using this comic to model real-world thinking about the difference between magic and science. Well, these blocks aren’t gonna stack themselves, are they Big Shot? And so since our own understanding of the real world is implied (or at least intersected) in the understanding of the Fantastic Four’s world, Doctor Doom is more deliciously villainous to us because he’s presented as an anti-scientific didact within a fantasy setting that’s partly of our own creation; and we love Reed Richards’ heroism the more, because although he is no less coercive a figure in terms of authority than Doom is, he enforces a distinction between rationality and irrationality that preserves the real-world contextualization of what science is “like” to a grade-schooler. Even though that contextualization itself is built up of the story’s spurious “facts”. Well…

But perhaps we love him the more because it’s built up out of spurious facts? That we have assented to: and because the temperature doesn’t go up because the thermometer gets red, but the thermometer gets red because the temperature goes up. Of course here there is not only no thermometer, but no temperature to measure: it’s just all made-up.

But from about 1940 to about 1965, it works. Because we make it work.

However, after that…

Christ, I sound like Ditko, don’t I. A-is-bloody-A. God help me, I’m lecturing…

Must try to do better!

Hey, kids: stay tuned to see.

*Although I always assumed they were in a band. Funnier if they were just the roadies for a band, though: “Where the hell were you guys?” “Well, we stopped at this old amusement park, and Velma…”

**John Byrne decided to prove just this point, and artfully, in FF #236.

Flashback! To “No Country For Old Men…!”

So, here it is at last…my favourite Coen Bros. movie.

I’ll always have a soft spot for Miller’s Crossing and Raising Arizona, mind you…but this is so obviously what it’s all been building to, all along, that I don’t see any way for it not to be my favourite Coen Bros. movie.  This is where it all folds together, where the longtime fan finally gets — so unexpectedly, in these days of boiler-room art marketing! — a payoff, not merely a punchline.  A way of looking, of seeing, of talking, of listening…the wry and the sinister, the cute and the chilling and the conversational…

…The space and the time.  The whole thing’s as lean and as spare as anyone could want, and yet there are oceans in it:  time for the eye to drink in everything it needs to.  Time to drink in the colours of the evening sky, and really what is any American movie ever doing, if it isn’t providing excess vista for the viewer’s retina to be enriched by?  Of course the Coens are old hands at this, and everyone knows it;  but here, too, there is a sense of culmination implicit in every frame and beat, that descends all the way from good old Blood Simple‘s formal intrigue, down to plain and hard-hitting personal meaning in the end.  The tricks aren’t tricks anymore, and they’re not to be simply admired now:  every odd observational joke the Brothers ever made is revisited here in the light of some kind of horror — the one aesthetic, as I believe I may have mentioned recently, that is always relevant.  Whose very soul is relevance:  because “irrelevant” horror is a contradiction in terms.

And that’s what’s so remarkable about this movie, pretty much in a nutshell:  it hews to relevance as such a through-line, as such a code, that it (to my mind, anyway) invites rare comparisons.  You may feel free to disagree, naturally;  but before I get back to why I love the thing so much as a movie experience, I just want to get into how it lights up the fluorescent spiderweb of influence in my own mind as a viewer.  This is maybe going to sound a bit whacked-out, because it’s not just Buddhism but Batman too…and just as (I’m so fond of saying) Repo Man was the greatest movie about skateboarding culture ever made, though it included not one railslide or ollie, so I think this movie’s about as Buddhist as it gets though it contains not one shred of ethicity.  And it’s not just for the noir-intersection that we all sometimes sense but never say, that I call it thus:  the grim fidelity to the actual that deliberately lets aesthetic prescriptions slip from its hand…well, but if the through-line in question isn’t centred on good and bad, how about beautiful and ugly instead?

Or, if not beautiful and ugly…how about intelligent and unintelligent?

Skilled and unskilled?

Appropriate and inappropriate?

Close to the Way and far from It, perhaps.  Oh heck, maybe that is what I mean to say.  You see there is at least a bit of Buddhism in every movie, every book…because it isn’t a religion, you know.  It’s an action…

So look, a little weirdly now, at Franny And Zooey:  a sutra retold in chic 1950s New York magazine style, a roman a clef for the paperback generation just feeling their eclectic oats at that time.  Oh, there go the first fireworks outside my window, but I prefer these fireworks:  it’s still incredible to me, that all the various Big Serious short-story writers of twentieth-century America who felt themselves so indebted to Salinger’s influence refused to actually pick up on anything he put out there for their benefit…but do you all think it possible, even conceivable, that crazy old Cormac was the one who got the transmission at that particular Flower Sermon?  Tough truth:  well, if noir is anything it’s elliptical.  And it owes you nothing you don’t already possess.  It doesn’t even offer the thing called understanding:  but instead it merely demonstrates an object.  So, there’s no “story” there, as such…

…Just as my countryman Denys Arcand knew, when he performed his culmination of oeuvre:  there Rene sits in hospital, grappling with the reality of cancer, of death, and that reality truncates every other Hollywood story that bubbles up around him.  All the tropes and all the conveniences fall to the ground half-used, and pointless:  focus is bestowed on a grateful audience, and then it’s taken away, perhaps to see if the gratitude can persist…

…Or even, possibly, evolve.  A hundred pitches in a minute, the Hawking radiation of plot-production, it’s just like The Player, and it’s got just the same point:  stories are great, but ultimately they’re contrivances, and ultimately they evaporate and blow up.  They’re very pretty when they overlap, they make lovely abstract Spirographic particle-tracks…but their purposes are hard to specify, in any complete way.  Stories have limits;  stories have restrictions.  Sometimes it’s necessary to remind ourselves of that.  Say, do these balloons come in funny shapes?

Well:  nope.

‘Less round is funny.

No, I’m not done yet, though my point was arguably done before I even put it in the oven…but let’s take that existential humour for a moment, and look at Batman with it.  Shall we?  Fucking Batman, that’s who it always comes back to on the comics-geek Internet, but there’s a reason for that:  I remember Geoff Klock said he didn’t go to Frank Miller because he thought Frank was a politics expert, but that he went to Frank because Frank is a Batman Expert…and I’ve gotta tell you, that expression’s been rolling around in my head for a good long time, now.  A “Batman Expert”?

What in the hell, I ask you, could that possibly be?

Whatever it is, it seems plain that Grant Morrison’s pretty much determined these days to prove himself one.  But a link comes in, here, courtesy of Batman #700…entitled “Time And The Batman”, for those of you who don’t know, and so there’s a man who understands the spirit of insouciance that the superhero’s heart needs to keep itself beating…!

…And in it, the Batman of the future mocks a supervillain, saying basically “using all these old Master Plans from old Batman comics, don’t you have any sense of originality?”

And the villain replies:

“I don’t invent;  I innovate.”

And right there, I’ll tell you folks…

…That’s the killer line, for sure.

Because it’s absolutely nothing, if it’s not philosophically relevant.  It’s boundary-crossing stuff:  hey, why in the hell would you bother reading these awesome Morrisonian Batman comics anyway, what can they possibly hold for you?  Well, the answer is as simple as pie:  they hold exactly what they have…!

And thus:  a mystery is reaffirmed.  Sure, it looks like it’s just more “meta” stuff, but it isn’t:  it isn’t as insular or as incestuous as that.  It’s a real problem, instead:  what are books about? What are movies about?  Batman’s questions about them are no different from your own, and the answers he gets are the same too.  Story is a burden.  But story is also a beauty.  Morrison’s Batman stories are always ending, always decaying into their own toxic waste-products, and there is something threatening in that, but not unmagnetic.  We are forever poised at the lip of the falls, we are always just noticing that the handrail on the catwalk is beginning to give way….the story itself is always a neon pubescence, the moment of the story is always in the yet-to-come…and then suddenly in the next panel it’s already caught in the rear-view mirror, with no intervening time having passed.  It’s the Marvel Method writ strange:  the impact is felt in the moment yet to come, the impact is felt in the moment just past…the punch-line, eh?  Everything in Morrison’s Batman (especially in Morrison and Quitely’s Batman!) is a moment just past or a moment yet to come, but Batman is always centre-stage in the present, the moments dithering around him like speed-lines in a tunnel.  Still think this is off-topic?

You think Batman’s in there all alone, in the tunnel?

At the centre of “No Country” is a story that doesn’t happen, that we never see unfold.  That’s because the story doesn’t make as powerful a point as does its absence.  AND THE PUNCHLINE WAS ME!  DOODLE-DO!  DOODLE-DO! All superhero stories are a struggle with the nature of maya, of samsara…and if you’re the villain you lose that battle, but if you’re the hero you have no choice but to go beyond winning and losing, to a sort of weirdly absurd long-underwear version of standing-wave peace.  Batman, whatever it is we call Batman, whatever we mean when we say “Batman”, always wins.  Because that’s just what’s in the script, see?

It’s all mapped out already.

But no map’s ever any good without a compass, and that’s the lesson here.  So regard the oeuvre of the Coen Bros., all the funny little absurdities that deflate carefully-built characters:  koans, yeah.  It’s an accidental pun, a space for the “reader” of these words that’s left blank, so he can fill it in himself.  A spiderweb in the dark, under “black” light:  I mean look at these words, they’re gaps too, they’re UV silk too.  The pattern isn’t already there to be seen, it’s the act of seeing that creates the pattern in the first place.  The Grant Morrison Party Line, you could call it, or you could just call it a bit of postmodernism I guess.  We all think postmodernism’s dead because it ran into the very limit that it, itself, specified:  the limits of story, the limits of narrative.  But Gautama’s smile is never very far away:  postmodernism can be reconstructed, too, the same as anything else.  Postmodernism is a lot older than we think, it just has gone by a lot of different Christian names.  You listening, Mindless?  You’ve gotta admit, Damian…the detective thing, it’s fun, isn’t it?  Once you start seeing these things, you see them everywhere.  Sean says he can see the Lone Man everywhere, but I can’t see always him, I freely admit it — for whatever reason, I usually need help to see him — however what I can usually see without special prosthetic aid is the queer phenomenon of Character-As-Diaphragm, where POP! the interior life suddenly finds itself inscribed on the external landscape, and then POP AGAIN! the scalar forces flip to turn the external inwards, abruptly redefined as a bunch of historical scarring like the moving finger writes, on the inside…and you never know when it’s going to happen, so wisdom quickly becomes the ability to manage it whenever it happens.  Except that no wisdom is ever perfect, and no state of skillfulness lasts forever, or anyway remains unchanged for long…unless one is Batman, of course, whose relationship with Time is incorruptible.

Oh, he hews to the Way, does Batman!  He practises his artless art, for sure!

It’s his only real story…!

But enough about that;  we were talking about the Coen Brothers, and “No Country”.  And how it’s my favourite.  All those characteristically absurd deflations, they’ve always been a fingerprint:  the way of seeing and hearing has always been too sharp not to cut.  Here, though, it’s cutting different things.  Ordinarily, you laugh;  whenever you see Raising Arizona, you laugh.  The way you know you’re watching one of their movies is all in how you laugh:  you hear yourself doing it, and you know it’s them just by the sound.

But here, in “No Country”, that’s all turned around.  Folded:  because it really is Raising Arizona, you know?  But seen through the other end of the telescope:  and the humour punctures the ones who deliver the lines, instead of the ones who butt up against them.  It’s the same humour, exactly the same in every way, except it isn’t funny:  it’s terrifying.  And so, predictably, I laughed.  Those throwaway lines, those diamond-splitting strokes!  It’s so Morrisonian you could almost scream.

“DOODLE-DO…!”

Shit, but it’s threatening.  Magnetically threatening.  Headlights on a hill, noise followed by silence.  Real chaos is somebody having to change your feeding tube for you.  Little throwaway lines, sharp as steel splinters.  Deep blue skies.  We’ve seen this before — and that’s the point, that’s where the magnetism comes from in the first place — but never like this, and that’s the point too.

I could write ten thousand words on this movie, and never mention Batman once.  But because this post is essentially a haiku…I did.

Anyone wants to go postmodern on it, be my guest.

What I’m saying is:  all those patented Coen Bros. bits, those funny bits of theirs that they’re so good at…they froze my blood, in this movie.  That shit, in other words, got real.  It got real in a hurry.  I think there may even have been a Doppler effect, it got so real so fast.

I think I may even still be surrounded by the echo of it, actually.

Me and the Joker going down the tunnel with the speed lines.  Still not sure what the relationship of Noir to Enlightenment is, can’t quite seem to figure that one out, old chum.  But, yeah:  well, of course.

Truth is tough.

Tough…!

And also, incidentally:  beautiful, too.

Highly recommend this movie.

Swing Vote Results…

…But first, my own favourite sandwich:  and it’s gotta be banh mi, doesn’t it?

This may turn out to be relevant later, but I think it may just have a longish fuse on it…

But in any case — sorry, Clone! — now that the votes are all in, here are mine:

PRIZE ROUND:

1. Mind Traders Of The Milky Way, by Kieran

Kieran, man…what can I say?  It’s like Space: 1999 crossed with Harsh Realm crossed with Alien Nation crossed with Solaris crossed with Farscape crossed with Planetary, and as bizarre as it sounds I think it would be possible to make…and so how can I not make it my #1?  At the skeletal level it’s nothing we’re unfamiliar with:  the space-bazaar, the sociopolitical first-contact SF drama…that’s good, solid stuff, and shows have been built on it before, but it’s been begging to be defamiliarized and weirded-up a little for a while now, so I can’t help but admire how elegantly you do that job.  Simply strip off the representations, and let the thing be exactly what it is underneath?  Let the skin float away from the bones, and then see which one the viewers really care about deep down?  Well of course, why didn’t I think of that?

Nice one!

2. Lighthouse, by Justin

And then on the other hand, here’s something that plays the conventions all perfectly straight, to make absurdist comedy.  Dry, deadpan SF sitcom parody?  There’s something just a little “space is Canadian” about this too, I think, that made me choose it even over Phosphorescent Beetles — bureaucratic military resource-based outstation social satire, believe me when I say I’m feeling that, Justin!  As conceptually-spare as Kieran’s is baroque, what made me choose this one over The Whale was its universality as an imaginable piece of television entertainment — Jonathan’s LaGrange point gives the whole thing just enough of a solid and specific justification for the space-setting, not to mention a nice clean Big Metaphor, that nothing much else is needed from the idea, and nothing much else is missing.  This is “stripping off the representations” too, in a way:  we’ve seen this type of story before, many times, and it’s always attractive…but I think a big part of that attraction is the embedding of the characters in some sort of alter-world that in many ways might as well be out in Jovian space as on Earth.  The military hierarchy, the public school system, Southeast Asia, Africa, the polar regions…Lighthouse just literalizes what’s underneath all that, tossing in some genuine Cold Equations-style inevitability.  Only it’s in a form that can be played with again and again, never needing to terminate.  Because a comedy about the status quo is always welcome, isn’t it?  So it’s just a matter of finding a place where it gets to hover near said status quo, and not have to move very much itself.

So this one’s perfect…and really, Justin, you should consider just writing that, you know?  I’d read the hell out of it, at least…

3. Seventh Son, by Harvey

And then there’s this one, which actually fits in pretty well with the other two:  because it looks for all the world like it fell out of John W. Campbell’s Astonishing but then stubbed its toe on the Sixties of Haldeman, Malzberg, Lafferty…even Dick.  Is it John Carter on the set of The Starlost? Is it Zardoz, only with Susan Calvin buried somewhere way back in the mix of the SF history?  Or maybe it’s Waldrop, or maybe it’s Farmer…maybe it’s Pohl, or Van Vogt.  Hell, maybe it’s me:  it seems to be everybody all at once.  Which is potentially an appealing thing even for people who aren’t SF fans tired of treating the same old tropes as though they still hadn’t blended into one another:  everybody likes carnage, everybody likes an apocalyptic scenario and a puzzle, but all too often you get stuck yelling at the main character not to be so stupid, you wonder why he or she always takes the wrong turning, you grimly suspect that’s the only thing keeping the unclosed seriality of it all going — that the protagonist is too dumb to get to the mystery, because the writers are too dumb to figure it out themselves.  Well, we have played with this expectation before:  Farscape, for one, specialized in the protagonist who got it, who was as educated about the genre he was in, as we were…but I sense in this one something a bit crazier:  the progressive destabilization of even the “smart” protagonist, as the exterior mystery and the interior one start to get uncomfortably cozy with one another, and the representations start to, not peel away, but flake off.  And seriously, how long has it been since somebody tried to do that right? This reminds me of Harsh Realm as well, a little bit:  not that I had any extra-special fondness for that show, but it did accomplish the defamiliarizing/destabilizing goal pretty much as well as Farscape did (maybe better!), and to my eyes at least it seemed interested not just in creating a milieu in which you could set a bunch of different stories, but in imbuing old tropes with a new sense of mystery and implication, that maybe made them worth visiting again.  You did not actually know what was going to happen in HR, because it wasn’t just a Matrix-like SF virtual-reality environment, but instead it was a stylized VR that operated solidly on the principles of a video game — a game as a game, and perhaps HR was even the first such game-based televisual entertainment? — or, have there actually been any more of them since? — and so it exactly blew up what it exactly laid down:  no parallel or divergent “realities”, no literal translation to a fantasy-based universe that allowed the uncomplicated convenience of a truly “dual” role by skirting the issue of sanity — because it’s all about the Platonic identity-crisis, folks, not the Machiavellian identity-fantasy! — and can you believe they are still not grading that first-year Compare And Contrast essay right, in our universities’ humanities departments?! — but instead the new twist on these old conventions was that it was all lived experience, which is right where the issue of sanity does and ought to build its so-relevant nest.  And that’s just what I see going on in Harvey’s effort here, too:  very pressing warm-blooded existential problems with a very crunchy genre coating on them.  The thing, once again, is exposed for exactly what it is.

Which is what all three of these proposals have in common, that made me pick ‘em — because this is the current TV landscape we’re talking about, that can now tolerate things like Mad Men:  shows where theme truly skeletonizes plot, in order to create an unusual focus.  And all these three seem like they could really run with that sort of thing, to me…

SWING ROUND:

1. The Whale, by Justin

…Unfortunately, as a result of me being into that aspect of showmaking at the moment a lot of really excellent ideas got passed over.  Justin’s second effort is one of ‘em, and I have to say it was a really close shave, ’cause I love this too.  Well, but how do you not?  The damn thing’s got everything we look for in an SF show, including uncertainty…and I note with some strange satisfaction the recourse some of you are having to what I suppose is the basic “lost in space” template, which I think it goes without saying could also use some updating and weirding-up!  Lost in space…yeah, there’s some meat on those high-concept bones yet, but it’s something that (one senses) the Book says you should not even try, doesn’t work, people don’t want it anymore.  Which is of course untrue:  you couldn’t have had BSG without it, for one thing.  And then there is again Farscape, and what the hell:  people even seemed to enjoy Quantum Leap, now that I think of it.  All stories of the great Fugue, but what’s particularly charming about The Whale is how it fuses the political with the picaresque, all inside a great big confining shell of frustrated navel-gazing, a generation ship without the Heinleiney bits…and an edgy humour lurking around the edges, that doesn’t inform the drama so much as it contends with it…which is some good design right there, if you ask me.  The factions don’t seem like crazy people, and the effects of the politics are (just as here on Earth) ultimately not directly observable;  and therefore they’re difficult to classify for good or ill or purposeful or pointless — because after all, you can’t have sides without a centre.  So this one may have the broadest scope of possibility concealed inside it, and I almost did pick it because I like it as much as anything…except I want to see “Lighthouse” just that tiniest bit more, even if this one’s a more precise fit to the requirements of TV, and the other could work just as well in short stories, and so there you go.

2. Dark Matter, by Mike

But with this one, things are a lot simpler:  I just want to see a show that bucks a certain trend, and returns to a certain form.

It’s just a prejudice!

I’m just sick of SF narratives on TV preferring military men to scientists, that’s all!

Not that they should never ever do so, but it’s bloody tiring when that’s all you ever see:  SF as nothing much else than “cop drama” with coloured lights in the sky, wherein every professor is an effete sexual deviant and every artist is a hypocritical moral coward, and the subliminal instruction is that authority figures are by definition more noble, more ethical, and more sensitive than thou…and therefore you can no more fail to trust in their ineffable instincts, than you can succeed in judging their failures.  Not that I’m uninterested in the story of practical people exercising their practical courage, in the dark if necessary…but how one yearns for at least an SF show to dare to suggest that sometimes in order to deal with the “dark matter”, you’ve got to have the grey matter!  Eh?  And rely on something other than submission to whatever the local equivalent of priestliness happens to be.  Hey…we accept it when it happens on House, don’t we?

Well, but even there it doesn’t quite happen in the right way.  And “instinct”, like inspiration, is a very fuzzy sort of plot-hammer…or should that be “plot-tweezers”?  Forever being used to make discriminations too fine for intellect’s blunt force to get away with — well, but maybe it’s time to have intellect make some fine discriminations of its own, like:  maybe you can’t trust instinct or inspiration to do your job for you.  Maybe they don’t exist, at least not as we’re so happy to believe they do.  Maybe human knowledge has limits, that can only be pushed back at cost.

And that might be the Wrong Reason for me to like Dark Matter, when you get right down to it…but what can I say?  It kind of grabs me.

Grabs me!  I don’t know;  I just want to see it, that’s all.

3. Tall Tales, by Matthew

And finally, I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve just about decided I don’t really know how filmable Tall Tales (such a good name!) would be in truth…but again I’ve just got to fall back on prejudice.  Like “The Whale”, how do you not like this for a show, unless your heart is so stubborn as to be called flinty?  Its virtues speak for themselves so well, I think, that I don’t even need to describe what I like about it…

Well…except…

I was just thinking about the problem of “American mythology” recently.  It’s tough, right?  Can’t use the myth of the place you left…can’t use the myth of the place you’ve arrived in.  So you’ve got to improvise.  And that’s a powerful mythic activity in itself!  Lumbering up from the bottom of nowhere, with no base, and trying to fit your hand around an idea good enough to throw.  I am minded of old Can-Am weirdoes like Ernest Thompson Seton, of Audobon, of Franklin W. Dixon…all architects, in their twisted ways, of the unbeknownst American landscape, of mystery and murders…or maybe I am minded of Kim Stanley Robinson, who had his Mars settlers clue into their new ability to make a myth, Islamic Zen Taoist or Christian, but however you look at it you get Big Man Mars…

…Who’s simply a fact of life, like Khidr the Green Man, or Father Time, or Baba Yaga, or King Snowden, or Mother Mary.  I’m not sure what Tall Tales might not do, in an animated form.  It would take some pretty diligent writing!  Because after all most adults suck pretty bad at kids’ stories.  Still, I trust Matthew’s “oh why don’t I just throw this one out there” instincts…

…As a matter of fact:  I’m counting on them!

And…

…

…And so we come to an end, here.  Or:  almost an end.  Counting my votes, I make it for the Prize Round as follows:

Mind Traders Of The Milky Way, with 9 votes

Phosphorescent Beetles, with 8 votes

Zerojidu, with 7 votes

Lighthouse, with 6 votes

Seventh Son, with 5 votes

Tall Tales and The Whale, each with 4 votes

Dark Matter, with 1 vote

…

But the Swing Vote may change everything!

Well, mostly.

It’s Tall Tales that wins it, by just one vote over Venus No. 17 and Seventh Son, both pushing towards the direction of bursting the tape…but in the end, by a nose, it’s Matthew who gets to cast two votes to a favourite-not-himself in this game.  All the while knowing that, whatever happens, he’ll place in that precious Top Three regardless…

Unless…!

There has already been some action in the “guess-who-I-was-pretending-to-be” sidebar-contest, that he doesn’t know about…!

But we’ll get to that in the comments, I think.

Won’t we?

It is not yet decided how ties will be settled.  Except that they will not be settled in a way that leaves people thinking “well, what a whole lot of crap for nothing, I’m through with blogging, this sucks.”  Promise, folks.

Okay, let’s play!

Matthew, cast your newborn votes!

Goddamnit, Harvey Pekar Died

I didn’t know ’til today.  And I have nothing to say about it.  I didn’t know the man.

But I know that sucks, and it leaves me feeling pretty pissed-off.  So here’s my eulogy:

I don’t know why it came as such a SHOCK, and I don’t know why I care as much as I do, but I do.  Some of you may know that I don’t like doing obituaries and eulogies of public people here, because if I started down that road I’d probably do nothing but obituaries and eulogies, and I can’t note and mark everyone, and besides I’m just some guy with a blog.  But then that just makes it weirder, when somebody dies and I ought to feel no powerful connection to them, but it turns out I do, so I guess that means I always did and just didn’t know it.  And so then you have to say something about it, but it turns out you’re not prepared at all, and you wonder why this person and not somebody else, and you wonder what that says about you:  how you can let so many more heartfelt obituaries pass you by for want of time and inclination, but then get arrested by the reality of it all when it’s some guy like Harvey.  Pekar.  Who was a guy you didn’t even know, and even only really admired when you stopped to think of him, which wasn’t really that often, because he was actually if-truth-be-known a stranger.  So…

Fuck it, I don’t know why I’m feeling this one.  But I am.

And I wish I had some good words to say, but I don’t.

Goddamnit, Harvey Pekar died.  I can’t fucking believe it.

I wish I’d met him.

“Flashback! To “Star Trek 2009…!”

And okay, everybody: let’s be serious here. Serious enough not to shoot the messenger?

Yes.

Because you may have liked it, you may have found it fun, but this was a hardcore geek’s movie all the way around, and the sooner we all accept that, the sooner we can get down to recognizing what was genuinely good and genuinely bad about it, and put our liking for it in the appropriate perspective. The story that it wasn’t a hardcore geek’s movie, that’s very flattering I’m sure, but then spin always is — and the thing called “good marketing” has always been distinguished from bad marketing by just this: its willingness to flatter its intended audience with something mostly true, instead of mostly false. So, let me be (as the politicians say) “very clear about this” — in that I don’t want to give the impression that I think anyone’s wrong to like it. We all like the stuff we like, and obviously much of it is horrendously geeked-out and narrow-niched, and none of us are immune to marketing, and none of that is anything like a crime against good taste…but at the same time, I’d be horribly remiss if I didn’t point out that this thing made me laugh my head off in as many places as it made me groan, which is coincidentally the same number of places where it stimulated my inner fanboy’s, ah…

…Let’s call them “reflexes”.

And that isn’t necessarily all good stuff. Because there’s an evident calculation in that: this isn’t a movie, it’s three movies, because somebody somewhere decided that those fannish reflexes couldn’t be “properly” stimulated in just one movie…which is kind of, what’s the word, bad of them…and even worse, none of those three movies are really “movies” either, not even really pastiches of movies, just a memory quilt sewn from bits of other movies and shows and scenes and tropes and (let’s face it) fannish ideas about what would be cool, propped up by the somewhat-crazy and inordinately fan-servicey supposition that there are “good” Star Trek fans who are members of a basically-ungeeky mass market that is well-socialized, and then there are “bad” ones who just live in a little nitpicky ghetto of bad taste and daddy issues, and this movie’s for the “good” ones. Which, I should be sure to say in plain English, is pretty much horseshit…even, from a certain point of view, offensive horseshit…but horseshit that’s at least guilty with an explanation, horseshit that gets saved at the last minute with a Hail Mary pass as Mr. Spock accomplishes the cold restart of the warp engines, because thank goodness for the fact, Bloggers, that there aren’t actually any specially Star-Trek-ized daddy-issue geeks out there in truth as a genuine demographic, that the marketing charge can be fairly levelled against. But rather the existence of those fans as a category of human weirdness is just a fannish idea in itself…after all, who is it that even bothers to watch that “Trekkies” movie, anyway? I’ve told someone about that (awesome) movie, my words all flowing scrupulously from the Hipster Chakra so as to seem as palatable as possible, but then receiving this response no matter how much normal-guy topspin I tried to put on it:

“Yeah, I’m not really into Star Wars, man.”

Because you see, there’s the people who think it’s fucking bullshit, and the people who don’t, and those are the only demographics that exist…

…Whatever we tell ourselves because we happen not to be the guy dressed as Riker who thinks the presence of spirit gum on his face means he can be lewd in a “turbolift” to some girl. The “bad” Star Trek fans…

It isn’t Star Trek that makes them bad. Hell, I’ve been to a Thin Lizzy convention where two harmless people in wigs pledged their love to one another. Massive applause and cheering; everybody had a tear in their eye.

It wasn’t Thin Lizzy, that made that happen.

And so I know that this seems like a way over-the-top statement in terms of blind boldness, to some, but until and unless we can see our way clear to accepting its basic truth, we’re never gonna be able to see what was good about this movie and what was bad — until we can see that the “bad fans” are rare as green rubies, in other words an empty category jury-rigged by someone as a temporary demographic barrel for a temporary marketing gun, then we’re going to be victimized by the parts of this movie’s brilliant marketing scheme that aren’t so nice, and be convinced by them to give up our ability to critically evaluate a thing that we all love, all in the name of despising people who would be exactly like us but for the fact that they practically don’t exist at all. Or do we really want to be in a foxhole with that non-fan online who says things like “dude, it’s just comics; dude, it’s just big dumb fun?” I tell you honestly, brothers and sisters, when someone says something like that, what I hear really coming out of their mouth is “comics are stupid and childish, but I hate this self-identification I’ve chosen anyway so it all evens out”…

And so I reject the elitist sentiment, the negative aspect of the genius marketing plan for Star Trek 2009, in favour of the positive…and thus come to what I hope is honest criticism. “We’re” certainly all the good Star Trek fans…

But this isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, the best Star Trek movie.

And: now that the preamble’s over, let’s quickly begin again. With a fact we should all be able to agree on: that Star Trek (note how I italicize it) was once a fairly large mass-market entertainment machine, and that this is what the “bad fan” stuff is glossing over. My parents have seen “Wrath Of Khan”, for heaven’s sake. Everybody knows about “Beam Me Up, Scotty”. These aren’t deeply subcultural trivia, rare gems of secret knowledge, they’re more like dandelions: they’re everywhere. And yes, some people are allergic, but I humbly submit there’s a real simple rule of thumb, here. My grandmother knew the words to Yellow Submarine despite never having heard it; meaning she knew more about the Beatles than she knew about cooking spaghetti. Yes. That’s what a mass-market entertainment machine is, and the line’s pretty easy to draw. It’s easy to find people who know who Darth Vader is, a lot harder to find people who know who Commander Adama is. More people know Lois Lane, than know Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Star Trek used to be like that.

But not anymore. Of course no one could possibly have come to Star Trek 2009 who didn’t already at least know Jim Kirk, Spock The Ears Guy, Dammit Bones and Scotty…but then there are plenty of people like the “I’m not into Star Wars” guy who didn’t come, and they’re not fans…and do you and I and him and her really make all that much of a common cause with the “Dammit Bones” guy? Or, who are we really claiming to be, who is it we’re trying so desperately not to be? Nothing in Star Trek 2009 was made for the people who only knew those Jim-Bones Spock-Ears characters, because they weren’t the target audience: they were part of the marketing machinery that targeted the real audience in the first place, that audience which is actually much larger than their weird-ass “sure I’ll see it why not” demographic. But the existence of the Jim-Bones folks were only another method — albeit a very clever method, and one that paid for itself into the bargain! — of cashing pop-cultural credit out of the mass-market entertainment phenomenon that used to be called “Star Trek”. And I know I sound like a grouch, but you have to remember that (as I said) it’s no shameful thing to be successfully marketed to. My old friend Emma could tell you that. After all, she went through it way back when, when she confided in me that “actually I liked Grosse Point Blank”.

And I laughed, and said “Well of course you ‘actually liked it’, Emma! After all what is it, but something that was made to get you to say so, and say it in exactly so many words? You and your media-savvy eclectic hipster ways, they really totalled you up and marked you down! High-school outsider John Cusack returns to his class reunion, to a soundtrack you’ve been making mixed tapes of for more than ten years? Is there any way you could not like that?”

And: “Oh,” she said, frowning. “Well…shit. I guess they got me. Damn.”

“But hey,” I said, “why worry about it, you know? So we can be marketed to now…well, so what? What’s the harm? You did like the movie, after all; so would you rather they hadn’t made it, just so you could hang onto your impenetrable hipstress cred another year?”

And okay, Bloggers, I confess it: I did not sound quite this world-weary and wise at the time, and Emma’s both funnier and smarter than me anyway. But let’s take the right kind of gist out of this admittedly self-serving little microdrama…which is just that there’s no shame in developing your taste to a point where you can sometimes, under the right conditions, be handled as a part of a demographic. The irony, at least, oughtta be instructive: since when you started to make all this stuff up about what you liked/didn’t like, you spent at least as much time dreaming of replacing the Establishment as you did revelling in your outsider status. I mean, did we really know what we wanted then, either way? Did we really want to “take over”? Or did we really want to simply wash the old staid formulae away? You can’t live in the complex of undecidedness, the complex of opportunity, forever — eventually all your impulsions do recollide as you inherit your own cultural capital, but the question then is just the question that always was, which is: what kind of story is that going to end up being, as you get older? Will you still be able to own your own taste, once it becomes possible to commodify it? What postures will you be able to adopt with respect to it, that will still let you zig, and zag, and break new unanticipated ground? Or…are there even such postures to be had?

Well, sure there are, and no one’s saying there aren’t. If you’re like me and Emma, you don’t have to look at “Grosse Point Blank” as the point where you were forcibly cashed out, because you took your time about selling out…because nothing’s stopping you, after all, from engaging with that story…slapping the pen out of the marketers’ hands, and picking it up and turning it around to the page yourself…!

And thus it is, even so it is, with Star Trek 2009. That they got you doesn’t mean your story’s done, or become stupid or futile or pointless. HOWEVER!

HOWEVER…!

You’ve still got to get to grips with it, don’t you? Look, this movie’s pretty fucking cynical in places, honestly. You don’t think that first shot of the Enterprise isn’t her spreading her legs for you? What, do you think it’s a “real” picture of the Enterprise, you think that’s just what she “looks like” when seen from “that angle”? But there is no real Enterprise, and there is no “accidental” angle you can see her from, and it isn’t you that’s even doing the looking — it’s only you that’s doing the seeing. So, yes: they meant it like that. And if you think I’m saying that’s a bad thing…no, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I’m saying it’s a thing that made me laugh my head off, I’m saying it truly was a meant thing — listen up, for God’s sake, that image was MEANT! — but I’m not saying it made the movie a bad movie, or not even really a movie at all, or not even really three different bad-not-movies cut up into one.

Hell, I’m not even saying I didn’t like it.

But come on, it’s there. How is it not there? And somehow I don’t think it’s aimed at the casual Star Trek semi-fan, do you? And so maybe we would (naturally) like to excuse it by saying it is aimed at the “bad Star Trek fan”…but knowing deep down that this Bad Fan business is really code for us, maybe it’s better we pretend it isn’t there at all? The Enterprise legs-spreading thing? Is it possible we can laugh at it? But we like it too much, see that’s the problem. And we know it really isn’t for the people everyone tells us the movie isn’t made to please, don’t we? So we know that, at any rate.

The word, as I’m sure you know, is “self-loathing”. And we might take a moment to wonder what that concept really consists of. “I am this, but there are people who are every bit as this as I am, that I don’t like to think I am similar to.” Well, natch. Happens all over. But it happens more, sometimes: where real love, real idealism, real caring are called into the circle…it happens a lot more, then. Where nerves get raw, is where something’s really at stake, on both sides; and there’s perhaps nothing so alarming as a fellow fanatic, because you are not free to withhold your respect from them unless you are also willing to withhold it from yourself.

Succinct enough for you, Bloggers?

I mean there’s just one sort of GEEK, isn’t there?

Understand, I’m not saying there aren’t things in this movie I thought were fantastic. I thought the scene with Spock and Uhura in the turbolift was fantastic. But it was fantastic because I’m a Star Trek fan. As a reinvention, as an example of how this stuff can still be made fresh while simultaneously trading on tired old fanwanky expectations…well, there’s no other scene quite like it in the movie, and I mean that both sincerely and sadly. And as an example of things you can do in a movie, if making a “real” movie’s what you want to do, it’s really rather good. Not exactly stuff we’ve never seen before, true. But decent stuff, stuff with some emotional pep to it, a place in the script where acting can be done, a place where directing can be directing and not just CAD-work…but let’s not kid ourselves, the punch it had for dedicated and hopeful fans, that’s a different punch than the punch it had for casual fans who know Spock-Man and little else, that percentage of its audience made so remarkably low, by the fact that the original series was so remarkably good, and so appealing to the mass market. But then that’s also part of what makes it such an effective scene: that it invokes that semi-fan appreciation that our self-loathing (to the degree we have it) encourages us to identify with. And so in this sense, to the right sort of eyes, it’s got two different complexions. It’s got two different kinds of roots, it’s of two different worlds if you take my meaning…and that appeals to just a certain type of Star Trek fan anyway…

That is: to every Star Trek fan, if the truth be known. And yet not everything in the movie cooks out so felicitously. The Rebel Without A Kirk opening is pure nonsense, for example: one of the most unnecessary bits of paper-folding I’ve ever seen in any movie, I am telling you that whatever that Roy Scheider “Sealab” TV show was called (damn, what was it called?) (okay fine, so I know damn well what it was called, it’s an O’Bannon joint after all, I mean jeez), it did this same thing better and to more purpose. You know? And in fact that’s where the whole passage was lifted from, not from James Dean at all. (By the way, did you know J.J. Abrams is only three months older than me? Believe me, I know his influences cold, that guy. I could go as him on Hallowe’en, if I wanted to. Honest to God.) But anyway I won’t bore you you with all the nitpicky ubergeek stuff in that scene, that I could go on for hours and hours about, all the reasons it’s wrong, all the reasons it’s dumb because it doesn’t fit, all the reasons it’s amazingly ridiculous beyond all semblance of science…little “WhatNot” reference for you guys, there…except just to say that every complaint that’s ever been made about it is dead right, yes the supernerds are right about it all, I’m sorry folks!…even sorrier that you are the supernerds, because there are no other nerds but you here anyway!…because “dumb” is entirely as bad as that scene gets, and lots of movies have dumb crap in them, and therefore so what? When it’s just summer fun, right? People responded to that silly scene, it grounded their expectations of Chris Pine’s Kirk even if it it grounded them in remarkably inelegant style. But they knew what they were looking at, and that was the point.

It’s the only point this movie has, when you bake the shit out of it. You always know what you’re looking at. This is where the crosshairs are, you guys. You know when you’re looking at comic relief. You know when you’re looking at dramatic confrontation. You know what you’re looking at when you’re looking at “The Big Reveal”. You can almost imagine Jeff Probst sitting in the seat behind you saying “now wait for my go”. This isn’t a movie, not even three movies, it’s a telegraph transmission: message follows stop act surprised end. One-two punches?

I gotcher one-two punches right here.

Everything here is from something else. The original Star Trek series is mercilessly ripped-off every twenty-two minutes like clockwork, sometimes inelegantly in sense, sometimes elegantly in the copying of its highly-skilled rapid-fire should’ve-been-impossible-given-the-constraints quasi-Olivier-movie-style Shakespearean shot-framing; and the Star Trek movies are on a similar cycle, only exactly out-of-phase Mr. Spock…and the rest is stuff you saw in other places growing up. We’re missing John Cusack in alien nose make-up saying “come with me if you want to live, plate o’ shrimp”, sure, but that’s about it. It’s Photoshop filmmaking, a lot of the time: the effect of the big-ass sea-urchin Romulan ship with the rotting Caesar in its heart, so familiar from the Nemesis movie that gracelessly beamed down “Wrath Of Khan” into its scriptwriting process, is made infinitely more watchable by the hybrid filmmaking techniques born of computer colouring in comics, and whoever it was who did Firefly’s (and then BSG’s? am I right?) external action sequences — man, I’m telling you, this is a Wildstorm movie in so many ways! — and yet of course it’s still essentially dull no matter what tableaux are successfully made, because, how does one put this, no one cares. Seriously, the fucking vendetta-bound Romulans, it’s too much now. TOO MUCH. This guy’s like a Romulan space-trucker. , this Shakespearean villain-dude, here.  It’s stupid. But then it’s the first time the casual Star Trek fan has seen that shit since ST: TMP, right?

That’s what it is, right?

It’s a mash-up.

And one of the things that is worst and most wrong about it, is that it never aspires to be much of anything more. However, let me pause a minute to give some praise where it’s due…before I charge up the phasers again. Zachary Quinto’s momma’s-boy Spock? That’s some beautiful stuff, honestly: as good as the Thor-dude they had in the Ultimates, and possibly in exactly the same way. The pugnacious little dickhead Kirk, the burnt-out mid-thirties McCoy whose backstory is lifted from New Voyages pre-Vonda McIntyre (and do not tell me I don’t know the inside of J.J. Abrams’ skull as well as I know my own, damn you!), all just brilliant, the “pump-up-the-lens-flare” business on the hyperlit Ikea bridge, it’s all fine and good and good and fine. Bring the bar fights, bring my countryman Bruce Greenwood who played such a great sociopath on St. Elsewhere and…elsewhere…playing against against-type here, Canada’s own Dennis Quaid, and by the way we always knew one day he’d play Bobby Kennedy, that was always in the cards, guys…I believe he used to put in on his resume: “one day will play Bobby Kennedy”…

…And bring the callbacks to Marvel’s “Starfleet Academy”, bring that Claremont/Byrne X-Men shit too while you’re at it (Simon Pegg = Nightcrawler, FYI), bring every ingredient. The green chick. The Kobayashi Maru. The goddamn apple-biting in the Kobayashi Maru. You guys see this happening, right?

Truly, I hope to God you do: because it literally was made for you.

And, in places: extraordinarily well-made. But now enough with the praise for the influence-peddling: let’s talk movie-ness.

I keep saying there are three bits of movies stuck onto this thing. That’s because there are. One is the movie that’s the essential component of what you might call the whole “Star Trek Begins” business…the one with a young Kirk going to Starfleet Academy and being all Kirktastic. And that’s nostalgia-stuff, sure…but it’s also the movie we most came here to see, and for the best of reasons. Because the TNG stuff went hopelessly wanky and narrowcast long, long ago; because the TOS stuff needs rebooting in a huge way, if this franchise is going to stay a franchise. And because thanks to Gene Roddenberry’s Runyanesque work habits back in the Sixties it all still works as well as it ever did…and so somewhere in all those facts (but particularly in the last one!) there’s the opportunity once again to make the Thing With Two Symbolic Complexions from it. And genre fans like us are used to seeing our old favourites, franchise-wise, undergoing reconstructive surgery…if you like superhero comics you’ve seen practically nothing but this for going on thirty years now, and wondered if the time of the Nostalgic Reconstructionist would ever, ever ever, ever really end…and to be honest it hasn’t exactly been easy to watch TV in this time either. But truly vital art-forms, Captain, have already penetrated this particular veil; gone on to make new really new stuff. So why can’t we?

Star Trek Begins. We could’ve cleared the decks, for real.

It’s just possible that my Dad would’ve watched it.

But that movie got abandoned after about forty minutes, and the first ten minutes of it was taken up by Rebel Without A Kirk, anyway. Understand, I’m not saying it would’ve been a good movie, necessarily. Indeed, I wouldn’t really have asked it to be: hey, I like fun as much as the next guy. But it would’ve been — and this is important! — a movie.

Which is something that my Dad, though I think he probably doesn’t know how to say it (because he assumes every movie will be a “movie”), really cares about. But he wouldn’t've liked this one, because instead of a movie, we got an extended trailer, a Star Trek music video, basically “Hungry Like The Wolf” with tricorders. And then jumped sideways to the next movie, which was basically like someone doing an impression of Ron Howard doing Steven Spielberg. I mean that as a compliment, actually: because at least it didn’t seem as desultory as the “first” movie did. An actual problem, a couple of real character moments. I mean you hardly noticed the failure of will that fell back on notions of alternate timelines and Romulan vendettas and better movies, to make it all go forward. For a moment — for a couple of moments, actually! — I forgot that this wasn’t a Hard Reboot, a true Star Trek Begins…

But maybe that’s because the plot of this second movie was so darned familiar, so I just thought they were doing it “again”. I mean, no wonder I liked it! It was actually Star Trek. I mean: Star Trek with annoying cutesy bits, why I half-expected to see E.T. sitting in a closet pretending to be a stuffed animal at some point…perhaps talking in a Wussian Accent…but WHATEVER! At least to see some original Star Trek, you know? Or some shadow of it. Young dickhead Kirk: I did not see enough of him in the first movie in this movie. I was told plenty about him, of course. But see him I did not. Listen, I’m not going to kid myself: that Rebel Without A Kirk business was not showing, but telling. It was TELLING. It was lame. But here, for a precious forty minutes or so, I actually did get to see him in motion, in action, in justification. And not by accident!  Because you can tell where the good parts of this movie are: the McCoy character’s in them.

And:  what a huge problem, really!

They didn’t know what to do with him, once he’d got his plot-point thing over with!

Fucking McCOY, they didn’t know what to do with…!

Just as Sexy Uhura turned as desultory as all get-out when it came to the part where her loyalties ought to have been divided…and sure, that could’ve been a beating heart in this movie…but this was never supposed to be a movie anyway, okay? It was never supposed to be, and so it never was. So don’t blame the messenger. And of course it was all in service to the big black sea-urchin of lame-ass time-travelling no-name Costco-cheese-sample Khan, and his complicatedly useless plan of revenge, but do I blame the actors? Do I blame the second unit? I most certainly do not: they did their best, with what they had. It minds me of Crystal Skulls, where for a moment some filmmaking genius was seen in a wheel almost going over the edge of a cliff, just as the snake slithered through Marion’s shoe in Raiders…and here is where I don’t blame myself for my ridiculous tastes: yeah, I liked it. There were moments, and I wanted to see them. I wanted to believe we could take Star Trek on into the land of the new really new, and for a brief clutch of moments here, we could. Of course Ham-Fisted Kirk blows the scene: that’s unfortunate. It seems deliberate. It seems perverse. But can’t you smell the fear here, Bloggers? These are highlights from three movies; don’t you wonder why things were so arranged? Can’t you see why there’s such a dependence on what’s worked before?

Can’t you see, in fact, that the filmmakers ate from the fruit of their own poisonous marketing tree?

If they weren’t fans themselves, they might’ve been up to the task. But: undecidedness. In all this undecidedness, here’s the closest they get to a decision, but they blow it. But they tried? Well at least they tried. And this second movie might’ve been good, too. It looked good; like that ad for The A-Team where they try to fly the tank, and then Face-Man goes topside like the total loon he always should have been. And if that was only the come-on, then I’d probably plunk down some money…but unfortunately these days the come-on and the payoff are usually identical…sigh…

And so on into the third movie, the aggressively head-patting one. Bloggers, do any of you really think this movie wasn’t made for the hardcore geeks to marvel at? Do any of you really think there are such things as non-hardcore-geek-fans of Star Trek? It’s just that being one isn’t such a bad thing, that’s all. We’re all Star Trek geeks now. These dreams are what our stuff is made on, has been for twenty years. But let us also bear in mind that this bathlith cuts both ways: no one who isn’t a geek ever saw a Star Trek movie past “The Voyage Home”. Just didn’t happen. That movie attracted tens of millions; “Generations” attracted dozens of hundreds. “Final Frontier” I’m not sure anyone even saw. I wish I hadn’t seen it. Come now, brothers and sisters: this shit got unpopular a long time ago. A hundred million Star Trek fans went to sleep for the simple reason that the money wasn’t left on the screen. My grandmother knew more about the Beatles than about cooking spaghetti; my parents know more about the Sex Pistols than they will ever know about the Borg Queen, or Marina Sirtis getting drunk. If they’d seen this third movie (and they never will or would), would they not have thought “jeez, that’s some pretty harsh and fucking expensive discipline Starfleet’s got, sending off a guy in an eight-million-dollar escape pod to the surface of some fucking moon or other…I mean what, they couldn’t've just taken away his key to the executive washroom or something?” Of course they would have, because they would’ve demanded the mass-market Star Trek stuff, the RunyanRoddenesque stuff, the stuff that made sense. And they wouldn’t have got this marketing missile’s impact, so they wouldn’t have liked it. Nor would they have thrilled to the weird distortion of Kirk going through several blends of Galileo Seven, Empire Strikes Back, and All Our Yesterdays…and the Farscape one where Aeryn dies…and the goddamn X-Files movie…and Red Dwarf…I mean pastiche is pastiche, people, but this is ridiculous, this isn’t desultory it’s insultory, and what in the hell’s going on, here? Oh yes, I forgot: the extremely bad and derivative and take-it-away-already overplot, and the grotesque light-fingered parody of the fan-service. Not that the two aren’t the same, eh? Trust me when I say I had scrupulously avoided any spoilers for this thing when I saw it, but I KNEW…Good Christ, I knew it all. Suddenly I was the time-traveller, suddenly I had the perfect foreknowledge. May I go so far as to say it was “icky”? ICKY, my friends: that’s what it was. Is it wrong for me to say I “hate” the character of Mr. Spock now? I HATE him; who the hell is he to be so goddamn cavalier? Do you want your future self to come back to you and say “oh, you know what you should do, divergent self who’s totally different from me? EXACTLY WHAT I DID, and never mind I’ll take care of everything else…” I mean the basic dramatic misunderstanding here is immense, I know it all graphs out tickety-boo on paper but the movie itself is at pains to establish that Spock has MOMMY ISSUES, not DADDY ISSUES…! Holy Hannah, one wonders how this could’ve been misunderstood, one wonders why whoever let Zachary Quinto act in Movie #1 suddenly withheld that permission from him in Movie #3…and why they never really understood the original Spock character enough to make all his changes in this movie stick. They know what inside-out looks like, and they do that pretty fine…but unfortunately they also can’t tell upside-down from right-side-up, and the movie – I should not say “movie”, I should say effort – suffers because of it. We should’ve just had a Hard Reboot, honestly. In the third movie they are simply losing it, simply going on the stuff that appeals to the “bad fans”, that the people who liked this movie are not supposed to be, it degenerates into junk like the Genesis planet, it’s head-patting garbage, it doesn’t even bother to slap you on the back and create bogus cameraderie, it just sends you to bed with a Bad Fan Cookie. And it’s sort of horrifying, and it has a sort of horrifyingly undeniable appeal. I like this Spock, I like this Kirk, I would like this McCoy if he was only onscreen long enough to register as McCoy…but more than any of them I like Simon Pegg, and it pisses me off to no end that it just doesn’t work with Simon Pegg. I mean, can we just cut him free to either be Scotty or a Pegg-ized version of Scotty, or at any rate not the venerable Australian dude who plays the looney-tune in Cosi Fan Tutti guest-starring on Farscape with an alien pet/sidekick that might as well be out of Gremlins? I don’t really care if the movie’s any good, if Simon Pegg’s in it: that is, if Simon Pegg being in the movie is what it’s all about. I’d take an Ape Lincoln moment. But it seems the Ape Lincoln moment here is all about getting Christopher Pike into that space-wheelchair. AND IN EVERY OTHER RESPECT IT IS THE SAME AS THAT SHITTY POTA REMAKE, except there is no real “Ape Lincoln” bit to speak of. Chris Pike might just as easily not have been paralyzed; because we’re rebooting, remember? But there is no commitment here: at the end of the trick, there’s nothing to show. Nothing happened. You just recognize things that you see, and that’s all.

In “Wrath Of Khan”, say this for it: something happened.

In “Nemesis”, even: something did happen.

But here there’s nothing.

And was the the Dammit Bones He’s Dead Jim Mr. Spock! contingent really not turning to themselves and going “what in the…?” at the Chris-Pike-In-The-Chair bit? With the rising chorus of “aaah”s all around them?

Christ, can we really even believe they were there, this time around?

Or that they even existed, or were we just sold a bill of goods. Not to beat a dead horse to death, but “Wrath Of Khan” and “Voyage Home” required nothing of any audience member but that they had heard of the show Star Trek. A friend of mine, on reading Watchmen for the first time, admitted that he felt a lot of stuff going over his head, because he wasn’t well-versed in the vocabulary of superhero comics. My mother didn’t know what the hell happened in Lord Of The Rings, even though I’d read it and ranted about it and tried to independently re-invent Elvish grammar (hello, Holly!) for about six years as a kid…until I told her “psst, Mum…the Ring is like Alberich’s Ring in The Ring…”

Then she said “OHHH!”

“I wondered what the hell everyone was going on about it for…”

But where was I.

Oh yes: the next movie.

Will it be Klingons?

I would be happy if it were, even though it’s clearly impossible for Mr. Spock’s time-travelling escapades to have produced new really new Klingons. But I am not one of the “bad fans”, Bloggers, and I would dearly love to see some new Klingons, no matter the justification so long as we the members of the audience don’t have to fuck around with knowing what a retcon is, or with having to have any opinion of it one way or another. I was in favour of a Hard Reboot, remember? And I still am; and maybe that could be the Ape Lincoln moment, the moment that fails to make sense but doesn’t matter: that the next movie truly and honestly won’t give a damn about that embarrassingly crucial pointless stuff. Just throw in some good new Klingons, and maybe I’ll choose to believe. Hey, there were a lot of new things in Star Trek 2009 I might’ve chosen to believe, actually!

But they didn’t give me the chance.

This stuff was well-made, back in 1966. Anybody could believe in it. It could go all over the world and be as famous as John Wayne, or Pepsi-Cola. There might even be movies made of it.

However, as yet, the “movies” thing is still part of the unwritten future.

I hate to tell you that it sucked, I really do. But it did.

But don’t shoot…!

Honestly, I’m unarmed.

I Don’t Know Where I Found This Search-String…

…Or maybe it’s something Englehart said?

Certainly it’s goddamn clever enough for him:

“The Tragedie of Batman, Prince of Denmark”

…Oh God, just to say it out loud one time!  JESUS!  It’s a weight off my shoulders.  How long have I been carrying that?  Okay, Bloggers, I guess we can use my Dad’s barn for the theatre…

Zom, you can knit the costumes…

David A, you can be the stage manager…

Any other volunteers?

Green With Irony

So…

I just watched Ang Lee’s Hulk, again.  And I seriously think I’m gonna buy the extended deluxe DVD, if there is one.  Because suddenly I am captured, virtually pinned to a metaphorical corkboard, by the irony:

They had every hope for the project.  Got the best technicians, the most creative scientists, got a GENIUS to run everything, and gave him his head.  And at every stage, everything looked like it was going perfectly.  So much money invested;  so much money would be generated.  Why the other movies had done INCREDIBLY well…!

And then…

The big boys got something, with Ang Lee’s Hulk, that they never anticipated, and din’t know how to deal with.  You know what his sin was?  HE LOVED IT TOO MUCH. He took it too seriously on its own merits.  He treated it for real on the one hand, treated it like a comic book on the other.  And he committed to both ways of seeing it.  This is the fourth time I’ve seen this movie.

Ang Lee’s a fucking BRILLIANT GODDAMN GENIUS.

He does everything right.  I’ve gushed before about his super-transgressive editing, his wish to capture what comics look like, the music he chooses, his informationally ultra-dense titles that made my friend Stella walk out of the theatre before Eric Bana’s face was ever seen…the lichens and the desert floor, the close sight turning to the long sight…I mean you guys, the only thing I never liked about this movie was the HULK!

On fourth viewing, that’s changed.  I think I like the Hulk best of all.  I like how his huge face signals emotions.  I like that he’s really Banner.  I think they did a terrific job on this.  My friend Ed told me, a few years ago:  “check out Sam Elliott in this, he is going to town on being Ross.”  I never really believed him, because I saw that fucking Roadhouse movie — I can’t stand Sam Elliott.

It’s taken me four viewings.  But I believe Sam Elliott read the comics.

And don’t get me started on perfection-girl Jennifer Connolly.  Just imagine this whole movie in subtitles.  No, wait, don’t imagine it:  because she delivers a FANTASTIC line.

“All I’m saying is:  frogs start raining from the sky…who’re they gonna come to?”

Get serious, I kind of believe she’s a scientist for about thirty seconds in this movie!  But more than that:  superhero stories are all about the costumes and the colours — the Hulk being a hero wearing green and purple was an innovation, I mean do I have to say it once again that the Hulk is the perfect Marvel Comics version of Superman?! — and Betty Ross has a costume too.  I don’t want to come off like a dick about it, y’know.  But what I think is so brilliant about her costume is that Jennifer Connolly probably wears it in real life as well.  Well, don’t we all remember how the people we used to go to school with had their habitual “costumes”?  And what’s better for a pretty blue-eyed brunette super-scientist than an appropriately-distressed vibrant jean-jacket?  Look at the confrontaions Betty has with her father in this movie:  there’s real acting there.  Ed was right about Sam.  I’m right about Jen.  I could’ve watched those two just sit in a room together and squirm for two hours alone.  But for her, she gets some range:  supergenius one second, angry daughter the next, then she SCREAMS (beautifully, I might add), then she has a scene where she’s frightened, then she has a scene where she’s angry, then one when she’s determined…I mean who knew a crap comics movie could give an actress so many things to do?

ANG LEE.

Look, I’m gonna go on about it for the next couple of days.  I’ve got lots of good things to say about it.  You really need to see it four times.  It’s a terrific movie.  Just for now, I’m concentrating on something.  But it really is good.

Oh, they thought they could control the outcome, didn’t they?

But they couldn’t.

So they had to wipe the project, start all over with another project.

Control, control, control.  I’m telling you, folks.

Some things can’t be controlled.  That’s what makes Ang Lee’s Hulk such an awesome movie.

So…I’ll just say it, shall I?

“Within Each Of Us, Oftimes, There Dwells A Mighty Raging Fury.”

Go ahead;  watch it again.  Dude from “Crouching Tiger”, right?

Crowd-Pleaser!

Can’t go wrong.

Moon Knight And Jack Staff: Slight Return

Have I said it already, and I just don’t remember it?

So here is where the gears finally stop spinning, and catch:  that long-awaited moment known as “the payoff”.  Having devoured “Everything Used To Be Black And White”, basically “Essential Jack Staff”, all the B+W stories collected into a slimmish phone book, I couldn’t stop thinking about it…

…Except I wasn’t sure if that was because it was almost perfect, or simply “perfect, almost”.  I should really take the opportunity to wax lyrical at some point about what it’s like to see a talent struggling to pierce the eggshell with its beak:  it doesn’t all have to be Phantacea (and there is a “Forgotten Comic” for you folks, by God!), because sometimes it can also be Alpha Flight, you know?  Sometimes it can be something like The Defenders — say, in the Kraft/Giffen years — and sometimes it can be something like Moon Knight.  I’d mention Deathlok here, too, but that is already being done far more interestingly than I could ever hope to do it, and so never mind…never mind…but for God’s sake go READ IT…!

And then let’s get back to the main comparison.  As I mentioned earlier, maybe it’s all a bit obscured by the distance down time’s curving barrel that it has to travel, but from pretty early on in MK it was obvious to the readers of the day that something pretty amazing was starting to happen here…and yet, though Ed and I spent a fair amount of time enthusing about this new Moench/Sienkiewicz team and how perfect they were…well, as has been observed already, they actually weren’t perfect, and those first twenty issues or so are bound to disappoint the new reader of 2010 — or the old reader going back to them in 2010! — because of what we expect to see and then don’t.  We only see flashes.  We wait on pins and needles for them to come faster and faster and brighter and brighter, until they turn into a steady, burning brilliance…but then they don’t, and holy crap just how long is this going to take, anyway?  You know?  Before we finally get into that “oh man, you should really read those old Moon Knights, I’m tellin’ ya” territory, that everybody keeps talking about?

Well…like I said, for me it all starts exploding with “Ruling The World From His Basement”…the real lunacy of it, the real commitment to the synthesis…or was that “The Moon Kings” that kicked that off, I can’t quite remember?  Marvel Comics could be, for a few years, a very interesting sort of influence-mangle:  one thing Superman comics can’t do is blend up Superman with other influences, just as Batman comics can only push the boundaries of “Batmannishness” so much…because in the end they’re constrained, by being such powerful influences themselves.  There’s just too much there there, to pretend you can be anywhere else.  But at Marvel you can put Clark Kent through the wringer ’til he comes out Bruce Banner;  and instead of building up to occasional episodes where you have to wonder if Bruce Wayne is crazy or not you can start out with him being crazy/not crazy/no one’s quite sure not even him…and paint the walls with that stuff so constantly that it just becomes background texture, just becomes the shape that happens to be the shape of the lens this movie’s filmed through, that’s all.  Yeah, okay:  so Bruce Wayne’s crazy, probably.  But so now what?

It takes two years, but eventually Sienkiewicz turns into the Sienkiewicz we know and love today, and the beautiful pictures do indeed turn into his inimitably mad textures, textures everywhere, subtextual textures that remind us what we’ve been reading this for.  MK #25 is a double-sized issue that looks like he painted it by pouring spices and sugars onto the page, like that sand-art girl on “Ukraine’s Got Talent”;  meanwhile Moench’s purplish-noir magazine-superhero stuff drags around in it and tightens through it like a cord, making a great and vigourous mess.  We were only working up to this:  this isn’t somebody’s riff on Batman anymore.  You could do Batman like this for a little while, but then eventually you’d have to stop;  but this is Moon Knight now, and there’s very little point even having Moon Knight if it can’t look something like this, from now on.  It ceases to be “the way it happens to be drawn, the way it happens to be written”…but instead this is the real Lee-Kirby/Lee-Ditko heartland, this tone and mood is what this character’s really about, now.  And it’s funny how Moench and Sienkiewicz go at this sort of business:  back in the “Ebon Seeker Saga” (but oh gosh, doesn’t that just sound awful) they burst through for a moment into full-on Thomas/Buscema FF land, and when it finally happens it…uh…feels really weird? Suddenly they start playing by the “proper rules” of FF stories, those same rules John Byrne will exploit in his “back-to-basics” run…but as at least Jim Roeg might note with satisfaction, the Moench/Sienkiewicz team does not take it all the way back to Lee and Kirby in their FF run, because that isn’t the sort of “proper” they’re going for.  Lee and Kirby were strange, vivid, unsettling…but Thomas and Buscema were something else.  I’m reminded of the Lee/Buscema “Origin Of The Silver Surfer” here, funnily enough:  where the mysterious Space-Being is discarded for the Alien Peter Parker, and some might consider that a letdown, but just take a look at that climactic splash-page where the form of the Surfer is finally revealed…! Because it’s more than just poor Norrin Radd who gets transformed, there:  that’s simply the place where Kirby’s irrepressible energy becomes a style, where his Olympian thumbprint becomes an influence like unto an -ism…it’s the real birth of “Cosmic Marvel”, no redeeming qualities required, it’s finally just THERE, it’s finally just inarguable.  Buscema does with the logic of the pictures, what Thomas will do with the logic of the words:  and I think you can’t quite call it “copying”.  I think you have to call it “internalizing”.  Byrne copied and twisted and refinished old elements of the Lee/Kirby run brillantly — let’s be sure to be fair, and say he was more than brilliant at it, most of the time — but he was also (I think quite obviously) updating it all as he went, very conscious in his homage as a good homage-ist must be…why the man was practically postmodern, he was doing some Milan Kundera shit out there!  But Buscema was swimming in Kirbyism, for God’s sake he was dripping wet when he got out of the pool, and his skin all puckered too.  I am hardly slagging off Byrne, here;  what he accomplished was staggering.  But our pal Big John went a bit Zen with the Marvel Universe — Roy may have made Stan’s continuity historic;  but his frequent partner made Kirby’s originality classic.

Which, I think you have to admit even if you don’t agree with me…is quite a trick.

“What the Fantastic Four is really about, now”.  Eventually Moench and Sienkiewicz get there, as Byrne does not…as it isn’t his plan to, anyway, and anyway no one is going to really remember the Moench/Sienkiewicz FF run with much fondness, unless part of the fondness is in the remembering.  Byrne’s incredibly self-aware reboot took, and is justly remembered as Very Good FF;  whereas Moench and Sienkiewicz’ journey through cramped post-Conway distortion-spaces to their oddly unsettling-yet-relieving Buscemaland, of metaphorical psychological harmony dressed up in even more metaphorical cosmic clothing…

Well…

Let’s just say that it’s remembered with such disproportionate fondness, by such a dwindling few, for a reason.  Hey, I still like it myself!  And maybe even more than I did before…but…

…But this is not a eulogy for the Moench/Sienkiewicz FF, so much as it’s using that run as an example:  because as I said, how this team goes at their material is sort of peculiar, and that’s what I want to take a look at.  In FF, they lived in the sublunar realm of the continuators, trying to reclaim the felicity of a true spiritual transmission, like that of the Buddha to his buddy:  some touch of long-lost and probably-unrecapturable grace, whose absence finally (perhaps) necessitated the clever forgery of amanuensis Byrne to get the train across the canyon, the ball across the plate, the mix across the metaphor…whew, this homemade cider’s pretty devastating stuff, I’ve gotta tell you…!

But in Moon Knight they started with that stuff — riffs and pastiches dropping like doves from the sky at a doomed wedding — sorry, it’s the cider — but take that, Mr. Moench! — and moved on up past the sphere of the moon and into (for want of a better term) Kirbyland instead of Buscemaland.  The glove turned inside-out:  the hat pulled out of the rabbit.  Originality?  Well, I couldn’t say for sure if I really do think there’s any such thing for sure…but there’s a reason I wanted to read the Bachalo MK and couldn’t, you know?  Because it absolutely had to be somebody like Bachalo, to do Moon Knight.  I mean, you can’t “copy” Sienkiewicz (oh no, did I say this before?), you just can’t…but you can take his lessons on board, he can be an influence of yours, you can care about it, care about “what this character is about, now”, you can in fact (if you are so motivated) make a hell of a job of following Sienkiewicz’ efforts…and you know Bachalo, he’s a nutcase, he can do truly remarkable things with pencil and paper.  Sometimes, it’s true, I have read a Bachalo book where I did not know what the fuck! was going on, and I’ve shaken my fist at the skies and sworn at him too…but hey, I never said I wasn’t well aware of the fact that he’s an amazing artist.  So:  his Moon Knight.  I was considering it very seriously.

But!

(You’re gonna laugh…)

I didn’t like the writing!

Imagine that, after all that, after all that admission of Moench’s shortcomings, after all that goddamn purple stuff he (let’s not mince words) perpetrated…I mean, isn’t it amazing, Bloggers!  Sometimes you’re lucky enough to see talent fighting its way out of the shell, still! And there is still something unsubstitutable about it.  Of course it’s easy to see Moench wobbling around with our 2010 eyes, but goddamnit if there’s been anyone to write a “proper” Moon Knight since he stopped it!  And I think the reason for it’s because:  he was getting a lot of stuff out of his system, on that book.  Some obsessions.  Some long ticked-over calculations.  God, but this cider’s a killer, am I still typing?  Really, all this time?  And still haven’t got to the point?

Me, I was fond of the “utility player” Moon Knight:  the cool guy.  How marvellous he was, what an amazing breath of fresh plot-point air, in “Who Is Scorpio?” I mean, was that amazing, or what?  I’m embarrassed to say that although I loved the Marvel Horror titles of the 70s, in particular had (and still have!) a huge fondness for “Werewolf By Night”, I didn’t catch too much of Moony in that one…but when he inevitably collided with the Defenders I knew what character in that movie I most wanted to be.  Well, but as soon as the Moench/Sienkiewicz stuff started he became a different sort of Cool Guy…one whose story was somewhat needlessly messed-up, I thought at the time.  I didn’t need the guy to have any extra texture, you know;  I really didn’t.  I wasn’t clamouring for it.  And Moench “wrote good” in the style of the day, and he’d written Deathlok after all…and I didn’t even know he’d made the bastard up!

Hell, I thought he’d made Fu Manchu up!

I was just a kid.

But I got transfixed pretty quick, even though my first instinct was probably right…and it was messy, even though I don’t remember noticing at the time…but you know what else?  It had some rough-sketched life to it, after all, and maybe it was inimitable.  The funny thing is, Sienkiewicz is inimitable and everybody knows it — but back on the first year of Moon Knight, looking from today’s perspective, he hadn’t gotten there yet.  Meanwhile it’s possible that MK features some of Moench’s worst writing…and yet as it turns out he was inimitable on it.  Oh no, is this like Gerber on Man-Thing, like on “Soul-Cry”?  I laughed at Tucker, knowing he was going to read that;  but show me the writer who can do better on Man-Thing than Gerber did, even at his worst.  So much of the brilliance of it is available only through the organ of memory, now…I cheered Tucker when he read the one about “Dawg”, with the amazing Ploog art, so insane…but I shuddered to think of him reading “The Kid’s Night Out”, I imagined him putting his head through a wall.  The Gods of Therea?  Hell, I thought he might come to my house and slap me.  You know when I was in high school I had this idea for an avant-garde play with a full script, only each word of it would be “door”…

JAMES:  (takes off hat) “Door door door, door door door door, Door?

VERONICA:  “Door door;  door door “Door”.  Door door door door DOOR door door door!”  (runs off crying)

…And the object of the play would be that when people left the theatre they would go into the parking lot, and one person would say to the other “Honey, could you get the…the…the motherF#@*$&6T#O@#!!!!!!  WHATEVER THE FUCK IT IS!!!”

…And then they’d, I don’t know, pick up a crowbar and just start whaling on their car, just smash everything in sight like Orson Welles in “Citizen Kane” (“I think I really felt it that time,” he is reported to have said.  “I swear to God I really did.”), and thus — in my stupid teenage mind — they would at that point truly understand how the THEATRE TOUCHES OUR REAL LIVES…!

And is the sainted Steve as bad as that, in Man-Thing?  Oh, fer shurr, Seth;  why, he’s where I got the idea from in the first place, no doubt.  So it’s awful…and yet something is there, that can’t be duplicated, anyway.  And it’s not all bad.  Never mind that we get Howard out of it all, you know?  But I’m thinking of the incredibly genial lameness of one of my favourite characters:  Dakimh the Enchanter.  I mean…really?  I like Dakimh?

Moreover:  someone can write him wrong?

It seems positively insane to say he can be written wrong, I mean how much effort would that take?  And Jennifer Kale?  jennifer KALE?  No, honestly, it isn’t hard…is it?

And yet apparently it is, because gosh and gee whiz, you guys won’t believe this but my hand to RAB there is a REAL JENNIFER KALE, and she showed up on Steve’s blog after he died, the girl he based her on, and…

…She was very sad, and…

I mean my question is:  who is it, that even has anything to say in a Man-Thing book?  Who would even want to write a comic about Ted Sallis being diffident around a hippie chick who likes him?  I mean why would they want to write that?  The corridor of the past is flexy, but it ain’t that flexy:  and I dare even Alan Moore or Grant Morrison to find a reason to write Phantacea.  Know what I mean?  Sometimes you know the heart is there, and it’s non-replaceable.  Or at least, not casually replicable by ordinary methods.  I suspect Warren Ellis could’ve probably written a pretty entertaining Ultimate Man-Thing back in 2001, “Candle For Sainte-Cloud” and all…and somewhere I’m sure there’s an alternate universe where I would’ve wanted him to, just because he could…

But then I guess he could probably write a pretty good Jack Staff, too.

And it still wouldn’t be the point.

So here’s what — and did I mention this was going to be a real long ramble to nowhere in particular?  Guess I shoulda mentioned that up front — here’s what I thought about “Black And White”, the Jack Staff phone book.  I kind of thought about it like I thought about Paradax, by Milligan and McCarthy:  “God,” I thought, “I wish I could be sure this was going somewhere, because I’d totally hop on board.” Okay, Paradax wasn’t going anywhere in particular, hell we all knew that…but the Jack Staff phonebook, it had so many little dropped stitches, so many “hey-catch-up”s that didn’t do the trick, that didn’t quite stick…it was great, really really great, but I only loved it like I used to love reading Alpha Flight to the American Woman album — let’s be honest, both very rough works — almost primitivistic, at least as far as the mainstream can go that way — I mean I love those guys, but Burton makes Elvis look like Yeats — and if you don’t think that was essentially Phantacea only made under a professional and corporate imprint you’re on glue — there’s some good self-loathing in there as well, I’ve come to think — or maybe it was like reading Man-Thing to the White Album?  So many useless tricks I used to try, when my own shell was still only half broken-out-of!

Anyway, I wondered about it, like I wondered about Moon Knight.  Almost exactly like that.  There were flashes;  it seemed a little spotty, though.  I hoped great hopes, of course:  I wanted Paul to hit his stride.  I mean it was messy.  Sometimes, I thought, it was even sloppy.  The art was wonderful and amazing.  The lettering was SO FUCKING GREAT! But the story…?

It wasn’t smooth.

But then — just as with Moon Knight #25 — I learned an amazing thing.

I learned, when I bought the next collection, that COLOUR made a difference to storytelling.

I still don’t know.  Was it, is it, all a hallucination?  Jack Staff in fucking COLOUR.  I have to tell you it has opened my eyes, it’s what I was waiting for.  Suddenly the unfortunate ellipses don’t matter.  They really don’t, and anyway they’re revealed as not unfortunate anyway.  I took my Black Dossier X-Ray Specs and read the thing without colour and the gaps are there, it all reads kinda clunky still.  I went that far, folks.  Then I took ‘em off, laid down in a dark room with a cool cloth for twelve hours or so, got up and read it again.  Presto, no gaps.  No clunks.  What used to be a logic-crevasse is plunged over by the wonderful colour — the colour carries you through.  That Helen Morgan wears a green jacket replaces twenty words a page, carries you across, across, across the plate, across all the mixed metaphors.  Sometimes colour really matters, as I wanted to say to Sea (and did I?  or was that someone else?  I can’t remember) about the Lee/Kirby FF run, or indeed about the Lee/Ditko Dr. Strange run, or indeed about Deathlok or Moon Knight.  What d’you think, Bloggers, does colour ease the load on the writer, penciller, inker, letterer?  Can it ease the load on the plot?  I sometimes like reading a pure B+W book, but it’s kind of making me think about what Paul Pope said about his Wednesday Comics experience (and this is essentially why I’ve changed my whole tune about Pope forever), which is that he thought he did pretty well, but towards the end became aware that he hadn’t fully grasped the Sunday Page format, what it required from the artist, what in its full potential it offered to the reader, how time and space oughtta be moulded when you do it.  He wrote it all on his blog, go take a look and check my reporting:  but I think I recall he said he learned something about how the old heroes usedta do it.  And of course, for anyone who read Wednesday Comics, I mean I think I can speak for everyone in saying that we LOVED the way he screwed with the gears of “take this part fast;  now wait, take this part slow;  now take this part FAST…!”  I mean I think he showed simply tremendous command of the possibilities of the Sunday page…but then I guess that’s why I’m not an artist, eh?

I mean I love reading a good B+W page…but maybe drawing one AS one, is different from drawing one IN YOUR HEAD as a coloured page?

I confess I don’t know, and that makes me unhappy.  But I’ll also confess that seeing Phil Elliott’s colouring on “Jack Staff:  Soldiers” gave me EXACTLY the same thrill as reading Moon Knight #25, when Sienkiewicz started to throw cinnamon and saffron and fleurs de mer directly into my eyes, and Moench started talking to the colour for real…

I mean, I think that’s the greatest thing ever.  I mean here’s what comics can do.  They can do a noir thing.

But in comics, noir is just another word for Basquiat.

God bless colurists:  the special-effects team.

Well, except for our pal Paul, right?  I mean just look at that lettering.  He’s always wanted to be a colourist!

And so one more remark:  my men the Mindless Ones have been sitting on pins and needles (it seems) for Mr. Grist as long as I sat on pins and needles myself for Messrs. Moench and Sienkiewicz way back in what young people seem to call “the day”.  Hoping for the really GREAT great good.  After all it started out as a riff, a pastiche.  A dead dove.

But having seen a lot of these beaks-and-shells things myself…

…The colour has given me total confidence now.

Seriously, the colour, guys.  That’s what I need to talk about.  It’s what draws kids to comics.  It’s what draws suicidal adults to cliffs over the sea.  It takes lives, and saves lives.  I am one stop short of saying it makes lives.

But anyway I have the funny feeling that Jack Staff has turned the glove inside out.

You?

Oh God this damned cider.  Will correct spelling mistakes tomorrow.

Viz:  “Woke Up On A Barge With My Pant-Legs Around My Wrists, Having Eaten My Own Tar-Smeared Pancreas!  CHEERS TO YOUR FINE LAGER!”

Oh God, Bloggers.  I can feel the dread approaching already.

But…maybe I said all this already?

Maybe this was just a very complicated deja vu?

Probably I should just go.  But I just had to say:

Moon Knight #25?  GET IT.  Jack Staff:  Soldiers?  YES, GET IT.  But read the black-and-whites first, otherwise that’s cheating.

Okay?

I do not believe you will be sorry.  But tomorrow I will be sorry, and probably want to add two thousand words to this post.  DO NOT LET ME DO IT!  It’s a comparison between Paul Grist and John Byrne, it’s two thousand words, I’ve already run through the whole thing in my head and it also involves Aladdin Sane and The Munsters and it all makes logical sense but it is NOT INTERESTING…!

I mean:  you thought this was not interesting…!

I’ll show you not interesting…!

Okay, goodnight Cider June.

Whatever Happened To Disintegrating Clone?

Oh, Clone…

Just a reminder.  Okay, I guess more of a nag, really…

Ha, that title kind of reads like a Google search, doesn’t it?

Bet I get a million hits tomorrow.