Peiratikos

Jim Henley wanted to know what women think of The Filth. I finished it last night and I think it’s Grant Morrison all right, and you’re not going to get much more out of me tonight, because my head is rebelling and I need medicine that works or, failing that, sleep. Ok, and what I need most of all is pictures of little kids with superimposed ants’ heads. Lots. I very much need this. I suppose pictures of rotund fellows with eye-bellies would be acceptable, at least the utopian sort, but not as good.

Anyway, the reason Jim Henley wants to know what women think is that he’s worried (or perhaps not worried) that The Filth is a guy thing. I don’t have a good answer to that question. I’m not comfortable with the idea that women deal with filth and bodies more or earlier than men (speaking of course in huge generalizations) do. Yeah, yeah, we’ve got menstruation and the awkwardness of breasts and having to deal with being an object of attraction, and I’ve managed to make my peace with the first of those things at least. But even as a young adolescent when I wanted to be anything but feminine, I wouldn’t have wanted to have to deal with random erections and wet dreams and all that hideously sexual guy-stuff. Also booger jokes. Ugh.

I think maybe a keener difference lies in ownership of sexuality, though this probably relies on even grander generalizations. Especially when it comes to sexuality, men are trained to think they’re in control of themselves. I don’t know to what extent they believe this, but that seems to be the paradigm, and that makes it really difficult to have sexual assault training for men (and here I’m talking about college guys because this is all I’ve had to deal with) who think they could never be assaulted and are sure they and all their friends are nice guys who would never assault anyone else. One way people get around this problem is with a horrible, offensive program that says to men, “Think how much you’d hate yourself if a man raped you! And imagine how you would feel if someone raped your girlfriend!” If the only way to remind men that they’re not in control is by calling on their ick-factor homophobia or urging them to be mindful of people they’re supposed to own, that’s not a good state of affairs. But that’s to some degree what’s going on in The Filth. Male desire (and I think Jim’s right that women aren’t fleshed out in the story, but mostly in that they’re not protagonists even of their subplots much) has gotten out of control. Desire for control is taking over the world, and it’s up to the members of The Hand to be Super-Men, to assert control over the sexually power-mad men. Whether we’re dealing with bad guys releasing hordes of super sperm that seem to destroy rather than impregnate their targets or goodish guys who don’t bother to close the window when masturbating to copious porn and don’t notice the porn in the street, or even possibly unreal has-beens who while away the hours watching their wives engage in hardcore sex with all their old friends and foes, we’re dealing with some ugly stuff and unpleasant guys. So what makes this a Guy Book? Is it because it’s a chance to explore otherwise hidden frailties while still sympathizing with the powerful main character(s)? Is it because it’s a chance to say, “Hee! Erection jokes! Prison rape jokes!” without noticing that their unqualified acceptance isn’t really supported by the text?

I dunno. I’m sure that’s not why Jim liked it, or Dave Intermittent or David Fiore or Steven, but I’m not sure if they have peculiarly gendered responses. I liked The Filth, too, though I think I prefer the pretentiousness of The Invisibles. That I’m not entirely sure may be a sign I’m skewing toward the center of the mind/body scale, our Little Rose growing up! Not hating my body was an important, difficult lesson to learn, but I still don’t love or privilege it either.

And thinking of hating my body brings me back to my impending migraine and thus departure, with assurances that more commentary will come in time. That Animal Man stuff is still in my head, too, while I’m making rash promises, but no more for tonight nor tomorrow, when I watch my brother test his physicality in the all-star game, the end of his high-school football career. He spent four years wallowing in sweat and bruises and bashing, and that’s all Filth to me. I’ll be the bitchy one aching in the bleachers.

(Demo is a pretty good comic book by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan. After the discussion about issue #6 at David Allen Jones’s blog, I figured it was time to do a closer rereading. Since the pages in Demo #6 aren’t numbered, I’m counting starting at the first page after the inside cover.)

Ken thinks his problem as a kid was small-town American xenophobia. Reminiscing on the day he sent an army of zombie pets after his entire neighborhood, he asks, “Did they deserve it?” (p. 23). Ah, Ken, wrong question… It’s obfuscated by the racism angle, but what poor little Ken seems to suffer is the same suburban ennui and fear of conformity that Lester Burnham felt in American Beauty, a dis-ease which is utterly terrifying to Ken (and Lester) and utterly banal to every other suburbanite who felt it and decided to do something other than whine or act pretentiously nutty. Ken’s real problem is his inability to take action to end his bad life. He thinks his problems are anybody’s fault but his. “Then there was my mom. I know she tried. But she was just as miserable and angry and out of place as I was” (p. 8). “But I know Dad tried too. It just wasn’t enough, I guess” (pp. 9-10). Even Ken’s happiness becomes the responsibility of others: “The only person that looked like me weeded the neighbor’s lawn. I never knew his name or even spoke to him, but he always made me feel better somehow” (pp. 6-7). (Ken’s claim that he never spoke to the gardener turns out to be incorrect [pp. 20-21], which is only the most obvious signal that he’s far from a reliable narrator.)

The ability to raise and control zombie pets is, of course, a great power for a guy like Ken who likes to displace responsibility. Ken wants revenge? Hey, he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty, let the dogs do it. He always had his dog to make him “feel better” (p. 14), but when one of those mean neighbors kills it, the dog becomes an instrument of vengeance. “…as much as my dog once helped me control my anger, he now helped me focus it” (p. 15). Ken is so passive himself, he’s passing the buck for his emotions on to his pet dog. The art focuses on horrific images of ghostly skeletal figures, zombies clawing out of the ground, violent death, but this is more displacement. The real horror is Ken’s passivity and retreat from the world.

But then, while Ken may be displacing his revenge onto the zombie pets, it’s still the most proactive measure he’s ever taken. The massive zombie devestation could be a terrible moment of insight that jolts Ken out of his loser world, but even as the power surges through him he can’t give up his lack of control. His one conversation with the gardener is brief: the gardener admonishes, “You should stop now. Hate will eat you too,” and Ken replies, “OK” (pp. 20-21).

Ken foolishly takes the gardener’s advice as the moral of the story:

I remember that day well enough. The one day I lost control, the one day I got mad. The one day I let those feelings out (p. 23). It’s staring me right in the face [over an image of Ken’s resurrected dog, looking up at Ken]. That gardner [sic] was right, hate will eat you up, if you let it. I stopped in time, and yeah, life is good now. But I will never forget how close I came (p. 25).

Well, is that a cop out or what? Here Ken has just lied to his wife about why his childhood neighborhood is an abandoned wreck. Because the text jumps from the frame story with Ken as an adult to the flashback with Ken as a child, and because it conspicuously refuses to fill in any information about the intervening years, and because Ken is hardly a reliable narrator, there’s not much reason to believe him when he claims “life is good now,” that he narrowly escaped tumbling into the abyss and is now happy and healthy. The narration is flat and simplistic (”I got sad. Mom cried. Dad got super mad. Then I got scared and embarrassed” [p. 11])—has Ken reverted to childlike narration for the flashback, or does he still actually think like that, as an adult? Why doesn’t he grow up and deal with his real problems? Oh, but then he’d have to tell his wife about them… And why does he decide not to do that? To protect her from his dark past? or just to avoid confronting them himself? No, there’s nothing good about Ken’s life now, and his wife is just another responsibility-displacement tool.

(David Fiore has a somewhat similar reading, over at his own blog:

…when you make a person you love cry, it’s not “society’s” fault, it’s yours. I would assume that goes at least double for mass-murder! And man, if you aren’t willing to look your past victims in the eye—just don’t bother looking at all, because the objects back there are much farther away than they seem, unless you have the benefit of another person’s perspective to help you find the range.

He also compares the story to the film The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.)

Plenty of people in the comics blogosphere seem to love The Losers, so when Rose and I found a copy of The Losers: Ante Up at Half-Price Books for $5, we figured it was worth checking out. This is an art-driven book, which is to say, I wouldn’t want to read it if I didn’t like the art. It’s not that Andy Diggle’s writing is bad—I see his job as inventing cool stuff for Jock to draw and filling the necessary speech balloons with tolerable dialogue, and he does his job just fine. The bad-ass quips are only occasionally cringe-worthy. “Candy, meet baby,” after the Losers cleverly escape yet another inescapable deathtrap, is the most unforgivable (N.B. to writers, glib rewordings of clich????s always come off badly). The left-leaning politics are pretty mild (apparently the CIA really does run drugs into the United States, they really do hire evil mercenaries to do their dirty work, they really are still selling illegal weapons to Saudia Arabia, the government really care only about oil, etc.), but I suppose they may seem more radical in the current political climate in which thin-skinned Republicans yelp whenever anybody Undermines the War Effort by questioning Bush administration foreign policies. But whatever, at any rate, I suppose I prefer the mildly liberal action of The Losers to the dumb Republican action of True Lies and other action movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis.

The characters are ciphers. The guys are all gruff but sociable action heroes, each with his own specialty: Cougar the sniper, Jensen the hacker, Pooch the driver, Clay the leader. Of course, the one exception is Roque, the asshole who never stops whining and never actually does anything useful. Aisha is the most intriguing characer simply because she gets to be a different kind of cipher than the rest: the silent loner. The sort of character who, in fanfic written by 14-year-olds, would be a seven-foot-tall man in a black trenchcoat, but Andy Diggle is clever enough to make his silent loner a crazy ninja woman from the Hindu Kush.

This is all fine. So far, The Losers is the kind of story whose plot ticks along like a well-oiled clockwork machine. The expert precision of the characters should be paralled in the expert precision of the authors as they construct the plot, and Diggle, Jock et al. do a fine job of it. I usually prefer my action-centered narratives to dig deeper and get a hold of that bloody human nastiness clogging up the clockwork, like Rififi or Three Kings. And I usually like my slick caper stories to be more like Ocean’s Eleven, longer on the witty repartee and shorter on the violent mayhem. And as a veteran of The X-Files, I carry in my heart a lovingly nurtured resentment and suspicion of longform serialized conspiracy adventures. And (last one!) as a veteran of Foucault’s Pendulum, I’m just not that impressed by most conspiracy theories anymore. The Losers, alas, hasn’t (yet) dug very deep, it’s long on the violence and a little too short on the witty repartee, and it’s very much in the just-what-we-needed-another-evil-government-conspiracy genre. Ah, but I’ve read only the first six issues, and those are just entertaining enough to make me wonder if I should keep on keeping on with it.

And since I started writing this post (two days ago) by saying I wouldn’t want to read it if I didn’t like the art, I think what I meant was that the plot of The Losers isn’t quite as well-oiled as it should be, but the art (especially the supercool coloring by Lee Loughridge, which is my favorite part of the book) is pretty enough to make up for it. Just thought I should clarify, since I wrote the first half of this post two days ago and the second half just now and I’m not sure they fit together.

There’s some good discussion of Demo #6 on David Allen Jones’s Johnny Bacardi blog, including some comments from Demo writer Brian Wood. The problem with artists making exegeses of their own work is that it’s always disappointing when you disagree with them, especially when you’ve just come up with a reading that you think makes sense of a text that was bothering you and the author disagrees with your reading. I’m not too worried about whether my interpretations of texts matches up with ‘authorial intent,’ but it still makes me a little less inclined to enjoy a text when I have confirmation that the author’s intent was to create something I wouldn’t enjoy. Oh well, though! I think I may enjoy Demo #6 more next time I read it, but I don’t know yet because I haven’t reread it yet! Until I reread, here’s what I think right now, direct from the Johnny B comment thread. David Fiore said:

The work is the work, and there’s always a way to connect any two points within a story’s structure. In my case, I’ve concluded that Ken is more dangerous in the frame than he ever was as a child…

Which makes me think:

Is Ken more dangerous as an adult than he ever was as a mass-murdering kid? Ken’s real problem seems to be getting caught up in his own story. I don’t have Demo #6 with me now, but I recall thinking as I read that the biggest problem in his childhood was that his daddy didn’t love him enough or was too weak to protect him from the world. Ken seems to have made the gardener into one of the magical wise old men Sean mentioned in the post Johnny B linked to, but the gardener doesn’t do much to deserve it—he remains remarkably calm while Ken is going around making undead pets eat everybody, but of course it’s Ken narrating and he doesn’t seem too reliable. Maybe Ken’s real superpower is inventing objects (his dad, the gardener, flesh-eating zombie puppies) that let him avoid dealing with himself. Ken may look like a well-adjusted happy newlywed, but has anything really changed in his life? Is his wife just another responsibility-deflecting tool?

Child-demons Sue Storm and Reed Richards invent horrible new sexual positions!

Over in the comments thread of Jeff Chatlos’s post about why so many people don’t read comics, Jeff asks Rose:

Rose: I’m VERY interested to hear what got you interested in comics in your 20s, and what your perceptions are as a latecomer. I look forward to reading what you have to say, either here or at your blog.

I am not, in fact, Rose, but I also started reading comics when I was 20 years old (about two years ago), and I’ve had some thoughts lately about how this affects my perception of all things comics. Actually, it’s partly Rose’s fault I started. I think the first comic I read as an adult was Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, specifically the Wonder Woman-Superman sex scene. Rose and a friend of ours showed this to me, I have no idea why. (That was also when I first learned that superhero comics aren’t just for kids anymore. I was barely aware Superman comics were being published, let alone ones in which he and Wonder Woman destroyed mountains wth their mighty orgasms.) The second comic I read was Transmetropolitan. I’m not sure why, but I think because it was just about the first comic I heard of that wasn’t a superhero comic and I was intrigued by the idea. At first I avoided superhero comics because I figured they were probably pretty dumb, but then Rose made me read Young Justice and next thing you know here I am with a copy of Crisis on Infinite Earths on my bookshelf.

Now, first of all, the fact that I began reading comics as an adult means I don’t have the baggage of exposure to Rob Liefeld at an impressionable age. I suspect a great deal of the “Superheroes are for kids, quit reading that crap!” criticism I see is driven by the deep-seated embarrassment of people who read X-Force when they were kids. On the other hand, it also means I never developed a childlike emotional attachment to any characters. This seems to be a fairly common criticism of adult ‘fanboys,’ that they’re emotionally stunted losers who continue to read superhero comics because they’re obsessed with Superman. In fact, I avoided superhero comics (motivated by exactly the sorts of stereotypes I mention now) until Rose showed me some good ones. At the same time, she gave me lots of non-superhero comics (e.g. Kabuki) and small-press and minicomics. So I started reading as an adult with fairly sophisticated critical faculties, I expected superhero comics to be bad by default, I had someone to expose me to a wide variety of comics and help me avoid the really bad stuff, I haven’t had a chance to get burnt out (which seems to happen rather frequently among longtime comics readers). I do think all this gives me an ‘advantage’ over people who’ve read comics since they were children, in that I just haven’t had the opportunities to build up bad baggage with superhero comics. Now, if I had read X-Force as an impressionable young lad, would I now scorn superhero comics as childish trash? I have no idea, obviously, but I do think my late arrival to comics played a large role in non-scorn of superhero comics.

As Steven said, we saw Troy this weekend, and my response is close to his. I’ve read portions of all the pertinent epics in the original, so I had strong feelings going into the movie and mixed feelings coming out.

My favorite part, as everyone knows, is when Hector was racing down the stairs To His Doom and was met by his stern-faced wife holding their lovely son. Poor heartbroken Hector peers down at tiny Astuanax, who promptly bursts into tears, terrified by his father’s hair-capped helmet. Hector takes it off for one last cuddle before suiting up again. Of course, this wasn’t in the movie, because somehow it doesn’t matter to other people as much as it does to me, but I was expecting that. At least all three of those characters got appropriate depth and screentime.

What impressed me most was the way all the characters who were relatives managed to look alike. I’m not sure about making Achilles and Patroclus cousins, but it explained the necessary resemblance well and allowed a palatable reading of Patroclus’s adoration, although the parallel to the similarly retconned Briseis cousin status seemed weird. The women were all excellent, which was a comforting surprise. I went in a Rose Byrne fan, which helped me avoid being too troubled by some of the stereotypes Briseis played out.

And the fighting! Well, all the one-on-one stuff wasn’t too impressive to me, but watching the shields collide and the blood flowing out to make the earth wet was just amazing and saddening. I know this is how it works, but it was hard to watch and harder to ignore. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such compelling battle. We watched like Priam’s family, gauging the trends while keeping our eyes on the heroes. The desecration of Hector’s body was similarly captivating and all the more poignant because I wanted Achilles to follow his lead and be a hero, treat him with respect and felt myself mentally urging him on to honor, even knowing how the story would go.

And then there’s all that stuff about not knowing how the story goes, but it wasn’t too much of a problem. It’s not as if I think Homer wrote a definitive history, and I’m quite sure there wasn’t a Homer, so while I think some of the changes didn’t work on a story level, I wasn’t hoping for a fully accurate translation. In fact, my favorite scene actually in the movie played on some of the ambiguity and conflicting stories and implications of choosing a focus. Helen tells Paris something like, “Every day I was with Menelaus, I was a ghost. Only now am I real.” And certainly that’s the sort of thing people say when they’re in love and when it’s true, but it’s made even better and truer by the story that Helen never went to Troy but was spirited off to Egypt while a war was fought for the sake of her ghost in Troy, and only later was the deception revealed. This made up for some of the lack of ambiguity and subtlety in much of the rest of the plot dealing with the motivations for war, and so I choose to believe it was intentional.