My unimpressedness with Idiocracy is well-documented, but I like xkcd's take:
I
don't know whether or not the rightmost stick figure is correct about
all that being absolutely false — I've found the data on this sort of
thing to be really screwy — but the line about more harm done by panic
over decline than decline itself rings true. (That, and the unsexiness
of technocrats.)
When I finally picked Watchmen off my girlfriend's bookshelf, I took care not to read it in public. It isn't that I'm one of those guys who can't be seen reading a comic book, but the big-deal IMAX adaptation is playing in theaters as we speak, and I didn't want to come off like I was half-assedly reading the book just because the movie came out. Problem is, I actually was reading the book — albeit, I would argue, full-assedly — because the movie came out; despite having for years harbored a vague intention to open the thing already, I wasn't moved to crack it until I just couldn't take hearing and reading any more discussion about subject matter which which I had no familiarity. Faced repeatedly with talk of mysterious entities like "Rorschach", "Doctor Manhattan" and "giant space squid", and, inevitably, felt a burning urge to find out more. In the name of curiosity, I got over myself and read the book, exposed to all the world, at Coffee Cat. Part of my hesitancy to get on with it must have sprung from the sheer amount of baggage Watchmen carries, or at least the sheer amount of baggage that all I'd heard about Watchmen made me bring to it. According to friends, acquaintances, commentators, bloggers and wags, the book is pretty much the Best Thing Ever, or at least a Great Thing Indeed. The voluminous, subtle detail! The groundbreaking comic storytelling techniques! The resonances internal and external! The capturing of the zeitgeist! The "total, devastating deconstruction of virtually every archetype in the genre's history!" (Thus spake Mark Tillich.) If nothing else, I take from Watchmen that it is difficult indeed to experience any work with such vertiginously built-up expectations, especially given that my experience with superhero comics is limited to a handful of Spider-Man annuals and the premiere issue of Force Works, which I never removed from its bag for fear of damage. (This was back when comic books were briefly considered a viable investment vehicle.) My journey from panel to panel was significantly slowed by my constant asking of myself, "Did you catch all the greatnesses in that text bubble? What about in that image? Is there some greatness in the background that you're missing?" The unceasing Easter-egg hunt for awesomeness exerted a strong drag. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed the book. Hell, it probably merits "very enjoyed", but I know full well that I don't — perhaps can't — have an uncorrupted perspective on such an oft-quoted, oft-imitated, turgid-academic-paper-inspiring work. As with other pieces of art whose fans grow devoted, though, I can relate the experience that they often wish aloud they could have again: that of taking it in for the very first time. (I take my duties as a Watchmen virgin seriously.) Going in, I only knew two facts about Watchmen, besides that of its belovedness. The first was that it's written my Alan Moore, the eccentric, heavily-bearded fellow behind such critically-acclaimed comic books as The Killing Joke (own it, read it, can't fully appreciate it due to lack of Batman background), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (liked the concept and saw the film, which is... just as good as you've heard), From Hell (saw the film, which surprisingly dim memories indicate I enjoyed) and Lost Girls (which I got Madelaine for her birthday and may read myself Real Soon Now). Moore's name doesn't draw me to nor repel me from a work. The second was that it's known for — here comes that word again — its "deconstruction" of superhero comic conventions. In this case, it seems that by "deconstruction" people mean "treatment as real". For years, I heard Watchmen pitched to me as the tale that dares to ask what superheroes would be like if they existed in the real world. The concept struck me as cool until Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins revealed that even the best, most detailed rooting of Batman in the real world results not in a Batman story, but the story of a Batman impersonator. And given his famous lack of superpowers, Batman should be the easy one to make realistic! The good news is that Moore and artist Dave Gibbons seem to execute the real-life-superheroes idea just about as well as it can be executed. Watchmen's main "costumed vigilantes", a slouchy amateur ornithologist, the bitter daughter of the previous generation's star heroine and a socially maladroit grown orphan with a rigidly Manichean worldview, are drawn from messy, imperfect life indeed. They're filled, in varying measure, fear, anger, doubt, disappointment and resentment. (I seem to recall "actual" superheroes being broody too, though in a less realistic fashion.) They labor under normal troubles like loneliness, awkwardness and piles of messy dishes. What pleasantly surprised me was that the characters not only exist in a real place, they exist in a real time; the story actually takes place in October 1985, though the October 1985 of a tweaked alternate America. (Richard Nixon, to take one of the most visible departures, is still president.) Watchmen's (relatively) young generation of heroes are given birthdates in the 1930s and 40s; their predecessors in the 1910s and 20s. Their lives are tied to the eras in which they've played out. The characters are, in short, made to exist. Which is why it seems like heresy, not to say a grand mal missing of the point, to claim that the superhero angle actually feels like a bit of wrench thrown into the works. I'm with the characters until they assume the thousand-yard stare and reminisce about the days when they used to run around in costume chasing down thugs. The idea, see, is that in this alternate America, the superhero thing actually bled from early Superman comics to real life; ordinary people, fed up with the failings of the justice system or whatever, chose to lead lives imitating paneled art. Despite early complications — a cape fatally caught in a revolving door being a memorable mishap — several such costumed crusaders join forces to form the "Minutemen", a league that tensions external and internal ultimately dissolve. It's the heirs of the Minutemen that Watchmen is concerned with, the straggly remnants of superherokind left after the 1977 outlawing of flamboyant vigilantism. And make no mistake, it is pretty cool to see some of the possible ramifications of the superhero lifestyle played out in a setting more closely resembling reality. The aforementioned ornithologist, who fights crime under the name of the Nite Owl, endures more than most, once losing a criminal's tail thanks to time wasted while strugging with his suit during a bathroom break and another time getting his arm broken by a malfunctioning powered exoskeleton. (He's the Batman analog, though his gear isn't quite as reliable.) There's also a familiar theme from The Killing Joke, that of the codependency of superheroes and supervillians. Watchmen's world appears to have always suffered from a paucity of supervillains, or at least of competent ones, leaving the heroes to beat up on petty miscreants when they're not feeling enervated by this new "white-collar" crime. But here's the problem I couldn't shake: there aren't superheroes in real life. There never were. There wasn't, to the best of my knowledge, even an aborted dress-up-and-fight-crime craze, much less one spanning two generations. And yeah, duh, positing a scenario where there are superheroes in real life is the whole raison d'etre of a speculative work like this, but the mental itch insisting that things didn't add up never went away. I ended up having to switch perceptive gears every time the characters talked about or did superhero stuff, requiring a more favorable mechanical ratio to suspend the vastly increased weight of my disbelief. This, on top of the self-conscious greatness-spotting, put me on a rocky reading road indeed. The plot is essentially this: when someone defenestrates the Comedian, the youngest of the former Minutemen who became a sort of nihilistic patriot in middle age, Rorschach wants to know who and why. Several deaths later, he comes to suspect a conspiracy intent on specifically killing costumed vigilantes or, as he calls them, "masks". The trouble Rorschach proceeds to both make and get into jostles the Nite Owl and the second Silk Spectre, ever-reluctant heroine and daughter of the first one, out of retirement. Amid NYC's mounting chaos, Rorschach and the Nite Owl discover an elaborate, wide-reaching scheme on the part of Adrian Veidt, formerly the superhero Ozymandias and currently a simple millionaire captain-of-industry genius. He plans, from his high-tech Antarctic hideout, to simulate a giant space squid invasion in order to end intra-humanity hostility by directing it toward a perceived non-human enemy. (It speaks volumes about the common perception of comic books that it comes as a pleasant surprise to find that Veidt, the closest thing Watchmen has to a villain, does not openly regard himself a villain.) Above all the proceedings, sometimes in more ways than one, stands Dr. Manhattan, a "big blue space guy". (Thus spake Brandi Jensen.) For all those concerned about how a formerly mild-mannered physicist could possibly turn into a bald, naked, blue giant (when he decides to be giant) who never ages, who may be made of pure energy, who can synthesize any element, who possesses full knowledge of the past and future, who can split into two or teleport himself wherever he wants, rest assured: it was an experiment gone wrong. Naturally, the U.S. military takes the poor alienated guy on a superweapon, using him to win Vietnam and hold the threat of even more mutually assured destruction over the Soviets. More to the point, he acts as a genuine, superpower-possessing — maybe all-superpower-possessing — superhero in a setting where the other main characters are just regular schlubs, albeit schlubs in better-than-average shape and goofy suits. I'm still wrestling with whether Dr. Manhattan's presence wrecks the superheroes-in-reality device by making reality too unreal, or whether it enriches it by forcing the workaday "superheroes" to reconsder their roles in a world containing an invincible dude who goes around raising floating castles on Mars with his mind. But even I, a Watchmen tyro, realize that to spend a lot of time on the plot is to ignore the book's greatest successes. Moore set out to create a comic book that takes full advantage its medium, and boy does it. Even in the sequential art renaissance that's supposedly going on as you read this, I haven't read anything that more actively exploits the strengths (and maybe even weaknesses) of its medium. The insertion of pages ostensibly from things that aren't comic books, for instance — a retired superhero's autobiography, another's paper in an ornithology journal, a back-page interview with another in one of those gotcha-question 70s magazines — or the threading through of an E.C. homage pirate story that parallels... well, it parallels a lot of things. (Watchmen is big on parallelism.) There are specific examples to cite of comic book techniques pulled off well, but it's more of a gestalt thing; the story unfolds in a way that only comics (and the fact that the comic reader can spend as much time as they want with a panel) allow. This clarifies Terry Gilliam's labeling of the material as "unfilmable", but clouds the modern decision by Zack Synder et al to film it anyway. So much would presumably get lost in translation that I'm not sure what the appeal is. And yes, Hollywood's all about the quick buck, but how bankable a property is a 22-year-old DC graphic novel like Watchmen, really? As I understand it, box office returns have thus far disappointed. Nor, as a Watchmen tyro, can I ignore the book's greatest excesses. From what I know of Alan Moore, he loses against the urge to politics-up his work as often as he wins, and he can't chalk up this occasion as a victory. I happen to listen to quite a lot of albums produced in England in the late 1970s and 1980s, and thus have grown accustomed to what I've come to call the "incoherent anti-Thatcher rant". In that era and country, you see, it was apparently in bigtime artists' fashion to hate on the prime minister, and to that end a number of musicians wound up including a track or five on their records of the period that, thinly veiled if veiled at all, attack her. While I'm generally on the side of criticizing those in power and while many of those numbers are musically quite enjoyable, the batting around of the same old icon of evil in these pop stars' internal cosmologies gets old quickly, especially since songs can't really deliver convincing arguments. Speaking in prose rather than verse, the singers did little better; evidently they thought maddeningly incomplete assertions like "Oi, Maggie Thatcher says there's no such thing as society, right!" would do the job. The most cosmopolitan of these pop politicos would also include Ronald Reagan on their roster of forces currently dismantling the world, sometimes paranoiacally lumping Thatcher and the Gipper into a their own sneering, mustache-twirling alliance of destruction. My problem isn't that they attack Reagan and Thatcher — I don't have any special attachment to those politicians — my problem is they don't seem to care enough to make their attacks hold water. If you argue that Reagan and Thatcher are so self-evidently bad that if I don't automatically agree with you I'm part of the problem, then sorry, I'll have to take Reagan and Thatcher. While the reasoning-free impressionism of those songs make Watchmen's own jabs at the leaders of the day look like an article from Nature, the politics with which Moore imbues the work aren't much more thoughtful. The narrative's being rooted with unusually dense detail in its era dates it in a good way; its treatment of matters political dates it in a bad way. I suspect that Moore — and especially the Moore of a, say, V for Vendetta — has a touch of the standard artist's process for assuming political stances: take positions based not on the ideas but on your like or dislike for the people who profess them, and make sure the like or dislike is as aesthetically-based as possible. (How else to explain the prevalence of Che shirts?) Anthony Lane's criticism of the Watchmen movie, I think, holds true for this aspect of the book: "it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear — deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation — is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along." It does nothing to change my provisional position that works of fiction shouldn't make political arguments — or arguments of any kind, really — since they're inevitably undercut, no matter how well-argued, by the unaccountability of their delivery system. But with maturity, I've learned to be bothered less by political puerility in art. If I let it get to me, after all, what art could I enjoy? Certainly vast tracts of comicdom would go right off the table. Neo-realist film wouldn't stand much of a chance, either. And what non-Stoppard playwright could I ever appreciate? (Not that I have much theater appreciation left over for the non-Stoppards.) Watchmen is, in practically all its other aspects, not a flimsy piece of art, and even that statement understates the case. The book may get clunky when it butts up against reality, but internally, there's a fine nuance and a damn fine structure. I'll soon read it again, I'm sure. | ||
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Enid and Rebecca, a pair of cynical late-teenage hipsters in the mid-1990s, go around peoplewatching, looking for ironically enjoyable diners, and snarking on everything they see. When Enid kind of sort of starts thinking about maybe going to college, a rift opens between the two friends.
Madelaine called Enid and Rebecca "modern monsters," a description accurate enough to warrant my appropriation. They're ironigirls, bundles of attitude all posed, horn-rimmed and faux-jaded with no place to go. What do they do with their time? Nothing so square as as school or work: they hang out in eateries, badmouth their mutual acquaintances and eyeball grotesques all day long. Enid is thrilled when they happen upon a dingy 1950s-themed restaurant ("This place is god") or when they see a hunched old man with wilted flowers ("It's so cute! I'm dying!"). After donning a leather jacket, spiking and dying her hair green, putting in a safety pin as an earring and cuffing her jeans above her Chuck Taylors, Enid gives the following monologue, revealing much about her worldview:
It's not like I was "going punk" or something... I'm not fucking thirteen... anybody with half a fucking brain could see that I wasn't dressed like some modern hardcore asshole... it was like an old 1977 punk look... [ ... ] I wish I could just come up with one perfect look and stick with it... like what if I bought some entire matching 1930s wardrobe and wore that every day... the trouble with that is you look really stupid and pretentious if you go to a mall or a Taco Bell or something... and you have to act a certain way and drive an old car and everything and it's a real pain in the ass!
(All the ellipses read better on the page, I swear.)
And no, I don't think Enid's fixation on the cultivation of a "look" is supposed to be sympathetic, but... yow. She reminds me of why, even though I wasn't drawn to the mainstream kids in high school, I also found the self-proclaimed outsiders repellent, focused as they were on outwardly defining themselves without a whole hell of a lot of inward self to define in the first place. The quest for a lost childhood record aside, there's not much in Ghost World about music, but I can totally picture Enid and/or Rebecca — Rebecca goes with the flow a bit more smoothly, except when she doesn't — being the type for whom it's critically important to demarcate precisely the dividing line between the music she does and does not listen to. I was very nearly the same way — though, I would submit, only at a fraction of the normal magnitude — at their age, but now I look back and laugh: could there ever have been a time when our lives were so small that we had to cling so desperately to the identity loaned us by the genre of organized sound we put in our backgrounds? (Or by the primary color of our hair? Or by the brand of safety pin in our ears?)
There is nothing in the world that could induce me to spend a day with real-life versions of these two, but when they're flat on the page I can get just enough breathing room. (And breathing room is precisely what I needed to read the book, looking up and away as I did every so often just to momentarily distract myself from these personalities with the world around me.) It's a testament to Clowes' skill as an artist and writer that, despite their awfulness, Enid and Rebecca don't come across as one-dimensional strident slackers; they're neither his piñatas nor his mouthpieces, though they may contain ingredients of both. Just as Enid and Rebecca are well-rendered and fascinating in a sort of unappealing way, so is Clowes' work as a whole: just excellently put together and highly compelling, but simultaneously repulsive on a deep, hard-to-articulate level. It comes through in a visceral way in the visuals: Clowes is one of the most skilled artists working in "alternative" comics and it shows, but he draws everything in this subtly ugly way that seems designed to seep into the reader's subconscious. Witness Enid's bulbous nose, jutting philtrum, slight overbite and the quease-inducing sneery edge to most of her facial expressions — and she's supposed to be one of the attractive characters.
I'm not going to be among the first thousand to make a Catcher in the Rye comparison, but here goes: these two kids are kinda like Holden Caulfield, huh? Am I right or am I right? The only problem is that, because Holden Caulfield is a guy, I could spend the entire length of Catcher in the Rye fantasizing about beating the living crap out of him, especially if he were to utter the word "phony" just one more time. (Friends ask, "But couldn't you identify with Holden's attitudes?" God, no.) Enid and Rebecca are girls, so as a nonalcoholic, I can't beat them up. And to Clowes' credit, he avoids creating protagonists that are just bundles of psychodramas. Holden Caulfield is really a concept, and hey, there's nothing at all the matter with beating up a concept. Enid and Rebecca, on the other hand, exist as reasonably nuanced, well-defined people in their own world — distasteful, inconsequential people, but people nonetheless. That's not something you can count on getting in any given narrative, let along those of the comic book variety.
(Also, I credit Ghost World with cluing me in to the term "homeless tan"; I'd been looking for a descriptor for the sort of tan you see on the homeless, and now I've got one.)
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Having
spent a good deal of his mental bandwidth determining his ideal of
feminine beauty — which just so happens to directly coincide with the
appearance of a cousin he spent one summer kissin' — the titular
nineteen-year-old security guard happens upon Wanda, a woman who fits
the bill and then some. After she disappears without explanation and an
unidentifiable assailant shoots David non-fatally, the Boring family —
sans the long-absent father, who David never met and has only a single
issue of a superhero comic the man drew in the 50s as proof of his
existence — and David's lesbian roomate Dot take a trip to their island
vacation home, where they find the mother's cousin's family staying. An
old uncle later shows up claiming that nuclear war has commenced,
causing things to get pretty Lord of the Flies on the island: one member of the group drowns, the food runs out, accusations are flung.
Eventually, David winds up back on the non-nuclearly-devastated mainland, dating a vegetarian who lacks the posterior of size that he so desires. He discovers that the guy who shot him is a professor who also fell for Wanda, and after meeting and commiserating it becomes clear to them that she's one of those girls who presents herself as the picture of purity — to each of the many dozens of guys she's run off with since, like, thirteen. Investigating Wanda's background, David then falls for her older sister Judy, who's essentially a less flaky version of her sibling. David and the professor tack Wanda down in a nearly-abandoned cult commune, some cops get on David's trail, and David ultimately finds himself back in the island house, kissin' his cousin.
Madelaine
brought home a bunch of Daniel Clowes comics last week, and out of
curiosity I read them all. I'd been aware of the guy's work for years,
but for some reason always preferred that of his close artistic cousin
(and Marketplace of Ideas guest)
Peter Bagge. My judgment so far is that Clowes, like Bagge, has
mastered the skill of portraying loners and losers in alternative
comics, but he draws more realistically and writes less realistically.
Bagge combines wildly cartoonish artwork with plots that could happen to your roommate; Clowes combines almost grotesquely real-looking artwork with plots that only kind of make sense.
Consider David Boring. Though in these writeups I prefer to provide the premise of the work in question rather than the complete story, that wasn't really possible here; I couldn't have just described the background of the book and let your imagination go to work, because you wouldn't have imagined anything remotely resembling the comic's actual narrative. I suppose I could have written "and then a bunch of weird stuff happens" after Wanda drops out of sight and David gets plugged, but that seems somehow... unsatisfying.
Not that the story really adds up, even in full. I can't help but read a lot of Clowes' work as autobiographical — the details feel a little too authentic, and they appear in the lives of characters with uncanny biographical similarity to the author — but the events of David Boring are too weird to have happened to anyone, except maybe in a dream. The trouble with stories like these is that they don't stick, at least to me; I had to consult Wikipedia to make sure I even had the plot right, which really doesn't bode well for my ability to pull themes out of the thing.
I don't know how much this says about me, but the most resonant one I could identify was the straight man's struggle against — or, as the case may be, capitulation to — his precisely dialed-in preferences in the female form. (Maybe women and gay men have equivalent problems, but I can't claim direct experience.) By this I don't mean male enslavement to the pursuit of female beauty in general; that's a way-overblown idea, and besides, it doesn't feel like enslavement from the inside. I mean the way that some guys can define to the smallest practical level of detail what they can't do without in a woman. (As opposed to the guys for whom anything biologically female with a body temperature of eighty degrees or more means game on — I don't understand those guys.) Such a practice brings the practitioner face to face with one big question: better to compromise the ideal in the name of expediency, or hang on through the long, hard slog in order to satisfy your every little requirement?
In most cases, I don't think the ideal these men hold is that of a centerfold: blonde, DD cup, turn-ons: sense of humor and long walks on the beach, turn-offs: war. In fact, the appeal of having specific preferences is in part that they are idiosyncratic. David Boring describes his ideal woman thusly:
I am cursed by two things: an unsympathetic eye for perfection and a blossoming knowledge of my own feminine ideal, specifically: the head (round eyes and mouth, a jaunty arc to the nose bridge), smallish and ovoid, leading with a particular tilt to an extended neck, swooping outward at the shoulders. A substantial carriage and arms; smallish round breasts; a convex stomach dividing powerful hips which, from side to back, describe a meaty semi-circle; proceeding downward to thick, girlish legs and insignificant feet.
This ideal conflicts with that held by his quick-to-die buddy Whitey: "gaunt, fashionable and dumb." Neither much coincide with my even-more-detailed vision of the Perfect WomanTM, probably because I don't have one: I've got more like a thousand small preferences that don't add up to a coherent whole. (None conflict directly, though most don't correllate; it's like wanting a car with pop-up headlights, a t-top, an ultra-specialized sound system and an unturned odometer.) But I'm a pragmatic sort of dude, so this sort of thing doesn't bend my life out of shape as it does David's.
It's clear that his pursuit of the ideal is what gets David into this surrealistic mess. But it's less clear that he could do otherwise: I mean, it's his ideal. When you've got the ideal in the crosshairs, you don't care about the consequences of locking on. And after being knocked around emotionally, roughed up, shot twice, chased by the fuzz and knocked out with a baseball bat, he winds up with the woman who formed his ideal, the original, so the hassle was presumably well worth it. So listen well, kids: follow your dream, but know that the path may grow nightmarish and that you might be satisfied only in an indirect way. But don't worry; it'll be a big, indirect, marginally incestuous way.
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Despite having made the grades and followed the rules, young Johnny Bunko finds he's become just one more bored corporate drone. Only when he comes into possession of a set of disposable chopsticks that, when snapped apart, summon a fairy that gives him career advice does he begin to turn things around.
Anybody who can bring together seemingly disparate elements of their life and work together to create something new and bold impresses me, just as does a chef who can combine whatever ingredients happen to be around into a meal both unusual and unexpectedly delicious. That's just about what Daniel H. Pink has done here: having written two books about the changing demands of the modern economy and gone to Japan on a fellowship to study the country's comic books, he's put together a book that's essentially career advice manga.
The fairy Diana teaches the hapless Johnny Bunko these lessons:
You can do something for instrumental reasons — because you think it's going to lead to something else, regardless of whether you enjoy it or it's worthwhile... or you can do something for fundamental reasons — because you think it's inherently valuable, regardless of what it may or may not lead to. The dirty little secret is that instrumental reasons don't work. Things are too complicated, too unpredictable. You never know what's going to happen, so you end up stuck. The most successful people — not all of the time, but most of the time — make decisions for fundamental reasons.
Unlike some business/management/career books I could name, Johnny Bunko excels by dispensing advice that at least doesn't obviously suck. (Yeah, the bar's that low.) The lessons are broad, sure, but I think they're for the most part sound. Let's take 'em one-by-one:
I doubt following any of this advice could hurt, and I'd be surprised if, dilligently kept in mind, it didn't help. Nevertheless, they're all conclusions you'd have come to in your own head with enough deliberate consideration; then again, your head wouldn't have put them into manga form. Though the combination of career talk and Japanese comics sounds ridiculous, Johnny Bunko is in reality a really slick, seamless piece of work; nothing feels like a kludge, not even the art by Wisconsin's Rob Ten Pas, who perfectly apes the Japanese visual style. (I guess I missed the point, somewhere along the line, when the meaning of manga shifted from "Japanese comics" to "a style of comics with a very specific aesthetic sensibility and conventions from Japanese Culture that even Wisconsinites want to make.")
Also, this is the only comic book you'll ever see that contains a superdeformed Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. And that's a promise.
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