Somnopolis

I mentioned here before that I am really looking forward to the film adaptation of Black Hole, in my opinion one of the strangest comic book series in recent years. A ragged hole of a story that leaves you drained afterwards, with horrifying visuals nesting alongside Burns’ evocative description of 1970s America.

The story charts the progress of a disfiguring virus known as ‘the Bug’, through a small-town in Seattle, seeming to target teenagers. We never see an adult infected by the disease, which physically changes those who have contracted it, causing them to grow vistigial organs, or deforming their appearance.

Our main protagonists are Chris, a teenage girl who catches the bug during a one-night stand; and Keith, something of a lost soul who is easily taken advantage of by his friends. During the course of the story both become infected by the bug, but react very differently. The virus itself appears to be spread through sexual contact, which is why so many teenagers become carriers. Many are  forced to leave the community and sleep rough in the woods. One scene in the first issue has Keith and his friends casually discuss how the popular Rob Facincani has caught the bug. “Man…that’s the last we’ll see of that guy” one of them says. Like anything else that occurs during adolescence, the bug itself, this horrible, disfiguring disease, has due to its selective infection of teenagers become just so much fuel for gossip. The boys laugh it up and get stoned. Tomorrow is another day.

Throughout the series our perspective shrinks more and more. The events are narrated to us by either Chris or Keith and sometimes when they cross paths we are treated to the same scene from a different perspective. Think a body-horror twist on Kurosawa’s Roshomon, that appears to be the feel Burns is aiming for. As this review points out hyperbole is a recurring feature of the dialogue. Chris and Keith both swear their undying love for their respective partners at different points in the story and a tragedy that slowly unfolds throughout the series is kicked off by a withdrawn young man’s delusional obsession with a girl.

Time is disjointed, we skip and jump back and forth through various character’s lives, and the story even indulges in dreamlike visions of the future, due to either drugs or unconscious prophecy. Rob’s own symptoms of the disease prove extremely unfortunate, as he develops a small mouth just below the hollow of his neck that has a tendency to speak aloud what he is thinking. Claustrophobia sets in with each of the teens becoming increasingly isolated from their friends and families. The bug serves to reinforce how alienating adolescence can be.

This is familiar territory for fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer which also trades in using horror movie tropes as signifying the emotional excesses of adolescents. The bug dovetails nicely as a dual-metaphor for the bodily changes caused by growing up and the mystery of sex itself. Chris is infected by Rob after he mistakenly assumes she knows he has the disease and does not care. Keith contracts it from a partner with a vestigial puppy tail. He never seems to make the connection that she has the bug. Her willingness to sleep with him overrides any concerns he may have. Teenage self-absorption, dream logic and stoned hallucinations combine to form an heady mix of the uncanny, which Burns expertly interweaves with the seeming mundane lives of these characters.

Re-reading the issues I am reminded of some early difficulties I had with the comic. I love Burns’ artwork, but occasionally have problems telling characters apart. Keith has a monobrow and Rob a small goatee, but aside from that they could be twins. The jumps in time and their physical resemblance combined to confuse the hell out of me when I first began reading the book, having come in mid-way through the series. I was convinced Keith was Chris’ boyfriend and while he is attracted to her, they never actually hook up. Perhaps though the homogeneity of the characters is an intentional move on the artist’s part. For their normalcy and bland faces contrast terrifically with the distorted features of the infected teens isolated from the town rooting through the garbage. The community rallies around what is familiar, expelling the strange and seemingly monstrous – although a post-script in the last issue reveals the infected eventually recover and become normal again. Too late, tragically, for some however.

My interest in Black Hole was first sparked back in 2004 when I read a rave on the now defunct Ninthart.com site. I came into the series near the end and was frustrated that I was unable to find back issues. So much so that later that same year I spent most of a brief holiday in Amsterdam searching for issues in various comic stores around the city. Thankfully I managed to get my hands on the whole set, though a trade hardback collecting the entire series is now available.

There was also news of a Roger Avary (currently tweeting from prison) and Neil Gaiman film script, though that has been passed on. Last I heard David Fincher still intends to direct. I am excited to see what he’ll come up with. A combination of his period detail from Zodiac, with the grotesquerie of Alien 3? A sweaty, gritty teen body horror that could rival Cronenberg’s The Fly? Here’s hoping. Burns’ work draws on the cinematic style of 70s horror cinema. It would be a homecoming of sorts to have a film version of Black Hole that lives up to the visionary excesses of the book.

I never thought David Fincher’s entertaining little romp adapted from Chuck Palahniuk’s MiseryLit got its due. Terrifying its distributor, bewildering film critics, it slowly creeped its way into cultdom via student posters and video rentals. The most enjoyable sequences involve Edward Furlong’s obsessively detailed pathetic little existence. ‘Ikea Boy’, is the moniker given him by the malevolent doppelganger Tyler Durden, following his taste for continually ordering catalogue furnishings. The climax of the film – personality split results in terrorist cell attacking capitalist society at large - sent critics into a hot and bothered frenzy, convincing them that Fincher was attempting to espouse fascism as a worthwhile ambition, successfully missing the point entirely.

I remember the pinched faces on BBC2’s Late Review ejaculating nonsense along those lines.

Some folk ‘got it’, though, ensuring Fight Club would be remembered and now we are experiencing the fallout. Namely…Wanted. Very loosely adapted from Mark Millar and J. G. Jones’ book for Top Cow comics (so loose you could scoop off the first twenty minutes like cream off a cappuchino and have an entirely different creature) the film focuses on Wesley Gibson, trapped in the very same office cubicle of frustrated machismo and desire as Keanu Reeves’ Thomas Anderson and Edward Furlong’s Narrator. A foul-mouthed, overweight female manager is the bane of our hero’s existence, as well as his cheating girlfriend, resulting in persistent panic attacks treated with compulsive pill-popping and repressed anger.

Hang on, I think I hear the Promise Keeper’s calling.

Possessing neither a thematic structure, nor underlying message, like Fight Club, Wanted exists solely as a vehicle for its director’s visual panache. This is Grand Theft Auto in a cinema, with Morgan Freeman cussing up a storm and a perfectly cast Angelina Jolie smirking her way through the film as Fox. Taking the role of Gibson’s inductor into the Tao of Destruction, Angie serves the very same function as her current husband Pitt in FC. Mocking the lead’s servility and feminine nature – and here to underline the point, the person is female. At every point Wesley’s life is navigated by the difficulties he experiences with women, leading inexorably to Jolie’s sphinx smile. So Fox is an updated combination of Tyler Durden and Marla Singer, contemptous of him and tempting him all at once. Burdened by the yolk of female oppression Wesley’s only salvation lies in imitating the man he never knew in life – his father.

Edward Furlong’s Narrator is also tormented by the lack of a father, his descent into violence an attempt to define himself as a man, giving his life meaning as a result. Wesley by contrast is seduced by the idea of being ‘Wanted’ – he jumps into Fox’s car delighted after having seen security camera photos of himself printed on newspapers. The purpose given to him by Morgan Freeman’s fraternity of assassins is to track down and kill his father’s murderer, though not before taking out strangers as determined by a secret code divined through a loom.

Hell even Tyler Durden had something approximating an ideology, cobbled together out of 7 parts anarchism, two parts marxism and 1 part Rousseaulian survivalism. Wesley Gibson discovers manhood and identity through random slayings.

Plot kicks in with a thud when he is handed the assignment to kill Cross, his father’s murderer. After scenes of slow-motion destruction and vehicular carnage it’s almost something of a disappointment to realize there is an actual plot. Exposition designed to justify the ‘code’, adhered to by the Fraternity is equally irritating. The absurdity of it sticks in the craw like the plot-pivotal peanut butter employed in the final scenes. Empty of meaning and vulgar in its grasping cynicism Wanted is just destruction on celluloid for it’s own sake. I can only defend it on two counts – Jolie’s smile; and when the moment comes for our hero to address the camera, pointing out how pathetic we are for sitting and watching the movie we’ve just seen, at least he’s not as offensive as his character was in the comic book.

http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=news&id=4947

http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v2_1/reviews/raney.shtml

I discovered Black Hole almost three years ago, a strange fable set in Seattle sometime during the 70’s, when a number of kids become infected with a sexual disease that mutates them horribly.

As fun as that sounds….what attracted me was the sensitivity of how the story was explored, as well as its bizaare structure. Occasionally shifts in memory and time are quite disjunctive. The storyline is rarely consistent throughout. Also there are a number of metaphorical dreams scattered throughout that may or may not predict the course of the story.

Keith, Chris, Eliza and Rob are seemingly paired off as male and female partners from the outset. All are in some way affected physically by the ‘bug’ and are either ostracised or flee the community they have been raised in. The actual nature of the disease is never revealed – we are led to believe that it is transmitted sexually. The discovery that Chris has become infected while she skinny dips in front of school friends is particularly poignant. She has mistakenly outed herself without even knowing. The art is painfully clear and concise, though sometimes I had difficulty telling the male characters apart (though I guess it was the seventies and everyone had awful hair). Where Burns excels most though is the pieces of first person narration that drive the story along. An bad trip suffered by Keith is described in great detail, helped along by the warped artwork.

And according to the first of the links above – it’s due to become a film! The system works.