Somnopolis

One of my favourite films is the quirky Jump Tomorrow, a multi-lingual road trip across America. It features a scene with a Frenchman and an Englishman (Gosford Park’s James Whilby) arguing over the relevance of the French language. All the great Gallic thinkers and writers are dead, whereas English thrives thanks to the dominance of America.

You can see a similar smugness with regard to Russian culture. All those tolstoys and dostoyevskys had been buried by fukuyamism, relics of a dead culture, historical artifacts of the conflict between ‘freedom’ and despotism.

Except of course that’s nonsense. Russian letters are alive and well. In fact they are thriving on the fallout from the same conflict that buried the Soviet Empire. In Sergei Lukyanenko’s Nightwatch series the protagonist is caught in a century’s old conflict between the forces of good and evil – but takes the time to list the songs on his walkman as he wanders down a street. Lukyanenko’s novel was adapted into a film, which annihilated the Russian box office, inevitably drawing the attention of Hollywood. Some weighty handshakes later and the Night Watch books have been translated into English and a second sequel to the film set in America is due soon. Headcrusher by Alexander Garros and Aleksi Evdokimov reads like a post-Soviet Fight Club, as a highly educated young Latvian becomes increasingly disillusioned by the free market, realizing he is just another corporate drone. The cathartic diversions of Western culture, violent video games and movies, provide him with the inspiration to escape his fate, with bloody results.

I find it appropriate that the plot of Wanted, directed by Nightwatch’s Timur Bakmambetov, is very similar to Headcrusher. Stripped of the excesses of Mark Millar’s comic, it embraces the decadence of Western cinema violence, while also exploding a bomb beneath the drudgery of corporate neo-feudalism that its audience is subject to.

All of this is prelude to the clown prince Victor Pelevin. Like Slavoj Zizek, I am left unsure after each of his books just where the margin between parody and insight lies. Babylon focuses on the psychological conditioning of modern-day advertising by having its main character entire a state of drug-induced free-association, with commercial logos becoming transformed into ever-present Jungian archetypes. The Helmet of Horror appears to be inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, though it also appears to be a satire on philosophical wankery.

Just last week I finished The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, which cites its primary source as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The main character is a boyish prostitute, although Pelevin mines Eastern mythology by having her also be a shapeshifting fox named A Hu-Li. After a series of events almost lead to her exposure as an immortal shapeshifter, she encounters an intelligence officer who is also a were-creature named Alexander. The FSB officer is based on yet another literary character from the Russian canon and himself acknowledges this when A Hu-Li mentions Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. The were-foxes it is revealed feed on human desire, whereas the were-wolves are in the service of the Russian government as oil-diviners.  The book is an attempt by A Hu-Li to describe her path to enlightenment, but as foxes are essentially imitative, she may only be imagining that she is experiencing such.

In the end the book is a satire on modern Russia and a pastiche of its literary and philosophical legacy. The fox A Hu-Li is tragic character frustrated that the long winter of the Cold War has not thawed enough, fondly reminiscing upon her former life in Asia. Alexander is plagued by loyalist fervour and machismo. He serves as Pelevin’s critique of Russian men and like the protagonist of Headcrusher finds himself out of place in a post-Communist world. The English translations of his books cannot come soon enough for me. I find it sad that the market sees fit to promote him as a ‘Russian Will Self’, whereas I find he shares little of the Englishman’s detached cynicism. He is to my mind a pop-literate tolstoyan, seeking the traces of the human condition among PSP games and blockbuster movies.

The sermon on Geek Mountain

During the week Kevin Smith appeared on a panel with Jeannette Winterson (Oranges are not the Only Fruit) and Natlie Hynes, chaired by Kirsty Wark on BBC’s Newsnight. The episode also featured an interview with Mark Millar on ‘comics’, although this mainly served to promote his own book Kick-Ass, the subject of discussion for the panel and a soon to be released film.

The episode revolved around the statement repeated by Wark, and proclaimed by Millar, that the ‘geek has inherited the earth’. Kevin Smith even appeared in a bathrobe as homage to Douglas Adams. Here, he said, was proof positive of the geek reigning supreme – a fat, sweaty man on a panel discussion show wearing a robe.

Jeannette Winterson was having none of it though and argued that comics as a whole are misogynistic. Whereas her fellow panellists were more forgiving (Natalie Hynes compared season two of Buffy to the Aeneid; Kevin Smith’s stoutest rebuttal was ‘its comics :shrug:’), it was clear that two seperate discussions were playing out here. For all the talk of the mainstreaming of geek culture, here was a prize-winning author pointing out the uncomfortable fact that comics often leave a bad taste in the mouth. Yes team comics are quick to point out that there are ‘empowering’ books like Birds of Prey (cancelled), or strong heroines like Tulip from Preacher (finished nine years ago), and Winterson has obviously never read Alias, or Bone, or the work of the Hernandez clan.

She still has a point*. What’s more she represents something of an actual vanguard of culture, in that she is using reasoned argument, whereas ‘it’s comics!’ or ’she’s kick-ass’, smack of inarticulate message board postings. For too long geek culture has subsisted under the radar and criticism of its outpourings is more likely to be met with defensive, angry reactions.

Are comics mysogynistic? A lot of them are. Has the geek inherited the earth? No, he or she is just another ready source of revenue for studios and companies hawking franchises.

Oh and Grant Morrison said the geek has inherited the earth years ago Mark, stop being such an echo.

* Has anyone pointed out to Ms Winterson that her own novel featured in a parody by the Spaced team? I doubt it.

Empire Online Review here.

It’s a troubling thought this. Troubling because I will admit to rampant, bigoted fanboyism when it comes to Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Some consider it the best comic book ever. I would add the caveat that it’s the best superhero comic book ever, which is something quite different.

So mea culpa. Criticism of Watchmen is something I take very seriously. Fanboys are known for their inability to engage in debate, their passion for their chosen topic excluding any possibility of argument. I will try to tread carefully here. For me Watchmen is an extremely well-written work. It takes as its central theme the idea of absolute power and how it relates to morality. If you could save the world at the expense of a few, could you do it? The plot is concerned with the death of a morally questionable superhero. Those other ‘heroes’ that survive him (the sociopathic Rorschach; defeated Night-Owl; reluctant Silk Spectre; calculating Ozymandias; and omnipotent Dr. Manhattan) each react differently to the demise of The Comedian, with only Rorschach immediately assuming that there is potential threat to them all. Who would want to kill a superhero and a patriot?

The story takes in an overarching conspiracy that seems to confirm Rorschach’s fears. Many readers assume that he is actually the main character of the book. However, Rorschach it is made clear is also mentally disturbed and violent, an unredeemed version of the Batman archetypal ‘vigilante’. With heroes like these, who needs enemies? Indeed each of the titular Watchmen (a term which is never applied within the story itself) fail to live up to the heroic ideal established by American superhero comic books. They are psychologically disturbed, alienated and/or disenchanted with their ‘mission’. This is Moore’s vision of the superhero as related to the ‘real world’, more a Weapon of Mass Destruction than a fighter for justice and truth. America’s political history takes a different turn. Richard Nixon holds on to power by successfully winning the Vietnam War thanks to the godlike Dr. Manhattan. The Watergate Scandal never occurs – it is implied that The Comedian had a role in the assassination of Woodward and Bernstein. The Cold War is escalating, with an immanent conflict between Soviet and US forces in Afghanistan.  There are hints that techonological advances have also been made, evidenced by everyday items like bulbs at the end of smoking implements that circulate air, or clean energy station pumps on the sidewalk.

Reading the book one is reminded on its themes at every point. Background details reinforce some of the central ideas and spring out upon repeated readings (look out for references to Alexander’s ’Gordian Knot’). There is an interesting use of repetitious symbolic images, that frequently take on the appearance of an atomic Doomsday Clock counting down to annhilation. The title refers to a translation of the classical aphorism ‘Who watches the watchmen’ and time becomes a measure of power. Dr. Manhattan exists partially outside of time, but cannot influence the course of events beyond their predetermined nature. Ozymandias has a plan for how to avert the end of time, but none as to what he will do next. Rorschach sees history through a narrow prism, as black and white as his shifting mask (Moore attaches a psychological report from the childhood of the character, wherein he describes the bombing of Hiroshima as necessary to end the war). Time is edging the world ever closer to atomic destruction and Einstein’s regret that he would have rather been a watchmaker is quoted to express the guilty conscience of the 20th century.

Phew. Bearing all that in mind – why make a film of this book? Watchmen was released as a limited series comic book that serves as a self-contained story. The book itself contains appendixes in the form of biographical extracts, scientific journal essays, celebrity interviews, psychological reports, a recurring pirate comic book (the play within the play) and even an ornithological article – all serving to deepen our understanding of this alternate world burdened with real-life superheroes.  How can all of that content be summarised by a film? Indeed why should it? The book is enough. Hollywood does not agree and for 23 years has tried to turn Watchmen into a ‘real’ commercial concern. Wired has an interesting potted history of this project’s duration. The worth of the book itself, it’s success as a brilliantly produced comic book, is not enough. That prestige can be capitalised upon by fashioning it into a mainstream movie, which would presumably make more money for Warner Brothers than the minuscule comic book readership could ever do. Is there a need to make a movie about Watchmen because a director has a vision that he or she feels could improve upon the text? No. The only ‘need’, is to sell a lot of tickets and here’s the most important point. Watchmen is not for everyone. It’s a difficult read, very dense and also carries with it a sense of its own importance. Comic fans who have enjoyed it often describe a sense of being unable to read superhero comics in the same way again. The word ‘deconstruction’, gets thrown around a lot. There is also, however, a strong feeling of resentment by certain ‘fans’, towards the book for the same reason. Watchmen ruined superhero comics.

When the term ”grim ‘n’ gritty” is used in relation to the comic industry, Alan Moore and Frank Miller (Dark Knight Returns) are mentioned as the responsible parties. There is another way of looking at the post-Watchmen malaise though, the sudden upsurge of extreme violence, titillating sex and moral depravity evident in the ‘funny pages’. They didn’t get it. Much like Nietzsche being accused of nihilism when he set out to decry it, Moore has been hung by his own petard. The positive Empire review above mentions the shocking violence of the film, the horrifying ending that Snyder has construed to replace the ’silly’, conclusion of the book, the kinky sex enjoyed by Silk Spectre and Night-Owl. I’m beginning to feel a strong sense of deja vu. For if the movie is unable to convey the breath of references and emotion of the book, are we not looking at a repeat of the same superficial homaging that plagued the comic book industry (and some would argue still does - Mark Millar’s scatalogogical Wanted, already adapted into a declawed movie, is yet another culprit). When I think of Rorschach, the first scene from the book I remember is not him scalding a fellow prison inmate with hot fat, but his interviews with the troubled psychologist. Quiet, measured scenes that express the lonely horror of being Rorschach.

If I had to see an adaptation of Watchmen, I would have preferred a television series, perhaps animated. In the Wired article linked above there is an interesting description of Zack Snyder as a ‘nerd-jock’. I think that is a very telling phrase. It signifies how comic culture and nerdy pursuits have been assimilated into the mainstream. That it’s ok to watch a film about men and women punching each other while wearing tights, because this is badass and hardcore! Awesome!

Except when I read it on the page, these characters were all faintly ridiculous. They were meant to be. Watchmen was a comic book that demonstrated stern and knowing tough love to the industry that spawned it. Watchmen the movie hopes to imitate the commercial success of the similarly morose Dark Knight and get lots of bums on seats. Somehow I don’t think that’s enough.

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.

Mark Millar promoted his new Wolverine story ‘Old Man Logan’ as his take on Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. Which is nothing new. Previously he promoted Wanted as his version of Watchmen. Essentially he is pitching this as the last Wolverine story, not to be confused with Paul Jenkins’ Wolverine: The End. Not to mention X-Men: The End.

In case there’s any confusion on this point, Millar is not the only one trying to recapture DKR. The attraction for these comic writers is understandable. Comic titles are franchises. There is no one creative vision for any of the mainstream comic characters – there may have been original creative teams, but they have generally long since moved on, leaving their creations in the hands of whomever is hired for the task. So Stan Lee’s Daredevil is a million miles from Frank Miller’s, or indeed Ed Brubaker’s. Seeing as these are stories with no ending, shedding continuity as often as times change like a snake sheds its skin, it is understandable that some writers evidence a strong desire to conclude the story, even if it is in a What If title, an Elseworlds or an ‘End’ story.

End stories can be identified as generally occurring in a dystopian version of the future. The DCU of DKR had succumbed to an all-powerful fascist American government that had successfully ejected most of the heroes and even recruited Superman to be their enforcer. Millar’s Old Logan wanders a landscape littered with the detritus of superhero wars populated by copycat vigilantes and aging fellow heroes from back in the day. This eagerness for dystopia is tiresome, in that every story seems to follow the same pattern. Marauding gangs of adolescents thugs in retro hero costumes are a recurring feature, as well as the surviving heroes making appearances either grossly overweight or missing limbs. The Invisibles by Grant Morrison features its own End story in the final issues, with King Mob the leader of the anarchist protagonists seeming to sell out by converting their history of activities against the Grand Conspiracy into a video game. Morrison and Alan Moore are exceptions in that their storylines – The Invisibles and Promethea – both end with an apocalypse, but that ‘end of everything’, is not shown as an atomic mushroom cloud. Instead humanity embraces its own end with a celebration, the eschaton revealed as a pan-global shift in perception.

The fascination with the end of all things is not new in fiction or history. There are theories that the Great Fire of London in 1666 was deliberately started by millenialists seeking to fulfill their own belief that Armageddon had arrived. It is an act of egotism, this fascination with the end – because people cannot accept that this world will outlast them. On a much smaller scale comic book writers need to make their definitive mark on narratives that they are only contributing to for a brief time. Mark Millar had already written what some consider to be the best Wolverine story in years Enemy of the State. This was the ‘balls to the wall action’, Canuckle-head story, with Logan becoming brainwashed by an evil organisation named Hydra and going on a killing spree. Wolverine’s violent nature is key to his popularity, which makes attempts to market him as a kid friendly character noisome at times. He is basically a killer struggling to control his bloodlust. In recent years he has become a flagship character for Marvel alongside Spider-Man and the Hulk, so his essential nature is frequently only hinted at, for fear of upsetting parents. See also how silhouetted murder and slicing off limbs is fine, but there is a taboo on depicting him having a smoke. Millar overtuned all that by having the fierce mutant go on a rampage within the institution he had called home for so many years, Xavier’s School for Higher Learning, threatening the lives of the children residing there. The storyline was immensely popular and with the exception of one more story from the Scottish writer, a WWII era POW yarn with Wolverine captive in a concentration camp, his run was concluded on something of a highnote.

For Millar to return to the book now and suddenly jump forward in time to do his own ‘End’ story seems excessive. All the usual ideas are repeated – aging heroes, wasteland surroundings, villains in the ascendancy and a hero broken by his past. Perhaps he will pull something interesting out of his hat, but Millar to me has always seemed like someone who thinks ’subtle’, is a species of wood.

Maybe someday there will be a Wolverine: The End story about Logan happily married to a fellow superhuman and their arguments about doing the washing.

This week the final issue of Mark Millar’s Civil War was published. A Marvel crossover, the book centred on a conflict arising over whether superhero identities should remain secret, between ‘Pro-Registration forces’ led by Tony Stark/Iron Man and ‘Anti-Registration’, led by Captain America.

See here for the best possible summary:

http://the-isb.blogspot.com/2007/02/civil-war-in-30-seconds.html

It was a comic book story, were men in tights beat the stuffing out of one another. But there is some serious teeth gnashing going on over this series.

Mark Millar has a reputation for being critical of the Bush administration. So instantly folk assumed that Stark was a parody of George Bush, with Reed Richards and Hank Pym as his neo-con supporters. See the Superhero Registration Act has been compared to the Patriot Act, with all the attendant loss of privacy and security that implies. Then there was the invention of ‘42′. A prison in another dimension where heroes who merely refused to sign up were locked away….without trial or representation. Sound familiar? A superhero Guantanamo was certainly a new one on fans and this was where things got interesting.

Fanboys are notoriously unable to express themselves. Everything is excessive, you have ‘haters’, and ’shippers’, with no middle-ground between them. They are also by and large fantasists. I read a lot of message boards and what’s worrying is the average age of most of these fans seems to be somewhere in the mid-twenties to thirties. As a result fanboys are also remarkable insulated politically. If politics does ever arise in a conversation, it usually turns into a flamewar of name-calling. “Republican fascist”, “Liberal douche” etc.

Yet with Civil War, once the battle lines were drawn, all of a sudden these inarticulate fanboys were having ongoing debates about the merits of Registration, the ethics of 42, whether or not Reed Richards et al were being written out of character or were actually being prudent. Was Captain America a terrorist?

Unable to discuss the real world, these fictional characters were suddenly lended a weight they might not warrant. Captain America is a soldier and a patriot, so choosing him to lead up the Anti-Registration movement got a lot of attention. It was a return to his stories under Steve Englehart in the 70’s, when the character resigned in disgust over Watergate. Millar’s clever little idea was to bring ‘real world politics’, home to roost in Marvel.

But that ending. Well it has upset a lot of people.

In fairness I would say – this is a comic book. It had nice art. The dialogue was a bit hokey and men punching each other in sequential panels is not something I can take that seriously. Still the conclusion was downbeat and ironic. The ‘utopia’, presented seems utterly doomed by short-sightedness, which is the flaw of utopias in general.

It was a comic book. It had some good moments. I only wish people engaged this much with the crap that’s going on right outside our doors.