Showing posts with label neat theories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neat theories. Show all posts

MARS

I am so excited about real physics right now. I wasted my morning productively by looking up Mars on Wikipedia, and the various plans and ideas for a manned space mission. A subject it is actually satisfyingly thorough on.


Musings: I wonder what the rights issues are with planets? Have space-faring countries signed a deal, or is it the property of whoever gets there first? If a space mission colonised Mars, and sold minerals back to Earth, whose would the profit be? Earth corporations are evil and without conscience, and inherently exploitative. I don't know science, but I am a bleeding heart liberal and everyone is talking about the practical issues, and none the ethical/legal frameworks. A best case scenario would be if the minerals were the property of the colonists - the profits would be cost-covering, and they could use them to trade for supplies. That way an economny would get going. We would need to prevent a scenario where a single business had financial interest in the minerals, and exploited the settlers - as the settlers would depend on Earth supplies for maybe hundreds of generations, their priceless minerals could be effectively extorted in exchange for basic survival kit. (Doctor Who's brilliantly nasty Vengeance on Varos posits a similar situation, where Varos intensely rare natural mineral is bought for peanuts by an evil company, because the Varosians are unaware of its value, and so poor that they are forced to accept low prices)


Under whose jurusdiction would the people there be - would they have rights? There would have to be some sort of declaration of their civil rights - could they form a union, or strike? How would they get their voice heard on Earth? Looking far ahead, but would there be a project for their independance? Struggles for independance in our history have been bloody and vicious - Friend 4's dad is from Guyana, and what America and Britain did to that nation is appalling, fixing the independant elections so a dictator who would support our interests was in power, instead of a brilliant and politically savvy chap, crippling the country, y'know, ever since. Or the problems still faced by African nations. How would the world relate to an independant Mars - would it be like Guernsey in the Commonwealth, where we have our own government but are still closely linked to England both culturally and legally. Alice asks "would the Martians pay international uni fees?" Or more like America and England, where America is wholly separate nowadays but has a sort of shared interest and "special friendship" with England. Both of these strike me as bad.


We would have to have some sort of universal world government, like the Terran Federation in Star Trek or the UN, but an effective and non-rubbish UN,in which the Mars Colony had the same sort of voice as every other nation. For that to work, and for Mars not to be like a little chunk of whatever nation got their first, the Mars mission would have to be like the International Space Station - multinational and multicultural.


I also wondered about the plans they have to "terraform" Mars - making it enough like Earth to live there. Cool, but a bit evil? You are basically setting out to destroy a natural, totally unique enviroment with no idea of the consequences.If you're interested in whether Martian bacteria have rights, this article is excellent: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/EthicsDTP.pdf

07:28 | Category: | 1 comments

Moby Dick and the Great White Phallus
As a result of working hard on my film coursework, I am getting increasingly sickened with academia.

It's been exacerbated by a volume in the Maughan library with which I am feeding my obsession, while picking through on spoilerific eggeshells. An academic volume dedicated to that great and ground breaking author of challenging post-numismatic discourse of the neo-Prydonian School: Terry Nation. He created the Daleks, invented Blake's 7 and wrote a lot of ace stuff for both series. What fun! Paragraph two, for example, begins a discussion on how far you can identify a single author in a television series. A very valid point - but it scuppers it by starting in this manner:

"authorship has been associated wiht power since the beginning of history in the Judeo-crhistian worldview, since God was seen as the author of the world and of humankind"

We now have academic substantiation to deify both him and Holmes. The second section of the introduction is even funnier - entitled "popular television and 'quality' :

"We believe that the work credited to Nation as creator and/or writer fails to fit some of the traditional criteria of 'quality'. It is largely in familiar generic forms, was made on a comparativelyt low budgets, and is addressed to a mass audience. As Bernadette Casey et al (2002:209)"

Oh, do you think? I can't believe they need to footnote statements like "Doctor Who often had crappy special effects".

I'm still waiting for them to do a serious discussion of his characters and themes. Normally, I bow to the Obviously Superior Wisdom of academics. After all, they might just know more than me underneath the scrambled prose. Doctor Who is something I do know the odd thing about, and so the illusion is broken - especially, while analysing form, they insist on referring to "cliffhangers" as "suspended enigmas". It's a childish and simplistic exercise in stating the obvious - inferences anyone could make from watching a single half hour of Genesis of the Daleks. Identifying things like "the Doctor and the companion separate and get into trouble", or "Doctor Who has a mystery which is solved at the end", and then crossreferencing it via Surviors and Blake's 7 which - amazingly! - does the same things. Damn you, that's what drama does!

So I have lashed out with violence, and this is the unpleasant result.

It's become an Accepted Film Studies Fact, much like the oedipal reading of Hamlet, that Alien is
"about" the male fear of pregnancy. Personally, I always thought it was a monster movie with a killer xenomorph first, and Freudian discourse second. Caylpso argued that it is a strong underlying theme - after all, what I choose to see as "people's innate phobia of having something growing inside them" is effecively pregancy. But I still think the focus on it is ludicrous.

To counter this, Calypso and I have decided to make our own unique contribution to the wonderful world of Film Studies wank.

Because Reservoir Dogs is undeniably all about the male fear of menstruation. Spoilers in the next paragraph.

Think about it: when Mr Orange is shot by a woman, it is a form of symbolic castration as she transfers "the female problem" straight at his poor, male abdomen. It is signified by the extreme fetishation of blood, and represents the terror Man has for the bleeding Female. The introduction of a feminised element into the hypermasculine atmosphere is the pivot around which the plot turns. As the blood seeps out, so does the femininity - through which Mr White is transformed into protective mother figure, creating the mother/daughter dynamic: helping a child through a first period. While the characters are confident to anatomise women at a distance - Madonna's big dick, the story of the super-glued-prick e.t.c. - they are unable to cope with a female influence brought into their all-masculine sphere. It provokes violence, suspicion and disgust, and causes the men to become even more masculine archetypes. Particularly in the patriarchal figure of Mr Blonde (straight razor = masculine attribute = Great White Phallus*), who lashes out with penetrating stabs to protest against reproductive expression. Ultimately, the menstruating feminine must be neutralised for the safety of the group.

I hope we call all agree that was the largest pile of bollocks this blog will ever produce.

But what is literary theory but a method to read film through? A Marxist will see every novel as about revolutionary politics - a revisionist will say anything as long as it hasn't been said before. If you've just been dumped, then everything you read is about your ex. Opinions represent your pre-occupations more than anything true and immutable about the text.

And you can't deny that most of what I said in the analysis above was correct. Mr Orange's injury does raise the tension, his presence drives the plot and he is mostly responsible for the eventual outcome. Mr White does behave in a motherly manner, that razor is long and straight. Men are unnaturally skeeved by periods. And Reservoir Dogs is the man's movie which women seem to love - perhaps because they see their own biological dilemma reflected in it. Subconsciously, obviously.

The facts are all correct - it's just been peverted through the prism of a crazy point of view. And yet the more we argue it, the more genuine it seems - which to me exposes the big lie at the heart of academia. You can convince yourself of anything.

And this is why I hate the footnoting obsession. Surely the first priority should be the film, the second one's own opinions - and third, third should be the weight of academic deforestation? Unless you are writing a response, the film is your primary evidence and your reaction the only prism through which you can appreciate it. "Who's Afraid of Literary Theory?" claims that Literary Theory exists so you can understand books. If you didn't know what a hero or a three act structure was, you wouldn't understand the significance, much like the way Indian music sounds awful to people not used to rasas and such. In other words, you cannot judge a work except in the context of your own opinions. The film is the primary source; all opinions are secondary, but yours takes priority because it is only from your opinions that you can interpret and then form any stance on a work.

It's not that other people's opinions aren't interesting. But they are not important compared to the film itself, and equally irrelevant to your own opinions, and the opinion of Bob the bus driver. A applied to B creates theory C - then C applied to D creates theory E and so on, further and further away from the topic under discussion. The ultimate aim of any writing on a book or film should, surely, be to enhance the enjoyment of that book or film by looking at it through different perspectives, on different levels and through different themes. If an essay doesn't make me rethink the film on a second watch, then it has failed. The film-snobs equivalent of pointing out movie trivia.

In a way, I'm reminded of my views on the Doctor and Master. I've never pinned down the exact nature of their relationship and wouldn't want to. Instead, I toy with different theories. Are they just friends? Lovers? Brothers? Father/son, both ways around? Is the Master the Doctor's dark side? Each of those perspectives gives you a slighly different reading, different things to notice or interpret or to think about. Much like sifting through various essays. But I would never pick just one, because at the end of the day, I come back to the text - the text which is totally ambiguous. An academic would pick one, argue it, argue how that related with Cuban Nationalism, argue how Cuban Nationalism could be explained by the Time War, and would be discussing the Marxist dialetic inherent in the nominisation of "Doctor" by tea-time.

This afternoon I found the Maughan's violence-in-cinema section, and because I've an urge to rewatch Reservoir Dogs, hunted down some academia. It genuinely distressed me. I was upset me to read how Holdaway has the ability to distinguish between the reality and artifice of postmodernity; and how the naming scene ("Mr Pink is too close to Mr Pussy") exemplifies the notion of catachresis and mimics the naming of Adam by God - but the idea that the name Mr Black causes quarrels signifies that blackness = violence and signposts the crisis in white cultural identity.

"The characterisation of Joe Cabot as "The Thing" from the 1950s D.C. comic The Silver Surfer foregrounds Joe as a fantastical genre character - also bringing to mind the Lacanian "Thing of the Real", the material embodiment of the chaotic and lethal violence of the Real - which is what Joe fails to control through the imposition of the conventional codes of reality of the gangster."

See, the difference between that and the menstruation theory is that I know I'm being ridiculous. And I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

Let's talk Tarantino's representations of "blackness". QT is an offensive individual who likes shocking people, writing about offensive individuals. He scatters his works with the "n-word" because he can get away with it and he thinks it's streetwise, cool and also funny. But many of his characters behave in a way which that author identifies as codified "black bodies". That's because Tarantino is interested in, and has pilfered from, what white academics call "black culture". END OF DEBATE. I don't see anyone proposing to write a paper about the high levels of violence in my writings - and I think that's because it is perfectly obvious that it is only there because I enjoy violent literature and films. It's not a protest against the patriarchal system, or a representation of buried race anxieties - it's because I like shooting people up.

Applying that sort of deep-level analysis is especially upsetting to me when referred via Reservoir Dogs - a film which is deliberately surface deep, deliberately nihilistic. It means nothing: life is cheap and mundane. All we know of their world is given to us in 90 minutes of real time - the message, such as there is one, is quick and meaningless. By the end of the movies, nothing has changed and it's not meant to. That's what the final juxtaposition of horrible tragedy and comedy music signifies - it's reminding the audience not to worry, because it signifies nothing.

There is interesting academia to be written on the film, but on the story and characters. The way they are set up, and placed in opposition, the information we are given. The intensely clever way Tarantino uses and witholds information from the viewer: that's what academia should be studying.

So, any comments to make on my Reservoir Dogs theory? I'm horribly tempted to write and footnote it properly, and try and get it accepted.

*Yes, this is a real academic term.
02:32 | Category: , , , | 3 comments

THE WALRUS WAS PAUL
I've always had a soft spot for conspiracy theories. The first magazine I bought regularly was Fortean Times, and would still had the cover price not gone up.

A personal favourite is Paul is Dead, the endearingly loopy theory that McCartney of the Beatles died in a moped accident as the hight of their fame. Undeterred, the band covered up the death, replaced him with a lookalike and carried on as normal - but slipped covert references into their later albums. The evidence ranges from the silly to the very silly:

Silly: "Turn me on, dead man!" "Paul is dead, miss him", "I buried Paul" e.t.c. can be heard when you play certain songs backwards. The "father McKenzie" who walks from the grave in Eleanor Rigby was changed from "father McCartney". Before his "death" in 1966, Paul's natural parting was on the left side of his head - afterwards, it jumped to the right, and apparently this is highly unlikely. Pre-1966 and post-1966 Paul look uncannily different, according to some amateur forensics, and more like Phil Akrill.

"In 1988 Warner Brothers released a video titled 'Imagine' which focussed on John Lennon and the 'Imagine' recording sessions. There is one particular scene where John and George are having something to eat and are talking about Yoko being a 'Beatle wife' and referring to the Fab 4. Then George corrects John and says 'Fab 3'. Realising his mistake John agrees."

Very silly: The number plate of the Beetle behind George on the Abbey Road album cover has the number "28IF", referring to the fact Paul would have been 28 had he survived. This theory is slighly derailed by the fact he would have been 27, but you can't keep a good conspiricist down: it's well known that the Beatles were into their Indian stuff, and in India age is dated from conception not birth. Making him 28. "The walrus was Paul" from Glass Onion refers to the song "I am the Walrus". The walrus is, reputedly, a symbol of death in certain cultures - but good luck in actually finding which ones.

And one from the back cover of Abbey Road, which I reproduce in full from the Officially Pronounced Dead site:

"The very name on the back cover could be conveying a cryptic message as to Paul's last resting place. If we read the full writing on the wall, and split the band's name we get "BE AT LES ABBEY". Les is the French definite article (though in plural). Furthermore, if we use numerologic on the next two letters and add the two together, (R and O are the 18th and 15th letters in the alphabet) you get 33, multiply this by the number of letters (2) and we get 66. What year did Paul die? But this is not all! 33 can also be read as CC (the third letter twice). Cece is short for Cecilia, suggesting that Paul couldpossibly be resting in peace in St. Cecilia's Abbey in Rhyde on the Isle of Wight."
The totally nuts:

"After the Beatles' broke up, John went to America to find his killers. During the second half of 1967 he had discovered they were members of the KKK. After years of personal investigation John was getting close, very close to the truth. Yoko Ono is a spy of the foreign office. She was part of John Lennon's assassination."
It's a shame so much of the "evidence" is so crappy, really, because the idea is so damn cool. I can't believe the Beatles didn't encourage the rumour. If ever I become famous, I am totally going to pull a hoax like this! All that rubbish about the lyrics and covers does mask some of the slightly more suspicious evidence, like the fact 1966 saw him suddenly get taller, change his hairstyle, and break up with his longtime girlfriend he was on the point of marrying, not to mention certain odd changes about his face. Nevertheless, this is basically this is the butt-end of conspiracy theoridom. I never believed it at all, until listening to "Day in the Life" - it sent a nasty shiver up my spine, and for a moment I knew exactly what they meant, where the rumours came from. So I now have a certain level of sympathy for the theory - no textual, solid proof, but thematic and tonal. It makes emotional sense, if not logical, especially during that song.

Another favourite crazy theory is the Alice in Wonderland-The Wall synch up. It's less famous than Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz, but I've never had the right CD-DVD combo to play that one. It's simple: you watch the movie with the sound off, while listening to the album, and trippy stuff happens. Much like Paul is Dead, the likelihood of it being real is miniscule - but when you watch it, you can't help but wish it were true...highlights include the doorknob singing the line "if you should go skating on the thin ice of modern life", Alice on the water during "daddy's gone across the ocean" and the terrifyingly creepy garden of wild flowers sequence, choreographed perfectly to "Goodbye Blue Sky". I can't find the instructions I followed on the web, but I think you had to line up that first guitar hit with the moment Alice's finger touches the pool and the White Rabbit appears.

I believe all the big assassinations of the 60s were controlled by the same body. Illuminati, CIA, Jewish Conspiracy, Freemasons - whatever. It was a bad decade to be famous.

A final fave is the faked moon landings. Convenient for the arms race, landing then was, and the BBC created more convincing spaceships in 60s Doctor Who. It does seem unlikely, especially when you consider the Lunar Module was never tested before going into space, and that three lives were risked before NASA had ever tried landing a non-manned mission on the moon. Then again, I still get excited when ice blocks crack in glasses of water, and when pitta bread swell up in the microwave, so I actually do believe we landed on the moon - if it had been a total fake, then other nations who had since landed would have blown the whistle on it. The dust would be different, and so would the landscape. But then there's the moon photos, and that's where it gets suspicious. Most of us can't do decent photos standing still in a normal situation, yet the moon photos/footage are surprisingly good. There are all sorts of anomalies picked out by experts/nutcases, about the direction of shadows or amount of light.

Now this does make sense to me. Man went to the moon. But the photos and stuff were really crappy, so they reproduced it in a studio later. This is the best way to put the evidence together.
Incidentally, the original moon footage was taped over. I know they used to do that in the 60s, but this was the original moon footage. Surely someone would have known it's value?

Here's the best site I could find, although there is better evidence around. I particularly like the way they continually refer to people who believe we landed on the moon as skeptics...

http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html

Incidentally, ever see the reality TV show when they faked sending people into space? Yeh. That.

I suppose my reaction to all of these is I believe it, because they are cool theories, because it doesn't really matter a damn what my opinion on it is and because it is more fun to do so. I also believe in Father Christmas, and in fairies. And I believe Gallifrey exists as well. Why shouldn't I? The key word is "believe" - that's the problem with the atheist argument that God can't be proved. It presupposes that proof matters.

I mean, take the moon landings. I know nothing about science or photography, so I have no basis for judging whether humanity could have landed, or for whether those photographs truly are as incriminating as they look. It doesn't help that one of the things I don't believe in is evidence. The existance of slashfic assures me that if you want to see something hard enough, you can always back it up. My A-level history course featured us weekly having to assess different historians. They would take the same situation, and refract it through the prism of their ideas -
Marxist historians see every revolution as an act of the people against a repressive system, believers in the Great Man Theory would interpret huge social change as acts of individuals, Revisionists would pose any idea as long as it was the opposite of the accepted norm. And so on.
Or the in English literature - is Dracula about sex, female oppression, drugs, syphilis, or just about vampires? What you find depends on what you are looking for. It's all a matter of perception: give the same solar flare to a Christian, a UFOlogist and a meterologist, and one will see angels, one aliens, and one a natural phenomena. Does it matter if one is "right"? Take the ancients, who saw Zeus in the thunder and passed generations knowing no better. In the world as they understood it, Zeus existed. I've always belived real was relative.

I think this is why skeptics have a hard reconverting the religious. It's not so much that people who don't believe in God have a hard time understanding why he might exist - it's that people who believe in evidence have a hard time understanding why it doesn't exist.

So


Some hurting people
10:11 | Category: , | 0 comments

My eyes are open
Good movies are like good friends. There are the friends you go to for a serious conversations, and they're not always the same ones you go to when you need a shoulder to cry on. Some friends inspire you, others allow you to indulge your stupid side. There are holiday romances too - wonderful at the time, but also quickly forgotten - caprices, one night stands, lifelong marriages. Fight Club remains very close to me, my right hand man. I could not have got through the Sixth Form without it. It and the Prisoner kept me sane - or kept me crazy, which is the next best thing.

I didn't really feel it on a first watch. Knowing the ending really bothered me. Once I'd seen it once, my mind relaxed. It's marvellous, start to finish, top to bottom, script, style, everything. it gets into your head. Tomorrow is our school Speech Day. I am going, because my inner Jedi Master thinks this will be good for my development. I'm not actually convinced, but there you go. There are other reasons too. But my condition for going was that I watch Fight Club the evening before. I'm toying with sticking The Prisoner on in the morning also. Films tend to anethetise my brain - I get stuck in their atmosphere, they influence me for days or more. It's always insane, usually enjoyable, and occasionally very, very useful.

It's one of my dad's favourite films, along with Excalibur and Lord of the Rings. I always thought this fact said a lot about him. Made me wonder what my favourite films revealed about me. To return to the first analogy, I wonder if the friends you choose/find/are left with also say something about you. My mum didn't quite get it - I'm not sure she hates the world enough, and I'm not sure she hates herself either. Now while I don't exactly subscribe to either of those viewpoints - a bit too all-encompassing for my liking - nevertheless, I believe the following to be true.

Humanity is not built to be happy. It's genetic. We've evolved from animals, and the the animals that lived to breed were the smart ones who were worried about every contingency.
Nowadays, broadly speaking, we don't have to worry about where the next meal is coming from, nor freezing to death if Za doesn't produce fire, nor being torn to pieces by dinosaurs. Yet we still have that hunter instinct, the same way we still have the right parts of the digestive system despite no longer needing to process grass. Actually, in a hunter-gather sense, there's not much we afflent Westerners need to worry about. And yet we are not living in bliss - even on days when everything is OK, compared to the myriad ills that one is not suffering, it needs to be really sunny, or good music needs to be on the radio for one to actually feel properly happy. I attribute that sense of disquiet, and the human ability to overreact and let the smallest thing spoil one's mood, to the survival of that "oh no!" instinct. If we're not worrying, we're not alert - and if we're not alert, we might get eaten by dinos.

That's my uplifting theory. And it is, when you think about it, optimistic. If my theory is correct then happiness is impossible, at least the type of happiness experienced by families in cereal adverts, or couples at the end of rom coms. Instead, we need to accept what we have as it is - continuing, endless (till you run out) it. There's a lot of peer pressure with happiness too - everyone else appears content, because other people's lives have a definition your own lacks. Like Monet paintings - the further away you are, the better sense they make, until you understand celebrities or historical figures perfectly, and your partner/family/friends not at all. Yet close up, there's no order or logic or art to it at all, and the more you analyse the more it simply reverts to splotches of lead on canvas. Your own life is so consumingly close
you can't even recognise it as artwork anymore. In short, I think this obsession with happiness
and visible contentment is making everyone feel worse because everyone else seems better. I think accepting that the world is uniformly unfufilled is not a depressive act. It's liberating. You no longer have anything to live up to, and can get on with simply living.

Or something. It's amazing the insights you get past midnight. In any case, Fight Club really taps into something most people feel. Though not my mum. The key to it's immense popularity is actually the insidious attractiveness of its central theories. Cinematically, too, the drama comes from agreeing with it all, buying into Tyler's nihilistic worldview and all but signing on the dotted line - and having gained your trust, the movie just runs with it.

When I found my Project Mayhem, one of the first things we're gonna do is make "Tyler Durden's Little Book of Life". It'll contain his choicest wisdom, interspersed with photos of kittens and sunsets, and slotted onto shop shelves besides "The Ways of Wisdom", "Poems for my Granddad" and other such platitude books. It'll be a scream.

Tyler Durden on Humanity: "You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."

Tyler Durden on God: "You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen. We don't need him." [capitalising the "h"s seems horribly inappropriate in this context]

Tyler Durden on Existance: "Our Great Depression is our lives."

I wonder whether I never thought of setting up a Fight Club at the Ladies College? It'd fit right onto their rosta, between Debating and Hockey.
14:54 | Category: , | 0 comments

"Well, you are riding on my bicycle..."
In this week's issue: a defence of the buddy movie, or, keep your slash out of my fandom; then academic bull on why slash fiction happens. This is not necessarily a topic you want to know my opinions on: please read with an open mind.

The buddy movie, if it counts as a genre, can only be my favourite genre of film. Sub-genre, perhaps. After getting terribly excited about Sherlock Holmes yesterday, I decided to watch my favourite film of all time: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It virtually invented the buddy movie, and this got me thinking about the genre as a whole. In particular, my love of those films,
my awareness of the slash scene and how to reconcile the two.

In general, I don't like slash fiction. I'll discuss that below, but I particularly object to it impinging on my favourite films. I do freely acknowledge the "OMG teh luv squee!!" inherent in the buddy genre (and look at the new Sherlock Holmes screenshot. If that isn't sweet nothings, I don't know what is...) but reject it as over-simplistic. Yes, maybe Frodo and Sam were at it like rabbits every time Tolkien got distracted by a subplot, but that takes away from the relationship its uniqueness and ultimately its meaning. On a case by case basis, I'll consider it - you might be aware that I do have a big gay theory as goes another favourite film, Guns of Navarone, but that is based on fairly solid textual evidence, does not destroy the meaning of the film or relationship and also the fact that Gregory Peck said so. I'll explain it one day.

I think this misses one of the chief points of the buddy movie - it's not the love that dare not speak it's name, it's the love that dare not say anything at all. The buddy movie is characterised by silence - emotion is expressed in what isn't being said, and disguised behind the wit of buddy banter. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid don't have a nice word to say for one another for the entire two hour duration, not a single one. Reading these relationships as gay, prioritising the sexual over the romantic, spoils what makes these special

There is certainly a counter argument that all buddy movies are about gay guys in denial, and this applies particularly to those set in i.e. the Victorian era, when people were far less informed not to mention open about these things. Alternately, its all happening off screen. Furthermore, is "the buddy movie" not just another example of the corporate media normalising and excluding homosexuality by trying to pretend it doesn't exist? "Oh, they are only very good friends!"

I was thinking in terms of Vaughan's Dressing Table. The term was used in an essay about Alias fandom, in particular shipping, in particular femmeslash. I can't remember it all, but this single concept stayed with me. Vaughan is the male lead in the show, and through a ruthlessly confusing series of events he ends up married - but not to the lead femalem leading to angst and tension. The wife and the girlfriend get slashed, naturally enough, but these stories are characterised by Vaughan's absence. It'll be in Vaughan's bedroom, surrounded by his posessions - they are expressing their love for him in love for one another. In other words, it is still all about him.

This doesn't universally apply to slashfic, but it is an interesting observation, and I was reminded of it when rewatching the film last night. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is actually about a love triangle - the two boys, and the object of their mutual affections, Etta Place. The genius of the movie is in its lack of angst, with all three accepting the situation and getting on with it. There is no rivalry, nor any sense of three being a crowd. Etta Place is on one level merely a cover girlfriend - doubtless her role for Hollywood is to prove emphatically that Redford'n'Newman are VERY STRAIGHT. Yet I think she also inhabits a role similar to that of Vaughan's Dressing Table - they spend the film both expressing affection for her which they refuse to express, and indeed cannot express, for one another.

Well, that's my excuse anyway. I'm not going to deny the other approach exists - buddy movie as closet love story - and I think there are cases where that works. I don't buy it for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid however. While it's easy to go gigglesnortgaycowboys, anyone actually viewing the film would find it very hard to construct an argument - they are clearly "in love" in several important senses, but not all of them. Though doubtless people have tried.

Furthermore, I see the fner fner reaction to the buddy movie as a different sort of Hollywood assault. I haven't done a study, but to my mind sheer platonic adoration is also overlooked as a subject of fiction except in the buddy genre. In the rom com, the gay best friend can be overlooked because he is not a sexual threat. The concept that he may be an emotional one is not taken into account. Name me a romance which doesn't involve the promise of fantastic sex? Name me an action movie love subplot which doesn't focus on the extreme masculinity of its hero, and the scantily-clad-ness of its heroine? There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this - I think art should represent everything - but its importance is overemphasised. There are other approaches, and this focus on physical attraction ultimately cheapens a lot of Hollywood romance movies. Our lead stars are both hot - therefore they find one another hot - therefore they can fall in love! No more character development required...

It results in bad films, and were that all maybe it could be forgiven. But it filters into real life, too. Movies are our teachers: they instruct us about life, love, people, manners, morals. Maybe not consciously, but the ideas do seep in. Yesterday I identified my dislike of romance movies rested in the lack of violence - this is undeniably correct - but I also hate them for the unrealism, an unrealism dangerous because it pretends to show "real life" in familiar settings. How can I ever hope to find my Rick Blaine, my Alec Harvey, my Mr Darcy? They are a balance of the best in men and women - both rugged and "manly", but also sensitive and refined. Rough, but also polite. And always very hot. Cinema teaches us that true love exists, that we should wait for "the one", that a man can be all these things and more. Actually, the poor creatures are only human. And it goes for women in movies too. Films are an oppertunity for escapism only in equal measure to the level they make us dissatisfied with our realistic lot. And by demanding of these perfect cut-out boys and girls that they also experiecence physical attraction first and foremost, they ask us also to look for conventionally attractive partners and dismiss the conventionally ugly.

The buddy movie has to establish love without sex. Which I'm sure is the worst nightmare of much of humantiy, but it nevertheless gives filmmakers a better chance to explore aspects of romance easily overlooked when there's the promise/threat of a good screw in the second act. My conception of love, which you can argue is on very thin basis, is that it is not a single idea or act, and for success it should work on as many levels as possible. Pure emotional attraction exists, as does the purely physical - neither is more valuable than the other. But both aspects together is stronger than either individually - then add into that intellectual attraction, and then the willingness to discuss tax returns and argue with your partner about stupid mundane things, and you are stronger. My point is, making homosexual what was intended as homoerotic you lose the buddy movie's raison d'etre: an undistracted exploration of the platonic elements of love.

I do think slash fiction deserves some serious academic study, however, and I've started to gather together a few ideas on why it exists. Why does a huge group of (generally) female fans* feel the need to write gay romances for canon characters? I don't really know enough about, i.e. fandom studies, porn studies, feminism, to do it properly, but here are a few ideas I've had:


*naturally, I am way above all this, and would never dream anything of the sort...

1 Vaughan's dressing table
Like Butch and Sundance with Etta above, perhaps it is a way of expressing their own attraction to the characters involved. In general, unattractive characters do not get slashed. In other words, it's all for the hottness. I can't help but put most of the Lord of the Rings slash straight into this box, as it has not the slightest textual sense.

2 some sort of feminist thingy-ma-jig
I don't know much about this area, but maybe it's the concept of two guys being equally vulnerable that appeals more than explicit het-fic, where the female character would be in a subordinate position. Laura Mulvey would have things to say about this - maybe it's a reaction against male control, albeit a subconscious one? In writing gay pairings, perhaps it's a way for women to explore sexuality in a very safe area, in which they (as women) are not involved? Instead, they are in control, and give the male characters more classically feminine attributes - tenderness, emotion, etc. Or something along these lines - as I said, I'm no expert in the academia, and don't know the lingo. But I'm positive there is a great argument here, even if I am not expressing it very well.

3 Eroticism
Kissing isn't hot any more, and the media is working on sex too. Kissing happens in public, daytime TV, most movies. In the 1950s, screen kisses positively smouldered, and it was precicely because of their rarity, their implicit naughtiness. Our modern morals are doubtless better than all this repression in real life, and yet it's damaging to fiction. It's the adult equivalent of the child wanting the cookies from the tin he has been denied - we all know unattainability, forbidden love, hidden desire is automatically sexier than when it is easy. Rightly or wrongly, homosexuality is not universally accepted, nor is it as often encountered in daily life. This does have the unintended effect of gifting the concept with a level of attraction at the same time it condemns it as wrong. Again, I'm sure there's a study somewhere to back me up. This is a different approach to idea 1 - it's basically just hot. Katy Perry, curses be upon her and her irritating song, has proved that point adequately.

I realised this watching an all-male company performing Romeo and Juliet. Even ignoring the fact he was the best Juliet I have ever seen, when it came to the kisses you could feel the audience's anticiption ripple like static across the room. That would not have happened for a "normal" production or a "normal" kiss without some very intense effort from the actors.

4 the drama! the angst!
The platonic sister of point number 3. Romeo and Juliet has long established that romances are more romantic when there's a barrier to the characters getting together. Thus the forbidden love aspect above takes on a narrative function.

5 - for the fnersI've been discussing serious slash so far, but there's also the other side I haven't touched on - people who do it purely for the giggles. I'm not sure there's much academia to be had here, except that people find gay sex funny.

6 - lack of well developed female characters
Well, this is what wikipedia suggests - and in a sense, this ties back into the buddy movie theory above. Male characters are invariably better drawn than female ones, so it is easily more satisfying to explore their feelings and emotions, which are invariably deeper and more complex. In a romance context, it's better to have two (male) thinking human beings, than one man and one (female) cardboard cutout. Similarly, relationships between male characters will be based on something deeper than a studio head saying "why can't we have a romance subplot?", then manufacturing a weak character to fall in love with. They will inevitably have more substance to them, and thus be more interesting to explore.

An example of this would be The A-Team. Now I know the characterisation on that show is hardly very deep. But what there is exists between the four members of the team - their history, their rivalries and friendships. Not with audience identification figure, Amy Adams, who was added to the show because the studio wanted a female character. I wonder what for? So you'd think that it would focus on the interesting dynamics. But oh no, they keep dumping Amy and Face together hoping that y'know because they're both young (unlike Hannibal), and both hot, and neither is black (B.A.) or crazy (Murdoch) they'll just go ahead and fall in love. No other reasoning required. It's like tring to make pandas mate in captivity...

Apparerently the Lucas corp. has attempted to put its foot down on slashfic. This just makes me laugh. It's counterculture. What's the point of a cease and desist?! Who is going to pay any attention? I'm even more amused by Anne Rice objecting to slashfiction based on her books, considering that Interview with a Vampire is, well...on the other hand, Joss Wheadon is a hero for deliberately encouraging the slash fans and dropping hints in his scripts. The man's a genius. RTD was basically writing slash fiction by the time he reached the end of Season 3 finale, which was hilarious as he strictly is a jumped up fan who happens to be in charge of canon. He did confirm what had been obvious for years, although smartly trod a neat line where fans could read whatever they liked into his script. Ms Rice? Mr Lucus? Don't hate your fans! They are buying your merchandise! They are paying you money!

Anyway. Apologies to anyone disturbed or alarmed by that trip through the dark continent. Iam vale, quod Latina me vocat.
01:16 | Category: , | 3 comments

Arena: Rorschach vs. Wolverine
Last night, I decided to rewatch Watchmen instead of going to see X-Men:Origins.

I justified this by saying "well, Rorschach could wup Wolverine in a fight anyway..." - and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to illustrate this fight. Ignoring, of course, that the two can never exist in the same universe - not only because one is DC and the other Marvel, but because Dr. Manhattan is emphatically the only superpowered being in Rorschach's world. More than anything else, the idea was art practice in the world of the garish graphic novel.

I've worked out some images: I definitely want to put Wolverine's trademark 3-slash through the edge of Rorschach's trademark face, leaving an evil little eye poking out. And concerning Wolverine's feral-ness, Calypso has suggested a great line for Rorschach - who knows all about dealing with dogs!

Yet the more I illustrated, the more I doubted my original position. I adore Rorschach, naturally, and I tend to claim he could beat up anyone on reflex because he is just that cool. There's a recurring web meme which reads:

"SUPERMAN VS. BATMAN. WINNER: RORSCHACH"
Which tends to sum up my feelings on the subject. He could take Tyler Durden with his hands
tied.

Yet...Rorschach is obviously resourceful, has a talent for tactics and refuses to give up under any circumstance. But he's still human, and can be defeated by humans too. Within the Watchmen universe, Manhattan is obviously the most powerful hero, followed by Veidt. After that, well we could argue all night.

But Wolverine is superhuman, and presumably the world's coolest guy presents no more threat to him than the world's coolest termite. His senses are better, making him faster, and his strength and stamina are probably better too. This is even before you get to the fact he's Edward Scissorhands with a bad attitude.

He has been properly trained in combat - although Rorschach's unpredictability on that front is also one of his greatest strengths, so maybe that would balance out. He has the advantage of being able to heal quickly too, although the jury is out about just how quick that is. And similarly, Rorschach is about as hardass - he walks through the Antartic wearing only a trenchcoat and fedora. Rorschach is a fantastic tactician, but I'd estimate Wolverine was approximately equivalent.

What advantages does Rorschach actually have? Well, if he was on home ground he'd have a little chance - Calypso has already suggested a rubbish dump, which would give him a lot to work with in terms of props and places to hide. Occurring in a ring or empty room, he would be dead (c.f. A.V. again). Wolverine is capable of killing people, but not as capable. Yet this doesn't stem so much from his hesitance as Rorschach's enthusiasm. He's also a nutcase, which can only help if you're fighting someone sane.

To be honest, his biggest advantage is me leaning down to him and giving him the Lady's favour to carry with him into battle. Superhero fights have a HUGE element of authorial intervention governing them, more than any logic. I hold up as examples two of the great, great Batman novels: Hush and The Dark Knight Returns. In both of these, Batman bests Superman. Now, you can argue in one Superman was being controlled by Poison Ivy, and the other he had been weakened by a nuke, but the point still stands: strictly, Superman should have such an immense advantage he could win every time. Thus comic book authors can and do just tweak these things, and yet I hate comic book canon and its contradictions and refuse to be a part of it.

Initially, the problem was "can Rorschach could beat Wolverine in a fight?" Now, my pretty four-colour fantasy has evolved into "can Rorschach survive Wolverine in a fight?" If he stood and fought he'd be very dead, very quickly. His only chance would be to run for it, and get Wolverine into an improvised trap of some sort. And Wolverine is not as dumb as he looks. One of Wolverine's defining characteristics is his tendency to go bezerker, so if R. got him mad enough, maybe he'd stop paying attention enough to give R a slight upper hand - but he'd still need some way to survive while all that took place. I can visualise quite well the pair tearing across an urban wasteland, with Rorschach bouncing up buildings and staying just out the way of those claws.

I'm now sorely tempted to do an X-Men marathon, purely to size up Wolverine and work this one out - and if it does evolve into him tearing our favourite masked avenger into shreds, well, at least I'll be able to get his fighting style a little more personalised than the generic sketches I have at the moment.

So, folks, today's question: who wins? I do intend to draw and ink this one, so your votes count! And there's a comic book precendent for this too, when DC got readers to phone in to say whether they wanted Robin to survive or not. Curiously, they didn't get the answer they were looking for, and next week's issue saw the Joker batter him to death with an iron bar then blow him up. The worst thing is, I'm not exaggerating: I've read it, and it's shockingly nasty.

So who would triumph, and importantly, why? Add any important details, ideas or thoughts, and I'll incorporate them. Ideally both characters should survive. But accidents happen.



While we're talking about Watchmen, I dug up this great piece of art. I'm amused to see the artist has done exactly what I did with Rorschach, which was instantly give him an iron bar to work with. Rorschach vs. Batman? Now that's a close call, which Batman maybe would win - they're about equal on the smart, tactical, urban, batshit crazy front. But Bats is wearing body armour. That's the basis for that argument.

But the curious thing is the art is actually leading into a comic series called Multiversity. Quick lesson on the DC universe - there are 52 parallel worlds, created by "alternate version" characters. So Earth-3 Superman is evil, on Earth-172 Superman is Batman's adoptive brother, Earth-1938 in which Superman has averted WWII, an unnamed Earth where Superman is both black and president of the USA etc. Instead of just treating these like the one-shot absurdities they are, they've been incorporated into canon. Periodically, they've had matchups and crossovers featuring several of these Supermen interacting, and thus the same for all the other DC characters. Multiversity is a miny series focusing on seven of these worlds, featuring a plot somehow linking them: no one really knows anything yet.

Except the news regarding Earth 4, and that poster. Now Earth-4 is the designated home of the characters DC bought from Charlton Comics: the Question, Blue Beetle, Peacemaker, Captain Atom, and so on. If any of those names seem familiar, it's because Alan Moore originally intended to use them in Watchmen before DC realised most of their characters would end up dead and/or nuts. You can still see their very real influence: I've read the first volume of The Question, hated it for various reasons, but was creeped out by the Rorschachyness of it all.

And Earth-4 is one of the worlds that is going to be used. The phrase "Watchmen 2" is being bandied about, incorrectly, but it's still going to be an interesting exercise. They're pretending that the style of Watchmen is part of the internal tone and consistancy of Earth-4, so while you're going to be watching Question and Atom running around there, it is going to be very much the same universe with the same rules. Or, as Grant Morrison puts it:

"I thought it would be interesting to pick up on that sort of crystalline, self-reflecting storytelling method, so the mad notion I came up with was to do the Charlton characters in a story I'd construct as an update on that ludic Watchmen style - if Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had pitched the Watchmen now, rooted in a contemporary political landscape but with the actual Charlton characters instead of analogues!"

Didn't think anyone would be so mad as to breathe on a sacred cow like that. Calypso has mentioned that she'd love to see a Minutemen spinoff: so say we all. But we learn everything we need to know from those slight hints in Watchmen. We don't need or, indeed, want it. It's a self contained entitity. Although I'm tempted to do some really corny old-style comics with them.

It's the closest thing we'll ever get. And I think, as a concept, it is fascinating. Bring it on! But I'm gonna wait for the trade...

PS - Wikipedia tells me Rorschach is also a municipality in Switzerland. If ever I go, I will buy so many tacky souveneers!

13:20 | Category: , | 2 comments

In which I procrastinate in Earth-B
In this post: why superhero comics deserve to be studied

There's nothing worse than trying to write an essay when really, you want to be writing an essay on something else.

Essay I am writing: women in early Greek myth

Essay I want to be writing: why comic books are the modern myth.

Well they are. Just as the ancient Greeks could, out of the blue, decide "we need a new hero, lets invent a new nymph and have her cop it with Zeus", so Marvel can decide "What would it be like if Jean Gray was a guy" - and invent the New Exiles team to showcase "John Gray" instead. Want to find out what it'd be like if all the X-men were zombies? What about reading "Marvel Zombies"?

As a stickler for canon, I can barely comprehend the make it up as you go along attitude that comic books take. Not fond of established Batman continuity? Why don't you read the one where Bruce Wayne is in the police force, and Barbara Gordon is Batgirl? There's another alternate universe where little Bruce was adopted by the famille Kent early on in his life; and anotherone where Batman is an evil vampire who is eventually killed by Gordon and Alfred; and another one, where magic exists, the Batmage. My favourite discovery of the day is DC's Earth-D, which features a more ethnically pleasing selection of heroes, including a black Superman and Native American Green Arrow.

It's the combination of the experimental with the strangely pointless which always amuses me. I'd ask "who wakes up in the morning and things "I wonder what it would be like if Batman was actually a transexual in a wheelchair?*", but I suspect the answer would be "because it's really cool".

*I was joking when I wrote this, but it turns out there really is a wheelchair storyline...

But more to the point - the flexibility is exactly that of myth. Lets look at Catwoman:

"Batman #62 revealed that Catwoman (after a blow to the head jogged her memory) is an amnesiac flight attendant, who had turned to crime after suffering a prior blow to the head during a plane crash she survived

In the 1970s comics, a series of stories taking place on Earth-Two reveal that on that world, Selina reformed in the 1950s (after the events of Batman #69) and had married Bruce Wayne; soon afterwards, she gave birth to the couple's only child, Helena Wayne

The Brave and the Bold #197 reveals that she never actually had amnesia. It is revealed that Selina Kyle had been in an abusive marriage, and eventually decides to leave her husband.

Several stories in the 1970s featured Catwoman committing murder, something that neither the Earth-One nor Earth-Two versions of her would ever do; this version of Catwoman was assigned to the alternate world of Earth-B, an alternate Earth that included stories that couldn't be considered canonical on Earth-One or Earth-Two.
(sourced from Wikipedia)

So which is it? Amnesiac flight attendant, abused wife, muderess or Mrs Wayne? Some modern comics, naturally, have her as a prostitute dominatrix, but I believe that's been retconned too: she was only pretending!

And how is that any different from the arguments over whether Pandora had a box and a jar, and whether it contained blessings which she lost by opening it, or curses which she released? Just like Pandora, Catwoman is revisted by different generations, with different ideas about what is exceptable or interesting.

Here's something you probably don't know - Bruce Wayne's parents were killed by Joe Chill. Well I always thought he was a random guy in the street, and for me the power in the story always came by the cruel, unsolved randomness of it. Two separate traditions! The dedicated comic book fans - lets liken them to the people in the cities - who know Joe Chill did the deed. And then the story of Batman filters out into the provinces - to us, to the less dedicated - by which time the story has changed. Which makes the Joe Chill people the comic book equivalent of those who insist baby Jesus ended up in Cornwall.

When a character like Batman has been revised so many times, it's hard to pluck out a canonical truth. Comic book afficianados, naturally, do have the upper hand - but some of the general public will have discovered him in any of the films or any of the TV shows. The original Harvey Dent had acid thrown in his face by Moroni in a courtroom - but there's a whole new generation now convinced that the Joker had something to do with it, and as it's all fiction, nothing makes one version intrinsically more valid than another.

But conscious reinvention was known to the ancients too. For example, Medea is infamous for killing her own children. Actually, this was a completely new addition by Euripides in his play - Medea had never done that before or since. Several versions, she and the children escaped entirely. Yet say "Medea", and she's the one who killed her kids.

It's not just the developement of comics which are the same. Superman is Heracles - like a man, only better, and someone to live up to. The didactic value of ancient myth (i.e. don't marry your mother) is clearly reflected in early comics, where the bad guys get their comeuppance and good guys defeat them in a way the Doctor would be proud of. During the war, the superheroes were defending the side of right too

Yes sir, I could get way more than 2500 words out of that, with a bit of time and a lot of research.

Oh well. Back to Hesiod...
09:30 | Category: , , , | 0 comments