Acephalous

Bit more on Inception

I’ve taken a lot of interesting flak [thanks Donald!] for my non-review of Inception, but before addressing it, I want to address Anderson’s comment at my old haunt:

People who think Inception was “a royal piece of smoldering crap” haven’t seen enough genuinely bad movies, and really should never leave the safety of The Criterion Collection.

I’m inclined to agree: if someone judges it to be worse than anything Michael Bay’s ever directed, they deserve their time in latte-sipping purgatory. As someone who strongly disliked the film, I can safely say that I didn’t think it an inferior film to Transformers. But to even head in that direction completely misses the point. I wasn’t judging the film as a film, a summer film, or a summer blockbuster film, but as a piece of Christopher Nolan’s body of work. The scale doesn’t slide from Bay to early Coppola; it’s internal to Nolan’s oeuvre, and as I’m not a critic who needs to concern himself with guiding the wallets of moviegoers, I’m free to discuss or be disgusted by Inception at will. Put differently: had I been unfamiliar with Nolan’s previous ventures, in all likelihood I would have enjoyed this film.

But the obverse of that statement is that because I’m intimately familiar with his earlier work, I’m incapable of enjoying the film. I can appreciate its technical virtuosity and plot machinations, but this is old hat for Nolan. He’s already filmed a movie in reverse, so the fact that he can film one up didn’t rivet me. I found it predictable and disappointing, not kin to the Transformers franchise. I walked out for the same reason I stop fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube once I’ve solved it: the joy of a puzzle comes from the puzzling through it. Without any strong connection to any of its characters, Inception felt like a puzzle.

Now, my friend Adam Roberts contends that my inability to sympathize with any of the characters is the result of my living a barren, childless existence. Adam beefs:

 

Inter-Inception

It appears as if my wife and I are the only two people on the face of the planet who hated Inception.  She walked out about an hour and change into it—immediately before the tedious exposition that made the rest of the film thuddingly predictable—and I followed shortly thereafter.  Spoilers follow under the fold.

As soon as the ersatz Ra's Al Ghul from Batman Begins got shot the film screamed its circularity.  Once the rules about dying in one dream level were explained, the mechanism of that circularity became obvious, as did the fact that the "cliffhanger" would consist of whether or not Cobb was really in the really real world or just in another dream.  Which is pot-logic; by which I mean, the sort of thing you say when you're listening to Floyd in your dorm and everyone has their own bowl and is abusing it.

"Man, but what if this was all, like, a dream?"

"I know, dude, but what if it's not even a person's?  What if we're all, like, in a dog's dream?"

"And the moment it wakes up to lick its balls?  We like cease to exist?"

"That is deep, dude."

"Totally."

It's an infuriatingly stupid conceit, and asking the audience to accept it in order to make a film work is insulting.*  I'll admit that film was finely composed: the plot circled back perfectly, i.e. the timing of the van versus the timing at the hotel versus the timing at the fortress and then Limbo.  Limbo.  What to say about that? 

The less more likely the better. 

Instead, I'll just note that psychological complexity in this film was figured like a wedding cake: "depth" literally entailed layers stacked one atop the other, such that the "deeper" one went, the "deeper" one was.  Which is deep, dude.  But the perfect circularity of the plot had another unintended consequence: the film felt like an exercise in empty formalism. 

I'm sorry, I misspoke: the film "felt" like nothing, because it generated sympathy for neither the characters nor the corporation at whose behest they toiled.  When Nolan did attempt to make viewers care about the characters, he did so in the most grossly manipulative of manners: he killed a wife and quasi-orphaned some children.  Only who cared?  They weren't people so much as necessary elements of his orderly plotting, without whom he couldn't have knocked over that first domino.  

"Dominoes" aren't the operative metaphor here, though.  Inception was the equivalent of watching a grandmaster play an uninspired game against the village idiot.  There's brilliance there, certainly, but it's pointless and wasted.

*My personal theory is that no one had the gumption to tell Nolan this because The Dark Knight was the highest grossing film of all time. 

Fall Comics Courses: "American Manga" and "Coming of Age"

I'm teaching two sections of my comics course in Fall 2010, and instead of relying on all the Batman or Alan Moore material, I decided to test-drive chapters from the upcoming book. 

The first is called "American Manga," and in it I'll be teaching the first book and the film adaptation of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, a few episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim.  You'll note that I've chosen three series that have been adapted into films, but am only teaching one of the films.  The idea is to get them to write about the films I'm not teaching with the tools they acquired from the one I did.  Or they can focus on what the process of Americanization actually entails.  (To that end I thought about including Cowboy Bebop and Serenity because they act like mirror images of each other: the former imagines fleeing a barely inhabitable Earth into a universe that is ostensibly Japanese, but heavily indebted to an explicitly American cultural ethos; the latter imagines fleeing "Earth that was" into a universe that is ostensibly frontier America, but heavily indebted to an explicitly Chinese cultural ethos.  But then I tried lesson-planning that transoceanic cultural exchange and my head exploded.)

The second is called "Coming of Age" at the moment, but could be changed into something along the lines of "Confessional Comics" depending on what other material I include.*  To date I've selected Craig Thompson's Blankets and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, and while I know there are a million other indie comics that fit the bill, outside of Ghost World I can't think of any other "Coming of Age" comics that have been adapted into film.  (My general aversion to Clowes is the only reason I'm disinclined to use it.)  As this is certainly a byproduct of a general summer malaise, I wonder what obvious item I'm overlooking. 

*If I lose the focus on "Coming of Age" and switch to the more general "Confessional Comics," I could obviously include Pekar and his film. 

Happy Eleventh Anniversary, My Beautiful Wife

On this day eleven years ago, a dear friend hauled me out of bed and was driving me to my wedding when he asked:

"What do you want to listen to?" 

I didn't know quite what he meant, so I asked:

"What do you mean?"

He said:

"You'll remember this song forever.  Rest of your life and then some.  So pick it right, but whatever it is, and don't pick anything not in this sleeve."

He handed me a sleeve slipped full of CDs.  I flipped through with trepidation, knowing that I'd remember this song forever, for the rest of my life and then some, so I had to pick it right ...

"Whatever it is," he said, as apparently I'd been speaking aloud. 

So I found it, a song that accorded with what I'd been reading—which was all Kafka because of the course I'd be taking with Wolfgang Iser the upcoming Fall in my first quarter in grad school—a song about metamorphosis, about changing from a single into a married person, a song that was this song:

Which is still, I think, still both my and my wife's favorite song by them, but was utterly inappropriate in retrospect.  And at the moment.  Not to mention generally. 

But for me, it was all about the metamorphosis—the changing into something, and someone, else on that day. 

Fuck the smashing into windshields, and fuck being hysterical and useless ... I've done and been that, both literally and metaphorically, and it hasn't changed the fact that as the rain came down and drenched the pastor, my future wife and me, as we were the only ones not under the wedding tent, I had but one thought in my head.  I knew nothing other than, I say, I knew nothing other than:

I want to kiss this woman.

I had vows to say, but:

I want to kiss this woman.

Even as the vows were spoken to me, I couldn't remember them.

I want to kiss this woman.

I was fixated on one thing and one thing alone:

I want to kiss this woman.

A conviction unakin to any I'd ever experienced before:

I want to kiss this woman.

It seemed like hours:

I want to kiss this woman.

Passed before I:

I want to kiss this woman.

Could:

I want to kiss this woman.

And it's burned me hollow every day of the months it's been since I have.  Happy anniversary, my beautiful wife.  Spend it wisely, well, and don't let it let you down ...

"YOUR BLOG IS A LIE!!!!!"

So declares the subject line of an email I just received from someone who, according to her own testimony, probably has better things to be doing:

i came here thru google becuz my husbands ring is stuck on his finger and this was supposedly to tell me how to remove it BUT IT DOES NOT.  His finger really hurts and now i have wasted TIME reading your website that i should have been reading others.  you need to tell people that this is ALL LIES becuz what if they have to cut his finger off HOW WOULD YOU FEEL THEN!!!!!!!!

Like you maybe have something more important to be doing than writing an email?  I'm just saying.

Mastery of language, eh?

It turns out that you can spend eight years working on a dissertation about literature and still write something as cluelessly creepy as this:

Until we lose ourselves, "this narrative is us."

Or so said Oliver Sachs about the stories that become our lives, and it's a sentiment with which I'm inclined to agree.  Not everyone does.  Augustine stockpiles his narratives in that famous warehouse of his and puts himself in charge of it: "It is I myself who remembers, I, the mind" (Confessions 10.6).  The mind here is distinct from the life that shaped and shapes it, but even he acknowledges that without "the force of my memory, I should not be able to call myself myself" (Confessions 10.16).  By "the force of memory," Augustine means the actual act of remembering, which to my mind—albeit against his stated wishes—puts him in my camp, because to paraphrase Beckett, to have lived is not enough: I have to talk about it.

So long, Harvey

Harvey Pekar wasn’t included on the list of people I’m officially allowed to mourn, but that doesn’t mean I won’t mourn his passing anyway. I first came to American Splendor too early—when I started reading Love and Rockets and Cerebus in 1993—and then too late—after the release of the film American Splendor in 2003—so while I understood it, I never truly “got” his appeal. I appreciated his ear for language, but as a teenager thought what it captured unworthy of print, and as a literary scholar had encountered many similarly talented ears and was, therefore, less impressed by it than I should have been. But when I read the news of his passing earlier today, I realized something:

I knew Harvey Pekar.

I didn’t know him know him, but like all of his readers, I knew him as well as you know me. Pekar was a proto-blogger, if you will, because he turned his life into something worthy of public consumption. Our Cancer Year is a grueling read not because all cancer entails struggle, but because the patient stricken with it is someone whose failed dreams, stunted career, and intimate thoughts are familiar to us. We may not have known Harvey Pekar, but we knew “Harvey Pekar,” and unlike artists for whom the distance between characters and self is meticulously kept, in this case it really is just a matter of quotation marks.

Rest in peace, Harvey. Lord knows you deserve some.

From The Get Out Of My Head Department:

I need to write faster, because this is brilliant.

James Hudnall seems to have forgotten about the other 51 percent of the population.

I get mail:

If this combination of two of your favorite topics doesn’t rouse you from your blogging doldrums, nothing will.

To which I replied:

My my.

Then I started writing this post, which is, as per the title, about James Hudnall’s remarkably unselfconscious rant about Wonder Woman. Hudnall’s not interested in her costume change, which was apparently a topic of no small interest while I had my head in the sand, and about which all I have to say is this: if you attended a meeting and were the only one there wearing a swimsuit, would you feel uncomfortable? Enough said. For Hudnall, though, the debate about her costume merely provides him an excuse to attack her character. Like many a spurned misogynist, he does so by accusing her, and by proxy all feminists, of misandry. He begins:

The problem with Wonder Woman isn’t her look. It’s her personality. She has never been a warm, appealing character. She comes from an island populated only by immortal Amazons who hate men. And men aren’t allowed to set foot on the island. This island of super-women send her to “the man’s world” where she brings the baggage of this sexist worldview.

You want to talk about baggage? Consider what Hudnall brings to the table: women who are not “warm” are also not “appealing.” The first question, obviously, is what does he mean by “warm”? The second, of course, is “appealing” to whom? That he failed to notice that his definition of “warmth” entails that she must be “appealing” to men like him is a remarkable, albeit typical among his lot, feat of argumentative blindness: women who possess characteristics that he finds unattractive hate all men because they fail to cater or conform to Hudnall’s needs.

In addition to his inability to distinguish the universal from the particular, he simply misunderstands the character. Wonder Woman does enjoy giving those who underestimate her because she’s a woman, be they thugs or comic villains, their comeuppance—a category that by extension includes readers like Hudnall, but more on that in a bit. But notice what Hudnall fails to: the comic universe is predicated on the logic of a vicarious enjoyment of comeuppance.

Consider this scene in The Dark Knight. The nifty camerawork helps ratchet up the tension on a formal level, but on a narrative one, the tension comes from the viewer knowing what the Joker doesn’t: the implications of having crashed Bruce Wayne’s fundraiser. The viewer anticipates the comeuppance, because the Joker underestimated Wayne on account of his being a wealthy playboy. Same thing works in any situation in which Clark Kent is threatened. It even girds works that demonstrate the limitations of the genre, as that last panel neatly illustrates.

In other words, despite being the motivating force behind the genre, the logic comeuppance only bothers Hudnall when men who underestimate women receive theirs.

I wonder why that is?

Let’s deal with some reality for a second. I know the PC crowd and leftists in general love the concept of “protected classes” and the idea that, say, women could do things better than men if they had the chance.

Because he’s boxing the shadows of the reactionary first wave of feminism? Perhaps.

[W]hile Diana Prince (Wonder Woman’s real name) does change her attitude somewhat when she comes ashore, the “whole men are evil” mentality continues. It’s misandry, plain and simple and that’s unappealing. She does undergo some growth as a character from her early days, but writers continue to revert to this lame argument, which is going to limit your audience to the self-loathing types.

Because his fundamental misunderstanding of the character extends into outright ignorance? Wonder Woman, after all, frequently opposes the Amazonian misandry by speaking in defense of the world of men when her sisters criticize it. Which is frequently. If anything, her opposition to that misandry is based on her belief in equality, inasmuch as the word can be applied to her and, say, Superman. Hudnall glosses over this with the “some” before “growth of character,” because he wants to ignore what is a defining quality of her character as currently conceived. His resistance to the manner of comeuppance she provides blinds him to the vicarious enjoyment others may take from it. Don’t believe me?

[S]he lacks personality. Any protagonist needs to be appealing in some way for the reader to identify with them or care about them.

He can’t even imagine a reader who might care about or identify with a strong female character who enjoys giving men who underestimate her the comeuppance they deserve. No more need be said.

Quick qestion for fans of anime and manga:

Is there any particular cultural or historical reason why the anime and manga all seem to have an epic nonsensical climax followed by a grossly sentimental denouement?  Hayao Miyazaki directed both Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke, so I thought it might simply be a personal tic—epic nonsensical disaster followed by a natural renewal—but it even extends to works merely influenced by anime and manga. 

For example, I just finished watching the series Avatar: The Last Airbender (because Scott McCloud told me to) and there it is again: an epic nonsensical climax followed by a grossly sentimental denouement—this time the resolution of the love stories and a natural renewal—which leads me to believe that what I took to be tics are actually a rhetorically relevant structural element of these works.  

My working thesis is that it has something to do with the scouring of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—which were epic and nonsensical events followed by personal, natural and societal renewals—but before I head down the rabbit hole of secondary literature, it would be keen to know whether there isn't some more straightforward cultural or historical explanation.