Becoming Mark Millar

My feelings about Mark Millar (with one notable exception) have been rehearsed often enough that you'll probably be surprised that I allowed my students to talk me into teaching Kick Ass (the book and film) in my American Manga courses.* I hadn't seen the film yet but knew from having read the book what to expect: a premise that's not nearly as clever as Millar thinks it is (ahem Nemesis ahem) would be presented as if it were a brilliant counterfactual (ahem Red Son ahem) only to be violated when the opportunity arose to "cleverly" twist the narrative with no regard for the logical or moral implications such a twist entailed (ahem The Ultimates ahem).  A quick diagram of Kick Ass would work something like this:

1. an unclever premise (what if superheroes were real?)
2. presented as a brilliant counterfactual (they would regularly get their asses kicked! in extremely graphic ways! by amoral people!)
3. whose logic would be violated at the first opportunity (superheroes do exist!)
4. to "cleverly" twist the narrative (but they're sympathetic 10-year-old girls who like to say the word "cunt"!)
5. with no regard for the logical (supereheroes can't exist! but they do!) or moral (Hit Girl is a sympathetic sociopath!) consequences such a twist entails

As I've already discussed his fascination with the word "cunt" and he's since named his magazine after the old printing pun

so I think it goes without saying that Hit Girl is Millar indulging in a spot of gender-bending narcissism with pedophiliac overtones and, as such, is telling me things about himself I frankly don't want to know.  Think about it: Big Daddy and Hit Girl are clearly variations of Batman and Robin, itself a relationship of questionable provenance, only Millar turns the 10-year-old proxy for Robin in a female version of an idealized vision of himself.  How is that not disturbing?  But I digress:

His premise is that superheroes can't exist in a world constructed with something resembling a realist ethos, and in order to prove this he has John Romita, Jr. draw the reason why with unflinching brutality.  (This is because at our current historical moment, "realism" functions as a synonym for "gritty," but you already knew that.)  For example:

In the real world, panels like this argue, a superhero would be stabbed and then hit by a car and then all the blood in his body would fly from his wounds like so many kicked-in teeth.  Such panels claim to be realist but are, in fact, hyper-stylized indulgences in violent juvenile fantasies ... which also happens to be a fairly accurate assessment of the entire book. 

All that said, you might be surprised to learn that I actually liked the film.  Why?  Compare the above to its on-screen equivalent:

Notice a difference?  The first and most obvious one is that the amount of blood on the pavement approximates the amount someone stabbed in the stomach would bleed.  The second and more important difference is that Matthew Vaughn shoots the aftermath of the accident from the side in a medium long shot, whereas Millar and Romita, Jr. frame the shot from above in a manner that fetishizes the effect of violence on the human body.  To put it differently:

Vaughn's shot selection is essentially critical of Millar and Romita, Jr.'s excessive lust for representing broken human bodies.  It quietly claims that the "realist" premise Millar claimed to be operating under is the very ruse Millar himself reveals it to be when Hit Girl first appears.  The book is pure torture porn of the sort that the film initially attempts to undermine.  Vaughn demonstrates that Millar is a monster by showing you what the book should have looked like and then turning you into Millar.  After all, the audience's understanding of the dynamics of the narrative is very different when Hit Girl first appears after Vaughn's implicit criticism of Millar's bloodlust.

*It turns out that the significant overlap between the demographics of UCI and the readership of manga is no overlap at all, forcing me to expend too much time explaining what the conventions with which I assumed they would be familiar were and how they worked.  As the reasons behind teaching popular culture in a composition class are 1) the students have an intuitive understanding of the conventions, which allows me 2) to focus on creating a formal vocabulary for discussing them, so that I might 3) show the students how to organize those technical discussions into persuasive arguments.  In other words: I need them to pick up the vocabulary quickly so I can focus on the teaching the process of formal writing.  As the manga and anime weren't facilitating those goals, I had no choice but to shift gears.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

"I had to drop the manga from my American Manga course."

"Dude! But it's called, like, American manga."

"Yeah, I know. But that was just because I thought they'd be familiar with manga already. If they already know, like, how big eyes means someone is cute instead of that they're a mutant or something, I can go on to show them how to make a formal argument that big eyes make things look cute."

"Dude... when I taught classes, we didn't assume that the students knew the material *before* they took the class. Actually we didn't assume that they knew anything at all."

"Yeah, yeah. Look, I'm not talking about assuming that they know anything, OK? The point is to take people who had a typical crap high school education and teach them how to be office managers or something. Reading and writing and how to write a memo for your boss that doesn't make you sound like a 3rd grader. Was it too much to ask that they've already read comic books? Excuse me, American manga dammit."

"And they haven't, huh?"

"No!"

"Well, what have they read?"

"I don't know! I guess they've seen movies or something. I mean, everyone's seen movies, right?"

"Yeah, I guess. Not art house movies. Lying in pool of blood ones, sure."

"That's right. Damn it, I'm going to teach those kids how to argue, starting from the assumption that they've seen movies where people get stabbed and lie in pools of blood. Comic books -- excuse me, American manga, dammit -- are too much for them. Damn it!"

"Dude. Your job sucks, dude."

[JPool]

Damn you're a dick, Rich.

[Jonathan]

On the subject of knowing things about Millar that you don't want to, I think it should be noted that the surname of Kick-Ass' girlfriend is the name of a pornstar. (http://www.iafd.com/person.rme/perfid=Deauxma/gender=f/Deauxma.htm) One of a certain age, in fact. Somehow I don't think that's a coincidence.

[tomemos]

Jpool: I disagree!

And it's weird to me that Rich always gets so much flack for supposed dickishness, when Scott's online persona so frequently relies—for the better!—on withering sarcasm, condescension, absolutism, etc.

[Martin Wisse]

Well, it is a dickish comment, but one not unfriendly, so you're both right.

[Peter Erwin]

... the significant overlap between the demographics of UCI and the readership of manga...

Do you happen to have a link to an ethnic breakdown of US manga readers? All I could find from a quick online search on manga demographics in the US was references to age groups and a vague "60% are female" remark from an article in Time.

(Or by "demographics of UCI" did you just mean: late teens/early twenties?)

[Rich Puchalsky]

Hey, I'm not a dick. I'm a tremendous dick.

I'm not really sure what needs explaining, if anything. I thought that Scott was burying the lede in a footnote in the same way as he was burying the recognition of the absurdity of dropping manga from his manga class -- a recognition that involves acknowledging that his job is about teaching basic workplace skills, not teaching how to read artworks at all, and really kind of sucks. An imagined conversation about it became a conversation like one between two stoner guys probably because of Scott's "facilitating these goals" language. I thought it was really funny, but hey, I laugh at my own jokes.

[Andrew R.]

Rich, I certainly got a belly laugh out of your comment.

But then, I'm also a lecturer in his early 30s wondering how the eff one can relate to one's students. Of course, my students are a lot less white than Scott's, and so I actually avoid trying too hard to look for a "hook" by which to reach the students, lest I be the Clueless White Liberal who tries way way too hard and does something supremely patronizing and embarrassing.

[SEK]

I didn't take Rich as being a dick so much as missing the point. I didn't bury the lede, I just mentioned something I've been discussing now for two years: I don't teach literature, I teach rhetoric and composition. As such, the acquisition of critical thinking skills and creation of cogent arguments is more important than cultivating an appreciation for literature. The other point he missed is that there's a reason that this class needs a crutch: it's ten weeks long, so if I'm going to meet the goals of the course, I need to work with some material at hand. If I said I was going to teach the Wake in a composition class, you'd laugh at the absurdity because freshmen aren't prepared to read it; non-English majors with ESL difficulties are even less prepared to learn how to write and argue rigorously, so the works we use to get them invested in the project need to be that much more engaging to them, and the familiarity helps...or so I thought. When I realized it didn't, I switched gears.

[SEK]

Do you happen to have a link to an ethnic breakdown of US manga readers? All I could find from a quick online search on manga demographics in the US was references to age groups and a vague "60% are female" remark from an article in Time.

Not handy, which is a problem, because I meant to be working on that chapter this weekend...I'll publish a post about it when I can put my hands on it again.

Of course, my students are a lot less white than Scott's...

As per the above, my students aren't very white. One of the reasons I went with the "American manga" theme is because the university bookstore devotes significant floor-space to mange and anime, as does the comic shop off-campus. They wouldn't if there weren't demand, etc.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Missing the point, maybe, but ... the imaginary dialogue pretty much said everything your last comment just said, only with a change in emphasis. Thus the dickishness, I guess. I could equally well have had an imaginary department chair growl "You've got ten weeks to teach those kids how to sound like they went to college. So drop the comic books and make your class about whatever crap they've already seen, and move it along." Which would be equally pretty much just what you said: that you've been given a short period of time to teach "the acquisition of critical thinking skills and creation of cogent arguments" starting from what appears to be no college-ready cultural or educational base whatsoever.

It's absurd. It's not absurd like teaching The Wake in your class would be. It's absurd because you've been handed a position at an educational McDonalds window where in addition to shoveling the orders out to the waiting cars as fast as possible you also have to dress up the process as "the acquisition of critical thinking skills and creation of cogent arguments".

[asdfsdf]

I think the biggest complaint that I can levy against the modern American public school is the sense of apathy that it instills in nearly everybody who graduates. I am a freshman in Materials Science and Engineering. Trust me, people also see STEM solely as a place to learn skills that will make you money, not just the Liberal Arts. If your problem is that administrators see your profession as a way to teach people how to write memos, our problem is that students see class as a way to learn what to plug into an equation. Actually learning why something works is out of the picture and considered completely secondary; all that matters is grades and passing the class. Fortunately, science is still regarded as an "honest" (in some senses mythic) profession by the general public (unlike the Liberal Arts, apparently), so administrators expect that students will learn the art of their profession, not just the trade skills. Unfortunately, students just want to make money and could care less about the whys of a situation.

Your problem is apathetic and shortsighted administrators; our problem is apathetic and short sighted students. I don't envy you. After all, students don't get to define schedules or requirements. They can control how much they learn, however, and I blame the school system for teaching kids that the art of thinking and learning is irrelevant, boring, and useless.

[JPool]

I wrote that comment above and then didn't check back for a few days. That was rude. Some might go so far as "dickish." Thankfully, Rich took it in a well-tempered way.

Rich, I hope that you'd noticed that I didn't say that you were wrong there, because, at least in that first comment, I don't think that you are (other than the office job crack). I find the "Dude... when I taught classes, we didn't assume that the students knew the material *before* they took the class. Actually we didn't assume that they knew anything at all" bit to be particularly apt. The dickishness, which I'm happy that you acknowledge, was in taking a sensitive issue and making it the subject of parody. Tastes is tastes, but I mostly could see myself thinking your parody was funny (and it was certainly well-crafted) if I disliked its subject.

I also don't think that you're missing the point, so much as attempting to redirect the conversation in a way that is more interesting to you. You always want to move discussions in a structuralist direction, and while I can understand this impulse, I don't always think that it's appropriate to the case at hand, in the sense of being illuminating. I'm not sure that you're right in this case (about, say, the administration being primarily concerned with producing semi-competent white-colar workers, rather than about some notion of the skills a college-educated person should gain for whatever they do, or, for that matter, the degree to which any of these concerns are pressed upon SEK from above, and different from his own concerns/desires), not having spent any time at UCI, but I don't know that you're not right. I just wish that you would realize that you don't know either.

Anyway, to turn things around, Scott, there's been something that I've been wondering throughout this pedagogic turn of yours. Given that you're teaching at UCI, rather than an arts tech/college of art and design, why does it make sense to teach composition and rhetoric through the medium of comic book or film theory? I mean, the purpose of a C&R course would seem to be to delevop the skills students need to a) analyze texts of whatever sort, b) write the papers they are going to have to write in all of their other classes, and c) develop a core set of competencies in prose expression that they can bring to whatever genre/situation they face. I see a), but b) or c) would only seem to be a product of the papers they write about said comic books or films. It seems like it would be much more ... integrated if students were analyzing prose and then trying to express them selves through prose. Granted, all writing takes a particularly stylistic approach and set of conventions, but it's hard to understand how your analysis of The Dark Night, say, with its emphasis on shot selection and camera placement, translates into an activity other than making and editing a film. More generally, isn't visual expression, even combined with words/text, a fundamentally different activity from purely written expression?

[asdfsdf]

When I read comments like that I remember that I'm out of my league and (a little) off-topic. It would be best if I were to go back to lurking and let the big boys talk, wouldn't it?