Acephalous

Let the circle be unbroken.

From a thread about Michael Steele's "white Republicans are afraid of me" remarks on Sunday:

I’m terrified of Michael Steele the same way Mary Jo Kopechne was terrified of Teddy Kennedy.

This ride is flat scary, and I want off.

In less than 30 words, this commenter compresses the conservative response to white liberals and all blacks into the singular image of a threatened white woman. I would stop and note that the white female martyr in question worked with the man who supposedly terrified her and willingly entered a vehicle with him on that unfortunate evening, but that would be beside the point. It is not the woman herself to whom conservatives appeal when they utter her name, but what happened to her as imagined through their eyes.

Their horror at Kopechne's death (and their subsequent insistence that in it can be found the root of all ideological evil) reminds me of nothing so much as the origin story of Rorschach in Alan Moore's Watchmen. (Such obsessions happens when writing a book.) His moment of decision—the moment he became, a la Bérubé, outraged by Chappaquiddick—was when he discovered some fabric that had been purchased by Kitty Genovese shortly before her murder:

What turns Rorschach into the misogynistic psychopath deplored by a witless Anthony Lane but beloved by many a conservative? The seventh and eighth panels tell you all you need to know. They are not presented from Genovese's perspective: the scene-to-scene transition from panel six to panel seven clearly indicates that they're Rorschach's reconstruction of the indifference she witnessed as she bled out before the eyes of friends and neighbors. She is no more a person to him that Kopechne is to those who claim to speak for her and yet, like conservatives, Rorschach claims her death for his own purposes.

I would continue, but I don't feel comfortable speaking for the dead. Would that others shared my discomfort ...

On informing your students that they're murderers

(Being another post in this vein.)

In a famous (and surprisingly controversial, for reasons I will tackle later in the week) section of Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud defines the act of moving from one panel, through the gutter (the white space between panels), and into the next as "closure."  Unlike film, in which closure is made unconscious by the persistence of vision and the limitations of our perceptual apparatus (such that twenty-four frames per second is automatically perceived as motion), closure in comics is a collaborative effort between author (or artist) and reader.  Take a scene in which one person threatens to shoot another:

What happens (at least in my tweaked-for-maximal-classroom-efficiency sequence) between the second and third panel there?  Put differently: in order to achieve closure between the second and third panel, what do Moore and Gibbons compel the reader to imagine in order to make the transition through that gutter make sense?  The answer, of course, is that they force the reader to imagine murdering a pregnant woman.  That is, they make the reader a silent accomplice to the Comedian's crime per McCloud:

Just in case the awful complicity of the reader failed to sink in, McCloud draws himself hugging his knees in a dark corner (and undoubtedly near tears behind his grandma glasses):

Students absolutely loathe the possibility that McCloud might be correct.  They claim they are the victims of a sick manipulation on the part of the author; that they were tricked into imagining this terrible crime and therefore aren't culpable; that they never knowingly sin in their hearts unless someone forces them to do so; etc.  I then show them the omitted panel:

And after they express how much better they feel for not being an accomplice to a fictional murder, I ask them why witnessing a crime is better than imagining one and we turn to a slightly more thematic discussion of Dr. Manhattan's culpability here.  But they remember McCloud's point, which was why I implicated them in the Comedian's crime in the first place.

Wait—is that supposed to be a bad thing?

One of you lot emailed me bits of a Warren Ellis script for one of the various X-titles—the perfunctorily racy "Emma" can only, I think, refer to Emma Frost—but given some of the email I received concerning my discussion of the ALL CAPPED verbosity of Alan Moore in this post, I felt I should share:

We're doing the steam-punk neo-Victorian thing, so we're doing corsets, gloves, chokers, boots, but we're also going to be doing long skirts (though, this being Emma, I'm sure she'd slit hers if need be). Let's have a teak carriage-clock type thing with a blank glass face (instead of a clock face) on the occasional table next to her, as she lounges and reads a hardback copy of Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. (Actually, she might read it in the untranslated French, so that'd be histoire de l'oeil). JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I'M TURNING INTO ALAN MOORE.

By request: my visual rhetoric course

As requested in the comments to my last post and via a couple of emails, here's a general outline of the course I teach on visual rhetoric. (If you find it interesting or just want to give me money, the book I'm co-writing with my course director should be available early next summer.) I'm more than happy to debate the merits of teaching rhetoric and argument through popular culture or the validity of any of the particular readings I put forward; however, keep in mind that those readings are presented in the classroom and, as such, are designed to be arguable instead of definitive. I want them to argue with particular statements because I'm teaching them how to argue, so there are moments (particularly in the readings of the films) that I'm deliberately wrong. Those moments will likely be obvious to you, but you're not an 18-year-old undergraduate on the short end of an institutional power imbalance who's afraid that, should they contradict me, they will fail the class, lose their scholarship and spend their days toiling away in the service industries.

That said, here are links to the analytic portion of the course:

1. I introduce them to the idea of the overdetermined image, because nothing is accidental in an Alan Moore script.*
2.  Nor, for that matter, is anything accidental when it costs $80,000 per second to film it, which is why we then discuss how Christopher Nolan turns Batman into classic horror monster in Batman Begins. The point here is get them fluent in the language of film, so that they might make arguments about how directors manipulate the camera in order to appeal to the audience. (We also discuss what is and isn't in the diegetic space, e.g. music, which is heard by the audience but not the characters.)
3. Then it's on to The Dark Knight. That link goes to a reading of the interrogation scene; this one leads you to a similarly thorough analysis dedicated to proving the controversial thesis that Batman is really fast—because demonstrating that even the simplest of claims require evidence and careful argument to be taken seriously is the point of the course.
4. Now that they're relatively fluent in the language of film, we try to prove something a little more complex; namely, that Superman Returns is very much about 9/11. First, I take them back to September morning; then we analyze the action sequence that's about planes slamming into NYC landmarks, lest they think I'm reading too much into the anxieties the film taps into.
5. Now that they're comfortable with film, I get them to apply that knowledge to comics via the comic that's about the conventions of comics and is therefore utterly unfilmable, Watchmen. I begin by reminding them of the overdetermined nature of the image, then we discuss panel transitions and word-picture relation, move on layout and narrative flow, then I try to prove what I stated in the second sentence about Watchmen being a meta-comic. My argument's deliberately argumentative, because Dr. Manhattan can also function as a figure of the reader as well the author, but that's an argument I want to have. From there, it's onto the unfilmable film itself.
6. Now that they can break film and comics into their constituent parts, I re-orient them in an explicitly rhetorical direction. We talk about the rhetorical situation, which is, of course, a triangle. (For the record: that silliness is me teaching myself to manipulate images in Photoshop for my book on teaching visual rhetoric.) Then we situate the rhetorical context in the historical context via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.
7. From there on out, it's all about the writing.  I teach them about paragraph burgers, which, while silly, is the single most effective means I've found to teach paragraph structure. Students intuitively understand that you don't call a pickle with and a piece of a cheese a "hamburger." For the remainder of the quarter, we use the tools from the beginning of the course to make sophisticated arguments about the rhetorical stakes of what they'd otherwise dismiss as pop culture ephemera. 

*I've never written up my notes on getting them to think about structure via punchlines, which begins, not surprisingly, here with The Killing Joke. The gist of it is that jokes don’t work if you only provide the punchline, which is my way of introducing them to the notion of process: this shot in a film or panel in a comic or argument in an essay only works as a punchline if the joke's been properly set up. Basically, I try to get them to think about argument in terms they intuitively understand.

Researching the competition; or, why other books about visual rhetoric & composition demonstrate the necessity of one like mine.

When demonstrating the importance of historical context, it's considered bad form to get it wrong.  For example:

• Hal Jordan?  Not the first Green Lantern.
• Sinestro?  Doesn't appear in Emerald Dawn.
• Doctor Doom?  Not the ruler of Latvia.
• Wolverine?  Not HIV positive.  (How would that even work?)
• "Raz Alcor"?  Liam Neeson has two names in Batman Begins and neither one of them is that.

Since I'm not sure where to begin with this—I could just as easily complain about shoddy research and methodology as go full nerd—I'll come to a full stop and change the subject.  A student essay addressed an offhand remark I made in class, about Dr. Manhattan being busted by Dateline NBC for sexing up underage woman, and inspired me to produce this:

Why even fight if you don't fight dirty?

I always have a hard time convincing students that the violence in Watchmen is categorically different from the chompurfzung violence traditionally featured in comics.  Dave Gibbons draws Watchmen in the same style he used in a previous collaboration with Alan Moore ("For the Man Who Has Everything") to depict Wonder Woman thrutching Mongul:

Because, of course, Jack London sucks harder than many comics, Part II

(My commenters wrote my first response to Bill's post for me.  They nailed it so accurately posting what I'd originally written seems unnecessary.  I'm neither kidding nor, it seems, necessary.  So in the [likely] event of a [hilariously hi-jinxed] tragedy, Acephalous can [and should] live on.)

Let me start with a statement that will annoy everyone: if a close-reading reveals that a work flirts with the formal elements of its genre or genres—whatever they may be—that work should be canonized.  Not that works that fail to engage the formal limitations of their genre are uncanonizable, mind you, but works that succeed both as an example and a critique of a given genre deserve canonization.

But canonization into what? 

In an age of inexpensive and practically limitless storage, the question of canonization need not be hidebound to the idea of preservation.  Within its first month of operation, Google digitized the 99 percent of the Western Canon, and even though some of those works are too recent to be viewed, they'll all eventually be released as copyright expiration rolls forward.  When I began my Mark Twain chapter in late 2005, for example, only the 1894 edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson was available through Google Book Search; by the time I began revising the chapter in the summer of 2008, I could track revisions of the novel over the span of two decades.  Because Twain is culturally significant and canonical, the saturation of Google Books with variant editions of his most important works was inevitable.  

This was not.

When I began working on The Youth of Washington (1904), I had to order it through interlibrary loan.  It took three months to arrive.  Henry Cabot Lodge's George Washington (1889), Paul Ford's The True George Washington (1896), Woodrow Wilson's George Washington (1896), Worthington Chauncey Ford's George Washington (1900) and Norman Hapgood's George Washington: A Biography (1901) trickled in.  Had I held off on writing my chapter until I'd looked over all 140 of the novels of English Colonial or Revolutionary America published between 1895 and 1908, I'd still be waiting for interlibrary loan.  Now all those Washington biographies are available, as are most of the historical novels I wanted to read for deep background. 

Are those novels good?  No.  Do they deserve canonization?  No.  Is it significant that as tensions between Spain and America strained and Americans became uncomfortable with the imperial pretensions of their leader, an appetite for works relating to Revolutionary figures or set in the Revolutionary period become incredibly popular?  Might that not have something important to say about what Americans thought it meant to be American at the time?  Is that not a viable object of study?  Do I not ask a shitload of rhetorical questions when I get polemical? 

For a few of generations, English professors claimed that cultural knowledge was the provenance of the literary (what with perceptiveness being the core feature of literary sensibility).  So when a scholar wanted to know how things stood between America and Europe at a given time, they would not turn to any of the countless travel narratives written by Americans in Europe and Europeans in America, but to the most acutely literary accounts of the current state affairs.  To wit:

The problem with Lucy's account of the canon and cultural knowledge should be obvious: however you define the literary, it is not the same thing as cultural knowledge.  An alternate canon, based on how a text registers and reflects the conventions of its time, is required; a subset of that canon would include texts that fought against their cultural constraints in order to articulate something convention had difficulty accommodating.  No matter what you call those texts, they are the ones deserving of close-reading.  

Note that I slipped from speaking of genres in the first paragraph to cultural conventions in the last.  I did that on purpose.  Genre focuses too intently on what a thing made from words looks like.  ("My novella's a long short story in 10-point Times Roman and a short novel in 14-point New Courier," says the aspiring writer.)  From the get-go, however, these things made from words contained stuff like this.  Texts have always had visual components, and while those components are sometimes abstracts (as with the afore-marbled page), the introduction of visual representations of the world into the textual economy of a novel alerts readers to the presence of a realist ethos.  But remember: 

Verisimilitude is not an end.  It is an always imperfect—because always filtered—means.  What matters is not the presence of supplementary gestures of verisimilitude but the manner in which they interact with the text.  For example, this comic sucks:

The image of Red-Eye (from Jack London's 1906 novel Before Adam) adds nothing to the description provided by the text; in fact, it looks like what a sketch artist would draw if provided the description in the text.  Now compare that to this or this or this or this or this.  Why do I have to justify studying the subject of all those thises but can write about Red-Eye with nary a care?  Is it because Before Adam was written by London?  Because he wrote it a century ago?  Because a quinquagenarian with Ivy credentials stretching four generations back wouldn't feel mortified if caught reading it on the subway?

(x-posted.)

Justifying comics as legitimate objects of study, Part I

Were I to muster a defense of comics as potentially serious objects of rhetorical analysis in, say, a textbook, I would begin by pointing out that while there may not be a ready-made critical apparatus for comics as a genre, there exists a robust tradition of analyzing visual narrative.  Consider Caravaggio's "Calling of St. Matthew":

I present the whole painting here so you can see what occupies the center of the painting.  (Many reproductions of "The Calling" crop the upper third off.  I will too to save bandwidth below.)  If we assume that the eye of the viewer is drawn to the center, it becomes evident that Caravaggio didn't intend his static painting to be experienced as such.  We light first on the boy's eyes and follow them:

I give you permission to indulge in your basest voyeuristic urges...

. . . but only if you promise not to comment on my shiny new course blog.  I'm experimenting this quarter with placing all my lesson plans online before I teach and requiring my students comment on them the night before class.  My thinking is that all my classes will traffic in reinforcement instead of introduction.  This idea could be genius and lead to more rigorous and intellectually stimulating classroom discussions . . . or it could make for painful dull classes in which I reiterate what they've already read.  I'll keep you posted. 

Does Dr. Manhattan act as a figure of the reader in Alan Moore's Watchmen?

(This post picks up right here.  Turn that double em-dash into a colon and forget you read the rest . . . but for continuity's sake I will rewind one sentence.)

Unless you happen to be Dr. Manhattan:

 

For brevity and bandwidth I'll skip the move into this flashback and focus on the one out of it.  In the left panel you have Dr. Manhattan in Vietnam.  The fireworks behind him celebrate V.V.N.  The body before him carried the child of the man in the coffin on the right until said man shot it in the chest [thanks JPRS] and turned that woman into a body.  Note that unlike the panels discussed earlier the expression on Manhattan's face doesn't change.  What has happened has already happened and he cannot change it without changing what has already happened.  Make no mistake: he can change it.  He can prevent the Comedian from shooting a pregnant woman in the chest.  He even tells the Comedian not to do it:

 

But as the Comedian does it anyway . . . then complains because Manhattan didn't turn the bullet into water.  The conventional reading of the novel stipulates something importantly philosophical is behind Manhattan's reluctance or refusal to act here.  I think the answer is much more mundane: unlike Ozymandias, who experiences in memory the emotions he felt in the moment, the unmoored-in-time Manhattan feels nothing not because he has abdicated moral authority before the throne of universal indifference, but because for all his power within the novel he merely functions as a figure of reader.  (To answer Rich's creepily accurate pre-emptive criticism, I would say that Manhattan doing nothing with his power trumps its potential.)

In the narrative present he amounts to little more than a M.A.D. weapon that maybe leaks carcinogens.  The conceit that he can be anywhere at anytime structures the fourth issue of Watchmen and calls into question whether Manhattan's flashbacks are actually flashbacks.  More constantly forces us to consider the status of what we see.  Take these panels from the first issue:

 

What is the relationship between the central and flanking panels?  Are we getting the detective's mental reconstruction of the struggle based on the evidence at the scene?  Is Moore juxtaposing the actual struggle with the detective's reconstruction of it?  What about these panels from the sixth issue:

Does the narrative jump to the perspective of a dying Kitty Genovese there?  Is that Rorschach's reconstruction of the last thing she ever saw?  Point being: throughout the novel Moore exploits the then-to-fore unexamined conventions of comic transitions.  He literalizes the oldest of the old standbys—the scene-to-scene transition—by granting Manhattan the power to teleport from one scene to another.  These characters have been transported from one scene to another via this transition the whole book to no ill effect.  But when Manhattan transitions them from a studio to a parking lot or New York to Los Angeles, their stomachs bark and they vomit uncontrollably.  What the reader painlessly accomplishes—what you, dear readers, painlessly accomplished when you scanned the panels above—requires godlike powers to be effected by characters in the novel. 

"READING IS FUNDAMENTAL. WITH DUMMIES LIKE YOU, WHO NEEDS THE MENTALLY DISABLED?"

(My actual review of the film can be found here.  That post I'm holding off on is still M.I.A.)

I’m holding off on that other Watchmen post because I think I might, um, be wrong about something fairly central to my argument. In the meantime, I have a declaration to make: I love Debbie Schlussel. Her review of Watchmen is simply to die for. To wit:

If you take your kids to see “The Watchmen,” you’re a moron. If you see it yourself, you’re also probably a moron and a vapid, indecent human being.

Set aside the fact that she punts the film’s title. Set aside the fact that she punts the film’s title even though the poster is included in the post. Concentrate instead on how she castigates hypothetical parents who would take their children to an R-rated film. Who is her audience? Who does she imagine it is?

I know, it’s being heavily marketed as a superhero movie, with action figures for your kids.

I see now—her audience consists of people who never click on links. Because if they did, they’d see Schlussel links to a limited run of 5,000 figures designed for I-buy-Power-Girl-statuettes crowd. But what about the hypothetical children? Who will care for the hypothetical children?

But then, we see cops looking over their naked, bloodied, dead bodies on a bed, with the words “LESBIAN WHORES,” written in blood on the wall.

Mommy, mommy, what’s a lesbian? What’s a whore?

So our hypothetical terrible parent takes her hypothetical toddler to see an R-rated movie and—what’s an R-rated picture again?

An R-rated motion picture may include adult themes, adult activity, hard language, intense or persistent violence, sexually-oriented nudity, drug abuse or other elements, so that parents are counseled to take this rating very seriously. Children under 17 are not allowed to attend R-rated motion pictures unaccompanied by a parent or adult guardian. Parents are strongly urged to find out more about R-rated motion pictures in determining their suitability for their children. Generally, it is not appropriate for parents to bring their young children with them to R-rated motion pictures.

Thank you, official Motion Picture Association of America guidelines. Let’s compare rubric of the R-rating to Schlussel’s litany of offensive scenes in the film:

Schlussel: Two superheroes have an explicit sex scene in a spaceship–she’s on top, then he’s on top, awesome–you can teach your young kids multiple sexual positions before they even reach puberty, by taking them to see this (there’s a less explicit sex scene between the slutty superheroine and another superhero not long before that).

MPAA: . . . sexually-oriented nudity . . .

Situation normal.

Schlussel: Superhero “The Comedian” (a bad Robert Downey, Jr. look-alike) brutally beating and raping another superhero[.]

MPAA: . . . adult themes . . .

Situation normal..

Schlussel: [S]uperheroes hurling obscenities[.]

MPAA: . . . hard language . . .

Situation normal.

Schlussel: A man’s hands and arms being sawed off with an electric saw–we’re shown the bloody stumps and the bloody sawed off limbs in close up shots[.]

MPAA: . . . intense or persistent violence . . .

Seems Schlussel has been offended by the very elements the MPAA guidelines predict will be in an R-rated film. Her whole argument, then, is that some parents would be dumb enough to take young children to a film that no one believes young children should see—and that only Debbie Schlussel can save them from their own craven stupidity. That can’t be right. She can’t possibly fashion herself Debbie Schlussel: Defender of the Morbidly Obtuse. Or can she?

Watchmen and the scene of reading (being a response to Anthony Lane's review of Zack Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' novel)

(Before I begin: Lane casually spoils the film, so do not click on that link if you want a virginal viewing experience.)

Anthony Lane would forestall serious criticism of his Watchmen review by characterizing defenders of the genre as "masonically loyal, prickling with a defensiveness and an ardor that not even Wagnerians can match." Anyone who reads a comic not written by Art Spiegelman is a—but why go there? Lane's acknowledgment that Moore wants nothing to do with Zack Snyder's film seems a concession, but in the end he returns to throw a few roundhouses at Moore:

Amid these pompous grabs at horror, neither author nor director has much grasp of what genuine, unhyped suffering might be like, or what pity should attend it; they are too busy fussing over the fate of the human race—a sure sign of metaphysical vulgarity—to be bothered with lesser plights.

To belabor the obvious: Watchmen is a book of the 1980s. Complaining about its concern with issues like containment, nuclear escalation, and mutually assured destruction would be akin to kvetching about the dowdiness of suburban American life in Far From Heaven—and Lane did not. So why fault Watchmen for being insufficiently universal in its appeal? Why insist that a film based on a graphic novel be of the moment the former is produced instead of the one represented in the latter?

Because Lane is an ignorant bigot.*

Lesson Planning 101: How to teach comics responsibly in a composition class (Watchmen)

Same thing I did with The Dark Knight, only this time about the fourth issue of Watchmen.  The same caveats apply.