Acephalous

How to teach the interrelatedness of historical context and audience via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth

Someone emailed to ask how it is I teach historical context via a single comic.  The book in question: Warren Ellis's one-shot cross-over between the Wildstorm imprint Planetary and the DC franchise that is the Batman.  Ellis created the book as a means of investigating the enduring popularity of the superhero genre.  Over the course of thirty-odd issues his team of quasi-cultural anthropologists tore through the history of the 20th Century in an attempt to answer that deceptively simple question: Why have impossible people in tights mattered so much for so long? 

Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth (2003) opens by jiggering that old comic standby: the multiverse.  An incidental murderer named John Black has been having seizures, and every time he seizes, a blue dome extends from his body and shifts him and everyone else from one dimension to another.  The dome looks like this:

 

The people who shift from a point in their dimension to an already-occupied point in another end up like this:

Not a pleasant way to die.  So the Planetary team is called in to investigate.  They learn that Black's fingerprints were recently found outside a soup kitchen and go to investigate.  They corner him in an alley when:

A scene analysis of the 9/11 analogue in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns

Being the fourth in a series.  Earlier installments can be found here:

• Batman Begins (first glimpse of Batman-as-classic-horror-monster at the docks: depth of field, continuity editing, eyeline match)
• The Dark Knight (interrogation scene: focus, lighting, framing, shot selection)
• The Dark Knight (fundraiser scene: camera movement, blocking, mise-en-scene)

If it seems like there's a lot of narrative sans analysis in there, that's because there is.  One assignment for Tuesday is that the students need to select one of the frames I didn't analyze and describe its formal properties (framing, lighting, &c.).  (The moments when I narrate the plot are likely the most compelling for those not interested in Film Theory 101 because I wrote them plenty funny.)  Unlike my earlier posts I skipped a lot of frames.  Why?  Because director Bryan Singer is a loon whose camera only stops panning once in this entire sequence and there are only so many hours in the day/seconds in your attention span. 

We begin with a computer simulation of what's supposed to happen:

 

Singer provides a template his audience can refer to.  (Note that in the simulation the camera is above the plane.  This will be important.)  He pulls the camera back into a close-up on the nice stewardess lady who's explaining in her nice-stewardess-lady voice what's happening in the simulation:

 

This would be a good time to mention that Singer films this scene like the obsessive former film student he is.  The camera never stops moving.  Never.  The only reason this close-up doesn't become a medium close-up is because he cuts to Lois Lane asking a question.  At this point the camera glides slowly and fluidly—not unlike the plane on the simulation—creating a sense of constant motion without any excitement.  Then he cuts to Lois with a workmanlike reverse shot:

 

But it's an odd reverse shot.  Lois meets the stewardess's eye but there's no eyeline match because the stewardess responds to everyone on the plane:

 

Because viewers expect eyeline matches in shot/reverse shot sequences, the stewardess's response feels like a snub.  Singer's violates convention in order to evoke an emotional response from the audience and does so with great efficiency: he doesn't need for Lois to look snubbed or say she feels snubbed because the editing took care of that for him.  He then reverse cuts back to Lois:

 

Who never appears to break eye contact with the stewardess.  Keeping the one-sided match makes Lois seem determined.  With his next cut he reveals something we had no reason to suspect: that this shot sequence has a source in the scene itself.

 

This has a mildly unsettling effect.  Singer tells the audience that he's willing to withhold critical information.  What we see may be focalizing through the needs of a particular character (the network cameraman) or those of the director (Singer himself) or both.  I say "both" because Singer immediately cuts to a point of view shot from the cameraman's perspective as he whip pans from Lois to the stewardess:

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. 

The Key to Literary Theory: Don't be an Asshole

Since this comment's been linked to a few times, I thought I'd lift it from the thread and score a cheap post.  The context:

I turned in the paper savaged in yesterday's post.  It came back with comments to the effect of:

I'm giving you an "A," but come talk to me. You don't want to become an asshole. 

But There Is Danger. 

Office hours Monday. Please attend. Don't, and for certain, you'll become an asshole.

I showed up on Monday morning to receive my dressing-down.  Went something like this:

You like theory, and that's awesome. I wish more kids were enthusiastic. BUT—and this is an ALL-CAPS, BOLDED "BUT"—there are different ways to approach theoretical problems. I'll charitably define yours as an "entitled imperialism," because you believe that reading a tiny excerpt of a three-part philosophical masterpiece entitles you to lay waste to Kant's entire project. You can't do that. Only assholes can. Hence, The Danger. You have to take writers seriously, study them, the commentary on them, and then—and ONLY then—should you assert yourself as you did in this paper.

Only it took an hour to deliver, and was peppered with detailed examples from secondary literature on Kant to show me what engaged critique actually looks like.  I left the office in tears, but with a firm idea of what solid theoretical critique looked like.  If only it hadn't taken three years for me to produce any ... but that's another story.

(Also, if you haven't read the comments on that last post, you've missed out on J.S. Nelson's maudlin tale of intellectual un-discovery and Human's inspiring story of Kant, conversion, and sexual discovery ... and are the worse for it.)

Cute Bunny Saved by Quick-Thinking Graduate Student: A CV-able Moment

On the way home from the liquor store—Albertsons' is inexplicably closed, so it's Ed McMahon's Perfection and a Giant Slim Jim for dinner tonight—I heard the unmistakable sounds of a scrum in the bushes to my left.  Peering over the flowering hedge, I saw a snake cornering a bunny in the gutter.  I brandished Ed McMahon to no effect.  I chunked a Giant Slim Jim.  Snake and bunny remained locked in a diaromic display of Nature's red teeth and claws.  I had no choice.  No bunny dies on my watch.  I grabbed a stick and entered the fray. 

The snake slithered away.  The bunny scuttled, stopped, turned to me almost appreciatively, then scooted away.  As I stood gasping against Blockbuster's faux-stucco exterior, I had a Rashomon-moment:

My sympathies had been with the bunny from the first.  I never even considered the possibility that the bunny had been the aggressor.  An inveterate squamataphobe, I couldn't be bothered to give the snake the slightest benefit of the doubt.  He could've been slithering along, minding his own snake-business when Peter "The Scale-Snapper" Cottontail came bounding out the bushes, murder on his mind.  Maybe I missed the gang of feral rabbits hunkered in the brush, eagerly awaiting the signal to strike.  Then I remembered:

I intervened.  Presided over a motherfucking intervention.  Right or wrong, it matters not: I did my academic duty.