BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE ALWAYS WIN PT 1

My title for this essay-series is meant not as a statement of unalloyed fact, but an indicator of a tendency that I feel to be grounded in the fundamentals of narrative communication. In this, I think it's a little more philosophically sound than a famous, and equally attention-seeking, assertion by Dave Sim; i.e., "No one wants to be a woman."

In one of my earliest blog-essays here I wrote:

For most genre-fiction-- particularly those media which, unlike prose, hinge on depicting the appearance of the characters-- the standardization of sexual attractiveness is a useful narrative tool. In romances, for instance, it's almost de rigeur to depict both hero and heroine as meeting a bland standard for attractiveness. This is not because the narrative is trying to convince anyone that homely people don't mate in real life, but because it's advantageous to the narrative's smooth progression to depict only good-looking people becoming romantically entwined. As long as the hero and heroine meet a basic standard of attractiveness, an audience-member is less likely to be thrown out of his/her participation in the story to think, "How can Character A possibly be attracted to Character B?"

Though my essay touches on some of the disadvantages of this standardization, other critiques by such low-wattage luminaries as Julian Darius and Kelly Thompson show little or no awareness of how this standardization-- or objectification, as some prefer to call it without exception-- serves a consistent narrative purpose. This purpose remains constant regardless of the intensity utilized in a given work, be it one of GLAMOR, TITILLATION or PORNIFICATION.

By way of demonstrating this consistency, I cite an excerpt from this post by fan-blogger Barry Pearl.  In this essay Pearl quotes from an interview with Silver Age IRON MAN artist Don Heck:

“I used to think of Pepper Potts as Schluzie from Bob Cummings’ “Love That Bob” (TV Show). She was always interested in the boss and never could go out with him, and she’s thinking of all these dumb broads Stark is going out with. Happy Hogan was just a pug type, like Joe Palooka.” “Stan called and said he wanted Pepper to be prettier,”Heck laments. “That wasn’t my idea. As far as I was concerned, that killed it. If she’s homely and she winds up going out, then it’s a big deal. If she’s prettier, who cares? “Then, Stan said, ‘Make Happy handsomer.’ I liked him with his banged-up ears and crooked nose. He was fun to do at that point. When suddenly everybody had to be pretty, then I didn’t like him.”

Here we have what many fan-writers would automatically assume to be an appeal to the male reader's groinal region.  Don Heck wanted to depict support-character Pepper Potts as a slightly homely young girl, modeled on, but not quite as homely as, the actress who played the part of "Schultzie" on TV's "Love That Bob."  Under editor Stan Lee's direction, Pepper soon became as "model-gorgeous" as any of the jet-setting babes with whom Tony Stark cavorted.  I believe that writer Archie Goodwin finally tossed in a note about how Pepper had transformed herself, but clearly Heck was justified in feeling that his conception had been put aside.

However, note that Lee also wanted Heck to make the pug-ugly character of Happy Hogan handsomer.  Why would an editor require that if he's just trying to appeal to horny young boys?

The truth may lie in the fact that Lee was less concerned with giving Heck the latitude for more naturalistic-looking characters-- with which I do think Heck did a fine job-- and more concerned with developing the characters in the soap-operatic style that he Lee had started developing for the Marvel superhero titles. 

Soap opera, of course, is all about romantic torment.  Rarely on real soap operas does one see a homely girl catch a handsome guy, or a homely guy nab a real looker.  Why?  Because, even though such things do happen in real life, they seem unlikely to the audience, which expects that "beautiful people always win," particularly with respect to the prize of "other beautiful people."  It's a pecking-order that most if not all human cultures internalize, and even when one sees exceptions, many rationalize the deviation by saying something like, "X married Y for Y's money."

Stan Lee's scripts for IRON MAN show Tony Stark going out with various models and rich bitches, but as far as romance goes, only Pepper Potts resonates as a real romantic interest.  I surmise, though, that Lee thought his readers would find it incredible had the playboy started dating his homely secretary.  Hence "homely" must change to "hottie."

At the same time, Lee surely wanted to promote the "triangle" aspect of the Tony-Pepper-Happy relationship.  In the original Heck version, most readers could imagine Happy and Pepper together, but not Pepper with Tony, nor Happy providing any competition for Tony if the playboy decided to date his homely secretary.  Therefore I surmise that Happy gets a makeover so that he will appear as a credible romantic rival.

Such were the demands of beauty in the innocent Silver Age.  In Part 2, I'll examine some modern permutations.

AT LAST LOST BOYS

Just as I read THE CORSICAN BROTHERS (covered in my previous post) in order to understand the origins of the later "uncanny" films made from it, I recently re-read J.M. Barrie's 1911 PETER PAN in order to justify the comment I made in a review of the 2011 telefilm NEVERLAND:

NEVERLAND, though it was financed by the Syfy Channel as was the two-part ALICE, shows Willing warming to his material to better effect. Possibly this was because J.M. Barrie's PETER PAN has stronger adventure-currents than the source material of either Alice or Oz. To be sure, were I classifying the Barrie novel, I'd tend to consider it a "combative comedy," in that I think the comic tones of the book overpower the adventurous tones. Likewise the Disney version of PETER PAN. However, Nick Willing's version falls more completely into the category of the pure adventure-work.

I never saw PETER PAN performed as a play.  This was the medium in which Barrie premiered his most famous creation in its best known form, though a somewhat non-continuous version of Peter appeared first in Barrie's 1902 novel THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD.  I knew only the Disney film, which didn't impress me all that much.  I don't know when I read the novel except that it was not as a child: it could have been ten or twenty years ago. 

Without question in my mind, the book PETER PAN qualifies not only as a "combative comedy" but as a "combative comedy-adventure" after the fashion mentioned in this essay. However, the example I used in that essay, DC's INFERIOR FIVE, represents a very different form of "comedy" than the one evoked by James Barrie.

In my essay FUNNY BONERS I contrasted Freud's "relief theory of humor" with that of Schopenhauer's "incongruity theory."  However, to be honest I have not read anything but excerpts from Freud's JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS.  When I recently came across a reference to Freud's having made a distinction between two types of humor-- one "tendentious" and the other "non-tendentious"-- I realized that I had not give Freud his due, having depended too much on secondary sources.  Though I still believe that Schopenhauer's theory encompasses more psychic territory than does Freud's, this Wikipedia entry establishes that Freud was aware of the type of humor that Heinlein called "the gentle smile:"

Freud made a key distinction between tendentious and non-tendentious humor. Tendentious humor involves a “victim,” someone at whose expense we laugh. Non-tendentious humor does not require a victim. This innocuous humor typically depends on wordplay, and Freud believed it has only modest power to evoke amusement. Tendentious humor, then, is the only kind that can evoke big laughs. However, Freud believed a mixture of both tendentious and non-tendentious humor is required to keep the tendentious humor from becoming too offensive or demeaning to its victim. The innocent jokework of the innocuous humor would mask the otherwise hostile joke and therefore “bribe” our senses, allowing us to laugh at what would otherwise be socially unacceptable. Therefore, we often think we are laughing at innocuous jokes, but what really makes them funny is their socially unacceptable nature hidden below the surface.

While I can't say that INFERIOR FIVE ever produced "big laughs," it was intended to do so, in that the feature was meant to "victimize" the standard straight version of the superhero with parodies of clumsy superheroes, dumb superheroes, etc. 

In contrast, Barrie's PETER PAN seems more focused on a low-key, homey type of comedy, tinged with a modest irony.  The opening chapters set the tone with their emphasis on what I've called "the small-scale world of home and neighborhood," and even the Darling children's voyage into a land of unbridled adventure never completely escapes that tone.  The same tone undercuts much of the potential nastiness of the conflict between Peter and his allies vs. Hook and his pirates.  There can be no doubt that the play and the book are combative works (though THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD does not seem to be), but the excitement is subordinate to the tone of incongruity.

Barrie's sense of irony rarely if ever translates to later film or television adaptations.  I can think of none that have communicated the frank but knowing estimation of children Barrie repeats throughout the book, one that most if not all children will instantly recognize:

and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

A SUBCOMBATIVE CORSICAN

Within the last year I've reviewed two cinematic versions of Alexandre Dumas' novella THE CORSICAN BROTHERS: one the 1953 B-movie BANDITS OF CORSICA, and the other the 1984 spoof CHEECH AND CHONG'S THE CORSICAN BROTHERS. Since I labeled both films as being "combative" types within their respective mythoi, as well as being "uncanny" in their phenomenality due to the trope of the twins sharing sensations, I felt it behooved me to see how the original book related to these.  I had no doubt that the book would fit the uncanny phenomenality as well, but was Dumas' work in any way a combative narrative?

My verdict, in a word, is no.  I suspect that these two swashbucklers-- one done straight, the other as a jokefest-- borrow their main tropes not from the book but from the influential 1941 Hollywood film starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr., summarized here.  IMDB asserts that there were seven previous filmizations of the Dumas story, but none of them have become celebrated by film-fans, so I think I'm correct in suspecting that the Fairbanks film is the primary model for the films from 1953 and 1984.  The makers of the Fairbanks version were probably aware that the film-audience's strongest association with Dumas was his novel THE THREE MUSKETEERS, and so I surmise that the 1941 film was given a "Musketeer-ization" to make it more palatable to lovers of buckled swashes.  The 1953 BANDITS imitates the plotline of the 1941 film, as well as calling the brothers "Lucien" and "Mario."  Rather surprisingly, the Cheech and Chong film is closer to the Dumas work, in that it uses the original names of the brothers-- i.e., "Lucien" and "Louis"-- and, rather than making both brothers formidable fighters, portrays the Louis character as unable to defend himself.

The central theme of Dumas' novella-- which seems like an extended short story-- is to explore the nature of "savage" Corsica, a French holding that was physically and culturally closer to Italy than to France.  Dumas builds on the reality of Corsica's seclusion-- due to being walled off by a mountain range-- to depict the inhabitants as something of a throwback to medieval days.  As the narrator-- implicitly Dumas himself-- travels in Corsica, he happens to visit the estate of the De Franchi family.  The main exemplars of this branch of Corsican nobility are Lucien de Franchi and his mother.  They take the narrator into their home and give him an intimate understanding of Corsican culture, principally the practice of the vendetta, the blood-feud that often pits entire Corsican families against one another to avenge some offense or insult.  Lucien and his mother are both well-spoken and sophisticated, but the narrator soon divines that Lucien is a man of his people, who predicts dolefully that in time his people's rough ways will be overcome by modernity. 

Indeed, Lucien's absent brother Louis has left Corsica to study law in Paris, the better to prepare for the inevitable transition of Corsica into the modern world.  Lucien informs the narrator that Louis shares none of Lucien's passion for hunting and shooting, which foregrounds Louis' unfortunate fate in Paris.  Lucien relates the novella's most famous trope-- that he can experience aspects of Louis' emotions even though the brother is in Paris, because the two of them were once conjoined twins, separated by surgery.  But Lucien also informs the narrator of a tendency shared by all the De Franchi men: that they always or often behold the spectres of their relatives at times of great turmoil.  Surprisingly, the sophisticated Parisian does not play the skeptic in this exchange, but attests that he's had his own psychic experience. This psychic aspect of the story only plays a small role in the story's plot, though it fits overall with the quality of Corsican sentiment: the sense that conflict and vengeance are fated to happen, and that they can only be embraced, not fought against. Throughout the novella Dumas frequently describes separate events that happen fortuitously at the exact same time, which in a rough way prefigures Jung's idea of synchronicity, which I examined here.


Following this long setup, the central conflict finally comes to light. Returning to Paris, the narrator seeks out Louis De Franchi. Louis, far from being involved in Musketeer-like affairs of state, has been asked by a friend to look out for the man's wife while the man is at sea.  Louis himself is in love with the woman, and because of that he somewhat abrogates his agreement to watch over the wife.  A roué named Chateau-Renard attempts to seduce the woman, and when Louis eventually interferes, the villain challenges Louis to the Parisian equivalent of the vendetta: a duel.  Louis, despite being incompetent with firearms, accepts the duel honorably and meets his death stoically.  However, the novella's reversal of this fate comes when his wrathful brother arrives in Paris-- long before any letter could have reached Corsica-- and scares the crap out of Chateau-Renard, since Lucien looks just like the man the seducer has killed.  The novella winds up with a repeat of the duel, which the villain loses, and the "hero" of the story weeping for his brother.

I say "hero" advisedly, for though many cinematic descendants of Lucien De Franchi have been legitimate heroes in every way, Dumas' original conforms to my concept of the "demihero," a character who may be as dynamic as a hero in some ways, but whose narrative function lacks the quality I call "intellectual will," and aligns better with that of the "intuitive will," discussed here.

Further, Lucien's victory in the duel, though it validates a certain level of martial competence, cannot be considered "combative," in contrast with later epigones from the film adaptations cited.  Even Tommy Chong's comic Lucien displays a power of "spectacular violence" in his none-too-funny antics.  The original Lucien's duel, though satisfying on its own terms, lacks even the modest spectacle seen in the conclusion of Doyle's HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, and I judged that conclusion to be too weak to qualify as "spectacular violence" here.

TORTURED, PROSAICALLY

In two of my 2009 posts, here and here, I stated that I didn't become quite as hinky as some comics-readers upon seeing heroic characters practice "inquisitorial torture," i.e., physical or mental torture in order to force a given individual to relinquish information. While I did not in any way condone real-world torture, or express any belief in its real-world effectiveness, I did note that it was often used as a simple narrative device with nearly no moral resonance.

In stories where [inquisitorial torture] is used as a minor narrative device that has all the drama and suspense of driving one's car over a road-bump, it's morally neutral. The formula "hero needs info so he roughs up a hood to get it" has no more symbolic significance than "hero needs to get somewhere fast so he steals a horse/car/spaceship to get there."

I did not, however, state that the act never had moral overtones. I gave as one example the work of hardboiled mystery-writer Mickey Spillane.  In Spillane's novels it's clear that the hero's ability to haul ass on his victims possesses strong ideological content, given that the author uses the excuse of anti-Communism to unleash his hero's brutality.

Because I grew up in a time when scenes of inquisitorial torture were rare in the comics, it's possible that I have a predilection to see such scenes as having a purely narrative (and hence non-ideological) function. In other words, a scene with Captain America beating up the Red Skull to make him talk is not necessarily emblematic of the fascism in American culture. I can think of comparable scenes that *might* imply a real ideological stance as such, as when Mike Hammer hauls ass on Dirty Commies in KISS ME DEADLY, but not every such scene carries ideological weight. All cats may look grey when one dwells in the darkness of ideological thinking, but the light discloses quite a bit more variegation.

In the shadow of the 9/11 catastrophe, television gave us 24, an eight-season wonder described by Wikipedia as "the longest-running espionage-themed television drama ever."  Though in its first season 24 avoided endorsement of inquisitorial torture, it was soon retooled to reflect what some have called the "Bushco" ideological mindset.  Scenes of torture, in which Jack Bauer or his aides successfully wrung vital information from America's enemies, became more than simple "speed bumps," as I claimed that they were in, say, Batman stories.  But even aside from its bad ideological content, I disliked the 24 series because the torture-scenes became one of the main selling-points of the teleseries.  I once complained about the tone of the series on Some Forum, and the usual yapping jackals claimed that I was contradicting myself, given that I had defended violence in its non-ideological manifestations.

In the last couple of months, I happened across not one but two instances of "inquisitorial torture" which weren't even directed at "America's enemies" but still managed to exude the odor of bad ideology with regard to the rights of the accused.  I'll look up titles and airdates of the episodes involved should anyone inquire, but for right now, I'll confine myself to brief summaries.

In a two-part episode of ABC'S CASTLE, the light-hearted title detective walks on the rough side of life a la the Liam Neeson film TAKEN.  Castle's daughter is kidnapped and whisked away to Europe by dastardly types.  The police find a skeevy fellow implicated in the abduction, a man who has sustained some injury (I forget the specifics).  The cops won't torture him for info, but they leave the anguished father alone in a room with the perp.  In moments, implicitly because Castle has tortured the man's injury, the perp gives up the information.

More recently, a rough simulacrum of the CASTLE scene appeared on the CBS cop-drama HAWAII 5-O.  To be sure, scenes of inquisitorial "leaning" appear consistently in this series, with cops invariably managing to force confessions or info from their captives, with seldom any scenes of  a lawyer's involvement.  The episode in question, though, resembles CASTLE in that the stakes deal with a little girl being abducted by ransomers.  Toward the end the cops get hold of a perp who's unquestionably involved in the caper, who refuses to give up the girl's location because he thinks he has "leverage."  One cop, the one played by James Caan' son, punches the crook, who then claims that cops can't do that.  The other main cop (the two are barely distinguishable, being alike right down to their "badboy stubble") asks Caan to give him his badge and leaves the room while Caan punches the info out of the crook.

Now, what's interesting here is that in both of these cases, the cops flagrantly abuse the laws they supposedly protect, based on the exigency of a life in danger.  This is a familiar trope, whose best-known exemplar remains the scene in 1971's DIRTY HARRY, where the hero tortures a criminal in order to make him reveal the location of a kidnap victim. 

However, the greatest difference between HARRY and the two television versions is that in HARRY, there is blowback as a result of the hero's actions: the villain is exculpated because the evidence of his crime becomes "tainted."  Whether one views the movie's script as a subtle manipulation of moral attitudes or a condemnation of societal molly-coddling, clearly its writer was aware that the action of torture had consequences.

In contrast, these two recent shows, more in less in the vein of 24, show no consequence to the action of torture.  However, with 24, lack of blowback was probable, given the hero's governmental connections.  But with more mundane crime-shows, why wouldn't the perps who suffered inquisitorial torture make noise about it?  I don't know if their cases would get "tainted" as quickly as the one in DIRTY HARRY, but surely the crooks would attempt to milk their abuse for all that it was worth.  The one in CASTLE might be hard to prove, but the other assault leaves the crook with fist-prints all over him. 

One probably shouldn't expect two lightweight TV programs to display any cognizance of real-world legality.  And of course, a lot of cop shows prior to this were known for some level of inquisitorial torture, though probably not as overt as the one in the FIVE-0 episode.  It suggests that the Bush ideology is alive and well, that the police may now arrogate to themselves the level of discretionary power usually attributed to a Jack Bauer, and that any criminals they choose to target will just become lost in the system a la the accused at Guantanamo.

MANDARIN DUCKED

Though I haven't seen IRON MAN 3 yet, I recently responded to an online comment on the general theme of "why did the adaptors bother to use the name of the Mandarin if they weren't going to keep anything else about the character?"  As usual, though I'm aware of some of the immediate contingent circumstances (e.g., Chinese investors and audiences), my response takes a more generalizing approach.

_________________________

Though I can't claim to have any direct knowledge of Hollywood thinking, I'm going to say that this is not a phenomenon not confined to comic-book adaptations. I think a lot of Hollywood adaptors have or come to have an adversarial relationship with the material adapted. In both the films KISS ME DEADLY and MODESTY BLAISE, the adaptors use assorted bits from the novels adapted, but play with those bits to suit their desires, often to pursue themes opposed to the original authors. That's why Frank Miller's SPIRIT doesn't resemble Eisner's SPIRIT. Miller didn't want to make a respectful Eisner movie; he wanted to make a Frank Miller movie.

Why even keep those bits if they're going to change them entirely? I think the adaptors are under some pressure to have SOMETHING that resembles the property the company buys. I have no idea who in the chain of command said, "Let's use the Mandarin in IM3," but once it was sent down, the adaptors were stuck with it. In this case the exigencies of political correctness probably informed the changes in the character, rather than personal preference as it seems to have been with DEADLY and BLAISE. But the principle is the same.

A FINAL PARTING OTTO-SHOT

In HOLY NUMINOSITY -- PART 4 I said:

I seem to remember that at some point Otto mentions his awareness that one response to the numinous is a desire to become "godlike" oneself, but as yet I can't locate the passage. 
 

I would have expected that a doctrinaire Christian would have little regard for the idea of any mortal undergoing apotheosis, and when I scanned my collection of Otto-quotes, I found that this one came the closest to what I seemed to remember:

The daemonic-divine object may appear
to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same
time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm,
and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and
cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to
it, nay even to make it somehow his own.
 

Here the "potent charm" stems from the aspect of the numinous which Otto terms the *mysterium fascinans.*  I've argued in this series of essays that one might take the desire of a subject to "become like God" to be a natural extension of the numen-aspect, in contradistinction to the "fear and trembling" next to a force one cannot oppose.  In Part 4 I said:

This [desire to become godlike] would seem to be a natural extension of the idea of celebrating numinous "worth," however: not just feeling that Zeus is the mysterious creator of the universe, but that Heracles, begotten on a mortal by the Father of the Gods, can provide a conduit by which mortals can participate in that divine mystery.

On reviewing other relevant sections of THE IDEA OF THE HOLY, though, I see that the only way in which Otto can see a subject legitimately trying to become one with the divine is through the process of conferring praise upon the source of the numinous, not by any actual physical or mental transformation. 

Here's Otto taking snipe shots at the different types of mystics who identify themselves with the numinous power:

A characteristic common to all types of Mysticism is the
Identification, in different degrees of completeness, of the
personal self with the transcendent Reality. This identifi-
cation has a source of its own, with which we are not here
concerned, and springs from moments of religious experience
which would require separate treatment.
 

This has a peculiar vagueness to it.  Does Otto mean, by speaking of a "source of its own," to imply that the Devil Made Them Do It?  But it's not likely: the rest of the book doesn't show any passion for demon-hunting.  Going by a later section, it seems likely that Otto's putting the pretensions of mystics into the same category as the "weird" beliefs of superstitious natives: as religious practices that are explained in part by anthropological findings, in part by Otto's conviction that the religious beliefs have not been "developed" enough:

...there is a series
of strange proceedings which are constantly attracting greater
and greater attention, and in which it is claimed that we may
recognize, besides mere religion in general, the particular roots
of Mysticism. I refer to those numerous curious modes of
behaviour and fantastic forms of mediation, by means of
which the primitive religious man attempts to master the
mysterious , and to fill himself and even to identify himself
with it. These modes of behaviour fall apart into two
classes. On the one hand the magical identification of the
self with the numen proceeds by means of various transactions,
at once magical and devotional in character by formula, ordination,
adjuration, consecration, exorcism, &c. : on the other hand
are the shamanistic ways of procedure, possession, indwelling,
self-imbuement with the numen in exaltation and ecstasy. All
these have, indeed, their starting-points simply in magic, and
their intention at first was certainly simply to appropriate the
prodigious force of the numen for the natural ends of man.
 

Though Otto turns up his nose at both of these "strange proceedings," he's roughly on track in making a valid distinction between the pratice of the primitive magician, who seeks to compel the gods or to assimilate their powers through "formula, ordination, etc.," and the primitive "shaman," who seeks to commune with the numinous through "exaltation and ecstacy."  What Otto fails to appreciate, of course, is that within all species of Christian worship one finds just as many appeals to the "numen of Christianity" for "the natural ends" of its worshippers.  One can find a few Christian credos that have attempted to place an insuperable wall between Deity and the needs of worshippers, but in a statistical sense these must be judged as "rare birds" that do not represent the prevalent norms of Christian worship.

To put a final point on the matter, Otto is so opposed to the idea of impinging on the numinous source that he similarly conflates the systematic approach of the medieval Scholastics with he views as a similar "rationalization" in archaic myth:

Representations of spirits and similar conceptions
are rather one and all early modes of rationalizing
a precedent experience, to which they are subsidiary. They
are attempts in some way or other, it little matters how, to guess
the riddle it propounds, and their effect is at the same time
always to weaken and deaden the experience itself. They are
the source from which springs, not religion, but the rationalization
of religion, which often ends by constructing such a
massive structure of theory and such a plausible fabric of
interpretation, that the mystery is frankly excluded. Both
imaginative Myth, when developed into a system, and intel-
lectualist Scholasticism, when worked out to its completion,
are methods by which the fundamental fact of religious
experience is, as it were, simply rolled out so thin and flat
as to be finally eliminated altogether.

I submit that Otto's real objection is to any system that does not validate the experience of the numinous as it is asserted by the "higher religions."  There is, to be sure, an element of the rational in the formation of archaic myths, as I argued here, but Otto is simply mistaken as to how much the rational elements exclude the non-rational.  Building on Jung's infinitely more latitudinarian understanding of the religious consciousness, I wrote in this essay:

In Jung's paradigm, it's impossible to imagine a primitive trying to explain the regular motions of the sun in terms of a figure like Helios driving his chariot across the sky. However, it would be fair to state that many of the features of the physical world that science would study in terms of their etiology-- the movement of celestial bodies, the characteristics of vegetation, et al-- became for the primitive sacred clues to the nature of divine power. The "empty and purely formal" archetype is the principle around which these "clues" aggregated. For Jung the emotional wonder of beholding the sun as a sacred mystery would be the keystone of making a myth about it, while the specific local details of any given myth were the "ions and molecules" upon which the organizing power acts.
 

Nevertheless, I maintain that though Rudolf Otto may have looked askance at the claims of magicians and shamans, their concepts of assimilating the numinous are archetypally identical with Otto's description of the *mysterium fascinans,* even though Otto himself saw the proper response as awestruck praise of the numen. 

Further, what the magician/shaman seeks from a numen-source in his theoretical reality is archetypally identical with what the typical subject of a reading-or-viewing "audience" desires from his experience of a fictional narrative: an identification with (1) various levels of meaning from the simple to the complex (comparable to the experience of the "combinatory-sublime") and/or with (2) various levels of dynamicity from the paltry to the exceptional (comparable to the experience of the "dynamic-sublime.") 

I should say that nothing in Otto's book supports my own personal deduction of "sympathetic affects" that I outlined in TRIPLE THE TREMENDUM AND THE FASCINANS.  But to be sure, though Otto does use all three of the terms that appeared in Lewis' PROBLEM OF PAIN essay, he never brings them into the same schema that Lewis uses in that essay.  Thus my formulation of three "sympathetic affects"-- "admiration" as a parallel to "fear," "fascination" as a parallel to "dread," and "ecstasis" as a parallel to "awe"-- is more properly a response to Lewis than to Otto.  But in my final anslysis both scholars' formulations suffer due to a mutual overemphasis of the antipathetic affects.

 

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING DYNAMICALLY DIFFERENT

Kelly Thompson's stalking that damn male gaze again.


I'm now anxiously awaiting another set of redesigns in line with one of Kelly Thompson's documented pet peeves: the idea that hot villainesses pander to the male gaze.  This will undoubtedly result in some masterful re-imaginings.

SEE-- The Viper, with her brand-new harelip and bald spot!

SEE-- The Norn Queen, with her smart new needle-nose and jutting chin!

SEE-- Granny Goodness and Ugly Meg, with their...
...uh...

...I know there has to be some change, but I can't...

Ah yes!  With one brand-new nose-wart apiece!

Yes, these are great times for feminism, comics-fans!