SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 3

 Following my earlier ruminations on Sir Walter Scott and the titular idiom, I decided to go through the index of Leslie Fiedler's magisterial LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL--which, though centered upon American authors, contains a lot about their European forbears-- and reread everything the critic had to say about the inventor of the historical novel. I knew from previous readings that nearly everything Fiedler had to say about Scott was virulently negative, with the exception of crediting Scott with being able to create literary myths that appealed to wide audiences. In Fiedler's demi-Marxist views from that era-- late fifties to early sixties-- Scott's greatest offense was that (according to Fiedler) all or most of the author's works allowed the viewpoint characters to give up ideas of revolting against authority and accepting the bourgeois lifestyle. I'm sure even back then Fiedler had read more of Scott than I have now-- though to be sure, Fiedler doesn't cite a lot of Scott works, saying nearly nothing about the classic IVANHOE and (quite naturally) not mentioning the work that recently engaged me, THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. But I still find this a very superficial pronouncement.

In previous readings I highlighted a lot of Fiedler's remarks in LOVE. Yet, given all of my earlier commentary about the intertwined literary categories of "the metaphenomenal" and "the heroic"--particularly in this essay-series-- I'm surprised I missed this one, in which Fiedler brilliantly links the rise of the gothic novel in Europe (beginning with Horace Walpole's 1764 THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO) with Scott's invention of the historical novel with WAVERLY in 1814.

...behind the Gothic there lies a theory of history, a particular sense of the past. The tale of terror is a kind of historical novel which existed before the historical novel (the invention of Walter Scott) came into being.

Fiedler then credits Samuel Richardson with having essentially invented the naturalistic novel's sense of "the present," beginning with 1740's CLARISSA. I'm not sure why Defoe's 1722 MOLL FLANDERS is out of the running in that department, or why Defoe doesn't even rate a mention in the whole of LOVE. But I agree with Fiedler's next point, that "the Gothic felt for the first time the pastness of the past." Long before Walpole subtitled OTRANTO as "a Gothic Story," the word "gothic" had been used since the Renaissance to indicate that which was medieval and therefore barbaric. Literature following the Renaissance rejected, as Fiedler says of the naturalistic novel, all those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.          

What is "the pastness of the past" in OTRANTO? Though of course Walpole wrote the novel in 1764, he published the book anonymously, claimed he had translated a manuscript from the 1500s, retelling a story from a distant medieval era. Walpole fooled some contemporary reviewers into believing that OTRANTO was an authentic work penned between the 9th and 11th centuries, and when he eventually admitted authorship, many scholars of his time regarded the novel as meretricious. However, setting the story in the medieval past allowed the author to represent wild fantasies of his own creation, much like the metaphenomena of chivalric romances.

During the early 1700s there had arisen a passion in Europe for both original literary fairy tales and reworkings of oral stories, the last including a craze for the newly translated THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. There were also a few freewheeling fantastic like GULLIVER'S TRAVELS and proto-SF works like Voltaire's MICROMEGAS. But OTRANTO inspired imitators to delve into the historical past, and to threaten the commonplace natural world with such horrors-- ghosts (real or fake), deals with the devil, and even the "occult science" of alchemy that infuses Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. The idiom of the Gothic even inspired an inventive hybrid of the European Gothic and the Arabian Nights fantasy in William Beckford's 1786 VATHEK.         

WAVERLY, the first of Scott's historical novels, doesn't delve very far into the past. Only about sixty years separate the novel's action during the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland and 1814, when Scott published the story. Then in 1820 Scott published IVANHOE, which, though it was a naturalistic story set in England's 12th century, nevertheless revived the genre of the chivalric romance. Further, even before the down-to-earth WAVERLY, it's also worth remembering that in 1805 Scott wrote his first original narrative poem, the aforementioned MINSTREL. And though it's not as imaginative as VATHEK, it certainly presents more wonders than did the average Gothic, such as a goblin, river-spirits, a book of magic spells, and a magician who comes back from death to reclaim his property. A case could made that just as Walpole gave birth the Modern Horror Story, Scott-- rather than usual nominees like George MacDonald or William Morris-- gave birth to the Modern Magical-Era Fantasy Tale. I now credit Leslie Fiedler with supplying me with a crucial conception for both of these modernized forms of older genres: that they are modern because they, unlike their predecessors, could not help but engage with modernity-- even whem the authors might be seeking with might and main to forswear the heavy hand of history.                  

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 2

 Following on the heels of both my review of THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL and the first part of this two-part series, here's a longer exploration of the relevance of MINSTREL to my concept of the superhero idiom.

My criterion for both "de facto superheroes" (those that everyone agrees to be superheroes for whatever reasons) and those characters who are "superhero-adjacent" is that they must always satisfy the connotations of "super" and "hero" thusly:

For a character to be a hero, he or she must have *megadynamic* combative abilities. This can mean abilities that go beyond those of ordinary mortals, or they can be an ordinary mortal's abilities taken to extraordinary heights. 

As indicated above, the character does not himself or herself have to be "super" in the common connotation of possessing either natural super-powers (Superman) or artificially enhanced powers (Iron Man). But the hero who possesses megadynamic capabilities must move within a world where "super" phenomena are possible, whether the hero opposes those phenomena or receives aid from them.

Now, to the latter category, there's no question that the world of Scott's MINSTREL is one where supernatural phenomena are readily accepted, even though the events take place in the late 16th century-- which, ironically, is about the time that stories of chivalric romance began to die out for the most part. In this respect, MINSTREL may resemble a lot of the literary fairy tales that proliferated in the late 17th century and throughout the 18th. I say "may" because I'm talking about only original literary creations by particular authors, not retellings of oral narratives, and I've not read many works in the former category, not even the best-known of them, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST from 1741. 

Still, because Walter Scott was a historian, he doesn't emulate the tendency of oral stories to take place in generic times and places. The 13th-century scholar Michael Scott is given an anachronistic makeover, so that he has perished only some years previous to the poem's main story, and here all the ahistorical legends about his having been a benign wizard are completely true. Lady Scott, who desires to possess Michael's magical book for unspecified reasons, is herself educated in magic, and the author even claims that she learned the skill from her father, himself educated in Padua-- which is generally more information than one gets about your generic bad witches and conniving faerie queens.

MINSTREL's main hero, loose though the poem's structture is, is the loyal bondsman William of Deloraine, whom Lady Scott sends to fetch the thaumaturgic tome from the warlock Michael's tomb. It's a spooky episode, though Deloraine doesn't end up fighting anyone or anything until he gets back from his mission. He crosses swords with Henry, boyfriend of Lady Scott's daughter Margaret, and Deloraine is wounded. He loses the magical book to Gilpin, the goblin-servant of Henry and Henry's family, though no one in Henry's clan even knows anything about the book. The book's only function in the story is that when the goblin gets a brief look at one page, it teaches him an illusion-spell that Gilpin is able to use later.

Clan-war breaks out while Deloraine is convalescing under Lady Scott's care, and one of the demands of the enemy clan is that they want Deloraine's life for his having previously killed the brother of an enemy lord. Deloraine has the choice of being tried for murder outright, or fighting in a one-on-one with Redgrave, the lord who lost his brother. So, will Deloraine be forced to drag himself from his sick-bed to prevent total clan-war? No, because Henry-- who's such an insubstantial character, he almost seems like Deloraine's shadow -- gets Gilpin to cast an illusion-spell that makes Henry look like Deloraine, so that the unwounded young warrior can triumph over Redgrave.

It's not hard to imagine how a later melodrama would have jacked up the duel of mystic powers, maybe having Henry's clan using the goblin's powers against Clan Scott, and Lady Scott retaliating by seeking the warlock's magic book. Assuming that everything in MINSTREL is original to Walter Scott and not borrowed from some unremembered oral source, Scott just wants Gilpin to be a mischievous imp instead of a major threat, and that does keep the poem's stakes on a low side. Deloraine doesn't get to shine in a final combat scene, any more than does his descendant Ivanhoe. But he is, by all indications, a doughty warrior, and he receives supernatural aid that saves him from being slain by another skilled fighter. Deloraine doesn't request the help, the way archaic Greek heroes would request weapons from their goddess-patrons. But structurally, Deloraine is a "hero" aided by a "super" phenomenon, even though his substitute is in reality an ordinary skilled man fighting another ordinary skilled man. But once all the goblin's business has been finished-- both petty pranks and benign actions-- his supernatural master arises from his tomb to reclaim him. This is not quite a moment akin to Shakespeare's "I'll drown my book," but it may not be a total coincidence that the main story is being related by an old minstrel, who appears to live in "our" world, a world in which magic has become only the stuff of literary fantasies.   

    

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM

I suppose the following "wish" might be deemed by some self-fulfilling-

I may as well as mention that the writer I **wish** had some strong candidates in this idiom is Sir Walter Scott. It looks to me like he single-handedly reinvented the adventure genre in the early 1800s, after the Age of Enlightenment made most of the fiction very talky and didactic, even when one sees occasional glimmers of adventure in Gothics or Byron's proto-swashbucklers.

-- because, after I read various summaries of Walter Scott works online, and chose to analyze the 1805 LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, I found what I wanted on my first try. "What are the odds?" a skeptic might say.   

Still, I'm fine with admitting that MINSTREL is not the ideal "first post-Renaissance almost-superhero." While Scott's narrative poem was popular in its day, its status as a long poem probably kept it from being influential on genre fiction of the 19th century. This stands in contrast to the way, say, Scott's novel IVANHOE unquestionably influenced the 1844 penny dreadful THE BLACK MONK. So other candidates for "first almost-superhero," such as one finds in the French crime-novel THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS or the fictionalizations of the English "urban legend" Spring-Heeled Jack, would seem much more credible as DIRECT influences on the superhero idiom that would eventually include such later 19th century proponents as Allen Quatermain and Nick Carter.

However, in a purely FORMAL sense, MINSTREL has most of the right elements for what might be termed a "fantasy-hero" if not a superhero. The poem has one supernatural creature in it-- a goblin with magical powers-- and a combative conflict between powerful opponents who can be loosely framed as "hero and villain." The fly in the ointment is that though the goblin might be said to be allied to the side of the "villains" in a general sense, the creature is not opposed to the hero in the way readers now expect from most fantasy literature following the birth of "sword-and-sorcery." MINSTREL also has a sorcerer, but he's not specifically helpful or harmful to either heroes or villains. In essence I think in MINSTREL Scott was trying to meld elements of "feuds between rival Scottish clans" with those of "people encountering the supernatural"-- both of which elements appeared in the older ballads Scott had been translating before he wrote MINSTREL, his first notable original work. One may argue that the two sets of elements don't quite cohere as one might desire.

Still, since I don't imagine I'll ever be devoted enough to this topic to read the entire Walter Scott oeuvre, I'm pleased that even on the purely formal level, the author has some skin in this particular literary game. 

THE READING RHEUM: THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL (1805)

 I recently commented to a poster on CHFB that if any author deserved to have the honor of reigniting "the superhero idiom" since its suspension at the end of the 16th century, it would be Sir Walter Scott, who as far as I can tell also reignited the combative mode in canonical literature. I made this comment, however, having only read two Scott novels-- IVANHOE and THE TALISMAN-- though I'd also seen various film adaptations of Scott novels. Up to this point, I would have said that 1812's IVANHOE was Scott's most significant work, as it brought back the "chivalric romance" that had been destroyed by the early 1600s release of DON QUIXOTE's two sections. Yet I was intrigued to read on Wikipedia that after Scott gained a measure of fame translating old Scottish ballads, often about border wars between feuding clans, his first attempt at an original ballad was an immediate success with 1805 audiences.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), in medieval romance form, grew out of Scott's plan to include a long original poem of his own in the second edition of the Minstrelsy: it was to be "a sort of Romance of Border Chivalry & inchantment".^[28] He owed the distinctive irregular accent in four-beat metre to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel, which he had heard recited by John Stoddart. (It was not to be published until 1816.)^[29] Scott was able to draw on his unrivalled familiarity with Border history and legend acquired from oral and written sources beginning in his childhood to present an energetic and highly coloured picture of 16th-century Scotland, which both captivated the general public and with its voluminous notes also addressed itself to the antiquarian student. The poem has a strong moral theme, as human pride is placed in the context of the last judgment with the introduction of a version of the "Dies irae" at the end. The work was an immediate success with almost all the reviewers and with readers in general, going through five editions in one year.^[16] The most celebrated lines are the ones that open the final stanza:

 The Wiki article also described enough of the plot for me to surmise that MINSTREL might be in the combative mode, which could potentially make it relevant to the superhero idiom, if not necessarily "superhero-adjacent." That, however, will be a separate argument for another post, and from here on it, I'll simply set down my impressions of Scott's first big hit.  

The word "lay" in the title connotes a narrative poem, traditionally sung by a minstrel in various European cultures, and the titular lay here is a framing-device for the main story, as it is related to a court full of listeners by a minstrel. I have no idea why Scott dubbed the unnamed singer "the last minstrel," unless he simply wanted to suggest the idea of a time that was passing in the shadow of the Industrial Age. Following the introduction of the framing-device, the minstrel only pops in at the end of each of the ballad's six cantos, as he takes a rest from his narrative.

The main story is set in historical Scotland, apparently of the 16th or 17th century. I'm sure that MINSTREL contains dozens of references to real Scottish and/or English history that simply went right past me, though I don't think Scott kept complete fidelity to historical sources. For one thing, a major part of the story involves a famous Scottish scholar, one Michael Scott, who though deceased is treated as if he had been a contemporary of the other characters in the narrative. In real history, Michael Scott lived in the 13th century, and though various legends made him a wizard there's no indication of occult knowledge in the real scholar's history. Still, English readers of the period would have recognized dozens of Renaissance-era historical figures worked into the story, even though I assume some though not all of the principal characters were fictional.

As the story opens, the Clan Scott has just suffered a grievous loss thanks to their enemies Clan Kerr, as Lord Scott has been killed in combat. The widow Lady Scott is not a happy camper.

Vengeance, deep-brooding o'er the slain

Had lock'd the source of softer woe;

And burning pride, and high disdain,

Forbade the rising tear to flow

Lady Scott, who is said to possess magical talents (she's seen listening to voices of local spirits), orders a trooper, William of Deloraine, to undertake a macabre mission. Deloraine must ride to the crypt where the wizard Michael Scott (no relation to the Scott Clan so far as I could tell) lies buried. Deloraine must descend into the crypt and remove a Book of Magic from the corpse of the wizard and bring it back to Lady Scott. The author never puts into words what Lady Scott plans to do with the book. though "vengeance for the slain" seems a not unreasonable conclusion. 

Deloraine journeys to the site of the crypt, and with the help of a monk (who claims to have known Michael Scott in life) the young man successfully liberates the magic book. Though the author puts in a lot of eerie descriptions, nothing specific happens during the crypt-raid, though the monk passes away a day or so later-- again, not from definite sorcerous causes.

Deloraine only gets into trouble in Canto 3, when he gets closer to his home base. Prior to the slaying of Lord Scott, his grown daughter Margaret fell in love with Henry, the heir apparent of Clan Kerr. Naturally, Lady Scott is not much inclined to entertain a clan-uniting marriage after her husband's death. Henry has however managed to contrive a secret if brief meeting with Margaret, and as he leaves the castle of Clan Scott he runs into Deloraine. The two fight, and Henry wounds Deloraine. Henry calls upon his page Gilpin to transport wounded Deloraine into the castle without detection, which is something Gilpin can do, because Gilpin is a goblin.

The author provided a loose history as to how the head of Clan Kerr came to be served by a goblin of magical talents: apparently Gilpin just appeared to the Kerr lord one day and insisted on becoming the lord's servant. Toward the poem's close, we finally learn, more or less, that Gilpin was originally in the service of Michael Scott, and that after the wizard perished, Gilpin apparently had to offer his services to some mortal. Or maybe Gilpin does so just to have opportunities for mischief, for while transporting Deloraine back to the castle, Gilpin also steals the magic book. He never does anything with the book, because it's bound with iron clasps he can't open, but he keeps it for the rest of the story. I'm not sure the author didn't forget about it, since Lady Scott, tending Deloraine's wounds, never asks any questions like "what happened to the book" or "how'd you get in the castle without anyone seeing you?"

Moreover, once Gilpin is on "enemy territory" as it were, he feels free to make more mischief. He lures the unnamed small son of Lady Scott into the forest, and though Gilpin would like to kill the kid, the goblin fears some retaliation from the boy's mother. So while the kid wanders in the forest, Gilpin assumes his appearance, returns to the castle and begins committing acts of childish destruction.

But although Prince Henry returned to his own lands without incident, his kindred have decided to march on Castle Scott for past grievances. Some outriders find Lady Scott's wandering son and take him hostage, since the boy is good enough to inform them of his lineage. Clan Kerr's forces and their English allies clash a few times with Clan Scott's soldiers. Then during a parley Clan Kerr reveals its hostage and proposes one of two outcomes. They'd like to try Deloraine for past acts of malice against their clan. However, since one of those acts included slaying the brother of a lord named Musgrave, Kerr is amenable to letting Musgrave and Deloraine settle their quarrel in one-on-one combat. However, Deloraine still suffers from wounds that might make it tough for an equal battle. (The author uses this trope again in IVANHOE.)

Miraculously, wounded Deloraine appears to fight and slay Musgrave. But big reveal time: the man beneath the helmet is Henry, who wanted to spare the life of the man he wounded. Henry somehow came across Gilpin and compelled the goblin to use his powers of illusion to make Henry appear to the other knight. In fact, Deloraine makes a belated appearance after Henry kills Musgrave, highly offended that someone else swiped his identity.

The final canto starts off with familiar lines that almost no one can ever quote the origins of--

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

--and the sentiments seem appropriate here, because the main action of the poem has been to provide a happy ending to a story of warring families. Henry and Margaret, the discount versions of Romeo and Juliet, receive permission to marry from the mollified Lady Scott, and apparently everyone in Clan Kerr is fine with it too, now that someone has died as a sort of scapegoat-that-solves-the-problem. The unnamed son of Lady Scott is of course returned, leaving just one difficulty, that of Gilpin-- which is solved when his master apparently leaves his unquiet grave to claim the goblin (and maybe the book too, for all I can tell). While the lords and ladies are feasting in a grear hall, Gilpin is seeking to make mischief again, when there's a flash of lightning and the goblin disappears, as well as a supernatural intrusion that out-otrantos OTRANTO.

Some heard a voice in Branksome Hall,

Some saw a sight, not seen by all

That dreadful voice was heard by some,

Cry, with loud summons, "Gylbin, come!"

And on the spot where burst the brand

        Just where the page had flung him down,

Some saw an arm, and some a hand,

        And some the waving of a gown.

The guests in silence pray'd and shook,

And terror dimm'd each lofty look.

But none of all the astonish'd train

Was so dismay'd as Deloraine

His blood did freeze, his brain did burn,

'Twas fear'd his mind would ne'er return;

For he was speechless, ghastly, wan,

Like him of whom the story ran

Who spoke the spectre-hound in Man.

At length, by fits, he darkly told.

With broken hint, and shuddering cold,

That he had seen, right certainly.

A shape with amice wrapp'd around,

With a wrought Spanish baldric bound,

Like pilgrim from beyond the sea;

And knew--but how it matter'd not--

It was the wizard, Michael Scott.

But once the dread apparition has passed, everything returns to normal, the happy couple is wed, and the frame-story of the minstrel's lay comes to an end. And I will deal with the ramifications of this story for the superhero idiom in a separate post.       

                  

MYTHCOMICS: "THE (SECOND) ORIGIN OF THE CHEETAH" (1944)

 'density is the means by which the reader subconsciously rates one creator above another: because the reader believes that Creator A can better describe a set of relationships so "densely" that it takes on the quality of "lived experience."'  -- GOOD WILL QUANTUMS 

Thanks to my acquisition of IDW's collection of the complete run of the 1944-45 WONDER WOMAN newspaper strip, I found a good example of a prominent author-- i.e., William Moulton Marston  -- taking a second shot at an early story and infusing it with greater density. 

Though Marston put a lot of (shall we say) mature content into the Golden Age WONDER WOMAN comic book, often the creator of the Amazon heroine tended to write down to his audience in terms of plotting. This was true of most raconteurs of the era: they assumed kids who bought comics just wanted as many marvels to gawk at as possible. But Marston took a different tack with the newspaper strip. He knew there was at least a chance of reaching an adult audience-- a chance eliminated by the strip's cancellation-- so in many cases he dialed down the sheer quantity of wild inventions. And in the case of his rewrite of the 1943 comics-story "Wonder Woman and the Cheetah," he upgraded a story with only fair mythicity into an exemplar of good myth. Unfortunately, there are almost no free scans of the newspaper strip available online. Thus I'm flung back to my practices during this blog's early days: depending on textual description with minimal illustration, partly taken from the 1943 story.

In the original CB story, Marston starts out by having Wonder Woman show off her prowess at a stateside benefit. However, she doesn't show up on time, and the chairman of the relief fund tries to placate the anxious audience by introducing debutante Priscilla Rich. This only exacerbates the audience's fervor to see the Amazon, and there's just one panel devoted to Priscilla being slightly miffed that the audience ignores her. Then Diana Prince shows up on stage, demonstrates her inability to move a heavy piano, and then cedes the stage to her powerful alter ego.

But in the CS version, Marston takes a more layered approach to introducing Priscilla. In a sequence that took up two weeks of daily strips, Priscilla shows up at the office of General Darnell, barges past his secretary Diana, and asks the officer to put her in contact with Wonder Woman, to ask her to appear at the benefit. This establishes a slight animosity between Priscilla and the heroine, but Wonder Woman quickly shows up and agrees to appear. However, on the night of the benefit, Diana Prince goes out dancing with Steve Trevor and just happens to forget her commitment. Thus, not only is Priscilla personally embarrassed by the absence of the special guest, Marston subjects the upper-class woman to more humiliation. She tries to placate the audience by performing "The Death of the Swan" with her balletic skills, but she earns only catcalls. Then the heroine shows up, curiously in both her guises, and satisfies the audience's desires.

 In the CB story, Wonder Woman proposes a second stunt-- apparently one she arranged with the relief effort in advance-- which involves her being chained and submerged in a tank. CB Priscilla, for no reason, decides to bind WW with her own magic lasso, making the heroine's escape more difficult. But in the CS story, Priscilla does have a reason to resent WW for her superior popularity. 

In both versions, Wonder Woman escapes despite the added difficulty, and Priscilla pretends she didn't mean to endanger the Amazon's life. In the CB version, Priscilla is merely miffed because the heroine goes to dinner with the benefit chairman, though there's no real indication that Priscilla cares about him in a romantic sense. Out of nowhere, the rich girl simply looks into a mirror in her room at home and her "evil self" manifests in the mirror. There's no particular reason for Imaginary Evil Priscilla to wear a cheetah-costume, except that there happens to be a cheetah-rug in the room, and Evil Priscilla tells Normal Priscilla to make it into a costume.

The CS version is much more psychologically compelling. After WW breaks free, she lets Priscilla off the hook, but Steve Trevor and a half-dozen other people accuse the girl of attempted murder. This sort of attention Priscilla did not want, and she flees, thinking, "Everybody adores Wonder Woman and hates me... I feel so low, so inferior!" She hides in a theatrical prop room, and there she encounters the dummy of a woman in a cheetah-costume. In this arrangement, Marston juxtaposed Priscilla's desire to escape her inferior feelings with her discovery of the dummy, and thus a more believable symbol-association is made, whereon she again imagines herself talking to her evil self, convincing her to become a costumed criminal.

In the 1943 story, Cheetah steals the benefit money and tries to improbably frame both the chairman and Wonder Woman for the crime. Since Priscilla doesn't really care about the chairman, the next five pages of the cops arresting the accused are nothing but filler. However, the 1944 continuity has Cheetah set fire to the theater-- which arguably involves her taking vengeance upon the audience that rejected her. In the former tale, Cheetah lures the heroine into a death-trap, while in the latter, the villainess captures the Holiday Girls, friends of her nemesis, which amounts to a more personal attack. 

In the CB, Marston then devotes two separate sections to Cheetah finding new ways to assail Wonder Woman. One involves using a beauty salon and a mind-reader to learn military secrets, which leads WW into a tangential battle with Japanese troops in the Pacific. In the final section, WW gets involved with training female soldiers on Paradise Island, and Cheetah infiltrates the program. There are several moments in which the villainess continues to express the hatred of all Amazons for their athletic superiority, but this twist means that Cheetah is no longer specifically focused on her star-spangled nemesis. She steals the magic girdle of Aphrodite, which empowers her to battle WW on her super-strong level, but she's defeated and consigned to an Amazon reformatory. The first section of the 1943 tale garners at least fair mythicity, but I'd probably rate both of these sections as poor, being just a collection of random incidents.

As for the remainder of the CS story, Cheetah imprisons all the Holliday Girls at her mansion and subjects them to various humiliations (with copious bondage of course). Cheetah also lures WW to the mansion, and despite various upsets, finally binds WW with her own lasso and forces her to make an Amazon "shocking-machine." This device (admittedly the most ludicrous item in the story) brings out the "subconscious personalities" of the Holliday Girls in a manner supposedly analogous to the way Cheetah was born, though in the case of the Hollidays, they actually become anthropomorphic animals. (Etta Candy naturally becomes a pig-girl.) WW finally defeats Cheetah and restores the girls to normal. However, when Priscilla is arraigned at trial, WW's personal lie-detector, the lasso, can't prove that the rich woman's the Cheetah, because in the Priscilla ID she no longer remembers being a super-villain. And so ends the career of Comic-Strip Cheetah, as Priscilla is sent to an asylum for examination. Obviously, it was Comic Book Cheetah who became an enduring opponent for the Amazon Princess, but the "Second Origin" provides an interesting example of a revision being more symbolically complex than the original, which is generally not the norm.  

      

                  

 
                                                            

THE READING RHEUM: BARON MUNCHAUSEN (1785)

 I gave this oddball quasi-novel a second read after having buzzed through it years ago. I tried this time to take notes about some of the highlights in this very episodic conglomeration of tall tales, but they all read about the same and there's no unity between them. Since there is not, I'll start out by listing a few episodes that stood out for me in a creative sense.

Many of the incidents in the novel feel like callbacks to the once popular "travelers' tales," of which the 13th century "Mandeville's Travels" is representative. Like ancient authors such as Pliny and Herodotus, Mandeville mixed genuine historiography with all sorts of bizarre, supposedly real marvels. Here's author Raspe using his narrator, his fictionalized version of the real Baron Munchausen, making up crap about things he saw in Antarctica.

We had not proceeded thus many weeks, advancing with incredible fatigue
by continual towing, when we fell in with a fleet of Negro-men, as they
call them. These wretches, I must inform you, my dear friends, had found
means to make prizes of those vessels from some Europeans upon the coast
of Guinea, and tasting the sweets of luxury, had formed colonies in
several new discovered islands near the South Pole, where they had a
variety of plantations of such matters as would only grow in the coldest
climates. As the black inhabitants of Guinea were unsuited to the
climate and excessive cold of the country, they formed the diabolical
project of getting Christian slaves to work for them. For this purpose
they sent vessels every year to the coast of Scotland, the northern
parts of Ireland, and Wales, and were even sometimes seen off the coast
of Cornwall. And having purchased, or entrapped by fraud or violence,
a great number of men, women, and children, they proceeded with their
cargoes of human flesh to the other end of the world, and sold them to
their planters, where they were flogged into obedience, and made to work
like horses all the rest of their lives.

This is of particular literary interest since the peculiar trope of "Black People in Antarctica" proves of inestimable importance to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym."      

And here's a crossover I certainly didn't remember from the earlier reading. 

I proceeded with the same retinue that I had before--Sphinx,
Gog and Magog, &c., and advanced along the bridge, lined on each side
with rows of trees, adorned with festoons of various flowers, and
illuminated with coloured lights. We advanced at a great rate along the
bridge, which was so very extensive that we could scarcely perceive the
ascent, but proceeded insensibly until we arrived on the centre of the
arch. The view from thence was glorious beyond conception; 'twas divine
to look down on the kingdoms and seas and islands under us. Africa
seemed in general of a tawny brownish colour, burned up by the sun:
Spain seemed more inclining to a yellow, on account of some fields of
corn scattered over the kingdom; France appeared more inclining to a
bright straw-colour, intermixed with green; and England appeared covered
with the most beautiful verdure. I admired the appearance of the Baltic
Sea, which evidently seemed to have been introduced between those
countries by the sudden splitting of the land, and that originally
Sweden was united to the western coast of Denmark; in short, the whole
interstice of the Gulf of Finland had no being, until these
countries, by mutual consent, separated from one another. Such were my
philosophical meditations as I advanced, when I observed a man in armour
with a tremendous spear or lance, and mounted upon a steed, advancing
against me. I soon discovered by a telescope that it could be no other
than Don Quixote, and promised myself much amusement in the encounter.

Cervantes would turn over in his grave. But maybe he deserved a little static, since DON QUIXOTE's greatest feat in the literary world was to kill off the chivalric romance-- albeit only temporarily, since Walter Scott brought the genre back to life in the 1800s. My main interest, one might anticipate, is to ask how relevant the tale-telling Baron is to the superhero idiom, given that he performs feats like this one:

Having made a track with my chariot from sea to sea, I ordered my Turks
and Russians to begin, and in a few hours we had the pleasure of seeing
a fleet of British East Indiamen in full sail through the canal. The
officers of this fleet were very polite, and paid me every applause and
congratulation my exploits could merit. They told me of their affairs in
India, and the ferocity of that dreadful warrior, Tippoo Sahib, on which
I resolved to go to India and encounter the tyrant. I travelled down the
Red Sea to Madras, and at the head of a few Sepoys and Europeans pursued
the flying army of Tippoo to the gates of Seringapatam. I challenged him
to mortal combat, and, mounted on my steed, rode up to the walls of the
fortress amidst a storm of shells and cannon-balls. As fast as the bombs
and cannon-balls came upon me, I caught them in my hands like so
many pebbles, and throwing them against the fortress, demolished the
strongest ramparts of the place. I took my mark so direct, that whenever
I aimed a cannon-ball or a shell at any person on the ramparts I was
sure to hit him: and one time perceiving a tremendous piece of artillery
pointed against me, and knowing the ball must be so great it would
certainly stun me, I took a small cannon-ball, and just as I perceived
the engineer going to order them to fire, and opening his mouth to give
the word of command, I took aim and drove my ball precisely down his
throat.

Now, one reason MUNCHAUSEN is not a combative work is because it varies too much between occasional combative scenes like this one and incidents where Munchausen is just (say) standing around describing the giants of (his version of) Swift's Brobdingnag. This stands in contrast to at least two of the feature films that adapted Raspe, the 1943 MUNCHAUSEN (an excellent fantasy movie tainted by having been released under the aegis of Nazi Germany) and Terry Gilliam's ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN-- both of which imposed some comparatively greater degree of unity on Raspe's wild imaginings.

But though I don't have a problem with viewing those two Barons as combative heroes, there's a second reason I don't think Raspe's original character qualifies to be included in the superhero idiom. The diegesis doesn't actually state outright that Munchausen is relating a bunch of tall tales, but it's perhaps implicit, because the Baron's world is just as mutable as his abilities. The book, for instance, starts out by having Munchausen claim that he witnessed how a great storm uprooted several trees, which flew into the air, and which fell to earth when the storm passed. But one tree in particular harbored a man and his wife who happened to be picking cucumbers at the time the storm hit, and when their tree falls to the ground, it happens to crush a local tyrant, after which the couple become the realm's new rulers.

This sort of "anything for a laugh" aesthetic fits Bugs Bunny more than Superman. Even some of the Baron's feats anticipate animated cartoons. When the Baron is attacked by a wolf and has to stave the critter off by jamming his arm into its open mouth, he solves the problem by-- pulling the wolf inside-out! 

Summing up, I don't think the superhero idiom works if the characters involved don't have some sort of limits, however variable they might be. Nothing's at stake for the hero without those limits, and so Raspe's wacky Baron doesn't even belong in the same company as funny-animal superheroes like Mighty Mouse-- who at least takes a hit once in a while-- but rather with Bugs, Porky, and all those zombies.      

     

INNOCENT SADISTS, BROADLY PT. 2

 I'm reasonably sure that I've only used my term "innocent sadist" for fictional characters who commit sadistic acts, or express sadistic sentiments, while giving the impression that they are innocent of sadistic intentions. All of my earlier examples, both in earlier essays, in the two recent THYMOS BE DE PLACE essays, and in the previous INNOCENT SADISTS installment, have concerned characters in slapstick comedies. A couple of counter-examples, Sakura and Hatta Mari, committed their violent acts for reasons I judged be epithymotic, and thus not true sadism. I also noted that Kelly Bundy did not initially conform to the "innocent sadist" trope but eventually developed to become one, so that the majority of her acts were thymotic in that she either explicitly or implicitly took pleasure in their damaging results.

However, there are other forms of innocent sadist, and the one I'll address here might be termed the traumatized psycho-killer, who may have started out as an innocent but who is changed by trauma into a murderer, either for epithymotic or thymotic reasons.

The 1964 STRAIT JACKET provides an example of the epithymotic type. Murderess Carol Harbin appears to have suffered childhood trauma as a child, when her mother Lucy murdered both her unfaithful husband/Carol's father and the husband's lover. Years later, after Lucy is released from an asylum, Carol sets plans to get revenge on Lucy by making her appear to have committed new murders, but in such a way that one of the victims is her fiancee's mother, thus ending the mother's opposition to Carol's marriage to her rich suitor. In my review I acknowledged some ambivaence in STRAIT JACKET's script, asking, "is Carol really acting for sheer gain, or is she recapitulating these images as a sort of repetition-compulsion?" At present, though, since there's no indication that Carol would have gone through so much trouble to execute serial murders just in order to frame her mother, I'd say that gain was a primary motive for her repetitious murder-rampage, though her early trauma predisposed her toward crime.

 With the titular character of the 1981 OLIVIA, we see a psycho-killer more informed by a need for thymotic satisfaction-- and, oddly enough, her need takes the form of both an "accommodation narrative" and a "confrontation narrative" in one. As a child, Olivia witnesses her hooker-mother slain by a berserk customer, one who's apparently not caught and punished. Having been told by her mother to play the part of Rapunzel in the fairy tale, Adult Olivia finds her "prince" in an abusive husband, which suggests her trying to accommodate herself to a world where men have superior physical power over women. However, Olivia has an episode where she subconsciously dresses up as a prostitute, lures a john into a compromising position, and then confronts her buried demons by killing him for the actions of her mother's murderer. Olivia only does this once, and then happens to meet a "real prince," with whom she has a brief affair-- also a confrontation with the force of negative masculinity represented by both her mother's killer and her husband. The two men in Olivia's life contend, and both the husband and wife disappear in one way or another. The Real Prince eventually meets Olivia again, who has tried to lose herself in a second identity. But the evil prince comes back into Olivia's life too, and this time the victim of trauma gets the chance to extirpate at least one source of her anxieties. From the way the film cuts off after Olivia has her revenge, one might assume that this victim of trauma actually finds thymotic closure in murdering the right target this time and so doesn't go on to further killing-sprees like so many of her kindred. Of course, those that keep killing for satisfaction also fall into the thymotic category for the most part.                  

MOORE ON LOVECRAFT

 

Over the past few days I've been reading three intertwined Alan Moore comics he devoted to HP Lovecraft. Like the LEAGUE books different chapters occur in different eras. The first two, entitled THE COURTYARD and NEONOMICON, didn't strike me as very ambitious, being content to quote a lot of HPL names but not making much of a story out of them.

The third part, entitled PROVIDENCE, is much more venturesome, though at bottom I think it fails my acid test as far as incarnating its own literary myth. If one has read PROMETHEA, one will recognize Moore treating the mythology of Lovecraft as he treated Western occultism in the previous comic, trying to concoct a master narrative that unites a lot of different cultural/literary phenomena. In PROVIDENCE, he starts in 1919 with a Jewish author named Robert Blake (obviously named after for the protagonist of "Haunter in the Dark," who was in turn named for Robert Bloch). Moore has a theme much like PROMETHEA-- the nature of the real world's indebtedness to dreams and fictions-- only the fantasies of HPL, and a few fellow travelers, are the source of the breakdown between objective and subjective. Moore doesn't have Blake encounter the Usual Suspects like the Great Old Ones or the Innsmouth natives, but obscurities like The Terrible Old Man and The Thing on the Doorstep.

Is it good? Well, in the sense of holding my interest, yes. The art is very restrained, which sometimes works to enhance some of the ghastly horror-pieces. It's very talky, like PROMETHEA, but though I could see Moore's "voice" informing everything, I was interested to see how he handled both the mythology and its creator. I have seen Moore get rather smug and mannered when adapting characters he didn't like, as with James Bond in LEAGUE. However, he's generally fair to Lovecraft, who appears as a character in the story-- much fairer than the yutz who wrote LOVECRAFT COUNTRY. (That name pops up in the last couple issues of PROVIDENCE but I'm not sure Moore was referring to the bad novel or to some slang term that preceded the novel.) And since HPL played a lot of continuity games himself, Moore's extensions aren't objectionable on that level. But at times the daunting research Moore put into PROVIDENCE serves no purpose greater than spotting continuity-points, like some of Roy Thomas' more involved exercises. 

My verdict is that I can't give it my highest recommendation. But anyone who likes both HPL and Moore will probably like this.       

THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 5

 I decided I needed to follow up PART 4 with a couple of variations on the thymotic/epithymotic word-pair-- but this time, taken from American rather than Japanese cartoons.

In my previous writings on thymos, I've drawn to some extent on Thomas Hobbes in defining what I now call "epithymotic" as actions taken for either "gain" or "security." The anime example I used in Part 4 was that of the character Sakura in URUSEI YATSURA, who repeatedly beats up Ataru to defend her personal security vis-a-vis not having him paw her. But a "gain" example can be found in the 1944 Warner Brothers short PLANE DAFFY, written by Warren Foster and directed by Frank Tashlin.

PLANE is set in a cartoon version of WWII, in which the noble American warbirds are having their plans stolen by the insidious Axis spy Hatta Mari. Hatta romances naive flyers into giving her their secret plans and then convinces them to kill themselves. The high command sends their best "woman-hating" pilot into enemy territory, Daffy Duck. Daffy is ambushed by Matta, who almost does melt him into a pool of goo with her ardor. However, Daffy rallies, giving as good as he got, and then tries to escape with the secret plans. 

As he tries to escape, Matta tries to kill Daffy in various ways, failing only because he's such a darn-fool duck. He swallows the secret paper to keep it out of her hands, but she seizes him and sticks him in an X-ray machine so that she and her leaders can see what's written on the paper. The big conclusion is that the secret is no secret, but the point is that all Matta's actions are oriented upon "gain," the gain of military advantage for her allies. There's no indication that she enjoys the activities of killing or seducing for their own sake, so all of her gain-focused violence would be epithymotic in nature.

Another flavor of the opposite category, the thymotic, appears in the 1952 Daffy Duck short THE SUPER SNOOPER (reviewed here), written by Tedd Pierce and directed by Robert McKimson. The flavor I described in Part 4 focused on the general pattern of Lum of URUSEI YATSURA. Whereas Sakura whales on Ataru to protect her own security, Lum does so because she's in love with him and wants to bend him to her will. This is a particular form of thymotic activity I've previously labeled "megalothymia," indicating that the person exercising his/her will seeks supremacy (though it's suggested that if Ataru settled down to be a good husband, Lum would become a good wife-- or at least, a better one than, say, Peg Bundy). 

The opposite flavor to megalothymia goes by the name of "isothymia," and it applies to the violence unleashed upon Daffy by the statuesque seductress, "The Body." Isothymia strives to bring about equality of recognition, and in SNOOPER's parody of gumshoe-fiction, Daffy-- a very different, often-self-defeating form of the duck than we see in PLANE-- barges into The Body's home in the belief that a murder's been committed. Because The Body comes on to Daffy, he assumes she's trying to cover up a murder she committed, so he starts tossing out wild scenarios about How She Dunnit.

 The Body is of course no more complex than Hatta Mari, but the script gives the former a little more nuance. The Body keeps trying to make whoopee with the detective, but he just keeps trying to justify his fantasies by setting up murder-methods and casting himself as the murder-victim. Of the four gags in the short, only the last one shows The Body lying back and letting Daffy half-kill himself. The other three culminate with the Body either shooting Daffy or dropping a heavy weight on his head. In two of the three, she seems slightly shocked when she accidentally precipitates violence on him, and in the third-- the rifle-scenario shown above-- the artists draw her in a stoic mode, neither pleasured nor troubled by her action of shooting Daffy a dozen times. The overall suggestion is that she's just patiently indulging the goofy gumshoe's fantasies, until she finally gets a chance to explain that he's in the wrong house. Prior to the revelation, she's only mildly protested her innocence, and when he finally agrees with her, she uses that as an excuse to go after him again-- and he flees, because he has no (theoretical) defense against the menace of wedded bliss. The Body does not show any passion to hurt Daffy, but she's willing to accomodate his fantasies if it keeps him close to her. And so the Daffy Duck (of this isolated short, at least) meets the matrimonial fate Lum threatens Ataru with, but without the implication that the guy's better half will always get her way with the help of electric shocks.            

INNOCENT SADISTS, BROADLY PT. 1

 

In THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 4, I gave two examples of my new categories, thymotic and epithymotic, as they applied to two characters from Rumiko Takahashi's URUSEI YATSURA venting slapstick violence on the same character, Ataru. One character committed violence in self-defense, to stave off Ataru's attentions, which I labeled epithymotic because it was not concerned with anything but self-maintenance. The other committed violence with the purpose of forcing Ataru to give her recognition as his proper wife and only love, and because it involved recognition, I labeled the action thymotic. The same thymotic characterization applies to all of Lum's actions, even those in which she takes the role of "innocent sadist," causing Ataru harm or humiliation without seeming to have any conscious intention to do so. 

I've most often used my term "innocent sadist," though, when analyzing episodes of the Fox teleseries MARRIED WITH CHILDREN. While I didn't feel like surveying every episode to support my views on the show's use of slapstick violence, I checked online summaries for the first two seasons of MWC to see how often, and in what ways, the two female characters acted the part of "dommes" to the male "subbes" of the series.      

The PILOT, while much less extreme in its use of violence than the later seasons, sets some ground rules. From the start, it's evident that Peg Bundy enjoys running husband Al down, so any time she causes him harm or humiliation, it's a given that she really means to do so, no matter what protests she may voice. In PILOT, she moves Al's alarm clock and puts a cactus in its place, and when he questions her capricious actions, she makes a lame excuse. For the length and the breadth of the series, Peg is a thymotic torturer: she does it because it gives her a buzz, not for any reasons of gain or security.

Kelly isn't quite as obvious at the beginning of things. However, for the first two seasons, the writers didn't really do that much with either Kelly or Bud. I imagine this was because the two young actors playing them were somewhat unknown quantities, while the two adult leads, O'Neill and Sagal, were the primary stars. Most of the stories in the first two seasons revolve around Al and Peg, or with their actions with their upper-middle class neighbors Steve and Marcy Rhodes. However, the PILOT does establish a degree of animosity between Kelly and Bud, though oddly, Bud's the aggressor. In one scene, he comes up behind Kelly, seated on the couch, and mimes cutting her throat with a rubber knife. Nothing more is said about the incident; Bud is nothing more than a typical annoying little brother. He annoys Kelly a couple more times in the first season-- he steals her diary twice-- before she really retaliates. And when she does so in the seventh episode-- the one entitled MARRIED WITHOUT CHILDREN-- the action goes a little beyond the mundane level of slugging him or giving him a wedgie. After it's established that Kelly's blasting out music from speakers in her room, Bud yells that "Kelly's tied my face to the speaker" in order to torture him with the racket. No reason for her action is stated.

Season Two doesn't have much more Kelly-sadism than the first season. The most notable episode is BORN TO WALK, the eighth one, in which Kelly gets her license to drive, and repeatedly threatens to turn her brother into "car meat." She never does anything overtly violent at this point in the show, though a much later episode had her run down her motorcycle-riding dad with a car. However, in the same episode Peg claims that at some earlier time Kelly shaved Bud's head, forcing him to celebrate Halloween that year by posing as TV detective Kojak. BORN TO WALK, though, seems to be the only second-season episode with that level of sadism.             

I won't go into all the ensuing seasons, but I would say that Season Three finally sets the Kelly-Bud relationship in stone, and to a mutual escalation in hostilities throughout the series, usually with Kelly getting the upper hand. THE CAMPING SHOW has Al, Steve, and Bud trapped in a rustic cabin with Peg, Marcy and Kelly, who are filled with hatred for men by their synchronized periods. At one point, the three women are alone in the cabin with Bud, and Kelly suggests, "Let's pretend Bud's a man and kill him." A little later, THE BALD AND THE BEAUTIFUL has Kelly torment Bud by pranking him that he's losing his hair, and when she asks Peg if she minds, Peg delivers the classic line, "No, that's why we had him!" From then on, even on those occasions when Bud provokes Kelly to retaliation, none of Kelly's actions can be considered epithymotic, because she, like her mother, enjoys male suffering far too much.          

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 5

 

As I wend my way toward the final chapters of METROPOLIS, it seems like Von Harbou may be losing control of some aspects of her dramaturgy.  

Chapter 10 is long and talky, as the ailing Freder is visited by his servant Josaphat (who has a separate minor plotline of no great importance). This gives the author a chance to recapitulate many things the reader already knows, with the protagonist conflating the imagery of the Seven Deadly Sins (from the cathedral) and the Whore of Babylon (from his own reading, apparently). He doesn't seem overly convinced that he merely hallucinated seeing his fathe and Maria together, but he talks about it in highly religious terms: "I saw Maria's brow, that white temple of goodness and virginity, besmirched with the name of the great harlot of Babylon." He also compares her to various archaic goddesses, two ancient cities (Gomorrha and Babylon) before labeling her "Metropolis," which brings one back to the origins of the name, "mother-city." This continues into Chapter 11, and Josaphat, not to be outdone, goes into huge detail about a seductive dancer who's performing at Yoshiwara, and who has sowed enmity between families and young males. This is presumably Fake Maria, but Von Harbou apparently forgot her timeline, for Josaphat imagines that this seductress was dancing in Yoshiwara during the same time that Freder saw Maria at Rotwang's house. Perhaps the 1925 proofreaders were as bored with this section as I was, that they didn't catch the error. The reference to Futura dancing for wealthy patrons has no plot-purpose but to set up, both in book and film, a later sequence where Futura seeks out Yoshiwara to make merry while the city falls apart.      

Von Harbou follows this up with an unusual tangent for Joh Fredersen. Though no version of the movie alludes to any Fredersen relatives except his son, Chapter 12 has the Master of Metropolis leave his domain and go to some nearby rustic locale, to visit the house of his unnamed mother. Described as "paralyzed," she appears to live alone in a farmhouse, supported by Fredersen's money though the two of them maintain a hostility between them due to the son's "sin" in seducing Hel away from Rotwang. Apparently, though Fredersen has always seemed stiff and unbending in his every encounter with his son, he's been disturbed at how easily virtuous Maria won him away from his father, and he's come to ask her advice. (As I predicted, no one ever brings up Fredersen's reverse-Oedipal flirtation with a robot made in the image of his son's lover.) The mother doesn't give her son much advice beyond the platitude of "you reap what you sow." It's not clear how if at all this visit causes the Brain of Metropolis to alter his later course.      

The film has a scene in which Rotwang is seen talking for a bit to his prisoner Maria, but in the novel he Freder goes on and on with ornate phraes just like those of Freder: "Women know nothing of love either. What does light know of light?" He wants some sort of forgiveness from Maria, even though he boasts about having stolen her "soul" and given it to her impostor, who will soon bestir the workers into rebellion. The chapter suddenly ends with Fredersen showing up and strangling Rotwang unconscious.   

Meanwhile, we're finally getting close to the big finish. Freder still doesn't know that there are two Marias, but he's heard that the Real One is going to speak to the rebels that evening. Futura addresses the crowd, encouraging them to riot and destroy the machines that make life in the city possible. To his credit Freder finally realizes that this is an impostor. He tries to denounce her, but he's recognized as the offspring of Fredersen and he's forced to flee. 

Slightly later Maria finds herself alone in the room with the unconscious body of Rotwang. The cut 1927 film doesn't even include the scene of Rotwang's strangulation, but in the book, it seems that Fredersen, despite being in the same room with the captive, doesn't interact with Maria in any way. Did Von Harbou want readers to believe she was just sitting in shadows (the room isn't well lit) and so Fredersen just didn't see her, and that she didn't call attention to herself? In any case, after Fredersen leaves, Maria escapes as well. She immediately heads to the city of the workers, evidently arriving some time after Freder runs away. She doesn't see him but she sees Fake Maria leading the rebels in an assault on the city's maintenance machines. I realize that this is supposed to be the book's great cataclysmic climax, but despite all Von Harbou's fervid descriptions I found it rather boiler-plate. Maria eventually finds a bunch of kids to whom she gives succor, which is clearly meant to bookend her Christ-like association with kids in her first appearance. The film improves on this by having her try to correct the malfunctioning machines.    

Freder seeks out and finds his father at the New Tower of Babel, but nothing much comes of it. Fredersen, who originally seemed obsessed with crushing the rebellious workers to protect the status quo, has suddenly "got religion" of a sort, telling Freder hat he unleashed the violence "for your sake, Freder; so that you could redeem them." In one of Von Harbou's best images, Fredersen happens to be standing on a platform supporting a power-tower, whose struts remind Freder of "the crosses of Golgotha," emitting "long, white crackling springs of sparks." Freder eventually concludes that his father won't help stop the cataclysm, so he returns to the underground, where he helps Maria save the imperiled children.

Elsewhere the revolting workers become incensed at Fake Maria for unleashing the chaos that endangered so many of them, so they go looking for her in Yoshiwara, where Futura is captivating the rich boys. Instead of the two groups fighting, the leader of the cathedral-monks also shows up, condemns Futura as a witch, and persuades both groups to burn her at a stake. Freder, having somehow become separated from Maria, happens across the scene and initially thinks Real Maria has been immolated. For some reason Von Harbou doesn't produce anything like the memorable reveal of the film, where Futura's robotic nature is revealed.

Almost lastly, Maria runs around looking for Freder, and Rotwang attacks her, suddenly imagining that she's Hel reborn. There's no precedence for this in the novel, though one line in the film has the inventor fantasizing about bringing back Hel in the form of a robot. So it seems as if the two father-figures in the story both conceive an unnatural passion for the young heroine, even though one knows that he's messing around with a fake woman. Freder catches sight of Maria being menaced again and overtakes Rotwang, eventually tossing him off a roof. This is the last of the big spectacle-moments, as Fredersen the Father turns over the administration of Metropolis to Freder the Son and his bride, who is also-- sort of a "holy mother?"

I'm glad I reread METROPOLIS, for all of its uneveness and its purple prose. I'm not sure how deeply invested Von Harbou was in her vision of a perfect, sexless madonna-woman as the counter to the Whore of Babylon, but the sheer excess of all of her fulminations about sin and virtue is entertaining in a way that, say, John Bunyan could not be. I've said almost nothing about the author's Big Moral that appears throughout the book and movie, because like most platitudes it doesn't really amount to much. METROPOLIS the novel is much more interesting when judged as a form of "religious fiction," rather than as "science fiction," even allowing for the story's indubitable impact upon the SF genre.      

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 4

 The scene in which Freder thinks that Maria has given herself to Fredersen is in my mind the almost definitive proof that Von Harbou was aware of some basic aspects of Sigmund Freud's Oedipal theory. Here's an apposite example of that theory from a 1910 essay:

When after this he can no longer maintain the doubt which makes his parents an exception to the universal and odious norms of sexual activity, he tells himself with cynical logic that the difference between his mother and a whore is not after all so very great, since basically they do the same thing. The enlightening information he has received has in fact awakened the memory-traces of the impressions and wishes of his early infancy, and these have led to a reactivation in him of certain mental impulses. He begins to desire his mother herself in the sense with which he has recently become acquainted, and to hate his father anew as a rival who stands in the way of this wish; he comes, as we say, under the dominance of the Oedipus complex. He does not forgive his mother for having granted the favour of sexual intercourse not to himself but to his father, and he regards it as an act of unfaithfulness.

^[Of course, Von Harbou would have been filtering any Oedipal concepts through her novel's heavy Judeo-Christian religious structure. But as mentioned in the last post, Freder does not get directed by Rotwang to seek out his father, and there's no evidence that Freder even knows that the mystery-house belongs to Rotwang. He does know of Rotwang's affiliation with Fredersen, though because Freder tells a confidante that he wonders if Rotwang and his father have a hand in Maria's disappearance. With that theory in mind he seeks out his father's "New Tower of Babel."

 The film is actually a little more explicit this time about clarifying Maria's primary purpose for seeking out Fredersen. A brief scene shows Fredersen giving Maria her assignment, to go among the underground workers, preaching violence so that they will revolt and so Fredersen can crush them--and then Freder barges in, seeing his father with the Fake Maria. The book is more ambiguous. We don't see Fredersen talking to Futura; Freder simply intrudes on the two of them, with his father embracing Futura. In fact, he seems to be in full seduction mode: "She [Futura] was not struggling. Leaning far back in the man's arms, she was offering her mouth, her alluring mouth..." Up to this point Fredersen has seemed utterly asexual, obsessed only with power, and he certainly showed no interest in Maria when he spied upon Freder and her in the underground city. Futura, as far as the reader knows, has never been anywhere or done anything, but somehow Rotwang has imbued her with a mature, knowing sexuality. Fredersen knows that Futura is just a robot, not his son's true love, but though I'm still working my way through the novel, I suspect Von Harbou will not make further comment on this curious book-scene.

Still, whatever Von Harbou had in mind, symbolically Fredersen is messing with the image of his son's beloved. Thus she has him reversing the usual course of the Oedipal configuration, where the son becomes possessive of the mother and envies the fact that she gave her "whorish" attentions to the father rather than the son. 

In both book and film, Freder goes berserk and attacks his father, who simply fends him off. Maria watches the father-son conflict a bit and then leaves the room, after which Fredersen convinces his son that he hallucinated the whole incident. Freder falls ill and is confined to bed. Later he has a long conversation with a confidante, during which he recapitulates some of the imagery of the Seven Sins imagery he saw at the cathedral, and brings into it the Scarlet Woman imagery, which apparently he acquired from his own religious education, whatever that was. Freder's ramblings about the Scarlet Woman go on for two chapters before they terminate with the confidante telling Freder that he's seen Fake Maria dancing at some men's club. Lang cuts most of Freder's speech or substitutes hallucinatory imagery, and then moves on to the subject of Fake Maria bringing all the boys to the yard.