EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD PT. 3

 So in the previous two installments of this essay-series, I've addressed AT-AT Pilot's essential question. "Is it possible for literature to be evil?" Dominantly my response has been, "most if not all evil is to be found in the parts of literature that encourage 'work,' a concerted effort toward a real-world goal." And even then, one must analyze a work's explicit or implicit polemic in order to determine if the goal advocated is evil. 

An obvious example of explicit polemic can be found in the 1915 BIRTH OF A NATION film, which adapted Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel THE CLANSMAN. The film (and, I assume, the source novel) makes no bones about its message: that liberated Black slaves must be kept down by the Ku Klux Klan. Implicit polemic is harder to identify, because so many critics project polemic where none is intended. However, such identification is not impossible and can usually be pegged by the way the implicit type mimics the irrational propositions of the explicit type. 

I have judged J.M. Coetzee's anti-colonialist novel DISGRACE as implicitly polemical due to the mirroring of two major events in the story. In Event One, the viewpoint character, a White South African professor teaching at the collegiate level, is condemned for allegedly manipulating a female student-- possibly but not definitely Black African-- into an affair. In Event Two, the professor's daughter, who runs a farm in South Africa, is raped by Black African trespassers, one of whom impregnates her. But because the rape took place against a scion of colonizers, it's asserted that the woman will eventually marry her rapist and that the land she owns will return to a Black African family. Obviously, some readers did not judge this disproportionate "tit for tat" as evil, in the same way that most readers today would judge the Dixon work and the Griffith film as evil. Clearly, I find them all morally noxious.

But none of the above works fall into the category I've called "play for play's sake," which takes in generally the majority of popular culture, and specifically the KAMASUTRA manga of Go Nagai, with which this discussion began. So far, most of the Nagai works I've surveyed are wild outpourings of sex and violence, with almost no attempts to impose any moral order on the chaos. The closest thing Nagai himself offers as a key to his works is an "ethic of transgression," insofar as he believes human nature is truly one big playground for a bunch of Freudian Id-Monsters. But he never expouses any sort of polemic-- though even in the more permissive country of his birth, Nagai was often criticized for his explicitness.

The majority of censorious critics don't bother to establish even an implicit polemic as I did with DISGRACE above. These critics usually follow one of two approaches-- the "monkey see monkey do" approach and the "projected polemic" approach-- and it just so happens that the two most prominent enemies of popular comics in the postwar years broke down along those respective lines. Frederic Wertham begins with the supposition that children were as twigs that would be inevitably bent by the wrong influences, and that any time one of them did wrong, an evil comic book done made them do it. Gershon Legman had the idee fixe that American culture nursed a vast conspiracy to substitute healthy sexuality with sadistic violence, and he repeatedly "proved" his thesis with endless facile projections. Neither they nor most of their descendants showed any capacity to define evil except in terms of personal self-interest-- which, some may recall, is explicitly rejected in the Bataille excerpt I cited in Part 2.

Oddly, "projected polemic" works both to champion and denigrate works that don't show either explicit or implicit polemic. Many will be familiar with news stories about evangelical groups criticizing J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER series, claiming that its magical content encourages young people to explore witchcraft and/or Satanism. This Wikipedia article chronicles many of those evangelical denigrations. However, the same article also mentions a number of defenses of the Potter series on the grounds of its encouragement of Christian values-- and even though I like the series, I view these positive characterizations to be projections. It's not that there's no moral content in POTTER. But at base I think that Rowling's series is essentially "play for play's sake" as much as most Go Nagai works, even though POTTER lacks the extreme sex and violence of Nagai.

Francois Truffaut said, "Taste is the result of a thousand distastes," and what many critics label as evil is often more a reaction against something they find unpleasurable. They often impugn the artist, as if he were showing them unpleasant things for some sadistic or politically motivated reason but have little appreciation for another Truffaut observation: that artists are not endorsing everything that appears in their works. All art is founded on conflict-- Bataille would say "transgression"-- and every fictional conflict conceivable can potentially trigger someone in terms of a taste-reaction. I try as much as possible to frame all of my critical downgrades in terms of analyzing a work's explicit or implicit polemic. But I'm sure there are some works I just don't like for reasons of taste, too, as with my generally unfavorable critiques of Mark Millar's comics. I certainly don't think he's guilty of any more polemic than is Go Nagai-- but I find Nagai creative and Millar boring in terms of their violently transgressive content. So even a critic who refutes taste-based criticism can't help but be influenced his own "thousand distastes." Probably the only time I'd denounce "play for play's sake" as evil would be when I think it's boring.

GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE

If I had a continuous run of the BLONDIE comic books, to say nothing of the strips, both would prove valuable in illuminating the interdependent mythos of male masochism and female sadism.-- MYTHCOMICS #2: BLONDIE #150 (1962)

Legman’s argument was that BLONDIE was important to American audiences because it showed an American housewife temporarily getting the better of her husband, though in theory she would always have to return to a condition of subservience. I have no way of knowing what BLONDIE strips Legman saw at the time he penned the essays in LOVE AND DEATH. Yet I tend to doubt that Young ever varied his act by much, so in all likelihood the only “subservience” Blondie ever suffered was having to cook Dagwood’s meals...-- SOCIAL JUSTICE VS. SADISTIC EROTICA PT. 2.

In an earlier essay today, I mentioned that as a kid reading newspaper comics in the 1960s I took notice as to how violent Chic Young's BLONDIE strip was. I also observed a concomitant level of mayhem in original comic-book stories of the time-- with almost all of the brutality aimed at Dagwood, the Goat of the World. Over fifty years later, I've continued to touch on the strip's unusual psychology on blog-pieces here, despite being fully aware that BLONDIE is far from one of the great comic strips. But I haven't had occasion to mention that I might have got a little help from the "devil" in my title, Gershon Legman.

In or near 1965, a family member, knowing that I liked the strip PEANUTS, gave me an issue of Time Magazine because it contained an uncredited article about Charles Schulz and his creation. Oddly enough, though nothing the author wrote about Schulz was all that illuminating, he decided to contrast the good-heartedness of PEANUTS with the darker manifestations of early comic strips, and with that in mind the writer quoted a passage from Legman's 1949 LOVE AND DEATH. From 1949 until his death in 1999, I don't believe Legman ever again turned his attention to comic books or strips, but the unbilled writer was evidently a fan of those 1949 observations.

Fun Without Flagellation. For the perennial critics of the comics, the new strips like Peanuts should come as a welcome relief. Taking the comics, in their own way, as seriously as Europeans, some Americans have castigated the funnies for offering a distorted, often brutalized view of life. In Love & Death, a brilliant indictment of the medium, Folklorist Gershon Legman writes: "Children are not allowed to fantasy themselves as actually revolting against authority—as actually killing their fathers. A literature frankly offering such fantasies would be outlawed overnight. But in the identifications available in the comic strips—in the character of the Katzenjammer Kids, in the kewpie-doll character of Blondie—both father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated and degraded daily. Lulled by these halfway aggressions—that is to say, halfway to murder—the censorship demands only that in the final sequence Hans & Fritz must submit to flagellation for their 'naughtiness,' Blondie to the inferior position of being, after all, merely a wife."-- THE COMICS: GOOD GRIEF.

I won't dwell long on arguments that Legman himself tossed out in a willy-nilly fashion, but I want to establish that when he made these remarks, Legman was not stating that early comics like BLONDIE and KATZENJAMMER KIDS were what the Time author called "offering a distorted, often brutalized form of life." Since Legman was in those days at least a nominal Freudian, he would have found it inevitable that the adults reading the comic strips-- and Legman does explicitly state that the comic strips are aimed only at adults-- should project "fantasy attacks" on "real frustrations," the latter being the "hell of other people." Legman only goes into all this detail about Young's BLONDIE and Dirks' KIDS, which supposedly conclude by returning the adult reader to the status quo for one reason. Legman wants to contrast such "status quo" entertainments with the overweening sadistic content of children's comic books, which as far as he's concerned do NOT return the reader to the status quo of relative realism but allow the kids to indulge in "the Oedipean dream of strength."

Legman's argument is littered with dopey ad hominem arguments and logical inconsistencies, and his contrast of comic strips and comic books is nonsense. (Despite his having excoriated teen humor books in the same essay, he somehow managed not to notice how often such stories also returned their protagonists to the same "status quo" experienced by the Katzenjammer Kids.) 

I like to imagine that even the ten-year-old me would have perceived how nonsensical his argument about BLONDIE was, because in the actual Young strip Blondie was never subservient to Dagwood. After he got beat up by his boss or his neighbor, or even (very rarely) by Blondie herself, she would tend his wounds, but one could rationalize that this was necessary because Dagwood was the breadwinner. She was almost always the boss in the relationship, with only occasional exceptions where Dagwood got his way by yelling and stomping his feet. So Legman clearly did not read BLONDIE very closely. And yet, he did home in on the fact that Dagwood was "degraded daily," and I never forgot that he had shown me one hidden cultural aspect of what most readers dismissed as forgettable trash.   

Parenthetically, in the same article where he favors BLONDIE's relative realism over the unrestricted fantasy of the superheroes, Legman nevertheless conflates the two, stating, "[Wonder Woman] is straight Wunschprojektion for the envious female-- Blondie with a bullwhip..." In the next paragraph Legman claims that the Amazon "lynches her spate of criminals" (even though Wonder Woman's villains were rarely even slain, as was the case with many other comic book features) and that she "humiliates and big-sisters all the other males in the strip" (which overlooks the fact that the heroine was not indulging in humiliation for its own sake, but attempting to convert recalcitrant men to her doctrine of feminine "loving-kindness.") If anything, Blondie has far more claim to being in the mode of Sade than Wonder Woman and her lasso ever has had.

But still, I give Legman his due for having a good instinct-- once in a while.

REPETITION AND PROLONGATION PT. 2

 All of the examples of prolongation and repetition discussed in Part 1 were dominated by a relatively serious tone, which meant that in every scenario the sadist and his victim were radically opposed into a "winner" and a "loser." But this pattern of oppugnancy breaks down somewhat in the more ludicrous mythoi, where "accomodation narratives" might in theory outnumber "confrontation narratives."

In this near-myth analysis, I took issue with Gershon Legman's claim that all teenage comedy comics were just filled to the brim with young women panting with desire to harm/humiliate fathers and boyfriends. But to test his theory fairly, I scanned all of the adventures of an Archie Comics teen-heroine, Ginger Snapp, lasting from the middle forties through the early fifties. I did find some examples of the heroine Ginger occasionally visiting quasi-sadistic humiliations on either her father or her boyfriend, but there weren't enough of them for GINGER to support Legman's faulty thesis. Thus the few stories that existed in this venue fit my category of "prolongation," because the sadism-scenarios are confined to particular issues and don't reinforce one another.

The one story I analyzed, "Nightmare," was interesting because the victim's humiliation stems largely from his reactions to the titular series-star, not from overt deeds by Ginger. The story's action proceeds from Ginger's old man Mister Snapp. She asks him for money for a baseball uniform, but he, playing the "heavy father," wants to make her prove her devotion to the sport. He embarrasses himself by trying to keep up with the young folk, and then his daughter, only indirectly the author of his torments, beans him with a baseball by accident. Snapp then experiences a dream in which his daughter goes out of her way to clobber him with a giant bat, and he goes through other prolonged sufferings until he wakes up. So in his mind at least, Snapp is the "loser" and Ginger "the winner," though the only way in which the real Ginger torments him is just by the fact of being younger and healthier than her dad. This would be "exothelic prolongation" in that the reader feels humorous antipathy for Snapp, given that he becomes victimized by his own illusions.

I've written much more frequently on this blog about other serials, particularly in Japanese manga, in which sadism-scenarios recur frequently, so that all of the relevant features-- LOVE HINA, MAYO CHIKI, URUSEI YATSURA, and NISEKOI-- partake of the pattern of repetition. Often the accomodation narrative is focused on a male who keeps offending the woman, or women, who attract him, and getting clobbered by them for his transgressions. 

I examined a few key texts of NISEKOI in TENDER LOVING SADISM PT 2.  In contrast to GINGER, there were a lot of sadism-scenarios in the ongoing series, but "The Promise" is of special interest because it established that Raku, the male lead of the series, wants to live a life free of violence, and nurtures a yen for a similarly mild-mannered young classmate, Kosaki. But the manga-god controlling Raku's fate wants him to reach an accomodation with the less predictable aspects of life (or so I believe). Thus his potential new love Chitoge comes into Raku's life like a March lion. Chitoge is always "the sadist" in that she wallops Raku for the least infraction, even if she regrets her temper later on. But unlike "serious victims," Raku benefits from this "endothelic repetition" torment because it makes him stronger and more resilient. Arguably, Chitoge's aggressiveness, and that of her servant Tsugumi, even spreads to two other women in Raku's "harem," Kosaki and Marika, who don't normally beat on him. In "Transformation," it's comically implied that all four of them get drunk and "have their way" with the helpless male, though conveniently Raku's memory edits out whatever happened. After all, there's just so much "accomodating" an ordinary guy can do in that kind of situation. (And to be sure, all four females are substantially seen as "good girls," so the reader doesn't really think they molested him in any significant manner, and is mostly amused by the possibility that they could have done so.)

REPETITION AND PROLONGATION PT. 1

The main reason I devoted time to sussing out "the two escalations" was because the earlier-conceived term bears on my also sussing out the quantitative form of "conflict-escalation" with respect to the long neglected topic of fictional sadism. To be sure, this line of thought was generated when I began thinking about how the quantitative form of "stature-escalation" depended on duration, and this led me to think about duration's influence upon a particular type of conflict-escalation.

My most concentrated observations on sadism were made in essays like POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY, aimed at disproving the simplistic attempts of Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman to define all forms of fictional violence as "sadism." In the same month I also observed, in SADISM OF THE CASUAL KIND, that the majority of audience-members are not vulnerable to becoming syndromic sadists just because they get a little jazzed reading about some criminal going on a crime-spree, which was another piece of nonsense from Wertham and Legman.

But while all forms of violence are not reducible to sadism, sadism and its "opposite number" masochism (which will have to wait for later discussion) have their own respective dynamics. 

Sadism, as previously related, is the ethical opposite of combat. Combat almost always involves two or more subjects in contention, where all have some ability for self-defense. Sadism depends upon one subject wielding control over the other subject and imparting physical (and sometimes emotional) violence upon the latter. I distinguish four patterns of fictional sadism. Two categories are the newly minted "prolongation" and "repetition," which are further subdivided (at the risk of inducing terminological overload) by my earlier categories of "the exothelic and the endothelic."

ENDOTHELIC PROLONGATION-- This type of scenario largely focuses upon one sadism-victim, or a group of victims, suffering prolonged acts of sadism, whether it's just one repeated scenario or an assortment of assaults. In fiction one of the most famous scenarios is that of Edgar Allan Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum," in which an unnamed prisoner must endure the agonies of the titular horrors, without his even interacting with the sadistic authors of his predicament.

ENDOTHELIC REPETITION-- Repetition, in contrast to prolongation, often depicts several independent scenarios separated by assorted time-frames. One of the most famous victims of repeated sadism appears in Sade's JUSTINE. Toward the end of the book the afflicted heroine provides a long chronicle of the many persons who have tormented her just for the hell of it, a list which apparently includes whatever God rules her world. Just a partial list:

During my childhood I meet a usurer; he seeks to induce me to commit a theft, I refuse, he becomes rich. I fall amongst a band of thieves, I escape from -hem with a man whose life I save; by way of thanks, he rapes me. I reach the property of an aristocratic debauchee who has me set upon and devoured by his dogs for not having wanted to poison his aunt. From there I go to the home of a murderous and incestuous surgeon whom I strive to spare from doing a horrible deed: the butcher brands me for a criminal; he doubtless consummates his atrocities, makes his fortune, whilst I am obliged to beg for my bread. I wish to have the sacraments made available to me, I wish fervently to implore the Supreme Being whence howbeit I receive so many ills, and the august tribunal, at which I hope to find purification in our most holy mysteries, becomes the blcody theater of my ignominy: the monster who abuses and pluncers me is elevated to his order’s highest honors and I fall back into the appalling abyss of misery.

As "endothelic" describes centric icons with whose will the reader is expected to sympathize, "exothelic" describes centric icons who ought to inspire antipathy.

EXOTHELIC PROLONGATION-- Whereas the unnamed narrator of "Pit" is the sufferer, the narrator of Poe's "The Cask of Amontilado," one Montresor, shows the slow and careful progress of Montresor's plan to trap his perceived enemy Fortunato into a death-trap; that of being confined behind a wall of bricks in a catacombs, where Fortunato will, and does, suffer a lingering demise.

EXOTHELIC REPETITION-- And, to maintain parallelism, my selection here also comes from Sade, who followed up JUSTINE with JULIETTE. The latter book takes the point of Justine's sister Juliette, who prospers despite visiting pain and death on innumerable victims, the most notable of which I discussed in this essay. 

More variations to come in Part 2.

NEAR MYTHS: “NIGHTMARE” (SUZIE COMICS #67, 1948)

 In the preceding essay I argued against the too-easy attempt to find syndromic significance in every fictional act of sex or violence. As I also mentioned, Gershon Legman had a unique take on the generally ignored comic-book genre of “teen humor:”

...there are published not only a handful of female crime-and western-comics, but whole series of so-called 'teen-age' comic-books specifically for girls, in which adolescent sexuality is achieved in sadistic disguise... through a continuous humiliation of scarecrow fathers and transvestist boyfriends by ravishingly pretty girls, beating up the men with flower-pots and clocks and brooms..."-- Gershon Legman, LOVE AND DEATH (1949), p. 47.

I’ve stated that I don’t think either Legman’s one cited example or the majority of teen hijinks embodied the syndromic sadism of female comics-readers of that period. But as a consequence of his overstatements, I have kept a weather-eye out for real syndromic sadism in any teen-humor comic book, though my main orientation is of course that of “Looking for Mister Goodmyth.”

I did come across some mildly suggestive material in a late 1940s MLJ (“Archie Comics”) feature named GINGER. This ditzy teen redhead debuted as a backup feature in another title—one devoted to a ditzy blonde named Suzie—and later enjoyed ten issues of her own title lasting into the early 1950s. So, I frittered away an afternoon glancing through the adventures of Ginger via the online Digital Comics Museum. As I expected, most of the redhead’s exploits were as expected typical enough, and none of them qualified as “Goodmyths.” But one tale, “Nightmare,” did have enough psychological material that qualified as a “near myth.”

Like many teen females before her, Ginger starts off the story by asking her father for money to buy clothes. This was a frequent trope in the series, and Daddy George responds as did most teen-humor fathers: he doesn’t like his daughter constantly milking him for money. However, this request is a little different. Ginger aspires to join a girls’ baseball team, so she wants money for a uniform. George doesn’t exactly call his offspring a liar, but he’s not sure of her sincerity. Thus, George follows his daughter to the team’s next game to gauge Ginger’s dedication to the sport.

Ginger takes her place on the team, but the girls are missing their pitcher. George, puffed up with memories of his glory days playing baseball, volunteers to pitch in the belief that he can easily smoke the girls on the other team. Naturally, he gets his ego slammed out of the park when the girls repeatedly belt his balls (so to speak). To top it off, when Ginger’s team goes to bat, George gets beaned by a ball, accidentally sent at him by none other than his darling daughter.

So far, the story’s dealing with standard “dumb daddy” stuff. But while unconscious, George has a dream, beginning with imagining himself to be a baseball, complete with face. George the Ball gets pitched at his daughter, who, to the delight of any remaining Freudians, wields a bat three times normal size. Ginger belts her dad out if the park and into a clothes store.

Once in the store, George becomes human again, and picks up the thread of the argument about having to buy his daughter’s clothes. A slightly Satanic salesman reveals that George must buy clothes for a couple dozen duplicates of Ginger, who probably represent George’s feeling of being overwhelmed with clothing expenses. The floorwalker then makes a bargain with George: if he can hit a ball out of the park, he’ll get the clothes for free. However, George’s feelings of inferiority then take Alice-style permutations. As the pitched ball comes at him, it expands in size while George shrinks, so that the ball creams him. However, this ends the titular nightmare. When George wakes, he retaliates by paddling the (mostly) guiltless Ginger. Some readers might have deemed this belated revenge for the many times she humiliates him and doesn’t get punished.

This story might indeed be deemed an example of syndromic sadism, since it does really lay on the “humiliate daddy” tropes, if only in the author's belief that this was what the audience for GINGER wanted to see. However, it doesn’t succeed as a mythcomic. It might do so if it were built only around George’s aggravations about Ginger’s sartorial needs, or only around George’s chauvinistic attitude toward women. But here the two tropes fight each other rather than complementing one another, and even the element of the Satanic salesman doesn’t enhance the story’s symbolic discourse.

SOCIAL JUSTICE VS. SADISTIC EROTICA PT. 2

In the essay SADISM OF THE CASUALKIND, I pointed out that writers like Legman and Wertham viewed every apparent act of fictional sadism to be deeply revelatory of how messed up the audiences were. In this the two authors followed the example of Sigmund Freud, who, despite his disavowals to the contrary, hardly ever met a cigar he didn’t deem a phallic symbol.

I’ve pointed out various salient differences between Wertham and Legman, but historically they’re on the same page insofar as both men believed that American popular entertainment offered far too much sex and violence for a healthy culture. At times both authors slanted their arguments to apply to the effects of such unwholesome diversions upon children, but both also caviled at the effects of bad books and movies on adults as well. Neither of them seemed capable of imagining that for the majority of consumers, the depiction of excessive sex and violence, even those configured into sadistic actions, provided little more than “casual” entertainment, temporary respite from the dull round of the workaday world.

Instead, for these worthies, everything in popular entertainment—the muscles of comic book superheroes, the “bitch-heroines” of paperback thrillers—denoted something deep and syndromic in American culture. Wertham in particular expressed the belief that children could be bent into deviance as easily as the proverbial twig, as if psychological syndromes sprang out of some “monkey see, monkey do” impulse. By saying this, I don’t deny that some individuals may have psychological syndromes that are brought to the fore by their encounters with various types of art. But this phenomenon certainly isn’t confined to encounters with popular entertainment. One of the most famous syndromic avatars of literary sadism was the Eton-educated Algernon Charles Swinburne, who didn’t need crime novels (or crime comic books) to write such odes to sadistic women as “Anactoria” and “Faustine.”

I should further note in some cases an author may repeatedly use transgressive materials not because they express some syndromic aspect of the author’s psychology, but simply as an avenue of captivating a large audience. Though I considered most of Gershon Legman’s identifications of sadistic entertainments to be fatuous, I agreed with him to some extent regarding Chic Young’s newspaper comic BLONDIE. Still, when I read a collection of the original BLONDIE strips from 1930, I found barely any such sadisterotic motifs there. The early strips are all over the place, even writing Dagwood out of the story for a time. The feature didn’t enjoy sustained success until Blondie became a hausfrau and Dagwood a harried victim of the middle-class rat-race. This suggests to me that Young may have happened on his formula — “torture the husband”—by sheer accident, and that he and others who followed the formula did so simply to make a buck. I would not even argue that a syndromic consciousness was behind the one BLONDIE episode that I’ve thus far identified as mythically concrescent, a two-page comic book story signed (but probably not produced) by Young.

Legman’s argument was that BLONDIE was important to American audiences because it showed an American housewife temporarily getting the better of her husband, though in theory she would always have to return to a condition of subservience. I have no way of knowing what BLONDIE strips Legman saw at the time he penned the essays in LOVE AND DEATH. Yet I tend to doubt that Young ever varied his act by much, so in all likelihood the only “subservience” Blondie ever suffered was having to cook Dagwood’s meals—though, as I showed in the analysis of “Shaved and Clipped,” she seems to have no problems telling him that she can cut off his meals any time she pleases.

I’ve also differed with Legman on the sadistic content of teen humor comics, for reasons I detailed in the BLONDIE essay and won’t repeat here. But because Legman made the assertion, I have at times sought to test his hypothesis, perhaps more rigorously than he did—as I will show in the ensuing “near myth” essay.

SOCIAL JUSTICE VS. SADISTIC EROTICISM PT. 1

 When I began this blog in 2007, ultraliberal SJWs were still in the process of attempting to brainwash American audiences into viewing straight white male privilege as an unforgivable sin. Back then, the paradigm claimed, this privilege was expressed in the form of the hegemony’s employment of sadistic acts upon the bodies of all those who did not share this privilege, be they women, nonwhites or LGBT. In the world of comic books, Superman could get beaten to death and Batman could have his back broken, and those manifestations of extreme violence said nothing about the repressiveness of conservative America. But ifa female hero like Tigra got beaten up, or if Spider-Woman lifted herbutt up high enough for males to gawk at,  SJWs insisted that this represented nasty straight white males exercising their privilege, and so It Had to Stop. It was, as I’ve pointed out before, the rebirth of a liberal form of lynch law that had in the forties had been largely confined to outliers like Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman.

In the greater world beyond comics, most such lynchings came from the conservative side of the tracks, as per the Moral Majority’s ill-fated 1980s attempts to “cancel” extreme sex and violence in popular entertainment. However, the 1990s gave rise to a subtler form of censure: the view of America as the “fruit of the poisoned tree.” In the 1960s the radical Malcolm X had more power to inspire the aggrieved than to effect change for Black people. However, American culture’s uncritical acceptance of Spike Lee’s 1992 biography (or hagiography) of Malcolm X might serve as a flashpoint for future developments, promoting the view that those who had suffered most from the old hegemony ought to become the arbiters of the new one.

The past five years gave rise to spectacles like the 2017 Oscar Awards, in which Hollywood liberals lined up to be flogged for the sin of whiteness. But once Americans started seeing once marginal groups achieving dominance, we started seeing less of the politics-as-sadism argument. Once the new boss is in charge, how credibly can he complain that the old boss is still putting the screws to him? Given far fewer depictions of marginalized groups being subjected to physical torments, the SJWs found a new lyric for an old song: preaching that SWM privilege leads to everlasting economic abjection. Since it’s also a given that, as someone in the Bible said, “there will be poor always,” ultraliberals finally found a cornucopia from which they can draw endless supplies of social outrage.

Most of the SJWs in the comics subculture who had pursued the old Wertham-Legman legacy seem to have dropped the sadism angle. I confess I don’t read THE BEAT regularly these days, but I’ve the impression in the past five years none of the BEAT’s clickbait has been as audacious as the 2008 post “The One with All the Comments.” In this blogpost—which did indeed garner a lot of comments —Heidi McDonald aligned American superhero readers with the audiences of the woman-bashing site “Superheroines Demise.” The Heidi-post has been deleted for whatever reasons, so it may be that the only surviving references to its audacity (and philosophical dishonesty) are those on THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE, particularly an essay entitled SADISM OF THE CASUAL KIND.

I suppose that nothing I wrote back then to refute Wertham, Legman and McDonald can be used to combat current SJWs and their reliance on the “economic abjection” argument. Still, on occasion the anti-sadism meme still crops up, most often in modern anti-pornography crusades that often sound barely distinguishable from the WAP crusades of the 1970s. I’ve repeatedly argued that sex and violence are integral components of literature, though without validating a given work just for being either sexy, violent or both. Therefore, in part 2, and the “near myths” essay following, I’ll explore some of the ways that sadism in literature can be fairly evaluated.

MYTHCOMICS: ["SCALP ITCH"}, JOE COLLEGE #2 (1950)

In a previous essay I won't trouble to track down, I wondered whether or not American "teen humor" comics had any potential to produce the symbolic discourse necessary for a mythcomic. Just the fact that both Gershon Legman and Frederick Wertham took a few shots at the genre might indicate that there was some potential for gold, where these two ignoramuses saw only dross. Legman was a little more explicit than Wertham about the psychosexual undercurrents of the genre, though like Wertham he was content to cite one supposedly disruptive example of said genre to prove his contentions. I quoted him in greater detail in this 2008 essay:

...there are published not only a handful of female crime-and western-comics, but whole series of so-called 'teen-age' comic-books specifically for girls, in which adolescent sexuality is achieved in sadistic disguise... through a continuous humiliation of scarecrow fathers and transvestist boyfriends by ravishingly pretty girls, beating up the men with flower-pots and clocks and brooms..."-- Gershon Legman, LOVE AND DEATH (1949), p. 47.

This quasi-Freudian reading manages the feat of making teen humor comics sound a lot more psychologically interesting than they really are. I've seen Legman's one example, a 1947 Timely issue of JEANIE, and it's no than so-so slapstick, though it does have a scene where a pretty girl's father gets conked by his daughter when she mistakes him for a burglar. "So-so slapstick" pretty well describes the majority of all teen humor comics from Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages-- and I speak as one who, whether motivated by intellectual genre-curiosity or by nostalgia for simpler times, has sampled most of the titles out there. Such forgotten ARCHIE-imitators as ALGIE, GINGER, MAZIE, DEXTER, and Thoth knows how many others sometimes had nice art, but offered little more.

Then I came across my copy of JOE COLLEGE #2. There were only two issues of this Hillman title over the years 1949 and 1950, and none of the stories in #1-- which I read on COMIC BOOK PLUS-- were anything special. Nor were any of the stories in #2, except for the cover-featured "Joe College" story. The artist on both of Joe's stories was Bob Powell, and though Joe's first story is ordinary, Powell did dip into some psychological waters for the second and last tale. The cover shown above, though it depicts an imaginary situation (a savage Indian seeks to lift Joe's scalp under the pose of being a barber), captures the essence of the tale's screwball premise.

By 1949 "Joe College" was a term for a fun-loving college student, and that's all there is to the series' youthful protagonist as he attends his alma mater, Hardknox University. But in the story I've retroactively entitled "Scalp Itch," all of the mythicity inheres in the young WASP's encounter with certain not-yet-vanished Americans.

Following a page on which Joe accidentally antagonists a cranky red man named "Horse Feathers" (a decorous euphemism for "horseshit"), one of Joe's professors explains the complicated reasons why there's a whole quasi-reservation of Indians on the campus grounds, Long ago an Indian tribe donated the land to the college's founder, and in a very improbable exchange, they and all their descendants got to live in some mansion near Hardknox. One assumes that the campus provides them some upkeep as well, though the professor asserts that all their money comes from standing around the campus begging for coins. (This is how Joe antagonizes Horse Feathers; mistaking him for a statue of an Indian and passing remarks about the redman's ugly mug.) On top of these considerations, the tribe gets two more privileges. First, one of their women-folk is apparently allowed to "roam der campus until she finds a mate," and though it's an ordinary mortal woman named Princess Dreamboat, Joe has somehow heard about this part of the custom and claims "I thought she was just a myth." However, Joe hasn't heard the second stipulation: that once every ten years, the men of the tribe "are allowed to take vun scalp from vun student"-- and though in practice this means nothing more than shaving the victim's head, it's definitely a demonstration of resentment at white people, since the Indians "always pick der longest and blondest hair."

Naturally, the two customs converge upon blonde, hapless Joe. First, he rescues the wandering maiden "Princess Dreamboat" from a waterfall, and she promptly falls in love with him. (Joe somehow neglects to mention that he has a steady girlfriend.)

At the same time, it happens to be the night when the tribal members can enact their hair-cutting hazing ritual, and Horse Feathers almost gets his wish, until Dreamboat intrudes in fine Pocohontas style.

I'll omit one of the climactic turnarounds, in which Horse Feathers's evil intent rebounds on him, but I will reprint the other climax, in which Joe's girlfriend catches the Indian maiden spooning with Joe, and proceeds to give her a trim job.

The fact that the Indian girl wants the white guy's loving feelings, while the men of her tribe want to cut something off of him, shouldn't require a lot of comment, beyond the commonplace notion that "hair= virility" in myth and folklore. I particularly like Dreamboat's line, "I've just been scalped by a savage white woman." The little tear in Horse Feathers' eye is a coincidental bonus, which takes on extra humor given its resemblance to this famous "crying Indian" commercial image.

I have no idea if JOE COLLEGE was Bob Powell's first "teen humor" comic book, though I know that he worked in the genre again in later years. The artist's wild sense of humor looks forward to the inspired lunacy of the MAD comic book that began two years after JOE COLLEGE's demise. though, oddly enough, Powell didn't do much if any work for EC Comics.

The entire story can be read here.

HOW TO HANDLE A TOXIC MALE

I already trashed DICK GRAYSON VS. TOXIC MASCULINITY in this essay,  but thought I ought to examine this particular absurdity in greater depth:

Even as Dick aged out of the Robin role, these elements remained: youth, feminization, subtextual queerness and campiness, passivity in romantic relationships. 

Author Plummer is by no means unusual in pursuing the idea that male characters can be "feminized" by being threatened (he calls Robin a "damsel in distress"), by being inferior to a stronger woman (Robin's relationship to super-powered girlfriend Starfire), or even by being killed. I'm not sure when this trope became popular, but I would assume it grew with the proliferation of "queer studies." While I myself have devoted no small amount of time to analyzing the overlaps between the fictional phenomena of sex and of violence, devotees of queer studies play a one-sided game. They don't mind seeing the image of masculinity torn down, but what happens when feminine characters are subjected to humiliation, violence, and death? Are any of these characters "feminized," or are they just--

WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS????

Since Kraft-Ebing codified the phenomena of sadism and masochism in the late 1800s, it's been impossible to doubt that certain men and women have mentally translated violence-- whether real or imagined-- into sexual stimulation. What modern ideologues want, however, is not a careful consideration of the ways both men and women think and feel. They want to find ways to ennoble marginalized women by placing them outside the bounds of violence, while degrading that horror of horrors, the straight white male, by "feminizing" him.

Those titans of tedium, Gershom Legman and Frederic Wertham, represent early attitudes of the "Freudian Marxist" to the threat of the macho male, whose epitome was that of the costumed superhero. Even though organized fascism had been defeated on the stage of world affairs by the time both men wrote their respective screeds, both men evinced extreme fear that Neo-Nazis lurked behind every fictional depiction of violence. Yet the closest that either one came to suggesting a feminized male appears in Legman's LOVE AND DEATH. The author suggested that in comic strips like BLONDIE and THE KATZENJAMMER KIDS, "father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated, and degraded daily." However, I don't think he was suggesting that this was a way of "queering" the paternal targets of this degradation. It was simply a means of allowing female and juvenile readers of the strips to indulge in fantasies of hostility. It's a limited rebellion, though, since Legman specifies that paternal authority will remain despite these escapist notions-- which just shows that he didn't read BLONDIE very carefully. While "the Captain," the main male antagonist of "the Kids," usually re-asserted his power by paddling the Kids' butts, Dagwood is rarely if ever able to reclaim any dignity, especially not against his quietly domineering wife.

Finally, I find it odd that Plummer is arguing that queerness should be associated with passivity.
I think most gays would find that rather offensive, not to mention impractical, as it would force them all to be "bottoms with no tops."

MORE COMMENT PRESERVATION

From a CBR thread this time:

_____________________
Well, I'd automatically put aside comparisons between entertainment and addictive substances. You can put alcohol and tobacco through the proper chemical analyses, and indicate pretty much what makes human beings want them. Thus far, no one's managed to do that with fiction,

The comparison between entertainment and domestic violence is wrong in a different way, Say that it's been statistically demonstrated that nine-tenths of all kids who witness domestic violence grow up to perpetrate domestic violence. But the kids of abusive families are not CHOOSING to see their parents batter one another; it's utterly outside their control. In contrast, patronizing violent entertainment is a CHOICE. The patrons may or may not be messed up by their personal circumstances, and they may or may not be employing what Adler called "negative compensation" to escape his problems. But we don't yet have proof that nine-tenths of, say, all horror-gorehounds become serial killers, perpetrators of road rage, or whatever.


I tend to think that entertainment has been violent since the dawn of humankind-- albeit with oscillations in tune with cultural priorities-- because fictional violence does serve as a stopgap. The contrasting view-- that violence ought to be rigidly controlled-- was once the province of pundits like Frederic Wertham and his fellow-traveler Gershon Legman. Given the effects of wild anti-comics claims, I might have thought that modern comics critics would shun that sort of extremism. Instead, I've seen both Wertham and Legman being represented as sober scholars rather than extremist cranks-- and I guess that too has much to do with current antipathies toward the very idea of representing violence, no matter how unreal it may be.


_____

A follow-up:

I'm not following. The anti-comics movement of the time may or may not have comprised a majority of the populace, but they had power because they appealed to a common belief among the majority, to the extent that that majority thought about comic books at all. That majority believed that comic books were for children, and so the majority of people did not oppose the minority that demanded some form of censorship. So, in effect, the vocal minority got their way by appealing to societal customs-- though the end game of Wertham was to get comics put off limits to children.

I can't see why you'd say Wertham lost. True, he didn't get the scenario he expressly said he wanted: because he didn't trust comic-book publishers to clean up their own houses, he wanted the magazines off limit to kids under 15-- which, I think we'll all agree, would have killed the medium if that scenario had been implemented. But in effect, Wertham won, because he got the U.S. government to intervene at all, regardless of what they actually did about the perceived problem. The Senate probably didn't want to be bothered with monitoring comics on a regular basis, and so they were probably satisfied with horror and crime comics were for the most part exiled from newsstands.

Yes, the comics publishers may have had less than honorable motives for their clean-up campaign, but it can be argued-- and I think John Goldwater did say something to this effect-- why should the guys who were providing clean entertainment be penalized by the ones who were promoting sex and violence?  Even though I myself favor a pluralistic marketplace, where "clean" and "dirty" both have their place, I can empathize with the logic of this statement; obviously the statement of someone who didn't want his own corner of the business destroyed.

"Comics won?" Well, specific comics companies did not win. We'll never know if EC Comics would've lasted much longer, but in effect they were driven off the stands, and Max Gaines only saved his bacon by converting MAD into a B&W magazine format. There's only one way in which I can see that comics benefitted. Because the majority audience didn't have the animus toward superheroes that Wertham did, the "cleaner" comics-atmosphere paved the way for superheroes to become relatively more sophisticated in the Silver Age, ranging from Julie Schwartz's love of SF-themed gimmicks and Stan Lee's emphasis upon dramatic moments. But in between 1955 and 1960, a lot of people were hassled by the Code or lost their jobs because of it.

DECIDEDLY SEEKING SYMMETRY

While some critics are fine with preserving a simplistic, dualistic symmetry-- as in "art is art and trash is trash and never the twain shall meet"-- in my long-running narratological project I find myself looking for symmetries that extend at least into quixotic quaternities.

For instance, I've repeatedly defended heroic fiction against the notion that its primary function is to appeal to its audience's tendencies toward sadism, fascism, or both. Probably my most representative argument against the "sadism" accusation, principally voiced by Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, is 2008's POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY, while  this year I re-examined the fascism argument in WORKING VACATIONS.  

The Legman-Wertham arguments are poorly reasoned, forcing the material under consideration upon a Procrustean bed of theory. However, because the "sadism argument" addresses, even in the form of a dumb dualism, the dynamics of power between protagonist and antagonist, it's a little more difficult to dismiss across the board. In POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY I presented my reasoning as to why the combat between hero and villain typical of the adventure-genre is a near-complete reversal of the paradigm of the sadistic victimizer:

...it seems obvious to me that when heroes fight villains in adventure-tales, the narrative action could not be less like a lynching, much less a Sadean sadist torturing helpless victims or a gangster shooting down old ladies in the street. Wertham and Legman dance around the difference by trying to make it sound as if the villains are merely stand-ins for despised minorities and the like, which argument remains a linchpin of Marxist oppositional thought, both in modern comics-criticism and elsewhere. But neither author can totally expunge this difference of narrative action: in the adventure-genre, *the villain can defend himself.* He may be fated to lose the struggle-- indeed, until recently he always did-- but the struggle itself is essential to the adventure-genre, as it manifestly is not with the crime genre.

Yet, though I continue to endorse this argument, I've always admitted that there are a few adventure-heroes-- specifically those of the 'super" variety--  who depart somewhat from the dominant narrative action of the adventure-genre. In this respect I'm thinking principally of the Golden Age stories of two DC characters-- Superman and the Spectre-- who are only occasionally pitted against enemies who can ably defend themselves against the hero's godlike powers. This narrative departure did not continue to dominate either character's exploits in the Silver Age or in any ages thereafter. But if the majority of Golden Age superheroes gave their villains as little opportunity to fight back as Superman and Spectre did during that period, then *maybe* the fulminations of Legman and Wertham would have been justified.

I could just say, "Yeah, some authors enjoyed the spectacle of omnipotent heroes beating the tar out of whining, helpless villains," and let it go at that. But because I value symmetry in my narratological system-- particularly in the quixotic quaternity I term "the four persona-types"-- it occurs to me that the "sadistic hero" provides a natural, and probably inevitable, counterpoint to the more frequent "courageous hero." Further, this narrative propensity mirrors in reverse the evolution of the hero's inverse persona, the demihero-- for it's far more rare to see a demihero face down the monster who persecutes him, than to see him either fall victim to said monster or to escape the monster by sheer dumb luck.

As it happens, I touched on the dynamics of "hero and villain" and "demihero and monster" once more in the recent essay GOALS, OR ROLES?:

Perhaps a useful distinction also arises from the concept of "paired opposites' I've formulated: to wit, "hero is to villain as monster is to victim (or, more formally, 'demihero.')"  The monster is designed to prey on a victim who is usually weaker than he, although in many cases the demihero may "step up" and conquer the monster through strength, guile, or a combination thereof. The villain may be just as obsessed as the monster, but characters like the Joker and Lex Luthor-- who make rather good comic-book parallels to Freddy and Pinhead-- are always oriented on challenging heroes, often despite having been beaten by said heroes on many, many occasions. That kind of glory may have only negative consequences, but it's still the same glory we descry in Milton's fallen Lucifer.

Anyone who's familiar with popular fiction could hardly deny that it's far more typical to behold exemplars of the "monster persona" enacting scenarios of sadism upon helpless demihero victims than to see exemplars of the "hero persona" doing the same to their villainous opponents. Naturally, ideologues have also railed against the horror genre-- the predominant dwelling-place of monster-types-- and for Wertham if not Legman, the sadism of the monster was apparently indistinguishable from the supposedly equal sadism of the hero. Public critics of the horror-genre, though, are usually not so undiscriminating. Roger Ebert attacked slasher films relentlessly throughout the 1980s, explicitly taking issue with the subgenre's power to make viewers Do Bad Things. In contrast, this collection of short superhero-flick reviews by Ebert shows no tendency to condemn heroes in general as budding sadists. I'm not saying that Ebert rendered any substantive judgments of the superhero genre, for he was as superficial about them as he was about monsters. I merely use him as an example of a popular film-critic who had a more normative reaction to hero-fiction than one sees in the pop psychobabble of Legman and Wertham.

Summing up, the heroes who *may* incarnate a sadistic dynamic-- one for which the Spectre has become far better known than Superman--

--are a distinct minority, just as it's rare to see monsters inspire their demihero victims to fight the monsters on their own terms.

___________________


On an unrelated matter, another assertion of symmetry occurs to me with regard to my formulation of the dynamics of the combative mode. In PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX, I explored some of the ways in which works might depart from or adhere to the mode in terms of their narrative strategies. For instance, the best-known paradigm of the combative mode presents the audience with a scene in which the central hero meets his villainous opponent in equal combat.

However, I considered the problem of whether the mode was fulfilled if someone other than the hero defeated the villain:

Another variation is seen in my review of the 2012 DARK SHADOWS, wherein vampire protagonist Barnabas Collins has a violent conflict with the villain but is taken out of the fight, after which the villain is destroyed by the main character's allies. But as long as there has been some narrative plot-thread to leads inevitably to some sort of spectacular combat, it doesn't matter if the combat follows the dominant pattern of the main hero overcoming the villain.

Now, though I did not say so at the time, it occurs to me that having the villain defeated by an ally of the main hero is not markedly different from the scenario in which the main hero fights, not the main villain, but some ally or henchman  of the main villain. As example, here's a still from the 1966 film TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD:

I don't think anyone watching the film felt Tarzan's heroism invalidated because the ape-man fought the main villain's enforcer, rather than the villain himself. By the same token, even though the Barnabas of the 2012 film doesn't succeed in defeating his foe, the fact that she is defeated by a being more or less allied to Barnabas' cause provides the same experience of combative satisfaction.

WORKING VACATIONS

I recently posted this simplified summation of my work/play concept on a forum-thread dealing with the question of whether or not superheroes were intrinsically juvenile.

"Escapism" is an important concept here, because on occasion (not necessarily on this thread) people sometimes conflate it with all things juvenile, which is not the case.

On my blog I've frequently contrasted two modes of literature which can be constructed for both juvenile and adult audiences. There's "escapism," which I consider "the literature of play," and "realism," which is "the literature of work."

Playing games means accepting a prescribed set of rules and limitations that aren't based on real-world means and ends, even if they might be loosely patterned after them (RISK, STRATEGO). But there's no real-world benefit from playing games. In a way, the player accept the game's fictional limits as a means of escaping the real world of limitations like inconvenient death, romantic loss, etc.

Work is all about means and ends, and the literature of work, "realism," is all about getting its audience to come to terms with mortal limitations. We may think of juvenile works as being only about escapism. But if someone writes a book for kids, aimed at coming to terms with the loss of loved ones, then that's both a "realist" work and a juvenile work.

Not that one has to be only within a naturalistic world in order to be "realistic." Lewis's Narnia books are aimed at kids, but their intent is to give the young audience a simplified grounding in the author's ideas of Christian philosophy. That's aimed at achieving a particular end by a particular means, and so I consider Narnia "realistic" in its thematic sense, even though it's a fantasy-- just as I do WATCHMEN and a handful of other "mature superheroes."

I've also occasionally asserted that the literature of thematic escapism functions as a "vacation from morals," moral prescriptions being the primary cultural manifestation of limitation: of what a member of a society must or must not do to remain a viable member of that society.

Early in THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, Northrop Frye discusses the ways in which types of melodrama-- he mainly references the detective story and the "thriller"-- can invoke in their audiences feelings of moral indignation, which might under different circumstances might involve the ideal of work in its sense of "means and ends."

In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.

We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there. 

Frye was IMO completely correct in assuming that the violent aspects of these "thrillers" is insulated by "a wall of play." However, he was wrong is assuming that it was "not possible" for critics to take violent melodramas "seriously" enough to believe that they were indeed "advance propaganda for the police state." About thirteen years prior to the publication of Frye's ANATOMY, Marxist Theodor Adorno attacked all products of the so-called "culture industry" as manifestations of a new fascism, though his analysis of the relation of violence to its audience may sound more Freudian than Marxist:


In the very first sequence [of a story] a motive is stated so that in the course of the action destruction can get to work on it: with the audience in pursuit, the protagonist becomes the worthless object of general violence. The quantity of organized amusement changes into the quality of organized cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction [until] the day of the pogrom. Insofar as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.

In 1949, Gershon Legman self-published his book of essays, LOVE AND DEATH, which in part assailed comic books as institutionalized fascism, virtually duplicating Adorno's argument about how it served the ends of an implied "police state" that wanted citizens to fantasize about venting violence on scapegoat victims so that said citizens would then accept any punishment the government dished out.

And of course, there's the debbil-doctor himself:

Superman (with the big S on his uniform—we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.) needs an endless stream of ever new submen, criminals and "foreign-looking" people not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible. It is this feature that engenders in children either one or the other of two attitudes: either they fantasize themselves as supermen, with the attendant prejudices against the submen, or it makes them submissive and receptive to the blandishments of strong men who will solve all their social problems for them—by force.


And, lest anyone reading think that these views no longer have currency, here's reliable Noah Berlatsky, from the comments-thread in which I recently participated, taking the POV that all superheroes are essentially cops, representatives of a police state:

 superheroes function as a kind of paramilitary right wing law and order force; they’re doing the dirty work of justice that even the police can’t do. That’s a lineage that goes back to the KKK; I don’t think it gets out of the dynamic I discussed. I think that applies to a lot of the lone badass against the system narratives too. 


What all of these individuals have in common is that they have refused to give the melodramatic entertainments they attack the credit for being "play." Thrillers, comedy cartoons, and superheroes are all defined by the "work" that the culture industry wants them to do, whether it's to create admiration for the forces of law-and-order or to provide "bread and circuses" so that the citizens won't notice how beaten-down they are by the forces of authority. Escapist melodramas might provide vacations from whatever morality these elitists tout as superior, but since the melodramas are working for authority, they only supply "working vacations."

Clearly I'm with Frye in believing that the consumers of these fantasies, violent or not, have the awareness to know that they're engaging a playful activity that doesn't represent the way the real world works. It can be fairly stated that concerns of "realism" do appear in any work, no matter how "escapist," be it a story set in the audience's own world or in some "Dungeons and Dragons" universe. But the element of play generally takes precedence, though permutations do arise in both the escapist mode and the realistic mode, as discussed more fully here.

The biggest problem of the "heroes are fascist" argument is that it soon becomes entirely tautological, like Freud. In Freud's opinion the Oedipal theory was validated whether or not  a man did or didn't marry a woman like his mother. A man who married a woman like his mother confirmed Freud's theory directly; a man who married a woman completely unlike his mother was undergoing "displacement," which in some roundabout way still validated the Oedipal theory.

Similarly, most of the "heroic fascist" arguments fall into the same circular arguments seen above. Does the hero work directly for the government? Then he's a fascist. Does the hero work on his own, reporting to no authority? Then he's "a kind of paramilitary right wing law and order force." Is the hero a badass fighting against the system, like (say) Snake Plissken? The argument will admit of no meaningful exceptions: the badass fighting the system is a fascist too. In other words, everything proves what the theory's proponent wants to prove, and the few exceptions the advocate may provide, if he provides any, simply happen to appeal to his or her particular moral system.

PUMPING THE PRIMACY PT. 2

In retrospect, I should have expected that the majority of works reviewed in the "uncanny phenomenality" would be dominated by "terror" more than "wonder," given the statement I made in THE ETHIC OF THE COMBATIVE PT. 2, where I also cited the now familiar Lovecraft quote:

Of these three patterns, I've hypothesized that the middle one, labeled "Might vs. Non-Might," is the most popular in the totality of literature (by which I mean, the "bad stuff" as well as the "good stuff.")

Now, assuming the truth of this, what would this pattern mean?

It might mean that the surest way to appeal to a human audience is to play upon their fear that they-- represented by the viewpoint characters of their stories-- are always on the verge of being overwhelmed by powers greater than themselves.  As noted in this essay, the aforementioned H.P. Lovecraft felt that fear was the most primal emotion:

THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Though there are a lot of stories in which ordinary humans are menaced by the forces of "the unknown," the basic pattern is not confined to supernatural stories: a story like the 1962 film CAPE FEAR sports only a "known" fear, that of a ruthless criminal who impinges on an almost-helpless family.  It is also the same pattern we see in Hegel's opposition of the "bondsman"-- who in my system would represent "non-might"-- and the "lord," who of course represents "might."

So if fear has primacy in human emotions, as Lovecraft claims, then that would be the reason why terror might dominate all literary phenomenalities, if indeed it does. To oppose a viewpoint character's "non-might" with the overwhelming nature of some source of "might"-- be it an entity like Dracula or a domain like Wonderland-- would be the easier way to appeal to one's audiences.

That said, the appeal of "might vs. might," which implies that a viewpoint character may become a liberating source of might, using that potency to battle a source of domineering might. In the above essay, I complained that Hegel did not address this possibility.

...within stories that emphasize "might vs. might"-- which is to say, combative stories-- the plurality of might implies that no lord is ever so mighty that a bondsman cannot assume his power and knock him from his lofty position. Of course, in real life this often means "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."  But in fiction we can indulge in the possibility that the new lord will make better choices than the old one.

But the elegant simplicity of this process is of course not acknowledged by ideological critics. Ironically, some of them are more terrified by the hero who rises to fight the tyrant than by the tyrant, rather than feeling engaged with sympathy for the hero's travails. The ideological critic-- the obvious example seen here--   is on some level attracted to the "might vs. non-might" formula, in that he imagines himself defeating tyrants by lofty rhetoric and psychological analysis.  From there, it's just a short step for the ideologue to defend the tyrant as being a mistreated "other," tyrannized by some superheroic storm trooper-- a tendency I identified in both Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman. In POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY I noted that their fatuous attempts to read all crimefighting heroes as exemplars of lynch-law were undone by their ignorance of the actual structure of adventure-fiction:

...while the jury may remain out on the question as to whether the adventure-genre can inspire any sort of sadistic vibe in their audiences-- a question I'll address more fully in a future piece-- it seems obvious to me that when heroes fight villains in adventure-tales, the narrative action could not be less like a lynching, much less a Sadean sadist torturing helpless victims or a gangster shooting down old ladies in the street. Wertham and Legman dance around the difference by trying to make it sound as if the villains are merely stand-ins for despised minorities and the like, which argument remains a linchpin of Marxist oppositional thought, both in modern comics-criticism and elsewhere. But neither author can totally expunge this difference of narrative action: in the adventure-genre, *the villain can defend himself.* He may be fated to lose the struggle-- indeed, until recently he always did-- but the struggle itself is essential to the adventure-genre, as it manifestly is not with the crime genre. As Wertham and Legman both point out, the crime-genre books usually ended with a last-minute destruction of the rampaging crook as a "sop" to morality. But the struggles of hero and villain in the adventure-genres-- best represented in comic books by the superhero-- are not thrown in at the last minute. Narratively, structurally, such physical struggles are the selling-points of the genres, and so cannot be conflated with either the crime genre or the Sadean paradigm by any truly rational approach.

 

 Since both writers made so many cutting remarks about conflating superheroes with fascists, it would have been interesting to ask both if they believed that the real Nazis had been defeated with lofty rhetoric and psychological analysis.

In conclusion, while I believe it likely that the formula "might vs. non-might" dominates the majority of all literary works, in all three phenomenalities, I will speculate of the three the domain of the marvelous may be most amenable to the formula "might vs. might," simply because works in this domain are given the license to stray the furthest from consensual experience, and thus, to imagine ways in which heroes can fight tyrants on the tyrants' terms, without becoming tyrants themselves.

ALAN MOORE, ELITIST NEOPURITAN PT. 3

I took issue with Alan Moore's remarks about the superhero filmgoing audience in this essay in part because they were expressed incoherently, with no justification as to why he had contempt for said audience.  In a more recent interview, he has expanded those thoughts, which are no longer incoherent but are still kind of stupid.

The subject of comic-related-films (or film-related-comics) had understandably arisen and, when asked, I had ventured my honest opinion that I found something worrying about the fact that the superhero film audience was now almost entirely composed of adults, men and women in their thirties, forties and fifties who were eagerly lining up to watch characters and situations that had been expressly created to entertain the twelve year-old boys of fifty years ago. I not only feel this is a valid point, I also believe it to be fairly self-evident to any disinterested observer. To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.

Not only is this a stupid opinion-- even though Alan Moore is obviously NOT a stupid man-- it's also a fairly routine and boring one.  If the adults of current years have learned to enjoy superhero films, it cannot be because there is something intrinsically entertaining about larger-than-life spectacle.  It must be "a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence."  The argument "fantasy offends realistic concerns" dates back to Legman and Wertham.  Those worthies dissed juvenile comics-- the sort of things Moore has found entirely appropriate to their audience-- because said comics confused youngsters about real-life matters of science (Superman's absurd defiance of physical law) or history (Superboy helping George Washington cross the Delaware).

And of course, it's Alan Moore, so he must work in a shot or two at Marvel and DC Comics, who are both "squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times." Of course not all superhero films are derived from Marvel and DC, though certainly they are in the majority.  But if films are made of relatively recent properties like HELLBOY (1993) or SCOTT PILGRIM (2004), are those films also squatting on the cultural stage?

I'm not finished reading the Big Long Alan Moore interview yet, so it may be that he has more to say about the pernicious effect of superhero films.  If so, I'll address such remarks later.