COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 2

I made this statement in the first essay wherein I discussed the concept of alignment:

In CROSSOVERS PT. 3,  I reviewed the way in which two villains, Mister Hyde and the Cobra, had debuted in the THOR feature but were recycled into that of DAREDEVIL. The two super-crooks never became firmly attached to the latter feature either, and they subsequently drifted into such venues as SPIDER-MAN and CAPTAIN AMERICA. Since the two evildoers never became strongly associated with any single feature, I would still tend to view them as Thor-villains who bring about a charisma-crossover every time they venture into a new character-cosmos.

But the more I thought about it, the less necessary it seemed to align such all-purpose villains as Hyde and the Cobra with any particular hero-cosmos, be it that of Thor, Daredevil or Captain America. The continuity-nut in me is driven to note that the Cobra probably ended up battling Captain America more than anyone else, due to a large quantity of stories where he took charge of the "Serpent Society."

 Yet, because of the nature of the Marvel Universe, wherein editor Stan Lee broadened the parameters of inter-company crossovers beyond any previous comics-company. it's possible for a figure like Cobra or Hyde to have what I like to call "floating alignment." They are never identified with any single cosmos, in the way the Riddler, my example from CROSSOVERS PT. 5, is always aligned with Batman. 

Ironically, though, the earliest major example of a floating alignment appeared not at Marvel but at Silver Age DC Comics. After the original Doctor Light debuted as a foe of the Justice League, it became a running schtick that afterward the florescent felon went around challenging individual members of the League, managing to log in appearances in three of Julie Schwartz's 1960s superhero features: the Atom, the Flash and Green Lantern.  

Of similar relevance is the alignment of new protagonists when they appear within the corpus of established features. If a given new character appears within an established feature and then graduates to his or her own feature within a very short period of time, then it's a High Stature crossover, in which the protagonist(s) of the established feature cross over with a new character thrust into the position of a series-star. For instance, the TV-character of "Maude" debuted on two episodes of ALL IN THE FAMILY before she got her own series. She would have been a Sub in the 1971 episode, but since the second episode, aired in 1972, spawned the regular series about four months later, I would judge that she was a Prime in the 1972 crossover. 

(ADDENDUM: Changed my mind since writing this: now both "Maude" debuts are examples of proto-crossovers.)

Of course, dozens of characters may debut with the author's hope of creating a "spin-off" serial feature, and many never go beyond "Sub" status. One example was the 1985 Atomic Knight, a revamping of an earlier Silver Age feature, but despite a handful of guest-starring appearances, DC never gave this polished paladin a shot at a feature, and as far as I know he went back into Sub Limbo thereafter. 

Others can be much delayed. Marvel's Inhumans debuted in a 1965 issue of FANTASTIC FOUR, and the Black Panther appeared in the comic in the following year. It practically goes without saying that Lee and Kirby intended for both the Panther and the Inhumans to appear in serials at some point, but neither did for some time, and so for all of those appearances they register as Subs. In a special FF issue dated November 1967, both the Inhumans and the Black Panther crossed over with the Fantastic Four in fighting Psycho-Man. The Black Panther would not get a regular berth for another year, when he became a regular member of the Avengers in 1968, so within the compass of that story, he remained a Sub type. However, the special placed a more immediate push to see if readers wanted an Inhumans series, since in an issue of THOR, also dated November 1967, the denizens of Attilan received their first feature, albeit only a backup strip. So the FF ANNUAL would be a High-Stature crossover because the Inhumans had just become Primes around the time when the issue came out, while the equally enjoyable Panther had to wait another year for Prime status. 

Now, I reiterate that although all of these examples have dealt with ongoing serials, crossovers of varying types also appear in more limited forms, and the alignment of characters may be judged qualitatively rather than quantitatively.

Take the character of Nancy Callahan from Frank Miller's SIN CITY. She makes a very small debut as a support-character in the first graphic novel, THE HARD GOODBYE. with no hint that she's going to be important later.

She is still a Sub when she shows up in THAT YELLOW BASTARD,  but she's integral to the story of the Prime character John Hartigan, who protects her from a maniac while falling into age-inappropriate love with her. Her importance in this story trumps any of her other, more minor appearances, so she becomes a Sub aligned with the cosmos of John Hartigan.

To date Frank Miller has not created a sequel to BASTARD in comics-form, but he did write one for live-action film in SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR.  In this story, which I should note does not really line up with the continuity of HARD GOODBYE, Nancy decides to train herself in archery to gain vengeance on the man she holds responsible for the death of John Hartigan, and she also persuades the muscular Marv to join her in her quest. Given that Miller seems to have dropped all interest in further installments of SIN CITY, this was probably his final word on the character, as she becomes a Prime by reason of taking on the same level of superordinate presence as Marv. Thus in this story-- one of several in the anthology-film-- we have another High-Stature crossover, between Marv and Nancy. even though there will probably be no further appearances for either character. The alignment of Nancy-to-John is in fact reversed, for within the DAME tale, Hartigan becomes a subsidiary character in Nancy's story, in that Hartigan appears as an almost impotent ghost who simply observes the exploits of his beloved and her rough-hewn accomplice. 

VECTORS OF INTENTIONALITY

 

In the three-part EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS series, beginning here, I referenced the way authorial well manifested in all of the conceptual categories on which I’ve meditated here, though the three essays were concerned only with the category of centricity. This essay will be concerned with the category of literary phenomenality.

A word first, though, about my use of the word “intentionality” in the title. This term has various associations in various schools of philosophy, but here it means exactly the same as the concept of “authorial will.” Based on my readings I’ve often thought the twentieth-century concepts of “intentionality” were not substantially different from what Arthur Schopenhauer meant when he spoke of “will,” and that the later term might have been introduced by writers who didn’t necessarily want to seem overly indebted to Schopenhauer. I’ve resisted using the term “intentionality” because my system does owe a lot to the Gloomy Philosopher. Yet I must admit that at times “will” is a lot less malleable as a term than the later conception. “Vectors of intentionality” simply sounds better to my ear.

My 2017 essay ECCENTRIC ORBITS supplies a case in point. At that time, I was still heavily influenced by the “circle metaphors” propounded by Northrop Frye, and so I attempted to conceive of different forms of phenomenality in terms of “centric will” and “eccentric will.” At some point I abandoned these terms, even though I still deem the logic of the ORBITS argument sound. One problem with the circle metaphors is that though they work fairly well for a complete finished work, such as a Dickens novel, said metaphors don’t work as well for serials conceived as open-ended works, whether they come to a definite end or remain indefinitely open. Whitehead’s metaphor of force-vectors works better for a teleseries like ANGEL, which, as I mentioned in the first VECTORS essay, changed its centricity-vectors from non-distributive to distributive during the process of serialization, Clearly one would not see such a transformation in a novel, even one that appeared in serialized form. It is at least easier to state, if not any easier to prove, that the character of Spike doesn’t have a centricity-vector equal to that of Buffy in her series but does have a vector equal to Angel’s.

The ORBITS essay gives several examples where the phenomenality becomes fuzzy due to authorial intentionality. There’s no doubt, for instance, that Frank Miller has a definite purpose in putting a ghost into “Nancy’s Last Dance,” one of the sub-stories of the movie SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR. This would seem to be the first time Miller put any sort of marvelous phenomenon into any SIN CITY tale. The presence of John Hartigan’s ghost, though, does not transform Miller’s cosmos into a place where ghosts or any other marvelous phenomena can be reasonably expected to make appearances. Thus, within the SIN CITY cosmos, the marvelous phenomenality possesses a subordinate vector. In contrast, Miller’s creative preoccupation with tropes of the uncanny—bizarre crimes, freakish flesh, superlative skills—appears with enough regularity that the entire series can be fairly judged as uncanny in its phenomenality. Thus even if there are occasional SIN CITY stories that lack uncanny tropes, the naturalistic phenomenality also possesses a subordinate vector.

Now, when I used the word “regularity” above, I do so while renouncing all previous attempts to *quantify * the appearances of this or that phenomenality within a work or series of works. My current conception of vectors supersedes even the concepts of “active and passive shares,” a critical stratagem by which I attempted to formulate a logical alternative to making a simple “head count” of each depiction of metaphenomenality in a series.

To hearken back to the RAWHIDE KID/RINGO KID contrast I offered while working on the active/passive formulations, both of these series, unlike SIN CITY, did not offer regular depictions of metaphenomenality, and so it would be easy to perceive both serials as dominantly isophenomenal. But where RINGO KID only has one measly mad doctor who departs from all the other naturalistic threats that the titular hero encounter, RAWHIDE KID used metaphenomenal opponents in a peripatetic manner. With RINGO, my perception is that the workaday creators, with or without the input of editors, assumed that their readers wanted westerns that were dominantly naturalistic in terms of what could happen in them: gunfights, cattle stampedes, et al. With RAWHIDE, though, the creators attempted to vary the mix. In contrast, the Rawhide Kid usually encountered gunfights and cattle stampedes, but from the earliest to the last of the series initiated by Lee and Kirby, there was always a strong vector encouraging the appearance of the metaphenomenal. As with SIN CITY, RAWHIDE KID had so few examples of marvelous phenomenality that the corresponding vector would be subordinate. However, even though the RAWHIDE creators did not keep uncanny phenomenalities front-and-center as Miller did in SIN CITY, I judge that the potential for the uncanny becomes a superordinate vector, rendering the naturalistic vector subordinate, even though the number of naturalistic stories proved superior.

A third example appears in yet another “weird western,” the teleseries KUNG FU. When I first started my project of reviewing all of the episodes in 2013, I knew that the series did not boast a huge number of episodes with a marvelous phenomenality, though on finishing the project I did find more than I anticipated (often using mild forms of marvelous tropes like telepathy or oracular pronouncements). But I knew in advance of the project that some episodes depicted Caine’s Shaolin skills as no more than naturalistic in essence—probably because those scripts didn’t need anything more—while other tales took evident pleasure in showing the priest showing off “superlative skills,” whether in minor actions like bending jailhouse bars or in major accomplishments like walking unharmed through a pit of rattlesnakes. As with RAWHIDE KID, it doesn’t matter how often the episodes were either naturalistic, uncanny, or marvelous. It only matters as to which of the three phenomenalities assumed a superordinate position. That determination can’t be deduced from a simple head count, but by an intuitive assessment of a given serial’s total concept, as it is perpetuated through various creators, usually following what insiders term a “series bible.”

Over the centuries, the disciplines of science and philosophy have remained in strife. Much of this strife may be seen as a conflict between science’s intention to judge the world’s phenomena in terms of quantity, while philosophy is far more concerned with quality. Literature, though not allied to philosophy in any fundamental sense, is conceived along roughly the same propositional lines: propositions have truth based on the qualities they enhance in the lives of audiences. I attempted to see if there was any method by which arguments regarding quantity could be used to buttress those regarding quality, but I have of late decided that the conceptual divide is insuperable.

MYTHCOMICS: THAT YELLOW BASTARD (1996)

In crime fiction, crime is often compared to a disease of the body politic. Some crimefighters prove immune to crime's allure, such as Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, but often crime can infect anyone. Sometimes the victims are only relatively innocent, as with the feckless booze-purchasers in Faulkner's SANCTUARY. Yet even hardened professionals can succumb. In Hammett's RED HARVEST, the otherwise unnamed "Continental Op" becomes so obsessed with destroying the crime-ridden hierarchy of the city Poisonville that he goes, in his own words, "blood simple."

John Hartigan, protagonist of  THAT YELLOW BASTARD, starts the story free of any criminal taint. Most cops in Sin City are on the payroll to Roark, the boss of crime bosses, whose evil is so pervasive that he holds the position of State Senator (in what is implicitly a version of California). Hartigan, though, is so straight-arrow that in one scene Roark remarks that he wanted to hold a party when he heard the almost-sixty-year-old Hartigan would be forcibly retired due to an angina condition. Yet on the eve of Hartigan's retirement, the aging cop-- married for many years, but significantly childless-- decides not to go gentle into the night. It's common knowledge among Sin City cops that Senator Roark's sole son, known only as "Junior," is a serial murderer of underage girls. When Hartigan hears that Junior has captured a new victim, eleven-year-old Nancy Callahan, the cop goes after the child-killer.

After much gunplay with Junior's thugs, Hartigan rescues little Nancy and removes the source of Junior's personal joy, castrating the pervert with a well-placed shot. Hartigan's own partner betrays him and shoots him, but Hartigan is satisfied to die if he's saved an innocent.

What dies, though, is not Hartigan but his good name. Senator Roark himself shows up at the cop's bedside and informs Hartigan that he will now be charged with Junior's crimes, and that if Hartigan raises any objection, Roark's people will kill anyone to whom Hartigan confesses.

Nancy Callahan, however, has not forgotten her rescuer. She appears at Hartigan's bedside and rails at her parents for not letting her tell the truth. Unable to keep her savior from prison, she takes a page from Victorian literature and promises to write Hartigan every week-- real paper letters, no e-mails or (God forbid) tweets.

Hartigan is condemned as a child molester, and since he won't defend himself, his wife divorces him. He's sentenced to solitary confinement. He doesn't take little Nancy's promise seriously, but every week, her letters come, giving the old cop his only life-line to the outside world. She becomes, in his mind, "the daughter I never had." However, Hartigan's enemies aren't satisfied to put him into jail for eight years; they want to twist the knife even more. In a surreal moment, Hartigan finds a man in his cell with him: a man with yellow flesh and a horrible smell.

After meeting the "yellow bastard," Hartigan is manipulated into believing that Roark's organization has located the innocent Nancy once more. The ex-cop debases his last principles to obtain an early release, and goes looking for a girl whom he still imagines as eleven years old. However, when he finds her dancing at a strip club, his paternal illusions are shattered.

Realizing that he's been used as a Judas goat to help Roark's people locate Nancy, Hartigan tries to elude his mustard-hued tail. More gun-violence ensues:

Escaping his tail briefly, Hartigan then faces a new problem. Despite not having been in contact with her savior for eight years, the young woman has made him her only true passion.

Despite a long absence from the fair sex, Hartigan forces himself not to succumb, but his antagonist re-appears, and reveals that he's none other than a hideously reconstructed Junior Roarke.

Junior thus gets the chance to shaft his old enemy both by killing him and letting him go out knowing that his beloved will endure hideous torture. Naturally things don't go the villain's way, but Hartigan still doesn't end up with the nubile Nancy, for reasons I won't go into.

To return to my opening point, some crime stories compromise the hero by causing him to succumb to evil in order to undermine the reader's sense of moral compass. Miller doesn't go that far. Junior's crimes are unremittingly evil, and none of Hartigan's vigilante actions palliate Roark's crimes. Yet Miller was surely aware of an uncomfortable parallel between Junior's despicable taste in pre-pubescent girls-- which is portrayed as being wrong apart from his larger crimes of torture and murder-- and Hartigan's burgeoning lust for his "imaginary daughter." Miller pens a revealing line for Hartigan, when he tells Nancy, "There's right and there's wrong, and then-- there's *this.*" Both Hartigan and Nancy are past the age of consent, and so their union is theoretically permissible-- hence not quite "wrong"-- and yet the age-gap is so great that it can't be "right" either.

Miller's not on the level of William Faulkner in terms of crafting crime-fiction with heavy ironic/tragic overtones. But there is in THAT YELLOW BASTARD a sense of tragic dimension far in excess of his other major SIN CITY work, THE HARD GOODBYE.

ECCENTRIC ORBITS

I borrow the phrase "eccentric orbits" from astrodynamics. Wikipedia saith:

The orbital eccentricity of an astronomical object is a parameter that determines the amount by which its orbit around another body deviates from a perfect circle.

In my numerous reviews of and investigations into the many domains that make up fiction-- not least those of phenomenality-- I've often found myself faced with such "deviations." Most works of art, whether they are naturalistic, uncanny, or marvelous, display a "centric will" on the part of the author. Plot and characters are strongly organized around the author's concept as to what things are possible in his world. 

Three convenient examples of differing phenomenalities were first cited in NUM-INOUS CONFRONTATIONS, VIOLENT SUBLIMITY, PART 1 and PART 2. At the time I wrote these essays, I was investigating Kant's concept of sublimity only in terms of dynamicity, and had not yet formulated the corresponding concept of the combinatory-sublime. I summed up three films with respect to their phenomenalities, as follows:

In DIRTY HARRY, as noted before, the hero dwells within an entirely naturalistic cosmos... In ENTER THE DRAGON, the hero dwells within a cosmos that largely appears naturalistic but deviates in a few vital aspects, which have a marked effect on Lee's struggle for dominance...In STAR WARS, the heroes dwell witin a cosmos that may be "natural" to them but which is clearly "marvelous" to us. 

Planets that have almost no eccentricity (like Earth) come as close as is physically possible to describing circular orbits. All of these cinematic works have a similar uniformity of "orbit," there are no elements of naturalistic, uncanny, or marvelous phenomenality that conflict with the "centric will" expressed in the main story.

And yet, I've often encountered works that manifested such conflicts. For instance, here's how I strove to sort out the phenomenality of Wilkie Collins' famous 1868 crime novel THE MOONSTONE, from this film-review:

The famous plot of THE MOONSTONE deals with a fabulous diamond, originally from the head of a Hindu idol, which is stolen from India by a reprobate British officer.  After the thief dies he leaves the diamond-- rumored to be cursed-- to his niece Rachel, a heiress being courted by her two first cousins Franklin and Godfrey.  (Nowhere in the novel does anyone remark on this level of consanguinity: one assumes that both Collins and his original English audience found it unremarkable, at least for the aristocracy.)  A trio of Indians, dedicated to returning the holy diamond to India, haunts the steps of Rachel and her protectors.  Because the unnamed Indians are so fantastically dedicated to their unique task, Collins' novel *might* be classified as uncanny because the Indians' "bizarre crime" (which is only a crime in the technical sense of the English law, of course) makes such a strong affective impact on the reader, and takes on a near-supernatural aspect at the conclusion even though technically nothing supernatural occurs.  The same logic applies to the "exotic lands and customs" trope.
The one aspect that propels the novel into the "marvelous" category appears early in MOONSTONE and never comes up again.  Because Collins wanted to give his Indians an almost supernatural ability to be wherever he wanted them to be-- and because he surely knew that they would hardly blend in well with British society-- Collins has one of his characters overhear the Indians using an unnamed English boy in a divinatory ceremony.  It establishes the possibility-- which the reader must take seriously even if no one in the novel does so-- that the boy is a real medium who can tell the Indians at all times where to locate the diamond.  It's a clever device, and I personally consider it veracious enough to classify MOONSTONE as "marvelous," even though I realize most readers won't take note of it.

In my newly re-formulated terms of "centric will" and "eccentric will," I would say that the centric will of Collins' novel falls into the phenomenal domain of the uncanny, because the actions taken by the Hindu seekers to recover their sacred diamond comprises the "center" of the narrative.  Their one "marvelous" talent, that of using a medium's psychic talents for guidance, is invoked by Collins only to make it credible that the Hindus are able to track down the diamond when they have no other means to do so. Thus, the one marvelous element in THE MOONSTONE expresses an "eccentric will," a will that deviates from the novel's central-- and uncanny-- concerns.

I  mentioned a similar concern in ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES, which dealt with the often perplexing phenomenalities of stories set in Frank Miller's SIN CITY universe. After explaining that one story in the film SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR had an absolutely veracious ghost-- which provided the only example of the marvelous-metaphenomenal-- I explained:

My review therefore classifies SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR as a "marvelous" film. Over the years I've classified other films as marvelous for the same reason: a film, being a unitary construct, cannot be just a "little bit marvelous" any more than a birth-mother can be "a little bit pregnant"... I'm playing around with some possible re-classifications that might better represent the roles played by the uncanny and the marvelous, when it is clear that they do NOT cohere with any thematic underpinnings. But I confess it probably won't provide me with an effective aspirin for all my taxonomic headaches.

I also mentioned a couple of other films in which marvelous elements played very marginal roles, and played around with the term "marginal-metaphenomenal." However, this term wouldn't work over time, since there have been many works, like Collins' MOONSTONE, where the work's centric will is uncanny, while only one or more eccentric elements are marvelous. A better example than the one mentioned in the ASPIRIN essay is 1971's HANDS OF THE RIPPER, wherein the "ripper" character is a crazy girl who begins acting like Jack the Ripper, and the only marvelous element is that of a psychic who figures out what's going on.

A week or so after finishing the ASPIRIN essay, I finally formulated the "active share, passive share" corollary, first stated here and here. These essays established the precedent that in some cases a narrative's combinatory mode might overrule its dynamic mode. Thus, even though from the POV of dynamicity, the Marvel cowboy-hero The Ringo Kid technically dwells in a "marvelous" domain because of his one encounter with a mad scientist, the symbolic underpinnings of his universe are dominantly naturalistic. The marvelous elements in RINGO KID comprise what I originally called a "minority passive share," and I now choose to link that concept to the notion of "eccentric will."
Similary the psychic elements in THE MOONSTONE and HANDS OF THE RIPPER also amount to eccentric elements, putting them in the minority passive share category.

I played around with the notion of a bifurcated phenomenality in my review of a martial-arts dud called THE SHAOLIN BROTHERS, wherein the centric will (and majority share of interest) revolves around a naturalistic core, and the elements of the marvelous are out on the periphery. Hence my name for them at the time-- "the peripheral-marvelous"-- has been subsumed by the concept of eccentric will.

Going by the current hypothesis, I would probably rate SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR as dominantly uncanny, thanks to the fact the conspicuous roles of Marv and super-ninja Miho, while the ghost's appearance, while not without all importance, amounts to a sort of perturbation in the orbit of the work as a whole.

THE DOMAIN GAME PT. 2

As stated in Part 1, the term "domains" can apply to any number of the multifarious principles, or groups of principles, that I've introduced on this blog since its inception. Obviously I could have continued to call them "principles," "rules," or "laws" just as easily. The word "domain," however, communicates a potential image of home and hearth, for all that in recent years that meaning may have been shoved aside for its connotation of "an address on the Internet," which is not much less abstract than a "principle."

Nevertheless, even the modern Internet usage is not without its "homey" associations. I compared my pluralist theory of art and literature to a "house with many mansions," where the separate rooms could contain such separable concepts as "Gene Phillips' version of Northrop Frye's generally accurate idea of the comedy-mythos" and "Gene Phillips' take on Todorov's thoroughly misguided idea of 'the uncanny.'" Since it's my house, it's inevitable that all of the rooms will reflect the owner's priorities.

But of course, just because I have priorities in my views of art and life does not mean that they have relevance only to me. Every philosophical posture is a open challenge to readers: it seeks to invite those who can agree with that posture, if only in part, and to downplay the priorities of those who disagree. A positivist would view all of these interactions from an atomistic standpoint: people agree and disagree purely according to their own interests.

Jung's concept of the "collective unconscious" was the psychologist's solution to science's tendency to view all psychological activity as belonging purely to what Jung called the "personal unconscious." From an entirely personal vantage, there can be no points of meaningful commonality between figures as removed in time as, say, Arthur Schopenhauer and Theodore Gaster. Yet, by seeing these philosophers' priorities through an archetypal lens, it may be possible to see what conceptual "mansions" they hold in common, rather than assuming that they just experienced similar patterns of toilet-training or the like.

Artists are not quite as focused on issuing conceptual challenges as philosophers. Sir Philip Sidney argued that "the poet never affirmeth." Surely "never" is certainly too strong given all the poets who trumpet their political affiliations to the world-- yet Sidney has correctly identified the archetypal nature of the artist far better than the ideologues who want to have their beliefs, be they ultraliberal or ultraconservative, supported by the artist's persuasive powers. The artist is one who potentially can see all things from all perspectives, even perspectives that may be alien to him. Thus, though most critics, including me, would judge Frank Miller's HOLY TERROR an artistic failure, it remains significant that he attempted, despite his limitations, to place some human face upon the political movement he wished to vilify.

On a related note, I spent a fair amount of time recently analyzing Frank Miller's SIN CITY in terms of my phenomenological NUM-project. SIN CITY is strongly indebted to the genre sometimes called "hard-boiled crime," and the shadow of Mickey Spillane's work looms long over Miller's crime-cosmos. Given Miller's status with his readership at the time SIN CITY began, he could have chosen to pursue the domain of a naturalistic phenomenality and left all the signs of the uncanny and the marvelous behind, as Mickey Spillane largely did when he moved out of comic-book writing and into the world of crime paperbacks.  But despite all the ways in which Miller chose to emulate Spillane's style and content, he did not set SIN CITY in the same sort of naturalistic domain as the majority of the Mike Hammer books. As my study shows, a large though not totally dominant proportion of Miller's SIN-works fall into the domain of the uncanny-- and though none of the comic-book works flirt with the marvelous, one story in the film SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR does allow for the presence of a literal, if nearly impotent, ghost.

The three phenomenal domains of my NUM-theory operate in what I deem an archetypal sense. Different artists are drawn toward images and tropes that promise, or at least suggest, different types of freedom. What Joseph Conrad deems to be artistic freedom relates to the perceived rigor of the naturalistic, while J.R.R. Tolkien associates freedom with marvelous creations like green suns. Yet both, as much as "heavy thinkers" like Gaster and Schopenhauer, are alike in searching for the formula that gives them a sense of transpersonal fulfillment-- which, in the last analysis, is what all persons, of all races and creeds, desire when they speak of their need for freedom. Yet it is a freedom that is only possible in terms of perspectivism and pluralism-- and any creed that takes a different stance is merely seeking the fulfillment of some favored group or groups.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE HARD GOODBYE" (SIN CITY feature, 1991)

The individual ‘yarns” in Frank Miller’s SIN CITY sage range anywhere from “very good” to “mediocre. But the first one—latterly entitled “The Hard Goodbye”—stands as a masterpiece of comics-art.  In all likelihood it will remain an unacknowledged masterpiece for the near future. When THE COMICS JOURNAL ran its 1999 list of the “top 100 English-language comics,” some fans bemoaned the fact that Sim’s CEREBUS was left off the list due to insufficient votes. A few fans even expressed some appreciation of Miller’s DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. But critically, SIN CITY has usually been ignored by the comics-literati.

While it's possible to criticize Miller's work on its own terms, most extant critiques  have been grounded in the over-ideological concept that Miller’s SIN CITY—and perhaps his work as a whole—can be summed up by the Old Fascist Two-Step: (a) Work A endorses violence, so therefore (b) Work A is also a tacit endorsement of fascism. For some reason, it’s always the “Rightie” version of “the rule of force,” never the “Leftie” version—but that’s another essay.

There’s no question that THE HARD GOODBYE is chock-full of violence. George Bataille, who viewed violence as so pervasive that it even subsumed the activity of sex, might have appreciated Miller’s ode to the hardboiled crime genre. Even though the story starts with a sex-act between the protagonist and the woman he’s framed for murdering, there’s no tenderness evident: the sex is nearly as violent as the violence. The first words, uttered by protagonist Marv in his ongoing voice-over—comments: “The night is hot as hell. Everything sticks.” With these simple words, Miller creates a world unredeemed by good air-conditioning, where people are always exuding sticky sweat—a prelude of sorts to the way copious bodies will soon be exuding another sticky substance.

Marv—whose surname is never given—is a hulking, flint-faced loser. Miller never clarifies how he ekes out a living in the demimonde of Sin City. Since he’s on parole from his last prison-sentence, one may imagine him getting bounced around in various petty jobs-- none of which, admittedly, matter to this story. The GOODBYE of the title begins the night Marv meets a beautiful woman named Goldie. Goldie wants Marv's protection from an unnamed menace, and she tries to get it by sexing him up. But Marv fuels his passion with booze. After sex he passes out, “stone drunk,” after which an assailant sneaks into their bedchamber and kills Goldie. Marv is immediately framed for her murder, but this disturbs him less than his personal failure as a protector:

“Why, I ask now. But when you got scared, when you trembled and your eyes went as big as a little girl’s, I didn’t ask why, not then. Then, I didn’t give a damn what was bothering you.”

I could pen a much longer essay than this one on the role of female characters in Marv’s universe, though for this post I can only say of such an essay that it would be free of the usual clichés about “objectification” and “women in refrigerators.” For the purpose of this essay, though, I need only assert that whatever Marv thinks about women, he sees men as their natural protectors. Even though he knows, and often asserts, that he belongs to the dregs of humanity, nothing about himself arouses such self-loathing as the thought that his “macho pig” lust caused the death of a woman under his protection.

Anti-violence ideologues will argue that Marv’s guilt is just an excuse for the violent rampage that makes up the rest of the story. That’s an argument I’ve refuted many times. Withiin the scope of this essay, I think that Miller makes it quite clear that Marv is not a hero in the general sense, and that he doesn’t even think of himself as a hero. The “big man” behind Goldie’s murder, as well as several other deaths, calls Marv a “monster,” and all of Marv’s mental musings make clear that he’s heard this appellation before. Even his square-headed visage may owe something to the iconic head of the movie’s version of the Frankenstein Monster. In any case, Marv, according to my system of persona-types, is not a hero. He doesn’t care about justice like Batman or Daredevil; he doesn’t even care about the code of the professional investigator, like Sam Spade. Marv’s a human monster who’s never had a reason to exist, until a band of well-connected murderers try to make him their patsy. The resulting violence is immensely cathartic to the sympathetic reader, but it’s a catharsis that functions less like the justice-seeking tales of Batman than like the rampages of the Frankenstein Monster against the stupidity and venality of mankind.

HARD GOODBYE is filled with many keen psychological insights into the mind of Miller’s human monster, too many to explore in a short essay. Yet the story is primarily a sociological myth. In the world of the superhero, the costumed crusader arises to facilitate justice, simply because the Law Can’t Be Everywhere. But in the world of hardboiled crime, Big Law is bed with Big Crime. The only satisfaction left to all those under the thumb of Powerful People—from simple wage-slaves to the "dregs of humanity”-- is that once in a while, they can spawn a holy monster that can tear down the towers of the rich with outpourings of Biblical violence. Even so, the conclusion remains less than triumphant, for the monster is fated to be destroyed, as Marv is, while the dark crucible of Sin City endures, brewing its endless concoctions of corruption.

_______

On a side-note, this is my 51st "mythcomic" analyzed for my "1001 myths" feature.

Only nine hundred and fifty to go now.

ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES

In the previous essay I alluded to some of the phenomenological headaches I incur in trying to analyze a series like Frank Miller's SIN CITY. Because it doesn't focus either upon one serial protagonist or upon an ensemble of such protagonists, it's difficult to decide how to classify the phenomenality of the series as a whole.

But the problems of what I'll call "non-centric serials" are nothing next to that of anthologies in the medium of cinema. In other media-- I'm thinking primarily, though not exclusively, of prose, comics, and television-- every story within a serial anthology stands on its own. However, a film-anthology represents a concatenation of stories that cannot stand apart from one another, unless they are surgically separated. In some anthologies, the stories are not associated in any way, except by dint of appearing in the same collection. Some are tied by virtue of being adaptations of the work of a single author, as is the case with 1963's TWICE TOLD TALES, and some are associated through a common framing-device, as in 1945's DEAD OF NIGHT, where all of the stories may been dreamed by a single interlocutor, leaving it unclear as to whether the stories "really" happened or not within the film's diegetic reality.

Then there are what might be called "shared universe" films. This term is usually applied to franchises where some person or company owns the concept but other raconteurs are allowed to contribute to the universe. The Marvel Universe is a concatenation of franchises in which every fictional event can hypothetically be linked to every other fictional event. In contrast, some shared universes feature multiple authors crafting stories set within the parameters of some fictional universe, but each author's conceptions can be independent from those of other contributors-- or else, at very least, no one tries to tie them all together.

Miller's SIN CITY comics-franchise, one of those aforementioned "non-centric serials," never invited authors other than Miller himself to participate. However, though it might have been possible to adapt selected SIN CITY stories as stand-alone films, producer/director Robert Rodriguez chose to utilize the anthology-format. I'm sure his purpose in so doing was to sell the moviegoing public on the diversity of Frank Miller's hardboiled cosmos. The anthology-format does create some headaches for the devoted taxonomist, though.

I reviewed the two Rodriguez adaptations here last year, saying in part:

Frank Miller's SIN CITY graphic novels and the films adapted from them prove difficult, though not impossible, to classify.
The difficulty inheres in the fact that Miller's quasi-anthology series takes its primary inspiration from naturalistic sources, such as films noirs and the hardboiled detective genre, particularly as executed by author Mickey Spillane, ostensibly one of Miller's strongest influences.  However, while these works usually take their rigor from the sense that their protagonists exist in a world without miracles, Frank Miller made his mark in comic books with costumed superheroes like Batman and Daredevil. He could have chosen to make his Sin City books entirely naturalistic, but instead he injects moments of the metaphenomenal, usually dealing with uncanny forms of grotesquerie.

Unlike the comics-serial, there's no questions about what phenomenality is dominant for the first film. In my original review, I pronounced two of the first film's stories naturalistic and the other two uncanny, but I've changed my mind on that, and would now say that only the story called "The Customer is Always Right" can be deemed naturalistic.

SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR creates a few taxonomic problems, though, because it's the only work in which the phenomenality of the marvelous intrudes.

The film adapts two stories done for Miller's comics-series and two stories that Miller has not yet rendered into comics-form. By my current evaluations, the two comics-derived stories are both uncanny, while one of the "original" stories, "The Long Bad Night," is entirely naturalistic. The other original story is principally an uncanny tale due to the presence of the monstrous character Marv, but it has one marvelous element: the ghost of John Hartigan, last seen blowing his brains out at the end of "That Yellow Bastard."

And yet, for a marvelous element, Hartigan is singularly impotent. No one in the SIN CITY universe can see him as he drifts about, watching his former beloved Nancy planning revenge upon the evil Senator Roark, nor can he Hartigan do anything upon the physical plane. Only the fact that the audience is seeing things through Hartigan's spectral viewpoint confirms that the ghost is part of the diegetic reality, rather than being conjured up by mere guilt, like the spirits that haunt Shakespeare's Richard III.

Once, and only once, does the ghost get the chance to interfere. At the film's conclusion, Marv and Nancy team up to attack Roark's sanctuary. Marv takes out all the guards but is wounded, so that Nancy alone must face Roark. She attacks a painting of Roark, mistaking the image for the evildoer, so that Roark is able to wound her. However, by sheer dumb luck Roark too gets distracted by an image-- the image of the watching Hartigan, who somehow becomes visible to Roark only when seen in a large mirror. Nancy never knows what has distracted Roark, but it gives her the chance to draw down on him, and to kill him.

My review therefore classifies SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR as a "marvelous" film. Over the years I've classified other films as marvelous for the same reason: a film, being a unitary construct, cannot be just a "little bit marvelous" any more than a birth-mother can be "a little bit pregnant."

And yet, I must admit that Hartigan's ghost seems a bit like a wild card, rather than something that really belongs to the Frank Miller cosmos. The ghost serves a purpose in one of the stories, much like the element of telepathy in Wilkie Collins' novel THE MOONSTONE, discussed in part here. Certainly Miller's image of the almost impotent ghost at least coheres with his overall themes, which is more than one can say for films which toss in marvelous elements as quickie jokes, as one can see in these two films of the "marginal-metaphenomenal."

I'm playing around with some possible re-classifications that might better represent the roles played by the uncanny and the marvelous, when it is clear that they do NOT cohere with any thematic underpinnings. But I confess it probably won't provide me with an effective aspirin for all my taxonomic headaches.

UNCANNY CITY

In this essay I cited the comic strips LI'L ABNER and DICK TRACY as examples of long-running serials that might or might not be metaphenomenal fantasies based on the considerations of my "51 percent rule." At the same time that I raised the question, though, I also dismissed it, in that I confessed my lack of interest in attempting to figure out just how many storylines in these features possessed metaphenomenal content. There are just too damn many of them.

Frank Miller's series of loosely related SIN CITY "yarns," however-- which this Wikipedia entry helpfully breaks down by plot-- proves much more useful as a test of the rule.

SIN CITY is a concept that does not, at first glance, appear to be metaphenomenal, unlike Miller's superhero books and his ventures into futuristic fiction, such as GIVE ME LIBERTY. Like Chester Gould's DICK TRACY, Miller's series centers its narrative in a supposedly "down to earth" setting: a modern metropolis overrun with crime and corruption. Whereas Gould grounded DICK TRACY in procedural crime-detection techniques, Miller evokes the downbeat story-tropes of noir fiction as his method of "keeping things real."

And yet, both Gould and Miller go out of their way to make things "unreal" as well, by evoking the sort of story-tropes I have termed "uncanny." TRACY isn't well known to younger fans any more, but I would argue that even the old farts who grew up with the Gould strip in one era or another remember the crime-solving sequences much less well than the artist's gallery of grotesque villains: Pruneface, the Brow, the Mole, et al.-- most of whom partake of the trope I call "freakish flesh." Usually Gould did not bother supplying an etiology for his deformed crooks: they're ugly because their bodies reflect the ugliness of their souls. (That said, I should note that most of Gould's heroes aren't much better looking: they're just not especially off-putting.)

Miller's SIN CITY universe has become well known to the public through film adaptations, and though the author's evocation of noir sentiments plays a big role in the serial's reception, I would say that Miller, like Gould, knows how to "grab" readers with intimations of the metaphenomenal.  Going in the order of the "yarns" as cited by Wikipedia, here's how they shake out.

THE HARD GOODBYE boasts four uncanny tropes. Marv himself is a bit like a cross between Dick Tracy and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, with features of flintlike angularity and a bulky, forbidding physique. He's not technically a "freak," but the narrative repeatedly emphasizes his ugliness beyond the realm of ordinary homeliness; so much so that any story in which Marv appears becomes uncanny by his presence. In addition, in his signature exploit Marv finds himself pursuing the murderers of a hooker. At least one of the two is what I term a "perilous psycho," since he becomes ecstatically aroused when he eats human flesh (implicitly, only the flesh of beautiful females). The psycho conspires with an "enabler" who is implicitly his lover, so that the two together comprise a "weird family." And though not every instance of cannibalism may qualify as a "bizarre crime," in this case the modern-day flesh-eaters keep "trophies" of their specimens, which in a less noir-ish setting would make most audiences think in terms of the horror genre.

A DAME TO KILL FOR, however, is naturalistic in its plot, focusing on viewpoint character Dwight as he gets sucked into the murderous schemes of his old girlfriend Eva.  However, Marv appears, lending his gargantuan presence to one of Dwight's schemes, and his presence alone gives the story uncanny content. There's also the questionable figure of the character Miho, arguably Miller's stand-in for his popular Marvel character Elektra. Yet Miho doesn't wear what I would deem a "costume" as with Elektra, or even an outfit that screams "ninja." During the story Miho is seen leaping around rooftops in a manner that seems beyond the capability of a naturalistic practitioner of the martial arts, and yet I don't see a specific skill or weapon in her repertoire that seems "uncanny," merely "exotic."

THE BABE WORE RED, a collection of SIN CITY, chalks up three entries for the naturalistic. One of the three stories is another Dwight tale, but the questionable Miho does not appear in it.

Miho does appear in THE BIG FAT KILL, and here she comes closer to performing an uncanny act of violence. When one of her charges is threatened by a gun-wielding cop, she hurls a swastika-shaped shuriken at his arm with such force that she severs his hand. While leaping around like a mountain-goat seems just barely possible in the realm of the naturalistic, severing a hand with a thrown weapon seems beyond the capabilities of a very small Japanese woman. This might argue that by dint of some special training Miho is a "superwoman" in the uncanny mode. She's also seen slashing off heads with a samurai sword, which action I might regard as merely naturalistic if it weren't being done by a petite female. Thus the second Dwight story, even without Marv, roughly qualifies as "uncanny."

"SILENT NIGHT" is a story of Marv going up against a gang of child traffickers. he alone makes it uncanny.

THAT YELLOW BASTARD, featuring hard-bitten cop John Hartigan, creates Miller's most memorable villain, Junior Roark. Though Roark starts out as a child-murdering psychotic at the story's opening, he is not precisely a psycho in the uncanny mode. However, after Hartigan maims him, he undergoes reconstructive surgery that makes him into a literally "yellow" bastard. Roark makes the story uncanny thanks to his "freakish flesh."

Four of the next six SIN CITY short stories are all naturalistic: "Blue Eyes" has Marv in it, even though he doesn't figure into the plot, while "The Rats" concerns a psycho-killer.

The two stories in SEX AND VIOLENCE are also naturalistic. Then, the last of the Marv-centered stories, "Just Another Saturday Night," is another one for the uncanny side.

Finally, the last two SIN CITY novels provide an even split. FAMILY VALUES is another Dwight story, and again Miho goes beyond the bounds of what the well-trained martial artist can do. However, the final novel, HELL AND BACK, falls into the naturalistic mode, even though main hero Wallace does experience a weird set of drug-induced hallucinations in which he talks to such figures as Hellboy, Hagar the Horrible and Lone Wolf and Cub.

Thus, going strictly on a story-by-story basis, ten of the nineteen stories fall into naturalistic mode, and nine into the uncanny mode. Still, the majority of the naturalistic yarns are very short, so it's not quite the same situation as we saw with DICK TRACY, where the creator of those yarns executed almost ten years' worth of naturalistic story-arcs before he finally brought in a significant number of uncanny grotesques. 

Other considerations abound. At present Miller's SIN CITY doesn't line up with the "51 percent rule" as an overall series, but it's debatable as to whether stories focused on non-continuing characters should be factored in with those featuring recurring figures. This is a problem that doesn't come up with a single-hero feature like DICK TRACY.  No doubt in future installments I'll have more to say about the nature of phenomenal attribution in "shared universes," to say nothing of anthology-projects-- such as the SIN CITY film-adaptations.