IDEOLOGY VS. MYTH *OR* THE WHIP AND THE BODY

In the comments section for EARTH SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE, Charles Reece brought up the question of the function of ideology in fiction. I think its function subservient to that of what Northrop Frye says about human beings and "primary concern," which I'd already brought up on a Comicon.con thread. Therefore I searched out the relevant passage on Comicon.com and have reprinted my summation of Frye's position below:

'In short, Frye asserts that "myth" and "ideology" (which he would probably interpret as a kind of allegory, or "forced metaphor") are idioms that deal respectively with "primary concerns" and "secondary concerns."

"Primary concerns" are basically what pagans call the "four F's"-- flags (housing), flax (clothing), fodder and frig (no explanation needed). Around such primary concerns myth, both in the religious and literary senses, orients itself.

"Secondary concerns" are the concerns of ideology, which is concerned with the best ways to obtain the items that make up "primary concerns." Name any ideology out there and at base it's just another way for its adherents to maximize their chances of getting those things that make life pleasurable and fulfilling. Myths in the raw are not concerned with ideology. Ideological notions derive from them, but such notions are entirely a secondary product.

And that's why it's silly to try to judge SPIDER-MAN as ideological fiction. Its concerns-- sex, money, power-- are the stuff of wish-fulfillment. As I noted in my earlier post, these are the forms that come first, and everything else builds on top of them.

Starting with an ideological approach to everything is like building a house without any knowledge of the ground on which you're building it.'

As should be evident this was written with reference to a debate on SPIDER-MAN, but it serves just as well to illustrate my point in MAKING A CLEAN BREAST. The statistically-dominant male attraction to the female breast is not defined primarily by its ideological usage in fiction but by its presence as a physical datum in the real world. The same can be said of the corresponding fetishization of the ripped-yet-often-hairless male chest on the covers of female-directed romance fiction (for the curious, I work at a library, so no, I don't seek this stuff out, but I can't help but see a lot of it). Both breast and chest are used in fiction to evoke a kinetic response on the part of the reader and any ideological interpretations of same are strictly derivative (Kant might say "contingent.")

Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with wish-fulfillment fiction. It might be dismal if that was all there was, but contrary to elitist critics, I know that that the danger never has existed and probably never will.

MAKING A CLEAN BREAST

Since sex evokes strong feelings in human beings generally, I suppose it's not surprising that whenever the subject gets raised in comic-book circles, strong feelings and opinions are the norm. What I can't quite figure out is the extreme priggish righteousness that so frequently appears in both the "mainstream" and "artcomics" portions of the comics-audience. The artcomics crowd seems to me the worse offender, which is odd since these fans are claiming greater maturity on behalf of their reading-interests, and thus, by implication, for themselves. The artcomics fan apparently thinks himself deep because he can look upon the frank depiction of homosexual acts in, say, LOVE AND ROCKETS, but mention DC's Power Girl and she's immediately proof of the slobbering mentality of the mainstream fan.








Yet artcomics certainly sport their share of big-busted women, ranging from Crumb's "female Bigfoot" to Kurtzman's Little Annie Fanny to Gilbert Hernandez's Tonantzin Villasenor. Why then isn't Little Annie Fanny a "proof" of the slobbering mentality of the artcomics fan?








Thee answer, of course, is what it always is whenver "art" uses narrative elements common to what the canon considers "non-art": where non-art is giving the reader no more than gross flesh, art gives the readers subtle ideas, grafted atop the spectacle of alluring women like so many conceptual silicone implants. But this is a dodge. Demi-intellectuals like Kurtzman and Crumb may indeed have had ideas they wanted to convey, but by evoking the spectacle of alluring women-- particularly those of pneumatic proportions-- it's arguable that they're just using a showman's trick that was old in the days of traveling carnies, and that by so doing they've compromised whatever ideas they may have meant to convey.

However, were one to expouse a less elitist and more pluralist view of literature's purpose-- one in which the expousing of Brilliant Ideas designed to dazzle the brain is not literature's main purpose-- then one might contend that there's nothing inherently wrong with evoking the kinetic appeal of a sexual stimulus in a work of fiction, whether the author stops with that appeal (which was often if not always the case with Power Girl's creator Wally Wood) or goes on to supplement his work with other elements related to thematic, dramatic or mythopoeic aspects of literature. I've addressed this train of logic before in this piece and so refer the reader to that essay for more critical detail if needed.

So, though I don't think the "idea implants" theory of literature has any validity, I do not in fact criticize a work like Crumb's "White Man Meets Bigfoot" because it combines thematic and kinetic/sensual concerns. It's simply a different mode of work than a POWER GIRL series, or for that matter a literal work of pornography. All three belong to modes that can be done well or badly, and invidious comparisons between them are merely statements of particular tastes, not true critical analyses.

There's nothing wrong with making jokes about fictional characters with huge cleavage: since big breasts symbolize excess, and comedy is meant to take advantage of any excess, humor is inevitable. But there's a big difference between the "joi de vivre" of Frank Tashlin's THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT and the priggish condemnations of psuedo-intellectuals who politicize a difference in taste with the underlying message: "Don't support what you like; support what *we* like."

Just to give equal time I'll talk about some of the priggishness on the part of mainstream fans sooner or later.

EARTH SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE

About a month ago, Dick Hyacinth wrote a blogpiece about the current trend at the Big Two comics-companies for indulging in "earth shattering events" at the expense of story values, and another blogger, Todd C. Murray wrote this in response:


"I think Marvel is also handling these EARTH SHATTERING EVENTS in a way that invites a kind of pseudo-interactive excitement. The books themselves are not so much story as little Lego blocks of main ideas that have been well executed conceptually (even though, as story, many of the blocks are poorly executed). It’s like D&D when I was eight… you’d buy a module because of all the cool stuff in it and to imagine playing it, and talking with your friends about how exciting this or that design or trap was, more than actually playing it, which often we never got around to. In fact, I think you could enjoy Secret Invasion quite a bit without reading any of it (maybe more than if you did)."


I agree with Murray more than with Hyacinth, but I'd take it somewhat further, in the direction of asking two questions:


(1) Is the preoccupation with "earth shattering events" as new as some think it is,


(2) Is there something fundamental to human nature that causes the human species to invest in games that have no real narrative to them-- something more fundamental than the modern example of D&D games?


Taking the second question first, I would say that there's no way to make any useful correlation between a modern form of literature/paraliterature and a modern game without whether or not the same relationship inheres in some or all forms of literature and game-playing. I don't have space here to go into critical approachs to literature in terms of game theory, but suffice to say that the most telling resemblance between literary works and games lies in their essential purposelessness. One can certainly impute some indirect purpose to both activities, and many theorists have done so, but in terms of what fruits the activities themselves directly yield, well, Oscar Wilde could have been speaking of games as well when he asserted, "All art is perfectly useless."


The best-known indirect product of both actitives is what we loosely term "recreation," though one will immediately get different theoretical answers as to why humans need, or think they need, such recreation. Between games and literature, however, looms the shadow of didacticism, for while games are difficult to structure (honestly) in order to deliver a message, it can be done with varying degrees of subtlety in literature. This lends to literature the appearance, if not the actuality, of having a "useful purpose" in culture and/or society, and the most "useful" forms of literature are usually those which have or are thought to be works of *thematic realism* insofar as they comment with the same varying degrees of subtlety on man's real-world situation.


And yet, despite the greater acclaim of the thematically-realistic works which make up most of what we deem "canonical literature," few of these are popular with a wide audience in any given time-period. The works that seem far more perenially popular in any given time-period are the ones that seem steeped in *thematic escapism,* and are therefore closer in structure to the irrational rationale of games.


Anthropologist Lee Drummond took an approach somewhat akin to my notion of *thematic escapism* in this excerpt from his book AMERICAN DREAMTIME, which attempts to deal with modern movies (STAR WARS in particular) as expressions of cultural myths:


"...the figures of myth do not live solely by virtue of the operation of a collection of sentences woven into a 'plot'... The critical thing about the doings of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, R2D2, C3PO, and the rest is the elemental level of crisis-- identity crisis-- that lies right at or just beneath the surface of their actions: Will the Force or its Dark Side triumph? Will R2D2 survive? Will Luke discover the awful truth of his paternity?"


Aside from Drummond's coincidental but felicitous employment of the term "identity crisis"-- which term became associated with one of comics' "earth-shattering events"-- the important thing he's emphasizing here is the independence of so-called mythic figures from the strictures of plot as such. I'm a little more in line with structuralism than I think Drummond is, but I recognize that what he's talking about might be well compared with Joyce's notion of the *kinetic,* that aspect of literary elements that causes extreme sympathy or antipathy. I would not say that the plot of STAR WARS is as unimportant as Drummond does, nor is it unimportant for the "event serials" in comics to have the appearance of some vast Pynchonesque plotline. But Drummond is right in saying that the type of works he's talking about-- which *I* have termed "thematically escapist" works-- the fine points of the plots are not as vital as the story's ability to engender "the elemental level of crisis" through whatever characters the reader recognizes as important, particularly in terms of their sufferings.


And to answer the first question, now: no, all that's new about this method of compelling quick identification through making travesties of the fictional characters' lives is the aforementioned attempt at Pyncheonism. Here's how Mort Weisinger, the first true master of the soap-opera appeal in comics-- not quite eclipsed even by his "pupil" Stan Lee-- handled it:



I chose this Superman "death-scene" because it too shows a "crisis" of elemental proportions, though one that will be undermined in order to bring the Superman mythos back to square one-- just as every game, when finished, is still survived by the rules OF the game, which make possible yet another game with different parameters played by the same rules.

None of this analysis necessarily states that the various "event serials" out there now are especially good even judged by the criteria of the best escapist works. However, I do find it interesting that while many comics-critics celebrate the works of Grant Morrison, not many seem to have twigged to the fact that his work shares this sort of near-plotless aesthetic common to many lesser escapist works, but given an overlay of symbolic complexity.

In other words, Morrison may be the only one in comics who understands the full meaning of the rules of the game-- but he's still playing by them.

COMICS-THEORY FOR CATHOLICS

Symbolic Catholics, that is, as contrasted with Protestants in Alan Sinfeld's book LITERATURE IN PROTESTANT ENGLAND:

"Polarisation of good and evil is characteristic of protestantism. Catholics and humanists posited a sequence of careful gradations between the extremes of good and evil, with mediatory agents and the continuous opportunity to repent. Protestants replaced this complicated structure with a dichotomy, all or nothing: a person either has grace or has not."

This inflexible attitude can be found in great abundance in the world of comics-criticism. I recall an early encounter with some Journalista writer in the 1980s who claimed that a writer "selling out" was all-or-nothing; that one could no more be partially an artist than a woman could be "a little bit pregnant." I asked him if he thought the ranks of artists included William Faulkner, who went to Hollywood to write things like LAND OF THE PHARAOHS. As I recall, said Journalista didn't get back to me on that.

And here's a more recent exemplar of exceptionalism, whose POV I trashed in the accompanying piece.

So I guess I must be a "Catholic" comics-theorist, inasmuch as I do believe that there are many fine gradations of quality in the continuum of literature and even "paraliterature," as I argued in the aforesaid "Exceptionalism" piece. I have no belief that something like the Archie Goodwin IRON MAN or (to take a more recent example) the Gail Simone BIRDS OF PREY will last the ages, or even signify all that much to future students of popular fiction, if any. But in the here and now, it ought to be important for any good (or at least "Catholic") theorist to be able to formulate a theory of "the good in art" that does not throw out items of fair quality to make more room for the works of supposed greatness.

Protestants, though, see only good and evil, great and not-great, which would make the dominant attitude of THE COMICS JOURNAL a "Protestant" one. That had me wondering whether or not Gary Groth should be regarded as a comic-book avatar of Henry VIII, but given that Groth never had quite the level of power that Old Henery did, I think a better fit would be...
This guy.

ADDAMS AND EVIL

As I found myself worrying the niggling question of Charles Addams' pre-eminence in the annals of crossover-madness (a notion that would probably amuse Addams no end), I checked out a book to see if I could learn more about the first cartoon to introduce the Addams Family. The book, Stephen Cox's THE ADDAMS CHRONICLES, didn't reproduce the first cartoon with the Addamses but it did describe it thusly:


"[Addams'] pop masterpiece and longest-running characters were the Addams Family, who first say the dark of night 'around 1937' he recalls, in a cartoon of yet unnamed Morticia, Lurch, and visiting vacuum salesman (Lurch stated out with a beard)."


So that means that CA's first cartoon with his eponymous family was indeed a "monster mash," if, as I assume, both characters were drawn essentially as they've come to be known: as a slinky vampiress out of 1935's MARK OF THE VAMPIRE and a big (albeit bearded) galoot reminiscent of the Frankenstein Monster.


Although, now that I read about the beard, I wonder if there wasn't another monster-- one who normally sported a beard, and who actually may've had some experience "butling" before-- that might have been a more primary inspiration for proto-Lurch than the creation of Mary Shelley.




Someone like, oh, this guy:



This is "Morgan the butler," Boris Karloff's mute villain from THE OLD DARK HOUSE. I'm not sure just how much Karloff's casting in this role was affected by his tremendous popularity as the Monster in 1931's FRANKENSTEIN, but I seem to remember reading that once FRANKENSTEIN was a success, Universal Studios began trying to mold Karloff as a successor to the late (and very profitable) Lon Chaney, emphasizing horrific roles as a matter of course.

So which Karloff character was Addams referencing: Morgan or the Monster? I imagine that Lurch probably assumed his Frankensteinian qualities pretty early, for after all, the Monster certainly was a more iconic figure than the mute butler. Cox's book mentions that Karloff himself recognized the tribute CA had given him, for Karloff said in a foreword to a 1942 collection of Addams' cartoons: "I publicly thank Mr. Addams for immortalizing me in the person of the witch's butler."

Cox doesn't enlarge on the "witch" comment-- presumably Karloff's referring to Morticia-- but Cox does also make the same comparison between ADDAMS FAMILY and OLD DARK HOUSE that I made in my earlier essay HEROES AND HORRORS. Two minds thinking alike on devious subjects, and all that.

So, whether the first cartoon was in '37 or '38, it does seem that Charles Addams holds pride of place in the annals of monster mashery.

X MARKS THE CROSSOVER

To talk about the nature of either "monster rallies" or their villainous parallels, one has to ask first, "Is there any validity to the crossing-over of characters not explicitly created to occupy the same mythos/universe?"

There's certainly a long-standing critical opinion that finds that any crossovers, particularly those not initiated by the original author(s), vitiate the original concept. And most authors would agree that their original versions are the best. If you could somehow arrange to let both Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley view ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, it's likely neither author would recognize Universal's versions of Dracula and the Monster as having anything in common with the original creations.

However, that's not quite the truth, for no fictional work-- novel, short story, film-- is a seamless whole, born as it were from the author's pure inspiration as Athena from the skull of Zeus. Every fiction is parented not only by its living author but also by other fictions which the author has absorbed. And, by the same token, every fiction is capable of birthing new "children," even if none of the parents want to acknowledge the offspring.

Take the relationship of the Shelley "Frankenstein Monster" to the creature brought forth by James Whale's 1932 film FRANKENSTEIN. Many critics have commented that the monster of the film is totally unlike that of the Shelley novel, for the latter has a Romantic locquaciousness while the former merely grunts and growls. And yet, this isn't the whole truth, for Shelley's creature doesn't start out as articulate. Indeed, Mary Shelley asserted that the whole concept of the novel flowed from a single nightmare in which she envisaged the creator of some horror awakened from sleep by his mute creation standing beside his bed-- a scene which Shelley does indeed work into the novel.

Now, James Whale may have had any number of practical reasons for making his version of the Monster mute aside from some animalistic growls. But the point is that his incoherent monster does mirror one stage of the character's development within the Shelley novel. Moreover, in both works that stage of development is symbolically comparable to an aspect of experiential reality. The Monster, though created from the charnel-house rather than by human concupiscence, is in both works an uncomprehending child in a giant's body. Thus with this story-element, which I might term a "mythologem" since it enhances the mythicity of the narrative, Whale proves that he is in essence faithful to one of Mary Shelley's most important concepts, even if he diverges from others.

This sort of divergence, which Harold Bloom calls "misprison," is clearly inevitable. No later creator ever makes an entirely faithful rendering of another author's work, for the later author always changes some things for his own satisfaction or for the satisfaction of his audience (or both). In some cases, we don't know all the details of the original's work-- like how Shakespeare would have staged his own play HAMLET-- but we can be fairly sure that it would not be identical in all respects to a staging by Kenneth Branagh, even if both used all of the exact same lines in the text.

Now, given that misprison is inevitable, the sins of the children may seem no greater than those of the fathers, who were, in their time, children also.

Now, Whale's FRANKENSTEIN is not a crossover, but an adaptation. But it should go without saying that every crossover is in some sense an adaptation, even when said crossover is engineered by the author of two creations who did not originally plan to associate the two but later decided to "adapt" them into a common universe (see my earlier examples of Haggard and Burroughs). And even if one agrees with the view of some critics that the original Shelley novel is superior to the Whale adaptation, it should be a foregone critical conclusion that this assertion does take from Whale's work of all claim to quality. One should be able to make this logical conclusion even without knowing the critical consensus on the work, which, in the case of the 1932 FRANKENSTEIN, is that it's generally considered a classic (though sometimes only a minor one, depending on the critic).

Now, keeping to the notion that the Shelley novel is superior to the Whale adaptation, it might seem logical to some critics that a "monster rally" type of film is going to be inherently inferior to both. But that isn't necessarily the case. Crossover concepts may, as much as the Whale film, borrow mythologems-- or "tropes," if one prefers a more theory-neutral term-- from the original work, and may yield interesting formulations by comparing and contrasting the mythos of one concept with that of another.

The 1944 film HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN is a "monster rally" film which does this, for all that no critical consensus is ever likely to rate it up there with either the Shelley or Whale works. But it does do exactly what the Whale film does: abstract aspects of the Frankenstein Monster concept and then crossbreed them with those of another concept. The concept I reference is that of the Wolf Man, cinematic creation of Curt Siodmak, who provided the story for the film but did not write the script, credited to an Edward T. Lowe, Jr. As for a scene that best shows one of those interesting formulations, this takes place at a point in the film when the film's mad scientist Dr. Niemann has revived both the Monster and the lycanthropic Larry Talbot from a frozen tomb. The Monster comes off worse for wear than Talbot, and seems on the verge of perishing, so that Talbot, still full of guilt for the Wolf Man's killings, comments:

"[The Monster] wanted only life and strength-- and I wanted only death. And now look at us--"

Now, some may find this line melodramatic, and I make no claims that it will last the centuries. But on its own terms it's a very good line that sums up the irony inherent in pairing two such different monsters-- one representing "too much life," in the sense of a monster that ruthlessly slays anyone it sees for the sheer love of killing, and one representing "too much death," in the form of a creature assembled from dead body parts.

It may be fairly stated that the rest of the film does not follow up on this insight, and I agree. HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN is meant to be a thrill-ride, with lots of absurd furniture-moving going on in order to justify lumping together the Monster, the Wolf Man, Dracula, a mad scientist and a hunchback. But even a small nugget of gold is still gold, and so HOF is appropriate for my purposes to show how even a work aimed more or less at an audience in search of simple thrills is still able to deliver a worthwhile insight, given birth specifically from the association of two character-concepts not originally meant to be played off of one another. This life/death mythologem is not radically different from the sort of conceptual insights one gets in greater profusion from, say, the Moore/O'Neill LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN graphic novel-- but there are a lot of other pleasing qualities in LOEG that are not purely about the pleasure of the crossover-text. HOF, then, fares much better to show how that specific pleasure works by virtue of being a much simpler text-- and I think makes a better proof than the more complex work does, as to how worthwhile the pleasure is in itself.

HEROES (the TV show); ALL OVER THE MAP

As my already-moderate interest in HEROES begins to sink slowly beneath the horizon during the show's third (and final?) season, I have to admit it may be unique in one way. I can't remember a show with this many characters that was literally "all over the map," and in which there was no "home base" or "headquarters" to which the characters returned.

In the show's first season, much was made of the need to assemble all the resident quasi-superheroes in one place, New York, in order to "save the cheerleader-- save the world." This was, to be sure, a nice narrative approach that had me interested just from sheer strategic considerations, since the show started with the notion that the heroes were scattered hither and yon but would have to be brought together somehow.

However, once the New York arc was done, the heroes all split apart like so many Dragonballs, and the show hasn't had a coherent storyline since then.

I'm not saying that the characters should have formed their own Justice League or the like. That would probably have been much worse than the plotlines that did develop. But something should have been done in order to give the majority of characters-- except maybe time-hopping Hiro-- some stable location around which to foregather.

Television is, after all, a domestic medium. Weekly and even daily serials work better in that medium because of the expectation that you can always get the new episode "at home" and don't have to go anywhere for it. TV even dethroned its closest rival, the newspaper comic strip, which by about the 1970s had lost all steam as a medium for promoting serial adventures.

Now, adventure-series do sometimes feature characters who hop all about the globe and possess no "home base" whatsoever. In all the seasons of the 60s series I SPY, I don't think I ever saw the protagonists check in at a headquarters or report to a boss. But that's not a problem when your regular cast is small. It's also possible to do a ensemble series when the "home base" is the protagonists' mode of transporation, as the Enterprise was for the cast of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION.

With a show like HEROES, possessing about eight or nine regulars whose stories are supposed to get frequently updated soap-opera style-- rather than being neatly rounded off in short arcs as with later TREK shows-- it's madness.

Moreover, in HEROES' first season, the producers made some attempt to be realistic about the exigencies of characters crossing huge distances for their meetings. But in the second and third seasons, that's all been thrown out the window. Characters come and go willy-nilly and I for one can't keep track where anyone is or where they've been in the last few days.

That's a good reason most soaps are built around particular towns or cities, so that it's not illogical for various characters to interact.

HEROES' debt to the ABC show LOST has been asserted by many, but here the bigger debt may be to ALIAS (also a show worked on by J.J. Abrams), which frequently had its main character bopping off to two or three exotic locations per episode. But even the ALIAS spy had a home base and a regular support-cast to balance all that waywardness.

Lack of location-stability is certainly not the only problem with the HEROES show. But I consider it to be a major reason why a tolerably-entertaining show went totally down the crapper.