A WHIFF OF BAT-IRONY

"And you, you nasty old man!  Have a whiff of Bat-gas!"

Batman speaks these immortal lines in the two-part second-season episode "The Devil's Fingers/Dead Ringers" just before he gasses the evil "Harry," brother to the main villain Chandell (both roles played by Liberace).  Batman's uncharacteristically strong language must be put down to the fact that both Harry and Chandell have put the moves on Bruce Wayne's kinda-but-not-really relation Aunt Harriet:

Having recently meditated somewhat on the nature of Schopenhauer's two modes of the ludicrous in this essay, modes which I subsume as identical to Frye's "comedy" and "irony," I found myself thinking back to my essay ADVENTURE-COMEDY VS. COMEDY-ADVENTURE PART 1.  In that essay I contrasted the use of humor in two works, the 1966-68 BATMAN teleseries and the 1960s superhero comedy THE INFERIOR FIVE.  While I believe that I was basically right in stating that the humorous elements trump the adventure-elements in INFERIOR FIVE while the reverse is true in the BATMAN teleseries, I've come to the conclusion that I misidentified the nature of the dominant humorous elements in the latter work.

It's true that there are many setups in the teleseries that deal with the incognitio of comedy.  I showed this one in the earlier essay:

Here's one that's even more slapsticky in nature, from the 1966 movie:

But BATMAN's stock in trade wasn't built around this sort of baggy-pants comedy.  Thanks in large part to the influence of producer William Dozier, BATMAN was popular thanks to the highly ironic artistic mode called "camp," which defined the show both in its own time and from then on.

On imdb we read that "camp means and has been from the start an ironic attitude," and further, that 'camp takes "something" (normally a social norm, object, phrase, or style), does a very acute analysis of what the "something" is, then takes the "something" and presents it humorously.'  In BATMAN'S case, the 'something" was the superhero genre, but it wasn't being simply inverted, as one might see in spoofs like the Daffy Duck short STUPOR DUCK, but rather subverted.  This distinction aligns with Schopenhauer's insight:

Irony is objective, and so is aimed at another; but humour is subjective, and thus exists primarily for one's own self.

The Chandell episode referenced above is an above-average example of the function of irony in the teleseries.  The bare plot-- the celebrated but criminal pianist Chandell attempting to marry into the Wayne fortune-- borrows strongly from the tropes of melodrama, as does the complicated backstory in which the pianist is blackmailed into a life of crime by his crooked brother Harry.  Liberace plays Chandell with his expected persona of effette elegance, while he portrays Harry as a stereotypical movie tough-guy, even emulating the diction of Edward G. Robinson's gangster-persona in one scene.

Other aspects of Chandell's crookedness don't make a lot of sense-- if he's planning to marry into money, why does he employ a trio of thieves to go around ripping people off with, of all things, a sonic bagpipe that renders its victims unconscious?

But the logic of the plot doesn't really matter.  What matteres is the process by which the tropes of the adventure-oriented comic-book superhero have been turned to the purpose of irony-- all of which is to exalt, in Schopenhaurean terms, the "objective," the audience's knowledge of what is credible, as opposed to the "subjective," the audience's knowledge of what is desireable.  Whereas a comedic treatment of the same tropes would simply take pleasure in their lunacy, the ironic "camp" treatment underplays the absurdity.  By playing the adventure elements in a straightforward fashion, but injecting oddball phrases and comments like Batman's "nasty man" dialogue above, Dozier and his writers were constantly subverting the narrative.

At least, that was their intention.  But though I now consider that the BATMAN teleseries uses ironic devices far more often than comedic ones, I'd still maintain that the adventure-elements predominate, so that it becomes an "adventure-irony" rather than an "irony-adventure" (an example of which might be MARSHAL LAW, examined briefly here.)

It's often been observed that the teleseries-producers pursued a two-tier approach with BATMAN.  They knew that children and some adolescents would take the adventure-elements seriously, while the adults would be entertained by the ironic distancing conveyed by the dialogue and some of the more overtly absurd situations (e.g., Batgirl almost fails to rescue Batman and Robin from a death-trap because she's careful to obey local traffic laws).  Yet, because of the two-tiered approach, Dozier and Co. couldn't avoid validating-- rather than subverting-- the most representative element of the adventure-genre: the *agon*, the fight-scene in which good wins out over evil.

Even giant comedic sound-effects don't dispel the appeal of this basic formula, as I wrote at the end of the ADVENTURE-COMEDY essay:

Because the heroes seem genuinely threatened by bizarre villains and death-traps, both plot and character validate the power of the adventure-mythos even while managing to keep the comic elements in play. This is why, even for later generations of kids not yet jaded enough to laugh at Batman, the series can still excite and fascinate them, precisely because even with the giant OOFS and WHAPS, the invigorating thrill of the agon still predominates.

It would be possible, as I've argued in STATURE REQUIREMENTS, that one might have found a way to have the heroes win their battles and still convey an undiluted ironic vision, as one arguably finds in the Mills/O'Neill comic MARSHAL LAW.  But Dozier-- whose most well-known work prior to BATMAN was the kid-TV series ROD BROWN OF THE ROCKET RANGERS (starring Cliff "Shame" Robertson)-- was probably not interested in such a vision.  And despite a mention in IMDB that he "hated comic books," I find it interesting that following the success of BATMAN, he chose to do, not another irony-laced adventure, but THE GREEN HORNET, in which every effort was made to play another "dynamic duo" as straight as possible.

Perhaps there was a part of Dozier that responded to the thrill of invigoration, the reflection of the sort of subjectivized victories which never come to mere mortals in the "real world..."

ZERO TOLERANCE FOR THE ZERO SUM GAME

Interestingly, given my recent response to Julian Darius on the morality of the *zero sum game* conflict between male and female interests, the phrase reoccurs in a recent BEAT piece in which Heidi *seems* to express her zero tolerance for the aforesaid concept.  I, of course, posted as follows.

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So if I understand Heidi correctly, there is no "zero sum game" for publishers if they were to expouse more female-friendly books, because whatever hardcore male audience they might lose would be replaced by a hardcore female audience (re: Salkowitz's assertion that "girl nerds can outperform boy nerds.")  If one assumes for sake of argument that this transformation could take place, then logically Heidi would be right--

For the publishers, that is. They would be doing either just as well or better.

But for the hardcore male audience that wanted to read half-naked Catwoman stories, that would be a "zero sum game" indeed.

There might even be a tiny fraction of female readers who liked half-naked Catwoman, for whatever reasons, but I think males would be preponderant (heh) in that regard.

I dunno, Heidi. I've seen a lot of readers-- even some who represent themselves as liberals-- who've said things like, "Let 'em go back to straight porn."

I'm curious to know if that's your position as well.  Either way, it still seems like a "zero sum game" again, even if you cloak it under "market demand."

Anyone here live in a small town?

I've heard it's hard to buy Hustler and Playboy these days.  Wonder why.

GROTHERY STORES

On a private listserve a poster guided me to this COMICS JOURNAL post, in which Gary Groth reacted to a post by Dan Nadel which concerned (in part) a short Internet film described as 'a Punisher “fan film” by Punisher actor Thomas Jane.'  Groth said in response:

It’s funny, I stumbled onto this 10-minute Punisher “trailer” yesterday —which, believe me, is somewhat uncharacteristic— on the website of an effusive blogger who was prattling on about how wonderful it was that such a film could be made for the sheer love of it and not for comnmercial reasons, as if making this brainless piece of shit was somehow made laudable because there was no profit motive behind it when I should think exactly the opposite — I was reminded of of George Santayana’s comment, “Americans love junk; it’s not the junk that bothers me, it’s the love,” more relevant today, with Comic-Con being its apotheosis and triumph, than ever.

Prior to watching the film and determining that it wasn't, in my opinion, a "brainless piece of shit," I noted that Groth's response was pretty typical, though his comparison of the short to Comic-con didn't seem to make much sense.  Another blogger condemned the "three ring circus" aspect of Comic-con, so I wrote:

[Groth's] not just impugning Comic-Con (yes, how ridiculous it is. to imagine people in search of entertainment going to a circus, three-ring or otherwise). He's slamming the "prattling" blogger for daring to imagine that this take on the Punisher could be deemed "laudable" because it wasn't informed by a profit motive. The Punisher short may or may not be any good by the standard of a critic who would not automatically condemn anything with the character. But Groth isn't such a critic. Over the years Groth has put forth dozens of quotes showing that he only loves a certain type of comics, and virulently hates other types. This is just another one.

I expanded somewhat on this later:

   

As I said before when responding to the original post about the Punisher short, I agree that he's perfectly entitled to like or dislike any genre or genre-production he pleases. But I also said that I disagreed with his notion that a given bad story incarnates the spirit of Comic-con, or whatever weird connection he was making between the two. A bad story is just a bad story.

BTW, I don't know if anyone else here watched the fan-made Punisher short, but I did, and did not find it a particularly bad story. It didn't reinvent the wheel or anything, but its ten minutes was more entertaining than any 10 minutes of the last 2 Punisher films.

Again-- he's free to dislike the short, as I'm free to like it. I'm not disputing his taste, I'm disputing the philosophical conclusions he makes on the basis of his personal taste.

I'll add in conclusion that the blogger who imputed a lack of profit motive to the makers of the Punisher short may have been a bit naive.  It's likely that anyone who makes such a short might like to parley its popularity into paying work.  That said, naivety is not nearly as offensive to me as unstinting arrogance.

MAJORITY RULERSHIP PT. 2

In Part 1 I compared the protests against oversexualized (and almost always female) images in comic books with the protests that changed widespread cultural attitudes about smoking:

Sixty years later, the discourse has reversed that position, and Party A essentially has no say in the matter any more. The objective proof of smoking's dangers have converted most people to Party B. Both in America and in many other parts of the world, people who want to smoke can only do so under the most rarefied situations.

Thus, for a societal concern in which science provides the "objective proof" that a given practice is harmful, which leads to the marginalization of the practice.

Most cultural practices, however, cannot be proven to be objectively harmful.  The Kelly Thompson essay "No, It's Not Equal" attempts to frame its objections in objective terms:

I think media is a powerful thing in our society and that there’s a trickle down effect in seeing these portrayals reinforced over and over again. These portrayals shape how we view and value women and contributes to everything from sexism in the work place to eating disorders. I don’t think comics are the only media to blame, but it does happen to be the medium I write about, so here we are.

Thompson offers no proof of this influence in this essay, but even if she had-- or had linked to citations that sufficed as objective proof for her-- this sort of influence is impossibe to prove to most people in the manner that the harmfulness of smoking was proved to the public at large.


Nevertheless, objective proof isn't necessary to get a given cultural practice converted into its opposite, a taboo that almost everyone in society openly abjures.

In my essay CARICATURE ANALYSIS I commented at length on the characterization of  the Will Eisner character "Ebony" as racist.  In my conclusion I declined to agree with this characterization but didn't entirely let the late Mr. Eisner off the hook.

It goes without saying that Ebony is much more offensive today than he was in "his" time, though one imagines that if THE SPIRIT's contemporaneous black readers weren't especially offended by Ebony, it would be because other negative stereotypes, particularly those of the movies, were far more pervasive.

But-- is Ebony White "racist" as such?

I would answer "Yes" only with qualifications. Clearly Eisner did not realize, or chose not to realize, that the minstrel-show visual devices he perpetuated "capitalized" on the "presumed characteristics" of black people, where big eyes and big lips conveyed such characteristics as stupidity and childishness, just as Fagin embodied supposed Jewish traits of criminality and miserliness. Eisner probably only saw that he had given Ebony a lot more wit and personality than one saw in many black characters in the pop culture of the time, and that would be true as far as it went.

Yet, having admitted that Eisner used a racist visual trope, I am still uncomfortable with unreservedly calling Ebony a racist creation. Eisner's case is certainly weakened by his inability to consider how the "negative stereotype" of blacks was used as an indirect rhetorical tool by which real people were consigned to second-class citizenship. And yet, his point about caricature cannot be so easily dismissed.

The visual tropes of the "Sambo" and the "Mammy" were once common in all American media and even traveled to certain other countries, notably Japan.  But over time, numerous protests from activist groups-- notably the NAACP-- effectively exiled such images from popular media.  From reading Thompson's fulminations against hypersexualized imagery, I don't think it's reaching to imagine that Thompson would like to see some similar cultural transformation take place.  I must qualify this, however, by saying that she doesn't object to particular characters, like X-MEN's White Queen, being decked out in Victoria's Secret garments if that fits their characters; she principally objects to seeing all female characters so attired as a default to male preferences. 

So could some cultural shift cause the practitioners of comic books to renounce hyper-sexy visuals, the way popular entertainers have largely renounced the Sambo image (Howard Stern notwithstanding)?  The circumstances that brought forth what David Hadju calls "the Great Comic-Book Scare" might never be duplicated, but it's not hard to imagine that a very different set of circumstances might call forth the same basic results.  It should be noted that if it did happen, we wouldn't see sexy costumes displayed only in terms of character appropriateness.  It would be an all-or-nothing conversion, wherein White Queen would start strutting her stuff in a sexy white burka.

However, the trope of Hypersexualized Women is functionally different than the trope of the Sambo.  When activists protested the latter trope, they might not have been able to prove objectively that "real people were consigned to second-class citizenship" through the effects of the Sambo image.  But they could certainly say, "Black people don't look like that."  Thus the offensive images of blacks could be anathematized on the basis that they were both offensive and inaccurate.

In addition to Thompson's particular angle-- that of protesting hypersexualization as a default for all female characters-- many fan-critics have attempted to argue that they're not opposed to sexy art but to bad sexy art.  However, it's hard to believe that all protest would die out if every hypersexual female character were drawn with the talent of a Dave Stevens or talents of similar stripe-- much less if the White Queen were the only one showing off her "secrets."   

At base, while the Sambo image was entirely a modern cultural construct, and could be rejected as such, the hypersexual female cannot be reduced to such a simplistic formula.  No matter how much one may dislike the particular modern manifestations of sexism, they have their roots in patterns that are as old as humankind.

More on these patterns in a future essay.

THE TWO FACES OF PUSSY GALORE

In the course of reviewing two 1960s superspy-films on my movie-blog, I've mounted an argument as to how *mythicity* can be discerned in works that may or may not be "politically correct" by a given social consensus.  I'm excerpting here just the section dealing with my chosen examples of mythicity: the representations of the character Pussy Galore in both the original 1959 novel by Ian Fleming and in the 1964 movie (scripted by Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn).  I wanted to transport this section here in case I decide to build on it in future.

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The symbolic discourse of the [Matt] Helm films, though, is more dubious. Though I’ve said the films embody the “swinger” cultural fantasy, saying that doesn’t give one any means by which to judge the *mythicity* of these spy-fantasies. As mentioned elsewhere, a narrative has high mythicity in relation to the complexity of its symbolic discourse, quite apart from its value as pure entertainment.

So what if the entertainment is politically incorrect? The Helm films, like many superspy narratives— particularly the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming, the main source of the subgenre—constantly put hot women on display, though not as explicitly as the infamous PLAYBOY spreads. At the same time, the superspy genre wasn’t entirely devoted to the humiliation of women, and it spawned not a few characters—Emma Peel, Modesty Blaise—who became icons of feminine (and sometimes feminist) rebellion.

As it happens, one of Ian Fleming’s characters, Pussy Galore of the 1959 Bond novel GOLDFINGER, has become one of the mythic touchstones of both the novel series and the film adaptations of the Fleming books. And this mythicity remains strong despite the fact that her creator depicts her in rather demeaning terms, while her film-adapters depict her in more empowering (and for this time, more politically correct) terms. The coyly-named Miss Galore, then, offers a paradigm for showing mythicity in spite of the creator or adapter’s political orientation.

In Fleming’s book, Galore—a lesbian henchwoman of the titular villain Goldfinger-- symbolizes all of Fleming’s conservative—even primitive—opinions on the nature of lesbianism. By the book’s conclusion Bond wins Pussy over for Team Hetero, though there's some intimation that she joins him against Goldfinger as a way of reducing her sentence. That said, in her prose appearance Pussy’s mythicity rates as “fair” given that Fleming makes her the vehicle of his sociological beliefs in a relatively thoughtful manner, no matter what one thinks of said beliefs.

In contrast, the Pussy Galore of the 1963 film GOLDFINGER barely references the lesbian nature of the book-version, though there are a few lines to indicate that Pussy resists Bond’s suavity because she plays for another team. This Pussy is portrayed on screen by actress Honor Blackman, who prior to the 1964 film had essayed a heroic female spy-type on the AVENGERS teleseries. Possibly in deference to fans who expected Blackman to play another such character, film-Pussy defends herself against Bond’s advances with judo-skills. Bond still manages to convert her to his team, this time with a forceful persuasion that some would consider rape. In the end she still joins him against Goldfinger, however, with a little less implication that she did it to save herself some years in prison.

Therefore, when I evaluate the way the Matt Helm films stack in comparison in terms of either demeaning or empowering archetypes of femininity, they stand or fail not in terms of political correctness, but according to the “Pussy test.”

MAJORITY RULERSHIP

The following is a partial rebuttal to Julian Darius' ON BODY TYPING Sequart essay, also rebutted here:

Julian, you say:

"And we’re so damned determined to sound distant and intellectual in their points, as if we were talking about the stock market, when the underlying issues aren’t distant or intellectual at all."

And you finish by saying:

"we can’t understand such matters without also feeling them.

And that means empathizing with the other’s position, as well as our own."

This empathy, plus an avoidance of abstract intellectual posturing, will then make possible an "honest discourse."

I suppose that this is within the bounds of possibility.  Nevertheless, when the problem is defined by a "zero sum game" situation-- in which Party A wants something and Party B doesn't want A to have that thing-- the only function of "honest discourse" usually comes down to converting enough persons to Party B's side that Party A's wishes are negated.

There is, to take an example more manifestly harmful than Body Typing,the evolution of American consciousness of the Dangers of Smoking.  In the 1950s warnings against the practice-- stemming from whatever incarnation of "Party B" you may prefer-- were few and far between.  Party A was numerically superior in insisting upon its right to smoke in public at all times, with no regard for one's own health or that of others. 

Sixty years later, the discourse has reversed that position, and Party A essentially has no say in the matter any more.  The objective proof of smoking's dangers have converted most people to Party B.  Both in America and in many other parts of the world, people who want to smoke can only do so under the most rarefied situations.

Am I arguing against the specific marginalization of the practice of smoking?  Not at all.

But I am saying that it's a perfect example of the "zero sum game" in action, even if there are minimal concessions to Party A in the form of "smoking areas" in restaurants.

So for me the question becomes, though the "Party B" that dislikes Body Typing in comic books is in the minority now, will we see "honest discourse" between A and B? Or will it just be a situation where B insists on having its way until A is reduced to whatever B will concede?

HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 2

For some time I've tended to see a polarity between the above-named scenarios.  I mentioned in this 2010 essay, which addresses the multivalence of the genres "crime" and "horror," that in practice both were dominated by the dramatic mythos.  In various academic essays I've seen efforts to treat them, at least in their 1930s film-manifestations, as parallel genres, since both deal with the destruction of a "monster" that imperils society.  Robin Wood, speaking solely of horror, boiled the genre down to the phrase, "Normalcy is threatened by the monster."

In the first part of HERO VS. VILLAIN I aligned drama with irony in terms of what Theodor Gaster terms *kenosis,* the process that expels harmful energy from society, and adventure with comedy in terms of *plerosis,* the process that brings positive energy back into the community, in the following terms:

,,,plerosis is best conceived as the life-force engendered by the contest of hero-and-villain, taken seriously for the adventure and humorously for the comedy, while life is purged or otherwise compromised in the black-comic irony and in the drama.

Now, having meditated awhile on Schopenhauer's distinctions between the homogenous status of "serious" discourse versus the heterogenous status of "comic" discourse, the above thought requires some modification.

As noted in this essay, Schopenhauer determined his assessment of either homogeneity or heterogeneity with respect to the agreement or disageement between "perceptual representations" and "conceptual representations." In order for me to apply these principles to literature, I had to make the distinction that in a literary world the former meant the verisimilitude within a given world, while the latter meant the expectations that the audience brought to the work.

In the second part, I argued that Schopenhauer's term "objective" compared well with both the irony and the drama-- and thus with Freud's so-called "reality principle"-- and the term "subjective" could be aligned with the adventure and the comedy, and thus with the "pleasure principle."  But what's the nature of the disagreement in the heterogenous forms, "irony" and "comedy?"

The nature as I express it is summed up by the different metaphors of "hero vs. villain" (pleasure principle) and "monster vs. victim" (the reality principle).

In the adventure-tale, every internal aspect of its world is dominated by the need for the hero to win out in the end, which is made credible to the audience by the fact that the hero possesses above-average combative power/skill.  Thus both "percept" and "concept" are homogenous because both are dominated by the pleasure principle. expressed by the metaphorical phrase "hero over villain."

In the dramatic story, every internal aspect is dominated by the possibility that the hero may fail, and that even if he wins, his triumph will evince substantial *pathos.*  Thus every aspect of the world is meant to convey the possibility of failure, in keeping with the expectations of the audience, rendering the two potentialities homogenous as well.  The hero's power of action is often compromised, so that it's credible when and if he meets a dire fate-- which fate is summed up by the triumph of "monster over victim," aka the reality principle.  

Now, Northrop Frye often alludes the idea that the irony reverses many tropes of the adventure, and the comedy of the drama, and Schopenhauer *might* say that it is because the latter two express heterogeneity between "percept" and "concept."  I express the first reversal as "villain over hero." As noted many times before, the hero of the irony is even more compromised than the hero of the drama, meaning that even when he has power he has no positive power-of-action.  But because the reader's level of conviction has dropped precipitously, the reader no longer identifies strongly with the disempowered hero, but instead views the hero's reduction by the reality principle in ironic, humorous terms.  Thus the reality principle dominating the world is reversed in terms of its effect, yielding a heterogenous form of pleasure.

Finally, the world of the comedy is dominated by the reversal "victim over monster."  Thus, though the comic hero usually does not possess the heroic stature one would expect of anyone able to conquer monsters (be they real monsters, criminals, heavy fathers or whatever)-- and thus sacrifices the verisimilitude logic would demand-- the world, dominated by the pleasure principle, is oriented on giving the comic hero a "free pass" that allows him to triumph-- though in some ways the compromise makes it clear that the reader gains that pleasure by "foul means" rather than the "fair means" of the adventure-mythos.  This too is entirely congruous with Schopenhauer's remarks on the nature of this type of humor.

As far as *plerosis* and *kenosis" are concerned, however, it doesn't matter whether they are reached by fair means or foul-- or homogenous or heterogenous devices.  Thus my earlier assignment of comedy and adventure to *plerosis,* and irony and drama to *kenosis,* remains applicable.