INNOCENT SADISTS, BROADLY PT. 2

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

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

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

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

MOORE ON LOVECRAFT

 

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

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

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

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

THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INNOCENT SADISTS, BROADLY PT. 1

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 5

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 3

 During Frederen's visit to the laboratory of Rotwang (whose name in German means "red cheeks"), the reader learns (pretty much as in the film) that the two middle-aged men once contended over a woman named Hel. It's broadly implied that she first belonged to Rotwang, only to be lured away by Joh Fredersen. Hel bore Fredersen's child and apparently died in childbirth, intimating that Freder was raised without a mother-- which might explain why he has such an ardent fixation on a Madonna-like image of a "virgin-mother," to use his own term. This also suggests that Maria, who is said to possess "Madonna-eyes," is also a mother-substitute.

Though Fredersen and Rotwang share an old enmity, they continue to collaborate, Rotwang perhaps serving as a court sorcerer to the tyrannical Metropolis Master. Fredersen has learned that the rebellious workers show allegiance to the strange woman named Maria, and he wants to quash her influence. Rotwang just happens to have devised a prototypical female android, sometimes called "Futura," and he plans to make it look and act like a parody of Maria.

Freder, finishing the shift he took over from Georgi, is informed that the workers plan to assemble to listen to Maria, so of course he attends. Maria is, as it happens, counseling the workers to pursue the path of peace and not revolt. (Both Fredersen and Rotwang also attend this meeting in secret, but Fredersen evidently does not think of using Maria to tamp down the rebel movement, but instead commands Rotwang to continue with the plan with Futura.) Freder pledges love to Maria, and as one might expect it's a very sanitized romantic moment, though Freder does indulge in a bit of stormy sentimentality. They part, planning to meet again at the cathedral, and Rotwang kidnaps Maria.

Freder shows up at the cathedral-- where he somehow knows that Hel, the mother he never met, uses to attend--but Maria isn't there. Freder sees statues representing the Seven Deadly Sins (also in the film), and a priest who hates his father asks him to leave. He wanders the city and just happens across the old house where Rotwang maintains his library. He hears Maria calling to him, albeit with ambiguous phrases, so he breaks in . Rotwang merely moves Maria to one of the house's many rooms and lets Freder exhaust himself running around the house, whereon Freder collapses. The only major difference between book and film is that in the film, Freder hears a priest at the cathedral lecturing about the "Scarlet Woman" from Revelations. This was Lang re-purposing some lines of internal dialogue in Freder's head later, where Freder thinks about the so-called "whore of Babylon" when he thinks he's been betrayed.

In the book Rotwang, who didn't know Freder was coming, claims that he wants to emotionally torment Maria so that he can make Futura's head more closely resemble that of the original. (That, and Rotwang also just wants to torment the son of his unfaithful lover Hel as a way of getting back at Fredersen.) Rotwang taunts Maria, claiming that she's naive to assume that Freder has not had other women before her (though the book affirms that he has not), but Maria does not respond. That scene ends with the statement that Rotwang has not yet finished the head of the false Maria. Later, Freder awakens and happens to see Fake Maria leaving, but though he follows her, he's not able to catch up with her. The book does not include any extended scene in which the mad scientist uses advanced technology to morph Future's countenance into that of Maria. In all likelihood, Von Harbou only intended to suggest that Rotwang worked on the robot's head just like a puppet-maker would. Lang, in setting up the film's action with Von Harbou, was probably the one who knew best what visual effects he could use to make Futura's transformation more startling, and so he was dominantly responsible for that content in the 1927 movie.

Also in the film, Lang does not have Freder spy the departing Futura and try to follow her. Rather, Rotwang appears before Freder and tells him that Maria "is with your father," knowing that the young man will come to the wrong conclusion.     .  

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 2

 In the 1927 film, Freder tries to follow Maria, but loses her and finds himself in the City of Workers, where he seems utterly shocked to see the dehumanized condition of the workers. In the novel, though, Freder does not follow Maria because he knows he's being watched by the agents of his father. He is also fully aware of the workers' situation, for he knows that his father Joh Fredersen has forged Metropolis in this image. Von Harbou draws many comparisons to pagan imagery here, particularly that of Moloch, devouring the workers as the idol Moloch received the sacrifices of children (though of course the workers do not actually perish, they merely live lives of quiet dehumanization).

  Also in the film, Freder seeks out his father and engages him in a fruitless conversation, in which Freder tries to understand why so much suffering is necessary. Von Harbou's novel is much more specific than the screenplay in laying out Fredersen's merciless philosophy, stating that, "That men are used up so rapidly at the machines, Freder, is no proof of the greed of the machines, but of the defiency of the human material." The two of them talk at cross-purposes, and Freder leaves, though Fredersen orders one of his flunkies to keep tabs on the youth. During this colloquy, Fredersen is also advised that there may be insurrection brewing in the underground City of Workers.

More or less the same is that the frustrated Freder eventually extends the hand of brotherly love to an afflicted worker named Georgi, taking his place at his machine and letting Georgi leave the hellish underground. Lang's film birthed the unforgettable image of Freder in his work-clothes contending with the hands of a giant clock, while the novel gives us a less compelling image of Freder manipulating some sort of hoses. These Von Harbou compares to the image of the elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesha. Von Harbou does not make clear what new dispensation Freder is following, though it's implicit that he wishes to feel closer to Maria by following her brotherhood precepts.

At various parts of the early chapters, Von Harbou makes reference to "Yoshiwara," a gambling-den, presumably open only to those with money. In the novel, when Georgi leaves the underground in a cab, he witnesses some of the denizens of Yoshiwara-- presumably Japanese, though Von Harbou does not use the name at this point, calling the denizens only "yellow-skinned fellows" who leap about shoving advertising hand-bills into the hands of passersby. Georgi, who's been given some money by the man who took his place, uses that money to gamble at Yoshiwara for about a chapter. The Fredersen agent assigned to follow Freder ferrets out Georgi and seeks information on the son of the Metropolis Master. The film just shows the agents accosting Georgi after his illicit visit. This is just as well, for if Von Harbou meant to depict Yoshiwara as a den of iniquity, possibly a brothel as well as a gambling-house, she failed, as the chapter on Yoshiwara is thoroughly dull. There are a couple of references to persons with Japanese names or heritage, though there's no clue as to what Japan signified to the author herein. 

Another odd detail in the novel is that Von Harbou devotes a lot of space to a Christian church whose archaic look contrasts with the ultra-modernity of Metropolis. Fredersen left the church in place because its denizens were fanatics and he didn't want to create martyrs by kicking them out. This holy building is contrasted to the laboratory of Rotwang, a small house decked out with cabalistic symbols. It's to this location that Fredersen appears to charge mad scientist Rotwang with a mission: to undermine the brewing insurrection, led by the saintly Maria, by making a not-so-saintly duplicate of Maria and making her look bad.     

More to come...

     

     

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 1

 I've just started re-reading Thea Von Harbou's METROPOLIS for the first time in perhaps forty years, as it occurred to me that it might prove interesting to compare the book with the screenplay for the 1927 movie in its extant versions. But because this entails a lot of detailed analysis I'm posting my reactions as I go along, which I haven't done with a prose novel review since I did Rider Haggard's SHE on this blog. My understanding is that Von Harbou began the novel with the expectation that her then-husband Fritz Lang intended to adapt it for the UFA studio, and that she completed the novel before she wrote the screenplay. It's possible Lang had some input into the novel but I have no evidence of this. 

The first thing I'll point out is that the city of Metropolis, which means roughly "mother-city," is the true star of the story, easily eclipsing any of its human characters. That said, the viewpoint character Freder is almost as important in the novel, if not so much the truncated original release. The name "Freder" is generally translated as "son of Frederick," which itself means "peaceful ruler." Von Harbou only calls Freder by his first name, but his father, Joh (short for Johann) Frederson is called by his full name. One online source says that both "Freder" and "Fredersen" can be patronymics," but I don't know if Von Harbou intended this to carry any special symbolism. I think, for reasons I'll show later, that Von Harbou might have chosen the name "Freder" because it sounds like the Latin word "frater," meaning "brother." 

The 1927 release opens with a quick montage of scenes in Metropolis, with the memorable image of dozens of identically clad workers trudging down into "the City of Workers." After that, the film shifts to "the Club of the Sons," a paradisical pleasure-dome for the male children of the city's movers and shakers. Freder is first seen cheering on other young men engaged in sports, and playing tag with a cute young serving-girl-- all of which is meant to suggest that he's unaware of the suffering of the lower classes.

The novel, however, starts with what seems much like a "sturm-and-drang" moment from a 19th-century German novel. Freder is still at the Club when first viewed, but he's in a room with star-designs on the ceiling, playing an organ and apparently working himself into a froth about some tormenting matter. By the second page it's disclosed that he has some obsession with an idealized image of femininity, which in early chapters Von Harbou calls, at least three times, "the austere countenance of the virgin, the sweet countenance of the mother-- the agony and the desire with which he called and called for the one single vision for which his racked heart had not even a name..."

 Now, why is Freder so "racked" by thinking about what sound like rather pacific images of femininity, both of which have strong associations with Christian imagery? I find it interesting that both "virgin" and "mother" become blended in the icon of Mary Mother of Jesus, but I don't think Freder is so wrought up by any sort of religious vision. What I think Von Harbou is editing out is the other half of what Sigmund Freud, in 1905, called "the Madonna-Whore Complex." In this formulation, Freud observed that young men felt ambivalence toward females their own age, for though the men had been raised from childhood by non-sexual mothers, or "madonnas," what young men in their maturation wanted from females was their sexual availability. I think its likely Von Harbou was aware of Freud's theory, but that she elided the scandalous part of it to make her protagonist seem more noble and selfless-- though even in 1925, I feel sure that most readers would have made the same correlation I've made, that Freder is tormented by his natural biological concupiscence. A later scene with Freder in the Clun with other young men does NOT show him canoodling with barmaids, and in conversation with his father in the novel, he as good as admits to being a virgin. 

Back to the novel: Freder dolefully leaves the organ-room and mixes with other young men in the stadium of the Club, where he is served a drink by a sexy young woman-- the book's first image of a provocative female-- but Freder certainly does not pursue this girl.

Then book and film enter a parallel course, for into the Club comes a pretty young woman-- later given the name "Maria"-- who is surrounded by an entourage of children. In both works Maria's only purpose seems to be to show the children the pleasures of the city's idle rich, though she does so without condemnation. She says only to the children, "Look, these are your brothers." She does not seem to see Freder but he immediately recognizes her visage to be that of the "virgin mother" with which he's obsessed. Maria and the children then leave the Club-- which leads to another divergence I'll address in Part 2.                     

IDIOMS PULPY AND TALKY

 I saw FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS yesterday, and prior to crafting a review for the movie-blog I decided to mediate on why I found myself less than captivated with the movie, even though it's a general improvement on the standard MCU product.

One problem is that of all the previous adaptations of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR have been unable to put across the unique blend of action, pathos and imagination found in the comic book, with the possible exception of the 1967 FANTASTIC FOUR cartoon, which was largely a straightforward recycling of the original stories. Though the FF was the conceptual flagship title of Marvel Comics, the property was owned for several years by 20th-Century Fox, and thus was outside the grasp of the Disney-owned MCU during its formative years. Disney's acquisition of the FF franchise in 2019 finally made it feasible to integrate the FF into the current universe. Because for the last five years most MCU movies and television shows have become creatively constipated and generally unprofitable, some fans held out hope for STEPS to be a game-changer. At present STEPS' box office won't even come close to the billion-dollar mark of last year's DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE, so it's not going to alter the MCU's downward spiral in terms of popularity. It's possible that STEPS will enjoy aesthetic prominence, though, given rumors that the company plans to go forward with an Avengers-FF crossover and possibly a STEPS sequel after that.

                

  While I've not followed any of the publicity statements by director Matt Shakman or the movie's four credited writers, it seems obvious that they all sought to choose a particular SF-idiom not found in previous adaptations. In my 2023 essay THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION, I expatiated on two idioms that had influenced the science fiction genre since its formulation in the late 1800s, calling them, informally, "gosh-wow" SF and "philosophical SF." The new names in my title. "pulpy" and "talky," are not meant to be any less informal, but they're a little more direct in encapsulating distinct forms of narrative appeal. "The pulpy" appeals to sensation and emotional melodrama, while "the talky" appeals to ideational concepts. Some critics automatically prefer the latter idiom, as per the nostrum that "science fiction is a literature of ideas." Yet not all ideas are good just because they share a didactic approach, any more than all sensations are good because they share a sense of immediacy.

In the SEEDS essay, I argued that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, as well as other Marvel raconteurs to a lesser extent, tapped into the two rough idioms of science fiction because they all had been exposed to those idioms in the 1950s through the proliferation of SF cinema in that decade, and they sought (as their chief competitor DC Comics did not) to convey both idioms to their young readers. The Marvel creators were not the first in comics to do this. But when they crossbred the SF idioms with the superhero genre in the 1960s, they created a self-sustaining mythology-- one that the MCU managed to adapt for cinema, to some extent bringing things full circle. 

The Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR was the most fully developed blend of the two idioms, allowing the quartet of heroes to vary their adventures from high-tension battles with supervillains to meditative reflections on man's place in the universe. But because Shakman and company chose to launch STEPS with their take on the highly praised "Galactus Trilogy," they clearly chose one idiom over the other-- and thus failed to capture the rich dichotomy of the original comic book. I know that during my viewing I found myself pulling back from all the homages to 1995's APOLLO 13, which was fine for a mundane film about space-exploration but became draggy within the context of a superhero franchise film.      

Indeed, the only places in the film that I saw any of the "pulpy" idiom of the original comic was in sequences showing how the "real" Fantastic Four had been adapted into kids' cartoons, like that of the 1960s Hanna-Barbera toon mentioned above. Shakman et al advocated a "talky" approach to their Galactus story, and yet didn't succeed as well as they might have with respect to some of the ideas they raised. I'll engage with more specifics in the blog-review of STEPS, but I wanted to get these idiomatic divagations out of the way first.   

THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 4

The last installment of THYMOS BE DE PLACE appeared in 2009, while the last time I wrote about Frank Fukuyama's magisterial application of Plato's "thymos" concept in a theoretical manner was 2015's MEETINGS WITH RECOGNIZABLE PRESENCES, which focused upon Fukuyama's extrapolation of "recognition" as the process by which human beings experience the abstract faculty of *thymos.*  

In contrast, the concept of literary sadism has continued to crop up fairly consistently over the years, but only in THYMOS Part 3 did I draw explicit parallels between the operations of thymos as described by Fukuyama (who does not address sadism in any way in END OF HISTORY) and George Bataille's formulation that the world of Sadean thrills belonged in the category of non-productive, esteem-related human activities.

Bataille's primary insight for literary criticism is the image he uses to present eroticism and violence as equivalent phenomena: "sensuous frenzy" (p. 192). Whether this adequately describes real-life sex and violence does not matter for the purposes of literary criticism, but I suggest that Bataillean "frenzy" does describe how fictional sex and violence impact upon the majority of readers. Bataille doesn't substantially address literature in EROTISM, except for the sensualized violence-scenarios presented by the Marquis de Sade, but elsewhere he makes the trope of "transgression against the norm" his hallmark, so I feel secure in adapting his terms for the purpose of literary criticism.

What EROTISM makes clear is that even though one may be experiencing fantasies of sex and/or violence through an intellectualized medium (Plato's "copy of a copy"), this is still the essence of a human (as opposed to animal) activity. He does not, as noted before, directly relate this to the subject of thymos, but because fiction is not the "real thing," it is not eros in the raw. Rather, it's closer to the nature of thymos in the same way that the sexual conqueror's boast, his tall tale of sexual conquest, represents thymotic rather than erotic stimulation.        

 

Most of my descriptions of sensual violence in literature have also taken the Bataillean POV. However, I have in various essays specified that there is a distinction between COMMON AND UNCOMMON EVIL. In short, the common form of evil is people doing bad things to another for the purpose of either gaining or protecting some concrete possession, even one's own bodily integrity, while the uncommon form is motivated primarily by the desire of esteem-based recognition. 

Thymos, as mentioned in previous essays, is one of the constituent parts of Plato's tripartite soul, which one Wiki essay sums up thusly:

• nous ("intellect", "reason"), which is or should be the controlling part which subjugates the appetites with the help of thumos.
• thumos ("passion"), the emotional element in virtue of which we feel joy, amusement, etc. (the Republic IV, 439e);
• epithumia ("appetite", "affection"), to which are ascribed bodily desires;

It now occurs to me that if the "uncommon form of evil" aligns with what Plato calls "spiritedness," then the "common form of evil" would align with the concept of "appetite." Further, though I'm in no way an expert on Greek language, I note that the word "epithumia" uses the same word-element found in "thumos," but qualified by the prefix "epi-." There are several contexts for the prefix "epi-" but here it seems to agree with this one:

1. Secondary: a consequence, by-product, additional, or lesser version.

   epilanguage is a second language used regularly for some purpose or purposes, epiphenomenon is an activity, process, or state that is the result of another, epitoxoid is a toxoid that generates less of an immune response than an original one

This would seem to accord with many if not all Greek oppositions between "appetite' and "passion," where the former is of lesser philosophical consequence than the latter.   

And now, with all these considerations in mind, I want to specify that only the "uncommon" operations of sadism are thymotic in nature, while the "common" ones are epithymotic.

This formulation may have a number of applications but I'll wrap up with just two, both from the manga URUSEI YATSURA, one of my "Domme Coms."   

Now, in URUSEI the male lead Ataru is the one who most often suffers comical outpourings of violence. However, some of these violent attacks are *epithymotic,* in that the attacker is retaliating in order to protect himself or herself. For instance, when Ataru is in full horndog mode, and seeks to grope a woman like Sakura, he gets slapped, punched, kicked or otherwise battered. Throughout the series Sakura has absolutely no romantic interest in Ataru, so whenever she hits him, it's for the "common" purpose of maintaining her bodily integrity by repelling unwanted attentions. This may not be exactly what Plato had in mind with respect to "appetite," but the correlation makes sense when seen through the lenses of Bataille and Fukuyama.

In contrast, the reigning champion for torturing Ataru is Lum, the alien wench who falls in love with him and demands that he reciprocate. As extreme as her actions are, they flow from a desire for thymotic recognition; that Ataru should recognize Lum as his one true love. Of course, if Ataru wasn't capable of feeling love for Lum, his continued tortures would just become dull, but author Takahashi is careful to keep hinting that on some level Ataru does reciprocate. However, he refuses to capitulate to Lum's attacks, and so continues to flirt with numerous other women, even though he has almost no chance with any of them and usually gets served just as Sakura serves him. So all of Lum's attacks, or her stratagems to otherwise manipulate her reluctant lover, flow from *thymotic* passion, which, while still comic, embodies the uncommon nature of love rather than common motivations like gain or self-protection.  

If and when I write further about these concepts, I'll probably cease to use any of Bataille's terms for these opposed operations and invoke "thymotic and epithymotic" instead. And as for what if any function Plato's concept of "reason" might play in these literary domains, that's a subject for some other essay.

    

VARIANT REVISIONS PT. 2

 Some of my current terminology re: "originary and variant propositions" was preceded by the two essay-series CRYPTO-CONTINUITY AND DOPPELGANGBANGERS, starting here. In those essays I more or less used "template" to stand in for the current "originary proposition," "template deviation" to stand in for "variant propositions," and "total deviation" to stand in for "null-variant propositions." All of these terms, though, are predicated on analyzing the propositions "from outside," seen from the POV of the "real" reader.

However, it's not impossible to see many if not all such variations "from inside," as if all of the propositions weren't just created by isolated raconteurs but were instead variations on archetypal tropes that precede even the first "originary proposition." 

It's true thar often the originary proposition is the strongest one in terms of evoking one or more of the four potentialities, which is why I previously compared such propositions to the sort of template used, say, in early printing technology. I mentioned in the CRYPTO series major icons like KING KONG and DRACULA, and it would be hard to argue that any of the variations on these figures, however entertaining, exceeded the originals in any way. 

      

  However, there are times that the originary proposition is not the most compelling, even on simpler levels. The durable Terrytoons stars "Heckle and Jeckle" are known by most viewers as a pair of wisecracking male magpies. However, the first cartoon in the series, 1946's "The Talking Magpies," posited them as a married male-and-female couple that caused no end of trouble for Farmer Al Falfa. Paul Terry then chose to issue a "rebooted" Heckle and Jeckle that same year with "The Uninvited Pests," and as two identical males with differing accents, the characters enjoyed another 51 theatrical cartoons. So in terms of popular success, the variant proposition was the more successful, not least because two obnoxious males could be used in many more slapstick situations than a married magpie pair.

Now, if one wanted to take the archetypal perspective I suggested above, one could imagine two parallel worlds, one in which Heckle and Jeckle were both male, and one in which they were a married couple. Most fictional propositions regarding parallel worlds are not much less chimerical. The parallel-world explanation for duplicate versions of DC characters such as Flash and Green Lantern sometimes verged on expressions of archetypal realities, though usually in fairly clumsy terms. The first Green Lantern begins very poorly-- I read the first volume of Golden Age reprints and could barely see any reasons for the success of the character beyond the base idea of a hero with a wonder-working "magic ring." Later in the series writers conceived a few subordinate characters-- Solomon Grundy, Vandal Savage-- evocative enough that DC Comics made them major figures in the company's later cosmology. But I'm not sure that, taken just on their Golden Age appearances, Grundy or Savage were as good IN THEIR TIME as the better villains of that era, from serials like Batman, Wonder Woman, or even Airboy and The Hangman. In contrast, the Silver Age Green Lantern, which crossbred the rudimentary Alan Scott concept with the "space ranger" ideas of the prose "Lensmen" series, displayed excellence in the kinetic and mythopoeic potentialities within a few years.

Even "soft reboots" within the same cosmos-- which make no use of "parallel worlds" as such-- are often treated as constituting variant propositions in, say, fandom-wikis like the DC Database. The 1988 ANIMAL MAN, reviewed here, dispenses with any idea that two separate Animal-Men co-exist in two distinct worlds. Rather, the first one knows that he was created by one author and rejected in favor of an updated hero with the same name by another author. Yet at the same time, Grant Morrison suggests that there's some loosely archetypal limbo where even the lamest characters ever created (hello, Ultra the Multi-Alien) continue to exist. And some soft reboots are performed not through intention but through error. In the first VARIANT REVISIONS, I took pains to analyze how Bob Haney first created a reasonably evocative mystery villain in one TEEN TITANS story. Yet when Haney later needed a make-work villain to plug into a hastily conceived scenario, the writer simply rewrote the established character's motivations to suit his current needs. As if to compound the error, George Perez constructed yet another ramshackle artifice on top of Haney's blunder and, to the extent that DC fans think of The Gargoyle at all, they probably defer to the Perez interpretation.

Some soft reboots even occur simply in response to changing tastes or priorities. Jerry Siegel's original Superman, while always devoted to justice, sometimes played fast and loose with legalities. DC editors didn't like that, possibly fearing a profitable character would get targeted by moral watchdogs-- which eventually happened anyway-- and so Silver Age Superman became an absolute stickler for obeying the law, even the law of made-up planets. Here too I would probably argue that Silver Age Superman surpassed the originary proposition in many though not all respects-- though the more creative Golden Age concepts of Siegel and his collaborators became the essential foundation for the Silver Age proposition.  

More to come.

        

MYTHCOMICS: "DEUS EX MACHINA," ANIMAL MAN #18-26 (1989-90)

 

  

The latter half of Grant Morrison's run on ANIMAL MAN wasn't originally given any particular title. However, by whatever contrivance, when DC issued its first softbound reprints of the title, they distributed the first half over two volumes, probably with supplemental material, while the latter half finished up in Volume 3, given the title of the last Morrison story, "Deus Ex Machina."

The first half of Morrison's ANIMAL MAN is a good basic reboot of the late sixties DC character, who in his original incarnation had never taken off. The first seventeen issues emphasize the attempts of Animal Man, who possesses the power to emulate the abilities of all animals, to fight for justice but also to care for the wife and children he maintains in his "Buddy Baker" identity. Morrison also invests Baker with a passionate protective feeling toward the many lower animals maltreated by uncaring human beings, and the author succeeds in making this moral point without becoming preachy. The early issues include a lot of guest appearances by familiar DC heroes and villains. Moore's SWAMP THING and Gaiman's SANDMAN had pursued a similar course to attract regular DC readers. However, the latter half of MACHINA is devoted to doing a deep dive into the DC cosmos rather than emphasizing the main hero's milieu-- and on top of that, a deep dive into the concept of metafiction.

Issue #18 foregrounds a storyline hinted at in the first half: the nature of Animal Man's powers. He meets academic James Highwater and the two seekers go to the desert and chew peyote to bring about a "vision quest." Highwater relates Animal Man's powers to the "morphogenetic fields" suggested by parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake (whose work, BTW, I also admire). From a vulpine oracle named "Foxy," the seekers also learn of an impending "crisis," which is Morrison's metafictional reference to the 1985 CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. This in itself is a form of metafiction, given that the CRISIS over-wrote established DC continuity so that almost no one remembers the events of that cataclysm. What Morrison plays with is something of an "anti-CRISIS" as he begins bringing back all the untidy fictional creations that the 1985 event sought to banish.

 

However, Buddy Baker's experience goes even farther than CRISIS. Not only does Buddy meet the 1960s incarnation of Animal Man, whose existence was rebooted to make Morrison's version, he also beholds the audience that's reading his comic book. Further, Original Animal Man's rants about how their creators "twist and torture" their fictional creations are borne out when Buddy gets home and finds his family slaughtered by an assassin.

     

For three issues, Buddy puts metaphysics on hold as he seeks out the men responsible for the killings, though later he'll conclude that the real murderer is his writer, Grant Morrison. Issue #23, entitled "Crisis," shows how the Psycho Pirate-- one of the few characters from the 1985 series who remembered how reality had been structured before-- begins summoning all the banished characters from whatever conceptual limbo they occupied. However, he also summons bizarre alternate forms of famous DC characters, all calculated to reflect the "grim and gritty" trend of eighties superhero comics. 

In issue #24-- graced by an evocative cover that celebrates the birth of DC continuity in the Silver Age-- Animal Man defeats the immediate menace of Overman and his purification bomb, satirizing current tastes for "realism." But the hero still wants to know what entity is responsible for the deaths of his family, so he's sent to the limbo of cancelled comics-characters.  

Unsurprisingly, in limbo Animal Man meets a lot of characters who simply ceased to be published, rather than being banished in the 1985 CRISIS, such as The Inferior Five, The Green Team, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny and (as seen above) The Gay Ghost. Though Morrison naturally only shows characters from DC or from companies DC acquired, he implies that the same limbo awaits other companies' failed icons, in his amusing line about "the great ruined cities of Atlas and Warren." (Atlas Comics ceased operation in the 1970s while Warren Comics went into bankruptcy in 1983-- though not all of Warren's characters were relegated to limbo.) 

 

As I've already stated, the architect of Animal Man's many torments is his writer on ANIMAL MAN the comic, and he only engineered the hero's sufferings for the sake of "drama." After spending the rest of the last issue outlining for the hero the absurdity of superheroes in the author's "real world," he concludes by expressing dismay at how reality has invaded fantasy. He vanishes and Buddy goes back home, where he's given one last gift by his author: a "reboot" in which Buddy's family never died at all. (I didn't regularly read the comic after Morrison left, but I suspect that this escapist fantasy probably ensured that subsequent authors left the Bakers unmurdered, since such a development would have been seen as thoroughly predictable.) 

And so ended one of the early runs that made Grant Morrison a popular comics-author. I don't agree with his implication that human beings create fictional characters solely to torture them, and I rather doubt Morrison really believes that himself. Indeed, everything that Real Author Morrison tells his readers may have exactly the same status as what Fictional Author Morrison tells his fictional hero-- that it's all done for the sake of a good story.