NIETZSCHE VS. THE NEOPURITAN NANNIES PT. 2

The "Neopuritan nannies" referenced in Part 1 were pretty much the Usual Gang of Bloody Comic Book Elitists, but I've never meant to suggest that they were the worst of the lot. Such elitists are pikers next to some of the philosophers who have been guilty of creating false expectations for the world as a whole.

Marx may be the biggest Nanny of all time, given that he fostered the idea of controlling human destiny through the manipulation of economic factors. But one of the seminal "fathers of science fiction" had similar nanny-ish proclivities, as I find after my having given one of his works-- H.G. Wells' THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME-- a quick though not superficial read-through.

By the time SHAPE was published in 1933, Wells was no longer writing "scientific romances" very much. His key works were all the flowers of his youth, and in his later years he often sought to use non-fiction as a means to express his passion for Socialism. SHAPE is what we now call an "alternative history," in which Wells narrates his understanding of world affairs up until 1933, and then imagines the future events that will lead to the formation of a beneficent world state.

I find myself regarding this as a "nanny-ish" proposition because Wells' world state is, despite all his protests as to the continued value of a "sublimated" individuality, remains a place that values safety above all else:

What has happened during the past three and a half centuries to the human consciousness has been a sublimation of individuality. That phase is the quintessence of modern history. A large part of the commonplace life of man, the food-hunt, the shelter-hunt, the safety-hunt, has been lifted out of the individual sphere and socialized for ever. To that the human egotism has given its assent perforce. It has abandoned gambling and profit-seeking and all the wilder claims of property. It has ceased altogether to snatch, scramble and oust for material ends. And the common man has also been deprived of any weapons for his ready combativeness and of any liberty in its release. Nowadays even children do not fight each other. Gentleness in difference has become our second nature.

Now Nietzsche was no less aware that every society practiced this same ritual that he calls "self-overcoming," by which individual selfish tendencies are conquered in order to promote each society's "table of values." But the German philosopher was extremely leery that any civilization could reach a point of such advancement that it would not grow stagnant, so that it needed men of "courage" who would overturn the established values. This is why THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA so frequently has its interlocutor rage against "the good and the just:" not because society's rules aren't based in real needs-- to prevent theft, adultery, etc.-- but because such rules become the people's reason for living in itself, rather than serving as a means to an end. The idea that Wells proposes above-- of a mankind where "even children do not fight each other"-- with extreme suspicion. To my ear it sounds like an old man's vision of paradise: a place where no one raises voices or has any arguments-- and of course Wells was over sixty when he wrote SHAPE.

I also find Wells guilty of a Pollyanna attitude in Chapter 8, where he tries to use biological double-talk in order to make it seem as if the human propensity for cruelty is an aberration:

The older psychologists were disposed to classify cruelty as a form of sexual aberration — in ordinary speech we still use their old word Sadistic — but this attribution is no longer respected by contemporary authorities. Cruelty goes far beyond the sexual field. Just as hate is now understood to be a combative fear compound, the stiffening up of a faltering challenge, which may become infectious, so cruelty is regarded as a natural development of effort against resistance, so soon as the apprehension of frustration exceeds a certain limit. It is a transformation of our attempt to subdue something, usually a living thing, to our will, under the exasperation of actual or anticipated obduracy.

I've established in my own posts that I don't consider cruelty, or anything associated with violence, to be entirely derived from sexuality. But clearly Wells is trying to divorce human nature from cruelty by making it seem as if cruel action is simply an adventitious reflex. Thus, if a "nanny-state" takes away anything that people might fight over, then there will be no "transformation of [an] attempt to subdue something."

Contrast this with Nietzsche's psychological insight from ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS:

"To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival."

One may disagree with Nietzsche about the degree to which human nature is dependent upon cruelty in its most objectionable forms. But who, aside from a nanny, could doubt that a part of what makes us human is our competitiveness, our desire to excel? Since I've quoted Francis Fukuyama's verdict on these matters at least three times now, I suppose I need not repeat myself on this subject.

Though SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME is no fun to read-- it often seems like the author merely repeating himself: "See, I was right about this, and this, and this"-- it does show that the ideal of the overprotected society is far from a new one.

Since modern-day nannies so frequently worry about how susceptible minds will be driven to orgies of fascist violence by superheroes, I find myself wondering if Nietzsche might not have viewed them as more in the vein of Wells than of his "overmen." After all, most superheroes are devoted to maintaining the values of the society, rather than overturning values. So maybe had Friedrich N., been given the chance to behold the spawn of Siegel and Shuster, he would have found superheroes as repressive to spirit as I find Wells' "nanny-state."

NULL-MYTHS: HOLY TERROR (2011)

For this short review I won't get into all the hand-wringing politics as to whether Miller, or anyone, could have produced in modern times what Miller claimed that he intended to produce: a "piece of propaganda" showing a costumed hero beating up Muslim / Jihadist terrorists.

Obviously I have to mention the genesis of the project: that Miller floated the possibility of a project titled HOLY TERROR, BATMAN in 2006, about five years after the events of 9-11.  I do not know whether or not DC Comics seriously entertained such a project, which IMO could have had no beneficial effect on the brand of their Batman character. But Miller clearly plotted and visualized the narrative as if it would involve Batman and his sex-sparring partner Catwoman getting involved in a major terrorist attack upon Gotham City. Instead, for whatever reason the graphic novel was published instead by Legendary Comics, replacing Gotham City, Batman and Catwoman with Empire City, a new hero called the Fixer, and a larcenous woman who has clawed hands (or gloves), hisses like a cat, and is called-- Natalie Stack?

While deriving images from the Net I happened across a review of HOLY TERROR from Sequart's Julius Darius, and was appalled to see that back in 2011 I had paid this munchkin of mediocrity a compliment for having tried to produce a "balanced" view of the work. I didn't re-read the essay, but I noticed that its conclusion was concerned purely with whether or not HOLY TERROR might "trap" readers into feeling nasty prejudiced feelings or some such tripe. I would expect that every extant review of this graphic novel similarly privileged real-world politics over the formal qualities of the work. I won't do that here. If HOLY TERROR is a null-myth in the terms I've set forth, it's because it doesn't take its absurd premise far enough, not because it should have pulled back and played it more cautiously.

In my first reading of HOLY TERROR I was aware that it would not be in any sense a nuanced observation of Muslim culture, so I didn't expect it to fulfill such a goal. I did look to see whether or not Miller targeted Muslim culture as a whole, or only the subculture to which the Jihadists belong. Within the narrative proper, most of the protagonists' aspersions are cast at terrorists and their beliefs in sanctified suicide. None of the aspersions are particularly ingenious, so even if one countenances the viability of trash-talking Jihadists, I can't say that Miller does a good job of it. I'm sure that most critics had something to say about HOLY TERROR beginning with a famous quote-- or misquote-- from Mohammed: "If you meet the infidel, kill the infidel." That might seem like a slam-dunk for anyone arguing that Miller's playing to American bigotry. I don't dismiss that possibility. But there's also the possibility that even if the famous phrase is a misquote, real-life terrorists like bin-Laden did adopt it for their own ends. And if Miller is using the quote the way bin-Laden used it, that makes a crucial difference with regard to said author's intent.

Miller specifically said that his notion of "propaganda" was informed by the early examples of anti-Axis propaganda seen in American comics, in which unreal heroes like Superman and Captain America regularly punched out menaces like Hitler and Hirohito.  None of those comics can be judged as reproductions of reality. If they have any value at all, it lies within the attempt of American artists to project depraved vileness upon their nation's enemies.

Instead, Miller's villains-- usually wearing heavy burnooses or some similar garb-- are unremarkable in the extreme. As the heroic Fixer and his reluctant gal-pal Natalie commence their personal war on terror, they unmask some of the low-ranking thugs, but they're entirely ordinary. Toward the conclusion Natalie encounters the unnamed leader of the Al-Qaeda cell-- his face obscured by a beaded headdress-- and the leader informs her that the reason they're called a "cell" is because they're just a "tiny part of an organism so vast as to be beyond belief." Natalie and the Fixer manage to destroy the cell with its own weapons in the end, but significantly, the story ends not on a note of triumph but of consuming fear, as a hard-bitten police captain (a re-written Commissioner Gordon) suffers a sleepless night, wracked with anticipation of further atrocities.  I suppose Miller may have wanted to make the nation's current enemies seem more menacing by their facelessness. He might have had more success, propaganda-wise, in making al-Qaeda's crusaders as weird and freakish as the bogus "Persians" of 300.

The two heroes comprise another arrow from Miller's quiver that falls far short of its mark. Since they were originally envisioned as Miller's takes on Batman and Catwoman, he doesn't really exert himself to re-design their costumes into anything compelling. Instead, prior to the terrorist crisis, we see Fixer chasing Natalie across Empire City's rooftops, and the two of them look like nothing more than a pair of acrobats in fetish-wear. Going by Miller's past oeuvre, the fetish-look was probably intentional on his part-- but my point is that both characters are badly designed. Again, real propaganda needs not just images of the villains' vileness, but also images of the heroes' superior status-- and that's nowhere to be found here.

One last kick to this horse that probably died in most fans' minds years ago: on one page, when Fixer and Natalie are slashing and shooting their way through a horde of fanatics, Fixer's thought-balloon says, "We engage in postmodern diplomacy." I won't say all of Miller's dialogue is as bad as this, but this is a real howler. What, did Miller think that "postmodern" means "ironic?" Given that at one point some pundit thought that 9-11 had done away with "irony" in American culture, it seems profoundly weird to see a comic warning Americans of the doom at their doors invoking the vagaries of postmodernism, especially in support of what ends up being the oldest form of diplomacy-- the "gunboat" kind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______

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

Only nine hundred and fifty to go now.

ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNCANNY CITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A MOVABLE HELLFEAST PT. 2

...in his last work, Nietzsche insisted that his point was merely that there was more hope for the man of strong impulses than for the man with no impulses: one should look for 'even a Cesare Borgia rather than a Parsifal.' ...This leaves no doubt that Nietzsche considered Cesare Borgia far from admirable but preferred even him to the Parsifal ideal"-- Daniel Conway, NIETZSCHE: ON MORALITY, p. 125.

In Part 1 I cited Jack the Ripper as an example of a killer who, if he indeed wrote the famed "from hell" letter, was in essence seeking to "theatricalize" his propensity for murder, to portray himself as a virtual demon from hell. Since the Ripper was mentally adept enough to commit his crimes without being caught, I'd assume that he did not expect anyone reading that letter to literally believe that a demon was committing the murders. However, if he wrote the letter, then by that act he made himself more than just a random killer. The murders might have been forgotten a century later-- as indeed the deeds of many other serial killers have faded over time-- but "From Hell" makes the Ripper into a figure of immortal dread.

However, the psycho himself does not necessarily need to announce his dreadfulness to a waiting audience. Ed Gein's "theater of the dreadful" was intended only for his own viewership, but even a partial recitation of his ghoulish alterations of body-parts can bring forth the shivers of dread:

Bowls made from human skulls
A corset made from a female torso skinned from shoulders to waist
Human skin covering several chair seatsSkulls on his bedposts

In the first part of this essay-series, I quoted Virgil's famous line:

'If I cannot bend the will of Heaven, I shall move Hell.'-- Virgil's AENEID.

Interpreting this aphorism purely from a psychological standpoint--as indeed Sigmund Freud did, since he used the same motto to preface THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS-- the "hell" in one's own psyche is the realm of unrestrained desire. Long before Freud elaborated the three-part structure of the psyche as "id, ego, and superego," Nietzsche pursued a parallel line of thought. Nietzsche esteemed the ability of "the superman" to practice "self-overcoming" of his own impulses. Thus Borgia, who allegedly gave into his baser impulses, is no superman, any more than Ed Gein or the Ripper could be. But they were able to "move the hell" of their own desires in such a way that history still remembers their deeds.

Thus do real human beings take on the appearance of something beyond the ordinary, even though we know that they are, in the final analysis, human beings who are much more defined by contingent circumstances than fictional characters. Yet there is a degree of freedom in displaying the ability to "act" as if one is more than one is, and it can be used no less for producing the beneficent affect of *fascination* as for the destructive one associated with *dread.*  It would be interesting-- though beyond the scope of this essay-- to posit what sort of real-world "supermen" go beyond the level of mundane heroics, even as the Ripper acted the part of one beyond the mundane reality of a serial killer.

I said at the end of HELLFEAST PART 1 that I would explore these matters in terms of the question of freedom, but for now I will postpone that discussion to pursue other concerns.

FIFTY-ONE PHENOMENALITIES, OR FIGHT!

I've been giving more thought as to how my "51 percent rule" applies to the form of serials and related formats.

Any regular readers of this blog shouldn't be thrown by this reference, for I've only brought up the rule three times over the years, and only once did I use the concept to discuss the intermingling of pheomenalities in a serial format. In ABNER ORIGINE I remarked upon the fact that the comic strip LI'L ABNER had made copious usages of marvelous concepts, though it was not usually classed as a fantasy-comic. I put this down to the fact that marvelous concepts only appeared in ABNER in an irregular fashion, and that the strip was better known for naturalistic tropes, like having its hillbilly characters run into society snobs and gangsters. At the same time, I mentioned that one of Al Capp's running gags was to portray both the strip's star Abner and frequent support-character "Mammy" as possessing inhuman levels of strength.  I opined that if this running-gag appeared as frequently as I thought that it did, then LI'L ABNER deserved to be considered a metaphenomenal strip, even if it wasn't as open about its fantastic nature as LITTLE NEMO and FLASH GORDON.

I conceived of the "51 percent rule" in keeping with the phenomenological considerations covered in the essay WITH ENFOLDED HANDS. All works with dominantly metaphomenal content-- whether they are stand-alone works or parts of an ongoing serial narrative-- cannot help but reference the phenomenal principles typical of naturalistic narrative: that there must be some degree of causal coherence and intelligibility, if only to provide contrast to the violations of one or both of these two principles.

That said, there are serials that only very rarely stray into metaphenomenal territory, which is what originally caused me to formulate the rule. Over the years Marvel Comics reprinted, to the best of my knowledge, all of the adventures of 1950s western hero "The Ringo Kid." Of those adventures, only one possessed metaphenomenal content, a story from RINGO KID WESTERN #8 (October 1955). In this issue the heroic Kid encountered a mad scientist, Doctor Saturn, who invented a super-scientific device with which he temporarily blinded people, whom his gang then robbed.

I'm reasonably sure that no one would induct the Ringo Kid into the ranks of metaphenomenal heroes on the basis of one lousy adventure. But things get a little more dicey with a serial concept like LI'L ABNER. The strip lasted several years, and even if I had access to all of the ABNER strips, I wouldn't have any interest in sedulously noting exactly how many metaphenomenal storylines appeared in all of the strips, and what percentage of all the story-arcs possesses such concepts. Yet I wanted to formulate the rule as a *theory* that could account for the dominant proclivities of any series, no matter how long-lived. Once more, from the essay where I first propounded the term:

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.  Thus, if one wished to determine the dominant mythos of the Briefer work, one would count up the total number of stories and determine which mythos-type was statistically dominant.  

As I've noted elsewhere, the context in this essay has to do with sorting out the Fryean mythos that dominates a given serial narrative, but the same logic applies to its phenomenality as well, and I've been using it in this manner in my informal determinations, though not so much on this blog.

Still, even with this "rule of thumb" in place, it should be obvious that even if LI'L ABNER's metaphenomenal storylines did not make up over fifty percent of the total storylines, it's obvious that Al Capp possessed a creative passion for coming up with metaphenomenal concepts on a regular basis, while the guy who put a mad scientist into a RINGO KID story may have simply been tired of the usual cowpoke sagas, and so elected to "bend the Kid's genre," so to speak.

I said in the except above that "51 percent" didn't give the holder of such stock an "unqualified dominion," and the same applies to serial concepts. Sometimes one can see that a given author has a real passion for playing with metaphenomenal concepts, while another author may just be tossing out whatever seems to work.

To draw once more upon comic strip examples, DICK TRACY debuted in 1931, and if it had been cancelled in 1940, we would hardly remember it as having any metaphenomenal content, as Chester Gould only rarely used weird, freaky crooks in his 1930s stories. However, from the 1940s and on, TRACY became famous for its "rogue's gallery" of bizarre criminals. TRACY might or might not exceed the formal "51 percent rule" in terms of metaphenomenal content, but as with ABNER, one can hardly doubt the influence of said content on the strip as a structuring principle.