August 2003 / Peiratikos

I want to talk about two comedic situations, one from National Lampoon's Van Wilder and the other from American Wedding. So I'm going to give spoilers about these scenes. Now, Van Wilder. Van Wilder has made enemies of some frat boys, I don't remember why, and has come up with an ingenious plan for revenge: ey masturbates eir pet dog, uses the resultant semen to fill some pastries, and sends the pastries anonymously to the poor frat boys, who happily gobble them all down only to discover that the bottom of the basket in which they arrived is lined with photos of Van Wilder masturbating eir dog and filling pastries with semen. I submit that this is not funny. You're surprised, right?

Now take American Wedding. Jim and Michelle are getting married. Stifler, eternally hopeless asshole, has been entrusted with the bride's wedding ring, which belonged to the bride's grandmother (I won't explain how Stifler convinces Michelle's mom to let em keep the ring, you'll just have to see the movie if you really want to know), only to foolishly allow a dog to eat it (see previous parenthetical). The ring, happily, soon reemerges, albeit, unhappily, encased in dog shit. Even more unhappily, Michelle's mom finds Stifler going to clean the ring. Now, even Stifler realizes that Michelle's mom, who is already skeptical of Jim's worthiness to marry eir daughter, cannot learn what happened to the ring and what a bunch of imbecilic boobs Jim and eir friends so often are. Ey tells Michelle's mom (OK, I should look up eir name.. Mary Flaherty) that it's a chocolate truffle. Ms. Flaherty loves truffles! Won't Stifler give em just a little nibble? Now, we all know, as this is a gross-out comedy, where this is going: somebody's going to end up with that dog shit in eir mouth. I submit that this is actually rather funny. Now you probably are surprised.

Why is frat boys eating dog semen painfully unfunny, while somebody eating dog shit is funny? Well, allow me to explain my theory of gross-out comedies. It's simple, only two parts:

1. If we, and the filmmakers, like the characters, we can laugh in sympathy with them at the hilariously hopeless predicaments they get themselves into. If we're supposed to despise the characters and laugh at their problems rather than sympathize, it's much harder to find the humor -- unless you're a sufficiently mean-spirited person to find the suffering of even fictional characters satisfyingly amusing, I suppose. Also, characters must be allowed to maintain at least a shred of dignity, otherwise they become depressingly pathetic and suddenly we're watching a tragedy not a comedy.
2. Even if the characters are at least minimally sympathetic and have a modicum of dignity, mere grossness is not enough to generate humor. Somebody eating shit isn't funny. But if you apply some basic comic principles -- say one person thinks it's a chocolate truffle, another knows it's shit but can't let anybody else find out it is, and one of these people is going to end up eating that shit, and let the tension build as the scene progresses along of the path of its inexorable logic to the inevitable climactic moment of shit-eating, when the tension is released and we laugh from relief and (as per point (1)) in sympathy with the shit-eater -- that can be funny. The build-up and release of tension and the creation of ludicrous situations out of a perfectly logical sequence of events are basic elements of a lot of good comedy, and the fact that a movie finds its humor in people eating dog shit is no excuse to abandon them.

Now I have another point: faithful application of those above two points will never make a gross-out comedy funny to somebody who finds the idea of somebody eating shit, or whatever, too distasteful for em to find any enjoyment in watching it. If you think the situations in a gross-out comedy too disgusting and unpalatable, you won't enjoy it no matter how well-made it is. Nevertheless, I think the fact that a comedy involves people eating shit doesn't necessarily mean it's not well-made or the filmmakers weren't trying hard enough or whatever.

Now, Van Wilder violates both the above principles. Van Wilder is the hero and the frat boys are evil (and subhumanly stupid -- I'm guessing not many people would mistake dog semen for something that could plausibly be found filling a pastry). We're supposed to laugh at the frat boys for being stupid enough to eat dog semen. Even more despicably, we're supposed to laugh at a poor sorority girl who becomes the punchline of the scene when ey ends up covered in regurgitated dog semen after the frat boys realize what they've just eaten and get sick. (You could, if you were masochistic enough to want to study college greek-system sexuality, spend many an hour wading through the disturbing subtexts, both in- and unintentional, evident in this scene.) On top of the cruelty of the scene, there's no comedic tension at all. We know the frat boys are eating dog semen, we know they're going to find out and probably puke it up, and the fact that they puke it up on a sorority girl is hardly shocking. No comedic principles applied at all -- apparently we're just supposed to laugh at the very idea of somebody unwittingly eating dog semen. Ha ha.

But American Wedding. OK, I'm going to spoil it and say that it's Stifler who ends up with the shit in eir mouth. Now I think most of us can probably sympathize with such a basic concept as that eating dog shit is bad (I mean no disrespect to any bestialitist/coprophagists who may read this). And Stifler has gotten emself into this situation of having to eat shit not because ey's the villain and the "hero" has tricked em into it, but because ey is the hero of the scene and ey knows ey must make this sacrifice for the good of eir friend Jim. That's really touching, isn't it? How many of your friends would eat dog shit to ensure your wedding goes off without a hitch [pun intended!]? OK, it's unlikely you or your friends will ever find yourselves in a situation where you'd need to eat shit for each other, but this is a movie, not real life -- why should it be perfectly realistic in its situations? My point is this scene applies both above principles: it lets us sympathize with Stifler's predicament and it uses logic and tension-building to make us (well, me at least) laugh almost involuntarily at a punchline that is, we realize immediately after laughing, is really horrible.

(no spoilers unless you read more. Be warned!)

Last night I went with my b(r)other Dan and eir girlfriend, Noelle, to see Northfork, the last possible showing, and it was everything I'd hoped for and expected. Since the more important event of the evening was mourning the sudden and unexpected death of Bertie's turtle, Blanche, that took precedence over blogging. And when the computer then destroyed the initial version of this post, I gave in to sadness and fury and talked to my own turtle through tears.

But all of that was fitting and appropriate in response to a movie about fading. Initially, this theme is literal, with still photos giving way to slow, deliberate movement, black and white shifting to color and sepia. The fades between scenes are long and visually and symbolically simplistic. At some point, shifting slowly, this technique gives way to rhythmic, parallelled cross-cutting between the stories. All the stories unfold predictably, but in an unforced way, to their necessary conclusions. There is no shock, only life, only things passing from presence to absence or back.

In 48 hours, the town of Northfork will be swallowed by the waters of a dammed river. Six men are given the task of removing the few remaining locals, a spirited young couple, an ark-dwelling bigamist and eir wives, and a crotchety, convictioned old-timer. They've been given "angel wings" to entice these residents to make the flight to higher ground by a strange priest, presumably though not explicitly Catholic, who runs an orphanage. Although the priest seems to be staying in Northfork, no effort is made to extract em. In fact, a couple return the little boy they've adopted on their way out of town, claiming ey's too ill to make the journey. Little Irwin is indeed sick, lying in bed and lively in a fevered dream world where ey meets four maybe-angels who seek redemption and escape, perhaps through eir own angelic nature. For all parties, the end is near.

Visually, Northfork is stunning. The landscapes contain so much emptiness and dark, drab remnants of human civilization. The six agents are straight out of a Magritte painting, all in black and deadpan in the face of absurdity. The Angels -- Cup of Tea, Flower Hercules, Cod, and Happy -- are a bundle of anachronisms, romantic clothes held together with rusted safety pins. The weatherbeaten priest in eir long, crisp cassock and homespun collar hobbles insistently through a world drained of color. And little Irwin remains perky and innocent whether sleeping or wearing a faded jacket and wandering the cemetery and the grounds around the orphanage.

Irwin's dream journeys immediately brought to mind Return to Oz, since I've recently rewatched the movie I found so terrifying as a child when it was released. The first hint for me was that Irwin sees a giant wooden beast with tremendously long front legs, like one of Oz's Wheelies, whose excellent costumes were emblazoned in my brain. Lingering shots of the table beside eir bed, though, call into question the "reality" of the Four Angels (Horsemen?). Beside em is a cup of tea, an airplane toy, a flower in a ceramic hand vase, a Viewmaster reminiscent of Happy's elaborate eyepieces, and a Hercules comic. Where Cod fits in, I'm not entirely sure, but ey's the greatest enigma of the group anyway, which is saying something.

I'd rather leave religion for a later post, but it's clear that angels play major roles, symbolically and perhaps literally, for the people of Northfork and the people of Northfork. These are not the sort of angels, though, who Touch the sick or lonely housewives. Stories say that angels once roamed the area like herds of bison, and like bison they have lost their proper role, their place in life and time. Angels in Northfork have become anachronisms, awkward reminders of an earlier, though perhaps not simpler, time. And anachronisms were what bothered many reviewers about this film. Some viewers took offense to such lines as "What are you talking about, Willis?" To me, though, this merely heightened the effect of the story and its narrative of progress and loss. While Northfork creates a gorgeous though frightening world, its falseness is always as apparent as the missing wall at the back of the church. In viewing, I can't give myself over to identification or belief in the unbelievable because it's so clear that anything worth believing here is unbelievable, and I think that's fine. Whether or not Irwin is an angel, whether or not ey meets other angels, whether anyone involved sees angels as anything more than a metaphor is immaterial. There's a story and it works as it should, as it must.

I said once that all stories end in death, and this is an example of what I mean. Life is all about entropy, the slow march toward death. If a town is destroyed to bring power to its residents, the town is still gone. What they have of it is memories, little scraps they create to tell the story of how things come and go, of what once was, of a town where angels roamed the hills like bison, or a simple time when the world could be divided into Ford men and Chevrolet men. We tell ourselves these stories to encourage and inspire us, but they're stories about death, and unlike the turtle who swam happily in the morning and then never moved again, we know the direction we're moving and know that looking back only pushes us forward like anything else. We may not know its trajectory, but we all know how our story will end.

And, duh, I completely forgot to mention the fact that Black Panther: The Client is written in nonchronological order. Um, I need to look at the book again. More later.

Get it from Amazon.com.

Quick plot summary: The Tomorrow Fund, some kind of organization for helping children in America (I think) supported by King T'Challa (a.k.a. Black Panther) of the African nation Wakanda, has fallen under allegations of corruption. After a little girl who was in a Tomorrow Fund publicity photo shoot with T'Challa several years ago ends up murdered, T'Challa decides to travel to New York City to to investigate the crime and personally fuck with whoever's responsible for destroying the Tomorrow Fund. An odd decision on T'Challa's part, considering ey leaves Wakanda in the midst of a war between the Wakandans and refugees from other war-torn African nations whom T'Challa has invited into the country for protection (without the approval of eir subjects, apparently).

Now, I gather from various sources that post-Lee-and-Kirby and pre-Priest Black Panther was a bit lame. Let's quote Christopher Priest:

My view of Panther is it makes no sense to me for so great and brilliant a creator to never use even the most modest and reasonable technology in the furtherance of his work. I mean, it just baffled me that Panther used to get beat up and shot almost every month, when he is certainly capable of kicking butt himself, and he could and should take some reasonable precautions (like a bullet-proof suit).... The guy who showed up in FANTASTIC FOUR #52 was definitely _not_ Tarzan. He wasn't clueless or uneducated. He used a _lot_ more gadgets than I do in the current series. He was duplicitous, mysterious, dangerous, ruthless, humorous, and violent.... I tend to think the Panther I'm writing is more in line with Stan and Jack's vision that Doormat Man (TM) who has traditionally been the colorless, humorless, often clueless guy standing in the back row of the Avengers class picture, or showing up for the odd guest-shot to fight *yawn* Klaw again, the guy who got beat up and dragged more often than I can mention.

Priest's Black Panther, to say the least, is not lame. Priest pokes fun at Black Panther's poor reputation with Everett K. Ross, T'Challa's U.S.-government assigned handler during eir visit to the country. Ross, expecting T'Challa to show up alone as usual, head to the Avengers mansion and "order up some ribs," is surprised when ey arrives at the airport in eir little Miata and discovers the king of Wakanda surrounded by a royal entourage of several dozen people. Ross is Priest's vehicle for helping the reader get into the story -- ey's just a normal person like us, who, despite being a resident of the Marvel Universe, isn't used to making small talk with demons and that sort of thing. Ey keeps up a running commentary throughout the story that offers both comic relief and insightful observations on the superhero genre -- like that it's odd for the king of the most technologically advanced nation in the world to put on a cat suit and jump out a window with eir bodyguards to go beat up some drug dealers in the streets of NYC.

According to essays on Priest's web site, Priest's goal was to take Black Panther out of the superhero genre and recreate it as a political thriller with stories that make sense with this character. Given that goal, Black Panther: The Client seems to be a bridge between the old Panther, who probably did nonsensical things like leave eir nation to come to America and fight bad guys, and the new Panther, who actually acts like a plausible political leader of a major nation. Priest uses Ross's incredulity at the king's antics (that jumping-out-the-window stuff, and the fact that T'Challa personally went out to join the battle between the Wakandans and the refugees) early in the story to notify us the readers that yes, ey knows just as we do that this is all pretty silly. A tense political situation in Wakanda develops throughout the story, even as T'Challa is running around NYC being a superhero, and the final page of the book provides a plot twist that sets up the series to finally jettison the superhero tropes and dive straight into the crazy world of international politics. Unfortunately, Marvel probably isn't going to collect more than the first twelve issues of Black Panther in TPBs, but Rose and I will definitely collect the entire series in pamphlet form eventually.

Now I'm thinking about other superhero stories that use normal human narrators to great effect. More on that later.

"I don't feel like I'm a flag-waving, torch-bearing feminist ... We don't have to attack them (men) to feel empowered."
-- Drew Barrymore in Famous magazine (for which I can't find a URL -- I pulled the quote from the Ventura County Star)

...the first "Charlie's Angels" movie, released 21/2 years ago, raked in most of its $125 million domestic gross from women, quite often mothers taking their (little) daughters to the multiplex.

...

Diaz: "The great thing about 'Charlie's Angels' is that you have these women who are totally capable, free, open and sexy. We wanted to make sure we portrayed women who have everything. They allow themselves to be as much of a woman as they are. They don't hide any of it."

Liu: "The movie touches upon the idea that women can be feminine and also capable and strong. I think that balance is clear."

Barrymore: "They have an opportunity to go out there and save the day, show their capabilities, be heroic, create a family and work together with other women in a bonded, beautiful, family, girlfriend, sisterly sort of fashion."
-- excerpts from this article [edit: link no longer works] at Indystar.com

Did you know Charlie's Angels was a feminist movie? It's not the antisex "bra-burning" feminism often associated with the Women's Liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It's third-wave feminism or lipstick feminism or antifeminist feminism or whatever you want to call it. "Third-wave" seems to be probably the most popular. I'm not going to write a thesis on third-wave feminism here, both because I don't have time and because I don't entirely understand it, so I googled "third wave feminism" for you. Since I'm talkign about Charlie's Angels here, I'll focus on a key idea: it's OK to be empowered and sexy. This is generally voiced as a response to second-wave feminism (Women's Lib), which supposedly was antisex and antimale. This is an overly narrow view of what the Women's Lib movement offered in terms of sexuality, but OK, let's go with it. We've got Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu up there telling us that Charlie's Angels is all about women being strong and sexy. About the empowerment of kicking somebody's ass in stiletto heels.

There's sometimes a fine line between sexual empowerment and sexual exploitation. Actually, fuck that shit -- in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, I'm pretty sure there's not a line at all. It's a (pretty mild, considering the PG-13) skin flick, it's got a lap-dancing scene, woman-on-woman licking, lots of tracking shots of Cameron Diaz's ass. Diaz, Barrmore and Liu are being exploited, exploiting themselves, using sex to exploit others, and all this exploitation is exploited for our entertainment. So I guess the questions are 1) can exploitation be empowering? and 2) can young girls, or whoever, be empowered by watching other women be empowered through exploitation? Good questions. I'm not sure how qualified I am, as a member of the patriarchy, to answer those questions. Read all that stuff about third-wave feminism and decide for yourself. Maybe Rose can enlighten us....

I can answer another question: if the answer to those other two questions is "Yes," is Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle an empowering movie for young girls or women in general? I'm gonna say no. It seems to me that in order for a movie to be feminist and empowering, it should offer some commentary or have something to say about feminism and empowerment. I mean, it should have more to say than, "Hey, we can be action heroes and wear makeup and high heels!" I'm being a snob -- I expect movies to have some intellectual content. Even Terminator 3 was a smarter movie than Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. It's a stupid action movie with some good action scenes and a borderline-nonsensical plot that exists only to provide excuses for the action scenes. The movie was clearly designed with the idea of female empowerment in mind -- Drew Barrymore's character gets to beat up on eir abusive homicidal ex-boyfriend, the Angels learn about the power of sisterhood, etc. I didn't notice any femme power stuff in the ads and trailers, but there are lots of interviews with the three stars in which they talk about empowerment and all that. Is that all you need? Ass-kicking action girls + hot clothes and makeup = feminism? Hmm, hmm.

Hell, I don't know. Was anybody empowered by Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle?

I bought some comics the other day.

Bad Girls #1 (not a permalink, I think): Writer is Steven Vance, artist is Jennifer Graves. I'll add the names of the inker and colorist and letterer when I get a chance to look at the book again. This starts out as pretty standard, though well-written, high-scool drama, with Lauren, the new girl in town, arriving for eir first day of school. There have been a million young-adult novels with exactly the same premise. This story has the refreshing twist that Lauren is friendly with nerds and the popular clique. Of course, all the popular kids are still utterly evil, because High School Cliques Are Bad or something. The other twist is that the evil popular girls get superpowers and begin wreaking havoc (hence, Bad Girls). The bad girls' blasé attitude toward their newfound powers -- merely another symptom of being perfect and popular, in their eyes, apparently -- is pretty amusing. It looks like this story is going to involve Lauren becoming a superhero to battle the Bad Girls, Lauren and the nerd who invented the superhero potion falling in love, etc. Not exciting, but it's mildly clever and pleasant.

The Crew #1 (actually a link to issue #3, and not I think a permalink either): Writer is Christopher Priest, artist is Joe Bennett. Other names to be added later. After reading the Black Panther: Client trade, I expected to find the same nonlinear narrative and comedy in The Crew. Instead, I find a dead-serious street-level crime drama with a straightforward narrative. James Rhodes, bankrupt ex-CEO of Stark Industries, finds out eir crack-addicted prostitute sister has been murdered. After discovering to eir chagrin that ey can't just hack into an NSA satellite surveillance photo database, grab some pictures of eir sister's murder, and hand them over to the police to get the murderers arrested, ey decides to go vigilante. Judging by the Iron Man armor Rhodes is wearing on the cover, I assume ey's going to become somewhat more superpowered in subsequent issues (of course, ey's already pretty bad-ass, considering eir (as far as I know, at least) presumably non-action-packed business training and career). The event -- eir sister's murder -- that galvanizes Rhodes to go beat up bad guys is better than another seemingly typical father-figure murder. As with Bad Girls, there's nothing amazing here, but I expect Priest to do something interesting with the concept. I don't really expect Marvel to collect this series, so I'm considering buying it in single issues.

Speaking of Christopher Priest, Black Panther is my new favorite comic. And, of course, no way Marvel will collect the entire run in TPBs. Time to start searching eBay for backissues. More on Black Panther: Client later.

The Athenian Murders by José Carlos Somoza is not as clever as it should be. It also does not have as much substance as it pretends. This lack of substance isn't a flaw in the writing, but the punchline of an elaborate joke. You might ask if 272 pages is excessive for an amusing, not hilarious, little joke, and the answer is "yes." But the problem is, Somoza needs those 272 pages to tell the joke, and even that is almost not enough.

Right, but what the hell is The Athenian Murders? Well, it's a novel, written shortly after the Pelopponesian War, in which "Decipherer of Enigmas" (read: Sherlock Holmes type) Heracles Pontor and Academy teacher Diagoras attempt to solve the mysteries surrounding the apparent death by wolf-mauling of an ephebe who attended the Academy. There are footnotes from the Translator (not Sonia Soto, who translated Somoza's Spanish novel into English, but the fictional translator who's translating the fictional Greek novel). Of course, there's more to this than an anachronistic murder mystery, and the footnotes aren't there to add a sense of realism -- they're an integral part of the metafiction which is the real central story of The Athenian Murders. As the characters in the Greek novel try to solve murders and debate the inherent rationality or irrationality of the world, the metastory emerging from the interactions of that Greek story and the Translator's footnote story grapples with the validity of Plato's philosophy.

There's a quote at the beginning of the book that I'll put here when I get a chance to look at the book again. For now, suffice to say that it's a quote from Plato listing the five ways of knowing an idea: 1) its name, 2) its definition, 3) its image, 4) the knowledge or intelligence about the idea, 5) the idea itself. The big question in this book is whether those five levels of knowledge exist. The first three, I think we can easily agree that those exist. The fourth one, I have nothing to say about it because I don't remember exactly what Plato was getting at right now. Now that fifth level is some hardcore Platonism. I don't think it's giving too much away to say that The Athenian Murders is ultimately either an attempt to prove or refute that the fifth level of knowledge, knowledge of the ideal form of the idea itself, exists. The book makes use of eidetic metaphor (supposedly a literary technique used by the ancient Greeks, actually invented by Somoza), by which seemingly random metaphorical images are scattered through the text which can be pieced together by the reader to create a hidden image. E.g. the first chapter of The Athenian Murders contains many references to hair, especially manes of hair, and gaping maws and teeth -- what is this? A lion! So we can see where this is going -- if everybody who reads the text gets the image of the lion, then the idea of the lion exists in the text, right? That question is the key to The Athenian Murders.

The end of the book is pretty clever (though not, as I said, quite clever enough), and I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't read the book. So, what can I say. This book would have benefitted from being a bit more Greek -- I would have liked some more stock Greek phrases that you see often in ancient texts, to make it seem more like a real text translated from Greek. And Somoza could have done better research. There's a sex scene that involves some highly un-Greek sex (although there's possibly a justification for it in the way the Translator, down in eir footnotes, is interacting with the text). Somoza says Athena has blue eyes (they're gray!), and the way the characters evoke the names of gods seems anachronistic, although I admittedly don't know much about how the Greeks actually went about evoking the names fo the gods. There are some realism problems with the Translator's footnotes -- ey's oddly obsessed with the eidesis in the text, to the point of failing to write footnotes about anything else, and ey clearly has never read the text through at all before translating it, which is not at all according to custom in good translations. If either of those problems were fixed, the book wouldn't work as well at establishing the set-up for its punchline, so I'm willing to forgive them. Many of the anachronisms and lack of Greekness in the writing, though, do detract a lot from the book.

This is a pretty good book. I usually expect a story this length to be more than a joke at the expense of people who've been dead for thousands of years, but it's not a bad joke. The book's tragic paradox -- it's too long for the joke to be satisfying, but it has to be this long for the joke to work -- does endear me more to it. It would have seemed cleverer if it had read more like a geniune Greek text (it occurs to me that this could be at least partly the translator's (i.e. Sonia Soto's) fault -- I can't read Spanish, so I can't check how Greek that version is). I think other reviews have overstated the cleverness and deepness of the book's thesis, which is too bad. My first reaction after reading it was disappointment, because I thought the book had merely failed to adequately argue its thesis. On reflection, I decided that this failure was a deliberate punchline to a joke, which means the book is more clever than I initially thought.