Self-Portrait of The Philosophe at 40 Years of Age



In the 17th Century, a fashionable pastime in high society was writing portraits of oneself and others. French writer François VI, Duc de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) begins his self-portrait with a physical description:

"[I] am of medium height, well set-up and proportioned, by complexion dark but fairly uniform . . ."¹

As for myself, I am of short height, slight of build, my complexion light, having exchanged the freckles of my youth for large, noticeable pores. Despite gaining flab around my middle, my cheeks remain drawn. My hair is not as red as it once was, and my blue eyes are bloodshot from too much time staring at a computer screen. I am no great looker, but a strong jawline, prominent nose and broad shoulders have served me well enough with the fairer sex, even if I have never been a ladies' man.

"My expression has something melancholy and aloof about it which makes most people think I am supercilious . . ."²

My expression is often blank and reticent, which combined with my unobtrusive manner makes people think me uncaring or dismissive even when I am not--although often I really don’t care about certain acquaintances. I imagine my face is also often melancholy and plaintive, but who knows how I look to others? Behind my eyes, I am simply baffled or dismayed by just about everything.

"[I] am not given to muddled thinking, yet I am so preoccupied with my gloomy thoughts that I often express my ideas very badly . . ."³

“Gloomy thoughts” are my constant companions. Like the Furies beleaguering Orestes, they drive me through each day, but this is alleviated somewhat of late. Perhaps my intellectual adventurousness has laid some burdensome questions to rest, or perhaps life has simply prepared a more comfortable situation for me midway along the natural lifespan. At the moment, my family and I enjoy a home that is more happy than not, and I hope this will continue for some time.

"I am fond of all kinds of reading, but especially that in which there is something to train the mind and toughen the soul . . ."⁴

Despite having traveled much of the world and tried many exotic pastimes, I currently lead an exceedingly sedentary, isolated and bookish lifestyle. I work long hours at home, and late at night when the work is done, I am back in my study, at my desk writing or reading. This has resulted in regular blog posts the past year, but I long for more activity. Should the right situation present itself, I will throw myself into it gamely.

I have no outstanding success or worldly riches of which to boast, but I take my work seriously and I have been rewarded with a small name for myself in my precise field. At this point, the career I have is likely to be the one I keep, with the lofty dreams of my earlier years further and further out of reach, but by the time you reach this age, you begin to accept that while life still holds plenty of possibilities, they are fast giving ground to established realities.

To conclude, I return to La Rochefoucauld once more:

"That, in plain terms, is what I believe I am like . . . and I think it will be found that my own opinion of myself in this respect is not far from the truth."⁵

 

 

 

***

 

1. La Rochefoucauld. Trans. Leonard Tancock. Maxims (London, England: Penguin Books, 1959), 25.

2. Ibid., 25.

3. Ibid., 26-27.

4. Ibid., 27.

5. Ibid., 25.

 

Why It's Difficult to Talk About the Killing of Police Officers

When Ismaayil Brinsley shot to death two New York City police officers, the public conversation immediately merged with the debate about police killings because Brinsley had been upset over Eric Garner’s death at the hands of the NYPD. The debate has dominated my thoughts, but I’ve found it difficult to say anything.

The most obvious thing one might express is sorrow over the deaths of Officers Wenjian Liu and Raphael Ramos and sympathy for their families, but there are two problems with this. The first is that it may sound hollow, like those who always said about Trayvon Martin, “It’s too bad when any life is lost, but drugs, riots, low pants, blah, blah, blah.” These people reduce the dead human being to a preface to what they really care about, which is blaming the victim, denigrating his defenders and defending the murderer. I wouldn’t want to do the same to Liu and Ramos because their lives are no mere preface to whatever narratives I have adopted as a supporter of the protesters.

The other problem is that any statement of sympathy for the NYPD, however obvious or morally just, inevitably plays into the hands of those who have been waiting for their chance to shut down the protest movement. They have had no qualms about using Liu’s and Ramos’s deaths to further attack the Black Lives Matter movement by blaming the protestors for encouraging Brinsley’s actions and by calling for a suspension of the protests. They know very well that once a protest movement dissolves, it rarely comes back anytime soon.

And, of course, one might fight back by saying that Brinsley didn’t represent the protestors: He was a violent man with a criminal record who was disturbed enough to also shoot his ex-girlfriend and leave her to die immediately prior to his ambush on the police. Even claims that recent protests somehow pushed him over the edge are so tenuous that video of protesters chanting “Kill a cop!” had to be faked. But when the debate has been framed as protesters-vs.-police, anything less than police worship can sound like sympathy for the murderer.

Which is exactly what the protests are against.

Even broad statements to the effect that All Lives Matter are no good because they strengthen the appearance that the two putative sides--the police and aggrieved communities--are equal, when they are anything but. Brinsley’s actions were illegal, the police acted to stop him, and police departments have policies for helping the families of fallen officers. By contrast, the system turned its back on Eric Garner’s family and let the killers walk. Teenager Mike Brown’s killer walked. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice’s killers are on administrative leave. The police dismissed the shooting of Akai Gurley as an accident. John Crawford’s killers walked. News came out this week that Jordan Baker’s killer will walk. And this will continue until--if you care--you despair of it.

But how volubly am I willing to press these points when right now the families of two police officers are grieving their own loss amid a media swirl?

Thus, I’ve found it difficult to say anything about the Brinsley killings. The situation is a perfect example of how speech is imperfect and performative. You intend to say one thing but come across or are received differently. You say one thing, but your words have a different effect, even a contradictory one. Aware of that, the best I can do is offer this post analyzing the complications and hope such a contribution isn’t entirely without value.

 

 

The Best of 2014: Comics

This is a category that usually gets scant treatment in my Best Of posts, but 2014 was a good year in comics. Largely, this is due to a friend turning me on to digital comics. I quickly got caught up with Batwoman (previous post), and began looking around for the best titles today--among them Neil Gaiman’s return to The Sandman, Gerard Way’s contribution to the Spider-Verse, and the best-selling reboot of Ms. Marvel.

But what grabbed me most this year was a manga series called Cherry from a lesser-known author named Eisaku Kubonouchi. Volumes of Cherry have decidedly girly covers, so I was embarrassed when purchasing my first volume, but the story dragged me in, so I had to go back for more.

 

Cherry is a romantic comedy about recent high school graduate Kaoru, who works at a convenient store in a rural community. Sick of his dull life and unsure about the future, he elopes to Tokyo with his childhood sweetheart Fuko, but no sooner do they arrive than they realize they have no money, no jobs and no place to stay. Sure, the plot setup is half-baked, but so are Kaoru and Fuko. As they learn to fend for themselves in the city, they learn about love, friendship and growing up.

I was first attracted to Kubonouchi’s work when I ran across his sketches on Twitter. His illustrations of young women are dazzling and capture the essence of the Japanese word kirei (綺麗). Kirei means “pretty,” but it carries a number of other connotations. Foremost among them is cleanliness, but kirei also suggests delicacy and elegance more strongly than its English counterpart. Kirei is everything Japanese culture has traditionally told girls they should be. We might complain about the negative effects of such norms, but girly girls are people too and Kubonouchi draws them stunningly.

The above front covers are decent examples of Kubonouchi’s sense of kirei, but I recommend checking out his Twitter feed. He regularly posts illustrations at various stages of development from rough sketch to full color, and many showcase his humorous and cartoonish side as well.

 

Toward the end of the series, the complications of adult life--money, jobs, time constraints, social ties--threaten to pull Kaoru and Fuko apart, but they realize all the hard work and stress isn’t worth anything if you lose the one you love. This is cliché, but isn’t it something we all struggle with? How often do we feel like all the stuff that is dominating our lives isn’t what’s really important?

For all that, Cherry is also comedy. Kaoru and Fuko elope riding a pig, make friends with quirky characters, tangle with yakuza stooges, and get into the most ridiculous situations. Kubonouchi keeps the laughs coming, and the humor combined with striking art and a touching love story made this manga the most enjoyable comic series I read this year.

 

 

The Best of 2014: Music

 

It was a good year for music. My listening ranged freely among genres from classic soul like Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man to Swedish melodic death metal like Amon Amarth, but despite all the groovy or brutal music with hipster cred I could name as the best music I encountered in 2014, I have to go with “Let It Go” from Disney’s Frozen (2013).

 

As I understand it (I haven’t seen the full movie), Princess Elsa has the ability to create and control ice. This is a cause of embarrassment and conflict in the royal family, causing Elsa to flee the palace in an emotional fit and unleash her powers to cast an eternal winter over the land. She hides herself in the mountains and erects an ice fortress where she can live as a Snow Queen openly wielding her powers.

On the surface, the lyrics suggest a moment of self-empowerment. Elsa is declaring that she will no longer restrain herself for the comfort of others. And yet it is out of weakness--her inability to stay in her home kingdom--that she has fled to her mountain refuge, dragging all her emotional baggage with her. She is overcompensating, boasting even as she breaks inside.

Altogether then, “Let It Go” is a powerful statement of the simultaneous experience of strength and fragility that is being human. I read somewhere that when the scriptwriters of Frozen heard “Let It Go,” they thought it was so wonderful that it was unsuitable for a typical villain, so they reworked Elsa’s character to be more sympathetic. The result is a charming musical number that children the world over are singing in the original English or their own languages.

 

My 3-year-old is no different. He makes ice castles with Legos, copies Elsa’s gestures, and belts out the song all . . . day . . . long. The lyrics “Let it gooooo!” are simple enough, but it’s comical to hear him sing such grown-up phrases as “The past is in the past” and “Distance makes everything seem small.” Some are a bit of a mouthful for him, like “spiraling in frozen fractals all around,” but he soldiers through. Then, when he finally stops, it isn’t over because I can hear kids a few doors down singing it!

A worldwide hit, a poignant statement of human nature, and an inspiration to children and adults alike: not much makes it to that level, so despite all the artsy, retro, indie or badass music I could pick as my personal best of 2014, I choose a showtune from an animated Disney film.

 

 

Deux hommes et une femme et leurs livres (Best of 2014: Books, Part 2)

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn stands as the best book I read this year, because it was every bit the thrill ride it was cracked up to be (previous post), but I had the good fortune of running across a lot of other interesting books this year. By some coincidence, the best of them came in pairs by French authors: Michel Houellebecq, Francoise Sagan and Milan Kundera.


Michel Houellebecq:

Early in the year, I discovered Michel Houellebecq, whose books in the UK editions have covers with a shameless sex-sells aesthetic. Nonetheless, they’re eye-catching, and a good book cover is worth nearly as much as a good book:

 

Atomised (The Elementary Particles in US editions) follows the lives of two brothers. Michel is a molecular biologist with almost no interest in love, while his brother Bruno is a loser obsessed with sex. They are both, as the title expresses, isolated from their fellow human beings by the conditions of modern life, among them market forces dominating everything from economics to sex. Largely set in today’s world, the story reaches beyond into science fiction. Michel discovers a method for cloning humans, thereby separating reproduction from love and sex.

It’s a book of ideas with a lot of explicit sex, which is all well and good, but what hooked me was the author’s blatant misanthropy and pessimism. Let’s face it, more often than not the world is a crock of shit, and Houellebecq isn’t afraid to say so. I’m not as much of a pessimist as I once was, but I can’t deny that in Atomised I encountered passages echoing many of my own dark thoughts. The author’s voice was a familiar one, and as one that doesn’t sugarcoat, I found it a great relief.

Platform is also about a man named Michel, and he too is sex-obsessed. An unrepentant sex tourist, he and his girlfriend embark on a sex tourism business venture, but it doesn’t end well. While Houellebecq’s portrayal of the lonely men who ache for sex with young women is at times compassionate and eloquent, the novel often comes off as propaganda in favor of sex tourism without an honest look at its downsides, such as how awful the lives of many prostitutes must be. Platform, while interesting, was less inspiring than Atomised. Often, I put it down feeling dirty.

 

 

Francoise Sagan:

 

The works of Francoise Sagan are also sordid--but less hard-core. Bonjour Tristesse is about Raymond and his daughter Cecile who spend their summers drinking, partying, lazing about and sleeping around on the French Riviera. Their dissolute lifestyle is scandalous for the times and alienates them from respectable society. When her father makes a bid to marry a proper woman, Cecile will have none of it and hatches a plot that ends in tragedy.

Bonjour Tristesse is fluff, and A Certain Smile--about a young girl’s love affair with an older, married man--is fluffier still. But I enjoyed these books. Their literary heft and insight into the human spirit is debatable, but the voices of the young protagonists are charmingly affectless and carry you along for short, sweet rides. Perhaps it’s just me, but I believe the languorous and free-spirited nature of Sagan’s characters are visible in the eyes of the author herself:

 

 

 

Milan Kundera:

While Milan Kundera’s Immortality and The Unbearable Lightness of Being were both written in Czech, the author is usually described as French-Czech, so he makes it into this post on a technicality. Immortality is a book that reaches in many directions, and while I’ve already posted on it twice, I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface. Check out my earlier posts (4/10/2014, 4/20/2014) or just check out this cover illustration for Immortality because it’s excellent:

 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with an original take on Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence and goes on to relate the changing fortunes of a doctor named Tomas, his wife Tereza, and his lover Sabina against the backdrop of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia. As the years pass, they make decisions that burden or lighten their emotional state, and along the way they have many amorous and erotic encounters.

While Lacanian psychoanalytic theory can be applied to anything, I was surprised to find Kundera intentionally applying it as the framework underpinning his characters, right down to chapters headed “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words.” Since words like “music” or “fidelity” mean different things to each person, we often fail to understand each other. One of Jacques Lacan’s famous pronouncements is “Communication is a successful misunderstanding.” And so it goes for Tomas, Tereza and Sabina. They inevitably fail to grasp each other, but sometimes they get along well nonetheless.

Not only does Lacan’s theory of signification factor heavily in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but there were also clear references to the Mirror Stage, objet petit a, foreclosure, and other Lacanian concepts without ever mentioning Lacan or using his curious terminology. No doubt others have noticed this in the 30 years since the book was published, but I hope to go into it more in a later post.

None of that was part of the reading I had scheduled for myself this year (I did finish the Dune arc laid out by Frank Herbert and take down a handful of Michael Moorcock’s Elric books as planned), but it was unscheduled reading in French literature that turned up some of the best reading in 2014.

 

 

When Is an Unarmed Teen Not Unarmed?

From the start, it was almost a forgone conclusion, because of systemic biases, that the law would not hold police officer Darren Wilson accountable for shooting and killing unarmed teenager Michael Brown (explainer). Since the announcement of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson, a lot of analysis from legal and law enforcement experts has pressed the point that irregularities in the handling of the case by the police and Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch made certain Wilson wouldn’t face charges. I’m not the one to analyze that data, but I do want to look at some astounding narrative sleight-of-hand that aided the authorities in their crime.

 

The above cover for satirical news publisher The Onion appeared on August 15 soon after Michael Brown’s death. It’s a funny cover, taking a jab at those who see every person of color, every young man with swagger, every boy in a hoodie, as a threat, and it uses a clear logical contradiction to do so: Assuming you have the average human being’s rational apparatus, you would have to switch it off to think that an unarmed teen is armed.

That is the exact narrative, however, that Wilson sympathizers have been pushing and that the anti-protester crowd embraces today. The first trolls to engage me on Twitter always started with some version of “But hey, Michael Brown was a big guy.” The idea is that Michael Brown was so big, so ferocious, that with his bare hands he was an immediate threat to the life of a grown man his own size, armed and trained. Wilson made the same claims in his testimony--in which he described Michael Brown as a “demon.”

All of this is to say, in effect, that unarmed teenager Michael Brown was actually armed. He was deadly. The very lunatic logic behind the humor of The Onion’s cover has become the narrative of everyone--including many in high places--who thinks Darren Wilson did his job, Michael Brown got what was coming to him, and the protesters should just shut up. This narrative is tried-and-true and has gotten many a killer off the hook, while the victim's parents and friends cope with the loss of a loved one in the face of a system that will do exactly nothing for them.

I have held off posting this as I tried to decide how much I want to continue to address the issue--like the death of Trayvon Martin, I find this injustice upsetting--and as I have waited, the story has continued to develop. Wilson has resigned without severance pay, President Obama has met with community leaders to look for solutions, and protestors of all variety continue to raise a stink. In the end, I suppose I have to post this to raise my own small voice of solidarity with those who have little power but a voice to raise.

When is an unarmed teenager not unarmed? When he’s armed, of course. We might also ask where is an unarmed teenager not unarmed? Why, in America, of course. Because in America, you can kill unarmed kids in broad daylight in front of witnesses and not even go to trial.

Justice in Ferguson has been served up like a sad, sick joke.

 

 

***

 

Previous posts on Ferguson:

Ferguson: How Did We Get Here?

Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom

Don't Look Away from Mike Brown

 

 



 

Don’t Look Away from Mike Brown (Zizek/Lacan 3)

The death of unarmed teenager Mike Brown is a problem, and a persistent one (explainer). Watching livefeed of the earliest protests, I remember a commenter speculating that the furor would die down in a couple weeks. I was inclined to agree, and yet here we are two months later and Ferguson remains a prominent issue. As I write this, protests are happening all over the country for #O22 and Missouri Governor Jay Nixon is the target of a Twitter storm. This on the heels of the large protests held earlier this month as part of Ferguson October.

The protesters’ reaction to police officer Darren Wilson’s actions has become an action in itself, thereby instigating a reaction in the form of anti-protesters. The anti-protesters range from racists who hurl verbal abuse at protesters to everyday decent folk discomfited by the whole incident, and it is the objections of this latter group that most interest me. I am convinced they know Darren Wilson was horribly wrong that day on Canfield Drive but for some reason still side with him.

In debate, they will say that riots are bad, that protests achieve nothing and that it’s all race-baiting anyway. They will say the police are heroes who protect the people for little reward. They will say the call to arrest Darren Wilson is a witch hunt and we should wait for the results of an investigation. They will say it’s in the past, so let it go. As mind-boggling as it is, they will complain about young men who wear their pants too low.

All of this avoids the central problem of Darren Wilson shooting Mike Brown to death.

They will even blame the victim. They will tell you things that appear to be true, that he hung around with gang members, wrote rap lyrics, smoked marijuana, shoplifted, and physically threatened a store clerk. They will tell you things alleged, that he assaulted Darren Wilson and tried to grab his weapon. They will tell you things proven false, that he beat Darren Wilson so badly the officer had to be hospitalized with severe injuries. And in doing this, they support a position contradictory to what they know to be true.

Namely, a police officer killing an unarmed teenager is bad, bad business.

The arguments of the anti-protester crowd are the result of defense mechanisms for avoiding the ugly truth at the point of origin: A police officer shot an unarmed teenager dead. Specifically, Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department fired repeatedly at unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown, hitting him at least six times (twice in the head) according to a preliminary autopsy. Mike Brown’s death--to say nothing of broader problems such as social inequality and abuse of power--is a stain on the fantasy view of the world that we often trick ourselves into believing is reality. His death is a threat to a more comfortable view of society and therefore must be repressed.

I suspect that what really rankles the average anti-protestor isn’t anything more than mild distaste for people who go into the street (or online) and make a scene. They find all the tears and the gnashing of teeth to be unseemly. Raising a fuss and being an eyesore in public spaces isn’t what decent people do. It may sound trivial, but there is a culture in America within which this is motivation enough to ignore the unjust death of a boy at the hands of the law.

Mike Brown’s death is indeed a stain, a blot, a blemish on the face of American society, and this is less figurative than you might think. Mike Brown’s body was eventually removed from the street, but his face continues to show up in photographs in the news and his name appears on the protesters' signs and in their chants. This week, a mural in New Jersey showing Mike Brown’s face accompanied by the phrase “Sagging pants is not probable cause!!” had to be painted over because it made the local police uncomfortable.

Stain removed. Blemish hidden. Truth repressed.

Through terminology such as defense mechanism and repression, I am applying rudimentary psychoanalytical theory to a social phenomenon. I just read in Lacan by Lionel Bailly that French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan believed some signifiers buried in the unconscious were so integral to the psyche’s coherence that unearthing them would cause the patient to come unraveled. Thus, they were better left untouched. But as individuals faced with Ferguson, we are not facing a truth as psychologically identity-shattering as that, are we?

So you have a choice. Assuming you do know in your heart of hearts that police officers gunning down unarmed teenagers is wrong, you may face this or avert your gaze. You may identify with the victim and say “I am Mike Brown” (earlier post), or you may keep making excuses to avoid looking at the ugly truth. If you choose the former, the world will not fall apart, only your picture of it will. If you choose the latter, you will have further chances to redeem yourself: The next Mike Brown, the next Eric Garner, the next Trayvon Martin will be along all too soon.

 ***

Earlier posts in this series:

Ferguson: How Did We Get Here?

Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom

The Rise and Fall of Kate Kane aka Batwoman

“Kate Kane survived a brutal kidnapping by terrorists that left her mother dead and her twin sister lost. Following in her father’s footsteps, she vowed to serve her country and attended West Point until she was expelled under ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ Now she is many things: estranged daughter, grieving sister, proud lesbian, brave soldier, determined hero. She is Batwoman.” --Batwoman 

Successful superheroes inspire their corporate backers to create spinoffs. Thus, Superman gets a whole family complete with pet dog Krypto, while Batman has Batgirl and the lesser-known Batwoman (profile). This kind of gimmick may sound corny to those who don’t read comics, but when DC Comics rebooted Batwoman in 2006, they weren’t messing around.

One thing to know about Batwoman is she is a lesbian. As I remember it, her new incarnation’s very first appearances were unremarkable, but her sexual orientation raised eyebrows among comic book readers. I remember gay men appearing in comics before, but I don’t remember any lesbians. This was when I first heard the term “lipstick lesbian,” because Kate Kane--the woman behind the mask--exhibits traditionally feminine traits such as wearing makeup.

At first, it seemed DC intended to relegate this bold move to a practically unknown character, but that proved untrue. From 2009 to 2010, Batwoman was the main feature in issues #854-#863 of Detective Comics, one of DC’s longest-running titles and the one that introduced Batman in 1939. The creative team was top-notch, consisting of writer Greg Rucka and artist J.H. Williams III. They developed what was to become, for a time, one of DC’s better characters.

Rucka/Williams--and later Williams and W. Haden Blackman--handled Batwoman’s sexual orientation with skill. It was no joke or cheap thrill, and while an egalitarian message did appear from time to time, it was never ham-fisted. Instead, the series simply showed what it would be like for a woman who happens to be gay to also be a superhero.

For years in comics and film, we have seen Bruce Wayne try to balance his life as a crimefighter with his love life, and Kate Kane must do the same. Her main love interest is Maggie Sawyer, who gets jealous when vigilantism or other women take too much of her girlfriend’s time. There’s kissing, cuddling and lazing in bed, but it’s never voyeuristic. And while there are plenty of hotties hanging around--a busty blond here, an exotic femme fatale there--Kate is no playgirl. The relationships come across as more meaningful than the customary Bruce Wayne fling.

 

What intrigued me most was how the creative minds behind Batwoman balanced a socially conscious hero with the traditional eye-candy approach of comics. In regular life, Kate Kane is a petite and cute redhead with a wardrobe that blends Goth, girly and menswear à la Coco Chanel. But as Batwoman, she’s a busty, leggy wonder in skintight black latex with red highlights.

 

 

However, the approach was always respectful. Often when comics decide to focus on women, the result is a gaggle of bodacious superheroines lounging around like Victoria’s Secret Angels before launching into battles that require flouncing in ways that plant their special parts right in your face. By contrast, Batwoman always manages to look good, and there’s a healthy eroticism at work, but she’s never there for drooling over.

Feminism has taken a liking to comics, and Batwoman satisfies its demands well without preaching. Rereading early arcs of Batwoman’s own monthly title, I was surprised at the degree to which powerful and professional women dominate the cast of characters. Kate’s girlfriend Maggie is a captain in the Gotham City Police Department, she maintains a rocky working relationship with Agent Cameron Chase of the Department of Extranormal Operations, and her sidekick is Bette Kane (aka Flamebird). The villains tend to be women as well, from her twin sister Beth to the Medusa operative Sune. Aside from Kate’s father, who serves as Kate’s primary backup, men come and go and generally carry little weight.

In addition to addressing timely issues, Batwoman was for years simply written and drawn better than most comics. The writing maintained the carnivalesque atmosphere of Batman and combined it with a gritty, noir realism. Meanwhile, the art was stunning.

But comic book publishers excel at ruining a good thing.

In 2013, Williams and Blackman suddenly quit because of editorial interference. Apparently it had been going on for a while, and when DC told them Kate Kane and Maggie Sawyer could not get married, it was the last straw. They were on board to do a few more issues, but DC cut them off just as Batwoman was about to kick Batman’s betighted ass.

 

New month, new creative team, new arc (without any resolution to the previous one), and a massive drop in quality. Batwoman has since become a vampire and fought a battle in outer space against monsters so unimaginative that Ben 10: Alien Force, or hell, the Care Bears would sniff in derision. I hate to end on a sour note, but I shouldn’t have kept my subscription as long as I did. Creative teams like those who oversaw Batwoman’s rebirth rarely come along, and now they’ve moved on to other projects.

 

 

Gone Girl: A Basically Spoiler-Free Review

“Mercilessly entertaining.” --Vanity Fair

“An ingenious and viperish thriller . . . twisted and wild.” --Entertainment Weekly

“Will give you the creeps and keep you on the edge until the last page.” --People

 

First there was Gone Girl the bestselling book, now there is Gone Girl the hit movie, so I decided to see what all the buzz was about. Having just finished the novel, I’m halfway through the phenomenon, and while I’m generally not one for murder mysteries, I have to say Gone Girl is one of those rare books whose cover blurbs provide an honest description of what’s inside.

The story begins with the morning of the disappearance of Amy Dunne as told by her husband Nick Dunne. Nick is--as countless reviewers have noted--an unreliable narrator. He leaves out what he was doing at the precise time his wife disappeared, he’s lying to the police, and he knows more than he’s telling you. Other chapters are from Amy’s viewpoint through diary entries starting a few years earlier.

And she isn’t reliable either.

The main question on every reader’s mind is “Did Nick kill his wife or didn’t he?” and chapters pass, chapters told from his viewpoint, without an answer to that question. He’s suspicious as hell and the evidence mounts, but . . . could there be another explanation? This all leads to the Gone Girl Twist that has shocked many a reader:

 

The device is flawlessly executed by author Gillian Flynn. She gets her hooks in with the first chapter and then tugs you along. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book this engaging--comparisons to Stephen King’s Bag of Bones and Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full come to mind. The writing was so good that Gillian Flynn’s photo on the back cover irritated me: No one should get to be this talented! And sell loads of books! And get rich! And be pretty, too!

Well, Gillian Flynn does.

The device in the first half of Gone Girl is, however, not without its weakness. Flynn has to take you inside the head of Nick Dunne but pick and choose with care what she reveals. Like many formal devices, it’s borderline gimmick and once you notice it, it stands out and doesn’t quite make sense. After all, Nick knows from the start whether he’s guilty or innocent, so why doesn’t he ever think it in so many words?

Because the author is preparing a surprise and doesn’t want to ruin it.

 

I’m reminded of The Sixth Sense. At the end of the film, we find out that Bruce Willis’s character was a ghost the whole time. To pull this off, screenwriter and director M. Night Shyamalan has carefully orchestrated the drama so that Willis appears to interact with other people but actually only interacts with the kid who sees dead people. Once you notice this, you realize it makes no sense internally to the movie. (Surely Willis would have noticed something sooner . . . “Hey, why doesn’t anybody but that one kid talk to me? What happened to my biological functions? I used to always pee in the middle of the night!”) It only makes sense outside the film, as a trick played by a director on an audience.

As such, authorial hocus-pocus can be a distraction that jerks the reader out of the world of a work of fiction. It might not, however, if the work has more going for it--characters you care about, a gripping plot, fascinating subtexts, etc.--and Gone Girl certainly does. Even after the main twist, Flynn keeps you guessing on a number of fronts up until, yes, the very last page. As an author, she has as many tricks as do the characters of her book.

You can view Gone Girl as about marriage, or feminism, or rape, or the media, or the law, or the economy, or American life today--and this kind of critique is showing up online now that the movie is out--but like many a good author of thrillers, Flynn is more concerned with character and plot. Any deeper themes lie underneath, lending weight to what is above all just one hell of a yarn.

 

I usually post my “Best of” series in December, but Gone Girl was good enough that I can go ahead and declare it one of The Gleaming Sword’s Best Books of 2014.