Nihilism and the Batgirl #41 Variant Cover Fracas

"I remember you describing the white face and the green hair to me when I was a kid. Scared the hell out of me."  --Barbara Gordon

I’m thankful to live in a time when comic books are taken seriously enough to occasion regular scandals discussed not just among fans but also in mainstream publications. One such controversy arose this week when DC Comics revealed a variant cover for Batgirl #41 illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque:

 

At first glance, it's nothing more than your standard cover depicting a supervillain threatening a superhero. The Joker, one of the comic book genre’s most homicidally maniacal villains, has done this countless times, and putting his mad grin on his victims in one way or another (laughing gas, paint, blood) has been a constant motif since the character’s appearance in 1940. Nonetheless, there was an immediate furor and accompanying hashtag campaign to #ChangeTheCover.

Those calling on DC to change the cover said it's too dark for the New 52 imprint's incarnation of Batgirl, which has featured cartoonish art and brighter themes. The current run of Batgirl has also attempted to portray female heroes in an empowering light--and indeed this is the trend in mainstream comics today--and yet Albuquerque’s cover depicts Batgirl as a victim, quivering and in tears. Even worse, the cover is yet another example of that old trope in male-dominated media of men threatening women, which all too often carries a suggestion of the female character’s sexual vulnerability and tantalizes readers with the possibility of vicarious rape. It doesn’t help that the cover is an allusion to the acclaimed yet notorious Batman graphic novel The Killing Joke (1988) written by Alan Moore, in which the Joker shot Barbara Gordon (one of the women to have worn the cowl), stripped her naked, photographed her bleeding and nude, and also may have raped her.

The cover has had its defenders. The Joker is a fictional villain, so of course he isn’t going to conform to enlightened standards of morality. Besides, it’s just a variant cover and it refers to canonical events in Barbara Gordon’s past. Caving in to outcry from some people according to their taste sets a dangerous precedent allowing future social justice warriors to prevent bad guys from doing bad things and, even worse, artists from doing their job with integrity. Is it not a form of censorship to tell artists that they may not draw anything some people find offensive? As Green Arrow artist Patrick Zircher Tweeted, by those standards The Killing Joke, a masterpiece of the genre, would not stand a chance of publication today. Comic book writers, artists and publishers could soon find themselves conforming to standards more suffocating than when every comic came stamped with the approval of the Comics Code Authority.

Personally, I think the cover is good precisely because of its questionable taste. It’s about time someone made the Joker disturbing again. Perhaps more than any other villain, he should be disturbing. This is what made The Killing Joke great. It didn’t treat the Joker as a goofy character in a book, it treated him like the embodiment of something you should fear like the Devil. Barbara Gordon herself impresses this upon Batman in the graphic novel:

No! No, it’s not okay! He’s . . . He’s taking it to the limit this time . . . You didn’t see. You didn't see his eyes.

But that’s just my take and I don’t like takes as much as I like getting to the bottom of things. So which side has the argument that settles the issue and how do we know? Which is the argument that it all boils down to? As usual with these debates, which rest on conflicting interpretations of an inherently ambiguous text, I hold there is no right answer and nowhere to turn for the final word on the matter as a whole.

From Batgirl #40 illustrated by current series regular Babs Tarr:

 

It would be gratifying if there were a right answer, then we could be certain we had it and everyone else was wrong. And it would be easier, because then there would be proof, some logic, some evidence, some authority that would end the debate. But there isn’t. Even something like artistic integrity that would seem paramount only extends as far as the artist’s right to draw what he wants and doesn’t extend any further. Most would agree, for example, that DC can publish whatever it wants, critics can raise a fuss if they want, consumers can buy or not buy the issue as they please, and so on.

Without any clear answer, our only recourse for resolving such an issue is a messy process involving a multitude of individuals, organizations, systems and cultural milieux hashing it out, sometimes duking it out, or simply shouting it out, to one imperfect conclusion or another. In this case, while many have grumbled at the outcome, when the SJWs raised a fuss, the artist apologized and the company agreed not to publish the cover. That wasn’t the right answer in any absolute sense--there is no such answer--but it was the answer that arose out of the cacophony of voices, rights and interests involved.

And it isn’t half-bad.

This type of thought is sometimes called anti-foundationalism, for it denies the existence of any ultimate ground upon which opinion about what should be rests. It is part of the positive brand of nihilism championed by politician and philosopher Gianni Vattimo. I’ve blogged about it before with regard to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and it has changed the way I approach nearly every issue. In a world without Truth, people must communicate--speaking and listening--to reach a consensus.

Consider this from Vattimo’s Nihilism & Emancipation:

An ethics that no longer refers to the Other, meaning to a transcendent being, will be an ethics of negotiation and consensus rather than an ethics of immutable principles or categorical imperatives speaking through the reason of everyone.

And this:

The goal is not to establish a definitive proof once and for all, only to establish an agreement that, albeit subject to revision, does nevertheless seriously bind the contracting parties (much more seriously than any “eternal principle” whatsoever.)

In the case of Batgirl #41, we might say that a weak consensus--or an apparent majority opinion--was reached by those whose interests were most immediately at stake, those who made their voices felt most firmly, and the general trend toward social consciousness in media. This consensus is flawed, temporary, and not without detractors, detractors who are at liberty to rejoin the fight next time.

This is what it means to live in the postmodern world, an intersubjective reality, and a democratic society. It’s complicated, it’s noisy, it’s frequently frustrating, but I would rather live in this world, in which answers are reached through the mechanisms of a free society, mechanisms which result from and include discourse, than a world in which answers are passed down from some unimpeachable authority--whether a despotic ruler, immutable law or abstract principle.

Other posts on comics:

Two Narratives: The Cover of Teen Titans #1
Thor Is the Woman of the Day!
The Rise and Fall of Kate Kane aka Batwoman


 

The Lacanian Real in Solaris (Zizek / Lacan 7)

The following is part of a series in which I apply rudimentary concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis to current events and film. My two principal texts are Lacan, an introductory text by Lionel Bailly, and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I present these posts in order to deepen my imperfect understanding of the concepts as well as to venture some insights of my own.

In Slavoj Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), the philosopher briefly applies the concept of Otherness in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to a scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic science fiction film Solaris. I wanted to explore the connection in detail on my own, but when I did, I reached my own hypothesis: The planet Solaris represents the Lacanian Real.

Solaris was originally a novel by Stanislaw Lem first published in 1961. Tarkovsky’s film appeared in 1972, and director Steven Soderbergh released his own version in 2002. All these versions tell of a man named Kris who travels to a space station orbiting a planet named Solaris. Upon arrival, he finds one crew member dead and others coming unglued due to unwanted visitations by uncanny guests somehow connected to the planet.

 

The novel describes in detail the findings of the fictional field of study called Solaristics, the study of Solaris. All experiences with the planet for over 100 years have defied human explanation, from its orbit to its substance. In Tarkovsky’s film, it appears as a shifting viscous mass, while in Soderbergh’s it is an ethereal gas giant. In the novel, Solaris exhibits an unending variety of forms, which scientists have attempted to categorize with names like extensors, mimoids and asymmetriads. One theory is that the whole planet is an alien consciousness, but this too is uncertain. The book’s narrator states the situation bluntly:

“The sum total of known facts was strictly negative.”

Lem himself has stated that this was the intended focus of his novel:

“I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images.”

That’s a fair description of the Real in Lacanaian psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan’s concepts don’t have precise definitions so much as clouds of signifiers, but here are some of the signifiers in my notes for the Real: imperceptible, unsymbolized, ineffable, unimaginable, alien. The Real exists for us only as that which we cannot grasp. And yet, it is out of this unknown that we fashion what we do grasp. For this reason, Lionel Bailly states the following in his introductory text Lacan:

“The Real is the featureless clay from which reality is fashioned by the Symbolic; it is the chaos from which the world came into being.”

The planet Solaris is just such a clay. Shapeless, it can take any shape, and just as we each fashion our individual worlds from the Real, the scientists aboard the space station orbiting Solaris fashion bits of reality from the planet during their encounters with it: a child, a garden. In the final scene of Tarkovsky’s film, we see that Kris (or the planet through him) has recreated his home, complete with the surrounding woods, pond and his aging father.

So far, my hypothesis has held up fairly well, and it continues to do so in consideration of the closely related concept of Das Ding (the Thing), which signifies something lost. Like the Real to which it belongs, it is unsymbolizable and therefore cannot be repressed. Lost, it nonetheless sticks with you, nagging, hounding and refusing to go away. The object of desire becomes an object of anxiety, even of terror.

In Looking Awry, Zizek connects the Real to zombies:

“Apropos of this phenomenon, let us then ask a naïve and elementary question: why do the dead return? The answer offered by Lacan is the same as that found in popular culture: because they were not properly buried, i.e., because something went wrong . . . The ‘return of the living dead’ is, on the other hand, the reverse of the proper funeral rite. While the latter implies a certain reconciliation, an acceptance of loss, the return of the dead signifies that they cannot find their proper place in the text of tradition.”

This is true of the visitors in Solaris. The planet probes the mind of each person on the space station and sends a flesh-and-blood creation of someone it found there within the thoughts and memories--usually someone traumatic to the crew member. The crew members can eject their visitors into space or kill them, but another copy will simply show up. In Kris’s case, his long-dead wife Rheya (Hari in Tarkovsky’s version) suddenly appears in his room.

Like Das Ding, Rheya is lost and desired--and something was indeed very wrong with her death. She and Kris quarreled and he stormed out. Realizing he had left a research drug in the house, he rushed back only to find he was too late: Rheya had used the drug to commit suicide. In the years since, he has been unable to come to terms with her death--in Lacanian terms, he has yet to symbolize and integrate it into his psyche with any balance. And now, like a zombie, Rheya keeps coming back to remind him of the incident.

Tarkovsky’s Solaris is particularly rich in material for a Lacanian analysis. Soon after the first Rheya/Hari sent by Solaris appears, she passes a mirror and recognizes herself for the first time, exactly like the Mirror Stage of development. As anyone familiar with psychoanalysis knows, the early childhood drama shapes us for life, and Kris is obsessed with his mother and father. The drives eros and thanatos are also present, and when Solaris’s tinkering with the crew members becomes more than their minds can handle, they lose their grip and insanity threatens.

I would never presume to contradict Zizek when it comes to Lacan, but his thesis that the planet Solaris represents the Other does not exclude mine, for Lacanians also describe the Real as Other. As with much in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the concepts are complicated, never defined with crystalline clarity, and overlap. Focusing on the Real in Solaris simply seemed an easier point of attack for my own interpretation.

Lem’s original tale is classic hard science fiction with a philosophical bent, while the lush psychological exploration of Tarkovsky’s adaptation has made it a classic in its own right. If you’re interested, however, I recommend starting with Soderbergh’s version. As a sleek Hollywood project, it’s Solaris Lite, but it looks good and it’s accessible. No mastery of Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts necessary.

 

Previous posts in this series:
Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom
Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past
Don’t Look Away from Mike Brown
Double Fantasy: Total Recall and The Woman in the Window
Sex…? Impossible!!
The Big Other and the Man Who Knew Too Much

 
 

The Big Other and the Man Who Knew Too Much (Zizek/Lacan 6)

The following is part of a series in which I apply rudimentary concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis to current events and film. My two principal texts are Lacan, an introductory text by Lionel Bailly, and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I present these posts in order to deepen my imperfect understanding of the concepts as well as to venture some insights of my own.

For a long time, I never took Alfred Hitchcock’s films as anything more than good thrillers, so it rankled when Vertigo knocked Citizen Kane from its long reign as the greatest film of all time (article). In recent years, however, I have come to appreciate the depth of psychological insight in Hitchcock’s films. Having just watched The Man Who Knew Too Much for the first time, I can say it is no different.

 

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) is about an American family traveling in Morocco when it becomes involved in international intrigue surrounding a plot to assassinate another nation’s prime minister. Throughout much of the film, Mr. and Mrs. McKenna know certain details that would foil the assassination, but they’re unable to say anything because the criminals are holding their son captive.

In Looking Awry, Slavoj Zizek makes much of the man who knows too much as a theme running through Hitchcock’s oeuvre. What stood out to me, however, was the film’s portrayal of how the Subject--the core of an individual’s psyche--interacts with what Lacanians call the Big Other.

The Big Other is a function of the psyche that is first represented by the mother but later comes to be associated with broader forces: culture, society, law, time and language. It is the vast web of influences--usually rules of one sort or another--beyond the individual’s control. It is the network of preexisting systems into which one is born and with which one must grapple throughout life.  

The Man Who Knew Too Much is concerned with matters of the Big Other from start to finish. Early in the film, the focus is on culture as the McKennas travel in Morocco and must respect local customs and taboos. Later, it is the law when they become entangled with spies, police inspectors and government officials. Society also figures heavily since Mr. and Mrs. McKenna cannot say a word of what they know to anyone. Frantic with worry for their son, they must observe etiquette and put on a good face when meeting acquaintances.

Interestingly, the distraught parents begin to make progress when they transgress these restrictions. Mr. McKenna is a stereotypically brash and blunt American, so he can rush out of quiet social gatherings and get in the faces of total strangers, but his wife is a study in poise in private and public and finds it harder to be impolite.

Thus, it is only fitting that Mrs. McKenna commit the biggest breach of etiquette in the film. When the assassination is to occur, during a concert, the tension builds as from a distance she watches the assassin slowly train his weapon on the prime minister. Meanwhile, her husband races through the halls trying to thwart the attack but failing because of police officers (the law) surrounding the intended target. When Mrs. McKenna can take it no longer, she lets out a blood-curdling scream, interrupting the performance, disturbing the audience, and startling both killer and victim so the bullet misses its mark.

 

All this reminded me of a sentence in Lionel Bailly’s Lacan:

“The Other is omnipresent: all our lives we will play with, struggle against, and learn to use its manifestations.”

The injunction against speaking during a performance is what makes Mrs. McKenna’s scream so effective. It cannot help but upset the immediate social order.

After the failed assassination, the McKennas still have to get their son back, but they finally stop struggling against the Other and decide to use its protocol to their advantage. Having saved the prime minister’s life, Mrs. McKenna calls in a favor. She requests a visit to the embassy where the prime minister is staying because she knows the villains are in hiding there with her son. The foreign dignitary naturally accepts--it would be ungrateful to refuse, showing that he too is subject to the Big Other--and the McKennas finally retrieve their son while at the embassy.

This change of methods--from resistance to acceptance of external order--marks a sudden reconciliation with the Big Other and a return to society’s good graces. The film ends with the couple rejoining some friends whom they abruptly left earlier as they raced off to free their son.

At one point in Looking Awry, Zizek states, tongue in cheek, that Shakespeare must have read Lacan because of the depth of his psychological insight. Shakespeare lived a few centuries too early to read Lacan, but Hitchcock and Lacan were contemporaries and Hitchcock’s interest in psychoanalysis is well documented. No doubt a psychoanalytic approach to interpreting The Man Who Knew Too Much could turn up much more than this post can contain.

Previous posts in this series:

Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom

Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past

Don't Look Away from Mike Brown

Double Fantasy: Total Recall and The Woman in the Window

Sex...? Impossible!!

 

Sex...? Impossible!! (Zizek/Lacan 5)

The following is part of a series in which I apply rudimentary concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis to current events and film. My two principal texts are Lacan, an introductory text by Lionel Bailly, and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I present these posts in order to deepen my imperfect understanding of the concepts as well as to venture some insights of my own.

A phrase that kept leaping out at me as I read Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry was the “impossibility of sexual relations.” It’s an awkward and counterintuitive phrase, but also a perfect expression for an experience nearly everyone has had.

Consider the classic film noir Double Indemnity (1944). Insurance salesman Walter plots with the hot-as-L.A. Phyllis to kill her rich husband for a massive insurance payout. After the murder, their relationship cools as they each realize the other could go to the police, turn in his or her partner in crime, and make off with the loot. Walter goes to Phyllis’s mansion to kill her, but she gets the drop on him. After she pulls the trigger, you see in her eyes that she truly loves him, but she has realized it a moment too late--a fatal moment. Walter, mortally wounded but still standing, puts a couple bullets in her and stumbles away.

 

This is a perfect, if troubling, illustration of love and sex, for all the gears rarely sync up for both partners at the same time. The relationship works, then doesn’t, then does for one partner but not the other, then for the other but not the other, and so forth. If science is correct, then the euphoria early in a relationship lasts two years if you’re lucky--but the tug-of-war, the soul-searching and the confusion is powerful even then, is it not?

In Lacan, Lionel Bailly describes it this way:

[Lacan] was not saying that sexual relations don’t exist, but that those relations do not have a character of mutual understanding, agreement, or rapports. The individual man and the individual woman in a joint sexual act is each pursuing a form of enjoyment that is distinct from and irrelevant to the other’s.

We think of lovers as counterparts, but in their psyches, any two people are less like a matching bolt and screw than a square peg and a round hole fated to fit imperfectly. This is because the early childhood drama forms each of us differently. According to Jacques Lacan, boys and girls respond differently to castration, the realization that one does not possess the all-powerful Phallus. For the rest of our lives, we seek the Phallus in various objects tailored to our own symbolic economy and shared by no one.

For another example, consider Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), one of my favorite films. During the Japanese occupation of China, Wong Chia-Chi is a member of the Chinese resistance who becomes the mistress of Mr. Yee, a high official in the collaborationist government. Chia-Chi and her comrades devise a plan for Mr. Yee's assassination. When she and her lover go to pick up a diamond ring he has bought for her, resistance thugs will seize the opportunity to assassinate him. However, as they inspect the ring at an Indian jeweler’s, Chia-Chee realizes that Mr. Yee truly loves her and she him. From the book by Eileen Chang:

     He really loves me, she thought. Inside, she felt a raw tremor of shock--then a vague sense of loss.

     The Indian passed the receipt to him. He placed it inside his jacket.

     ‘Run,’ she said softly.

      For a moment he stared, and then understood everything. Springing up, he barged the door open, steadied himself on the frame, then swung down to grab firm hold of the banister and stumbled down the dark, narrow stairs. She heard his footsteps break into a run, taking the stairs two or three at a time, thudding irregularly over the treads.

     Too late. She had realized too late.

This is a perfect scene. You can feel the whole drama from start to finish hinging on this one moment. Will the killers come barging in? Will Mr. Yee notice something is fishy? Will Chia-Chi warn him? It’s a much tighter scene even than the one in Double Indemnity, but it illustrates the same thing: a perfect rapport between lovers is not possible. No matter how close you get, something will always be slightly off.

But, we all know this, don’t we? As good as it gets, it never gets that good. And you don’t need Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek or me to tell you so. Not only will your partner never be perfect, but the perfect partner doesn’t exist. That’s why perhaps the longest standing piece of marriage advice humanity has come up with is accepting your partner with all his or her faults. Love and sex do, after all, provide a measure--but only a measure--of comfort.

 

Previous posts in this series:
Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom
Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past
Don’t Look Away from Mike Brown
Double Fantasy: Total Recall and The Woman in the Window

Double Fantasy: Total Recall and The Woman in the Window (Zizek/Lacan 4)

The following is part of a series in which I apply rudimentary concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis to current events and film. My two principal texts are Lacan, an introductory text by Lionel Bailly, and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I present these posts in order to deepen my imperfect understanding of the concepts as well as to venture some insights of my own.

Fantasy space is among the many interesting concepts in Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry. The book explores the concept through examples from film and literature. Here, I will take a look at the concept through Zizek’s own example of legendary director Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944) as well as the recent remake of Total Recall (2012).

According to Zizek, “fantasy space functions as an empty surface, as a kind of screen for the projection of desires.” In works of fiction, fantasy space takes the form of a world within, underneath or in the cracks of everyday reality: dreams, idle fantasies, virtual reality, alternate dimensions. The characters’ adventures within these fantasy spaces enact their desires. One of Zizek’s examples, Robert Scheckley’s short story “Store of the Worlds,” reminded me of Total Recall.

In Total Recal, a factory worker named Douglas Quaid visits a company named Rekall to receive artificial memories fulfilling any fantasy he desires. He chooses to have memories of being a double-agent in the conflict between the government and the resistance. However, as he sits in the injection chair, government agents bust in and try to arrest him for being exactly that: a double agent. As the movie plays out, Quaid learns he was a spy, but the authorities caught him, wiped his memory, and gave him a new life as a common laborer. Quaid fights back and in the end topples the evil regime.

It is possible read Total Recall as mostly occurring within a fantasy space. In this reading, everything from the injection chair onward is a fantasy provided by Rekall. At some point after the film ends, Quaid would wake up and return to his life as a factory worker, albeit with some mind-blowing memories, and the oppressive rule of the government over everyday, hardworking folk would remain in place.

Total Recall presents a clear example of fantasy space as a formal mechanism in fiction, but I eventually realized, for reasons I will explain, it isn’t the best example for illustrating Lacanian psychoanalysis and its efficacy. Zizek’s own example, The Woman in the Window (1944), is a more penetrating work, as well as an enjoyable film noir without the aid of fancy concepts.

The film is about Richard Wanley, an aging psychologist with a handsome wife, two children, and--like Quaid in Total Recall--a desire for excitement. One night as he leaves his club, he notices a portrait of an alluring woman hanging in a storefront window. At that moment, the actual woman who modeled for the portrait approaches him and they end up having drinks back at her place. When her lover storms in and attacks, Richard fatally stabs him with a pair of scissors. The ensuing difficulties in Richard’s life eventually lead to his suicide . . . but then he wakes up back at the club, having fallen asleep in his chair and dreamt the whole scenario.

According to Zizek, this is no clumsy way of providing a happy ending:

“The message of the film is not consoling, not: ‘it was only a dream, in reality I am a normal man like others and not a murderer!’ but rather: in our unconscious, in the real of our desire, we are all murders. . . . we could say that the professor awakes in order to continue his dream (about being a normal person like his fellow men), that is, to escape the real (the ‘psychic reality’) of his desire.”

In other words, we each have two sides: one we present to the world and one we keep hidden even from ourselves. The first is an illusory construction of the ego, while the second is the seedy truth of our unconscious. Dreams pull back the veil of the former to reveal what lies beneath.

This is what sets The Woman in the Window apart from Total Recall. In Total Recall, Quaid simply gets the fantasy he wants: he gets excitement, he gets dangerous lovers, he gets to save the world. His fantasy space delivers to his ego exactly what it would devise to flatter itself. In The Woman in the Window, however, the psychologist’s fantasy reveals a repressed and unsettling inner reality: one in which he is a cheater, a debaucher and a murderer.

For that reason, Richard’s fantasy is more powerful, and therefore transformative. In Total Recall, it is hard to imagine that Quaid, upon waking, would be relieved to find himself back in his apartment facing another day at the factory. Richard, however, is overjoyed to find himself back in his daily life. Upon leaving the club, he stops to look at the portrait of the woman once again, and again he meets a woman. But this time, he rebuffs her advance and runs away.  We know he will now relish his humdrum existence like never before.

We have then, two types of fantasy. One is a mere fiction, while the other is an eruption of a deep inner reality. Pleasurable fantasies can also exercise hidden corners of ourselves, but it is the dangerous fantasy that holds the greatest potential for meaningful personal change.

Previous posts in this series:

Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom
Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past
Don’t LookAway from Mike Brown

Also related:

Total Recall, the Cultural Superego, and a Nation in Denial