Adventures of a Cultural Omnivore: 2015

Each December, I try to put up a post on the best media I encountered throughout the year. This year, my omnivorous appetite for culture concentrated on music more than anything, but I did all right in other categories as well.

 

Books

I didn’t neglect fantasy (George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire) or science fiction (Warhammer 40K), but as usual, the classics made the biggest impression. Joseph Conrad’s portrayal of the British Empire in Heart of Darkness connected in my mind with W.E.B. Du Bois’s comments on colonialism and racism in “The Souls of White Folk,” and I almost got around to a whole series of posts on it (previous post). Honorable mentions would include Franz Kafka’s The Trial, for its absurdist take on the workings of bureaucracy, and Hemingway’s Men Without Women. Every time I read Hemingway, I wonder why, if he had such an impact on English style, more authors don’t write like he did.

 

Comics

I would recommend He-Man and the Masters of the Universe from DC Comics to anyone who enjoys fantasy, and I would highly recommend Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham’s run on Miracleman from the Nineties, now being brought to digital format by Marvel. However, nothing could top Ms. Marvel this year.

Kamala Khan is a Pakistani-American high school girl and a Muslim. After a weird gas gives her the ability to stretch her body, she starts fighting Jersey City’s bad guys and, completely without permission, adopts the name Ms. Marvel, which once belonged to her idol Carol Danvers, currently known as Captain Marvel. For her costume, she redesigns a burkini.

 

 

Kamala gained a lot of press as DC’s first Muslim character with her own title, and her cultural and ethnic background is important, but she’s also just a high school girl running the teenage gauntlet and trying to figure out who she wants to be--and it isn’t anybody but herself. She doesn’t have her parents’ roots in Pakistani culture, she isn’t as religious as her brother, and she isn’t like the other kids at her typical American school either. She has squabbles with peers and falls in and out of love and is painfully self-conscious and unsure of herself.

Literature is full of cookie-cutter caricatures along those lines, but writer G. Willow Wilson brings Kamala to life in ways that resonate across cultural and generational divides, and Adrian Alphona’s art is unique, effective, and frequently hilarious. Together, the two serve up everything from typical superhero exploits to tear-jerking drama--and at least one moment among the most powerful I’ve ever read.

Early in Volume 1, Kamala’s powers are fluctuating wildly and she suddenly finds she has transformed to look exactly like her hero Captain Marvel, a classic buxom blond beauty whom Kamala sees as perfect. But a mere 23 pages into the series, I had already come to understand and care about Kamala so strongly that I only wanted her to be who she is--a short, sometimes clumsy brown-skinned girl with unruly black hair. That’s part of her beauty, and watching her turn white felt wrong, wrong, wrong.

 

 

I was so impressed by Kamala Khan, and have been so unimpressed with most of the 2016 presidential candidates, that I even whipped up a couple memes featuring her. Nothing mind-blowing, but feel free to share:

 

I love it when she embiggens her fists:

 

Movies

Early in the year, I continued a stretch of films from director Jean-Luc Godard. Then after my son started leaving the house each day for kindergarten, I was actually able to hit the movie theater every now and then! Spectre and Star Wars: The Force Awakens were both excellent, but it was Mad Max: Fury Road that inspired me most. The result was a series of blog posts examining the movie from the perspectives of feminism, Christian myth, and Marxism:

     Mad Max Feminista

     Jennifer Blood Feminista
     Mad Max: Of Hawks and Doves
     Mad Max: Out of Eden
     Mad Marx: Frederick Road

 

Television

I also found the time--I have no idea how--to watch more TV this year. Penny Dreadful and Outlander were entertaining, while Supergirl was just the fluff I was looking for. The show has problems, but Melissa Benoist isn’t one of them. She’s fairly wonderful, and watching her deal with her life as Kara Danvers is one of the highlights of the series. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones continues to engross and Syfy appears to have a quality space opera in The Expanse. However, Mad Men really was the best show on television, and the question needs to be asked: Has there ever been a better show on television?

 

Video Games

The only video game I played this year, aside from a little Relic Run (Tomb Raider) on my iPhone, was Silent Hill: Downpour. I felt like it was a return to form for home console games in the series, after Homecoming was so bad GameStop salespersons encouraged me not to buy it. I should have listened. Downpour doesn’t try to break or even bend the template for Silent Hill, it just tries to get it right and succeeds.

 

Music

This year, I learned that scores of bands I’ve never heard of are pumping out some incredible metal: Barren Earth, Khemmis, My Dying Bride, Tribulation, Krisiun, Avatarium, Sylosis, Sulphur Aeon. However, the bands that really struck a chord with me this year lay in a completely different direction. One was Siouxsie and the Banshees. I can’t believe I didn’t discover them earlier. They belong in the company of alternative music greats like U2, R.E.M. and The Cure, and you may put “Night Shift” on my list of coolest songs ever:

 

Then one morning I put on some Jefferson Airplane and Grace Slick’s voice in “Somebody to Love” electrified me. Of course I’d heard the song countless times, but this time I really heard it. Now Jefferson Airplane is an obsession. I’m still just wading in, but the water promises to get deep as I explore more of their music and the movement out of San Francisco that they were a part of:

 

And there you have my favorites from 2015. Let me know yours. This cultural omnivore is always looking for something else to eat.

 

Related posts:

Twilight of the Cultural Omnivores
Best in Comics 2014
Best in Music 2014
Best of Books 2014
Best in Movies, Video Games, Comics 2013
Best in Music 2013
Best in Books 2013

Proof that 2016 Was the Best Year Ever for Movies

A little while back, I ran across some click bait claiming 1999 was the last great year of movies. The author compared such medium-expanding greats as Fight Club, American Beauty, Magnolia and Being John Malkovich with the sorry profusion of superhero films today. I was surprised a whole genre could be so slighted, and then when the first photos of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman appeared, I realized something must be said, preferably with some hyperbole:

We live in the Silver Age of Hollywood.

In 1989, I was all about Tim Burton’s Batman. Before it came out, I caught teasers on a little black-and-white television with rabbit-ear antennae. I had the movie comic. My dad, who knew Purple Rain was among my earliest music purchases, bought me the soundtrack by Prince on cassette. My friends and I all agreed that Kim Basinger, who played reporter Vicki Vale, was “hot.”

Batman was a big deal. Until then, superhero movies had been a lot like Shakespeare in the park: men in colorful tights, stilted dialogue, occasional fighting. Batman and Batman Returns changed all that by turning the tights into armor and shrouding everything in a lot of shadow. Suddenly, actors--and big names like Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer--could look like the larger-than-life figures from the pages of comic books, and the movies could be cool.

New-style fan trailer for Batman:

 

After that, the Batman films trundled on, but superhero films on the whole languished until X-Men in 2000. Perfect casting, emotional subplots, and more stylish costumes set a new standard that director Sam Raimi quickly met with Spider-Man in 2002. Big budgets, new technology, and artistic vision were making the bizarre and tacky worlds of comic books--and fantasy (The Lord of the Rings) and science fiction (The Matrix)--possible for the silver screen in ways that weren’t cringe-inducing. Thus, 1999 wasn’t Hollywood’s last good year, it was the beginning of a better Hollywood.

Now we have the glory that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and more. The Avengers in particular showed that Hollywood can pull off a superhero ensemble wearing costumes that resemble the traditional ones, make it appeal to a broad audience, and rake in a fortune at the box office. It’s the apotheosis of Stan Lee! Someone go commission a painting!

As a lifetime reader of comic books, this is a dream come true.

Cynics might insist that for all their success, for all their dazzle, superhero movies are still fluff, but don’t buy it. That’s only on the surface. Underneath, there are powerful, universal themes of justice, responsibility, morality and identity. Along the lines of that last is the nature of masks: what they hide, what they reveal, how they represent the different sides of a single personality, how they spice things up. A lot of that can be found in the iconic scene in Spider-Man when Spidey kisses Mary Jane in the rain.

I don’t expect many people to agree, but I’ve long felt genre flicks and comic books are where the true edge is in art today. Literary fiction and whatever’s winning Academy Awards are largely playing it safe, no matter how serious their stated subject matter. Comic books, by hiding what they’re really about under easily dismissible manifest content, can be much more effective, moving and subversive.

Director Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (previous post) is a great example of how superhero films can be arty and deep, and with Man of Steel (previous post) director Zack Snyder finally delivered a Superman with dramatic potential. Henry Cavill, one of the highlights of The Tudors, plays a Kent/Kal-El who is pretty, sympathetic, gritty and not a putz, so I’m glad he will be reprising his role in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Which brings me back to Wonder Woman, whose Amazonian costume revealed recently recalls some of my favorite designs from the comics:

 

If you had told me in 1989 that in 2016 I would be able to see a movie called Batman v Superman and it would also feature Wonder Woman, I would have started paying a lot more attention in Science so I could make a Hot Tub Time Machine. The uses are obvious: quality time with Kim Basinger and traveling to 2016 to see The Bat, Supes and Princess Diana tear it up on the big screen.

And that’s why 2016 will be the best year in movies that ever was. Superhero movies aren’t what’s wrong with Hollywood today, they’re why Hollywood is bigger and better today and looks only to improve for a while to come.

 

 

My Personal Best of 2013 in All the Rest: Movies, TV, Video Games and Comics

I may have managed to read a fair amount of books (blog) and listen to a lot of music (blog) in 2013, but I had little time for other types of media. Nonetheless, I always make an effort, so here’s my best of 2013 in movies, television, video games and comics.

The only movie I saw in movie theaters this year, and the most enjoyable movie I saw this year, was Star Trek: Into Darkness. J. J. Abrams’s reboot of Star Trek is the best thing to happen to the franchise since Star Trek: The Next Generation. But the rest of my movie viewing tended to be of classics, which I find increasingly reliable for stimulation (blog). After hearing philosopher Slavoj Zizek discuss Possessed (1931) in the following clip from The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, I had to check it out. (Discussion of Possessed starts after the intro and finishes at 3:16 when he starts talking about The Matrix.)

 

In Possessed, a short and fast-paced film, Joan Crawford plays a factory worker who becomes the kept woman of a city gent (Clark Gable). At first, she’s just out for his money, and even tells him so, but she ends up falling in love and desiring marriage even though the ensuing scandal would harm his chances of being elected governor. It doesn’t sound like anything special, but like all great films, it covers a lot of ground, as the back cover of the DVD summarizes so well:

“This pre-Code scorcher…expertly mixes greed, ambition, politics and sex into a frank portrait of a world where men have power and women have a sell-by date stamped on their flesh.”

I fared less well in television this year, falling even further behind with series I love like Game of Thrones and Mad Men. These are on hold until my wife and I can find time to sit down together and watch them--which means the situation is dire. On my own, I did find time to watch both seasons of Rome. The shifting fortunes of soldiers Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus were entertaining, and it was interesting to watch the fall of the Roman Republic as the House of Caesar rose, but I enjoyed most the character of Atia of the Julii. She schemes for her family’s power with such lovable simplicity that the sore price she pays in the end, as her son finally rises to become Emperor Augustus, makes her tragic. Here is Polly Walker in full flurry as Atia the Amoral:

 

In video games, I played through The 3rd Birthday, a sci-fi shooter and spin-off from the Parasite Eve series, on my trusty PSP, and, in a sudden burst of activity, I busted out the old PS2, scraped the crust out of its crevices, and finished off Silent Hill 2--a game I began seven years ago way back in 2006. I got the suicide ending, which apparently means I play on the edge with no regard for danger. I would have expected to get the chickenshit ending, but this is much cooler.

Comics suffered the worst this year since I have yet to find an economical and convenient way to buy them in Japan. However, I did read through the graphic novel of the Spider-Man classic Kraven’s Last Hunt, and it proved to be as engrossing as it was when I was a kid scouring the shelves for single issues at Day & Palin in Farmington, IL. When Kraven the Hunter decides it’s time to kill Spider-Man and take his place, we readers get a deep look into the psyches of the two, their darkness and strength.

 

All in all, as 2013, the Year of Dwindling Free Time, draws to a close, I count myself blessed. I can never read enough or absorb enough music, but increasingly I find that other forms of entertainment like movies, TV and video games can take a backseat to everything else. Much better to spend time with my family, say by talking with my wife over a bottle of Sangria or using Tomica cars to knock down Transformers with my son.

Classic Movies: Three Levels of Experience

For some time now, I’ve noticed that I enjoy recent Hollywood movies less and less. Movies I watch because they are in genres or franchises I love--like The Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus or Skyfall--continue to impress, but other movies usually leave me uninterested. Meanwhile, I’ve been increasingly drawn to classic movies. I eventually realized that this was because the experience of older movies is multilayered in a way that new movies can’t provide.

The most obvious level of experiencing an old movie is the immediate experience based on its content, the way you would experience any movie. You follow the story, identify with characters, marvel at special effects, get swept up in the score, admire the performances, and so on.

One old movie that captivated me recently was Gaslight (1944). The fragile Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman, marries a devilishly tall-dark-and-handsome smoothy and the two move into her childhood home. However, she soon begins--so it would seem--to misplace items, forget appointments, and notice strange phenomena that no one else does, such as the lights dimming. Her husband, increasingly exasperated with her hysteria, suggests she is going crazy. But is she? Isn’t there something suspicious about her husband’s behavior? Isn’t it almost as if he is orchestrating her episodes for some purpose we cannot yet guess?

The movie provides plenty of excitement simply through its content. You are drawn deeper and deeper into Paula’s emotional unraveling, you are engrossed by Bergman’s performance (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress), you come to loathe the villain for his villainy, you wonder if the young detective will figure it all out in time, and you are on the edge of your seat until the denouement. At this level of experience, this old movie provides nothing more than and just as much as a good thriller from recent years.

But we experience the classics on another level that we cannot experience recent movies: From our standpoint today, we experience them as representatives of the past.

One need go no further back than the 1980s--say The Breakfast Club (1985) or Pretty in Pink (1986)--to begin feeling out-of-time, but then to watch Saturday Night Fever (1977) or The Hustler (1961) or The Seven Year Itch (1955) is to feel increasingly as if you are in a foreign land. By the time you reach the 1940s and 30s, you are like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939), only in reverse, moving from Technicolor to a bizarre and magical world of black and white. Watching silent films is like peering at another planet through the grainy and flickering lens of some queer, lighted telescope. Can these people up there on the screen really be members of the same human race I am used to? They look and behave so differently!

Every time I watch The Wizard of Oz, I wonder why no one talks like Judy Garland anymore. Women with that particular accent are common in older movies, but I’ve never heard anyone talk like that in my lifetime. To take another example, I always find it odd in the MGM Marx Brothers’ movies how they’re a weird mish-mash of genres--like vaudeville--with slapstick next to musical numbers next to drama and so on, as if film was viewed as an omniverse of previously existing art forms. In Anatomy of a Murder (1959), the prosecution raises as an example of Laura’s moral laxity how she moves when she plays pinball. Anatomy of a Murder is a gritty movie even today, but how quaint that pinball and how one plays it could be seen as dangerous and sinful! These are all examples of how a movie can stand out for characteristics that have passed into the past.

Seen across the gulf of time, the classics are very strange.

The third level of experience is where it gets really interesting. No longer are we simply experiencing a classic movie for its content, or viewing it as a curious relic from times gone by. Instead, we now see it through the eyes of its contemporaries. We assume, as best we can, the standpoint of movie-goers in the early to mid 20th Century and experience the movie as they would have at the time, as if viewing the past from the past.

A good example is Morocco (1930), which I watched just a couple days ago for the first time. In an early scene, Marlene Dietrich performs in a nightclub. She’s dressed in a men’s tuxedo. The quiet that descends over her audience immediately casts over you the viewer a sense for the gender roles being toyed with. When she flirts with a lady in the audience and even plants one on her lips, its thrilling and shocking today just as it would have been back in 1930 when the movie first screened. It doesn’t matter that I’ve seen James Franco and Sean Penn kiss in Milk (2008) or Scarlett Johansonn and Penelope Cruz kiss in Vicki Cristina Barcelona (2008). By then, the old dominant ideas of gender and sexuality, while still not entirely gone today, had long been played with in the public arena, sometimes to the point of boredom. The scene in Morocco is exciting now because it was exciting then.

This isn’t to say that Hollywood movies today are somehow inferior, only that because they are recent they lack levels of experience that movies acquire after having aged for a while. Next on my list is Notorious (1946). More Ingrid Berman, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I expect it will be engaging on all three levels of experience.

The Limiting of the Libido in Post-Production Code Hollywood

About a year ago, just after I started this blog, I posted a note on Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s book In Defense of Lost Causes (blog). Soon after, I put the book aside unfinished and embarked on a series of books in philosophy and revolutionary history to help give me the background knowledge I needed for understanding Zizek’s book. Now I have returned to it and have been inspired with another note.

One characteristic of Zizek’s thought is how quickly he turns to analysis of movies to illustrate his points. In the section titled “Stalinism Revisited,” when discussing censorship and artistic expression, he takes an example from Casablanca, which I reviewed for this blog.

Ilsa (played by Ingrid Bergman) goes to visit Rick (Humphrey Bogart). She knows that he hates her for abandoning their romance years before but begs him to give her papers of transit so that at least her husband Victor Laszlo, an important member of the resistance against the Nazis, may escape the city. When Rick refuses to budge, Ilsa breaks down in tears and reveals that she still loves him. They embrace. Fadeout to airport tower. Fade back to Rick, who says, “And then?” Then Ilsa explains why she left him.

Zizek says that this scene is striking because of what he calls “inherent transgression.” The film breaks its own rules, so to speak. It tells us clearly that during the fadeout to the tower, Rick and Ilsa definitely did it. All the signs are there: they embrace before the fadeout, we all know what such fadeouts mean, Bogart is smoking a cigarette afterwards, etc. The film also sends very clear signals that they did not do it: the conversation picks up right where it left off, both characters are fully clothed, Bogey still sounds hostile, etc. This allows the film to satisfy the Motion Picture Production Code of the 1940s and at the same time tell us a story that encourages our imagination to insert screwing.

The prudishness of the Production Code and the movie-makers’ skirting of it may strike us as quaint and amusing today, when so many movies contain overtly sexual content, but it occurred to me that our movies are in some ways actually more restrained.

Movies today can show more than they used to, but the current ratings system and cultural mores result in movies that are surprisingly tame for all that they proclaim themselves to be sexy. Tasteful montages of unidentifiable swathes of skin moving slowly are the norm for sex scenes, but since they are showing the act, usually missionary, little is left to the imagination. The libido must enjoy its movies in the narrow space between what isn’t allowed and what is explicitly shown. The old movies, in showing little, were able to suggest much.

One of Zizek’s claims is that despite the horrible repression of the Stalinist years, they also “saved what we understand as the humanity of man,” because rather than insist on the total destruction of dissidence, dissidence was often allowed as long as it was internalized. You could hate Stalinism as much as you wanted, you just couldn’t say so.

In the same way, we might say that the Production Code, despite the restrictions it must have put on artists, kept sexy infinitely alive by keeping some things secret. We will never know exactly what Rick and Ilsa did that night in Casablanca, but it can be as hot as we want.