ON POSTWAR MASCULINITY

 Another day, another messboard topic...

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With respect to post-WWII gender roles, the first thing I think of is that when the war ended, the surviving American men returned home expecting to return to their status as family breadwinners, while women who had substituted for them in factories et al would return to being homemakers. Some contemporaneous women expressed the same sentiment. Some, like Betty Friedan, did not, and so we got the rise of second-wave feminism. 

How did that affect depictions of men and women in postwar movies? I agree with the general proposition that one major trope to come out of the changes was "men have become weak and there's nothing that can be done about it." That's where your example of INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (and the Matheson novel published the previous year) belongs, and there are surely others in the same vein.

However, we also get the trope "men have become weak but with the right approach they can re-assert themselves." I don't recall the specifics of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, but it's strongly suggested that James Dean is messed up due to his mother, and near the end the father puts his foot down and reasserts his authority. HILDA CRANE (1950) spends most of the movie with Joan Crawford manipulating her husband, but then he walks out on her at the end. You can also see this type of trope in a fair number of stories predating America's entry into the second world war, not least the 1936 GONE WITH THE WIND novel.

The movie we're discussing, DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS, is a little different, and it's also not precisely "postwar" since it's based on a play performed the year before Britain entered the war against the Axis powers. It's not that the men in the DOD movie are weak, but they're unable to deal with the ways women think and interact, which constitute a separate social world. You see the same ethos in the 1939 Bette Davis weepie THE OLD MAID, which came out the same year as the GWTW adaptation. The world of men there just barely impacts on that of women, even though the story takes place against the backdrop of Civil War violence. 

ANGEL AND THE BADMAN is a different trope still. John Wayne's bandit character is never weak at any point in the story, but he's a creature that needs to be civilized by the gentle Quaker girl, who takes him off the path of doom. That too is a very "woman-centered" ethos, though it doesn't depend on nullifying masculinity, as does HILDA CRANE and maybe REBEL.

There probably are other movies, not least SF-genre films, that get into the trope of men falling victim to either too much or too little masculinity. You mention NEANDERTHAL MAN, and MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS might be another example of the latter. But I find it interesting that in the late forties and fifties we start seeing a fair sampling of low budget "action girl" (often swashbucklers) and "monster girl" films, far more than I think one can demonstrate from the beginning of sound films through the end of WWII-- and DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS is one of these. But whether that indicates a real shift in genuine gender roles would be food for a second discussion.                            

   

SOAP OPERA SOAPBOX

I've watched reruns of the original 1966-71 DARK SHADOWS twice before this, but only in this third re-watch that I've started attempting to analyze the series in terms of its mythicity. But to even make the attempt, it's necessary to dwell on the way the series told its stories, particularly in terms to the topic of structural length.

I introduced my CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH last year, in which I made one reference to the form of melodrama known as the soap opera, in my section dealing with "the long arc:"

the long arc also takes place within a larger continuity, but like the short arc doesn't entirely stand on its own. The American "soap opera" did not originate the long arc, but it's the genre best known for particular plot-lines that could be extended for weeks, if not longer.

Now, I should specify that there are two different subspecies of soap operas, and that when I made this statement, I was speaking of what I'll term the "weekday soap" rather than the "weekly soap." While there may well be any number of other subspecies of which I'm not aware, I think of "soap opera" as productions that appear five times a week on daytime television. (I presume that early radio dramas of this type, of which I know nothing, followed this general tendency.) For most of my life, television dramas that aired on a weekly basis-- almost always in the evening-- tended to be episodic stories with only marginal continuity between one another. Eighties serials like DALLAS and DYNASTY weren't the first "weekly soaps" on television, but since then they've provided a storytelling model not only for serials in the exact same mold but also those that alternate between long arcs and self-contained short stories, like most of the seasons of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER.

Despite the fact that I'm now going to generalize on the structure of the weekday serial, I confess that I've only followed three in my lifetime: the supernatural soap DARK SHADOWS, the spoof-soap MARY HARTMAN (which was technically a "weeknight" serial), and PASSIONS, which was a little of both. Still, I believe that the typical weekday serial consists almost entirely of long arcs, short arcs, and the occasional vignette. The narrative appeal of the soap opera is that for the most part it forestalls pleasing resolutions-- perhaps very loosely comparable to the Freudian notion of disavowal-- with the result that even when a given problem seems to be wrapped up, a new problem ensues so quickly-- often one introduced through the uses of subplots-- that there's no real pleasure from the first difficulty's solution.

If it's accurate that the first American soap was a 1930 radio drama called PAINTED DREAMS, then it may be that newspaper comic strips like 1924's LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, began utilizing the essence of the long arc first. Yet even though a number of comic strips appeared on six out of seven weekdays-- and sometimes on Sunday as well-- the comic strip doesn't make heavy use of subplots, except to lead into the very next ensuing storyline. The weekday soap comes closer to the jumble of real life, in that neither long arc, short arc, nor vignette has dominance. The viewer seems to be seeing regular lives-- even those of 18th-century vampires-- to be unfolding before them.

Following the innovations of Stan Lee's Silver Age Marvel comics, the comic-book medium was able to master many of the rudiments of the weekday soap. Nevertheless, even though comic books had a greater potential to master narrative forms than did comic strips, they weren't published as often. Even the rate weekly comic-book feature could not develop its narrative any more quickly than could a weekly television serial.

Because there's so little resolution in the weekday soaps, the writers behind the scripts tend to repeat themselves a lot. Thus a serial like DARK SHADOWS exhibits not Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" but an "eternal recursion," going by this American Heritage definition of the word:

A method of defining a sequence of objects, such as an expression, function, or set, where some number of initial objects are given and each successive object is defined in terms of the preceding objects. 

With this in mind, a serial like DARK SHADOWS doesn't have "continuity" so much as endless variations upon a theme, which become more and more complicated as new information is added.
The serial starts out in 1966, and its central Gothic mystery seems to be the familial background of Victoria Winters, who may or may not be related to the Collins family. Victoria's relation to the Collins past shifts into a new phase with the introduction of vampire Barnabas Collins. Though the two of them originally have no direct relation to one another-- Barnabas is searching for the reincarnation of his long-dead lover Josette, and thinks he's found her in Maggie Evans-- but eventually Victoria becomes identified, however imperfectly, with Josette. At the same time, when the actress playing Victoria leaves the show, the serial simply shifts into exploring other mysteries of the Collins family, with or without involving Barnabas.

It's almost impossible to analyze a single episode of a weekday soap like DARK SHADOWS, because the incidents of one episode are designed to lead quickly, albeit often not seamlessly, to yet more and more incidents, with hardly a breath taken to reflect upon the Meaning of It All. Rather, SHADOWS can only express any mythicity in its primary structural forms of the long arc, the short arc, and the vignette-- which I'll attempt to show in a forthcoming review.

THE MIGHTY MARVEL COLLECTIVE SUBCONSCIOUS

In the previous essay I stated the reasons that I disagree with Tim O'Neil interpretation of Marvel Comics' "we're the underdogs" myth. Here I'll address an aspect of his essay that speaks to "why people read popular entertainment at all."

Conspicuously absent from O'Neil's essay is any coherent reason for why Marvel enthusiasts became so, um, enthusiastic about their reading-matter, apart from O'Neil's claim that they bought into the "myth of the underdog." If one prunes away everything related to that theme, one winds up with these statements:

Marvel was what cool college kids read - literally, your older brothers' comic books, not like those staid Superman magazines you read as a child.

Marvel was cool and the books were better than National - and all their later imitators - and all that was true, at least for a while. 

Marvel was the place where a few crazy middle-aged men had accidentally created a counter-culture incubator, as the company became increasingly dominated by younger men (and even a few women) who had grown up reading the books and very much wanted to be a part of the clubhouse Stan had built.

Perhaps because the main point of thes essay is to point out the gulf between Marvel's underdog-myth and the reality of their unethical dominance of the market, the third of these statements glosses over the fact that a lot of "younger men" invaded the New York comics-companies that weren't exclusively in love with Marvel. Archie Goodwin was one of the first comics fans to turn pro, but by all accounts I've read, he was primarily an EC fan, and his first substantial contribution to the comics-medium came during his employment from 1964-67 with Warren, which company was in essence reviving the spirit of EC with its horror and war books.  Jim Shooter was another early emigrant to the New York publishing-world, but he broke in to that staid DC world, and though he later became a Marvel head honcho, arguably he brought to Marvel a regimentation akin to that of his former boss Mort Weisinger.

So it wasn't just the charm of Marvel that lured all those Young Turks to New York; it was a fascination with the possibilities of the comics medium. Both DC and Marvel had hardcore business reasons for employing all the young folks, of course; the publishers and editors cared primarily about making money, not giving people creative freedom. The sales of newsstand comics had dipped critically following the conclusion of the national Bat-Fad, and publishers were clearly seeking to tap markets less chimerical than the younger juveniles who had remained comics' primary demographic for the last thirty years.

But even if one could prove that Marvel alone was crucial to pulling in the "cool college kids," what made Marvel Comics cool in the first place? Given that older juveniles had long scorned comics as "kid stuff," what made Marvel "better than National," as O'Neil says?  Saying that Marvel's creators excelled at "being both more primitive and more sophisticated than their rivals" really says nothing of substance.

An easy answer would be the gimmick of "heroes with problems," but this has always been an oversimplification, even when Marvel creators themselves used it. What Stan Lee seems to have conceived was the potential of bringing a particular type of drama to the superhero genre. Significantly, it worked for superheroes far better than for Marvel's western and war books, in part the American audience was already used to seeing quasi-adult drama in the cinematic versions of those genres. I don't buy into Stan's myth that he simply wanted to do comics-stories "for himself;" the bottom line was always Stan's concern. Perhaps, having worked well with Kirby and Ditko on the SF-horror books, which allowed for a greater emphasis upon dramatic intensity, Lee was simply trying to find a formula that would make his superhero books sell modestly better. I'm sure it was a surprise to him, as to Kirby and Ditko, to find themselves being championed as "hip reading" on various college campuses. And Lee was quick to seek a way to capitalize on the enthusiasm, briefly branding a handful of 1965 comics as "Marvel Pop Art Productions" in order to feed off the vagaries of the highbrow art-world. 

The fact that I term Lee's editorial approach a "formula," though, does not mean that I think it was only a gimmick. There's a species of Lee-criticism in which it's asserted that Stan Lee's only contribution to the Marvel Universe was that of hype, and O'Neil's essay suggests that position with his insistence that Marvel became a success via its "clubhouse" approach. I've frequently argued that neither Jack Kirby nor Steve Ditko seemed consistently interested in the "heroes with problems" formula either prior to or subsequent to working with Stan Lee, so that my verdict is that Lee primarily evolved the formula, though not without many false starts, stumbles, and outright bad stories.

I take the position that the only way any cool college kids would have bought into the Marvel Universe would have been if they were convinced that they were getting a slightly more sophisticated-- but still fun-- version of the superheroes with which they'd grown up.  And it was actual talent, not hype, that convinced them that Marvel Comics were more than kid stuff.

One of Northrop Frye's most trenchant observations on popular literature was that it provided a "window" through which one could view Jung's archetypes in pure form, as opposed to seeing those archetypes reflected covertly in the scenarios of fine literature. In this "pure" archetypal sense (one might also say "primitive"), Marvel comics of this period were no better or worse than the contemporary works of DC, Dell or Charlton. But Marvel found a way to persuade older readers that there was some dramatic heft to be derived from stories of spider-men, thunder gods, and giant green-skinned monsters.  

As noted before, O'Neil is less concerned with the aesthetics of Marvel Comics than with the poor ethics of the company. I have no doubt that Marvel's representatives have committed many evil acts in its long existence, as is the case for most if not all large companies. However, evil is not the exclusive province of big companies, nor has ethical merit ever been a viable factor in determining the quality of art.  

The expansion of Marvel's business plan to gargantuan proportions concerns O'Neil far more than I. To paraphrase Captain America regarding the Red Skull: "You're the most evil man of all time... But then, someone has to be. If it wasn't you, it would be someone else."  I don't disregard particular acts of evil as irrelevant, but then, I don't think their presence nullify all claims to virtue, either-- mine being a perspectivist concept of morality, as I've detailed in this essay.

TOO ILLEGIT TO QUIT PT. 2

The remarks in this essay dealt with the ways in which popular art is or is not viewed as legitimate. Of course "is not" proves far common than "is," despite those infrequent works that receive both great critical and commercial success. The cinema, even in its formative years, proved subject to the same elitist critical attitude that dominated other, older media.

In BATTLE PT. 1, I asserted that "serial melodrama" was not granted any particular legitimacy by critics of the silent-film era, and that the only ways in which it ever come close to such legitimacy was when the serious works of the period were being parodied:

If Berlatsky is correct that at some point "highbrow" critics venerated any sort of melodramas, it would only be through this arguably distorting lens, as ironic or comic takes on material that was originally meant to be taken seriously, at least in terms of rousing strong emotional involvement.

I will admit that I'm no expert on the era of silent films. However, I do know where to find experts, and I found three in the 2004 collection of academic essays ACTION AND ADVENTURE CINEMA, edited by Yvonne Tasker.

First up we have Jennifer M. Bean, whose essay "Trauma Thrills" examines in part the use of shock tactics in early action cinema, which the trade papers of the period labelled "sensational melodrama" or "thriller melodrama." Bean's express interest in "hysteria, or shock, or astonishment as a key aesthetic effect of early film" is rooted in her "dissatisfaction with the way that both traditional and revisionist historians have told the story of cinema's turn to a predominantly narrative form." She examines, among other things, the series THE HAZARDS OF HELEN, and concludes that "far from a homeostatic model that "aims at... the regulated order of the spectacle," this narrative machine is calibrated for spectacular excess"-- a remark that I find to be in line with my own observations about the relevance of Bataille's concept of "expenditure" to popular fiction.  She also notes that the highbrow film-maker Sergei Eisenstein is known to have studied HAZARDS OF HELEN for the purpose of "his experiments with shock-like montage techniques."


Second, Richard Abel examines "The Culture War of Sensational Melodrama," asserting that according to the trade papers of the period, most of the audience for "sensational melodramas," whether in serial form or not, was "the ordinary moving picture audience," as opposed to the more well educated upper classes. He mentions, too, how cinematic melodramas usurped the popularity that had once belonged to stage melodramas of the late 1800s and early 1900s, though his chief concern is to point out how American audiences had an early flirtation with melodramatic movies from France. However, the audience's interest in exotica waned in deference to home-made products, and Abel notes that the audiences of the time rejected what is probably the only silent French film that's anything to conjure with these days, 1913's FANTOMAS.


Finally, Ben Singer offers the most complete picture of "serial melodramas" within the greater context of general film melodramas. Today one of the greatest short-hands for silent-film thrills is that of the feminine beauty tied to the train-track-- winsomely spoofed in the cartoon DUDLEY DO-RIGHT-- but Singer mentions a male character, a "tenderfoot," who gets tied to a train-track in 1907's THE BAD MAN, and is for good measure rescued by his girlfriend.

More importantly, Singer points out that D.W. Griffith, "the finest director of melodramas in the feature-film era," learned his craft while working on "blood and thunder melodrama" with his short films for the company Biograph, roughly from 1908-09. Many of these have not survived, but Singer, drawing on trade journals, presents a panoply of effects that are not especially comic in tone: "extreme moral polarity, abduction, brawling, brutality, binding and gagging, murder, and 'infernal machines' (intricate death-dealing contraptions used to prolong suspense.)"  In keeping with Bean's remarks on the transition from early sensational melodramas to films with a "predominant narrative form," there's something satisfying about knowing that Griffith, often lauded as the Father of Film-as-Art, once did a melodrama, THE FATAL HOUR, in which a detective was doomed to be killed by a pistol tied to a ticking clock.

Singer provides a summing-up that ought to put paid to any notion that sensational melodramas were regarded, by audiences or contemporary critics, as comic in tone. Rather, "they epitomized a new, or at least newly accentuated, cultural appetite for powerful stimulus." It was an appetite that did not conveniently disappear once the relatively more sophisticated works of the feature-film era, for even the more restrained dramas never entirely got away from the need to stimulate and thus direct its audience with the allure of the forbidden and the illegitimate.

THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY

Once again, a commentary on the 1966 BATMAN  show by Noah Berlatsky provides me with more grist for my mills, which, as the saying goes, grind exceeding slow. I'm not debating his take on the particular Bat-episode he cites, but I will respond to this passage in terms of the fannish history involved.

In part it seems like Batman comic book fans have been wary of the show precisely because it situates superhero comics not in the relatively sober tradition of gritty pulp noir, but in the (often comic) tradition of serial melodrama. Yet, as this episode is well aware, that melodramatic tradition is in some ways actually more high-brow, or more accepted as high-brow, than those supposedly more validating pulp sources. 

First, I have to take issue with the implied distinction between "gritty pulp noir" and "serial melodrama." Melodrama itself is a capacious category that takes in any work, in any medium, that makes an appeal to sensation rather than Aristotelian *dianoia.* Merriam-Webster's primary definition is relevant even though I don't agree with its comment re: "characterization":

a work (as a movie or play) characterized by extravagant theatricality and by the predominance of plot and physical action over characterization

One may think of "pulp noir" as connoting the arty detective stories of BLACK MASK, or the highly regarded films noirs of the 1940s and beyond. However, to the extent that they depend on extravagance and the emphasis on plot over character and/or theme, all of them are melodrama.  As far as the Golden Age Batman is concerned, though, his main influence from the pulp magazines stems from the even more outrageously melodramatic pulp-hero tradition.  It's common knowledge in fan-circles today that the very first Batman story in DETECTIVE #27 was a swipe from a SHADOW story.

I'm not sure that I would call even the more respectable forms of pulp melodrama entirely "sober," whether one is talking about the Continental Op or DOUBLE INDEMNITY, but the term can be fairly used in a comparative sense. The most famous pulp melodramas are "serious" rather than "comical;" ergo, they are more "sober" than a work than seeks to spoof those tropes, as the teleseries BATMAN does.

Admittedly, Berlatsky isn't talking about all melodramas, but the sort of "serial melodramas" that BATMAN frequently imitates, particularly in the Riddler episode cited. But if one is speaking of the sort of serials that commenced in the silent years of American filmmaking-- that is, films that purport to tell a story broken up into short chapters-- then it's questionable as to whether the majority of these were comic in nature.

I'll cover the matter of silent serials in a separate post, but for the time being, I'll put forth the generalization that most of them were not comic in tone. Comic send-ups of adventure-stories have a long history, though, and silent film had its share, notably Buster Keaton's SHERLOCK JR. I suggest that when modern fans think of silent melodrama films at all, they're seeing them through the lens of their spoofs. This is understandable but inaccurate; a little like assuming that medieval epics were all funny because Cervantes is better-remembered than the epics he was satirizing in DON QUIXOTE.

If Berlatsky is correct that at some point "highbrow" critics venerated any sort of melodramas, it would only be through this arguably distorting lens, as ironic or comic takes on material that was originally meant to be taken seriously, at least in terms of rousing strong emotional involvement.By this logic, William Dozier's BATMAN might find himself in the same category as Douglas Sirk's witty inversions of women's melodramas.

But what should this mean, if anything, to those readers who wanted emotional involvement from their BATMAN stories?

For the answer, Stay Tuned Till Tomorrow, Same Bat-essay, Same Comics-Blog.