DOMME COMS

Regarding my new term in the title, it came about when I encountered TV Tropes using the abbreviation "Dom Com" as shorthand for "domestic comedy." I've been aware of the term "domestic comedy" since I first began reading about fictional genres, and everyone's heard the term "Rom Com" that became popular in the 1990s. But when I read "Dom Com," I responded with my own "Domme Com."

Now, there are a lot of serial comedies in which two or more characters contend in small ways but end up making up, like the classic I LOVE LUCY. This is the basic aesthetic of what I've called the "accomodation narrative." But any comedy, self-contained or serial, that emphasizes an ongoing imbalance of power would broadly qualify as a Domme Com. I'll concentrate here on heterosexual entanglements, though I'll touch briefly on other possible combinations.

(1) The primary type that I've examined here I'll call "The Delectable Domme." Such stories feature a female Domme constantly exerting her power over a male Subbe (a spelling I'll toss in to distinguish the term in my mind from my other use of "Sub.") Examples I've covered over the years include, with assorted variations, include URUSEI YATSURA, RANMA 1/2, NISEKOI, and NAGATORO. Usually these are one-on-one encounters, though various support characters may irregularly torment the male protagonist to provide variety.

(2) A second type, "The Deflected Domme," forswears any power-imbalance between the two main hetero characters, but one or more support-characters exert power over one of the main ones. Said support-characters are not necessarily limited to being of a gender opposite to that of the Subbe. For instance, relations between Darrin and Samantha on BEWITCHED are usually pacific and balanced. But many of Samantha's witchy relations intrude on the couple's marital bliss to torment Darrin, usually with minor, annoying transformations. In keeping with countless mother-in-law jokes, Endora is the main Domme, but it may be no coincidence that Samantha's lookalike cousin Serena is the next most frequent female tormentor. Yet Darrin also frequently gets "subbe-jected" to humiliation by his father-in-law and by Endora's brother Arthur, so male Dommes are seen there as well.

(3) I'll term the third type "The World is His Domme," in that there's a Subbe character who's constantly the butt of torments from nearly everyone, male and female, with whom he comes in contact. In the teleseries ABBOTT AND COSTELLO, Costello's character is sometimes given bad treatment by Abbott. But Abbott is in no way Costello's main tormentor; he's just one of many, male and female.

(4) Finally, I'll term the fourth type "Queen of the Tormenting World," because the Subbe suffers from any number of diverse torments from separate sources, like the Costello character-- but the Subbe suffers all these torments largely because he's become tied to a Domme female. The comic strip BLONDIE, which I'll be examining in future essays, is one where husband Dagwood has become the target of everyone in his circle-- neighbors, bosses, cops, pesky salesmen-- specifically because he's married to a dominant spouse. Blondie, for her part, sometimes appears to be an accommodating spouse like Samantha Stevens. But close examination shows that on a semi-regular basis Blondie exerts power over Dagwood, either overtly bullying him in one way or another or humiliating him with acts of "innocent sadism." (Example: Blondie moves a ladder while Dagwood's working on the roof of their house; after Dagwood falls to the ground, Blondie seems unaware of having wrought harm.) 

A second "Queen" example I've often discussed here is MARRIED WITH CHILDREN. In this show Peg Bundy barely makes any bones about tormenting husband Al. Al, unlike Dagwood, responds with insults, but his impotent responses merely underline that he's just as much under Peg's thumb as Dagwood is under Blondie's. MARRIED offers an unusual variation in that the husband-wife couple is mirrored by the relationship of their teenaged kids. Bud, in contrast to the Al-Peg dynamic, occasionally does manage to degrade Kelly because she unlike her mother is stupid. Nevertheless, the majority of their battles validate Kelly, if only because of her dumb luck, so it's pretty obvious that the sibling relationship was designed to mirror that of the married couple.

Next up: Chic Young's not-so-innocent sadist.

TUTELARY SPIRITS

In DOWNGRADING (OR DEGRADING) ON A CURVE, I discussed the dynamics of the BEWITCHED teleseries. I stated that even though the characters of Samantha and Darrin were the superordinate icons of the ongoing narrative, the subordinate character of Endora was the one most often used to generate stories, often by her desire to "teach Darrin a lesson," whether her reasoning was good or bad.

Though on this blog I've mostly discussed accomodation narratives featuring romantic ensembles, another frequently seen trope is that of two characters linked by some tutelary activity. These may be entirely distanced from anything resembling romantic pairing, as seen in both GOOD WILL HUNTING and the more recent HOLDOVERS, where the give-and-take relationship of a teacher and a student makes them both superordinate characters. Another variation appears in the 1956 TEA AND SYMPATHY play-adaptation. In this story, an older woman, not a teacher but connected to a school through her husband, perceives a young man's confusion about his sexuality and dispels his fears by initiating him into manhood. Somewhat related are narratives focusing upon a psychologist and his patient, such as Peter Schaffer's EQUUS, wherein the former must play detective to comprehend the latter's malady, and in so doing experiences some insight about himself.

So, after all those examples of highbrow theater and cinema, my main illustration of a tutleary superordinate ensemble in this essay will be-- the completely lowbrow hijinks of Jack H. Harris' MOTHER GOOSE A GO GO.

Though Darrin Stevens never learns any lessons, Tom Hastings of MOTHER desperately wants to find out what's causing him to freeze up when he tried to have marital relations with his newlywed bride. But I wondered, "Is that enough to make him the main character?" He's a mystery to be solved, but his neglected wife certainly does not function in the narrative as the Samantha to his Darrin. Rather, only psychotherapist Marilyn Richards can unlock the secrets of Ted's impotence and its goofy association with Mother Goose imagery.

Now, whereas both EQUUS and TEA AND SYMPATHY seek to produce reasonable, rational propositions about human behavior, all of MOTHER's propositions are, to use an earlier phrase, "informal." Writer Harris wasn't concerned with probability: he wanted a smarmy sex-comedy. So the script has Marilyn's sexy professional woman, whom I term a "mother-imago," ends up liberating Ted from a subconsciously prohibition accidentally laid upon him during his childhood by his real mother. Toward the end of the movie, Marilyn kinda-sorta makes an erotic move on Ted, justifying the move as "therapy." But long before any such move has been made, Ted has a fairytale-dream-- the second in the story-- wherein he imagines Marilyn as the Evil Queen in "Snow White," who seeks to keep Snow, "played" by Ted's wife, from uniting with Kirk's Prince Charming. 

At the climax, when Marilyn has managed to call forth the nature of Ted's prohibition from his buried memories. she discourages Ted from seeking out his wife, claiming that he ought to use her as a test-case for his restored virility. Then the script has Marilyn change her mind for no good reason and fend Ted off, probably because Harris guessed that his target audience wouldn't like seeing the male lead cheat on his loving wife. So even though Marilyn and Ted don't end up in bed together, they provide a fascinating example of a tutelary ensemble with a strange mother-and-son dynamic, though it stops short of a TEA AND SYMPATHY resolution.

DONWGRADING (OR DEGRADING) ON A CURVE

 I devoted some attention in REPETITION AND PROLONGATION PT. 2  to differences in the ways sadism-scenarios are used respectively in accomodation narratives and confrontation narratives, noting how in the former the consequences were almost never as dire as in the latter, as per all the Poe and Sade examples referenced in the first part. And another way of approaching these distinctions is by incorporating a dichotomy I came across in some forgotten book on comedy: that of "downgrading" vs. "degrading." 

Usually, when we think of "sadism"-- particularly because of the stories written by the man for whom the syndrome was named-- we think of people trying to degrade others by nullifying their will, abusing their bodies, minds, or both together. This is also the motive of what I'd term "pure sadism," which is not connected to such gains as learning enemy information or the location of hidden treasure. This is usually, though not universally, characteristic of sadism-acts in "confrontation narratives."

But "accomodation narratives" are usually about "downgrading," not degrading. Downgrading does not destroy the will of the one subjected to it, but rather alters it, seeking to purge parts of the will that the character does not recognize as disadvantageous. In Part 2 my foremost example was that of Raku Ichijo in NISEKOI, who, if I correctly interpret his creator's wishes, needs a little pain and humiliation to get him out of his romantic comfort-zone.

That said, not all serials are structured like NISEKOI, with a beginning, middle, and end. The open-ended teleseries BEWITCHED begins as an accomodation narrative concerning the difficulties of a young married couple-- one an ordinary, somewhat priggish mortal, the other a witch with supernatural powers. The first three episodes of the show merely set up some basic tropes of the situation. But the fourth episode, reviewed here, established the most fundamental trope that dominated most of the episodes, which might be formulated: Uptight Husband Tries to Restrain Wife's Identity and Her Relatives Make Him Pay For It.

This segment of my review recapitulates the main action between the mortal husband Darrin Stevens and his wife's mother-in-law Endora, whom he encounters for the first time in this episode.

When Darrin and Endora meet that evening, it's mutual hate at first sight. Darrin wants no interactions with Samantha's weird family, and Endora threatens to turn Darrin into an artichoke. This is one of the very few Endora episodes wherein Endora does NOT wreak some magical alteration on her son-in-law's helpless mortal body, and it's probably the first in which Samantha asserts that she can't do anything to cancel the spells of another witch. To the extent that Endora represents Samantha's  own rebelliousness, one might regard this claim as Samantha's tacit consent to tolerate the comical acts of violence her mother perpetrates upon Darrin. Indeed, it occurred to me for the first time that every time Endora or any other witch changes the way Darrin looks or acts, Darrin gets some part of his own identity erased, even as he repeatedly insists that his wife must.

Endora is hardly the only witch-spawn who gives Darrin trouble over the eight seasons of the show. Yet she is the only character who's more than a "guest star," given that actress Agnes Moorehead shared principal co-billing with those playing Darrin and Samantha, even for episodes in which her character did not appear. The sadistic acts that Endora and her brood perpetrate upon the helpless Darrin are fundamentally harmless and frivolous, and they're usually directed at "downgrading" his assumptions of absolute authority. 

Yet in marked contrast to the example of Raku Ichijo, Darrin never learns from any of his victimizations. Occasionally he might show a moment of relative tolerance, but by the next episode he's back to shouting and demanding and thus inviting yet another humiliating spell. And to some extent Endora, to the extent she has any consistency, enjoys tormenting her son-in-law so much that she invents the most tenuous logic to give herself the excuse. I suspect that as the showrunners approached the eighth and last season, no one thought for a moment of wrapping up the series by forging some stable rapprochement between Darrin and Endora-- and indeed, the very last episode is just a remake of a Season Two tale, with Endora playing another prank on Darrin and his workaday world. The showrunners knew they were doing simple done-in-one stories that always went back to the original status quo. And it should be said that the status quo allows Darrin to look like a successful professional to the outside world, all his eccentricities swiftly forgotten. But the audience at least sees that he brings some of his humiliations upon himself, and that was apparently enough to grant the series long life. 

It's of course possible for "degrading sadism" to appear in comedies, usually directed at minor characters in whom the audience has no investment, like the suckup Brice in 1988's SCROOGED. And a fair number of "serious" adventure-stories concern men or women being martially trained, and often these include trainers who seem to be perpetrating sadistic acts on their students, though the rationale is usually "what doesn't kill them makes them stronger." Thus the Jackie Chan character in his breakout film DRUNKEN MASTER keeps dodging the painful rigors of training, but eventually buckles down and endures all the downgrading torments needed to improve his kung fu and to triumph over an enemy.

Still, "degrading" is more associated with the "serious" mythoi, and "downgrading" with the "ludicrous" ones.

FROM ELFLAND TO NEW YORK CITY

 

I mentioned last year, in my review of the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST episode “To Reign in Hell,” that on occasion I’d contemplated the possibility of subjecting that series to an episode-by-episode analysis as I’d done with a few select teleserials. I’ve now re-watched the first season of the 1987-90 show, and I’ve decided that despite the artfulness with which BEAUTY was crafted, it’s more appropriate just to do seasonal overviews of the show on the NUM blog. But since I generally don’t post on theoretical matters over there, I’m going to descant a bit about the nature of the program, in part because BEAUTY was a great favorite of mine back in The Day.

In my “Reign”-review, I devoted almost half the essay to explaining the show’s setup, so I’ll repeat that explanation here:

As of this writing I’m not sure where the 1987-1990 series BEAUTY AND THE BEAST stands. During my contemporaneous viewing of the show, I remember thinking that it did offer a great deal of mythic material. In effect, the show took the romance-dynamic of the literary fairy tale, probably with strong reference to Cocteau’s cinematic adaptation, and transferred that sensibility to the mean streets of New York—or rather, transplanted it beneath those mean streets. This was “the World Below,” an urban faerie-domain beneath the Big Apple. In place of sprites and deathless queens, this world of subterranean tunnels became a haven to all the outcasts from the normal world above—sort of a demi-America within America. The outcasts, almost always attired in quasi-European garb, are led by a spiritual patriarch known only as “Father,” but Father recognizes only one of his children as his True Son, and he’s the greatest outcast of all. Where the original “Beauty and the Beast” had the beastly protagonist cursed by faeries, Vincent is condemned by biology to have the strength, claws, and face of a lion-made-human. And though Vincent does not rule his bizarre domain the way the Beast of the short story ruled his isolated mansion, he becomes the sole focus of the one outsider who comes and goes from the underworld with impunity. “Beauty” Catherine Chandler, a young lawyer is brought to the Tunnels by "Beast" Vincent to save her life, who subsequently forms a “soul connection” with the tender yet passionate lion-man.

But I also said, just before getting into the review proper:

I suspect that BEAUTY AND THE BEAST deserves to rate with the other three programs I mentioned above: as a show with a high incidence of high mythicity episodes. For now, I’ll concentrate on this 1988 offering.

This suspicion may yet be justified by either of the last two seasons, but only a few episodes of Season One qualify as high-mythicity narratives. The problem in my eyes is that the show’s transitions between its two settings—mundane New York City and the “Elfland” of the World Below—mitigates against a strong concrescence of mythic ideas.

The World Below, a.k.a. “The Tunnels,” bears only a mild relationship to the enchanted mansion where the original Beast of the literary fairy tale dwells; in a deeper sense, the subterranean domain is symbolically identical with the faery otherworlds of Celtic myth. These fantastic realms are almost pictured as existing underground, which by itself suggests a strong identity between the people of faerie and the spirits of the dead. All of BEAUTY’s subterranean dwellers begin as inhabitants of the mundane world above, but rather than passing through the veil of death, they are reborn into new lives, laboring to keep their commune-like existence secret from ordinary mortals, aided only by a network of “helpers” who also guard the secret of the Tunnels while still continuing to live in the surface world. In Season One at least, the World Below harbors no supernatural wonders, with the exception that some characters boast gifts that one might explain as “psychic.” Further, the European attire of the dwellers, couple with a marked capacity of some of them to recite Shakespeare and Wordsworth, makes this “demi-America” into a crypto-Europe, not unlike the uncanny environments one finds in the Gothic works of Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and, most importantly, Edgar Allan Poe.

However, a difficulty arises whenever the stories transition into New York. Most fairy tales, whether spawned in folklore or literature, make the mundane world as sketchy as possible, so as to focus on the wonders of faerie. But New York, the domain of heroine Catherine Chandler, must boast at least the broad trappings of reality. The base conflict of the series is that, while the leonine Vincent can occupy the World Below and enjoy a semblance of normalcy, his spirit, at once gentle and savage, cannot possibly prosper within drab reality. In the original fairy tale, the Beast’s story ends when he loses the vesture of animality and becomes a man who can marry the Beauty in her world. But there are no miracle transformations for Vincent, and thereby rests the “impossible love” of Vincent and Catherine.

The first season of the series ends with Catherine considering the possibility of turning her back on the mundane world, and of attempting to live with Vincent in the Tunnels, at least on a trial basis. This development of course would have eliminated the main conflict of the series and the show could have ended in a manner not unlike the climax of the fairy tale. However, the writers found a rather clever way to prolong the agony, by making Catherine Chandler into a Woman with a Mission. Catherine, a child of privilege, suffers trauma and is “reborn” in a different sense than the Tunnel-dwellers: she becomes a do-gooder, obsessed with the holy mission of saving innocents from injustice. A few of Catherine’s altruistic missions are undertaken on behalf of the Tunnel-people, and when this is the case, the potential for mythic symbolism is high. But more often, Catherine defends the banal citizens of a jejune New York, the sort of New York one could find in any bland television cop-show.

It's not that it’s impossible to lend a mythic aura to people and places that would usually be deemed mundane; one can find “big-city” myths in everyone from Faulkner and Dos Passos to Chandler and Spillane. But as I also commented in the “Reign” essay, episodic TV shows are turned out on an exacting schedule. One might argue that the writers of BEAUTY were doing pretty good just to keep building up the Gothic world of the Tunnels, without expecting them to re-imagine the mundane Big Apple as well. Nevertheless, Catherine’s enemies—who inevitably become the enemies of her protector Vincent—are comprised of a boring amalgamation of thieves, pushers, grifters and serial killers, and their presence undermines a lot of the mythic potential of the stories. For that matter, most of the “innocents” are not that symbolically complex either.

Returning to the matter of metaphenomenality, the World Below is usually depicted as an uncanny dominion, just as Vincent’s lion-like appearance is implied to be a freak mutation, albeit one with some rather advantageous abilities. His fangs and claws are just barely within the boundaries of the uncanny, but the empathic bond Vincent shares with Catherine clearly belongs to the world of the marvelous, and so that phenomenality holds sway for every episode.

I think the mythopoeic potentiality was important to the writers, but not quite as much as the dramatic potentiality. Everything in the series had to revolve around the “impossible love,” and thus even episodes weak in myth were capable of generating intense dramatic situations, far more than one could ever find in “any bland television cop-show.” Thus I find that BEAUTY AND THE BEAST most deserves praise for its mastery of dramatic concrescence.

COMBATIVELY YOURS

                 

In the three-part LOVE OVER WILL (FOR NOW) series, starting here, I listed five of the mythcomics I’d reviewed here because I deemed that they all rated as “accommodation narratives” rather than “confrontation narratives.” In my many observations on the combative mode in confrontation narratives, I’ve continually sought to make clear that although many narratives resolve conflict through violence, said narratives are only combative if the violence has a particular level of organization. I further observed that many other narratives of the accommodation type resolve conflict through romance and/or sexual activity, and that they would follow the same dichotomy. The stories would only be “combative,” so to speak, if two or more characters with *megadynamic * wills are brought into conflict, with that conflict resolved by their romantic interaction. 

That essay-series didn’t look at any of the accommodation narratives through the lens of the four mythoi, as I did with four confrontation narratives in STATURE REQUIREMENTS. I’ve now improved my interpretation of the mythoi through the metaphors of “the four ages of man” in the DYNAMIS essays, starting here, and so I’ll use that approach in comparing and contrasting four accommodation stories, one for each of the four mythoi.

Again, for an accommodation narrative to register as combative, the contending wills must have a high level of dynamicity, expressed in terms of sexual rather than martial conflict. If the tropes of combative energies in battle are embodied by famous myth-stories like Odysseus slaying the suitors (“extroversive”), the tropes of energetic sexual cooperation are embodied by a model like the one in Yeats’ “Solomon and the Witch,” wherein Solomon and Sheba have such great sex together that it seems as if the whole word has been temporarily annihilated (“introversive”). This would be the kind of interaction that Hollywood advertising calls “tempestuous,” so that’s what I sought in the four examples I’ll examine. Three of the examples are taken from the LOVE OVER WILL series, while the fourth is new to these considerations.

In the DYNAMIS essays, I’ve allotted the mythos of comedy to the first age of man, in which the main character, regardless of how old he may be, is placed in the situation of a child seeking to negotiate his way through the arbitrary, often ludicrous rules of society and/or nature. In “She Tried Her Own On,” a self-contained story from the series DOMINA NO DO, the humor proceeds out of nature. Lead female Hikari has been keeping her supposed boyfriend Takeshi in her mansion for some time, subjecting him to her confused sadomasochistic attentions. Then, like the Melancholy Dane, she begins to have “bad dreams.” She imagines that Takeshi menaces her with a titanic phallus, despite the fact that she’s seen his actual joystick and wasn’t consciously impressed. But Hikari begins to feel guilty about having abused Takeshi, so she decides to “walk a mile in his wang” by having her sorcerous grandma give Hikari a temporary penis. The experience doesn’t fill the young woman with anything akin to “penis envy,” but the ordeal does solve Hikari’s nightmare-problem, because now she can imagine “dueling” Takeshi in her dreams.       

Next of the four ages is that of adolescence, when the thoughts of young men and women turn to goals of heroic accomplishment. In the NEW MUTANTS story “To Build a Fire,” one of the titular heroes, Magma, finds herself stranded in the Amazonian rainforest with Empath, a member of the Hellions. Though the New Mutants and the Hellions belong to rival mutant schools, the ongoing continuity had Magma leave her team to sojourn with the “bad” mutants. The reasoning for the “school transfer” always remained murky, but the author’s main purpose was probably just to get Magma and Empath together. As her name suggests, Magma can call streams of lava from the vasty depths of the Earth. In contrast, Empath’s mutant power is entirely mental: he can persuade almost any woman to fall in love with him. When the two teens are stranded in the forest, they quarrel about whether Magma should use her power to call attention to their plight. The young woman gives evidence that she’s attracted to the rather skeevy Hellion even when he’s not using his power on her, and the mere fact that he might try to master her—albeit only mentally—may have a lot to do with her refusal to “give it up.” The story concludes with an accommodation between the two, in that Magma does use her power the way Empath wants, but only after both belting him and kissing him, leaving him confused about whether he influenced her at all.

Like “To Build a Fire,” “Rite of Spring” is a nonviolent story within a series that is dominantly violent (and within the combative mode as well). Like most stories centered upon a monster-protagonist, the SWAMP THING series falls into the dramatic mythos, particularly because Swamp Thing’s experiences as a monster don’t emphasize thrilling physical triumph (as with say, the Thing of the FANTASTIC FOUR), but the tragic dimensions of life, of the limitations that dog every mortal’s tracks when he transitions into the third age of man. The swampy protagonist, however, gets a bit of a new lease on life, when his female companion Abby, after having followed him around for years as a friend-in-need, suddenly confesses feelings of love for the plant-monster. He for his part reciprocates. Since the Swamp Thing is a mass of plant-growths in humanoid form, he doesn’t have the equipment to consummate a romantic relationship after the human fashion. So instead he encourages Abby to “eat of his flesh,” a specific tuber growing from his body. Not only is the tuber psychotropic, it apparently enhances Abby’s psychic senses so that she can behold the spirit-energies of living things that Swamp Thing can normally see. Swamp Thing and Abby then link minds and experience an ecstatic communion with all the surrounding life-forms of the swamp—which is portrayed as being both as intense and as intimate as any human coitus. Yet the advancement of their relationship into a sort of sexual congress signals that they've moved outside the sphere of triumphant adventure; that they've entered the sphere in which men and women have congress in order to create their replacements when they pass on-- even if the exigencies of comic book ensure that neither Abby nor Swamp Thing shall perish from their earth.

The hero of RAT GOD is actually more of a demihero, an upright New England man who finds himself entrapped in a Lovecraftian cosmos, including a degenerate town that I called “an Innsmouth for rats.” Clark Elwood, like many protagonists of such stories, finds himself forced to fend off a cult that worships the titular rat god. But whereas H.P. Lovecraft would have emphasized the brooding terror of the rat god and his followers, Richard Corben focuses on Elwood’s overly flattering view of his own racial heritage, as against, say, the local Indians. The only reason Elwood gets embroiled with the rat-worshippers is out of sexual passion, as he pursues his love-interest Kito. The real cosmic joke on Elwood is that he doesn’t realize that Kito is an Indian girl, meaning that cohabitation with her ought to be verboten for an upright Caucasian. This sort of a joke, in which the protagonist is caught in some ludicrous situation that he has no power to meliorate, is characteristic of the final age of man, as a person loses his health and faculties with increasing age. To Elwood’s credit, he does overcome his prejudices on a basic “but I really want her” level, and though Elwood’s not a real fighter he does show enough determination to outwit the rat-worshippers. Afterward, Elwood settles down to some sort of romantic accomodation with not only Kito, but also with a rather degenerate looking white woman named Gharlena. This is about as close to a happy ending as one ever gets from a predominantly ironic narrative. As seen in the conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide, the protagonist does not so much triumph as escape from the craziness of the madding world.

I mentioned in QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM PT. 2 that the master tropes governing the organization of the violent combative mode were either “univectoral” or “multivectoral.” The first three of these “combative love-attacks” emphasize the back-and-forth exchanges of Hikari and Takeshi, of Swamp Thing and Abby, and of Empath and Magma, so all three would be multivectoral in nature. Only RAT GOD would be univectoral, since the story’s main emphasis is upon Elwood, with Kito, despite her erotic charms, taking the position of a support character.  

THE READING RHEUM: UPROOTED

Back in September of last year I experimented somewhat with "viewing the mode of the combative through the lens of sex rather than violence." My specific conclusions in that essay are only tangentially related to my reading of the 2015 Nebula-winning fantasy-novel UPROOTED.

There have been, as I've frequently mentioned on my FEMMES FORMIDABLES blog, hundreds if not thousands of fictional characters who conform to what I called, in LOVE OVER WAR "the fighting woman archetype." I've occasionally seen ultra-feminist ideologues complain that this archetype isn't true to the spirit of actual femininity, that it reduces the female characters to "men with boobs" or some such nonsense. Clearly, I for one don't think it's a problem to show fictional women assuming confrontational roles, like the superhero's function of fighting evil in all its forms, as opposed to some pie-in-the-sky conception of a femaleness that is ideologically opposed to confrontation.

That said, I think it's conceivable that one might be able to create a combative heroine who's oriented more on accomodation than on confrontation, going by the terms discussed in the LOVE OVER WAR series. However, such an "accomodation heroine" would have to be more than some warmed-over tripe with no theme smarter than "girls are sugar and spice and everything nice."

In UPROOTED, author Naomi Novik takes a trope seen in many archaic folktales-- that of the maiden forced to serve a strange or evil master-- and gives it several modern twists, not least being that of giving the maiden, one Agnieszka, her own individual, quirky personality. But Novik doesn't approach this challenge in the narrow, ideological manner seen in, say, Jemisin's BROKEN EARTH TRILOGY, which hardly lets a page pass without ranting against evil white males. In Novik's world, Agnieszka and her "master," the mysterious sorcerer Sarkan, evolve a fractious but ultimately emotionally rich relationship. But although it would be fair to deem Sarkan to be the "co-star" of the story, his male way of using magic-- that of constant confrontation with the book's "villain," an evil forest known as "the Wood"-- is shown to be inferior to Agnieszka's feminine sense of reaching an accomodation that heals and dispels evil rather than dominating it.

I won't go into the specifics of the plot, except to say that Novik's small fantasy-world-- loosely based on Polish folklore-- is under constant threat by the Wood, and that Novik brings that menace to a boil right at the time when the humble village-maiden Agnieszka is made aware that she, like Sarkan, was born with a wizard's power, making it incumbent on her to accept the Campbellian "call of heroic destiny." Again, unlike many feminist ideologues, Novik is actually extremely good with working out methods by which wizards might battle menaces like magical arrows and giant mantises. I'm not damning Novik with faint praise when I say that she's among the best female authors in terms of depicting invigorating combative scenarios, right alongside Rumiko Takahashi and C.L. Moore. And, as far as I'm concerned, she may even be their superior in terms of crafting battles that have a specifically feminine touch to them.

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 4

At the end of Part 1, I wrote:

To re-state: even though I don't believe that biology is the sole determinant of gender differentiation, I categorically do believe that the biological potential of males to develop greater strength and body-mass makes a crucial difference in their tastes in fiction. The next logical questions, then, would be:

(1) What tendency of females can be seen as the "objective correlative" (borrowed from T.S. Eliot, even if I don't agree with his application of it) for the female preference for "love and domestic situations?"

(2) Assuming that I find such an objective correlative, in what way do fictional love-narratives express "high spirits," paralleling the expression of similar spirits in fictional war-narratives?

I decided to answer the second question first, and so devoted Part 3 to giving examples of "love-narratives" in which two characters found some method of accomodation to one another, whether fully or partly successful. All five of the narratives I chose used some tropes that suggested a negotiation of non-martial power between two individuals, though in the case of THE FALL, the trope-- female temptress manipulates aimless male-- did not eventuate in megadynamic sexuality.  In the case of SWAMP THING, I didn't think the story exhibited evidence that both of the principals engaged in "mind-sex" were equally dynamic, which means that the encounter couldn't register as a parallel to the combative mode. In the other three accomodation narratives, the principals in each couple, whether they had literal sex or not, displayed some form of megadynamic might which could metaphorically translate into evidence of sexual potency.

In real life, males and females of the human species also possess differing forms of "might" in terms of their biological proclivities. For males, the tendency to "develop greater strength and body-mass" than females is their form of "might," and influences the male's taste in entertainment. A frivolous answer to the question of "what do women have" might involve the ability to bear children. However, this is not an ability that females possess independently of males, since fertilization is necessary for pregnancy to take place. So this ability does not represent a true parallel to the male tendency toward muscular development.

However, the female's ability to produce multiple orgasms, irrespective of whether her stimulation comes from a male partner or not, would seem to be the "objective correlative" I'm looking for. Some references attribute the female's capacity for orgasms within a regulated time-frame is about ten to one, though some of these references caution that not all multiple orgasms are equally satisfying, for women any more than for men. Nevertheless, the potential seems intrinsic to the human female, even if the potential comes about due to the male's great refractory period after sex.

The respective bodily propensities of males and females might be seen as a rough parallel to the Yang and the Yin of Chinese Taoism, given that "Yang" is seen as an active principle and "Yin" as a passive one. Of course, in this case "activity" is a matter of perspective, since a body that can orgasm many times exhibits more activity than one that only does it once. So maybe a better parallel would be between "extroversive activity," in which the subject seeks to use bodily strength to acquire other objects, and "introversive activity," in which the subject seeks to experiences the body's deeper ability to produce pleasure not necessarily tied to external objects.

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 3

In this essay I'll explore the application of my concept of megadynamicity to a selection of comics-narratives that I've more fully analyzed in my mythcomics essays. The common ground for all five stories is that they are all "love-narratives." As I noted in ACCOMODATING ACCOMODATION, such narratives are a subset of the total set of "accomodation narratives," so I've already specified that I'm not claiming that these are the only form in which the accomodation patterns appears. However, since I've put forth the proposal that "love-narratives" are "female" while "war-narratives" are male, this point will be brought forth better by focusing only on examples that concern the theme of heterosexual love (and not, say, homosocial affection, as one can find in Dave Sim's "Guys" arc.)

To reframe my question: my first premise is that in real life, sex, like violence, is an activity that often (though not always) involves at least two subjects. In literature both activities can be portrayed as being exactly as the reader perceives them in real life, or they can be exaggerated or enhanced by tropes of what the reader considers "fantasy." I've stipulated in previous essays, such as SUBLIMITY VS. MYTHICITY PART 3,  that phenomenality makes no difference to dynamicity. In that essay all of my examples were "confrontation narratives," but the principle holds true for "accomodation narratives" as well, as well as for any potential portmanteau combinations of the two patterns (such as one might find in an anthology-film).

Here are my examples of accomodation-narratives with a theme of heterosexual love:

THE FALL (2001)

RITE OF SPRING (1985)

SHE TRIED HER OWN ON (2008)

TO BUILD A FIRE (1988)

SISTER SYNDROME (2001)

At the end of Part 2 of LOVE OVER WILL (FOR NOW),  I remarked that the end of Yeats's poem "Solomon and the Witch," it is suggested-- though not made definite-- that Solomon and Sheba have such great sex that the world seems to have come to an end. Even if this is just Solomon's metaphorical reading, this is still a representation of sex that goes beyond the limits of what real-life sex can do, and thus aligns itself with metaphenomenal narratives. Isophenomenal narratives can only portray the real base action of sexual activity, and so it follows that all such narratives can only be "sexually megadynamic" if they portray two or more sexual participants who are really, really good at shtupping, even though they can't cause the world to end. 

This is certainly not the case with the ambivalent romantic pair of THE FALL, Kirk and June. In a probable emulation of a "film noir" trope, June plays the femme fatale and manipulates good-hearted schmuck Kirk, not for any grand design but just to enjoy a sense of power. They don't ever get it on within the space of the narrative, though the possibility of romance is suggested at the conclusion. Thus they provide a sort of "negative example," in that one has no reason to think that the universe would have stopped, even if they had made it.

SHE TRIED HER OWN ON (with the words "Balls and All" in a subtitle), is my best illustration of a nearly naturalistic situation, although the particular story has metaphenomenal content. The basic situation is certainly bizarre even for a comedy: high-school boy Takeshi is more or less forced to live in the home of an eccentric Japanese family, the Dominas, because their daughter Hikari lied to her parents and claimed that Takeshi was her boyfriend. Hikari only did so to get out of an arranged marriage, but the longer she's forced to remain in Takeshi's company, the more she becomes intrigued with him as a potential consort. The self-contained story deals with Hikari dreaming an erotic fantasy about Takeshi's balls, imagining them as enormous, even though her waking mind knows better. Hikari's witchy grandmother enspells her so that the girl temporarily obtains male equipment, enabling Hikari to see how the other half lives. After this trial ends and the young girl goes back to normal, she apologizes to Takeshi for having injured him in his sensitive spot. But her dreams still play havoc with her conceptions of human genitalia, for her next dream is an absurd megadynamic exaggeration of real sex, as Hikari imagines that she again meets Takeshi and engages in a contest of "dueling phalluses." Though the magic spell is real within the story's confines, the overall implication is one that could have been enacted within an entirely naturalistic phenomenality, using dreams to portray Hikari's weird projections about sex.

(Note: though Takeshi's prowess in this particular story is only imagined, some of the DOMINA stories suggest that he forms an uncanny erotic devotion to Hikari, and to Hikari alone, so that the entire corpus of stories implies an eventual sexy culmination for their wack-a-doodle romance.)

RITE OF SPRING is a more explicit exaggeration of sex, given that the act is dominantly mental, taking place between human woman Abigail Arcane and the penis-less Swamp Thing. Alan Moore's script and Steve Bissette's art are at their best, as Swamp Thing gives Abigail a unique form of communion, by having her devour one of the hallucinogenic tubers growing from his body. Their shared mental experience has megadynamic potential, but I hesitate to include this one, simply because the idea of the combative focuses on two extraordinary willing subjects joining together, either in combat or in cooperation, and unfortunately, there's nothing extraordinary about the human participant in this "hieros swampos."

RITE is an accomodaton narrative within a series that is dominantly confrontational, and the same is true for TO BUILD A FIRE. Amara, one of the New Mutants, is stranded in the Amazon jungle with a sometime enemy, Manuel. As they forge through the jungle, trying to reach civilization, the two of them never precisely fight, but they are in conflict due to their mutual attraction-- though some of Amara's erotic feeling toward Manuel may stem from his mind-control powers. As I point out in the main essay, Amara, who knows the jungle better than city-boy Manuel, often assumes the "male" role in their travails, and Manuel is relegated to "feminine persuasion," as he argues that she should use her mutant fire-powers to signal a rescue-party. Ironically, the moment when Amara more or less gives in to Manuel's demand may or may not be a response he has coerced-- even Manuel is not sure-- and yet Amara's surrender is marked by a note of defiance rather than acquiescence.

SISTER SYNDROME is a few chapters away from the romantic finale of the LOVE HINA series, but the arc is crucial to the accomodation of main characters Keitaro and Naru. For many stories previous, the most-reused joke in the series is one in which (1) Keitaro somehow offends Naru, usually by catching her half-naked, and (2) Naru punches him. Though technically neither one is "super-powered," comic exaggeration allows Naru to hit Keitaro so hard that he flies into the air, and also allows Keitaro to survive incredible falls and huge objects striking him. Though there are minor metaphenomenal entities in the stories, Naru and Keitaro are only supernormal in being "slapstick gods." SISTER SYNDROME has a confrontation-element, in that Keitaro's adoptive sister Kanako arrives and nearly undermines Naru's relationship with Keitaro. However, toward the end, even Kanako gives way to their romantic mystique, which culminates in the elusive Naru finally deciding to commit to her persistent boyfriend. The coda implies that the violence between them has become eroticized, and that their eventual nuptials will be preceded by a bout of erotic violence-- with the female on top, of course.

The three narratives that qualify as examples of megadynamic sex-- the ones in DOMINA NO DO, NEW MUTANTS, and LOVE HINA-- all depend on channeling the sexual nature of their principal characters through exaggerations of real human abilities, iu much the same way that examples of megadynamic combat deal with powers not commonly within the sphere of human ability.

Section Four will focus more on the question raised in Part One. 

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 2

My essay THE NARRATIVE RULE OF EXCESS was the primary argument in which I connected Nietzsche's specific idea of "high spirits" with my concept of megadynamicity, extrapolated from Kant's considerations of "might" in CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. In EXCESS I argued that Nietzsche's philosophical championing of the "excess of strength" had a parallel within literary narratives, where "excess of strength" manifests as the megadynamic power of one or more characters.

Now, for the majority of my posts on the "conflict and combat" subject, I have analyzed the appearances of megadynamic power within what I termed, in ACCOMODATING ACCOMODATION, "confrontation narratives." Historically, such narratives have been devalued by critics, who disparaged violence-based narratives as being either vulgar or counter-progressive. I still value confrontation narratives as much as I ever did, and I focus upon accomodation narratives merely for the purpose of exploring other aspects of the dynamicity theory. I hope I will never be accused of sharing the views of those jejune critics have often championed accomodation narratives for idiotic reasons like "they're more like real life."

Now, I've specified in various essays that Kantian "might" did not necessarily manifest only in violent forms. The three-part essay A REALLY LONG DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE, beginning here, cites how a non-violent form of might informs the ending of the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN. I would deem this graphic novel a "confrontation narrative" even though it's one in which the "good guys" essentially lose. Yet although the heroes are forced to cover up the villain's perfidy for a perceived public good, it's the journal of the slain crusader Rorschach that *may* have the power to defeat the villain's long-term aims. I would not call the journal "megadynamic," of course. It serves as an objective correlative for the power of the people, who will presumably rise up against the villain's hoax *if* they are given the knowledge to do so.

The journal also has nothing to do with Nietzsche's "high spirits," which is appropriate, since Moore makes poor usage of Nietzsche in "The Abyss Gazes Also." I bring it up, though, to show that "forms of might" can inhere in a variety of situations that do not involve violent confrontation.

So I began to ask myself: what would "high-spirited," megadynamic might look like within the context of that subset of "accomodation narratives" known as "love stories?" And here's one of the first examples that came to mind, provided by Yeats in his 1921 poem "Solomon and the Witch:"

'A cockerel 
Crew from a blossoming apple bough 
Three hundred years before the Fall, 
And never crew again till now, 
And would not now but that he thought, 
Chance being at one with Choice at last, 
All that the brigand apple brought 
And this foul world were dead at last. 
He that crowed out eternity 
Thought to have crowed it in again. "

Some critics aver  that this is a reference to the idea that Solomon and Sheba had such great, mutually-satisfying intercourse that the cock that had crowed when the world started crowed again because the bird thought the end of the world had come. This is probably as "megadynamic" as sex can get, and provides an illustration of the theoretical upward limit of sexual ecstasy in its fullest sense of "high spirits."

Part 3 will explore other, less cosmic examples.

ACCOMODATING ACCOMODATION

In the second part of  LOVE OVER WILL (FOR NOW), I started exploring the matter of narratives that emphasizes non-confrontational forms of conflict. First, I''ll place this particular categorization of narratives in more perspective by returning to some comments I made in the 2012 essay THE COMPLICATIONS OF COMEDY:

Quiller-Couch's arrangement, by its use of the opposed terms "protagonist" and "antagonist," also suggests opposition in every sense.  And yet, it's possible-- particularly in comedy-- for the conflict to be one that results in accomodation rather than confrontation.

In this essay and its second part, I explained that romantic comedies-- whether they were stand-alone works (I MARRIED A WITCH) or serial works (BEWITCHED)-- often ended with some accomodation of the primary couple involved. This I tend to view as a dominantly "female" narrative form, as opposed to the dominantly "male" narrative form that emphasizes a confrontation, which, more often than not, ends with one subject triumphing over the other.

Now, "accomodation narratives" are not solely about romantic encounters between a couple, be they heterosexual or otherwise. Just scanning the first year of films I reviewed on my movie-blog, I came across my review of 2011's HUGO. This film does not involve romance in any way, but does involve an accomodation between two principal characters. One of these is the orphan Hugo, who loses his father early in the film, while the other is a bitter, elderly man named Georges. Hugo investigates the strange old fellow and learns that Georges is actually the once-famous movie-maker Georges Melies. Hugo's detective work results in Melies being lionized by his peers once more, after which the old man adopts the orphan. There is "conflict" between these principals as well, but it's a conflict that leads inexorably to an accomodation rather than a confrontation.

In addition, I should add that it's quite possible to have a narrative that focuses upon a romantic couple in which the attempt at accomodation simply fails. Sometimes the accomodation fails for reasons extrinsic to the couple's intentions, as with Shakespeare's ROMEO AND JULIET. In other narratives, the accomodation fails because the two principals are unable to understand or empathize with one another for whatever reason. Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND and Woody Allen's ANNIE HALL are two prominent examples. There are violent acts that transpire within the Shakespeare play and in the Mitchell novel, but said acts of violence are, to use a term I've floated a few times, "peripheral" to the main action, which is about the emotional bond between the principals.

Obviously, there have been many "accomodation narratives" both created by male authors and dominantly read by male audiences, just as there have been 'confrontation narratives" both created by female authors and dominantly read by female audiences. The two genders show dominant preferences, but they're not members of different species, and so each can readily understand the narrative logic informing each of these two broad forms of narrative.

So when I stated in LOVE OVER WILL that it was my current project to view "the mode of the combative through the lens of sex rather than violence," it means that I must seek to explore my quasi-Kantian concepts through the lens of "accomodation narratives," or what I also called, in a more limiting fashion, "fictional love-narratives." The second part of LOVE OVER WILL should address my reasons for focusing on "love-narratives," which must be seen as a subdivision of the larger set of "accomodation narratives."

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 1

Nietzsche's "high spirits" line from TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS prompted this current line of thought. Once more, with (high) feeling:

"Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part."

I last used the "high spirits" in M FOR EFFORT to assert that such spirited-ness was a necessary component to both of my "big M's," megadynamicity and metaphenomenality. I won't be addressing the latter, because I've decided to focus on a (comparatively) new concept: viewing the mode of the combative through the lens of sex rather than violence.

The combative mode, as I've generally defined it, comes about only when two or more megadynamic agents in a narrative contend with one another. Combative works are, I've specified, a subset of the total set of works dealing with any form of conflict, be it physical, moral, psychological, etc. Over the years I've tended to compare combative works with works that included some form of violence that was not combative, though I've also frequently written about works that have no violence, or works in which the conflict is extrinsic to the narrative.

So in recent weeks I've been meditating on the following topic: if in combative works "high spirits" are best shown by the act of combat between near-equals-- the quintessential "male" theme of war-- then what do "high spirits" look like in works in which the conflict-emphasis is more oriented upon the "female" theme of love?

It's axiomatic that male audiences generally like violence and contentious situations, and female audiences generally like love and domestic situations. There are basically just two extant explanations for this differentiation of gender-taste: either the tastes are expressive of the physical natures of the respective genders, or the tastes have been manipulated into existence by the Evil Culture Industry. Anyone who reads this should be able to guess which explanation I find more credible, but even though I agree that physical nature is a primary influence, I don't agree with those who consider it determinative.

I'm aware, of course, that the latter explanation is the one most favored, possibly because it gives its adherents the chance to wallow in victimhood. To them, absolute equity between the genders is the only possible ideal. In this essay I took issue with Heidi McDonald's ideal of equity by saying:

The whole "who's exposed more" question should never have been one of pure equity.  Equity is something to be observed in the workplace or the boardroom, but not in fiction.  Fiction is a place where fantasy reigns, and as I said in the essay, it's simply a lot harder to sell hyper-sexualized fantasies to women than to men.  I tend to think that this is because in general men are hornier bastards than women, but others' mileage may vary.

A couple of years previous, I wrote DEFINING PSUEDOFEMINISM, in which I contrasted remarks by a writer I considered a "pseudo-feminist" with remarks by noted "anti-feminist" Dave Sim. Both, I pointed out, attempted to shore up their opinions with appeals to what each of them considered empirical fact. Sim's views about female athletes dispensed with any considerations of equity whatever. I observed:

Sim "proves" that women are "inherently, self-evidently, inferior beings" by asserting that women cannot beat men on an equal footing.  Hence fantasies of women kicking butt, in sports or in other forms of entertainment, are related to "the Charlie's Angels Syndrome," and so stand as further proof of women's inferiority.

In addition to disproving Sim's view in that essay, I championed the concept of the "fighting woman" archetype in several essays, and showed in NON-ADDICTIVE VICTIMAGE that I was not allied to the "biology is destiny" crowd.

I wouldn't have written as much as I have on the subject of "the Fighting Woman Archetype" if I believed that the greater body mass of the human male decided all questions of supremacy. But if it's almost inevitable that most men are stronger than most women, then this physical factor inevitably will be reflected in fiction. This inequity will at all times comprise an "is" that cannot be negated by any *ought.*  Even comic books, which have arguably been a greater haven for the Femme Formidable than any other medium, can't refute the basics of physical law. 

To re-state: even though I don't believe that biology is the sole determinant of gender differentiation, I categorically do believe that the biological potential of males to develop greater strength and body-mass makes a crucial difference in their tastes in fiction. The next logical questions, then, would be:

(1) What tendency of females can be seen as the "objective correlative" (borrowed from T.S. Eliot, even if I don't agree with his application of it) for the female preference for "love and domestic situations?"

(2) Assuming that I find such an objective correlative, in what way do fictional love-narratives express "high spirits," paralleling the expression of similar spirits in fictional war-narratives?

More in Part 2.