QUICK THOUGHTS ON INHUMANS PREMIERE

I write this essay the day after a two-hour INHUMANS "film" premiered on ABC-TV. This broadcast premiere follows what has been described as a "disaster," when the same two hours debuted exclusively on IMAX theatre-screens.

I had no high hopes for this franchise. In my review of the 1998 Jenkins/Lee graphic novel, I commented that the characters had failed to enjoy success in comic books partly because they were "static." Of course, the history of the comics-characters doesn't speak to their potential as a franchise in other media-- look at ANT-MAN, a marked failure in the medium of his birth but an adequate performer in his cinematic makeover. But, prior to the debut of the INHUMANS show, Marvel Television attempted to boost the appeal of the franchise by interweaving a very vague version of the Lee-Kirby concept in with the story-lines of their currently-running teleseries AGENTS OF SHIELD. I found these Inhumans-Shield stories witless and tedious, but that was no surprise, since SHIELD had been witless and tedious even before it started trying to build up the Inhumans. Clearly ABC-TV was forcing one modestly popular franchise to attempt supporting a completely unknown entity. It's been suggested that one reason for this strategy was that, seeing how 20th-Century Fox had profited from their cinematic rights to the X-Men, Marvel Entertainment wanted a new set of "merry mutates" over which it had exclusive control.

However, the SHIELD show did not adapt the classical "Royal Family" or any support-characters from various versions of the comics-franchise. Thus, the ABC pilot was free to build upon those characters with no reference to anything that had happened on the SHIELD show. That show merely alluded to the comics' idea of the "terrigen mists" through which the Inhuman citizens of Attilan mutate themselves in new, often fantastic, sometimes super-powered forms. Thus the two-hour film introduces audiences to the Royal Family who have always been the stars of the INHUMANS franchise-- Attilan's monarch Black Bolt and his super-powered cousins, Gorgon, Karnak, Medusa, Triton, and Crystal. The pilot also introduces the family's pet Lockjaw, a colossal canine with a penchant for teleportation, and Black Bolt's scheming brother Maximus.

I won't review the two-hour film, in part because it's a continued story that may not be resolved until the last of the show's eight episodes. I can to some extent understand why anyone who splurged to see the film in IMAX would feel cheated, for in terms of production, it's just another TV-movie. Sets and FX are more expensive than they would be for a commonplace SF-themed teleseries, but they can't compare with the outlay for Real Hollywood Features. If you're looking for big-budget eye-candy, the INHUMANS two-parter is not for you.

Still, I'm amazed that anyone would call this "jaw droppingly awful television." The characters are not precisely the same as their comics-templates, but that may be a plus, since the Royal Family has sometimes come off like a bunch of royal bores. Scott Buck is credited as the "showrunner," which presumably means that INHUMANS is written by a team of scripters. But Buck or someone has devoutly researched the original comics-series, with good effect to the dramatic arcs for the show's seven main characters (eight if you count the dog). One of the better moments, in which Evil Maximus shears away Medusa's formidable tresses, is taken from the Jenkins-Lee graphic novel. Not every arc is equally entertaining. But if there's even one good arc-- such as the complex relationship between Black Bolt, his wife Medusa, and Maximus, who desires his brother's wife-- that's one more good arc than AGENTS OF SHIELD has.

I've encountered some complaints about the quality of the FX. I admit I can see some flaws-- especially with the animation of Medusa's prehensile locks-- but it's not that much worse than most of the FX on television. Slightly flawed CGI doesn't bother me. I grew up seeing most of the TV-aliens sport zippers in their backs.

I might dislike a lot of the behind-the-scenes deal-making, but the dubious machinations of the SHIELD-INHUMANS crossovers certainly didn't make SHIELD any worse than it already was. The debut for the show proper has some decent character moments and some interesting plot-developments. (Lockjaw uses his teleport-power to dump Black Bolt in the middle of a New York street. Howcum???)

I've seen many, many TV-debuts weaker and less appealing than THE INHUMANS. It's rumored that it will never get any more episodes due to the IMAX failure, which proves that whoever engineered that idea was a complete idiot. But it doesn't prove that Scott Buck's INHUMANS deserves to be dumped on in egregious fashion-- particularly when AGENTS OF SHIELD is a much deserving target.

ADDICTED TO VICTIMAGE

I've already responded, here and here, to the specific incident in which one of my comments was deleted at the Hooded Utilitarian. In the interests of full disclosure, I'll note that I was mistaken earlier this year when I expressed the belief that NB had threatened me with across-the-board deletion. However, now that he's deleted a comment w/o genuine justification, in essence the threat is now real. I give him a grudging credit-- certainly more than the Sequart scumbags-- for allowing some latitude for exchange of ideas, even diametrically opposed ones, on his site. But everyone has his limits, I suppose.


So Berlatsky probably will delete this too. I tried to think what would make a good "parting shot," and decided to expand on this disagreement, which I mentioned briefly here.


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Addicted to victimage. It's like Robert Palmer's "addicted to love," but more sappy.


Maybe you'll see the opening phrase before you delete the post; maybe not. But this time, it'll see print elsewhere, if anyone who catches sight of the post chooses to check out the original.


 At times I've wondered if I was wasting my time critiquing Frederic Wertham, because the man is dead and gone and his direct influence is a thing of the past. But you, Noah, have made clear that you intend to carry on his tradition of making spurious connections between things you don't like.


I tried, Noah, to think which of your posts best sums up your philosophical attachment to the concept of victimage beyond the boundaries of commons sense. At one time I might've thought the height of your absurdity would've been your attack on an episode of AGENTS OF SHIELD-- I repeat, a single episode-- because one event in the story reminded you of the real-life shooting of Trayvon Martin. Though that essay weeps a lot of crocodile tears at the series' lack of a strong black protagonist, I wonder how long such a protagonist would have appeared on that show-- or any show-- before you performed a little "ultraliberal lynching" on the producer for some other damned thing.


But no, this one wins the prize for being most absurd.


Your tendency to characterize all "power fantasies" as fascist-- another point you hold in common with Wertham-- is simplistic in the extreme. But at least you're consistent, if only on your own terms, when you attack actual power fantasies, be it those of AGENT OF SHIELD or of FOXY BROWN.


The true height of absurdity is reached in your return comment to me here. I asserted that FOXY BROWN-- which I believe to have been an inspiration to many viewers of color, rather than somehow erasing their real history-- has been inspiring precisely because it allows a black woman to be a near-superhuman warrior. I assert also that because Foxy is behaving in the same superhuman way as any model of male superiority-- my example being Conan surviving crucifixion-- that she's achieving a level of heroism rarely given to heroines of the period.


I didn't expect you to agree, and you tried to brush off the significance of Foxy by complaining about "downplaying the effects of violence." OK, still absurd, but not the MOST absurd thing...


That comes when you do a Wertham by trying to claim that a fictional power fantasy has a direct effect on the real world:

You can see why these narratives are poisonous in the discussion of harassment in comics this week. A guy grabbed a subordinates crotch; the subordinate (a man) froze. Some people commented that he should have slugged him. There’s this heroic default idea that people shouldn’t be traumatized or even confused by sexual violence, or any violence. It tends to reduce sympathy for victims.

This is classic Werthamism, since the good doctor liked to cite, as evidence of pernicious comic-books, incidents of juvenile delinquency in which no actual link to comic book-reading had been cited. You didn't provide a link to the place as to where this real-life story was told. I assume it's here, though Heidi McDonald doesn't mention anything about anyone criticizing the assaulted fellow, and I didn't find anyone in the thread claiming the victim should have slugged his assailant. I take your word for it that someone may have said words to that effect-- but why in the hell would it be a "heroic default?" Why wouldn't it be a "self-defense default," as it would be anywhere outside the subculture of comic books? And what in the hell did any of it have to do with heroic power fantasies?


*Maybe* the alleged persons who doled out unasked-for advice were insensitive-- but your distortion is worse than anything they said.  The real-life victim is to you just a club with which to pound on heroic fantasies, though what happened to him certainly happens in subcultures that aren't built around fantasy-concepts. Your rhetoric collapses if you can't show your readers a never-ending stream of victimage, and when you can't find enough to attack in the present, you resort to harrowing up dead guys like Lovecraft and Frazetta, with the balmy notion that you're somehow speaking to modern-day abuses.


You're doing marginalized peoples no favors by depicting them as perpetual victims. But by all means continue. You won't actually change anything, but you'll give me lots of grist for my own critical mill.

ULTRALIBERAL LYNCH LAW

The only pleasant thing about ultraliberal lynchings, as compared to ultraconservative lynchings, is that the former are generally content with killing nothing more than reputations. (Here is an example of one from 2013, albeit one better known to the general public.)

Of course, if you're in a financial league with Joss Whedon, you can afford to ignore the Internet's hanging-judges and their sycophantic juries. Going by Whedon's own remarks, he's been attacked many times by all sorts of  nutbars, presumably ultraconservatives as much as ultraliberals. However, in recent months the comics-related blogosphere generally-- and the Hooded Utilitarian particularly-- have conceived a new fascination for finding ways to take superficial pot-shots at Whedon. In all likelihood this "meme," as I choose to call it, has come about because of Whedon's alleged marginalization of the Black Widow character in AGE OF ULTRON, which I discussed somewhat in CURSE OF THE BLACK WHEDON-TWEETS.

One of the more ludicrous volleys appeared in April: Noah Berlatsky's BE WHITE OR EXPLODE. Given that the essay is two months old, I suppose it's "old news"-- though maybe not quite as old as writing an essay on a single episode of a television series; an episode that debuted a little short of two years ago, on 9-24-13.

In keeping with his standard practice, NB does not analyze the whole episode; only the part of it that he considers ideologically retrograde. The interested reader can wade through it if he pleases, but it boils down to the fact that (a) the show starts out with a working-class black guy performing an act of heroism, (2) NB's thunderstruck realization that the black guy is not the show's hero, but a "schlubby plot point." and (3) NB's criticism of the show for not spotlighting enough people of color.

I consider this muddled argument a "lynching" because hanging-judge Berlatsky conveniently ignores any evidence that might conflict with his prosecution of the show's producers for the crime of not being ideologically advanced. He's particularly annoyed that the episode's one black character is shown as being out of control (hence, ready to 'explode") while the mostly white guys are controlled and in control. (The presence of an Asian female in the SHIELD team is supposedly nullified by the allegation that she's a stereotype, which, even if it were true, would be pretty much impossible to demonstrate in one episode.)

I'm not a fan of AGENTS OF SHIELD (henceforth AOS), for reasons I won't explore here. Nevertheless, it's clear that the show isn't going to get a fair hearing in any court that watches only one episode-- or a court that automatically condemns said show for not having enough POC in one episode to suit the judge. It's significant that even after a correspondent informed Judge Berlatsky that one of the regular, apparently Caucasian characters was actually biracial, he simply inserted that datum into the essay as written but declined to let that fact cause him to reverse his judgment. AOS showed a character named Mike Peterson, who happened to be black, getting pacified with a tranquilizer gun, so therefore this escapist teleseries can be implicated into all the real-world narratives about criminalizing black men (Trayvon Martin is mentioned twice).. Never mind that Peterson, as written, could have been as readily played by a white actor as by a black one. Never mind that the first season's episodes quickly established that Peterson was the only one of several persons who received the destructive super-power treatment. Never mind that SHIELD is responsible for Peterson living through the experience, and that any moral umbrage regarding Peterson's destructive actions is clearly not directed at him acts but at the fiends who experimented on him-- at least some of whom were also white.  AOS is automatically guilty by association-- even though it's an association that's only in the judge's mind, that might read something like, "any disempowering portrait of a black character= automatic racism.".

In addition to considering only one episode as proof of retrograde racial tendencies, this judge also threw out of court any evidence that might have mitigated the verdict. Evidently NB decided that parallels with Trayvon Martin were the only reason that Whedon's team would have had for casting a black actor, one J. August Richards (formerly a regular on Whedon's ANGEL teleseries) as Peterson. The fact that the Peterson character was based on a Marvel character of color was not explored by His Dishonor, because such a consideration would have impeded the all-important "rush to judgment."

While I don't have any more experience than NB in the actual production of AOS, I offer for those interested my take on how this episode of alleged bigotry probably came into being:

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AOS WRITER 1: OK, we've decided we're going to have one guy, Peterson, survive the Project Centipede experiment. SHIELD will save Peterson, and their investigation will bring them into conflict with the architects of the project. Are we gonna make the survivor a one-shot, or bring him back?

AOS WRITER 2: Let's make him a reference to one of the Marvel characters we have the rights to adapt. We may work into later stories or not, but using one of the old familiar characters is good for keeping the attention of the hardcore Marvel fans.

AOS WRITER 3: OK, let's do that. Who do we have rights to use? Moon Knight... Two-Gun Kid... Doctor Droom-- jeez, who bought this package?

AOS WRITER 2: Hey, we got Deathlok. He works, 'cause he was already the subject of an evil experiment. Let's make Peterson our version of Deathlok.

AOS WRITER 1: That works, and for a bonus to Whedon's Buffy fans, we could cast one of the Buffyverse actors in the role. What's Boreanaz doing these days?

AOS WRITER 2: Are you crazy, man? You can't have even an off-brand Deathlok played by a white guy. Original Deathlok is black!

AOS WRITER 1: He is? I read the seventies Deathlok; I thought he was a white guy whose skin turned grey.

AOS WRITER 3: No, man, it was kind of buried, but that version was black, too.  Number Two is right. If you have one of Marvel's black super-guys played by a white guy, the bloggers will bury us in shit.

AOS WRITER 1: All right, already; we'll get a black actor to play off-brand Deathlok-- and then, everybody will be happy---

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(Fortunately the three writers were spared execution by hanging-judge Berlatsky, thanks to the appeals-court, presided over by Judge Phillips, who voided the lower court's verdict as insubstantial and not based in the rudiments of good literary criticism.)