MYTHCOMICS: MARTHA WASHINGTON GOES TO WAR (1994-95)

 In the first installment of RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS, I said:

...I loosely associated Frank Miller with the *megalothymotic* tendency, which often got him tarred with the fascist brush, while Alan Moore got a pass for his "alleged anarchism," which I find to be identical with *isothymia's* tendency to break down hierarchical structures.

I wasn't particularly seeking to validate my take on Miller's "megalothymotic" tendencies when I got around to reading the second of his serials about futuristic soldier Martha "named-for-wife-of-first-U.S.-President" Washington. Some years previous I'd read the introductory arc of Martha stories, GIVE ME LIBERTY, and the last arc, MARTHA WASHINGTON SAVES THE WORLD. Both were very good adventure-stories, but without rising to the level of modern myths. However, WAR, the middle arc, not only satisfies my criteria for mythicity but also shows the artist adroitly frustrating many of the political labels comics-critics have affixed to him.

WAR commences with the status quo set up from GIVE ME LIBERTY. Martha, a Black American raised in the squalor of Cabrini-Green, joins the Pax Army of Future United States, less out of patriotism than expedience. The young woman proves to have exceptional military competence, which comes in handy in a period when America is being broken apart by a horde of secession movements. (My favorite, seen in GIVE ME LIBERTY, was a group of gay Nazis, the Aryan Thrust, whose motto was "America's future is white-- and male-- and gay.") In LIBERTY, Martha keeps a usurper from taking over the Pax government, but at the start of WAR, it's clear that there's something rotten in the United States. While she's fighting in the field, Martha's equipment repeatedly fails, and the soldiers she encounters pass rumors of strange invisible beings called "ghosts." 

She survives a battle but gets wounded, during which time she apparently hallucinates her friend Raggy-Ann, a mutant she liberated from Pax before she died. Her injury puts her in the hands of an old foe, the Surgeon General, one of several robots-or-cyborgs presumably modeled on some unscrupulous original. While in the Surgeon's power, Martha beholds another friend she believes dead, her Apache-chief boyfriend Wasserstein, who "ghosts" into the installation to let her know he's still alive.

She's rescued from the Surgeon by a superior officer and taken to the orbital satellite Harmony as security. There Martha finds that even this superlative construct is suffering from constant breakdowns that emphasize Pax's attrition. Sure enough, no sooner does Martha arrive than the Ghosts strike. She pursues the Ghost craft into an irradiated zone, where she meets a bunch of mutants who, surprisingly, don't try to eat her.

Then, by dint of her relentless quest into a domain that ought to kill her with radiation poisoning, she finds her way to a mysterious redoubt-- the home of the Ghosts, whose membership does include her old friends Wasserstein and Raggy-Ann, both still alive and part of a movement to overthrow the illegitimate Pax government. Martha is converted to this movement when the Surgeon General uses her radio transmitter to send missiles to destroy the redoubt-- after which Martha leads an assault upon her former superiors.

I return to the popular canard that because Frank Miller has produced stories about violent heroes, he must perforce be a fascist. But the amusing thing about WAR is that all of the things that Miller critiques about Pax are the same things liberals always attack about conservatives: pointless militarism, an "old boy network" (which ties into the rottenness of Pax technology), the reduction of the marginalized (like mutant Raggy-Ann) into property, and the use of religion to justify government policies.

In contrast, the unnamed government that Martha brings forth is defined by dissent: the fact that even those governing constantly disagree with one another but manage to unite for the common goal of improving the world. For all the current tendency of Ultraliberals to shame people about American history, be it over slavery or colonialism, they overlook that American politics are infused by the desire to improve life. Miller, the alleged "fascist," incarnates this American spirit in a far more intelligent manner than any liberal comics-writer of the past few decades. 

MYTHCOMICS: THE DARK KNIGHT, MASTER RACE (2015)

They'll kill us if they can, Bruce. Every year they grow smaller. Every year they hate us more. We must not remind them that giants walk the earth.-- Superman, Book 3, THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS.

When Frank Miller wrote those words circa 1986 for THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-- his "brass band funeral" for superheroes-- he gave no indication that there was any real way to reconcile the domain of  the colossal super-crusaders and the domain of the Lilliputians whom the heroes are destined to save from peril.

(Sidebar: In THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA Nietzsche often railed against mediocre people, for whom one of his many epithets was "the small men.")

Over rhirty years later, Miller and Brian Azzarello raise these same issues once more in THE DARK KNIGHT MASTER RACE. (To be sure, the progress from TDKR to TDKMR was interrupted in 2001 by a weird, carbuncle-like growth called TDKSA, but so far as I can see, this interruption plays no role in the progression between the 1986 work and the 2015 work.) Seven pages into Book One of MASTER RACE, Wonder Woman-- who has moved with her Amazon sisters to the Amazonian rainforest in South America-- saves a tribe of Indians from a rampaging minotaur. And as she vanquishes the monster, she thinks:

When they are threatened, we are there, and they name us saviors-- until they call us threats.

However, in contrast to Superman's frustrations in TDKR, the Amazon Princess seems to accept the absurdity of the sacrifice with samurai-like stolidity:

The same, a hundred times. A hundred hundred times. We know that, and we are still there for them. You taught us to be that way.

The "you" of which the Amazon thinks is Superman himself, the father of Diana's two children, an infant son named Jonathan and a teenaged daughter named Lara. Later the reader will learn that the Man of Steel has become a man of ice, retreating from his heroic duties into a frozen stasis due to his disappointment with the people he's served so long. The reader sees his self-exile through the eyes of his half-Kryptonian, half-Amazon daughter, who gets no answer when she asks her entombed father, "Why did you let the ants knock you from the sky?"

To be sure, Batman, the ostensible star of the show, has been gone for a while too, though a caped crusader makes the scene in Gotham City. However, it's not the aging and ailing Bruce Wayne, but his protege Carrie Kelley, formerly the first female Robin and now masquerading as her mentor for reasons that are never entirely clear. Really Old Batman doesn't make an on-panel appearance until Book 3, but he seems to have lost most of his zeal for crimefighting.

Though other superheroes are still around, DC's "Big Three" are largely removed from the current scene. Superman's hibernation in particular gives rise to his opposite number: a cult devoted not to the service and protection of humankind but to mastering all life. And his own daughter is the vehicle of the cult's rise, for while visiting her comatose father in his Fortress, she discovers the Bottle City of Kandor, and decides its inhabitants ought to "get big." And to accomplish this, she seeks DC's smallest hero, the Atom, who as it happens is just as given as Diana to waxing philosophical, though he's more scientist than samurai:

Everything-- for Stephen Hawking's brain to a molten flash of goo bubbling at the earth's core-- shared an undeniable commonality--

This belief in commonality, profound though it is, leads him to assist Lara and her Kandorian friend Baal (note the Old Testament cognomen) in enlarging a coterie of Kandorians to human-size. The Atom assumes he's going to get good men and true. What he gets a cult of Kandorians, led by a Manson-like old fellow named Quar, who believe that the ants ought to be worshiping them.

It's not clear how aware Lara is of the cult's purpose when she abets their ascension. However, she's a hot-headed teenager, who resents her father's absence and her mother's attempts to control/discipline her, and she doesn't exactly rush to combat Quar's cult. (It's strongly suggested that she's hormonally motivated, since she's a teenager who perhaps wants a boyfriend able to survive mating with her, though she ends up falling out with false-god Baal.)

 At any rate, the cult runs roughshod over humanity and neutralize most of the heroes, starting with Atom and moving on to Flash and Green Lantern, though Aquaman and the two offspring of Hawkman and Hawkgirl remain on the periphery. (This is perhaps the closest we'll ever get to seeing Frank Miller write a Justice League story.) Though the Kandorians can't rid themselves of Superman quite so easily, their real foe is Batman and his protege, who are able to combat the cult more with strategy than with brute force. Miller and Azzarello certainly make much more judicious use of DC continuity than Miller did in TDKSA, though only hardcore insiders will get the references to the Lazarus Pit, and even I, hardcore though I am, have no idea why Green Lantern conjures up the image of Bat-Mite in one panel. Yet, for all of the juicy superhero action and continuity, MASTER RACE's greatest accomplishment may be that of giving the lie to all the penny-ante intellectuals who dismissed THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS as "fascist."

In my 1987 review of TDKR, I challenged this canard, though I qualified that view by suggesting that Miller might have "left himself open to such criticisms." But over the past thirty years, I've witnessed the irrational attachment that most psuedo-intellectual critics have to the "superheroes=fascism" meme, and now I believe that nothing Miller could have written then would have deflected that knee-jerk reaction.

Miller, as I said elsewhere, deals in visceral scenarios, not abstract propositions, so his answer to the fascist accusation appears in the form of the heroes having internal dialogues about heroism. The Atom's early musings about commonality prove central to Miller's response, and though the hero's meditations are qualified by some of his own experiences, he's certainly validated in that he ends up saving the day when the bigger heroes (yes, even Batman) fail. In Princess Diana's internal monologue provide a counter to Quar's ascension to godhood via the rays of a yellow sun, she argues that "specialness" must be cultivated as "something we can grow into, through curiosity, exercise, and discipline." And Superman, whose voice dominates the final coda, reverses his earlier animus to the incredibly shrinking mediocrity of humankind:

Ultimately, we understand how small our role really is-- that the lives we affect are potentially even greater than our own.

Superman also refutes the tendency of human beings to think of superheroes as gods, stating that "that's not even what we aspire to be." Miller and Azzarello are clearly not speaking only of four-color mystery-men, but of all human impulses toward heroism, however one may choose to define them. In a balanced viewpoint one could never be conflated with the ambitions of either historical fascists or super-villains like Quar, who sacrifices one of his own daughters as a "super-suicide bomber" whose exploding body annihilates Moscow-- though I feel relatively sure that some reviewer somewhere has complained about Miller and Azzarello having used Islamic motifs for his villains. (Quar has three Kandorian wives who wear veils. Oooooohhhh--)

In this post I've left out a lot of good stuff about TDKMR and some not so good stuff. Regardless, it's a given that, even if MASTER RACE's philosophy is more articulate this time round, this graphic novel can never surpass the place TDKR occupies in comics-history. But given that dopes like Frederic Wertham attacked superheroes by conflating Nietzsche and Nazism, it's fascinating to see these creators echo certain Nietzschean conceits that I identified in this meditation on the INCREDIBLES movie:

Nietzsche's ideal of his Ubermensch is not covalent with any version of the superhero, with one exception. the motivation of magnanimity. The Nietzschean "superman" is magnanimous because he has so much more "spirit" than common people. Superheroes generally don't show as much contempt for the rabble as Nietzsche did, but there's still a sense that superheroes are frequently magnanimous for similar reasons. But even here, there's a crucial difference. Mister Incredible enjoys getting praise and plaudits for his super-deeds, but his deeds primarily spring from empathy: from the realization that ordinary people need his help. 

MYTHCOMICS: "A DREAM OF FLYING" (MIRACLEMAN, 1982)

(Note: "A Dream of Flying" is the title of the first MIRACLEMAN story, and is used for a Marvel Comics reprint of material with the character. In my review-usage the title denotes what I deem the first main arc of the MIRACLEMAN story, from the beginning to the death of the hero's principal villain.)

Though WATCHMEN will probably continue as the main touchstone for many readers regarding the talents of Alan Moore, MARVELMAN-- renamed MIRACLEMAN in its first and subsequent American reprints-- may carry more cultural weight in the long run. When the character first appeared in the first issue of Great Britain's WARRIOR magazine (1982), Moore's idea of examining the superhero in more realistic terms was far from new, as evinced by the 1970s works of creators like Steve Gerber (for DEFENDERS) and Ross Andru (for THE FLASH)-- to say nothing of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN of the 1960s.

What Moore did was to up the game. Lee, Gerber and Andru all remained firmly within the ethos of melodramatic entertainment, but Moore created a sociological and psychological myth of the superhero that embraced the dominant critical attitude he'd apparently grown up with: that of literary modernism.

In this essay I touched on the salient differences of modernism and post-modernism as regards popular culture, so when I define Moore as a modernist, I'm thinking primarily in terms of my distinction that "modernism was essentially tied to a realistic paradigm not appreciably different from that of representational realism, and that post-modernism was in essence a reaction against that realistic paradigm."

In short, though Moore did not invent the idea of "the realistic superhero," he brought the idea in line with one particular philosophical outlook: that of rejecting the fantasy-appeal of violence and regarding it as a violation of "real" human values. Though not all literary modernist authors favored this view-- Jack London being a major exception-- it's a common trope throughout the early 20th century. A cogent example would be Simone Weil's 1939 essay THE ILIAD, OR THE POEM OF FORCE, whose radical interpretation of Homer's classic epic was grounded in a rejection of the credo of "force" that had plunged the world into a Second World War.

The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relation to force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.

In old interviews Moore stated that in his MIRACLEMAN work he was seeking to exorcise the part of him that loved the "fascist power-fantasies" of the 1950s "Marvelman," of which MIRACLEMAN was a more "adult" reboot. Throughout the first large arc of the story crafted by Moore and various artists, the inhuman "force" which Miracleman incarnates-- as well as his fellow "monster" Kid Miracleman-- is treated as a source of horror rather than as an occasion for juvenile excitement. Moore's "overthought," as I've employed the term here, is clearly to interrogate the genre of superheroes for its love of "force before which man's flesh shrinks away," as Weil puts it. In many respects, Moore's tone sounds not unlike that of Frederic Wertham, decrying outrageous fantasies in favor of humble normalcy.

And yet, despite the mediocrity of this "overthought," Moore was-- and possibly still is-- too much of an artist not to allow for a deeper "underthought," in which he can still see superheroes and supervillains as transcendent presences. Thus we get this authorial observation during the city-smashing battle between Miracleman and his opposite number, Kid Miracleman.

They are titans, and we will never understand the alien inferno that blazes in the furnace of their souls. We are only human. We will never grasp their hopes, their despair, never comprehend the blistering rage that informs each devastating blow… We will never know the destiny that howls in their hearts, never know their pain, their love, their almost sexual hatred… …And perhaps we will be the less for that.

This poetic aside does not nullify the thrust of Moore's modernist critique, of course. In the "real world," superheroes are not made by stalwart young chaps being given powers by saintly old wizards. Such expenditures can only come from the government, and the government only makes such expenditures in the name of war-technology. That said, Moore can't quite resist the allure of  a key trope of superhero fiction: the "supervillain-as-master-manipulator." The man responsible for turning an ordinary English bloke into an Aryan god is not a faceless bureaucrat, but the closest reality can come to a "super-villain:" an obsessed schemer whose whole project is to use the "superman technology" as a way of gaining personal immortality. The villain can only do all this through one of the most popular tropes in modernism: that of "everything you know is wrong"-- in this case, causing ordinary bloke Mike Moran to become consubstantial with Miracleman.

By now it should be obviously that I'm passing over the specific permutations of Moore's plot, with his confused double-identity hero and his no-less-confused wife, for the key to A DREAM OF FLYING lies in Moore's "Readers' Digest" version of Friedrich Nietzsche. Put bluntly, I don't think Moore read the German philosopher with any great insight. Nevertheless, as a teller of fictional stories, he's allowed to bowdlerize, as long as what he produces is a *good story.* Nietzsche serves the same purpose for Moore that he did for Wertham: he's a name everyone knows as a proponent of a "superman philosophy."

Happily, Moore only selects one or two actual quotes from the philosopher: like Wertham, Moore's real target is capital-F fascism. Both of the main villains of the arc-- "opposite number" Kid Miracleman and master manipulator Doctor Gargunza-- are strongly associated with Nazis. In the case of the former, he rants that "the real era of the Overman is here." Gargunza, though he is of Mexican nationality, ends up working under the Fuhrer himself, not to mention enjoying kaffeeklatches with famed "Nazi philosopher" Martin Heidegger, whose only purpose in the story seems to be as a stand-in for Nietzsche. Gargunza defects to England-- possibly a comment from Moore on the alacrity with which Allied nations accepted ex-Nazis into their midst. In Old Blighty the unscrupulous scientist comes in contact with the alien technology that will make the Miracleman project possible. Thus, as Moore points out at least twice, Gargunza is in a philosophical sense the "father" of Miracleman, but he hopes to become a "son" by impressing his brain-engrams upon the persona of the infant offspring of Miracleman and Mike Moran's wife.


The "Flying" arc ends with Mike Moran escaping a trap by Gargunza-- a trap which, like those of most super-villains, is entirely unnecessary, compared to the ease of shooting the vulnerable alter ego in the head. Moran manages to re-assert his Miracleman persona. First he kills various thugs working for Gargunza, all of whom seem to be practicing modern Nazis ("Forty years we have waited for you, for the first of the blonde gods that would replace us"), and then the hero executes Gargunza while Moore's captions invoke the "Star Light Star Bright" verse.

I don't take seriously Moore's political take on superhero psychology; while it's deeper than that of Steve Gerber, it's still fairly shallow. I do, however, regard him as a leading creator in the modernist tradition-- and my next mythcomic will show how one can examine some of the same content through a more "postmodern" lens.

ANOTHER QUICKLY BEATEN POST

The melodies of Mickey Marx do linger on and on and on...

________________

 Blue Saint said:

"All this “geekery” we surround ourselves in are aspects of commercial enterprise. "

I realize this banal line of Marxist thought has yet to shuffle off the mortal coil, that it continues to drag itself from Internet essay to Internet essay like a legless mummy.

But the fact is that no matter how one may try to define Captain America as an "aspect of commercial enterprise," this is an invalid "outside definition," proposed by someone who wants to reduce a given franchise to something predictable and determined by market forces and all that crap. None of this "culture industry" junk offers the slightest insight as to why people put down hard money for Captain America, or, for that matter, Love and Rockets, which is no less a ":commercial enterprise"-- or anything that was ever sold for money.

NOTE: The poster in question denied being an advocate of what I later caleld "Marx/Adorno 101," so I retracted the specific accusation, though it still applies across the board to other critics.

SECOND NOTE: Ripped off this cool quote from the discussion, possibly for later use:

“This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought.

“For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. …

“Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well.”

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html

________

As for the essence of the current kerfluffle about Captain America turning out to be a Hydra agent, I covered all this in my 2008 essay EARTH-SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE.


Also, I appreciate the comment by a poster named George, who points out that death-threats from aggrieved fans predate the Internet. He mentions that both Claremont and Miller received such threats for knocking off fan-favorite characters.

Frankly, I really don't think that the Cap-Hydra schtick can be critiqued in terms of "diversity" until it's actually appeared. Whoever started the "anti-Semitism" angle was plainly trying to stir shit without having facts on which to base an argument-- not to mention the fact that Nazism, of which Hydra is a fantasy-analogue, is not defined ONLY by anti-Semitism.

POSSE COMIC-TATUS

1. A child living is in esse, but before birth is only in posse.-- from Your Dictionary's definition of *in esse.*

I should qualify one aspect of my recent screed against the ideological critics who so often cry "fascist" against superheroes, "crime comics," or whatever they find ideologically suspect. Though I think that Frye's "wall of play" usually throws a veil of unreality over popular fiction's usages of violence, there may be cases where the ideological critic's tendency to "cry fascist" may luck onto the real thing.

In my essay TORTURED, PROSAICALLY, I largely defended the trope of inquisitorial torture from the usual attacks on it, but noted two exceptions, in which the television programs 24 and HAWAII 5-O indulged in the trope purely for the sake of showing the hero in the position of doling out violence without restraint. These shows were in part bad because there was no sense that the authorities involved might face any consequences for their actions, and in part because they were, in Sadean terms, stupid and unimaginative. At least when a Mickey Spillane hero tortures someone, there's a sort of brain-fevered fascination with the act itself, and I've often thought that Spillane's ideological posturings were just an excuse to bring about retributive violence. In other words, Spillane, like Sade, esteemed violence for its own sake, not as a means for preserving the police state.

Now, given that I myself unleashed the *in posse, in esse* distinction in this essay, I wondered whether or not this logic could apply in any degree to the argument of the ideological critics cited in WORKING VACATIONS.  Naturally, Adorno, Wertham and the rest don't admit of any exceptions in their characterizations of the American pop-hero. Superman, Sherlock Holmes and Donald Duck (that one's from Adorno) are fascist power-fantasies *in posse,* and they never had the option of being anything else.

I prefer the reverse formula. Batman always employs violence and occasionally utilizes torture, but as long as that "wall of play" is there, he's only a fascist *in esse.* Frank Miller's twist on the theme, in which Batman quite obviously enjoys inflicting pain ("The scream alone is worth it"), plays a darker form of the pulp-hero game as articulated by Bill Finger and his contemporaries, but there is, in my opinion, still a sense of freewheeling fantasy in the mix.

Given the philosophy I've expressed here, is it possible for Batman to be a fascist *in posse*?" I would say yes, though the only story known to me that comes close to being an overt jeremiad is Andrew Vacchs' heavy-handed BATMAN; THE ULTIMATE EVIL, in which the Caped One goes on a crusade against child pornography-- but even this doesn't seem quite as much of an advertisement for the benefits of a police state as the aforementioned 24 and HAWAII 5-O.

My conclusion, then, is that *in posse* fascism is a possibility within popular fiction, but in contrast to the insistence of the ideological critics, it's a rare phenomenon, and occurs only when the creator of the character forgets that he's playing a literary game, and enters the mental state of someone who's using fiction as a means to promote particular means and ends.

WORKING VACATIONS

I recently posted this simplified summation of my work/play concept on a forum-thread dealing with the question of whether or not superheroes were intrinsically juvenile.

"Escapism" is an important concept here, because on occasion (not necessarily on this thread) people sometimes conflate it with all things juvenile, which is not the case.

On my blog I've frequently contrasted two modes of literature which can be constructed for both juvenile and adult audiences. There's "escapism," which I consider "the literature of play," and "realism," which is "the literature of work."

Playing games means accepting a prescribed set of rules and limitations that aren't based on real-world means and ends, even if they might be loosely patterned after them (RISK, STRATEGO). But there's no real-world benefit from playing games. In a way, the player accept the game's fictional limits as a means of escaping the real world of limitations like inconvenient death, romantic loss, etc.

Work is all about means and ends, and the literature of work, "realism," is all about getting its audience to come to terms with mortal limitations. We may think of juvenile works as being only about escapism. But if someone writes a book for kids, aimed at coming to terms with the loss of loved ones, then that's both a "realist" work and a juvenile work.

Not that one has to be only within a naturalistic world in order to be "realistic." Lewis's Narnia books are aimed at kids, but their intent is to give the young audience a simplified grounding in the author's ideas of Christian philosophy. That's aimed at achieving a particular end by a particular means, and so I consider Narnia "realistic" in its thematic sense, even though it's a fantasy-- just as I do WATCHMEN and a handful of other "mature superheroes."

I've also occasionally asserted that the literature of thematic escapism functions as a "vacation from morals," moral prescriptions being the primary cultural manifestation of limitation: of what a member of a society must or must not do to remain a viable member of that society.

Early in THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, Northrop Frye discusses the ways in which types of melodrama-- he mainly references the detective story and the "thriller"-- can invoke in their audiences feelings of moral indignation, which might under different circumstances might involve the ideal of work in its sense of "means and ends."

In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.

We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there. 

Frye was IMO completely correct in assuming that the violent aspects of these "thrillers" is insulated by "a wall of play." However, he was wrong is assuming that it was "not possible" for critics to take violent melodramas "seriously" enough to believe that they were indeed "advance propaganda for the police state." About thirteen years prior to the publication of Frye's ANATOMY, Marxist Theodor Adorno attacked all products of the so-called "culture industry" as manifestations of a new fascism, though his analysis of the relation of violence to its audience may sound more Freudian than Marxist:


In the very first sequence [of a story] a motive is stated so that in the course of the action destruction can get to work on it: with the audience in pursuit, the protagonist becomes the worthless object of general violence. The quantity of organized amusement changes into the quality of organized cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction [until] the day of the pogrom. Insofar as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.

In 1949, Gershon Legman self-published his book of essays, LOVE AND DEATH, which in part assailed comic books as institutionalized fascism, virtually duplicating Adorno's argument about how it served the ends of an implied "police state" that wanted citizens to fantasize about venting violence on scapegoat victims so that said citizens would then accept any punishment the government dished out.

And of course, there's the debbil-doctor himself:

Superman (with the big S on his uniform—we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.) needs an endless stream of ever new submen, criminals and "foreign-looking" people not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible. It is this feature that engenders in children either one or the other of two attitudes: either they fantasize themselves as supermen, with the attendant prejudices against the submen, or it makes them submissive and receptive to the blandishments of strong men who will solve all their social problems for them—by force.


And, lest anyone reading think that these views no longer have currency, here's reliable Noah Berlatsky, from the comments-thread in which I recently participated, taking the POV that all superheroes are essentially cops, representatives of a police state:

 superheroes function as a kind of paramilitary right wing law and order force; they’re doing the dirty work of justice that even the police can’t do. That’s a lineage that goes back to the KKK; I don’t think it gets out of the dynamic I discussed. I think that applies to a lot of the lone badass against the system narratives too. 


What all of these individuals have in common is that they have refused to give the melodramatic entertainments they attack the credit for being "play." Thrillers, comedy cartoons, and superheroes are all defined by the "work" that the culture industry wants them to do, whether it's to create admiration for the forces of law-and-order or to provide "bread and circuses" so that the citizens won't notice how beaten-down they are by the forces of authority. Escapist melodramas might provide vacations from whatever morality these elitists tout as superior, but since the melodramas are working for authority, they only supply "working vacations."

Clearly I'm with Frye in believing that the consumers of these fantasies, violent or not, have the awareness to know that they're engaging a playful activity that doesn't represent the way the real world works. It can be fairly stated that concerns of "realism" do appear in any work, no matter how "escapist," be it a story set in the audience's own world or in some "Dungeons and Dragons" universe. But the element of play generally takes precedence, though permutations do arise in both the escapist mode and the realistic mode, as discussed more fully here.

The biggest problem of the "heroes are fascist" argument is that it soon becomes entirely tautological, like Freud. In Freud's opinion the Oedipal theory was validated whether or not  a man did or didn't marry a woman like his mother. A man who married a woman like his mother confirmed Freud's theory directly; a man who married a woman completely unlike his mother was undergoing "displacement," which in some roundabout way still validated the Oedipal theory.

Similarly, most of the "heroic fascist" arguments fall into the same circular arguments seen above. Does the hero work directly for the government? Then he's a fascist. Does the hero work on his own, reporting to no authority? Then he's "a kind of paramilitary right wing law and order force." Is the hero a badass fighting against the system, like (say) Snake Plissken? The argument will admit of no meaningful exceptions: the badass fighting the system is a fascist too. In other words, everything proves what the theory's proponent wants to prove, and the few exceptions the advocate may provide, if he provides any, simply happen to appeal to his or her particular moral system.

A REALLY SHORT DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE

In the essay SUPERHEROES ARE ABOUT FASCISM, Noah Berlatsky offers an assortment of generalized arguments about superheroes, violence and fascism that I have refuted under other circumstances.

in order to prove superheroes fascist, you dismiss the diegetic reality of the villains whom they fight, who most often are seen robbing and killing and swindling, and choose to perceive [these acts] simply as amorphous violations of a "dominant order."  That way, you paint the hero/ine as a mindless defender of that order-- one that can then be compared, no matter in what far-fetched manner, to whatever dominant order one doesn't like.

What strikes me as most interesting about Berlatsky's essay-- to which I have already responded at some length-- is that from a writer's standpoint he makes his point clear right away.  Whether his readers agree or disagree with him, he provides a succinct theme statement right away:

Superheroes conflate goodness with hitting things. For the superhero genre, the best person in the world is the one with the greatest power; beating evil is a matter of hitting it harder.

In the comments-section a respondent named Sean boils this assertion to its most familiar formula:

Actually, superheroes are about capitalist democracy – might makes right together with a bit of (self serving) moralistic waffle about justice and the individual.

Thus, though Berlatsky himself does not utter the familiar formula, anyone can read his first sentences and know that (a) he believes superheroes are governed by the ideal of "might makes right," (i.e., "the best person in the world is the one with the greatest power")  and (b) that this is a bad thing to believe.

What would be the countervailing statement to this assertion?  It comes down to this:

                               MIGHT MAKES EGO


And that's the short definition.  Long one to follow.

OVERTHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT PT. 4

"Primary concerns" are basically what pagans call the "four F's"-- flags (housing), flax (clothing), fodder and frig (no explanation needed). Around such primary concerns myth, both in the religious and literary senses, orients itself.

"Secondary concerns" are the concerns of ideology, which is concerned with the best ways to obtain the items that make up "primary concerns." Name any ideology out there and at base it's just another way for its adherents to maximize their chances of getting those things that make life pleasurable and fulfilling. Myths in the raw are not concerned with ideology. Ideological notions derive from them, but such notions are entirely a secondary product.-- Me, IDEOLOGY VS. MYTH.

I think my fundamental point about villains and freedom is being missed here, though: Wonder Woman isn't the one defending freedom, the villains are. It's very much in the text of the comic: whatever evils the villains have committed in previous issues is aligned with a demand for self-determination and free will. What conclusion is there to be drawn here when the ones even you are acknowledging as the bad guys are the ones espousing the virtue of freedom? I think Marston's message is loud and clear.-- Charles Reece, comment-thread to this essay.

On the contrary, most "messages" from the world of art, be it "high art" and "low art," are far from "clear."  Not once, within the comic books stories Reece surveys, does any character make the ideological statements Reece deduces from the work.  One might argue that the mere fact that he has extrapolated what he considers Marston's "message" is tantamount to an admission by Reece that no one can find such "messages" working from the overt declarations of a story's characters.  For Reece, "freedom" is first and foremost an ideological conception, and Marston fails Reece's test for taking the proper ideological attitude toward "free will."

I've already shown the inaccuracies of Reece's interpretation in earlier esaays, but that isn't to say that there are no ideological statements in the Marston WONDER WOMAN.  In keeping with my quote above, though, Marston's ideas evolve from the primary concerns evoked by Marston for himself and for his audience.

If one rejects Reece's position that Marston's "message" is to assert the ever-present practice of bondage as weapons to maintain an "ideological state apparatus," what are the primary concerns involved in the Marston corpus?  Most comics-critics, assuming that one could get them to read and comprehend Frye's passage, would assume that Marston's fascination with the practice of bondage started and ended with "frig."  This position is at least more in tune with the actual function of bondage in Marston, in that the practice often connotes sexual play.  A number of online critics are content to regard the bondage-element as a covert appeal to salaciousness, and of course no one can be entirely sure that this was not one of Marston's motivations in his approach to WONDER WOMAN.

However, even "frig" isn't just all about nothing but fucking.  Bondage itself is a sexual practice which has nothing to do with actual sex as such.  Without eliding the "bodily" aspects of bondage, it should be evident that Marston, through his frequent emphases on the subject of "will," was aware that bondage also pertained to the "nonbody" aspect of the human entity, as bondage is paradoxically a restraint and a liberation of the will.  Reece objects to the way Marston presents restraints on the human will in the service of an ideological state apparatus, making it clear that he rejects the "liberation" half of the Marston equation, as I explored more fully in Part 3. 
 
All that said, in what other ways might one show not only that Marston's "message" was not entirely "clear" and that his use of bondage was not purely a paraphiliac indulgence?

In his essays Reece principally studies WONDER WOMAN #28 (1948), the last Wonder Woman story Marston produced prior to his death, which concerns the Amazons' use of "Venus girdles" to restrain and re-train prisoners on Transformation Island.  But does this one story encompass every aspect of Marston's thought, even about the "Venus girdles?"

I have not read every Marston story which uses the aforesaid restraints, which first appeared in ALL-STAR COMICS #13.  However, I have read another girdle-story in WONDER WOMAN #22, published about a year before the one Reece surveys.  Suffice to say that not only does it not support Reece's ideological argument, it comes close to refuting them.

The 11-page "Jealousy Visits the Winged Women of Venus" shares the comic with two unrelated stories, though one of the other two involves another adventure against the Saturnians who figure prominently in WW #28.  The story begins with an Earth-girl who attends school with Diana's buddies the Holliday Girls.  Said girl goes by the risible name "Gell Osey:"

The first seven page remain on Earth, where Gell repeatedly shows that she can't play well with others due to her extreme jealousy of others' accomplishments.  Gell sneaks aboard an experimental rocket that takes her to Venus; Wonder Woman pursues her to keep her ship from crashing due to her added weight.  Once the superheroine does so, she binds Gell and introduces her to her Venusian buddies, the Winged Women ruled by Queen Desira.  While waiting for the rocket to be repaired, Wonder Woman allows Gell to be kept at a local training-school.  Young winged girls, it seems, need to be trained to be good, so while they're being trained, their wings are bound in net-like affairs.  Gell, who's been bound with WW's lasso, manages to work it off her wrists.  (Apparently the Amazon wasn't Amazing enough to give her the command, "don't take the lasso off.")  Gell inspires the other trainees to rebel against Desira's tyranny, and leads an assault on the queen.  Gell uses the lasso to subdue both Desira and Wonder Woman.

The revolt doesn't last long: in a final, hurry-up-and-finish page, Gell Osey gets the prisoners' wings released, but then shows an even more draconian edict: under Gell Osey's rule all the Venusian women who had won their freedom must now be bound like the untrained girls.  "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" doesn't do much to promote Gell as an advocate of free will, any more than it did for Villainy Inc. in WW #28.  Gell makes the same mistake Wonder Woman made: she holds the heroine bound but fails to command her not to get free, so WW surprises Gell and gets free.  Desira reverses Gell's command and the rebels accept returning to their bound status, while Wonder Woman pays her erstwhile foe a fair compliment: "You've convinced me of your superiority, Gell-- you're a very dangerous girl!"  Possibly this mollifies Gell's raging insecurities, for in the final panel, as WW tells her she's got to go to "Reform Island," Gell suddenly evinces a desire to learn how not to be consumed by jealousy.

Now Reece argues above that the evils commited by the "Villainy Inc." antagonists are obviated because they've been allies to "a demand for self-determination and free will."  Gell Osey's sins, however, aren't conveniently off-camera as in the other story: from her petty defiance of sensible rules (don't stowaway on rockets or you'll break your neck) to her decision to oppress everyone else on Venus, it's clear that she's only concerned with her own "free will," and no one else's.  By extension the Venusian rebels are no better in Marston's diegesis, and though many readers might be distressed to see the status quo return by story's end, I'd argue that it only seems distressing to readers who do the same thing Charles Reece does: making easy correlations betweeen Venusian social conditioning and Orwellian brainwashing.

An insight into "primary concerns," however, suggests that Marston's repeated trope of restraint and liberation-- both of which could be good or bad depending on story-context-- was in essence beyond any dubious moral analogues.  To borrow once more from Suzanne Langer, Marston did not lay down a "discursive" argument as to when either restraint or liberation was good or bad.
His repeated passion for recapitulating bondage-scenarios in just about every conceivable manner is more in line with Langer's concept of the "presentational," in which meaning adheres to the physicality of sense-experience, seen here as identical with "primary concerns:"

What we should look for is the first indication of symbolic behavior [in man's predecessors the anthropoids], which is not likely to be anything as specialized, conscious, or rational as the use of semantic. Language is a very high form of symbolism; presentational forms are much lower than discursive, and the appreciation of meaning probably earlier than its expression... It is absurd to suppose that the earliest symbols could be *invented;* they are merely *Gestalten* furnished to the senses of a creature ready to give them some diffuse meaning."-- NEW KEY, p. 110.

 Everything I've written about the potential mythic content that arises from sense-experience depends on this idea of "diffuse meaning," which later becomes concentrated (or calcified) into ideological forms.  To me the power of myth is the true expression of free will, while ideology always threatens to trap and bind even the people who most think they have control of its intricacies.

OVERTHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT

‘Meaning is derived from context, and there are two contexts for verbal meaning: the context of literature and the context of ordinary explicit or intentional discourse. When we first read a concentrated and difficult poem, we first try to grasp its explicit meaning, or the prose sense of what it says. We often call this the “literal” meaning, but actually it is a translation of the poem into a different verbal context, and is not what the poem really means at all. Gerard Manley Hopkins draws a distinction between the poet’s “overthought” or explicit meaning, and his “underthought,” or the meaning given by the progression of images and metaphors. But it is the “underthought” that is the real poetic meaning, and the explicit meaning must conform to it ...-- Northrop Frye (fuller context here).

On a deeper symbolic level, Marston as author certainly knows that Wonder Woman’s conversion of “man’s world” to the law of Aphrodite is his personal fantasy, but as long as his creation Wonder Woman keeps saving fictional victims, that law is continuously validated.'-- me, MYTHCOMICS #23:WONDER WOMAN #1.

At the end of BETTER THE DEVIL YOU KNOW PT. 2, I said that I'd explicate an example of the species of "adversarial criticism," which I define as criticism in which the critic assumes an adversarial relationship to the literary work he critiques, beyond merely judging its merit as literature.  For this essay, I select Charles Reece's essay ON SECOND THOUGHT, I REALLY DON'T LIKE WONDER WOMAN, which appears on the HOODED UTILITARIAN in part one (the bulk of which does concern Wonder Woman) and part two (which only tangentially concerns the DC heroine).

Reece's essay is a perfect example of the process of "overthinking the underthought" as per my title. The "underthought," Frye tells us in the above quote, is the "real poetic meaning" of any given literary work, and for centuries critics have attempted to validate their livelihoods by demonstrating that they possess the ability to discern the real meaning beneath the merely "explicit meaning," or "overthought," of said work.  As a quick example, anyone can sum up the "overthought" of HAMLET by simply reciting the "prose sense of what it says," but the "underthought," conveyed by "the progression of images and metaphors" within the work, is a more dicey proposition.


My examination of WONDER WOMAN #1 and Reece's examination of the WONDER WOMAN mythos generally (though he only cites the events of one story from WONDER WOMAN #28) have this one critical purpose in common: in Fryean terms, both of us are claiming to have ferreted out the "underthought" represented within the stories critiqued.  However, I assert that the thing that separates our methods is that I believe, as Frye says at the end of the above quote, that there must be some agreement between underthought and overthought, between "poetic meaning" and "explicit meaning."  Reece, in contrast, feels that he can represent the underthought as what it connotes to him, with scant reference to the overthought/explicit meaning of the work in question.

Early in Part 1, Reece lays bare his ideologically informed reaction to the WONDER WOMAN mythos as follows:

If there’s a danger to Marston’s feminism, it’s in his tranquil submission to a “loving” authority. Don’t ultra-nationalists love their country? He circumvents this problem by making his heroes as anodyne as possible. We should trust the Amazonians, because we know they are pure and virtuous. Granted, this hardly sets Wonder Woman apart from all the other classic DC heroes, but isn’t that a problem? Even a feminist heroine can be as indicative of the fascistic aesthetic as any of her male counterparts. Marston’s creation helped with equality in representation, but it did so by presenting some ideas that any libertarian-minded type should find fairly repellant (and by ‘libertarian’ I mean the philosophical belief in free will, not necessarily the political variety)...Any society that promotes a totalizing agenda should be feared and distrusted, as should art promoting such an agenda, whether it’s rooted in misogyny or feminism.

Throughout his essay Reece will keep Marston in the docks for the charge of having promoted a totalizing "propanganda," taking as gospel (perhaps naively) Marston's philosophical tub-thmping on behalf of his Amazon creation, as seen in this Marston quote offered by Reece early on:

[That w]omen are exciting for this one reason — it is the secret of women’s allure — women enjoy submission, being bound [was] the only truly great contribution of my Wonder Woman strip to the moral education of the young. The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound. … Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society.

Was Marston sincere in his belief that women might transform society through an ethic of submission?  Probably to some extent, though I prefer to give the author the benefit of the doubt.  In my summarizing quote above, I opined that Marston was surely aware that his fantasy of the "law of Aphrodite" was just that, a metaphorical fantasy, and therefore the "underthought" to the events of Wonder Woman saving widows and orphans and whatnot.  Precisely because WONDER WOMAN was fantasy and not some fanatic's account of his personal hegira, I don't believe that it's fair to regard the series as "art promoting a totalizing agenda." 

Speaking of "totalizing," I find that Reece uses totalizing logic in aligning all "pure and virtuous" heroes with "the fascistic aesthetic."  Comic books certainly did not invent the narrative strategy of asserting that a given hero was  foursquare virtuous (not to mention good-looking), which qualities made that hero worthy of the reader's emotional investment and conviction.  However, I doubt that any medium outside of comic books has been so frequently pilloried for using this narrative device to usurp the "free will" of their readers through this identificatory process.

In order to vilify the heroes, of course, such dodgy critiques must elide or downplay the act of the villains opposed by said heroes.  In the comments-thread of the second part of Reece's essay, I challenged him on this point with the comment I preserved under QUICK COMMENT PRESERVATION.  My opposition boils down to this statement:

I find it really hard to reconcile a “dominating will” who waits until the other guy strikes. That too would seem not to line up well with your “fascism” charge. I’ll agree that a reluctant hero is inevitably going to kick ass. But that doesn’t eliminate the connotative difference between the reluctant hero and the quasi-hero who’s ready to go Lobo on anyone with the least provocation.

I'm not going to rehash Reece's responses at length here, as anyone (at this time) can search out the thread and read it.  But as far as I can tell,  Reece feels that the actions of the villains are merely excuses for the hero to kick ass, rather than diegetic realities in themselves:

Similarly, WW’s dominating will can remain passive (on the surface) so long as everyone shares it. When someone violates the (Amazonian) dominant order, she uses force to contain the transgression. Is a dominant will operating under the ideologically determined image of waiting “until the other guy strikes” all that difficult to reconcile when we live in a country with fundamentalist Christians?

This old dodge was often practised by both Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman; in order to prove superheroes fascist, you dismiss the diegetic reality of the villains whom they fight, who most often are seen robbing and killing and swindling, and choose to perceive them simply as amorphous violations of a "dominant order."  That way, you paint the hero/ine as a mindless defender of that order-- one that can then be compared, no matter in what far-fetched manner, to whatever dominant order one doesn't like ("fundamentalist Christians.")

I remarked earlier that there should exist a conformity between the story's "explict meaning/overthought" and its "poetic meaning;/underthought."  Whereas my analysis of WONDER WOMAN #1 cites every major event in the story, the only event on which Reece focuses in his critique of WONDER WOMAN #28 is the fact that Wonder Woman's opponents, the aggregate of WW foes known as "Villainy Inc.," seek freedom from their conditioning on Paradise Island.  He makes this most explicit in the comments-thread:

And get this straight: the only characters talking about freedom in WW#28 are the villains. That’s right, Marston only has villains caring about freedom. If he sees them as fascists (which I doubt that he does), then that would be a pretty clear cut case of Newspeak. The book is totalitarian and authoritarian. It views mind control as good and individuality as bad.

Of course the freedom of the villains here means, within the diegesis, the freedom to commit any crime they please, ranging from Queen Clea enslaving a whole society to Zara simply swindling people with her flame-powers.  Reece, busy overthinking his agenda against fascist agendas, gives no thought to the fact that all of the villains are much closer to practicing the vices of fascists than Wonder Woman or her Amazons.  The ladies of "Villainy Inc." are "individuals" only within the sense that they're colorful opponents for the hero within a fictional cosmos.  In real life, you wouldn't want to sample their individual "quirks." 

Part 2 will touch on other problematic aspects of the sort of criticism that is to literature as a prosecuting attorney is to the subject of an indictment.