ETHOLOGICAL ASIDE

Here's a section of an online argument I had with an atheist poster who, as the final section explains, attempted to claim that early humans evolved "ethics" without any input from the abstractions of religion. Hope it makes sense on its own, which I preserve here for the possibility of further development. ______________________________________                                                        Animals of many species have demonstrated at least the possibility of very elementary reasoning processes. We know that ants use tools, as with transporting liquids. Did they reason, "if I do this thing with this thing X will happen," or did they just stumble across something that worked? We don't know. But in that case, as with the case of male lions murdering other lions' offspring, we're talking about observing possible consequences in the near future. Lions might not be able to articulate: "if I leave the lioness' other cubs alive, the lioness won't have milk for my cubs." But it's a zero sum game that a lion might observe, not any more abstract that making plans to find food. We know that cougars cache their excess of food, which also indicates some sense of future outcomes, though some have argued that the animals don't retain the memory of their caches very long. My earlier example of large rats giving in to smaller rats while in wrestling-play applies here too: it doesn't take abstraction for the big rat to figure out that he has to give a little to get a little. ALL of these examples depend on time-sensitive observations imbued with self-interest. But it takes abstract correlation of many factors to make the conclusion, "Hey, my cubs with a strange lion came out good and the cubs with my sister didn't; ergo, better avoid incest." It's particularly counter-intuitive because offspring with relations don't ALWAYS show immediate physical flaws. Maybe some primates *might* make some such connections, but if so we're getting back into the deep end of the brain-pool. Your concept of animals forming societies through an "ethics" based on acceptable/non-acceptable behavior is also predicated with pre-cognitive reasoning processes. I brought up the lack of strong incest avoidance in lower animals to show one of the places where humans diverged from animals, to give an example of an ethical conclusion founded in abstract conceptualizing. We know that in modern times tribal-level humans correlate their incest injunctions with their religious beliefs, so it's not a giant leap to theorize a parallel development in prehistoric eras. So again, your attempt to segregate "ethics" from "religion" is a dogmatic belief that isn't even justified by available anthropological and ethological evidence.    

TOWER OF SCREAMING FREUDIANS

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of excitation-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of emotion-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of correlation-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of cogitation-quanta.

           --STALKING THE PERFECT TERMS: THE FOUR POTENTIALITIES

          

So I've just finished reviewing the 1968 French thriller TOWER OF SCREAMING VIRGINS,only to find that the movie's diegesis contained more material than I could fit into a film-review. It's a shame I'm not a Freudian, because the film is really a treasure trove of Freudian tropes, for all that the narrative was based on a story written some twenty years before Freud was born. I judged that the film has only "fair" mythicity because it was not as interested in what I have called "correlation-quanta" as on "emotion-quanta." 

Here's the setup material I wrote the review.

This English-dubbed French thriller, despite its exploitative title, boasts a distinguished lineage. The source material is partly from a legend from French history: that, in the 14th century, Margaret of Burgundy, wife to King Louis X, committed adultery within a Parisian guard-tower, the Tower of Nesle, for which offense the unhappy French queen was imprisoned for the remainder of her life. A writer named Frederic Gaillardet dramatized the incident, though Alexander Dumas rewrote the play, possibly because he'd become famous for a stage-success in 1829, prior to his later fame as a novelist. However, the Gaillardet-Dumas story only takes various names and places from the historical account, concocting a wild hybrid story I'm tempted to call a "psycho-swashbuckler." I have not read any version of the prose source material. But I theorize that one of the authors borrowed a folklore-tale about Cleopatra, which asserted that the Egyptian queen had the habit of taking male lovers into her boudoir for one night of passion, only to have them executed afterward. 

TOWER, like the play on which it's based, spins out the idea that Queen Margaret-- who, according to the story's dynamics, ought to be in her middle thirties-- uses the deserted Tower of Nesle for a series of one-night stands with young Frenchmen, whether they are or aren't "virgins" like the title says . In fact, there are usually three such encounters each night, since Margaret (Teri Tordai) sets up liaisons for her two handmaidens as well. Then comes the "screaming," as Margaret's main henchman Orsini and various hooded thugs slay the male victims and toss them into the Seine River. I don't know why any of the henchmen, or Margaret and her ladies for that matter, affect any sort of masks, since they expect all to be killing off any and all visitors. The attempts at secrecy don't keep the locals from getting the sense that nasty things are happening at the "Tower of Sin," as they call it.

Like a lot of psycho-dramas, TOWER depends on a crapload of big revelations about things that happened prior to the film's diegesis. So for purpose of deeper analysis, I'm citing the actual events of the film in order that they are said to have happened, to get a handle on the psychological constructs the adapters used, which may or may not all be in the original play, or any book adaptation thereof.

1) Some time before Margaret of Burgundy becomes Queen of 14th-century France by marrying Louis X, she's just a young noblewoman living with her father. Margaret has some conflict with her father that will lead her to plot his murder. She then has intimate relations with two young pages, hypothetically when she's in her teens or twenties, though there's no testimony as to how old the pages were. One of the pages, Orsini, she gets to poison her father, which may help her rise to power in some way. But by the other page, who later goes by the name Bouridan, plants a bun in her oven. That bun results in two non-identical twin boys, and either Margaret or Orsini gives the order to have the incriminating children killed. This apparently happens without the knowledge of Bouridan, though it's not clear what he knew and when. But the henchman (or huntsman?) in charge of the killing leaves the two infants with a church, and they're raised to manhood. They both look about twenty when they arrive in Paris, which would make Margaret at least 35 by that time (though actress Teri Tordai was in her twenties). 

2) Bouridan presumably has various adventures before he becomes celebrated for military valor in the service of Louis X, and he too should be at least in his middle thirties, though the actor playing Bouridan was in his forties. He's first seen on his way to Paris, but he takes time to chat up Blanche, who's both implicitly in her innocent twenties and played by an actress of the same age.

3) Bouridan encounters the twins, Philippe and Gautier, in Paris. He thinks it's odd because they both have old scars on their forearms, which reminds of a similar scar on the arm of his former lover, though he does not say as much. Both Bouridan and Philippe get invited to party at The Tower, and though Bouridan seems to be familiar with the place's bad rep, he doesn't try to talk Philippe out of going.

4) Bouridan is set up to have sex with one of the Queen's handmaidens and then be killed, but he avoids both fates and escapes the Tower. Philippe has sex with the Queen, all the Oedipal innocent who doesn't know he's shagging his mom. Margaret, who's sacrificed numerous victims to her lust and that of her two handmaidens, feels a little tender about Philippe and almost spares him. But the enthralled young man tries to see the face under her mask, and Margaret has Orsini kill him and dispose of the body.

5) Around the same time, Orsini-- also played by an actor in his forties-- takes a fancy to Blanche when she arrives at court. He strongarms her into becoming a handmaiden to Margaret. Later he gets her alone and tries to rape her, but he's interrupted and Blanche gets away.

6) Bouridan seems to nurture an old rivalry with Orsini, since his main concern is to blackmail the Queen, threatening to reveal her ilicit activities to King Louis X, newly returned from a foreign campaign-- though later in the film it's implied that the King suspects Margaret's doing something not quite right. However, Bouridan gets a chance to question one of Orsini's henchmen, whom they both knew from their time as pages. The henchman reveals that he spared the lives of the twins and marked them with scars, though he doesn't say why. 

7) So now Bouridan knows that the two children he sired with Margaret lived, even though Philippe died after getting sexed up by his mother. The captain doesn't seem too broken up by this revelation, and he's still more interested in forcing Margaret into giving him a special position at court, even going to the extent of confronting her with the dead body of Philippe. Bouridan also doesn't seek out his surviving son Gautier, though Gautier tries to kill the older man, thanks to Orsini telling the young fellow that Bouridan killed Philippe. 

8) Bouridan does not reveal his filial relationship to Gautier, but somehow talks him into helping Bouridan assault on the Tower while the Queen intends to have one of her orgies. The end result is that Gautier is killed by the Queen's men, though she's belatedly horrified to see her other son slain (though apparently it was okay when they were infants). Bouridan duels Orsini but it's Margaret who stabs Orsini, her former favorite, to death. Then, since the Tower has conveniently caught on fire, she consigns herself to the flames. The King, summoned by Blanche's efforts, shows up mostly to give Bouridan the commission he wants, and the hero cleaves to his (much younger) beloved.

So none of these Freud-tropes are brought together in the service of either a didactic or mythopoeic discourse, only to exploit an array of emotional responses. The Oedipal drama of a son accidentally sleeping with his mother isn't even the main focus here, though. If anything, the main plot resembles Freud's scenario from TOTEM AND TABOO, in which a male tries to keep all the nubile women to himself. Obviously, in his youth Bouridan is not able to do this, because Margaret forms an alliance with his rival Orsini. Still, she later says that she felt a deeper relationship to Bouridan than anyone else, so there's a strong implication that he was such a good lover that for years Margaret's been trying to satisfy herself with lesser (read: younger) peccadillos. 

Bouridan, though, doesn't display any longing for Margaret; he doesn't even try to kiss her at any time. The implication I take from this series of tropes is that he was betrayed by her taking up with his rival Orsini. He doesn't really care about his two sons any more than he does about Margaret. He's dominated by a "will to power," and he prospers as a result of infiltrating Margaret's murderous operation. Also of Oedipal interest is that he ends up with a woman young enough to be his daughter, though to be sure actor Jean Piat did not look to be in his forties for this role. It's also interesting that both Bouridan and Orsini desire Blanche, just as they presumably both desired Margaret as well. I might even theorize that, to Bouridan's ego, both of his sons can be easily sacrificed in his quest for power, and for sex with a younger woman. I'd call it a double standard, but of course Margaret is still the greater sinner, since she kills for her thrills.

Interestingly, I did some additional writing on another film with strong age-inappropriate clansgression. In TUTELARY SPIRITS I mostly addressed the question as to which characters were the superordinate icons of the schlock-film MOTHER GOOSE A GO GO. There the writer showed little attentiveness to anything like emotional tenor. But he did succeed in using fairytales as a means of creating a mythic discourse around a quaternity of taboos concerning age and blood-- and no such discourse appeared in TOWER OF SCREAMING FREUDIANS.

INCEST WE TRUST PART 7

 I was looking up something about the TV show MODERN FAMILY and stumbled across an academic article for Gale Research, which is only readable through one's library subscription service. In this article, "Modern Family: the Return of the Incest Aesthetic in Culture,"  author Stephen Marche argued that the primary use of incest in traditional societies has been for the purpose of describing the dissolution of stable cultures, and that modern cultural artifacts that utilize incest topics or incest humor (GAME OF THRONES and RICK AND MORTY are cited) represent an "incest aesthetic" oriented on societal dissolution as well.

I don't deny that the trope of incestuous relations can be used to signal societal downfall, but my own occasional examinations of the trope in popular fiction don't bear out Marche's conclusions. In short, like almost any subject matter, incest can be used to signal whatever any author pleases to reference.

Here's a section of Marche's article that gets the subject wrong.

Incest appears at the end of things because the fear of incest, the law against it, rises at the beginning of things, at the beginning of meaning for both individuals and societies. In the early twentieth century, anthropologists struggled with an odd fact about human society: the prohibition against incest was so universal and so ancient that it could hardly be described as cultural. "This rule [against incest] is at once social, in that it is a rule, and pre-social, in its universality and the type of relationships upon which it imposes a norm", Levi-Strauss wrote in The Elementary Structure of Kinship. Nature plays some role in the incest prohibition. We have evolved not to have sex with our family members. A study from 2002 found that same-sex siblings dislike their siblings' smell and that mothers dislike their children's smell--an aversion, the researchers speculated, expressly to prevent incest. For Freud, the repression of the incestuous urge was essential to the formation of the ego. The "family romance" demands prohibition. This prohibition lies at the moment of separation between nature and culture, both a bridge and a fracture.

The problem with this view of Freud, though, is that Freud doesn't just say "incest must be prohibited." Given that he thinks the Oedipus Complex is inevitable in everyone, different only in degree, the complex must not just be prohibited but sublimated. This means that the mature Oedipal male must re-direct his affection for his maternal unit to some more plausible marriage-partner. However, Freud continued to maintain that even sublimation did not destroy the power of the complex. Instead, Freud had it both ways. If the mature male marries someone similar to his mother, he's still "marrying his mother." Yet if he marries someone markedly dissimilar, this is a form of "deflection," which just shows how much work the male goes through to dampen down his original affections.

Actually, most recent iterations of the incest-trope have, in my opinion, followed Freudian orthodoxy, and though I could cite other essays I've blogged here in support, the teleseries MODERN FAMILY actually does counter Marche's "Modern Family." I won't go into onerous detail here, since anyone can find assorted Youtube videos chronicling all the show's humorous jokes about sons subconsciously desiring mothers, brothers sisters, and so on. The point is that this was a well to which the MF writers kept returning-- and yet they certainly weren't trying to sell their fictional family as a paradigm for "the end times." If anything, the showrunners represented their paradigm as the future of American families, inclusive of various ethnicities and sexual proclivities. Within that context, MODERN FAMILY got humor out of sublimation, not actual incestuous feeling. Thus, for just one quick example, the Dunphy daughters at one time or another date males reminiscent of their daffy dad, and one daughter, Haley, marries her goofy beau in the later seasons. The one Dunphy boy, raised by both a permissive dad and a bossy mom, is mainly seen gravitating toward older women as sex-partners, though the series concludes without giving him a permanent love interest.

What MODERN FAMILY celebrates with its take on incest-tropes is a tacit assumption that every family has these little hangups and that sublimating them is just part of the maturation journey, though the hangups remain funny because they're always incongruous to the audience's expectations about what family "ought to be." This has nothing to do with any "end times," and may be closer in spirit to "the carnivalesque" spirit promoted by the Russian critic Bakhtin. The disruptions to "normalcy" are like those of the carnival; they divert, but do not permanently overthrow, the boundaries of normal life. And that, I believe, is the real dominant "incest aesthetic" in the 21st century.

NEAR-MYTHS: "IN THE GALLOWS OF THE GHOUL" (HANGMAN #8, 1943)

Many superhero comics of the Golden Age possess the extravagant and horrific elements of Gothic prose fiction, and a fair number of them use an expressionist style that's sometimes labeled "Gothic." The series I'm considering here, THE HANGMAN from MLJ, is one with such an artstyle.

The earliest prose Gothics, such as THE MONK and CASTLE OF OTRANTO, are noted for emphasizing a particular horror-element: that of incest. Despite the fulminations of comics-haters, most comics of all genres seem innocent of this particular element, in its sexual form.

In other essays I formulated an umbrella-term, "clansgression," to include all literary effects that even suggested incestuous activity or feelings, even if actual sexual transgression did not transpire. One form that did occasionally appear was the form of violence-clansgression. This usually took the form of madness-- fathers killed daughters, or brothers sisters-- but no sexual activity was suggested; such events were mainly melodramatic excess.

On the surface, "In the Gallows of the Ghoul" seems one of these. A madman, Jed Jennings, strangles his sister Mary, and on the next page throws his nephew out a high window. But Mary's plight has come to the attention of the heroic Hangman, and he saves the boy, though he can't prevent Jed's escape. So far, just "ordinary madness."

Hangman then tells his girlfriend the tale Mary told the hero (in his other identity)-- and then the story takes an unusual turn. Jed had been the sole support of his "widowed half sister." But when Mary conceives a child-- presumably from the late, unnamed father-- Jed becomes tormented with worry about being able to provide for both of them. As rendered by artist Bob Fujitani, the uncredited writer shows Jed spiraling down into madness, feeling himself mocked by the outside world-- though it's hard to say why the impoverished fellow would think the world would mock him for being poor. Then Hangman concludes his story, speaking of a "secret" revealed to him by Mary-- only to have the last narration cut off by the madman's appearance. Jed claims that his "secret" is that he suffered from a "brain disease" that made him feel persecuted. The villain kayos the hero, and threatens to strangle the hero's girlfriend the same way Jed strangled his sister. Hangman rises. Jed runs at him with a weapon, Hangman dodges, and Jed takes the same high dive out a window that he bestowed on his nephew, but with fatal results.

Yet the unknown writer created some odd discordances in the narrative, possibly even strange enough to make young readers think twice. The first picture those readers would've got with regard to Jed during the backstory was that when his half-sister was delivering her child, he was pacing the hospital floor "as though he were her husband, instead of her half brother." Then his first words to the doctor express his wish that the child will be born dead. In adult melodrama, these two elements lead to one conclusion: Jed *is* the child's father, but he's so ashamed of his sexual congress with his half sister that he wants all evidence of the act expunged.

Possibly the writer actually played around with using this raw idea-- man wants to murder his sister and sister's child-- but the writer realized he couldn't get away with such adult material in a kid's comic, even a gory one. Thus the script claims that Jed's concern is about having enough money to feed another mouth in addition to that of his half sister. And since worries over money were not enough to motivate a murder-- particularly since Jed could have just picked up and left Mary and her son to their fate-- the writer has to add in the excuse of a "brain disease."

Admittedly neither Mary nor her kid, due to their brief appearances, provide any support for this view. But I find it odd that the writer specified that Jed and Mary were half-siblings. It would make more sense if the two had been raised together, so that Jed felt a responsibility to take care of a full sister. But if they're half-siblings, the reader has no expectation about their having been raised together. Indeed, if they were not raised together, one might expect that sexual inhibitions would not have been naturalized by the so-called "Westermarck effect,"

Is it clear that literal sexual incest occurs in "Ghoul, as it does in Matthew Lewis's MONK. No. But Jed's extreme antipathy for his sister's son would have been a trope that many adults of the period would have recognized within the framework of an adult melodrama, enough to at least suspect some forbidden hanky-panky. The kids reading HANGMAN COMICS probably did not think twice about the matter, and probably accepted the explanation given. But the writer of the story was certainly an adult in the early forties, and one can't presume that he was at all innocent of the tropes used by adult melodramas. Even calling a man a "ghoul" is suggestive, not of a victim of psychological guilt and/or brain disease, but of a being that transgresses against society. And rather that transgressing by eating the flesh of corpses, Jed Jennings seems to commit murder to cover up a very different "sin of the flesh."

PATTERNS AND POTENTIALITIES PT. 2

In Part 1, I attempted to show how the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities could be in conflict within the scope of one particular short story, that being a particular Steve Ditko tale. In this essay I'll hold forth on how the conflict can help or hurt a particular creator's creativity.

I would not rate highly most of the films on which del Toro served as writer and/or director, either specifically as metaphenomenal films or generally as cinematic works. I got moderate entertainment from PACIFIC RIM and the first HELLBOY, was bored with MIMIC and the HELLBOY sequel, and had a strong positive reaction to PAN'S LABYRINTH, though I've not been moved to watch it again since seeing it in a theater back in 2006. I saw 2017's Oscar-winning THE SHAPE OF WATER and frankly loathed its politically correct tedium so much that I've had no stomach even to trash it. But some positive mention of CRIMSON PEAK-- the film he wrote and directed immediately prior to SHAPE-- caused me to seek out the film on DVD. After watching both the movie and del Toro's commentary-track, I posted this review on my movie-blog. In short, I rated CRIMSON as del Toro's best work, which is doubly ironic since the movie only enjoyed moderate success and certainly did not display as wide an appeal as SHAPE. Even allowing for the possibility that SHAPE may have been given a greater publicity-push by its studio, I can't deny the obvious fact that the later film succeeded with its target audience and CRIMSON did not.

Elsewhere I've described CRIMSON as a "love letter to Gothic melodrama." It may be that, even though I was fascinated by the layered density of symbolism in the film, its basic Gothic premise-- young bride comes to a mysterious house and learns terrible secrets about her groom-- was too static and/or old-fashioned to appeal to audiences in 2015. In contrast, SHAPE has a far more accessible gimmick, and one with a clearer narrative thrust. In 1962, Elisa, a downtrodden cleaning-woman, both mute and of Mexican extraction, works at a government-run installation. Elisa discovers that the installation is studying a strange "Amphibian Man"-- a clear shout-out to 1954's CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON--  and she falls in love with the alien-looking but intelligent humanoid. When the young woman finds out that the Evil White Man running the project plans to dissect the Amphibian Man, Elisa and her cohorts successfully break the humanoid free and return him to the sea, and in addition, Elisa's romantic feelings are rewarded by a "happily ever" union with her beloved.

Despite SHAPE's derivative nature, it could have been a decent film, had del Toro not subsumed the mythopoeic potential of his concept by trying to teach the audience a lesson about the pernicious influence of Evil White Men. I could have tolerated a certain degree of didacticism had I felt that villainour Colonel Strickland had been more than just another stereotype. But it wasn't enough for del Toro that he should be a government drone lacking empathy-- which is actually not too far from the characterizations of most humans in the 1950s Creature-series. But when del Toro found it necessary to have Strickland expose his genitals to Elisa and the other cleaning-women-- inevitably, all women of color-- then I could no longer view SHAPE as anything but an interminable series of virtue-signaling. Evidently some audiences were able to either (1) focus on the romance and action while ignoring the political signaling, or (2) largely shared del Toro's political sympathies and so did not mind the film;s clunky posturing.

Now, I've repeatedly said that I view the primary purpose of art to be expressive rather than intellectual, but that intellectual concerns can generate emotion that their concerns, while didactic, can bleed over into an artist's expressive potential. No such "bleeding" takes place in SHAPE, but something of the kind does occur in CRIMSON PEAK.

During del Toro's commentary for CRIMSON, he goes into great detail about his aesthetic influences, but makes only occasional references to the moral universe of his film's characters. And certainly CRIMSON had as much potential as SHAPE to be a tiresome didactic lecture. Heroine Elsa-- whose name is, oddly, similar to that of SHAPE's Elisa-- is an heiress, but her family's money comes from hard-headed business practices, not from aristocratic entitlement. In contrast, Elsa's groom Thomas Sharp is an English baronet, and thus he does come from "old money," though Elsa eventually learns that the family's "absent father" squandered the family's riches. As a result Thomas and his sister Lucille inhabit a decaying manse right out of Poe's "House of Usher." Further, in the hope of renovating the property, the Sharps have taken up the practice of bride-murder, in which Lucille pimps out Thomas to wealthy matrons, and then covertly murders them so that Thomas inherits their fortunes. Elsa is just another target to Lucille, but because Thomas falls in love with the American heiress, the siblings fall out over killing Elsa, despite the fact that the two of them have been incestuously entwined since adolescence.

In his commentary del Toro talks about the film's theme as a need to break away from the past. A small-minded approach would have made CRIMSON an indictment of Old European aristocracy, and nothing more. Such a reading of CRIMSON is possible, but only by ignoring how thoroughly fascinated del Toro is with his subject matter. Didactically, he may have wanted to say that the corrupt siblings should have broken with their polluted past, and that Elsa, despite being initially deceived, is on a path to truth by rejecting their ways and overcoming Lucille's emnity. Yet, because del Toro was in love with the Gothic melodrama, he shows far more investment in the perverse world of the Sharps than he ever does in Elsa's journey to self-knowledge. That's what makes CRIMSON PEAK a rich treasure-trove of mythic images and discourse, while the only "shape" in SHAPE OF WATER is that of being an over-intellectualized reflection of a real myth, that of Universal's "Creature" films.

WORK PLAY ACT PT. 2

At the conclusion of the first WORK PLAY ACT essay I wrote:

How does "play" manifest in a performance, be it live or preserved on celluloid? It may be through innumerable bits of physical "business" that convey to the audience a more organic sense of the character's actuality, or it may be something more sweeping, a mental concept of the character that assembles all of the disparate "parts" of the performance into a whole greater than the sum of those parts. But in any case, the profession of the actor seems particularly apt as a means of distinguishing the interacting forms of work and play.

In the essay I cited Humphrey Bogart as an example of an actor renowned for his performances in many films, not least the 1941 flicks HIGH SIERRA and MALTESE FALCON. I focused on those two films because it was rumored that both lead roles were originally offered to George Raft, an actor of more limited abilities. The likelihood that Raft would have done little for either of these roles does not, of course, mean that Bogart alone could have depicted the characters well. Without doubt, many actors existed then, and still exist now, who could've brought the same level of acting-imagination to those lead characters that Bogart did.

Now, the scripts for both films were above-average as well, so any actor embodying those characters might be said to have "a leg up." In the majority of my movie-reviews I've tended to credit any mythicity films may possess to their writers or their directors. Understandably, the primary aspect of the acting craft relates to the dramatic potentiality: the art of showing how a given character interacts with other characters. The actor can also put across aspects of the other three potentialities-- the kinetic, the didactic, and the mythopoeic-- but in most cases, I would tend to think that the actor translates these from the script he or she works with.

Having conceived of this general rule, I considered possible exceptions. George Raft in MALTESE FALCON would not have been able to bring many of the potentialities of the script to life, even as, arguably, Ricardo Cortez failed to do playing Sam Spade in the 1931 adaptation. But what about actors who realize potentialities that the script does not?

In this review I gave the 1992 SLEEPWALKERS, directed by Mick Garris from an original script by Stephen King, a "poor" rating for its mythicity. If I were rating the film on its other three potentialities, it would prove equally dismal on the didactic level, but might get a "fair" in terms of kinetics (lots of sex and violence). "Dramatic" is a little dicier, since most of the main actors-- Brian Krause, Madchen Amick, Ron Perlman-- turned in no more than serviceable performances for the undercooked, inane script. But I had to give special credit to Alice Krige:

King may have been thinking of Egyptian myths involving incestuous content when he conceived Mary and Charles, for like Horus and Isis in certain tales, the mother and son are sleeping together. As a plot-point this doesn't add much to the story. But it does allow for the film's one source of merit. Though the other actors put across competent performances, only Alice Krige, playing Mary, distinguishes herself. She brings to the under-scripted role a heady ambivalence, in that she's simultaneously a woman jealous of her young lover's possible affections for their targets, and yet also a mother who cherishes her son and perhaps, on some level, wishes he could have a normal life with someone other than her. But as I said, this is only suggested by Krige's performance, for the thud-and-blunder script gives her no help at all. 

Given that I've not seen the script used for the 1992 film, it's not impossible that Krige was given some cues by it, or by director Garris, that enhanced her performance. However, I think it's more likely that she showed the same quality of acting-imagination that I imputed to Bogart in the earlier essay. Much of this imagination was dramatic in nature, just as I've described it in the excerpt. At the same time, Krige's acting shades into the mythopoeic, insofar as one can see in her attitude a complex of emotions comparable to, say, Isis linking up with her son-lover Horus. I doubt that Krige got any help at all from the script, but in a really good script on this mythic theme, Krige's performance would have enhanced by the narrative of such a film. To see how such a film on that theme might be done right, one might look at Stephen Frears' 1990 adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel THE GRIFTERS. Even though the Frears film takes place in a dark and seedy reality, with no metaphenomenal presences whatever, the interaction between son John Cusack and mother Angelica Huston is actually closer to both the dramatic and mythopoeic potentialities of the Isis-Horus myth.

MYTHCOMICS: DEVIL BY THE DEED (1984)

The title DEVIL BY THE DEED suggests that even though creator Matt Wagner has given his protagonist the name of a famous literary monster, this Grendel should be judged not by his lineage (the original Grendel was the offspring of the Biblical Cain), but by the totality of his deeds, both good and bad. In the history of pop culture, a fair number of features in pulps, movie serials, and comic books focused upon villains. Yet Grendel has less in common with “the Secret Society of Super-Villains” than with the recherché charms of Fantomas, at least in terms of showing the attractions of criminality.

I didn’t follow Grendel when he debuted in the early 1980s, when he seemed to be one of many characters inspired by the vogue for ninjas. I was aware of the character’s strong appeal for fans, but those who followed the character’s first appearances in 1982 were doomed to disappointment when his magazine was cancelled before Grendel’s first story-arc was finished. However, Wagner both recapitulated and completed the original arc in DEVIL BY THE DEED, but with a difference. This time Grendel’s story was distanced through the device of being narrated by a chronicler, albeit one whose identity is not revealed until the tale’s conclusion.

In the BEOWULF poem Grendel is an inhuman monster slain by the titular strongman hero, but Wagner reverses the human-inhuman dynamic. His Grendel is a normal-looking human who alternates between two identities: that of social butterfly Hunter Rose and of his alter ego, Grendel, a  sword-wielding assassin who controls all criminal activity in the unnamed city where Hunter dwells. His one significant opponent is Argent, who rather than having the name of a “wulf”  looks like one, being a near-immortal being cursed to take wolf-man shape. His name, a synonym for silver, is clearly a reference to the association of werewolves and the moon-colored metal, even though Argent does not transform, and is entirely on the side of the angels against this “devil.” Yet despite these tacit references to the BEOWULF mythos, the story that most glosses DEVIL BY THE DEED is the tragedy of Oedipus.

The chronicler of the story, later revealed to be female, starts the story by relating that she meant to write the story of Grendel in order “to clear my mother’s name,” but that she ends by becoming “as enraptured as [my mother] was with the man whose given name was Eddie but who eventually engaged the world as GRENDEL.” The name “Eddie” is never again mentioned, nor does the story reveal any details about Eddie’s parents, aside from the intimation that they had wealth and thus gave Eddie the freedom to develop his “almost limitless brain capacities.” However, the significance of the young man’s name is seen when it’s revealed that “Eddie” became a man by knowing a woman twenty years his senior, a woman with the possibly assumed name of “Jocasta Rose.” The lady with the Sophoclean name allegedly perishes without leaving any records of her presence, save in Grendel’s diaries, as conveyed through the agency of the narrator. By this choice of names, Wagner signals the strong possibility that Grendel’s first sin is that of sleeping not with his literal mother but with a mother-substitute. The young polymath then assumes the name “Hunter Rose” for the rest of his life/fictional existence, at least as far as DEVIL is concerned.  The invented cognomen could mean any number of things, though it may significant that both the name Rose and the flower are most commonly associated with femininity.

Sophocles’ tragedy of the original Oedipus alludes to, but does not emphasize, the fact that the hero has conceived children, now grown, from the bed of incest. Neither Hunter Rose nor his lupine adversary father children, and yet, both of them become paternally protective of a nine-year-old girl, Stacy Palumbo. (Her surname is Italian for a type of dove.) Stacy, an orphan like Hunter, is not aware of the greater conflict going on between Grendel and Argent, but comes to know both of them because at one time or another both law-keeper and law-breaker attempt to leverage information from her adoptive uncle Barry Palumbo. Uncle Barry is then poisoned and his girlfriend goes down for the murder, but some time after Hunter Rose adopts the twice-orphaned girl, she eventually finds out the truth about Grendel, and uses her “inside knowledge” to bring about the destruction of both Grendel and Argent. However, as the narrator—Stacy Palumbo’s own grown daughter—reveals, the wages of sin are still destruction, as Stacy herself succumbs to insanity as the result of her actions.

I won’t discuss the specifics of Stacy’s retaliatory plan here, save to state that, as in many tragedies, it depends on being able to take advantage of familial loyalties. The climactic, mutually-injurious battle of Grendel and Argent is distanced through the agency of the narration, though Wagner is careful to build up the final combat with at least one other Classical reference, in that one of Grendel’s diaries refers to Argent as “my Hector.” I have not followed all of the later iterations of Grendel, so I’m not sure how final his “final fate” actually was. But Wagner does succeed here not just in giving the fate of his supercriminal an elegiac tone, but also giving him a larger significance, ending the chronicle by stating that Grendel “is the demon of society’s mediocrity.” The creators of Fantomas probably would have empathized.

 

INCEST WE TRUST PART 6

I'm recycling the title of the essay from a series that ended way back in 2010. I do so merely to provide an easy link to one of my posts that dealt substantially with the influence of Sigmund Freud's psychology on human art-- something that also impacts upon this week's mythcomic, Grant Morrison's 2001 mini-series FANTASTIC FOUR 1234.

Here's Morrison's original statement on the subject of how the topic of Freudian incest influenced his mini-series:

I’ve worked out this whole Freudian shit. The incest thing in The Fantastic Four. What you’ve got is a family. There’s Reed and Sue, the Mom and Dad. Johnny’s the big brother and Ben’s the little crazy baby. But in that situation you’ve got Johnny and Sue — brother and sister! So there’s an incest thing that the Fantastic Four hides.I looked at it and said, okay, Sue actually wants to fuck Johnny and Johnny wants to fuck Sue. So how do you do that? They make Namor, the Sub-Mariner who is always a linked pair with Johnny. The Human Torch and the Sub Mariner have always been together since the ’40s. Namor is the dark, seedy, watery, wet, dirty side of it. And Johnny’s bright, mercurial. So he doesn’t fuck his sister — but Namor does.

To be sure, he doesn't state that he intends to follow Freud as the royal road to truth, only that he uses such a concept to generate his story.

All I’m doing is using that as the basis, then I make a story out of it. The story suddenly has this incredible power because underneath it are these terrible incestuous tensions.

It should also be noted that not everything an author says about a project is absolute truth; often authors make statements calculated to "tease" readers into buying the item in question. Still, even before addressing how Freudianism affected the actual story, Morrison's remarks require a little sussing out, both in minor and major respects.

The least problematic portion of Morrison's statement, as it bears on the classic Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR from 1961-1970, is that the characters of Reed "Mister Fantastic" Richards and Sue ("Invisible Girl") Storm function as the "mom and dad" of this ersatz family, even before the two of them get married in 1965. Usually Reed and Sue fill the role of parents controlling unruly children.

Indeed, Stan Lee occasionally has Sue Storm, or other characters, refer to her as the group's "den mother," and while Reed Richards doesn't get nearly as many paternal references, he's almost always the de facto authoritarian of the "family."

However, I find odd Morrison's statement that "Johnny's the big brother and Ben's the little crazy baby," not least due to the actual discrepancy between the ages of the characters; i.e., Ben "The Thing" Grimm is a veteran of World War II, while Johnny "Human Torch" Storm is a teenager in high school. Ben is extremely loud and obstreperous, and he is the only one in the group clad only in a pair of trunks, occasionally mocked as a "diaper." But in every Lee-Kirby story I've ever seen, the Torch comes off as the attention-hungry younger brother constantly needling an older brother who has little sense of humor and doesn't want to be messed with.

Morrison's quasi-Freudian summation is also odd in that he fails to note that though Johnny Storm never displays any *overt* erotic interest in his sister, Ben "the crazy little baby" openly expresses such forbidden sentiments three times, in issues #1, #3, and #5.

I don't think either Lee or Kirby seriously thought about having Ben pursue Sue as an ongoing subplot. But the basic storytelling trope, that of "best friends fighting over the same woman," must have appealed to the artists enough to work it into three separate stories. Finally, Lee and Kirby solved Ben's romance-problem by introducing in issue #8 his new girlfriend Alicia, who, as I mentioned here, just happens to look almost exactly like Sue Storm. In contrast, the FF feature is so taken up with the conflicts of the Torch and the Thing, or of Reed and Sue, that Sue and Johnny barely interact with one another, aside from basic melodramatic stuff like, "Nobody does that to my sister/brother," etc. Lee and Kirby were simply not that interested in such interactions, though, to be sure, Stan Lee did devote much more space to the siblings' chemistry in the 1962-65 run of the "Human Torch" feature in STRANGE TALES. But even in that series, wherein Sue and Johnny lived together and she often functioned like a bossy mother to the teenager, there were still no *overt* intimations of erotic interest.

Now, I've intentionally emphasized the word *overt* twice here, in order to segue to the standard Freudian argument that repressed desires, particularly involving incestuous impulses, appear not in overt but in *covert* forms. If I were going to pick an example where Johnny manifests some covert consciousness of his sister's charms, I'd probably go with the sequence in FF #43 (1965). Here, for the space of one issue, Johnny becomes slightly enamored of the then-villainous Medusa, who's portrayed as being roughly the same age as Sue Storm, to say nothing of Medusa being the heroine's "evil counterpart" in the Frightful Four.

Grant Morrison, though, rests his case on the idea that the Sub-Mariner is an inverted double of the Torch, the "dark" shadow of the "bright and mercurial" Johnny Storm. Morrison loosely references the interlinked symbolism of the Torch and Sub-Mariner characters in the 1940s, though that doesn't really say anything about the creative propensities of Lee and Kirby in the 1960s. The most one can say is that Stan Lee was aware that the two Golden Age characters had enjoyed great sales in the forties, and that he was trying to find some way to make reworked versions of those characters sell well in the sixties. This included having the new version of the Torch bring the new/old version of the Sub-Mariner into the Marvel Universe.

Morrison does not reference FANTASTIC FOUR #4, but it would be fair to surmise that the Torch's act of unleashing Prince Namor on the world *could,* in Freudian terms, be viewed as a projection of Johnny's hidden urges, given that one of the first things Namor does after his rebirth is to mack on Johnny's sister. During subsequent issues, Johnny doesn't manifest any jealousy of his sister's attraction to the "fish-man," though once or twice he does show some animus...

...though, to be sure, he never shows nearly as much anger toward the sea-prince as do Reed or Ben.

So, how well does the actual Morrison take on the Lee-Kirby "first family" integrate all these Freudian formulations?

To be continued...

NEAR-MYTHS: ANGEL SANCTUARY 1-20 (1994-2000)

Before venturing even a short review of Kaori Yuki's ANGEL SANCTUARY, I feel constrained to observe that I am not the audience it was designed for. Like a lot of the manga influenced by the popular manga-artists' group CLAMP, SANCTUARY was meant to be fanservice for teenaged girl readers in Japan. That means that hardly a page goes by in which the reader is not regaled with willowy, somewhat androgynous males-- though at least there's a fantasy-justification for this trope, since most of the characters are supposed to be the angels of Judeo-Christian belief.

In theory the main characters who appear in the early books are two mortal teenagers, Setsuna Mudo and his sister Sara. Their ordinary life going to school in Japan is a sham, however, because Setsuna is deeply in love with Sara. Her reciprocation is a little more ambivalent at the outset-- she yells at him a lot, and tries to set him up with a date (albeit with a girl not as attractive as Sara herself is)-- but in due time, she too acknowledges a deep passion for her sibling. However, at the same time super-powerful angels begin invading Setsuna and Sara's world? Is it heavenly vengeance for their sins?

Well, no, the angels are there to claim their own, for both of the mortal teenagers are reincarnations of angels who were important in the many (and utterly confusing) internecine wars in heaven. Some angels want Setsuna to claim the heritage of his original (female) precursor, Alexiel, and there's another faction that want Sara to do-- well, something or other. I confess that I couldn't follow Yuki's sprawling plots, which by and large seemed to have no real function beyond giving her more reasons to draw willowy males.

I have nothing against feminine fanservice, but I have to say that-- when compared to other manga-artists of her time-- Yuki doesn't have a great design-sense, and a lot of her characters look pretty similar, like the ones in this panel--

--which doesn't contribute to a lot of clarity plot-wise or character-wise. The incest plotline is always kind of "there," but its psychological ramifications are largely set aside in order to pursue the artist's goal of greater sexual fluidity, of males turning into females and vice versa. Okay, that's not my thing, but I'd like to think I could appreciate the sexual dramatics if there was good characterization. There are a few amusing moments here and there, but the heavy drama usually goes nowhere.


Like a lot of Japanese artists, Yuki tosses Judeo-Christian concepts and other mythic tropes into a manga-mixmaster that seems more concerned with quoting exotic names-- "Adam Kadmon," "Yggdrasil," and so on-- that on getting any symbolic value out of the quotations. I did get that ultimately the real villain of the story is God himself, who's a butthead who deserted his creations when they didn't turn out like he wanted. But though this sounds daring on the face of things, Yuki's execution of the "divine rebellion" theme is jejune at best.

The serial's best aspect is that it's got lots of pretty art, which was perhaps the creator's main concern from square one. One just shouldn't expect character-design on the level of the greats, like Oda and Takahashi.

THE READING RHEUM: THE ENCHANTED SCREEN (2011)

I'd read one or two works by Jack Zipes before sampling THE ENCHANTED SCREEN, and to say the least his heavily Marxist interpretations of fairy tales were not to my taste. Still, SCREEN was touted as the first extensive survey of cinematic fairy-tale adaptations, so I couldn't resist giving it a try.

Although the book's subtitle is "the unknown history of fairy-tale films," my word "survey" applies better than "history," which implies a tracing, whether synchonic or diachronic, of developments over a timespan. Zipes' first chapter sets forth his theoretical preferences. Then, in the next four chapters, he (1) excoriates all of the fairy-tale works of the Walt Disney company, (2) champions the greatness of George Melies, and (3) provides quasi-histories of short fairy-tale cartoons and of feature-length animated fairy tale films. Live-action fairy-tale films are discussed in later chapters, but they don't get this summary treatment. The rest of the book is somewhat in the diachronic mode, as Zipes devotes whole chapters to cinematic treatments of particular fairy tales, such as "Cinderella" and "Snow White," or to general topics of academic interest, such as the lugubriously titled "Between Slave Language and Utopian Optimism." In a prologue Zipes admits that he simply didn't have room for some subjects, such as adaptations of the Arabian Nights.

What Zipes finds plenty of room for-- over and over and over again-- are his aesthetically hollow validations of only those works that conform to his Marxist dialectic. On the first page of the book proper, Zipes describes his priorities.

Fairy tales hint of happiness. This hint, what the German philosopher of hope, Ernst Bloch, has called the anticipatory illumination, has constituted their utopian appeal that has a strong moral component to it.

Much in the same vein as a similar Marxist work, Rosemary Jackson's FANTASY: THE LITERATURE OF SUBVERSION, Zipes' survey celebrates fantasy for purely utilitarian purposes, in line with the Marxist project of restructuring corrupt society. Thus, a fairy-tale story that has "a strong moral component" gets the Zipes stamp of approval, but if it in any way supports the bad old bourgeoisie, it gets condemned to commodification hell.

Here's Zipes clarifying that what he doesn't like about the bad fairy-tale films, i.e. almost everything done by Disney, because they're not "carnivalesque" in the sense of the word coined by Mikhail Bakhtin:

Fun is cotton-candy, fluffy, sweet, and without nutrients. It is the staple of all banal products of the culture industry up through the present. Fun has nothing to do with carnivalesque laughter... for the carnivalesque fairy tale ridicules fun and provokes reflection and self-reflection-- p. 56.

The idea that one should divorce "fun" from any concept related to carnivals-- which are, by the bye, a great source of cotton candy-- is not redeemed by such Marxist moralizing as "a questioning of the hierarchical arrangements of society" and so forth.

The real-world history of applied Marxism does not exactly suggest that it can deliver on its "utopian" anticipations. At best, Marxism has provided critiques of particular manifestations of social corruption, but so far its perfect society, like More's original utopia, exists in "no place." Thus, for someone who advocates fairy-tale works that are "reflective," Zipes is pretty unreflective about his discriminations. For instance, he validates most of the Fleischer Brothers' fairy-tale works, particularly those starring Betty Boop, since Betty is the picture of a harried working-girl. But for paltry reasons he dismisses three long Popeye cartoons of the late 1930s-- wherein the sailor-man encounters such entities as Sinbad, Aladdin's genie and the Forty Thieves-- largely because Zipes thinks the Fleischers were trying to emulate the works of Disney, that evil emissary of the culture industry. I would say that there's nothing in the Fleisher history more "carnivalesque" than one scene in POPEYE MEETS ALI BABA'S FORTY THIEVES. Popeye, facing off against the nasty Abu Hassan (Bluto in Arabesque gear), somehow steals the villain's longjohns off his fully clothed body, and then remarks:

"Abu Hassan got 'em any more."


Clearly, Zipes only likes moral arguments he agrees with. Of other non-Disney works that he faults is Jacques Demy's 1970 DONKEY SKIN, because "it is unclear at the end of the film whether Demy winks at the serious nature of incest." Demy's film might have some problems, but I find it ironic that Zipes dismisses it, simply for not being overtly serious about the subject of incest, given that many of the actual oral stories in the "Donkey Skin" tradition don't supply a pellucid moral. Thus, in Zipes's world, the foremost requirement of the carnivalesque is-- seriousness.

The most that I can say for THE ENCHANTED SCREEN is that it should introduce readers to many, many fairy-tale adaptations that aren't well known to Americans. But the tired recitation of nearly every Marxist cliche-- from "culture industry" to "commodification" to "appropriation"-- renders most of Zipes' observations less than illuminating.

MYTHCOMICS: WORLD OF KRYPTON (1987)

John Byrne's 1980s tenure on the SUPERMAN titles has almost nothing to recommend it in terms of symbolic discourse. In every way, Byrne seemed dedicated to reducing the florid creativity of the Silver Age down to his drably functional revisions. Still, his revision of the Weisinger version of Krypton was not entirely of his own invention, but was borrowed from the 1978 Richard Donner film, wherein the Man of Steel's homeworld was re-imagined as a glacial, over-technologized place.
Given Byrne's enthusiastic endorsement of the Donner Krypton in his 1980 COMICS JOURNAL interview, one might have thought he'd never want to write any stories about such an unappealing environment.

Yet the 1987 WORLD OF KRYPTON, written by Byrne and (principally) penciled by Mike Mignola, is the only time Byrne contributed anything interesting to the Superman mythos.

The story begins a thousand years before the birth of Jor-El, with Van-L, father of Jor-El. In those days, Kryptonians enjoyed near-immortality, hardly ever bothering to sire children, thanks to their advanced techniques in cloning. The opening sequence of issue #1 makes clear that most Kryptonians live a privileged life.

Clone technology makes it possible for Van-L's potential girlfriend Vara to be instantly repaired when she loses an arm in a crash. However, the ethical debate over the immorality of cloning is growing, because the clones are kept in stasis and never allowed to take on individual identities. (The "anti-clonists" use the slogan "minds for the mindless" a couple of times.) Eventually Vara-- whose name references that of Superman's mother "Lara," though she's presumably no relation-- becomes a radical "anti-clonist," and accuses her fellow citizens of being virtual "cannibals." However, what really stokes the cultural conflict-- and even leads to a series of destructive wars-- is the abuse of a clone by Nyra, the mother of one of Van-L's contemporaries, one Kan-Z.

What kind of abuse? Well, I referenced this particular taboo in my analysis of Jerry Siegel's 1960 "Superman's Return to Krypton"-- but where the taboo in that story is purely symbolic within the boundaries of the narrative, Byrne's KRYPTON makes the taboo of incest more literal. Nyra, because she does not believe any woman is good enough for her son Kan-Z, abducts one of her own clones from its facility,. Somehow she contrives to grow the clone to maturity, educate her, and give her a separate identity, all for the purpose of marrying her son to a version of herself. Kan-Z's reaction is to kill his mother and her clone, and to attempt his own death. Later Kan-Z too becomes an ally of the "clones rights" terrorists, whose most radical group is called "Black Zero," after this earlier Superman villain.  

Apparently in Byrne's world incest is worse than cannibalism, for the scandal of Nyra's deed sparks a thousand-year-war, as well as the ultimate destruction of the planet by Black Zero. As if to disavow the sybaritic lifestyle of earlier Kryptonians, the post-war Kryptonians become extreme isolationists. They no longer need clones to extend their lifetimes, having invented other anti-aging techniques, but they've become the inhumanly glacial humanoids seen in Donner's film and Byrne's rewrites.

Mignola's art is consistently gorgeous, but Byrne's ability to invest his characters with dramatic heft is seriously lacking. However, I will give props to the schematic sociological myth he devises for Krypton: first too sensuous, then too abstemious. This stratagem succeeds in characterizing the homeworld of DC:s pre-eminent hero in terms of unpleasant extremes, as against the "divine middle" embodied by the Planet Earth.

Given Byrne's tendency to rewrite earlier stories. it's not hard for me to believe that he caught onto the way Jerry Siegel concealed the quasi-incestuous theme of his story by giving Superman's Kryptonian lover the name "Lyla Lerrol," a shuffling of the name "Lara," Byrne thus creates both a bad mother and a not-so-good girlfriend, Nyra and Vara, before introducing the "good mother" who will make possible the birth of a "savior" of sorts. Byrne doesn't devote nearly as much attention to the two main male characters, dramatically or symbolically. Van-L's name doesn't seem to hold any strong associations, though an old SUPERBOY story does state that one of Superboy's ancestors is named "Val-El." As for "Kan-Z," I can't help but note that his name resembles that of the American heartland where the infant Kal-El ends up; i.e., "Kansas." But the latter confluence may not have been consciously intended.

MYTHCOMICS: "RITE OF SPRING" (SWAMP THING #34, 1985)

When holiday-seasons roll around, I sometimes give thought to the idea of organizing these essays on a holiday theme. However, it's not often that comics-makers have succeeded in coming up with symbolic discourses about seasonal events. One exception, perhaps more appropriate for Easter than for the current season, is the Moore-Bissette "Rite of Spring." Indeed, the magazine, released in March 1985, may be the only example of a 'springtime comic book." If there are others, this is still probably the best.

I used "Rite" earlier in the essay LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION as an example of  a sexual activity free of any aspect of physical violence, summing up the action thusly:

SWAMP THING #34's story "Rites of Spring" (Moore/Bissette/Totelbein) features about the most non-violent sexual encounter one can imagine, since the sex act is abstracted into an interweaving of minds rather than bodies. The narrative concept is that because Swamp Thing doesn't have a penis, he uses one of the hallucinogenic fruits growing on his vegetable body to give his human love Abby an ecstatic ride into his enhanced consciousness. Thus the mind-sex scenes in ST #34 bear kinship with those Hollywood sex-scenes which depict the literal sex-act as a flurry of abstract movements, with lots of touching but no hint of one body actually entering another body. I imagine that a simplistic Freudian would read the significant value of this story as an instance of "castration anxiety." But since the sex-scene takes place in a story that hypothesizes that all living things possess energy-fields to which Swamp Thing and Abby are both attuned, it's more accurate to the narrative to see "Rites of Spring" as a celebration of Jungian energy/libido in all things. In addition, to the extent that Swampy does "put" his consciousness "into" Abby, he doesn't function as a castrated male in narrative or significant valuations.

The "mind-sex scenes" in "Rite" would be enough to make it a mythcomic, but it also belongs to a much more prevalent myth-image, that of "the woman and her demon/monster lover." Prior to this issue, the characters of Matt Cable and Abigail Arcane, who functioned as support-cast for many of the early Wein-Wrightson stories, had been married for some time. However, the marriage was on the rocks even before Abby's evil uncle Anton possessed Matt's body and used it to have indirect sex with his niece, before he was defeated by both the swamp monster and Cable herself.

Prior to Alan Moore's tenure on the feature, I don't believe other writers had even entertained the notion that Abby Arcane could entertain any feelings for Swamp Thing beyond a certain distanced respect. But Moore was in those days the guy who went the extra distance.

To be sure, though Matt Cable's body is still alive, there's not much chance of his recovery. and it's clear that, in keeping with the changing of winter to spring in the story proper, Abby's feelings have also undergone a seasonal shift, so that she's fallen in love with the monster. In turn, Moore reveals that Swamp Thing, even though he no longer thinks himself to be a human transformed into a plant-creature, has been in love with Abby for a long time. Since the two of them can't have sex, Swamp Thing suggests a communion of spirits, which can be obtained when Abby eats one of the tubers growing on the plant-man's body.

Abby then gets to see that the world of animal life and death is suffused with interweaving energy-fields, merging the cosmological world of life-processes with the metaphysical world of spirit.

This "good trip" lasts for eight pages, most of which must be read vertically rather than horizontally, which is one of the few truly artful uses a comics-artist has made of said arrangement. The trip then culminates in a figurative orgasm, an experience beyond words.

In contrast to the many interactions of woman and monster that are predicated on violation-- not least that of the vampiric intruder-- Moore and Bissette are clearly seeking to break down the barriers between the human world and the world of "the other," at least insofar as it makes for a better story. This storyline led to other developments, such as a hybrid spawn from Abby and Swamp Thing, but the narrative of issue #34 never feels like a set-up for future events, and can be read with only minimal acquaintance of preceding continuity. To my knowledge Bissette's designs here constitute one of his highest achievements, while Moore-- whose command of poetic elements in his prose hasn't always proved sure-- never hits a false note with his visual accompaniments. Even when Abby sees visions of rodents fucking and fighting in their holes, Moore's images of "small hearts spilling poppies of blood on  black earth scented with urine" causes even the images of violence to become subsumed by those of sex.

I'll add that the subsumption of violence applies to the story as a whole, for though the tale follows the violent encounter with Abby's uncle, here there is no villain to be defeated, no cataclysm to be averted. Of course even 1985 readers knew that this was an idyll at best, that by the next issue Swamp Thing would again be battling gruesome entities. Still, like the story I discussed in THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT,  this one is more about overturning expectations than about fighting opponents. In an addendum to the original essay on said story, I fleshed out my original view:

I still assert that the predominant appeal of "The Last Night of the World" is its defiance of audience-expectations re: the equanimity with which the viewpoint-characters-- and implicitly, all other people in the world except the children-- meet the world's irrevocable end. But this conflict arises from the combination of a dire situation with reactions which do not seem to fit that situation...

"Rite of Spring" is, like the Bradbury story previously discussed, devoted to presenting an ordinary person, in this case, Abby, and presenting her with new insight into the familiar world she knows, thus transforming her perceptions. If there is a conflict, it's one appropriate to the theme of springtime, in which the old expectations of winter gives way to the rebirth of vernal possibilities.

ADDENDA TO MARSHAL LAW REVIEW

Re: last week's mythcomics review: I spent so much time recapitulating the backstory of the hero that I somewhat neglected the "psychological myth" that I credited with making it a "mythcomic." I usually don't have any scruples about disclosing plot-developments, short of tossing out a spoiler warning at times, but for anyone who wants to know what the Oedipal narrative was behind Mills and O'Neill's FEAR AND LOATHING, here's a short summary.

_____________

MARSHAL LAW #1-6 (CB) (1986-87)--  “Fear and Loathing”—(M/S):I/S.1, (M/S):I/V.3 (+)—The superhero-hating policeman MARSHAL LAW is faced with a mystery: who is the SLEEPMAN, who goes around raping and killing women dressed like the celebrity-superheroine CELESTE? It eventually comes out that the killer is DANNY, the offspring of (1) CELESTE’s current superhero- boyfriend THE PUBLIC SPIRIT, and (2) the SPIRIT’s previous lover VIRAGO, whom the SPIRIT tried to murder when she revealed herself pregnant. VIRAGO survived the murder-attempt and raised DANNY with an eye to avenging herself when her son was old enough. During his childhood his mother punishes DANNY for any display of his powers, so that he acquired a sense of inferiority and worthlessness. Additionally, he may have associated his mother with pain, so that when he became the SLEEPMAN in adulthood, he was in part raping and killing his tyrannical mother—who may or may not have used a few feminine wiles on him to make him do her bidding. It’s also clear that DANNY has the same tastes as his father, so in killing women who look like CELESTE—as well as, eventually, the real thing—he’s transgressing against his evil, neglectful father. To complicate matters further, DANNY works for MARSHAL LAW as a computer-tech, and admires the lawman as a substitute father, and in his killing-campaign he also manages to kill off LYNN, the girlfriend of his “good father.” In the final confrontation THE PUBLIC SPIRIT finally manages to murder his former inamorata VIRAGO for real, and MARSHAL LAW takes out both him and his demented son. 

MYTHCOMICS: "SUPERMAN'S RETURN TO KRYPTON" (SUPERMAN #141, 1960)

I've already used this Jerry Siegel story a couple of times, in 2010 as an example of a Jungian incest-motif and in 2012 as an example of sublimity. Since the former subject relates more to mythicity than the latter, I'll explore in more depth some of the thoughts from the 2010 essay.

I wrote:

In terms of tone, this is less Freudian than Jungian incest. Jor-L and Lora are “heavenly” echoes of the couple that Superman and Lois will become, however long the latter relationship may be deferred. (Critics who make windy arguments about the perpetual childhood of the superhero should remember that in 1940 Jerry Siegel attempted to set the stage for a more mature Superman-Lois relationship, but was overruled by his editors.) But even though the visual resemblance of Lois and Lora is probably just a visual joke, the resemblance of their names may carry a little more psychological heft. Critics may never be sure exactly why Jerry Siegel used the name “Lora” for Superman’s mother, in contrast to the name of the father Jor-L, whose name is certainly derived from JERry SiegEL. But as we don't know of a particular "Laura" who influenced Siegel in these years-- at least I find none in Jones' MEN OF TOMORROW-- it’s possible that consciously or subconsciously Siegel modeled the mother’s name on the girlfriend’s. Not only does “Lora” have the same number of letters/syllables as “Lois,” one finds an interesting congruence given that the first two letters of Lois Lane's first and last names come out to LO and LA. And if one makes a metathetic substitution of the letter ‘R’ for the second ‘L,’ one sees that the name of the prospective wife symbolically embodies that of the mother.

However, wordplay is not the only aspect of the story that might be fruitfully analyzed though the process of Jungian amplification.

Now, it should be said up front that Jerry Siegel was an inveterate fan of wacky humor. Thus even though "Return" is admired by a fair number of critics-- not least Gerard Jones-- for its pathos, Siegel apparently couldn't resist transporting his hero to his former home-world in a rather peculiar way, as seen below:

There's no way of knowing whether or not Siegel's original script specified that the planet-sized creature should look so goony; for all anyone knows, the creature's depiction may have been the choice of artist Wayne Boring. But I suspect that Boring wouldn't have depicted the creature as  being the size of a planet unless Siegel had specified that detail, and that suggest to me that the beast's likeness to a planet is a foreshadowing of the superhero's encounter with an actual planet, the home-world of Superman's birth-parents.

In accordance with the mythology, the hero immediately loses his super-powers on Krypton, but though he's relegated to the status of an ordinary man, his super-costume confers on him a new status. Siegel compensates for his hero's lost power by putting Superman in contract with Krypton's version of Hollywood (note that the "director" below wears something akin to a beret). This in turn leads to the hero being scoped out by Krypton's version of Marilyn Monroe.

Later, the movie-company will also serve as the device by which Siegel returns Superman to his role on Earth. For the time being, Superman's association with the film-world provides a mundane excuse for him to go wandering around Krypton in inappropriate clothing. He uses this excuse when he visits his newly married father and mother, who haven't even given birth to him yet.

The above scene makes it seem as if Superman's priorities are all about connecting with the father he never knew. That wish-fulfillment is certainly present. However, though Superman doesn't try to connect with his mother, Lara intuits their relationship, and does her best to mother-hen him by setting him up with the aforementioned actress / Monroe-double, Lyla Lerrol. Superman mentally compares her to his earlier "LL" loves, Lois Lane and Lori Lemaris, but as I note above, Lyla's nature, being Kryptonian, is most like that of the hero's mother. Thus, by Superman's action of returning to his "mother-world," it may be logically said that he is also returning to his mother-- though more in the symbolic manner of Jung than after the manner of Freud's Oedipus complex.

Arguably, this freedom from future consequences-- in which Superman feels he can do anything, since he's now doomed to perish when Krypton explores-- allows Siegel and Boring to "cut loose" in terms of romantic imagery, as the super-swain pursues his lady love amid sublimely colorful imagery.

To be sure, during one part of the story Superman and Jor-El seek to construct a space-ark capable of saving some of the Kryptonians from the coming destruction. But in keeping with previously established mythology-- which Superman himself apparently forgets until it's too late-- the space-ark is spirited away by the evil city-stealer Brainiac.

By this time, Superman sees no way out, and is content to die bravely with his parents and his beloved. Yet, by the writer's twist of fate, Krypton's version of the fantasy-factory Hollywood serves the cause of "reality" over "fantasy." It's the power of the movies that returns Superman to his usual stomping-grounds-- even though the rationale makes even less sense than the planet-sized goony-bird critter.

It's interesting that after Siegel has played the romance-story so "straight" for the majority of the story, that the author should come up with this daffy scenario: that the infuriated creature's fiery breath acts like rocket propulsion and launches the moviemakers' prop rocket all the way back to Earth's solar system-- thus returning Superman to his role of the dutiful superhero. The last two panels even show the hero waffling on his experience, one moment thinking that he'll always "treasure" the memories of his Kryptonian experience, and in the next, regarding it as a "strange, incredible dream."

Since I'm not advancing the incest-theme in terms of Freud, I don't have to drag in a lot of deadwood about "disavowal" or "fear of castration by the father." The romance with the quasi-maternal figure is derailed not for such fear-based reasons but because the serial character had to be returned to his normal sphere of adventure. However, while many Superman-stories of this period were replete with bizarre whimsy, "Superman's Return to Krypton" is one of the few times that whimsy gave way to a deeper level of archetypal fantasy.