SHADOW BOXING WITH BATGIRL'S GREATEST ENEMY

Just to get the title-explanation out of the way, the "greatest enemy" of Batgirl-- and indeed, of most if not all fictional characters-- is the ideological critic, the sort who reads fiction in order to see only what he wants to see. I've already critiqued the misrepresentations of Ennbee's Guardian essay on the KILLING JOKE DVD, and I truly meant to leave it at that. But it occurred to me that are deeper issues involved in the ideological reading of KILLING JOKE than just whether or not a given critic renders a careless, ideologically over-determined reading.

A bigger issue is that ideological critics like Ennbee are unable to understand the inevitable contradictions inherent in their position. For instance, here's Ennbee arguing that even if the DVD adaptation had been better than the source material, it still would have been a bad idea:

Rebooting stories that are racist and sexist is one way that racist and sexist narratives and ideas get replicated and perpetuated. You can sometimes change the story and make it better – and then, sometimes, you can’t. The Killing Joke didn’t have to be as wretched in cartoon form as it turned out to be, but remaking it was always going to be a bad idea.

Now, here's Ennbee arguing for what DC Animation should have done, rather than perpetuating an evil sexist story:

Instead, maybe, DC could have done an animated Birds of Prey – a series in which numerous female superheroes, not least Barbara Gordon, fight crime together without having to ask Batman for permission. 

As I mentioned in the previous essay, Ennbee made no mention of the film's allusion to Barbara Gordon becoming Oracle at the end; of continuing her heroic activities in another manner. This by itself is mere sloppiness on his part. But Ennbee's real whopper is that he doesn't even get that without the Moore-Bolland KILLING JOKE, there is no BIRDS OF PREY, at least in the historical sense.

Sure, it's *theoretically* possible that, had DC never published any story in which Barbara Gordon or anyone else was shot and paralyzed, the company could have published its first all-female team-book without such a character: without "Barbara Gordon in her new identity as Oracle." Such a book would still have to employ any number of narrative contortions to satisfy Ennbee's political purity test, of course. But from what Ennbee wrote in the Guardian essay, one would never know that BIRDS OF PREY was in any way dependent on the events of the Moore-Bolland work. He makes it sound like BOP was totally untainted by the events of the very graphic novel that, quite unintentionally, determined a new direction for the then-moribund adventures of Barbara Gordon.

To sum up briefly: Moore asked DC for permission to have Batgirl be crippled by the Joker in KILLING JOKE. Later he stated that he never expected the character to remain a paraplegic, given the many miracle-cures abounding in the DC Universe, and indeed DC did toy with the idea of reviving Batgirl via one such cure, "the Lazarus Pit" of Ra's Al Ghul. This idea was dropped, and credit for a better direction is usually given to writers Kim Yale and John Ostrander, who spearheaded the idea of reconfiguring Gordon as a mysterious dispenser of information to the superhero community. Thus Oracle made her debut roughly a year after her fate in KILLING JOKE, in Ostrander's SUICIDE SQUAD #23.

Once the character was revealed to be the now-paraplegic Barbara Gordon, she became a more prominent player in the DC Universe, particularly in the Bat-corner of that cosmos. This new role-- which gave Gordon greater prominence than she had enjoyed as Batgirl in the late 1980s-- engendered a one-shot team-up with Black Canary in 1996, which in its turn led to the regular BOP title.

To be sure, the first fifty-plus issues of the regular series, largely scripted by Chuck Dixon, were basically no more than decent formulaic action-stories. Gail Simone, debuting on BOP #56 in 2003, distinguished herself on the title and made both the character of Oracle and the feature's "girl power" theme more appealing to fans. 

Now, though I consider Simone's contribution to the BOP concept to be vital in a creative sense, there's no question in my mind that from first to last, BIRDS OF PREY is intimately tied to the supposedly sexist injuries inflicted on Barbara Gordon by Moore and Bolland. I have no idea whether Ennbee thinks well of the comic book itself, though he certainly seems to be stumping for an adaptation, if only one produced by female creators. 

In earlier years Simone apparently agreed to some extent with Ennbee's characterization of KILLING JOKE as sexist, for she listed Batgirl's paralysis as one of the casualties of dastardly male creators on her WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS site.  In this essay I expressed my disapproval of Simone for ham-handedly listing characters regardless of the context of their suffering in each given narrative, and over the years I've become (in contrast to Ennbee) even less sympathetic to the "WIR" complaint. But Simone's protest against female marginalization becomes even more ironic, when one realizes that BOP was her first major success in the comic-book field, and that her success stemmed in large part from the fact that DC readers were invested in the fate of Paraplegic Barbara Gordon. That Simone wrote some really good stories with PBG-- quite possibly better than anything Alleged Misogynist Alan Moore could have rendered, given the same subject-- does not obviate Simone's indebtedness to Moore's 1988 ambition desire to shock his complacent audience with an event of arresting violence. That indebtedness also does not "go away" even if Modern Moore recants his 1988 ambitions. BIRDS OF PREY, DC Comics' first all-female team-title, owes its existence to the Big Event of a heroine being sliced, diced, and stuck in a Frigidaire-- though it appears that even before Simone, Yale or Ostrander became involved, there was always the possibility of a Resurrection from the Refrigerator.

To explain the other part of the title now: this complaint comes down to mere "shadow boxing" with the ranks of ideological critics in general. From experience I know that, should I post my analysis of Ennbee's faulty logic on HU, Ennbee would not be capable of arguing any of my points. He has established a persona whereby everything he writes is for the betterment of marginalized people, so if you challenge him on logic or anything else, you must be a low-down defender of the status quo. I would be curious to know if Gail Simone perceived herself in any way indebted to Moore, but from what little I know of her during her Comic Book Resources, she has never really forsworn WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS, so that may not be a likely scenario either.

At the end of NEGATIVE I.D. I said that "one must distinguish between the artistic potential of a controversial trope like girlfriend-killing, and any particular negative example of same." Even if I agreed with Ennbee that the gut-shooting of Barbara Gordon marked Moore, Bolland and DC Comics as unregenerate masculinists-- which I don't-- I would still contend that what didn't kill Barbara Gordon made her stronger, rather than reducing her to a victim. Simone herself pursued that theme in BIRDS OF PREY more than once, and any animated adaptation of the property that didn't allow Barbara Gordon to suffer for a good narrative reason would surely end up as far worse than the 2016 KILLING JOKE.

NULL-MYTHS: THE PRICE (1981)

When I attempted to come up with a "Bizarro version" of this week's "mythcomic," I wanted a work that tried to do something akin to what Jack Kirby began in 1971 with his "Fourth World" series-- a work that sought to deal with the metaphysical concepts of good and evil, but did a really horrible job of it. Sadly, I was forced to choose THE PRICE, which is the second section of Jim Starlin's bloated space-and-sorcery opera, THE METAMORPHOSIS ODYSSEY. I didn't reread any other sections of this unholy mess-- which by its title alone offends the memories of both Ovid and Homer-- but I may review some or all of these sections for future null-myth essays, since I remember disliking every part of the opus in its original publication.

Why do I say "sadly?" Well, the ODYSSEY's lack of overall quality rivals that of Mark Millar's WANTED, which I panned in this review, following which I further critiqued it as being "practically inconsummate in every way."  But Millar never showed any real talent, while Starlin had showed himself a superior superhero artist in such Marvel Comics works as CAPTAIN MARVEL and WARLOCK. However, the direct market's boom in the 1980s made it possible for many graduates of the Big Two to attempt their own creator-owned works. In Starlin's case, the first part of his ODYSSEY appeared in EPIC ILLUSTRATED, while THE PRICE was published by Eclipse Comics. But some raconteurs also made themselves "independent" of good storytelling practices, and so THE PRICE, like WANTED, fails in terms of all four of the potentialities. Since I'm trying to focus here upon the work's failure as symbolic discourse, I'll get the other failures out of the way quickly:

DRAMATIC-- though the story's set in a far-flung cosmos, it begins like a murder mystery, as master magician Syzygy Darklock, a priest in the service of a religious order called the Instrumentality, tries to find out how his brother was slain by a demon assassin, and why. The story fails as drama because at the beginning Starlin barely devotes any time to establishing the nature of Darklock's character, or that of his confidante Sister Marian, but he does dump a lot of character-backstory at the story's conclusion, almost as an afterthought. When Darklock does find the man behind the assassination, he finds that the villain did it so as to force Darklock to become a kind of super-magician, the better to deal with a major cosmic crisis that will evolve in a future narrative.

THEMATIC-- his work on WARLOCK established that Starlin had an animus against organized religion, particularly Christianity. But whereas the argument against religion is moderately well presented in WARLOCK, here Starlin "coasts" on the same theme and doesn't really analyze what makes the Instrumentality evil-- except that it kills people, which Darklock himself does too.

KINETIC-- whereas Starlin could draw excellent superhero action, THE PRICE is mostly a conglomeration of talking heads, usually reciting tedious exposition. I would also rate an artist's ability to name his characters as an appeal to the kinetic, in that a good name rings well in the ears and a bad name has an irritating sound. And while "Syzygy Darklock" may sport one of the worst hero-names ever, the name of the villain-- "Taurus Killgaren"-- is even worse, especially when one suspects that Starlin unconsciously modeled the awkward name on that of a real-life celebrity: "Dorothy Killgalen," a reporter/game-show guest of the 1940s and 1950s.

With all those failures, how does Starlin also manage to fail in the realm of the mythopoeic?  Well, putting aside all of the artist's phony-baloney attempts to reproduce the effects of ceremonial magic, the core of the story is seen below:

See, after Taurus explains everything he's done to make Darklock into a super-magus for this future crisis, the villain reveals that Darklock can only obtain his super-magic if he sacrifices the thing he loves most, which happens to be Sister Marian. 

Given the numerous indirect references to Christianity throughout the story, it's impossible not to read Marian's death as a reference to Christ's Passion-- except that this time, it's the Serpent who gets the upper hand:

Now, if Starlin's protagonist had asked Marian to sacrifice herself, and she had agreed, then that might have worked in one fashion or another, be it as a serious *imitatio Dei* or as a satirical version of same. But because Darklock does not give Marian a choice-- and yet he isn't abrogating to himself any superior freedom to act with cruelty, as one might argue of Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia-- Starlin's murder of "what he loves most" comes off as shallow in its self-aggrandizement. I've critiqued on various occasions the thin-skinned gender-complaints summed up by the trope "women in refrigerators." But even if I'd cross off the names of a lot of female characters on the "WIR" list, Sister Marian would probably remain on it-- and maybe even move to number-one position.

The real price of THE PRICE was the one this work levied on Starlin's capacity as an artist, since I'd argue that he never subsequently lived up to his initial potential.

NULL-MYTHS: BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE (1988)

For a null-mythic version of the Joker, I strongly considered the 2012 storyline "Death in the Family," which extended over an arc of 23 parts, spread out over several DC features. I did read the TPB that concluded the series. In this story, apparently the conception of Scott Snyder, the Joker has watched the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE a few too many times., since he's started wearing his own flayed face-flesh as if he were the love-child of Leatherface and Jame Gumm. 

At length I decided that (a) it wouldn't be fair to review just one section of this involved arc, and (b) I didn't have any burning desire to read the rest. I will note that I can understand why Snyder and his DC co-workers might have wanted to "re-estrange" the Joker with this grotesque makeover, given that the familiarity of the Joker's iconic visage may have bred a certain degree of audience-contempt. Reputedly the series sold well, so in one sense there's no arguing with success. Nevertheless, I'd venture that Snyder et al seem to guilty of mixing their monstrous metaphors. The Joker, insane though he is, isn't insane in the same fictionalized way as Leatherface and Jame Gumm. They wear skin-masks to efface their real, overly fragile identities. But why would the Joker resort to such a device? Everything that makes the Joker one of the medium's most popular villains suggests that he's loved because he's become a living archetype. In the comics, at least, the Joker has totally subsumed whoever he was before his transformation--

Except in the world of Alan Moore.

I wrote this essay, THE KILLING BLOKE, some four years ago. I wasn't using the "null-myth" terminology then, but the Moore-Bolland "Killing Joke" story seemed perfect as an illustration of what I called (after Philip Wheelwright) "monosignative" rather than "plurisignative."  I hadn't then elaborated the four potentialities, but now I'd view what I wrote then as an anticipation of that doctrine. KILLING JOKE is, in essence, a story in which writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland decided to tell the story of the Joker's lost humanity.

I wrote, in part:

There's no question that Alan Moore was aware of the symbolic status that Batman and the Joker had assumed over the years. To be sure, though, Moore's Batman gets short shrift in that department, coming off most of the time like a weary costumed cop, the "straight man" of the comic duo, saying things like, "How can two people hate so much without knowing each other?" In contrast, the Joker gets so many good lines describing how he embraces a world of inescapeable nihilism that Moore might've done better to title the work "Sympathy for the Joker." Moore's own expression of sympathy for the philosophy of nihilism, then, results in a work that demonstrates what happens when, as noted above, the explanation of the myth becomes what the myth "means." Frye defines allegory as "forced metaphor," and in many respects the two opponents have been forced into metaphorical roles that do more to spell out Alan Moore's philosophical views than to emulate the free play of myth. 

"It's all a joke!" declares the villain, trying to lure Batman over to the dark side, "Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing?" The Joker gets much better lines than Batman, but I'm not sure his myth is any better served than Batman's by being bound in a philosophical strait-jacket. Moore's revisionist origin for the Joker posits that he was once just an ordinary schlump, a would-be stand-up comedian, who lost everything in a manner analogous to the way his bat-garbed enemy did. This take on the Joker's history didn't become accepted canon for the various ongoing Bat-serials, and it's not hard to see why: the origin gives the Joker a humanity that's at odds with his more traditional blackhat-villainy. In fairness Moore crafts his story so as to apply that the Joker's memory of his "origin" may not be true in all details, so Moore gets points for realizing that others might not care to follow his lead in playing with DC Comics' "toys."

Reviewing these remarks once more, I would even follow up my "straight man" remark to say that Batman and the Joker, instead of fulfilling their roles as archetypal crimefighter and criminal, have become something like a jaundiced pair of performers, sort of a superheroic version of the "Sunshine Boys."

Aside from the story's purely fortuitious effect on the career of Barbara "Batgirl" Gordon, the story has none of the deeper symbolism of which Moore is capable. Here we have an excellent master of his writing-craft indulging in an exercise, that of trying to graft realistic personalities onto fantasy-figures. It's a credit to Moore's dramaturgic talents that JOKE can still be read on that level. Certainly it's superior to DEATH IN THE FAMILY in that regard.

Returning to the subject of Batgirl--

Within the world of comics-fans, this may be the best-known scene in which Moore depicted a well-known female icon not of his own creation-- and given that he once wrote an essay complaining about the marginalization of superheroines in commercial comics, it's a delicious irony that it's a "Women in Refrigerators" scene all the way. I don't have quite the same knee-jerk animus toward such scenes as do others in the fan-community, but last year I was greatly amused to see that Liberal Moore found himself being pilloried for Writing Rapey Comics, mostly by Ultraliberals whose solution to the problem of evil is to avoid depicting it.

In a subsequent interview, Moore said that he didn't expect the crippling of Barbara Gordon to last: he was sure she'd get magically healed by one of the many DC miracle-devices. Kim Yale and John Ostrander are generally credited with realizing that the tossed-off mutilation of a long-time DC heroine-- albeit one at a rather low ebb of popularity in 1988-- could serve as a means of exploring the dramatic consequences of a differently abled superheroine. I wouldn't say that "Wheelchair Batgirl" was precisely much more mythic than her predecessor. I enjoyed those stories-- particularly those of Gail Simone-- on a purely dramatic level. But the fact that Original Batgirl finally did come back may say something about the sovereign function of fantasy within the context of fiction that has always been "play for play's sake." 

Ironically, though Alan Moore's tune throughout KILLING JOKE starts out as "Sympathy for the Devil," he says very little of importance about the Joker-- and instead supplies a leitmotif through which other raconteurs could compose their own version of "the Batgirl Song."

Whose baby is she, indeed?

THE ONLY GOOD RAPE IS A FAKE-RAPE PT. 4

In the comments-section to FEELINGS, NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS, poster Marionette said in part:

At one point I was keeping a tally of how many rapes occurred in comics (largely for this purpose) a month. I stopped because the whole thing just made me feel ill after a while.

Since Marionette didn't provide a list, I have to wonder at her criteria for this statement. Was she including attempted rapes that are prevented by timely intrusions? I mentioned this sort of crime in this essay, noting that it was the same trope whether the (usually female) victim was rescued by a male or by a female hero. I wouldn't say that attempted rapes should be deemed the same as accomplished rapes, though it's true that a given attempt may be as sensationalized as a completed act.

It's possible that sexual threat may be counted as well.  I have no doubts that even powerful female superheroes probably get sexually threatened by villains much more than male superheroes are. But that too would not be actual rape.

The only other possibility that I can countenance-- speaking as a comics-fan who no longer reads a lot of current comics-- is that some of the "rapes" included may be incidents in which a female victim gets beaten up and/or killed. I'm not imputing any of these beliefs to the poster Marionette, but of all those described, the last position has become the most popular in fannish circles, as evidenced by Gail Simone's notorious WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS list.

In this essay I've stated that there are two forms in which fictional sexuality does or does not have a significant violent component, and two in which fictional violence does or does not have a significant sexual component.  So I've obviously no problem in saying that *sometimes* a violent act is not just a violent act.

A problematic aspect of the Simone list and similar fulminations, though, is that such imputations start and end with the observation that a lot of female characters get beaten up by male ones. But if any popular medium is notable for its preponderance of Equal Opportunity Assaults, it ought to be comic books.  This is not to say that I think "man beaten by woman= rape" any more than I do when you reverse the genders. But often comics-fans are a little too quick to condemn in the male what they ignore in the female.

For instance, it's become a popular fan-trope to laugh and/or sneer at comic-book covers in which a heroine like Lois Lane or Wonder Woman is made the target of assaults that may or may not look like Freudian displacement.

Here's one famous "spread-eagled" cover:

And here's one that's a little more convincing in the Freud department:

But if we're going to say that any projectile is a penis, what should one make of this GREEN LANTERN cover?

Here Star Sapphire is not only jabbing the hero in the chest with a lance-like lightning bolt, she's even smiling while she does it.

So, by the logic that all assaults equal rape, is she raping him?

And what should one make of this famous, admittedly comical scene of Feminine Rapine?

I should perhaps underline the point I've been hammering away at so long. Assuming that everyone could somehow come to total agreement as to what constitutes fictional rape, it doesn't really matter whether there are more male-female rapes in comics, or female-male, or any other permutation of which one may conceive.

What matters is that a great part of fiction's appeal is its ability to conjure forth fantasies of supremacy, with or without sexual content. By doing so fiction mirrors that portion of human nature that I will again term *megalothymia.*

This portion may be, as Jung once suggested, a part of an indelible shadow within us. But even if this is the only way to characterize this part of human nature, Jung repeatedly calls on human beings to acknowledge and understand that nature, rather than attempting to bury it beneath fatuous appeals to goodness-- or, even worse--

Political correctness.

DANCING ON THE DWARF PT. 3

At this stage of the game, I'm sure I could let my enigmatic title go unexplained and no one would ever inquire. However, here's the explanation anyway.

The image above is that of the Hindu deity Shiva, dancing one of his ecstatic dances.  Unlike many other statues using similar iconography, this one shows him dancing upon the body of a dwarf, sometimes represented as "apasmara-purusha (the man of forgetfulness) who embodies indifference, ignorance and laziness."                                 

I interpret the image on two additional levels. In Hindu Samkhya philosophy the world is composed of three aspects, the lowest of which is *tamas,* which also embodies all qualities of inertia and ignorance, which are a fair match to "evil" in Judeo-Christian systems.  The dwarf, then, is also inertia, over which the lively energies of  Shiva have triumphed.

At the same time-- and this I do not draw from Samkya philosophy-- the dwarf is also a foundation for Shiva's dance. Maybe a god could dance on nothing if he so wished, but the fact that Shiva dances on the lower aspect of the universe demonstrates that to certain Hindu ways of thinking, even ignorance and inertia are a necessary part of existence. If nothing else they are the things against which we strive in order to reach excellence.

In Judeo-Christian philosophy there is, generally speaking, less of a sense of the interdependence of what we often call "good" and "evil."  The dominant tradition is that of good casting out evil into a howling netherworld, embodied in the ancient Jewish ritual of the scapegoat.  For me, though, one doesn't always solve the problem of evil by casting it out.

What is evil? I won't strive to come up with a substantive definition here. I will content myself with no more than a working definition instead, stating that for my purposes: "Evil is self-interest to the point of excluding all other interests."

Certainly people who make threats of rape to anyone, male or female, commit an evil act. It doesn't matter if they feel themselves put upon by an author whom they view as having a "feminist agenda." Their act is evil because they have acted in self-interest without any consideration of the commonweal that permits persons of diverse beliefs to live together in society.

And yet, there is also an evil-- lesser by far, to be sure-- in promoting an agenda that does not recognize a pluralistic worldview: one that insists upon a rigid "sheep vs. goats" division between good and evil.

If any readers (?) think I'm going to name Asselin as an example of this, guess again. I've critiqued her writings a couple of times but I've no evidence that she has promoted a one-sided agenda in a flagrant and badly conceived manner.

I would have no problem in locating just such an agenda in Gail Simone's currently dormant website WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS, though.  In this essay I wrote of Simone's effort: "her criteria for inclusion on this list is horribly skewed, showing a tendency to negatively characterize any violence inflicted on a female character, no matter what justification the violence had within the context of the story." 

Now, the nimrods who attacked Janelle Asselin probably didn't have any elaborate thoughts as the ongoing arguments regarding male and female portrayals in the comic book industry. It is quite likely that they attacked Asselin because they thought she threatened their "male privilege," whatever they might have conceived that to be.

I'm not concerned with male privilege. I'm concerned with artistic privilege, and for that reason I find myself impatient with both creators and critics whose whole idea of solving gender-related problems is to chuck the devils into the abyss. Putting aside the dubiousness of this theory, it doesn't even work in a practical sense, as I noted on THE BEAT:

I should add that no degree of moderation of CBR’s boards would have prevented lurkers in the community from printing the same crap on Asselin’s original survey.

Trolls, the internet's version of *tamas,* will always be with us.  It's certainly understandable for a businessman like Jonah Wieland to distance himself from their activities to whatever extent he can. But for my part, I can only say that as much irritation as I have personally taken off insulting dumbasses on various boards, the stupidity of trolls gives me new targets against which I may pontificate (hello, Chicken Colin) and a foundation on which to dance the dance of Reason.

 

NEGATIVE I.D.

"All that said, I can tell you Alex was a character destined to die from the moment she was first introduced in GL #48. I created her with the intention of having her be murdered at the hands of Major Force. I took a lot of care in building her as a character, because I wanted her to be liked and her death to mean something to the readers. I wanted readers to be horrified at the crime, and to empathize with Kyle's loss. Her death was meant to bring brutal realization to Kyle that being GL wasn't fun and games. It was also meant to sever his links with his old life, paving the way for his move to New York. And ultimately I wanted her death to be memorable and illustrate just how truly heinous Major Force was. Thus the fridge."-- Ron Marz, justifying the GREEN LANTERN incident that inspired the title WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS, from the WIP site.

"Naturally, this formula [of men beating women] is not popular with girls. Granting all the masochistic excitement of terror, it is difficult to identify yourself with a corpse."-- Gershon Legman, LOVE AND DEATH (1949), P. 47.

In the comments section for Part 3 of THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY, Curt Purcell commented thusly:

I certainly wouldn't say there's any encouragement to identify with the villains in the movies I discussed, if only because they tended to be repellently nonhuman--sometimes little more than a writhing mass of tentacles. How does one identify with that?

In that specific case, I can't say with certainty whether or not the particular audience for this particular type of thing does or doesn't regularly identify with something like a "writhing mass of tentacles."  But I can venture a way in which they *might* do so, in keeping with one of the key essays on this site, my take on how Schopenhauer's theory of the will applies to literature:

Was Schopenhauer was right about “Will” inhering in every aspect of our reality? We do not know. However, we CAN be sure that “Will” inheres in every aspect of the various LITERARY realities we as humans create, for we KNOW for a fact that they are all “willed” into existence by their creators (and sometimes, however indirectly, by audiences as well).

Identification need not always connote one's sense of participation in a given character's bodily reality, although when speaking of erotica, that would be the natural assumption.  It's equally possible to identify with a nonhuman creature, or even an inanimate phenomenon, by identifying it as an expression of a particular will to do something within the sphere of a narrative.

The other night I happened to rescreen Sam Raimi's 1981 THE EVIL DEAD.  As many horrorphiles will know, the film's about as simple as a splatterpunk flick can get: five young people camp out in a remote cabin and come under attack by murderous Sumerian demons.  Raimi's film shows particular influence by the "stalker vision" element, where the camera seems to assume the viewpoint of a murderous force stalking its prey-- a narrative element that inspired righteous condemnation from the team of Siskel and Ebert back in the day.  The film-pundits were wrong, though, in thinking that the audience necessarily identified with the violence-happy desires of the murderous stalker. What's more probable is that the audience did identify with the *WILL* expressed by the stalker, be it a deformed human being like Jason Voorhees or an invisible discarnate force such as the demons in EVIL DEAD.  To the extent that I as audience-member want to see the EVIL DEAD demons do demonic things, then I have (whether it gives me a particular fetishy thrill or not) identified with a thing I can't even see on-camera-- certainly a proposition no harder to credence than identifying with a malign mass of tentacles.

The same thing can even apply to phenomena that don't really have benign or malign intent, just some nature that comes into conflict with human agents.  In AGAIN SUPERHEROIC VISIONS: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, I stipulated that the focus of a given story could be an insubstantial phenomenon, such as the titular force of Rene Clair's THE CRAZY RAY, or even a place, such as The Center of the Earth to which Jules Verne's protagonists journey. 

Now the reason I titled this essay "Negative I.D."  is twofold.  I stated the law of identification earlier:

Therefore, neither a foolish child nor a discriminating adult is in any way wrong to say "I'm Daredevil," as long as either of them has actually identified with the character.

I do deem such identifications to be phenomenologically real within the sphere of literature and literary response.  However, it should go without saying (which is the reason why I didn't explicit say it) that such moments of identification are fleeting.  One moment the reader may identify with the slayer, and then in another, with the slain: with Captain America one moment and the Red Skull the next.  The nature of the human imagination inclines toward such identificatory pluralism, proceeding from "flower to flower to flower" as per the monarch's advice to the bee in THE KING AND I.

So identification can be positive one moment, and negative the next, where "negative" simply meaning that the reader has ceased to identify with a given subject.  Pundits such as Siskel, Ebert, and the above-quoted Gershon Legman understand identification only in terms of the aforementioned "bodily reality." For this reason Legman thinks he's been clever in claiming that "it's difficult to identify yourself with a corpse."  But dozens of horror-stories written from the viewpoints of corpses-- whether said corpses are walking around or are just lying there mulling over their sad fates-- indicate that readers can indeed identify with what corpses symbolize in narrative terms: the extinguishment of a character's ability to participate in the world of living, willing activity.  It's possible, of course, that a poorly executed story of anything-- be it a talking corpse or a discarnate spirit-- may also fail to inspire identification because a reader finds it stupid or tedious.  In DAREDEVIL THE MAN W/O IDENTITY I noted that this was my own non-identificatory response to Clowes' DAVID BORING.

However, some readers reject identification for reasons extrinsic to the story's dynamics (or lack of dynamics.  This is the second form of "negative I.D."

In PART 2 of MASTERY I refuted views expressed by both Heidi MacDonald and the "Women in Refrigerators" site.  Of the two, however, Gail Simone's 1999-created site has had the greater influence over opinions in comic-book fandom. The tone of Simone's initial address on the site is quite measured:

This is a list I made when it occurred to me that it's not that healthy to be a female character in comics. I'm curious to find out if this list seems somewhat disproportionate, and if so, what it means, really.

These are superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator. I know I missed a bunch. Some have been revived, even improved -- although the question remains as to why they were thrown in the wood chipper in the first place.

I know I missed a bunch -- I just don't know my comics deaths the way I should. I'm not editorializing -- I'm just curious to find out what you guys think it means, if anything.

However, her criteria for inclusion on this list is horribly skewed, showing a tendency to negatively characterize any violence inflicted on a female character, no matter what justification the violence had within the context of the story.  I attacked one example of this skewing tendency on a recent CBR board:

I do think it's historically valuable that WIR at least encapsulates an attitude characteristic of the time. And perhaps it does record some of the dominant cliches used by comics-creators during that period.

But one of the most objectionable things about the WIR list is that it doesn't provide context. For instance, it might be arguable that if one reads that a starring heroine like Amethyst gets put through the ringer:

"Amethyst (blinded, merged with Gemworld, destroyed in LSH; became a power-hungry witch in Book of Fate)"

That *might* be indicative of a tendency to downgrade or persecute heroines.

But the same can't be said of some other characters on the list:

"Carol Ferris/Star Sapphire (turned into a villain by the Zamarons, possessed by the Predator)"

That's not a fair representation. Star Sapphire was always, if not actively villainous, a somewhat ruthless figure depending on the writer handling her. That was the whole dramatic point of having her be the "Miss Hyde" to Carol's "Lady Doctor Jekyll." It wasn't something radically added at the time she transforms into the Predator, as the above line implies. Englehart's idea was simply an extrapolation of the original concept, regardless as to whether one thinks it was well executed. It didn't belong on a list devoted to female marginalization.

And it's certainly not the only ill-considered example on the list.

 Even more damning is Ron Marz's response, in which he states that he developed the character of Alex (the victim killed and stuffed in a fridge) with the express intention of killing her.  His response too is quite measured, and worth reading in full.  I can't say that the original GREEN LANTERN story achieved its ends of making me "empathize with Kyle's loss;" I failed to experience any identification with the hero or his dead girlfriend, which I define as the first kind of "negativity."  However, Simone rejected the trope of the "dead girlfriend" in terms of the second type of negativity: that it was emblematic of a questionable tendency in comics-crafting.  Here's her summing-up from the WIR site following assorted reactions (no year date given):

I still think women are pretty unevenly portrayed in comics, but so are men, really. Ultimately, we speak most loudly with the choices we make at the cash register. And to future creators - we ARE out there reading. Please don't barbecue all the characters we like!

I have no problem with Simone-- whom I respect as a comics-creator-- questioning a given tendency.  I do have a problem (as did others, whose responses are recorded on the site) with her lack of context.  This lack expresses to me a deeper problem seen also in Ebert, Siskel, and Legman: the tendency to reject a creator's use of sex and/or violence against any figure perceived as "unevenly portrayed."

I didn't like Marz's "Alex in the fridge" story.  However, I support his right to come up with a story in which a supporting cast-member is horribly killed simply to advance a particular plotline, just as I support the notion of the Marquis de Sade having his heroes torture and kill dozens of identical victims to advance his particular brand of narrative.  I've certainly seen my share of poorly-executed executions (*cough* Gerry Conway *cough*).  But one must distinguish between the artistic potential of a controversial trope like girlfriend-killing, and any particular negative example of same.