WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS PT. 1

In MESSING WITH MISTER INBETWEEN PT 2 I explained my reasons for not deeming Neil Gaiman's NEVERWHERE star Mayhew to be a less than combative protagonist.

Mayhew may kill a monster with a great weapon, but the weapon's just given to him, with no sense of his having mastered it. 

The sense of mastery-- which I also referenced as a form of Nietzschean "self-overcoming" in COMBAT PLAY PT. 4-- can be a factor that plays a vital role in determining whether or not a given character can be seen as possessing at least "exemplary dynamicity." of the type described in DYNAMICITY DUOS PT. 1.

Jack Burton, my earlier example, might be styled a "weakling with a weapon," just as Gaiman's Mayhew character is. Burton's weapon isn't even as special as the one Mayhew inherits-- it's just a common throwing-knife-- but Burton uses a common object in an uncommon way, while Mayhew uses an uncommon object in a common way. The former places a positive light on Burton's self-overcoming, while a negative light is cast upon the short heroic career of Mayhew.

Another example appears in the British SF-film THE TERRORNAUTS, which I reviewed in August 2013. Main character Joe Burke and his tiny coterie of allies are roughly on the same level of "ordinariness" that I find in the Gaiman character. However, for what it's worth, the characters do have to pass some tests before they can get hold of the super-weapons with which they repel a horde of alien invaders.

Suffice to say that the humans pass all the tests, despite getting no help from the comedy-reliefs.  This accomplishment proves that they've capable of rational thought, and they receive presents, such as a ray-gun weapon, as rewards from the automated test-givers.  They soon learn that there had been a living caretaker of the asteroid facility, but he has died, which may explain why they never get a proper briefing on their reason for being here.  Fortunately, they stumble across the answers through various accidents, one of which teleports Sandy to the very planet of which Joe Burke dreamed.  After a violent encounter with some savage natives, the scientists learn that an interstellar space-fleet, which previously caused the destruction of the asteroid's makers (I think), is now headed for Earth.  Burke and his fellows then activate long-dead weapons and manage to blast the interstellar fleet into dust (hence my LAST STARFIGHTER comparison). 

True, the everyman heroes get some help from electronic skull-caps that instruct them on the use of the space-station weapons.

However, they, like the main character of LAST STARFIGHTER, have to figure out how to use the weapons in combat. so that the film slightly anticipates the 1970s vogue for video games like SPACE INVADERS.

I mentioned in my review of TERRORNAUTS that I hadn't re-read the source-novel, Murray Leinster's THE WAILING ASTEROID, at the time that I reviewed the film. However, I eventually did reread the Leinster novel, and found that the film followed the novel fairly closely-- except for the one scene that makes TERRORNAUTS a combative film for me. Leinster's characters pass more or less the same tests and don the skull-caps-- but they don't get to play "first-person shooters" with alien invaders. Instead, the Earth-people simply unleash what might be termed a "Maginot line" of explosive asteroids, and the enemy ships blunder into them.

Leinster's conclusion, though it has the same narrative value in terms of destroying the alien threat, lacks the significant value of combative sublimity, and so his everypeople don't quite ascend to even the "exemplary" level of megadynamicity I observe in the movie's characters.

More on this subject anon.

GHOSTS, AMERICAN STYLE

At the conclusion of THE PHENOMENALITY OF PSYCHOS I wrote:

At present I have not found a necessary connection between the two forms of the sublime.  It does suggest to me how some figures of comparatively low dynamicity can suggest that they are more powerful than they really are. I conclude that it is because of the effect of the combinatory-sublime, which seems to invest such figures with a larger-than-life "mana."

To toss out a more concrete example, PSYCHO's Norman Bates and the Jason Voorhees who debuts in FRIDAY THE 13TH--PART II are both "perilous psychos" within the category of "the uncanny." They are not equals in terms of their dynamicity-- Norman is at best at the low end of the "x-type" level of dynamicity, while Jason, even when he's supposed to be no more than a deranged human being, clearly occupies the high end. But they may be deemed as equals in terms of their mythicity, a narrative value that has its roots in the affects I have termed the combinatory-sublime. 

I emphasize again that mythicity is not coeval with popularity.  The mad killer from 1983's CURTAINS is probably no more formidable than Norman Bates in terms of dynamicity, but she isn't anything to write home about in mythic terms. However, the psycho-killer in 1971's BLOOD AND LACE is barely known outside the halls of horror-fanatics, but I rated her mythicity as "good" in my review, if not quite as good as that of Norman and Jason.

One thought I'm toying with is that although I still believe that the mode of the combative is determined by the presence of both *dynamicity* (an exceptional level of power is expressed in the combat of at least two opposed entities) and *centricity* (their combat is central to the plot), the aspect of the combinatory-sublime may affect the way in which a given protagonist's *dynamis* is received.

For instance, I wrote in this essay that even though ordinary gangsters are not able to fight the Golden Age version of the Spectre, the author had to throw in complications so that the Spectre would have struggle on some level.  I would add to this observation that criminals in THE SPECTRE represent more than just ordinary crooks: collectively they are the evil that forces the undead avenger to keep up his crusade, rather than going to his eternal rest. On this admittedly limited level, then, even the most mundane crooks assume greater mythicity than they would in a less ambitious story.

A less ambitious story involving another undead avenger appears in the 1941 ghost-comedy film TOPPER RETURNS.

This engaging if simple comedy-- barely a TOPPER film at all, as the titular character has little to do in it-- is really about co-star Joan Blondell's character Gail Richards. While staying at a typical Hollywood "old dark house," Gail is murdered by an unknown assailant.  Gail rises again as a ghost who wants to bring her murderer to justice, and forces the twittery Topper to help her.  To be sure, though, like other ghosts in the TOPPER oeuvre, Gail is able to affect the physical world. In one scene the masked murderer attempts to kill again, and Gail, turning invisible, rains punches down on the confused killer until he flees. At the climax she does manage to ferret out her killer and cause his death too. 

The mere fact that the mystery killer is not exceptional in his dynamicity would keep this from being a "combative" film.  However, would things be different if the killer had a more prepossessing aspect, if he had some sort of bizarre identity like "the Bat?"

Such an added fillip might indeed make a difference, and in future essays I'll discuss some reasons why.

QUICK LIST OF EXEMPLARY OPPONENTS

Since I've recently advanced the notions that (a) a combative work must contain no less than two opposed characters possessed of megadynamic "might," and (b) that level of "might" extends from a low level ("the exemplary") to a high level ("the exceptional"), it behooves me to provide a short list of examples of the more newly-defined of the two categories, the "exemplary."

As of this writing I've reviewed over 200 films on my movie-blog, though there are fewer than 200 entries given my tendency to "double up" or "triple up" the films to which I've given short critiques.    In each case where a film had a combative mode, I noted that status in the label section, along with each given film's status in terms of its Freyean mythos.  So the easiest thing is to go down the list and determine which if any films are qualified by either protagonist or antagonist (or both) being of the lower level in the combative mode.

Since the separate "demihero concept" also requires some elucidation, I'll also mention whether or not it appears in this grouping of films, though this will not be a list of all demiheroes in the corpus of films reviewed.

______________________

Under the label "combative ironies"--

Only one of the films, John Carpenter's THEY LIVE!, has a protagonist of the exemplary level, the hero John Nada.

________________________

Under the label "combative comedies"--


In 1989's EASY WHEELS, the villain She-Wolf and her gang of bad bikers are exceptional; the heroes are only exemplary.

Both 1994's BLANKMAN and 1989's CHOMPS pit exceptional heroes against exemplary gangster-villains.

Both of the DOCTOR GOLDFOOT films pit an exceptional mad scientist against merely exemplary secret agent heroes.

 ___________________________

Under the label "combative dramas"--

Both 1958's HORROR OF DRACULA and 1960's BRIDES OF DRACULA present a "Doctor Van Helsing" who, while not exceptional in his level of power, is a much more athletic and resourceful hero than the character from the novel DRACULA.  In past essays I've mentioned that the assembled "vampire killers" of the novel, though they are demiheroes, also qualify for greater-than-ordinary status, though I was not using the term '"exemplary" at that time.

The 2011 RED RIDING HOOD potrarys the titular heroine as an exemplary demihero.

In 1999's VIRUS Jamie Lee Curtis' character Foster is an exemplary demihero.

In 1954's MISS ROBIN CRUSOE, both the demiheroes and villains are exemplary types.

The character of the vampire-slaying monsignor in 1968's DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE has the same exemplary status as Hammer Films' Van Helsing.

______________________________

Under the label "combative adventures"--

The villains of 1941's JUNGLE GIRL are exemplary types.

Exemplary villains menace the heroes of 1945's ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS and 1953's THE SIREN OF BAGDAD.

Both THE WHISPERING SHADOW (1933) and SHADOW OF CHINATOWN (1936)  pits exceptional villains against exemplary demiheroes.

Exemplary villains constitute the threats in 1986's ADVENTURES OF THE AMERICAN RABBIT, 1937's DOCTOR SYN, 1963's DR. SYN ALIAS THE SCARECROW, 1953's BANDITS OF CORSICA, 1943's THE PHANTOM, 1953's VALLEY OF HEADHUNTERS, 1951's MASK OF THE AVENGER, 1953's THE KID FROM BROKEN GUN, 1937's THE SHADOW STRIKES, 1958s LONE RANGER AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD, 1984's SHEENA, two of the "uncanny" HERCULES films, many of the TARZAN films and all of the BOMBA films.


NOTE: I have used the term-set "exemplary and exceptional" before, to denote differing types of literary merit.  However, I don't envision using them in that manner very often in future, and so have chosen to re-use the terms in this very different context.

ADDENDUM 4-29-17: Since writing this I have disallowed CHOMPS, the GOLDFOOT films, and DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE from combative status.
 

DYNAMICITY DUOS PART 1

I'm tempted to subtitle this essay "the trouble with gangsters," since some of the considerations here stem from evaluating the presence of the combative mode in stories where the exceptional hero faces unexceptional crooks.  Are there ways in which some gangland-spawned foes prove more "combative" in the significant sense than others, just as I've said that some heroes, who have (discounting weapons) only ordinary mortal abilities, can possess more dynamicity than other heroes of the same basic abilities?

Anyone who's read this blog (aside from the automatic Google search-engines) should know that when I phrase a proposition in this manner, the answer will be affirmative.  But is there a way to rephrase the concept of dynamicity to take in this application of the combative mode?


In DYNAMIS VS. DYNAMICITY I outlined three "power-ratings" of dynamicity, patterned loosely after related categories in Aristotle.  To sum up:

The "X-type," who possessed megadynamicity, was said to be entirely "exceptional."

The next rating down, the "Y-type," possessed of mesodynamicity, was said to cover a range of "good-to-fair."  I justified the need for such a range thus:

'This category requires a "range" approach because characters who are simply "good" in terms of their personal dynamicity function almost exactly the same as those who are simply "fair."'

Finally, for roughly the same reasons, I assigned the final rating, the microdynamic "Z-type," as "fair-to-poor."

However, I've now amended that breakdown.  Keeping in mind my assessment of the way a "mesodynamic" hero, such as Jack Burton, could be "boosted" to the higher status, I decided that the the same principle should apply to some-- though not all-- of the mundane opponents pitted against an exceptional hero.

As a negative example, one where such boosting does not take place, here's a brief scene from the first adventure of "the Bat-Man."

These two catchpenny thugs, while hypothetically capable enough within the "good-to-fair" range, are so easily disposed of by the exceptional hero that they certainly cannot be "X-types."

However, the corpus of Batman's adventures contains many mundane crooks with no more actual powers than those in the previous example.  Such opponents could and did give the hero a harder time.

I suggest that although these ne'er-do-wells are not in the same league with Batman's truly exceptional foes, as per my example of the Penguin here, they still fall into the range of the megadynamic by virtue of their narrative operations. For one thing, though in both examples Batman defeats the mundane malefactors, he has to work somewhat harder in the second case, suggesting that the lawbreakers here are smarter and/or more formidable.

The same "boosting" distinction applies even in cases where the criiminals are even more outclassed, as when they combat heroes with literal super-powers.

In "The Mysterious Mister X" (ALL-STAR COMICS #5, 1941), a group of gang-leaders get sick of having their operations continually broken up by the members of the Justice Society, many of whom are powerhouses like the Flash and Doctor Fate.

With one exception (the section of the story devoted to Green Lantern), none of the gangsters have any special resources.  Even the guy in a Hindu outfit, who goes after Doctor Fate, is merely a trickster.

All of them meet ignomious defeats, such as this one:

And this one:

Nevertheless, as outclassed as the hoods are in the powers department, one has to admire, if only slightly, the guts of mundane men determined to tilt with gods.  Perhaps their courage is born of foolhardiness-- certainly the author was not holding them up for admiration.  Still, it takes some moxie for such thugs to take on the mighty Justice Society.  I'd argue that even this futile attempt confers on them a level of "might" not seen in less ambitious crooks.

While such thugs' moxie cannot make them exceptional, I suggest that it does boost them to what I now term the lower level of megadynamicity, which makes such encounters qualify for both the narrative and significant values of sublime dominance.

Thus I've re-interpreted the schema put forth in DYNAMIS VS. DYNAMICITY, to show that all three categories encompass a range of dynamicities.  The reigning schema now reads thusly:

THE Z-TYPE covers the narrative functions of all dynamicities ranging from the "poor" to the "average."

THE Y-TYPE covers the narrative functions of all dynamicities ranging from the "fair" to the "good."

THE X-TYPE covers the narrative functions of all dynamicities ranging from the "exemplary" to the "exceptional."

This elucidation of an "exemplary" range of power in the megadynamic level doesn't just serve to account for the narrative functions of mundane villains like the "Academy of Gangsters."  It also takes in certain "weak heroes" like Jack Burton and Jonathan Harker, who begin as no more than "mesodynamic" presences but who "step up" to become full-fledged monster slayers, either through the possession of limited talents or dogged persistence.

In Part Two I'll offer detailed examples of each of these six power-ratings, to illustrate how the extent of a character's dynamicity affects his (or in the case of the forthcoming examples, her) narrative function. 

EXEMPLARY STAN, EXCEPTIONAL JACK 'N' STEVE PART II

To recap: fannish opinion usually considers that famed editor/writer Stan Lee didn't do anything of worth prior to Silver Age Marvel Comics; that he must have been coasting on the talents of his artists-- largely Kirby and Ditko, though sometimes the argument is extended to all the Marvel artists as a whole.

I for one find this argument may be a bit too pat.  Whether one agrees with it or not, though, depends on whether one believes that the work Kirby and Ditko did prior to their collaborations with Lee was substantially like the work they did slightly later with Stan Lee.  Many fans have seen no essential differences between the Kirby of CHALLENGES OF THE UNKNOWN and the Kirby of FANTASTIC FOUR.  I take the position that there are considerable differences between these two phases of commerical creativity.

However, "Defending Stan Lee" in terms of his pre-Marvel creativity presents two large problems.

The first is that in many of his public statements following the success of the Marvel line, Stan himself dismissed his Golden Age work in the comic book medium.  Of course, in so doing Lee was patently attempting to design a story of heroic proportions: in which his Marvel Comics work alone shone above the dreck he'd been creating for the previous twenty years.  While it's quite likely that Lee had no deep and abiding regard for the work he'd done prior to Marvel, his judgment of it isn't centered in any critical process as such.  One suspects that if an early comics-character like Lee's "Jack Frost" had become as extraordinarily popular as the Human Torch was in that era, and continued to be revived to good effect, Lee would probably not have minded linking his name to that chilly concept.

The second problem, though, is that unless one goes out and buys tons of hard-to-find Lee Timely-Atlas comics, there's no way to assess the quality of Lee's "dreck."  Recent years have seen a greater turnout of reprints of the Timely-Atlas line, but I suspect that we're not going to see omnibus editions devoted to goofy teen-comics like MARGIE, WILLIE and NELLIE THE NURSE-- even though it's arguable that it was in stories like these that Lee honed the brand of "insult humor" he used so well in his Silver Age superhero comics.

The expected riposte from Lee-loathers would probably be, "So what?"  While Steve Ditko didn't enter the comics field until 1953 and didn't work for Timely/Atlas until 1955, Jack Kirby had been working in comics only a little longer than Stan Lee had.  In contrast to Lee's middling record, Kirby, albeit in concert with Joe Simon, had turned out a plethora of conceptions.  Not all of them were successful, but even co-creating only Captain America and the Boy Commandos would put him (in many fans' estimation) far ahead of Lee's co-creation of such minor figures as the Destroyer and Headline Harris.

For many fans, this ends the discussion.  Early Kirby created more famous characters than early Lee did, so Kirby alone was the creative one, period.

However, that's not a viable measure of creativity as such.

Were Lee's Golden Age stories dreck?  I've read only a smattering of his works, though it's not always easy to tell what Lee did or did not write, as demonstrated here by blogger Nick Caputo.  Some have been bad, and some have been good-- but only in a special way: the way I would term "exemplary," but never "exceptional."

I said in EXEMPLARY AND EXCEPTIONAL 2 that I felt a story could be very ordinary in some respects yet exemplary in just one, as was the first Batman story.  The same is generally true of early Lee work like his war-comics, humor comics, and superhero comics.  A collaboration between Stan Lee and Dan deCarlo (Stan 'n' Dan, as they were then billed) might be, in terms of plot, a fairly ordinary cute-girl comic like MILLIE THE MODEL, but it would in my view be exemplary if it possessed some quality above the ordinary.  I did perceive a sprightliness, an effervescence, in Lee's early humor work that I don't see in a lot of the humor comics of the period, which I do dismiss as entirely ordinary.

Kirby's work, however, also has its moments of badness and goodness, but when it was good, it was good in the "exceptional" sense, or, to gloss John Romita's remarks, once again, in its sense of "completeness."  Even enjoyable Kirby works might present a number of narrative problems, as I argued in my analysis of the first CHALLENGERS story.    But Kirby's narrative lapses never diminish that sense of artistic integrity.

I mentioned in Part 1 that one of my forum-foes dismissed not only Lee, but pretty much every comics-writer in the Silver Age.  It seems puzzling to me that this opponent could see special qualities in everything Kirby did, and nothing in the work of his contemporaries, even though most if not all of them were engaged in addressing the same pre-teen audience, and were usually employing most of the same story-motifs.

I suggest, in my intersubjective way, that what this individual took for absolute quality was just one type of creative quality: the quality of the artist who brings "integrity" and "completeness" to his narrative world because almost everything in it constitutes something of significance to the artist.  This is the world of the exceptional.

However, the world of the exemplary does not cease to exist in comparison to the exceptional, even though many fans have expressed such opinions.  Stan Lee probably was never a visionary creator as Kirby was.  He probably wasn't even as productive of new concepts as another non-artist writer like Gardner Fox was.  But I find it amazing that many fans can view creativity in terms of absolutely nothing else than "new concepts"-- particularly since even "new concepts" are always derived in part from previous ones.

Lee's type of "exemplary" creativity was certainly not focused on blazing new trails, in contrast to the highly personal approaches of Kirby and Ditko.  But fans who can dismiss twenty years of work as being uniformly bad just because earlier generations of fans never said much good about the work recalls the parable about how medieval doctors refused to investigate the nature of any disease not covered by the works of Galen.

In other words, the fannish narrative of Lee as dreck-producing drone-- even when it's been put forth by Lee himself!-- is just another example of "received wisdom."

Which, as we all should know--

Is no sort of wisdom whatsoever.

EXEMPLARY STAN, EXCEPTIONAL JACK 'N' STEVE

"...there were a few guys who did what I would call a complete world on paper.  If you looked at one panel of Jack Kirby, you knew where you were.  You were in Jack Kirbyland.  And when you were in Ditkoland, you knew where you were.  The reason I called myself a generic illustrator [is] because my stuff, I could make you believe you were in anybody's land... whatever those guys do has an integrity, a completeness about it; they created an entire world." -- John Romita, Interview in COMICS JOURNAL #252, 2003.

As the essay's title should suggest, I'm referring back to the entwined critical concepts I introduced back in this 2010 essay.

My initial definition was as follows:

for me "exemplary" means principally "that which is a good example of something," while "exceptional" means "that which goes beyond what is expected."

A rough parallel can be made between my categories and the dichotomy suggested by Romita above, with "generic illustration" standing in for "that which serves as a good example," while his idea of a "complete world" parallels "that which goes beyond the expected."

In part two of that brief essay-series, I compared the first Batman story, which was exemplary purely in terms of its accomplishment of introducing the hero, and the Englehart-Rogers stint in DETECTIVE COMICS, in which the creators attempted to boil down the appeal of the Batman mythos into six exceptional issues.

But as the title also suggests, I think I've come up with a better example of the dichotomy: the Great Myth of Marvel Comics.  American comics fandom knows no more vital myth: in the beginning there was chaos, until the Three Gods of Comics sorted Kosmos out of chaos, and trailblazed the way to the promised land of Adult Fandom.

But with the orderliness of Kosmos, each god had to be assigned his divine domain.  To the God KIRBY, fandom assigned the heights of heaven, wherefrom he rules forever. To the God DITKO, fandom assigned the great seas of churning anxiety, where he too rules in great dignity.  And finally, to the God LEE, fandom cast him into the Land of the Dead, because as we all know he never "created" anything and couldn't have done squat if it wasn't for Kirby and Ditko.

I would hope readers might detect a note of sarcasm in the last sentence.  No, *I* don't believe the beloved fannish fiction that Stan Lee was nothing without the stellar presences of Ditko and Kirby, but if I had a quarter (inflation you know) for every time I've heard some fan make that statement, I'd probably be rich enough to publish my own line of comics (and not even miss the dough when the line went belly-up).

As I mentioned here, I'd recently been embroiled in yet another Lee-Kirby-Ditko argument in which not a few of my opponents argued in such terms.  In fact, one participant not only dismissed everything Stan Lee had ever done, but also every other Silver Age comics writer: Broome, Fox, Binder, Kanigher.  There was no attempt to offer any argument as to why they were bad, of course, or why Kirby and Ditko shone so brightly above the muck and mire.

In Part 2 I'll suggest some arguments as to why this perception came about, and why (keeping in line with my project of intersubjectivity) it's both right in some ways, and wrong in others.

MY FIRST SEMI-DIRTY FILMS

Since it’s part of my personal identity to be an incorrigible list-maker, I don’t blush to admit that since the age of fifteen (some forty years ago, if anyone cares) I’ve kept a list of the movies I’ve seen. It was, and is, a simple list of titles alone. Usually this brief notation was all the mnemonic aid I needed, though on occasion I might read that I’d seen some flick called THE PSYCHOPATH, but I’d have no idea if it was the one from 1966, 1968 or 1973.


In my young movie-viewing years, I naturally had no recourse, even had I wanted one, to explicitly “dirty movies,” since most of what I viewed was on broadcast television. However, now that I've recently formulated the concept of the “semi-dirty” middle ground, I decided to rummage through the first few pages of the list to figure out which if any of the “clean”-looking films might have concealed a dirty affectivity, whether that of sex exclusively, violence exclusively, or the two conjoined, as I illustrated here with FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!


Now, in that period there were dozens of films that inspired dirty thoughts, but very few that were “semi-dirty” in the way I’ve used the term. In comedies and adventures, sex functioned to bring together hero and heroine for the closure of romance; in dramas and ironies, sex functioned to show how hero and heroine could have their bonds severed, whether they actually were separated or not by story’s end. But none of these films—most of which I viewed on television== drew attention to sex “as sex,” as a “sensuous frenzy” beyond the limits of the functional.


Still, one exception was the 1964 oddity, GUERILLAS IN PINK LACE.


In this oddball WWII army comedy, directed by star George Montgomery, the actor plays a gambler who masquerades as a priest to escape wartorn Manila. However, he and five USO showgirls are shot down and land on an island held by enemy Japanese. The Japanese accept Montgomery's masquerade and consider him harmless, but all five showgirls lust after Montgomery, despite knowing that they have to keep hands off, because he's supposedly a celibate priest-- and Montgomey doesn't dare reveal his deception. After assorted comic turns, Hamilton and the showgirls manage to capture the whole Japanese occupaton force (or maybe they call in American troops to help: I really don't remember). By this time the five girls have found out that Montgomery isn’t a priest. But the ending doesn't shake out the way it would in most mainstream films of the time-- say, your average Elvis film, where one of the competing ladies would be chosen as The Girlfriend, Implicitly the Future Wife. Instead, the five horny girls jump Montgomery and knock him into a concealing trench, where it’s broadly implied that they’re all going to gang-bang him.

To be sure, it’s a banging to which Montgomery cheerfully consents. But in 1964, when the so-called Sexual Revolution was just getting started, this was a really dirty ending to a clean-looking movie-- more like something one might get from those lusty Italian filmmakers than from anything in North America.








As for violence, the first one in which I saw violence go beyond the merely functional was probably Arthur Crabtree’s 1958 FIEND WITHOUT A FACE. For the first hour or so, it’s a slow film in which people at a military base are being mysteriously killed by some invisible monsters. But at the climax, a scientist finds a way to render the monsters visible, revealing that they look like disembodied brains with bony spines attached—spines which the “fiends” use to propel them along the ground the way snakes move their bodies.















In addition, the brain-beasts can coil their spine-lengths under them, so as to spring like snakes. Once they reach a victim, they can wrap their “spines” around his neck like a snake’s coils, and then “bite” into the victim’s flesh somehow or other. Of the dozens of monster-films that simply trundled out SF-versions of vampires or werewolves, FIEND is unique in coming up with a monster whose violence seems uniquely disruptive, even though one sees very little actual blood and guts.





Finally, I looked for the first film in which, from today’s perspective, I could see sex and violence conjoined. PSYCHO, of course, would be a good example had I seen it first, but as it happens I first encountered a film from the same year; a film which may sexualize violence even more than PSYCHO does with its infamous shower-scene. This was George Blair’s THE HYPNOTIC EYE, in which an assortment of beautiful women-- all of whom attended performances by a strange hypnotist (Jacques Bergerac)-- apparently go mad and disfigure themselves. Thus, long before Dario Argento would specialize in sadistic set-pieces showing beautiful women being killed or tormented, Blair paved the questionable path with such EYE-brow-raising scenes as a woman setting her hair afire from a stove.

This would seem to be an indictment of male sadism, but interestingly, Blair adds the twist that the master hypnotist is actually subject to His Mistress’ Voice--that is, his female assistant, the signficantly-named "Justine" (Allison Hayes). It seems that Justine herself was disfigured long ago, though she conceals the fact with a face-mask, and now she forces the hypnotist to destroy any of her potential rivals.









Of course there are many films that are better known for pushing boundaries in terms of acceptable levels of sex and violence. But though I don’t find any of these three films to be exceptional in terms of the history of cinema, all are *exemplary* in terms of showing how the kinetic elements of sex and violence permeated even the more formulaic Hollywood oeuvre.

THE EXEMPLARY AND THE EXCEPTIONAL PART II

I started refining some of my thoughts on the topic of "quality in popular culture" upon giving more thought about how one might defend certain choices for "best comics stories" on a transpersonal basis, rather than just personal liking. If one's only criterion for inclusion on such a list was exceptionalism, then there's no way that one could ever find room for "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate," the first story to introduce the character of the Batman. I've mentioned before that in terms of the pulp aesthetic that prevailed during most of the Golden Age, the Batman stories possessed an overall higher quality than that of most other costumed-crusader features. Yet "Syndicate," the story to initiate the Batman series, was in almost every way a thoroughly ordinary tale, as evidenced by the stiff art above, in which nothing seems to have any life but the dramatic figure of the Batman. Moreover, fan-research revealed that most of the story was cadged from a text-tale from one of the SHADOW pulps, so that it's not even merely a derivative story, but a swiped one. If one's only criterion is one of exceptionalism, of that which exceeds the normal boundaries of a given form, then "Syndicate" would not make an exceptionalist's list.



And yet, "Syndicate" does have that one appealing element of the Batman, flitting in and out of the prosaic goings-on. The earliest form of the character's costume is almost entirely an abstract design, with little resemblance to what a real man in a costume would look like in a representational drawing. Even Joe Shuster's Superman, crude though it is, looks more like a real figure. Yet, as I've observed before, the Siegel-Shuster SUPERMAN posited a supernormal crimefighter who automatically outshone almost all of his adversaries and supporting characters, while Batman, a normal crimefighter with only the appearance of the supernormal, quickly propagated his occult aura outward, so that even minor enemies like the Monk and the Duc D'Orterre became significant figures in the series' expressive design.

Thus, on the basis of the one design element of the Batman, with its enormous kinetic appeal, I can fairly pronounce "Syndicate" to be an exemplary tale in spite of its obvious failings. Poor as it is in many respects, it set a palpable example for better stories. I wouldn't say that every origin-story does this, however, which is one reason I disagree with Tony Isabella's 1000 COMICS book, in which he indiscriminately lists any story that begins a significant series. Some origin stories may actually be technically better than Batman's first outing, but not all first stories are exemplary stories.

In contast to an exemplary story, an exceptional story needs to convey the sense that it has not only fulfilled the requirements of a given form or genre but has in some sense surpassed it. Such is patently the case with the aforementioned six-part DETECTIVE COMICS serial by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, which reputedly sought not to simply tell another Batman story but to capture the essence of the Batman concept: condensing in six issues the major tropes of the serial, at least as Englehart and Rogers perceived them.

In the Golden Age there was no thought of attempting such a condensation. Even when Golden Age stories got better, with Bill Finger's scripts becoming more finely-tuned while artists like Sprang and Robinson easily outdid Bob Kane's crudities, there was no sense of "going beyond" the limits of any single Batman story; of telling, in effect, an exceptional "meta-Batman" tale.






In Rogers' work, Batman's costume is no longer as abstract as in the original Kane story, but now it has become a design-element in a greater design, that of Rogers' Eisneresque comic-book architecture. And in like manner, Englehart's story consistently articulates sophisticated (some would say "pseudo-sophisticated") meanings to what the original audience considered to be nothing more than simple pulp fantasies. In the section excerpted, Englehart has villain Deadshot expouse pure moral relativism: "I want what I want, and don't care how I get it!" Earlier in the same story, Rupert Thorne, a crime boss operating behind a respectable front, becomes far more philosophical than any Bill Finger gangster could've been, as Thorne tells Batman that the people of Gotham want the hero gone because he "stirs things up." Whether or not one agrees with me that Englehart and Rogers did succeed in crafting an exceptional Batman story, the conscious intent evident in their stories makes clear that this was what they were aiming for a quintessential Batman story, rather than just another of many stories in the opus.

For those interested, I would say that this refinement should gloss my earlier meditations on the subject, where I devoted considerable energies to defining the reasons "why Batman's as good as The Spirit," with the former being "exemplary" and the latter "exceptional." For my trouble, I was flatly told that I was merely "dancing" around the truth that THE SPIRIT was the "clearly superior work." I don't expect the above refinement to make any difference to proponents of exceptionalism, but I'll put it out there anyway, just for the hell of it.

AN EXAMPLE OF THE EXEMPLARY

Before embarking on the long compare-and-contrast I announced in THE EXEMPLARY AND THE EXCEPTIONAL, I want to spotlight someone else's concept of an "exemplary" comic even though the person in question probably would not use my term. It's my intention to show that the base *concept* of the exemplary already exists in readings of popular fiction (though maybe not only popular fiction) regardless as to what one calls it.

The person in question is Shannon Gaerrity, and her 9-18-09 Comixology essay describes her take, and that of others, regarding the story "Silent Interlude" in G.I. JOE #21 (1984).

Gaerrity begins her piece with a quote from Scott McCloud, who tells her that "that comic was a kind of watershed moment for cartoonists of your generation." Gaeritty goes on to say that she does remember it, though I'm not clear as to whether it was a "watershed" for her in particular, though she later says that it was for others:

'The one remarkable thing about the issue is, of course, its wordlessness. Comic books in the 1980s were wordy. "Silent Interlude" cuts through the verbiage; it's a 22-page action sequence. Hama's blunt, anatomically careful art (he drew this and a few other G.I. Joe issues) isn't beautiful, but it has a clarity that's perfect for pantomime. "Silent Interlude" demonstrates how to tell a story visually. Hearing cartoonists who were kids—okay, boys—in the 1980s reminisce about it, I'm reminded of older manga artists who recall first looking into Tezuka's New Treasure Island, the master's first graphic novel, with its wordless, cinematic opening sequence. Silent, upon a peak in Darien.'



I myself only collected G.I. JOE from the quarter boxes, but would agree with Garrity's characterization re: Larry Hama's take on the Hasbro characters. I remember liking "Silent Interlude" a little, but I've never gone back and re-read any of the JOE comics. In '84 G.I. JOE was something I collected less to enjoy than to study as part of my ongoing critical project.

Garrity's summation makes clear that G.I. JOE #21 was not, to insert my own term, "exceptional." The "clarity" of Hama's art, "blunt" though it was, may have seemed a small breath of fresh air in the domain of Jim Shooter's Marvel, for Shooter, like his former boss Mort Weisinger, seemed to have an animadversion to the power of comic-book art, as if he insisted on heavy wordage to keep the art bolted down. But even without Shooter's editorial controls, it's a safe bet that no one would be comparing Hama with the greats of comic-book art: the Eisners, the Kirbys, the Kuberts.

Still, Gaeritty ends with an encomium on the "silent issue" of G.I. JOE:

"Scott McCloud asks me if I'm familiar with the silent issue of G.I. Joe. I call Andrew over and hope he can explain how these things happen, how a soft-spoken gun nut with a work-for-hire gig can derail a boy's life—half a million boys' lives—without a word."

To me personally, G.I. JOE is not an exemplar of the best a comic book can be while conforming to the expectations of the audience, but I can entirely accept that it is an exemplary work to others. The boundaries of "the exemplary" are circumscribed more by personal taste-- by one's acceptance of what Frye calls a story's "narrative values"-- than they are by "significant values," which have more to do with What the Author Wants You to Get from the Story. The latter values are more often found dominating those works I call "the exceptional," for stories which can coherently communicate an exceptional level of thematic meaning are always rare, in any time or clime.

More on this sort of thing later.

THE EXEMPLARY AND THE EXCEPTIONAL

Amusingly, I conceived the above pair of terms as part of my own ongoing concerns for defining the nature of "quality" in the popular arts. I then Googled the terms and found that they'd been used in some context by an avant-garde-sounding academic named Buchloh. Nothing new under the sun, sadly.

Putting aside whatever the other guy meant by the terms, for me "exemplary" means principally "that which is a good example of something," while "exceptional" means "that which goes beyond what is expected."

The exemplary, then, confirms expectations; the exceptional goes beyond them. Given that I view genre-fiction-- which dominates but does not characterize the totality of popular fiction-- as based in any given audience's set of expectations, this duality has significant consequences for my theory.

And for that I must give a little credit to Tony Isabella.

I haven't quite decided how to approach isabella's new book, 1000 COMICS YOU SHOULD READ. Because the book's selection of its recommended comics is based on no criterion save whether or not Tony Isabella liked them, it's a book that is as immune to critical theory as any other outright statement of pure taste. It's my conviction that taste cannot be argued; one can only argue the logic by which people intellectually justify their tastes. Since Isabella propounds no logical grounds for his choices, all one can say is things like, "how could he leave X out" and the like.

Nevertheless, thinking about how I would approach such a project reminds me of my own processes of thought when I complied some of the personal lists I've made here, like my 100 BEST COMICS. Isabella explicitly avoids saying that his chosen comics are "the best," but since I have said so, I as a theoretical critic DO have to justify that statement.

Now, when I wrote STREAMING VISIONS my main concern was simply to elucidate my perception of a "developmental quality" in serial works regardless of whether they were designed with a conclusion in mind or with the idea of running endlessly on, as per these remarks about the Batman series:

'In an issue of COMIC SHOP NEWS Clive Barker said that both serial comic books and serial television shows shared a narrative advantage in that both could take their time slowly revealing whatever ideas or themes the creators had to offer. I agree, and the serials I’ve listed below display this “developmental” quality, whether they run less than a dozen issues (the first Englehart/Rogers collaboration on Batman) or fill up fifteen years (the entire Golden Age period of the same character).'

One question I didn't dwell on, however, was whether or not there was a difference in the type of quality available in these disparate approaches to the serial format. Thanks to thinking about one organizational problem with the Isabella book-- the question as to how to count continued story-arcs as opposed to done-in-one tales-- I would now designate the latter type of quality-- that which is found in the "entire Golden Age" of the Batman chararcter-- as "exemplary," while that which typifies the closed-ended approach of the six-issue Englehart/Rogers arc is "exceptional."

More on this in part two.