THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD

 In this essay (and any follow-ups) I want to develop the line of thought in QUICK NUM NOTES. 

As I said in NOTES, I'm not disavowing the assorted analyses I advanced with respect to looking at how fictional realities are governed by different combinations of (1) intelligibility and (2) casual coherence-- at least not in the way I disavowed Aristotle's criteria (as I understood them) regarding "impossibility" and "improbability"). HOWEVER, it has occurred to me that there could be a problem in talking only about the ways in which an author models the phenomenality of his fictional world after the way he perceives the real world to work. The author of fiction is not creating something that's ever totally faithful to the real world, even if the elements of artifice he may use are simply invisible structuring principles. Here's Herman Melville on the unrealistic "symmetry" of fiction as compared to really real reality:

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. --Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD.

In the same essay in which I quoted this Melville passage, I also compared Melville's "symmetry" to my concept of artifice. But one can see the function of symmetry/artifice as being just as present in naturalistic works as in the other two forms, the uncanny (where BILLY BUDD belongs) and the marvelous (where one might place Melville's MARDI, for what little that's worth). I'm not sure that any of Melville's works are purely naturalistic, but just to venture an example with another nautical theme, Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND has no metaphenomena at all, but it's certainly just as determined by artifice. What many critics have missed that this use of artifice is no less present in naturalistic works which seem to be based on "real" events. Flaubert's MADAME BOVARY may appear to the naive eye to be more "realistic" than TREASURE ISLAND, but Flaubert has to use the same range of tropes Stevenson did, in order to create the emotional effects he desired. Neither BOVARY nor ISLAND possesses the "ragged edges" of reality. 

Yet Stevenson and Flaubert use artifice invisibly, somewhat like the "invisible style" attributed to the majority of movies in Classic American cinema. However, I posit that whenever an artist in any medium invokes metaphenomenal tropes to get his desired effects, I believe that he has to exert a new level of "authorial will" as I defined it way back in 2009. That's why I'm now seeking to look at the amount of work-- which I also called "crap"-- that an author has to put across to sell his metaphenomena:

But my current line of thought is more like, "how much crap did an author have to come up with to put across this involved a deception?" (like that of The Hound of the Baskervilles)... The opposition I'm currently playing with is that we're used to thinking of "marvelous things" are total inventions while "uncanny things" are supposed to be in line with the way the natural universe works. But the latter are arguably just as much inventions as the former. if you can't observe a real Pit and Pendulum in human history, or a real crime in which someone pretends to be a ghost to get rid of all the heirs to a fortune, then the phenomenon described is still a creation of the imagination-- just not one that requires as much imaginative effort as something overtly marvelous.

What further developments might be fostered from this line of thought, I cannot at this time predict.   

GIRLBOSS TROUBLE

 This CRITICAL DRINKER video was posted to YouTube in the last week. An "Open Bar" discussion followed but didn't add anything much.

I've followed Critical Drinker for some years now, and though I don't agree with him on various subjects, this was one of his better rants, even with the predictable, eyeball-grabbing title of "XXX IS DEAD." In many of his videos CD repeatedly complains about the offense to verisimilitude every time a female outfights a male in a way CD doesn't like. Yet until this "Female Action Movie was Killed by the Girlboss" thing, I didn't think he was very good on the history of femme-fight movies. 

Here, however, he contrasted a lot of the female action franchises of the 2000s and 2010s prior to the rise of the girlboss, such as Resident Evil, Underworld, Lara Croft, Hunger Games and (potentially) Kill Bill. He said were accepted by mass audiences in part because none of them were trying to usurp the place of the male action movies, which is something we began seeing with increased frequency in the late 2010s. To those franchises one might also add some above-average one-shot films like Jolie's Salt and Theron's Atomic Blonde, the latter showing up during the flood of the girlboss flicks. The Open Bar mentions how some of the nineties movies promoted actresses who clearly didn't have any command of fake-fighting, like Halle Berry and Pam Anderson. 

I hesitate to say that any particular moviemaking craze (talking here about the crazes of the movie-makers, not the viewers) kills things dead for all time. But he made a credible case for audiences avoiding reasonably competent flicks like BALLERINA and FURIOSA because audiences got burned so many times with crapfests like BIRDS OF PREY and THE MARVELS. Of course the Disney STAR WARS films were profitable even though they did what Drinker most hated-- slotting in girlbosses in place of established heroes-- but that was before we were drowned in all the MCU dreck, as well as some DC dreck as well. The new FANTASTIC FOUR movie sounds like its makers are still infected with the girlboss disease, so we'll see if it flops and validates CD's fatigue claims. 

Now I don't think this century is the first time filmmakers have overpowered female fighters. 1974's POLICEWOMEN, despite a scene in which Sondra Currie only beats Big Big Smith thanks to judo techniques, concludes with a scene where Currie vanquishes another male hulk with several straight punches and one kick. CD gives the Asian female action films a pass, but how often did chopsockies and "girls with guns" movies show women duking it out with men the same way, and not really getting thrown by a loop by superior strength blows? Only a couple hundred times, I'd say.        

Lastly, I am aware of one still successful girlboss franchise: HBO's HARLEY QUINN show, which enjoyed five seasons so far and is allegedly getting a sixth. I watched the first three seasons and thought they were all crap except for the general quality of the animation. HQ is entirely a girlboss, and the third season even has her replace Batman in the "Bat-family" of heroes. Granted, Harley earned a degree of spinoff success before HBO, and the character still seems wildly popular with cosplayers. And the HQ cartoon has an advantage over the BIRDS OF PREY movie, since the cartoon is sort of a Liberal version of SOUTH PARK, with loads of foul language and ultraviolence. So if HQ is the only current girlboss franchise that bucks the failures of MCU movies and of streaming shows based on the STAR WARS and STAR TREK properties, it could partly due to other factors that the pure girlboss project lacks.

TAKING STOCK OF 2024

 I've mentioned in previous year-summaries that I've been sharing some of my essays on the comics-site BLEEDING FOOL. My most ambitious project for 2024 was an essay-series entitled HEROES BY THE HUNDREDFOLD: 100 BEST COSTUMED-CRUSADER FILMS, based on one of the categories I've been regularly exploring on the GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA blog. The final section finished up in December 2024 here, and the series of course has received thunderous acclaim. ***JUST KIDDING.*** But it was an enjoyable undertaking, worth doing for its own sake. It gave me a chance to exercise my ability to suss out superhero movies with respect to other potentialities than the kinetic one for which the public knows them. The essay-series is partly a response to the anti-superhero polemic of Martin Scorsese, last addressed here.                                                                                                                                   Meanwhile, back at the ARCHIVE, my most challenging project was probably to define the nature of literary (as opposed to real) evil in the EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD series, beginning here. This occasioned a small return to the poetics of Bataille, which might spawn some future ruminations down the road. Second on that list would be the formulations on my category of "magical fantasy stories," using the conceptual framework of Mircea Eliade to arrive at a concept of a pure magical fantasy in contrast to those rendered impure by intrusions of modernity, or non-magical nonsense-concepts. Though I've seen a fair number of critical studies that privilege the appearance of magical fantasy in archaic societies, I think MIND OUT OF TIME PT 2 might be unique in stating that the archaic society is part of the equation that allows for conviction in the magical rationale.                                                                                                                                                                                                           The "phase shift" is probably the only significant term introduced in 2024. I furthered some of my investigations on durability, ravishment, and ontology, any of which may breed more involved ruminations later on.                                                                                                                                                                                                   I produced in 2024 a handful of overviews of either serials or concepts. My examination of the Lovecraft "mythos stories" was tabled for other projects, but hopefully I'll finish it up this year. I provided a fairly detailed analysis of Chic Young's BLONDIE here, as a means of providing context for the particular type of "sadism in domesticity" myth I've found in that franchise. In contrast to Young, who found his metier with BLONDIE and stuck with that strip until his passing, the manga-artist Nanashi brought his serial NAGATORO to a conclusion in 2024, and though I wasn't satisfied with the serial's conclusion in every respect, I noted here that the artist's determination to bring closure to his teen-romance brought forth Nanashi's only mythopoeic narrative, which is no small feat since his dominant focus was upon the dramatic potentiality.                                                                                                                            In addition to the Nagatoro and Blondie "1001 myths" entries, I also particularly enjoyed working on those for Tezuka's UNICO, Nagai's KAMASUTRA, a Binder MARY MARVEL tale, Druillet's DELIRIUS, another wacky WONDER WOMAN from Marston, and one of Gardner Fox's classic sensawunda tales for ADAM STRANGE. No new non-fiction reads in 2024 that really set my brain afire, but there were some worthy new fiction reads, like the original Pinocchio, and the Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden, which I started reviewing here. It's not that I didn't keep busy reading various new works in my three book-groups, but there just wasn't all that much I could build upon, aside from my observations on Dotoyevsky's NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND. I suppose I'm glad I read Wyndham's TRIFIDS, Rohmer's GREEN EYES OF BAST, and Barker's SCARLET GOSPELS even though I found all of them not-as-mythic as I could have wished. In addition to my long-form attempts to suss out the Lovecraft mythos, I probably put in the most effort to explicate both Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST and LeFanu's CARMILLA.                                                                                                                                                                                       Over on the NUM blog, I like to think I elucidated some interesting myth-tropes (even if sub-concrescent ones). Some reviews of possible interest: WATCHMEN (2009), HIS NAME WAS HOLY GHOST (1972), TOWER OF SCREAMING VIRGINS (1968), LITTLE MISS INNOCENCE (1973), THE THRONE OF FIRE (1983), THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1940), WANDA THE SADISTIC HYPNOTIST (1969), CUTIE HONEY (2004), SUPERMAN VS. THE ELITE (2012), THE BLACK SWAN (1942), LUPIN III: FUJIKO'S LIE (2020), THE FISH WITH EYES OF GOLD (1974), HEY, GOOD LOOKIN' (1982), INVADERS FROM MARS (1953), GHASTLY PRINCE ENMA, BURNING UP! (2011), and, just to round out the year with something I'd been seeking for some time (but didn't want to pay for on streaming), THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU (1980). Though I also completed a good number of series-reviews, there wasn't much to explicate in GOTHAM, THE TICK, INVINCIBLE, or even STARGIRL, though I very much liked the latter show providing a final decent three-season run in marked contrast to the horrible idiocies of so many other CW shows. There was more to analyze in the six seasons of XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS, though also a lot of formula junk to sort through there. TEEN TITANS probably was more rewarding in terms of providing more fair and good stuff to offset the weak sauce. I also finished Season 2 of SMALLVILLE, but who knows when I'll find time to do individual show-critiques of the later seasons.                                                                                                                                                        So Year 2024 offered quite a bit of variety, and maybe 2025 will at least keep pace. I would be remiss not to mention one dominating political event: the re-election of Donald Trump. Though I believe none of the fervid fantasies of the Far Left as to his assumption of power, I also don't believe that the next four years will be smooth sailing, as Trump's adherents imagine. He's going to mess up on one thing or the other, maybe several things. But the change was necessary, because the Democrat Party had just become such a polluted mess, and I think that no matter badly Trump does in some particulars, the alternative would have been far worse-- though of course, no one will ever truly know what might have been. We will be living in interesting times, to be sure.                                                         

HETERO FORMATIVE

The idea that sex functions to provide variation for natural selection to act upon was first advocated by August Weismann and it has dominated much discussion on the evolution of sex and recombination since then...  In summary, although Weismann's hypothesis must be considered the leading candidate for the function of sex and recombination, nevertheless, many additional principles are needed to fully account for their evolution.-- NIH abstract.

All normal human beings have soi-distant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts: those who know this and those who do not. --Robert Heinlein, FRIDAY, 1982.

I haven't written as much as I used to about the excesses of academic "queer theory" since the Hooded Utilitarian site closed down. But HU's demise was not an indicator of a general trend. This is confirmed by a recent jeremiad from London's School of African and Oriental Studies regarding philosophers who were too "white" and "heteronormative."

SOAS, perhaps after thinking deeply about this for the past seven years, is now reviving the debate. It has issued a “toolkit” for secondary schools and universities who wish to teach philosophy (although you’d hope that other universities would have ideas of their own)... The toolkit sets out its position from the start. “Much academic philosophy in the UK, US, Australasia and continental Europe masks its structural antagonism to everything that is not white, bourgeois, male, heteronormative and able-bodied,” it begins. The document continues along very much the same lines for 27 pages.-- Roland White, THE TELEGRAPH, 2024.

The only possible defense for anyone to use a term as stupid as "heteronormative" is that they've allowed their minds to be polluted with Mickey Marx bullshit, and the knee-jerk inclusion of the word "bourgeois" confirms as much. And this narrow-minded, neo-chauvinist screed is rendered even more fatuous than usual when one views "normative sex" through the lens of evolutionary theory.

On a slight tangent, I read a lot of academic film criticism in the eighties and nineties. I'm not sure when I realized that almost all of the critics worshipped at the altars of either Marx, Freud, or some syncretic combination of the two, possibly to be named "Marfreud." Film critic Richard Grenier was a welcome exception. While I didn't agree with every essay in Grenier's 1990 collection CAPTURING THE CULTURE, he made clear how much the academic world had been influenced by Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who used the phrase "capture the culture" to describe the devious social conditioning of the bourgeoise. Grenier wittily pointed out that modern Leftist academics were just following the same program Gramsci projected upon "normative" culture, by undermining everything that "normals" valued. An example, from some book whose title I forgot long ago, was the assertion that the "romantic clinch" seen at the conclusion of countless Hollywood movies was merely a social construction designed to please the bourgeoise-- which was stupid even if the forgotten author didn't use the word "heteronormative."

I probably read that lunkheaded judgment sometime in the nineties, long before anyone thought of using four-or-more letters to mainstream the idea of "homonormative" pride. But even then, the judgment struck me as amazingly presumptuous. If there was no heterosexuality, there would be no human race to give birth to new offspring of any sexual proclivity. Heterosexuality was not something that existed to shore up non-Marxist values, as one might argue with some logic regarding racism. Nevertheless, some thirty years later, Marxists are still whining that if most of the world still trends boy-girl, it's a terrible sin against the Marxist ideal of totally capturing the culture so that homosexuality of one kind or another becomes "the norm."

Now, had evolution not chosen the path of heterosexual conjugation as August Weismann theorized, asexual reproduction might have continued, but there's little if any reason to suppose those life-forms would have arisen to their current level of complexity. Thus heteronormativity, which gets such massive disrespect, is the factor that promoted the immense variety of life-forms on this planet.

Now stating that fact in no way supports real bigotry against any of the many paraphilias-- which includes LGBT etcetera in my book-- that also evolved alongside vanilla old hetero sex. Contrarian conservative Robert Heinlein was certainly being facetious when he had the fictional characters of his novel speak of "mixed up glands." I largely included the quote because I happened to read FRIDAY for the first time while planning this essay. Yet even back in the early 1970s, Heinlein somewhat charted the course for many non-Marxists, who simply looked upon "gay rights advocates" as justified in their rhetoric, striking back against a chauvinism that often made the homosexual paraphilia illegal. This aspect of history should always be acknowledged, not least for the many abuses perpetrated by various types of heteronormative chauvinism. But the answer to one chauvinism is not another chauvinism, and statements like those of the SAOS are nothing but a chauvinism that exaggerates the significance of homonormative behavior at the expense of the entire range of human sexual behavior.

I feel sure, for example, that there exist other persons with non-homosexual paraphilias who view their sexual persuasions as being just as opposed to "the normal" as are homosexual paraphilias-- but some if not all of these may be able to produce offspring. For instance, a macrophiliac who's stimulated only by very tall women may not have a large range of potential mates, but mating and producing offspring is not impossible. But if he (and it's usually a "he") only gets stimulated by literal giants, then he will probably contribute no more to the gene pool than anyone confined to purely homosexual hookups.

 But paraphilias like macrophilia will never get courses devoted to their kink as universities, partly because most of them keep a much lower profile than LGBT. A truly liberal philosophy would embrace all sexual variations-- with the obvious exception of the one that will and should remain illegal-- without regard to who's given the most attention by lunkheaded academics.

BATTLE OF THE GIRL BOSS FRANCHISES

 It's difficult to tell when "girl bosses" have negatively affected an ESTABLISHED franchise. Even if an audience does not like a given female character, they may still like the franchise enough to support it. But if the audience does NOT support a previously profitable franchise, it's also difficult to prove that the presence of a bad female character was the reason.

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY was an unquestionable box office bomb. I liked it much better than the much more profitable entry in the series, CRYSTAL SKULL, so I have to ask, "why did audiences not want to see it?"

Long before the film hit theaters, there were podcasts bagging on Indiana's co-star Helena Shaw being a "girl boss." So many people may have stayed away from DIAL with the negative sense that Disney wanted to "replace" Indiana with a younger female hero. BUT-- the same negative opinions also swarmed around 2021's NO TIME TO DIE, in which it was rumored that Bond was going to be replaced by a female 007-- and TIME was not a flop. In both cases audiences had reason to believe that the respective films were going to be the last hurrahs for both the Craig Bond and the Ford Indiana, but they supported one and not the other.

I also personally think that Helena Shaw was a better character than her detractors claimed, even after they saw the movie. Certainly she's more three-dimensional than Nomi, the new 007. I think both female characters were being floated by their studios as POSSIBLE new feature-characters, but neither is so overbearing as to beat the original character into the ground, as the early podcasters feared. Those podcasters MIGHT have overreacted, though it's important to state that such neutralization DOES happen when an old franchise character's on the way out and a new one's on the way in.

So we can't in the end say that DIAL failed because of a girl boss. Her presence might not have HELPED, that's the most one can say. Given that some complaints were made that DIAL was depressing because Ford looked his age, I find an alternative theory more believable: TIME succeeded because it allowed Bond to go out looking good, DIAL flopped because it didn't allow Jones to look unfailingly great from start to finish.

HOWEVER, all of that applies to ESTABLISHED franchises, and I think Disney has flopped with many of its NEW girl boss franchises. Take THE MARVELS (please). There's no reason to see that film except to celebrate the girl boss rhetoric, but it was so bad, even the people who want more girl bosses didn't go see it, and it was a tremendous bomb. So IMO one can blame the "girl boss" theme for "going broke" only when there's no other contributing factor.

A SHORT DEFENSE OF TIM BURTON

 I saw the following quoted from Roger Ebert with respect to Tim Burton:

..design over story, style over substance - a great-looking movie with a plot you can’t care much about.

 I have a probably unprovable theory that Burton's mature creativity was strongly influenced, as he came into his own, by his apprenticeship at Disney's animation department.

With animated movies, plot, in the sense I believe Ebert's using, is far less important than character. Whereas in live-action films the characters can literally become cogs in an overarching plot-- Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS comes to mind here-- animated characters need vivid scenarios that express what each of them can do. The structure is more like vaudeville, or a Marx Brothers movie. A loose plot allows characters to come out "on stage," establish their personas, and bounce off other characters as needed. 

That's how Burton's movies seem constructed to me. It's not "style without substance," as Ebert says, but the substance is more free-flowing. With METROPOLIS, one knows the theme behind the plot, because the storyteller is very overt in expressing said theme. But what's the theme of BEETLEJUICE? One may be present, but it's not overt by any means. The theme isn't expressed by the precise movements of the plot, but by all the character-arcs bouncing off one another until things are sorted out as the storyteller desires.

This approach worked well with BEETLEJUICE and Burton's two BATMAN films but not with DARK SHADOWS. With both BATMAN and DARK SHADOWS, Burton had a certain range of characters he had to play off one another, sometimes because of producer interference (he reputedly didn't want the Penguin in RETURNS). But he was able to impose a loose structure on RETURNS, with Max Schreck bringing Catwoman into being and trying to use Penguin to his own ends. With SHADOWS Burton seems at a loss, unable to figure out how to boil down the unwieldy ensemble of long-term characters into something he could work with.

TAKING STOCK OF 2023

I suppose 2023, in comparison to the previous two years, sums up as more of a re-elaboration of old concepts than a bounty of new ones.

I continued my exploration of the dynamics of how icons function in crossover-universes. One two-part essay, here and here, dealt with how Marvel Comics apparently concocted its first interordinate icon-association not with the idea of selling funnybooks, but just as a means of banishing authorial boredom. This was a strange beginning, for before Marvel, crossovers had only been intermittent anomalies. But after the 1960s, they would arguably become  the measure of all modern popular literature from the 1960s on, more expected by the general audience than not.

DOMINANT PRIMES AND SUBS put forth a terminology capable of clarifying how a stature-icon can retain its stature despite being placed in the most compromising subordinate positions, like the unfortunate Lord of Vampires being dragooned into appearing as a sub in such gems as BLACULA, THE DRAK PACK, and (perhaps the ultimate comedown) WITCHMAS.

STALKING THE PERFECT TERMS: THE FOUR POTENTIALITIES hopefully settles at least on accurate terms for the *quanta* that I perceive as fundamental to each of the potentialities.

TIME OUT OF ALIGNMENT succinctly states why crossovers brought about through regularized breaches in fictional space-time don't merit consideration as crossovers.

And the ICONIC BONDING essays, starting here, provide a rationale as to why icons with certain bonding situations also don't count as the crossing over of fictive universes.

On the non-crossover front, I finished Whitehead's SCIENCE IN THE NEW WORLD, and I don't think I'm by any means finished with exploring his work with relation of my form of literary concrescence, but MIGHT AND MYTH is a pretty fair start.

There's also more to be written about the history of the science fiction genre's influence upon the comic-book superhero genre, but I flatter myself that I made a pretty good start in THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION. which also argues that Jack Kirby unleashed something of a creative demon he couldn't entirely control. This essay was reprinted on the conservative comics site BLEEDING FOOL.

Also on the essay front, coincidence brought me to a high-falutin' online essay about a so-called "incest aesthetic," which I refuted in INCEST WE TRUST PART 7. But I think WHAT VS. HOW might be my best essay as far as elucidating the dynamics of lateral meaning and vertical meaning.

As for reviews. a number of these were of famous works of pop fiction-- Carroll's ALICE books, the first of the OZ books, Doyle's LOST WORLD, THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I did NOT even get close to finishing an annotated edition of Lovecraft's "Mythos stories," don't know if 2024 will prove better on that front. But my most interesting discovery was finding a treasure trove of naive myth in Burroughs' RED HAWK.

As for mythcomics, some of these were also works that I already appreciated, such as THE SONG OF RED SONJA, but there's a little more sense of adventure in exhuming forgotten gems (that some would call "moldy oldies") like THE MONGROL MAN and THE LEGEND OF THE LONG THIRD FINGER.

As for the NUM reviews, here's a list of the shows that most challenged me in sussing them out, even if a couple were interesting just as rare birds.

THE SUPER SNOOPER

BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA

Peter Jackson's THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy

THE BEAUTIFUL BEAST

YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM

LOLA COLT

BURNED AT THE STAKE

PANDORA'S BOX (Mighty Mouse)

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

SEX KITTENS GO TO COLLEGE

INFERNO

REVENGE IN THE HOUSE OF USHER

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY 3

WOLF DEVIL WOMAN

MIRACULOUS FLOWER

DAGON

THE WOLFMAN

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY

JONNY QUEST (1964)

MONDO KEYHOLE

THE INCREDIBLE PROFESSOR ZOVEK

XENA SEASON ONE

THE LAST DRAGONSLAYER

HELLBOY (2019)

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

SUMURU

GODZILLA MINUS ONE

BRAVESTARR THE LEGEND

I can't say my GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA blog is burning up the Internet, despite my placing a link to the blog on the aforementioned BLEEDING FOOL. But I attribute that to the fact that most fans are not bugs for categorization as I am. I will continue that project, though, because it suits me. I look forward to more such categorization conundrums in 2024.

THE NATURE OF STORYTELLING PT. 3

Literature is a luxury, fiction is a necessity.-- G.K. Chesterton, IN DEFENSE OF PENNY DREADFULS, 1901.

In Part 2 I responded to Martin Scorsese's praise of Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST by noting that Hitchcock used much the same "innocent accused" trope for THE 39 STEPS, which lacked any of the "painful emotions" Scorsese extolled in NORTHWEST. In that essay, I said I didn't know what if anything Scorsese had written about STEPS, but I was informed that the movie did make at least one of the director's best-films lists.

Another famous film on the list, at #942, is 1971's DIRTY HARRY-- and it just so happens that in Pauline Kael's contemporary review of that film, she touched on some of the same issues mentioned by Scorsese in his 2019 remarks. Kael wrote:

There's an aesthetic pleasure one gets from highly developed technique; certain action sequences make you feel exhilarated just because they're so cleverly done-- even if, as in the case of Siegel's DIRTY HARRY, you're disgusted by the picture.

I don't know what aspects of the Siegel film Scorsese liked well enough to elevate it into his personal pantheon, but those favorable aspects must have weighed more in his personal scales than any elements he might've found problematic. 

The Kael excerpt, even though it doesn't specify the reasons why HARRY is disgusting, is a flawed analysis. I don't believe for a moment that Kael was "exhilarated" by this or that action sequence because she thought they were cleverly done. I think she had a visceral response FIRST to a thrilling scene, because it conveyed the illusion that she was experiencing the events. Then, after the fact, she rationalized that she'd been captivated by the technique behind it.

This general idea of "good technique in the service of a bad story" bears a strong resemblance to the way Scorsese dismisses superhero movies in his remarks to EMPIRE magazine re: theme parks.

The only time his ardour dims is when the subject of Marvel comes up. “I don’t see them,” he says of the MCU. “I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well-made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

In his follow-up remarks Scorsese admits filmgoers also went to Hitchcock movies to experience "thrills and shocks" like those offered by amusement parks. (I assume he's associating such parks primarily with things like carousels and roller coasters, though he doesn't explicitly say that.) But after admitting that the Hitchcock films offer thrills and shocks, he stated that they offer other elements that keep viewers coming back to them.

I don't disagree that a lot of Hitchcock films offer other interesting elements, just as I believe that Siegel's DIRTY HARRY offers more than, say, an appeal to fascist sentiment (which was one of Kael's condemnations of the movie). But I also would say that some superhero films offer these other elements as well, and that they're not all homogenized thrill-rides as Scorsese contended.

Ir's at this point I finally work my way back to my Chesterton quote. In his defense of the despised medium of penny dreadfuls-- which defense is an almost precognitive rebuttal of Frederic Wertham  -- Chesterton admits that what he calls "fiction," as opposed to "literature," is a "dehumanized and naked narrative." Yet he calls it a necessity because these naked stories are akin to the ones people tell themselves as they live their daily lives in society.

Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilisation is built; for it is clear that unless civilisation is built on truisms, it is not built at all. Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.

The "ordinary" men and women who watch the films of both Siegel and Hitchcock may be responding equally to the movies' "heroic truisms," to the convention of watching the good guy overthrow the bad guy. Some may also respond, as Scorsese says, to other elements of  the famed directors' stories, but others in the audience may not get anything out of PSYCHO or DIRTY HARRY but the visceral thrills. If the best superhero movies could compete with Siegel and Hitchcock in terms of both the visceral and what I call the mythopoeic, then that accomplishment would be a little more impressive in my book than the comparatively simple excitements of a roller coaster ride.

And as it happens, I do think at least some superhero films have more to offer than "technique" alone. 

The 2008 IRON MAN is a case in point. There's little doubt that the filmmakers capture much of the appeal of the comic-book character, depicting the wonder of a man's rebirth: of compensating for a near-fatal wound by building himself into a super-knight-in-armor. The flawless way in which the filmmakers explore every step of Tony Stark's evolution into Iron Man-- including the humorous ones-- provides enough "thrills and shocks" to satisfy even the most undemanding of Chesterton's "gutter boys." But of course there are other elements that made the Marvel Universe seem credible, ranging from Tony Stark's silver-spoon political naivete to his "daddy issues," which didn't exist in the early IRON MAN comics and only developed, very erratically, over the course of two decades. I noted in my review that in the comics the Obadiah Stane arc is clumsy and superficial, but the movie takes all of those weak "father's evil colleague" motifs and works them into a more cohesive myth of the superhero as partly damaged in spirit as well as in body.

Is the 2008 IRON MAN as great a film as PSYCHO or DIRTY HARRY? I wouldn't go that far. But IMO it does show a mastery of elements that go beyond "thrills and shocks," and other costumed-crusader films have done much the same, though there's perhaps not enough of them yet to form a "canon." I don't question that the very same filmmakers turned around and made a lot of mediocre superhero films-- not least the two IRON MAN sequels. But those sequels no more downgrade the accomplishment of the 2008 film than PSYCHO is compromised by the vastly inferior FRENZY.

THE NATURE OF STORYTELLING PT. 2

I've responded to the "anti-superhero" remarks of Martin Scorsese on this blog a couple of times. The first time, my basic conclusion was that Scorsese was most invested in what I'm pleased to term  "the mythos of the drama." This is why, in his 2019 remarks, he places such great emphasis on whether or not a given piece of cinema concerns "the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures." Elsewhere, while speaking of the enormous allure of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, he notes:

The set-pieces in NORTH BY NORTHWEST are stunning, but they would be nothing more than a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts without the painful emotions at the center of the story and the absolute "lostness" of Cary Grant's character.

This quote relates well to the observation I made in my second essay, which didn't really examine Scorsese in depth, though I did reference my personally articulated concepts of artifice and verisimilitude:

...the director's main target, "franchise films" within the superhero genre, belong more to the category I've called "artifice" than to "verisimilitude." Works in the category of artifice are by their nature more aligned with generating meaning, when they do so, by examining literary tropes rather than consensual reality.

 

Now, Hitchcock did not make "franchise films" in the sense the term is usually employed, in which the franchise offers the audience either continuing characters (Spider-Man, Antoine Doinel) or a series of roughly analogous stories linked by some umbrella concept or theme (Tales from the Crypt). But the Master of Suspense certainly used a situation beloved by espionage stories: that of "fugitive, while seeking to prove his innocence, must seek to prevent catastrophe." This situation can be fairly deemed a "trope" insofar as it has been used, and probably will continue to be used, by many authors to get audiences to invest in the fictional events.

Now, Scorsese says that without the "painful emotions" transmitted to the audience by the Cary Grant character, NORTH BY NORTHWEST would only be "a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts." There's no knowing that this would be the case, for all we can't "un-see" the version of NORTHWEST that we know. But one may fairly wonder if that less emotional version would have looked like Hitchcock's first major version of the aforementioned artifice-trope, 1935's THE 39 STEPS. 

I have not read, and am not likely to read, John Buchan's 1915 novel. Still, the summation I've read of the book makes it sound identical to the situation of Richard Hannay in the 1935 movie as embodied by Robert Donat: that Hannay is pretty close to being an emotional cipher in terms of dramatic intensity. 

And yet, it seems to me that Hitchcock's 39 STEPS is still a great movie, even without "painful emotions," and I also think it's more than the sum of its compositional shots.  It took a relatable, if artificial, situation and engrossed the audience in the outcome of the protagonist's seemingly insoluble dilemma-- often by adding elements foreign to the book, like the romantic angle. Near the movie's end Hannay has tracked the titular spy organization, the 39 Steps, to its base of operations at the London Palladium. There Hannay the ordinary man has an extraordinary insight: the spies plan to use a performer with exceptional memory (also a movie invention) to memorize vital state secrets for transportation elsewhere.

Trouble is, the London police are there too, and they're about to pull Hannay out of the crowd surrounding Mister Memory's stage. On all sides, audience-members are challenging the performer to answer any question put to him: fine details about atomic weights or historical dates and the like. Mister Memory meets every challenge, answers every question put to him, until Hannay, almost in the clutches of the cops, yells to the performer, "What are the 39 Steps!"

The crowd of fair-goers don't have any idea what Hannay is talking about, but they see Mister Memory hesitate at Hannay's inquiry, and they all take up the chant, "What are the 39 Steps?" The viewing audience doesn't know what goes through Mister Memory's mind, for he's even more of a cipher than Hannay. But as if the man can't help responding to a question to which he knows the answer, Mister Memory speaks the literally fatal words, "The 39 Steps is an organization of spies," just before his compatriots shoot him. And his death liberates Richard Hannay.

I've never seen Martin Scorsese say anything about THE 39 STEPS, but I think it impossible that a cineaste like him could avoid loving this scene. And if I am correct on that point, I argue that he wouldn't be loving the scene for its compositional rigor, and he certainly wouldn't be loving it for any character's "contradictory and paradoxical nature." 

He would be loving it because it's a vital part of a puzzle that makes the whole picture come clear. It's a picture that has nothing to do with verisimilitude, with the way people live their lives.

But it has everything to do with artifice, the way people wish they could live.

On a side-note: though Hitchcock did not make franchise-films by the definition I've used above, John Buchan's Richard Hannay enjoyed four more novels after the success of his debut, though as far as I can tell no one ever adapted any of the other Hannay-adventures. And the success of Hitchcock's adaptation of Robert Bloch's PSYCHO eventuated in Bloch doing two sequels to his novel, neither of which were adapted for the other three movies (and teleseries) in Universal's "Norman Bates franchise."

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 1

 In 2019 Martin Scorsese said, in part:

Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri.

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.

I've already responded loosely to aspects of Scorsese's essay in this post, and I won't repeat my response here, except to say that the director's main target, "franchise films" within the superhero genre, belong more to the category I've called "artifice" than to "verisimilitude." Works in the category of artifice are by their nature more aligned with generating meaning, when they do so, by examining literary tropes rather than consensual reality.

But one problem with critiquing "escapist works" is that it can be difficult to demonstrate how they develop over time. I recently re-watched Part 2 of the director's PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES (the only part that happened to be free on Youtube). I noticed that in the documentary Scorsese directed a great deal of attention, at least in the subsection "The Director as Illusionist," to the linear development of various forms of directorial technique, ranging from D.W. Griffith to Alfred Hitchcock. Today anyone can read comparable histories of the development of film techniques, or particular film genres, because general film history has been analyzed in great depth by many writers, long before Scorsese's analysis.

There are a few good general histories of comic books, though none that go into a lot of detail about overall diachronic development of genres (say, how superheroes and funny-animals dominated much of early original comic-book content). However, many histories provide a good linear history of superheroes only, which usually breaks down by designated "ages." I supplied my breakdown of the ages in this essay, but there I focused only the "big events" that defined those ages. A more nuanced analysis, devoted to describing how each age responds to the use of artifice-tropes, would go something like this:

THE GOLDEN AGE-- Because nearly all publications are aimed at children, the entire age is defined largely by wild, pulpish artifice and almost no verisimilitude. Even standout comics artists like Eisner, Cole and Barks only invoke verisimilitude conditionally.

THE SILVER AGE-- Possibly in response to the demands of the Comics Code, the long-time editors of Marvel and DC made an effort to explore techniques that lent greater verisimilitude to their still-pretty-wild fantasies. With DC it was greater use of organized motifs of sci-fi or occult fantasy, while Marvel worked on making characters seem two-dimensional. Almost no other companies followed their lead, though.

THE EARLY BRONZE AGE-- Mainstream comics got edgier, and superheroes followed suit. THE NEW X-MEN, for example, often looked as breezy as many 1960s superhero groups, but often Chris Claremont surreptitiously worked in story-elements suggestive of sadomasochism and rape, among others.

THE LATE BRONZE AGE-- What was kept fairly sub rosa in the seventies became big business as mainstream superhero comics embraced the ideal I've called "adult pulp," of which WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS were the exemplars.

THE IRON AGE-- With greater examination, I might end up dividing this era into "early" and "late" as well, since the "adult pulp" tropes from the eighties and nineties are first compromised by a chimera one might call "the Literary Superhero," and later by "the Politicized Superhero." 

But even if one does not agree with my characterizations, it's possible to see how the superhero genre showed definite changes from era to era. 

But superheroes in cinema-- that's a question for Part 2.

TAKING STOCK OF 2022

 Year 2022 was dominantly my "year of the crossover." Though I started my first systematic analysis of the phenomenon in late 2021, most of my key writings on the subject took place in the newly departed year. Among other things, I believe I finally came to some conclusions about what separates a crossover from a mashup.

Although I'd devoted an earlier post to the subject of the "Asian claw imagery," I gave the subject a thorough investigation here, ranging from Sax Rohmer's novel THE YELLOW CLAW to Marvel Comics' various iterations of their same-name villain(s). Only an equally Rohmeresque subject, it was fun to re-examine the author's 1918 GOLDEN SCORPION, which for me encoded some clues as to why the author might have played down his best known creation Fu Manchu for roughly a decade.

I finally came up with serviceable names for the quanta of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities here.

In the year of George Perez's regrettable passing, I was finally able to isolate a story from his WONDER WOMAN run that I could designate as a mythcomic. Similary, though for years I'd known that Ra's Al Ghul was a strong villain, 2022 was the first year I learned that he was also a mythic villain.

I learned about some interesting dichotomies in the work of the philosopher Wittgenstein thanks to reading and reviewing one of Stuart A. Kauffman's books.

I concluded my reviews of Dennis Wheatley's four most renowned occult novels in TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER. And while I may never get around to reviewing *all* of the Moore-O'Neill LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN novels, I was moved by O'Neill's passing to review the first and the last, which together offer some interesting data as to what the authors did and did not accomplish.

Lastly, I enlarged upon an earlier concept, consummation, so as to illustrate what makes fiction different from reality, and why the former is most desirable when it's least like the latter.

As for the NUM blog, some key reviews in terms of giving me good mental exercise in their analysis include:

The 1931 DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE.

The anime AQUARION and the two seasons of HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY.

The 2022 BATMAN.

The four ALIEN films, starting here.

The psycho-thriller WHAT THE PEEPER SAW.

The bizarre BLINDMAN.

The 2001 METROPOLIS, a good version of a mediocre Tezuka work.

TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, even if it was a poor version of a good book.

And in December, I finished reviewing all the ATOR films, with the pleasant surprise that the only one with mythic resonance-- despite still being riddled with goofy inconsistencies-- was IRON WARRIOR, which I'd seen once and barely remembered. WARRIOR was also the last film reviewed for the year, which at least took away the taste of the HE-MAN/SHE-RA CHRISTMAS SPECIAL.

Finally, though I usually don't play up the things I put on my "junk-drawer blogs," I devoted several posts to surveying the sadism tropes found in the HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY manga, starting here.

As for the current year will bring-- quien sabe?

THE RETURN OF THE TWO ELITISMS

 Back in 2013 I took advantage of a public debate between two comics critics, Gary Groth and Ng Suat Tong to show how both were wrong about their chosen subject (the artfulness of EC Comics) and I, of course, was right. In my essay ELICITING ELITISM I observed that although I considered both critics to be elitists (in contrast to the pluralism I practice), Tong's approach consisted of "form elitism," in that he only recognized art in terms of the form of a given work, while Groth's approach (at least in his defense of the EC comics he was re-publishing) consisted of "content elitism," in which he recognized art in a work's elements of content. This week I found a similar opposition in the public arguments of one acclaimed artist and one not-so-acclaimed performer, put on display in this BOUNDING INTO COMICS essay. 

(Note: before proceeding I should note that I have not seen the MCU "Shang-Chi" film, so I have no opinion of the merits of Simu Liu's performance in that film, only of his public remarks.)

Liu's remarks respond to two interviews given by Martin Scorsese and one given by Quentin Tarantino. I don't know why Liu includes Tarantino in his screed at all, given that Liu's main complaint is about "Hollywood racism," and Tarantino has distinguished himself for having scripted strong starring and supporting roles for POC actors. Further, though Tarantino has made his share of ideological statements over the years, his comments about not wanting to be a "hired gun" for the MCU are merely practical in nature, and do not condemn the superhero genre as a whole as does the remarks of Martin Scorsese. So I'm focusing here on Scorsese's remarks, which show him to be a "form elitist."

Scorsese takes exception to the box-office dominance of Marvel films, by which he means superhero films, though he says nothing about the films of any other studio. Scorsese says:

Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.

The famed director's remarks spring forth as a defense of his personal tastes, and that's why they are vague at best in a critical sense. Phrases like "revelation" and "mystery" may have special meaning to Scorsese, but they mean nothing in a wider critical context. Both in this excerpt and the rest of the essay, Scorsese's main complaint is that superhero films depend on "a finite number of themes," while with the filmmakers he loves, Scorsese feels that he's going to be "taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience."

Without my defending the overall quality of 21st-century superhero films, though, I believe what Scorsese really wants are works that fit the mythos of drama, in which most of the central characters are put through rigorous tests of their beliefs or personal loyalties. In contrast, most though not all superhero works fall into the mythos of adventure, where the main purpose of each narrative is to fill the viewer with excitement and invigoration rather than the purging of one's belief-system. Even in the many botched storylines of the MCU, this potential is always present. It's certainly possible to work purgative elements into an adventure-context. In my review of the BLACK PANTHER film, I pointed how it had given shorter shrift to its dramatic elements than had the Don McGregor comics on which the film was partly based. But had Scorsese been exposed to the original "Panther's Rage" arc of the Marvel comic, I tend to think the director would not have recognized the dramatic elements therein, because they weren't as important to the story as the hero physically triumphing over his various opponents. Almost all of Martin Scorsese's work falls into the mythos of the drama, and though he probably enjoys films that fall into other mythoi, most of the filmmakers he applauds also excel in dramatic works, not those of comedy, adventure, or irony. This is what causes me to label Scorsese a "form elitist," who cannot fathom excellence apart from the form he likes best.

Scorsese's essay ends with a complaint about the "financial dominance" of the films he cannot bear to call cinema, and his case is at least strong in terms of his personal tastes, not just his own prosperity. Simu Liu's remarks, as represented in the BOUNDING essay, start and end with the philosophy that "if it's good for me, it's good."

Even if Liu had only attacked Scorsese and left out Tarantino, his vile "everything that doesn't benefit me is racist" would not be any better. Since Scorsese does not bring up racial concerns of any kind, aside from (over)praising Spike Lee, Liu's attack seems grounded in nothing more than. "Scorsese doesn't like the genre which allowed me Sam Liu to get a starring role." 

Liu also manages to talk through both sides of his mouth, praising the two directors' "filmmaking genius" but condemning them as "gatekeepers" who, unlike Woke Disney and the MCU, would never have allowed an Asian star to star in a major Hollywood film." Of course Liu also tries to link his ascension to the entire Asian-American community, to their "lived experience." The entirety of White Hollywood existed for no reason but to keep POC performers down, and any work that does the opposite, no matter how meretricious it might be, is good for possessing that racism-defying content-- making Liu a person who makes his choices on the basis on content, though calling him any sort of "elitist" is a stretch.

I acknowledge that Liu is not engaged in an intellectual discussion as were Scorsese, Groth, and Tong. Yet the ideology he represents (but certainly did not originate) has permeated much of the Hollywood business community, insofar as even hard-hearted businessmen perceive the need to virtue-signal to gain cultural approval. Indeed, though Scorsese makes no comment upon the political content of MCU superhero films-- which it's possible the director did not even notice-- the virtue-signaling aspect of those films bears much of the blame for the aesthetic failure of most modern superhero films to measure up to the comics they pretend to emulate.

THE MASTER THREAD OF DISNEY'S "STAR WARS"

If one wanted a cogent, concise summation of the many failings of the Disney STAR WARS trilogy from 2015 to 2019, I for one would recommend this Youtube video by "So Civilized," entitled THE STAR WARS SEQUELS: DISNEY'S ANTI-TRILOGY. SC lays out the many missteps made by the creative teams, which I will abbreviate to the respective directors: J.J. Abrams for THE FORCE AWAKENS and THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, and Rian Johnson for THE LAST JEDI.

I fundamentally agree with SC on his essential thesis, which I'll boil down to "Abrams was too respectful of Lucas's NEW HOPE and EMPIRE; Johnson was too disrespectful of the whole mythos with nothing to put in its place." He doesn't elaborate what virtues of George Lucas these two latter-day creators fail to emulate, though a separate video, THE PERFECT STORYTELLING CLARITY OF STAR WARS, provides a good counterpoint to the ANTI-TRILOGY essay.

But, now that I've agreed with SC about all the storytelling flaws of both Abrams and Johnson, how do I make them line up with my own estimation of the three Disney flicks, since I rated the mythicity of LAST JEDI as "poor" while I deemed FORCE and RISE as "good."

Of course, I've championed a lot of works that have all sorts of surface flaws-- as seen recently in my reviews of grungy trash-films like BLOOD SABBATH and BLINDMAN-- because I consider that mythopoeic discourse can be formed even in the near-total absence of dramatic or didactic excellence. My criterion for mythopoeic discourse is that I have to be able to find a "master thread" around which the author(s) organize(s) his symbolic correlations, as explained in my essay series on the subject, starting here.

Interestingly enough, So Civilized has nearly nothing to say about the thread that most interested me, as I noted in my review of FORCE:

... it’s an interesting psychological touch that the script, by having Luke be Kylo’s teacher, makes him the symbolic offspring of the Luke-Leia-Han triangle

And this concatenation is echoed in Abrams' conception of Rey:

 ...Rey displays aspects of all of her parental influences, combining Han’s talents for piloting and scrounging, Leia’s feminine hauteur, and Luke’s instinctive connection with the Force.

I didn't comment in the FORCE review about the intimations of a romance-arc between Kylo and Rei. Yet this comes to fruition in JEDI, and I find it significant that even though Johnson downgrades almost every conceit Abrams raised-- Rei's mysterious parentage, the future significance of the Jedi, et al-- he never seeks in any way to tear down the blossoming quasi-romance between these two offspring, both literal and figurative, of the Luke-Leia-Han triangle.

 I failed to note this thread's development in my 2019 review. But in my recent re-screening, I must admit that Johnson seems fully aware that he cannot undo the growing "fellow feeling" between Rei and Kylo, even though she's seen him ruthlessly cut down a man who was Kylo's real father and Rei's wished-for surrogate parent. Johnson seems at least moderately aware that when he has Kylo betray and murder his mentor Snoke and invite Rei to join him in ruling the galaxy, he has fulfilled the intimations of a similar ambition voiced by Darth Vader to Luke in EMPIRE-- even though RETURN OF THE JEDI patently ignores Vader's earlier scheming against his mentor Palpatine.

In RISE, Abrams re-asserts his trope about Rei's special destiny, though in much the same way that Luke's destiny had dark roots. Just as Luke found out that he was the seed of an evil father, Rei learns that she's the granddaughter of the source of all Sith evil. I didn't feel that Abrams cared that much about that big revelation, and Palpatine's whole rap about "strike me down with your hate and I'll be reborn" fails to carry much resonance. But the repeated encounters of Rei and Kylo make up the trilogy's master thread, and Abrams puts far more effort bringing this trope to life than any of the pallid plotlines about Finn or Poe or even Threepio's supposedly comical loss of memory. In my review of RISE I noted:

As soon as renegade Kylo Ren encounters Rey, it's clear to every SW-savvy character that he's going to seek to convert her, as Palpatine successfully swayed Anakin Skywalker and as Anakin, in the guise of Darth Vader, failed to suborn Luke Skywalker. I suspect that Abrams may have formulated some specific ideas about Kylo's personal motives, and that Disney executives didn't want to delve into LOST-style psychodrama, so that in a psychological sense Kylo appears half-formed at best. However, Abrams does succeed in making Kylo a metaphysical complement to Rey, particularly when Kylo himself tells Rey that they comprise a "dyad," like the two sides of the Force. This yin-and-yang unity, though true to some of George Lucas's real world inspirations for the fictional Jedi, resembles nothing in the way Lucas treated the interactions of Palpatine-Anakin and of Vader-Luke, where it was clear that one character would dominate the other. Kylo, in his ceaseless attempts to draw Rey into his sphere, seems to be seeking some deeper consummation. To be sure, Abrams backs off on making the sexual aspects explicit, save for a suggestive final kiss between young Jedi and young Sith as the latter is about to perish.

I don't know how much of a Freudian J.J. Abrams may be now or has been in the past. He's written scripts that suggest Freudian content, particularly for LOST, but he's certainly done other scripts that don't pursue that sort of content. But it seems logical to me that either he or his collaborators on FORCE looked at the way Lucas had resolved the romantic angle of his original trilogy and wondered what might have happened had some of the offspring of both Light and Dark sides of the Force came together as Luke and Leia had not. I'm not saying that Abrams was engaging in nothing more than "shipping" forbidden romances, though there were be nothing wrong with it if he were. Rather, I think he had some notion of showing the dramatic costs of Rei's choice to pursue the rigorous destiny of a Jedi, which arguably put her apart from ordinary humankind. This gave Rei a kindred nature with the obsessed Kylo, who certainly had been all but overwhelmed by the weight of his heritage, and who may have chosen to imitate Darth Vader as an act of rebellion against his father, mother and uncle. I'm not saying Abrams totally succeeds in evoking all the dramatic potential of this psychology, but there's something more than mere imitativeness in his attempt to capture the complexities of Lucas's wonder child.

TAKING STOCK OF 2021

Once again I take keys in hands (in place of Charlie Brown's "pencil in hand" whenever he would write his "pencil-pal") and look back at the things I wrote on this blog and its companions.

Some of the essays I liked best included:

MYTH AND SEXPLOITATION, in which I examined some of the works I already analyzed for their mythic content and showed how the myth-concerns of those works also played seamlessly into their passion for sexploitative content.

DEATHBLOW AND DEATHMATCH-- Though I formulated my concept of the combative mode near the start of this blog, guided largely by some salient if brief remarks by both Kant and Frye, this essay is the first time I attempted to codify how the combative mode is expressed through popular story-tropes. The essay immediately afterward, QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM PT. 2, further elaborates the tropes in terms of the "vector terminology" I borrowed from Alfred North Whitehead.

LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE was a new attempt to summarize my NUM theory and to relate it to the history of literature as articulated by Aristotle and misinterpreted by people who misread Aristotle.

PROBLEMS VS CONUNDRUMS represents my effort to find a more elegant way to restate some of my earlier formulations regarding what I called "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning."

KNOWING THE IDEA FROM THE CONCEPT focuses upon finding new terminology with which to analyze the *quanta* through which the two vertical potentialities are expressed in fiction, with the "idea" being the quanta through which mythopoeic thought is expressed, while the "concept" is the quanta through which didactic thought is expressed.

And in December, starting with STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: ENTER PRIMES, EXIT COES, I devoted numerous posts that month to "an anatomy of the crossover," a subject that's interested me for years, though only in the previous year of 2020 did I conceive of terms, "stature" and "charisma", for the different operations of Prime and Sub characters/presences. I anticipate writing more on this topic in 2022, though I confess I may be reaching a point where my system is about as all-embracing as it can get.

Most of the mythcomics I analyzed were works I'd read at least once before, though a few items, like Ernie Colon's THE MEDUSA CHAIN, proved more rigorous than I'd perceived in the initial reading. I don't think I encountered any new-to-me works in 2021 that I liked as much as my 2020 discovery of NISEKOI, although ELFEN LIED and THE SONS OF EL TOPO probably rate as my foremost discoveries for last year.

My favorite movie/TV reviews of 2021 included:

NAKED KILLER (1992)

The BEAUTY AND THE BEAST episode "To Reign in Hell," which may inspire me to make a full examination of all three seasons of the teleseries within year 2022.

Perennial old favorite FIEND WITHOUT A FACE.

The two-season NISEKOI teleseries.

GODZILLA VS. KONG, because I'd been waiting for fifty-something years to see the titans of Japan and the U.S. to square off in a city-smashing donnybrook.

The first two Tobey Maguire Spideys, here and here, which certainly helped me out when it came to consider NO WAY HOME.

The two Keaton Bat-flicks, here and here.

"WAXWORKS," which at present reigns as the first true "monster mashup."

THE TRIUMPH OF HERCULES, my favorite Italian peplum.

The fourth episode of BEWITCHED, which finally put into perspective for me why this often mediocre show had such strong resonance for many though not all TV viewers.

And one of the best adventure-serials of that form's glory days, THE SPIDER'S WEB.

Naturally, a lot of my movie/TV viewing for the year was driven by cogitating about what movies I wanted to cross-reference on THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA, which has been going since June. I have not yet made more than a couple of attempts to cross-promote the blog, so not surprisingly OPERA doesn't get much attention, though still a little more than my other two "junk-drawer" blogs. For the time being I'm still committed to OPERA, though. In my mind at least, OPERA builds on Northrop Frye's comment that the critic, like the natural scientist, tries to examine all phenomena, going on the theory that a "total coherence" exists between all of the relevant subject matter. In the hands of ideological critics, this was often a means of deriding, say, even the best BATMAN productions by having a big laugh at how stupid the TV show was (or seemed to be). I'm aware that even old-time fans aren't ever going to be deeply invested in the analysis of a creaky old serial like JUNGLE DRUMS OF AFRICA. But there's a sense in which understanding anything-- be it a genre or a physical phenomenon-- requires that the analyst must see everything, good, bad and mediocre, as comprising facets of Shelley's "dome of many colored glass," doing everything possible to stain that monotonous white radiance of Eternity.