MYTHCOMICS: "EYE EYE SIR" (WITCHES' TALES #24, 1954)

Though the word "mythic" is sometimes used as shorthand for seriousness and importance, there's no reason mythic works can't be humorous. Indeed, Northrop Frye's four "mythoi" cover both two "serious" forms and two "unserious" forms, and I've already included a number of comedic or ironic works in my attempt at a canon of mythcomics.

However, the stories selected for this canon do have to sustain a level of symbolic complexity, and even many of the classic MAD stories of the early 1950s don't reach that level. An exception is "Mickey Rodent," which sustains a sociological myth relating to the human use of language and custom. 

This week's mythcomic falls more into the psychological department. EC influenced more than a few comics-companies of the early 1950s, and according to this Bhob Stewart essay, Harvey Comics was one of the main disciples. In fact, by 1954 each Harvey title became oriented on a particular theme, with that of WITCHES' TALES being (as Stewart puts it) "funny horror." The story "Eye Eye Sir" could have appeared in any of the many imitators of MAD, and in its five short pages it outdoes a lot of MAD tales in giving the reader a winsome spoof of both horror and hardboiled detective fiction a la Mickey Spillane. As the only creator-attribution in GCD is that of artist Sid Check, I have to refer to him here as if he was the sole author.

I imagine many modern readers would find it difficult to understand how much the Mickey Spillane books changed 1940s pop culture. His work would probably be excoriated by the sort of ideological critics who worship at the feet of Laura Mulvey, who liked to conflate "the male gaze" with both sadism and scopophilia. Sadly, even a broken clock will be right a couple of times each day, and there's not much doubt that Spillane's work is all about males gazing at hot women-- to whom the Spillane heroes seek to make love, even if they must kill the women later-- and killing lots of male criminals along the way, often in explicitly sadistic fashion.

The image of the tough private dick cleaning his gun at his desk is immediately spoofed by Check in a very MAD-esque sequence; catching his finger in the cartridge. But more than the gag, I like the backstory provided by the voiceover of narrator/hero Rudy Crane, who mentions first that he got kicked out of college for trying show his female teacher "a couple of laughs-- after school." He's also established to be, not a street-smart guy living by his wits, but a counterfeit shamus who's been set up in the private dick business by a rich daddy.

No less archetypal is the entrance of the gorgeous female client into the detective's seedy office, but Check puts a spin on it: the lady doth wear heavy blue-lensed glasses. Every male in the story will remark upon the glasses, offering un-subtle confirmation that "guys don't make passes at girls that wear glasses." Even if one had never seen this sort of humorous repetition in a MAD comic, a reader could hardly fail to draw the conclusion that there's something special about these glasses.

Client "Lucy Latour" hires Crane to find her husband, who left her three years ago when he went out for a loaf of bread. Crane then escorts her to various places to interview witnesses about her husband, and when Crane isn't pawing at Latour-- apparently not much dissuaded by her married status-- he's roughing up the interviewees with barely concealed sadistic glee ("I grabbed him by the collar. I wished it was his throat.") 

Then on page five, we finally see what's behind the glasses.

Though "Eye Eye Sir" is a jape, I strongly suspect that the author(s) knew about the notorious ending of Spillane's 1952 KISS ME DEADLY. In this essay I examined some of the symbolic complexities of both the book and, to a lesser extent, the 1955 film adaptation. In the novel, Mike Hammer's femme fatale projects the illusion of beauty through her face alone, and conceals what Spillane calls "a picture of gruesome freakishness" beneath her clothes, "from her knees to her neck." Given that "Eye" must conclude with a joke, albeit a very creepy one, there's no explanation of why Latour has, in place of eyes, "two big sockets with candles inside them," as if she were some sort of humanoid jack-o-lantern. But like the ending of KISS ME DEADLY, it's a great joke on a concupiscent male. Here's Rudy Crane, whose only reason for wanting to see the gorgeous dame's eyes is to imagine them shining with love for him, and all he gets-- assuming, by the narration, that he survives-- is a look of utter and complete emptiness.

The entire story can be read here.

OVERTHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT PT. 3

How wouldst thou use me now, blind, and thereby
Deceiveable, in most things as a child
Helpless, thence easily contemn'd, and scorn'd,
And last neglected?-- Milton, SAMSON AGONISTES.

All higher or moral tendencies lie under suspicion of being rackets.-- Saul Bellow, HERZOG.

In Part 1 I disagreed with Charles Reece's WONDER WOMAN essays. In order to indict William Moulton Marston's WONDER WOMAN for being propaganda for an "ideological state apparatus," albeit one based in the worship of "Aphrodite's law" rather than the state as such, he overemphasized some factors and underemphasized others.  I also compared his method with mine, asserting that in my own WONDER WOMAN analysis I'd stayed closer to the source material and attempted to represent the narrative "underthought" in concert with its literal "overthought."  The following essay touches on some related points in that respect, particularly with respect to the Mulveyan concept of "the male gaze."


Reece likens the Amazon's Transformation Island-- where criminals are obliged to wear "Venus girdles" designed to bring them to a consciousness of Aphrodite's law-- to both real-world correctional institutions and the philosophical concept of the "panopticon:"

Liberal do-gooder resistance to retributive justice can often slip into the most totalitarian of utopian ideas. By focusing on utilitarian notions of rehabilitation and deterrence, rather than a just punishment to fit the crime, the criminal’s agency can be diminished for the general good. What results is a society that begins to look like a penal colony. There are the science fiction dystopias such as A Clockwork Orange and The Minority Report, but also B. F. Skinner’s utopian model for the real world, Walden Two, where a centrally planned system of positive reinforcements has eliminated crime through the shaping of behavior (the behaviorist had no truck with talk of free will, Beyond Freedom and Dignity being one of his major popular works). And, to my mind, Marston’s Transformation Island is a more horrifying, feminine version of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon.

The concept is ubiquitous nowadays (cf., the masthead above), but briefly: The panopticon is a circular prison with a watchtower in the center covered in two-way mirrors, where guards can observe any of the prisoners through the glass walls of their cells that face the tower. It’s a model of efficiency: few to no guards are needed at any given time, because the prisoners can’t determine when they’re being watched. Thus, they learn to act as if they’re always being watched. Besides the obvious visual analogy of the tower to the phallus, the concept can be read as masculine due to its use of Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze.” [3] Similar to what’s done with Rear Window, substitute the film audience for the guards, the screen for the glass walls and images of women for the prisoners, and you pretty much have her view of cinematic pleasure. The woman/prisoner exists as spectacle (connoting “to-be-looked-at-ness”), “freezing”/disrupting the progression of narrative/legal order, which is what the masculine camera/guard’s gaze is ultimately searching for: “This alien presence [erotic or criminal spectacle] then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative [patriarchal or legal order].” [4] [p. 203, Mulvey]

Laura Mulvey's (in)famous concept of the "male gaze," whatever one thinks of it, does compare reasonably well with the panopticon concept.  Both ideas are based in the fear and anxiety one may experience-- not unlike Milton's blind strongman-- of being looked at without being able to look back.  However, I'm moved to point out that Marston's concept of Transformation Island has exactly nothing to do with the idea of visual monitoring, and so a comparison to either Mulvey or Bentham seems egregious.

The only resemblance to Bentham's panopticon is that Transformation Island does have some guards.  However, the intrinsic idea of the Venus girdles involves a spirtual awakening, rather than a deadening. In WONDER WOMAN #28 one of the Transformation Island guards explains:

[The girdle] is magic metal from Venus—it removes all desire to do evil and compels complete authority to loving obedience.

Initially this sounds an awful lot like brainwashing of the Orwellian kind.  However, in the same issue, one of the long-time prisoners of the Island, after being liberated by newer escapees, has the following mental monologue:

 “Without the girdle I feel dominant—invincible! But I don’t feel cruel and wicked as I used to—the Amazons transformed me! I love Wonder Woman and Queen Hippolyte—I can’t bear to have them hurt—I must save them!”

 
It's possible, I suppose, to view the speaker as being just as brainwashed as Winston Smith.  However, to do so one must force onto Marston's narrative an "underthought" not supported by the "overthought" expressed in the story proper.

Reece's comparisons to Mulvey, Bentham and Orwell are not without purpose.  By alluding to various methods of thought-control, he can suggest that Transformation Island is simply a tool for such control, rather than what Marston believed it to be: a means of awakening "cruel and wicked" souls to a greater understanding of their own potential for love.  One may find this sort of psycho-religiosity sappy or repelling as a matter of taste, of course.  But it's impossible to overlook that in Marston's universe, the law of Aphrodite has a different phenomenological nature than any of the compulsions from 1984. 

Another problem specific to the comparison of Marston and Bentham is that in the former, readers know that the prisoners of Transfomation Island are all guilty of their crimes.  We know this with a narrative certainty that cannot extend to the philosophical prison of Bentham.  This diegetic fact weakens Reece's case for portraying the Amazon's adversaries as pawns of an "ideological state apparatus."  Therefore, to strengthen his case he brings in Mulvey's formula of the "woman-as-spectacle," the cinematic female who is also unable to prevent being under the scrutiny of a male-dominated order.  However, the comparison is not apt.  In one case we're talking about characters as they're being controlled by other characters within a narrative diegesis, and in the other, about characters being controlled by the extra-diegetic forces (a film's producers and audiences) who bring the diegesis into existence. 

In case it's not been made clear in earlier essays like PROOF OF EMBODIMENT, I reject absolutely Mulvey's cockeyed notion that only women are sources of spectacle, either in the cinematic medium or any other.  There are some differences in the ways men and women are "spectacularized," differences which have their roots in the biological and sociological identities of the genders.  And if there's any comic-book creator who did the most to shift the burden of spectacularization from female to male, Marston would be my nominee.

In my earlier WONDER WOMAN essay, I too made a comparison between the story I analyzed and the Mulveyan concept:

“Origin” could also serve as a satirical commentary on Laura Mulvey’s oversimple concept of “the male gaze.” Though Trevor is an intrusive presence, he sees nothing of the Amazon world for most of the story, and indeed his eyes seem to have been injured from his experience, since on page 12 he comments that “my eyes must be bad again” as he sees Diana in all her costumed finery, rather than as “the scientist who saved my life.” Rather than seeing, he is the one seen as Diana and her friend Mala rescue him from the waters. Yet only Diana, the one explicitly born on Paradise Island, falls in love with him and brings him back to life. Toward the tale’s end, when Hippolyte prepares to send Trevor back to his world in the company of Diana, the physician relates that she has removed Trevor’s “eye bandages.” Hippolyte orders that Trevor “must see nothing on Paradise Island,” and Diana retorts, “Nothing except me! I’ll bind him again--myself!” While Hippolyte protects Paradise Island from the rapacious gaze of men, Diana accepts Trevor’s gaze and his desire, though the binding of Trevor’s eyes may prefigure her intent to convert him, and every other man, to the bondage of Aphrodite’s law.

Obviously Marston's scenario makes Steve Trevor the "man-as-spectacle" within the diegesis of the narrative, and makes him a "blind Samson" for the length of his stay within this bower of femininity.  Of course the extra-diegetic readers see everything Trevor does not: Princess Diana, her hot Amazon sisters, and all the ritual appurtenances of Paradise Island.  Nevertheless, the Amazons aren't precisely on display as commodities for male gazers, after the fashion of Mulvey's most prominent example of male gazin': the multi-gal musicals of Busby Berkeley.  Given that WONDER WOMAN has long been a favorite of female comics-fans, it's arguable that this particular "Island of Beautiful Women" often serves the female audience's needs for the feeling of fictional superiority.  This dynamization parallels the sense of validation which Mulvey imputes to male viewers as they observe a "narrative/legal order" that always shows the guys on top.

I note also that my essay, written and printed long before Reece's, does deal with the fact that Wonder Woman's ultimate purpose is to "convert" man's world to the law of Aphrodite.  Yet, where Reece regards this sort of mental/moral conversion as just another "racket" to keep the ideological apparatus running, I regard it, first and foremost, as a fantasy.  I don't believe that Marston's vision would have worked in the real world, but not because it's fascist or invested in mind-control.

On a more minor note, I can't help noting that Reece indicts most if not all superheroes as sharing the same quasi-fascist agenda as WONDER WOMAN: "This is your basic superhero moral gobbledygook, only encoded as feminist."  Yet he also says, in the quote above:

"By focusing on utilitarian notions of rehabilitation and deterrence, rather than a just punishment to fit the crime, the criminal’s agency can be diminished for the general good. "

Most superhero comic books do not deal with "rehabilitation and deterrence" to the extent that Marston's WONDER WOMAN does-- which is, on balance, still a small though not insignificant corpus of "Transformation Island" tales against the entirety of Marston's body of work.  Usually "just punishment" is precisely what superhero comics are about.  Though some villains die (or appear to die) as a result of their crimes, many receive what is coded in the stories as "just punishment," enduring temporary imprisonment so that the writers can bring them back again and again with impunity.  The Penguin might occasionally pretend to be rehabilitated, or Mister Element may actually be reformed, but in neither case are they subjected to Orwellian mind control.  The Penguin returns to being "cruel and wicked" because it gives him a charge, while former Wonder Woman villain Paula Von Gunther becomes the Amazon's boon ally.  One is a static view of the subject of "crime and punishment," while the other involves dynamic personal transformation and is based in what Bellow calls "higher and moral principles."  One need not agree with every idea propounded by William Moulton Marston to appreciate the dynamism of his conceptual universe.

THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 2

Most people who read this column regularly know how I feel about these issues [of objectification and hyper-sexualization]. The short version is that I think it’s a big problem that extends far beyond comics and like other media, it really affects the way people view women, and how women, especially young women, view themselves. I don’t think “it’s just comics” and it doesn’t matter. I think media is a powerful thing in our society and that there’s a trickle down effect in seeing these portrayals reinforced over and over again. These portrayals shape how we view and value women and contributes to everything from sexism in the work place to eating disorders.-- Kelly Thompson, No, It's Not Equal.

At the end of Part 1 I said:

What I believe Thompson truly objects to is the *feeling* of greater exposure for the heroines; the sense that they are always being subjected to the "male gaze" as promulgated by Laura Mulvey. I'll address some of the problems with this tendency in Part 2.

I want to emphasize the word "tendency" because I'm not claiming that Thompson has been either directly or indirectly influenced by the Laura Mulvey essay. I'm saying that she makes an assertion which parallels the same tendency I see in Mulvey's essay, where any sexual view of women is anathematized.  Mulvey's last sentence speaks of "women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end."  Thompson's essay is neither as radical nor as academically turgid as Mulvey's, but I think that there is an oppositional aspect of the former essay that has been overlooked in the circles of comics-fan online response.

Thompson doesn't spend any time proving her case that the "portrayals" of objectivized women contribute to "everything from sexism in the work place to eating disorders"-- though she may have done so in other essays-- but focuses only on one unattributed assertion made in a comment-thread, which Thompson says that she's seen in many other versions:

The, “Comic books are sexist to women” argument does not work, simply because it is not just women who are being objectified.
It isn’t about ‘how’ the characters are objectified, it’s about the fact that they are objectified at all. And men and women are both idealized in ridiculous fashions. That is why the argument on how women in comics are objectified will forever be flawed, because it is not an objective criticism.

Just like her title says, her essay is entirely devoted to disproving this, but in keeping with her dislike of "vitriolic comments," Thompson does not *overtly* anathematize those who defend female objectification:

while you can personally decide that you LIKE seeing objectification of women in your comic books, and you can decide that you are quite content with the status quo, or that you don’t think it’s detrimental to women and it doesn’t bother you, the idea that women and men are treated visually the same in superhero comics is utter crap.

And toward the essay's end, the above thought is repeated:

again I have to say, you are free to like this, and to advocate for it if you think it’s really the best thing about superhero comics and something that you love about the medium and genre no matter what, that’s your prerogative, but please, stop with this cry of “It’s equal!” because it’s really really not.

Many of Thompson's respondents, as well as several of the negative respondents on my Sequart essays, were beguiled by this seeming tolerance for disparate tastes.  I initially had a similar response that I placed on the Thompson comments-thread on 2-27-12:

I’ll add that one thing I did appreciate about the essay was that Thompson doesn’t call for any jeremiads. She’s very explicit about saying, “If this is the type of thing you like, that’s one thing, but just don’t pretend it’s fair and balanced.”

And yet, as I've intermittently assailed several of the weak points of the essay over the past few months, most of the responses to my essays have been jeremiad-like in tone.  My most moronic critic (I hardly need name him) has accused me of trying to pretend that there is no sexism in the sexual representations of comic books.  Thompson's not responsible for these dimbulbs, of course.  But I do think she is responsible for rendering a very poor definition of the "sexism problem," and that she has constructed an oppositional "either/or" that tends to attract those who want simple solutions no less than the fans she excoriates for "tunnel vision."  So these days I tend to think that she did manage to launch a jeremiad, albeit a more *subtle* one than most of its breed.  And Thompson did so by focusing on the question of "equality."

American culture is founded on the ideals of fair play and equal opportunity, no matter how often various forces conspire to establish unfair hegemonies or hierarchies.  American feminism is from the first an opposition to a hierarchy inherited from the Old World: the bifurcation of societal roles and rights based on gender identity. 

In No, It's Not Equal, Kelly Thompson focuses most of her attention on the inequity of male and female portrayals in comic books.  This in itself could be a worthy undertaking.  However, as if to provide proof for the statement made by the unnamed poster Thompson opposes-- who states that "the argument on how women in comics are objectified will forever be flawed, because it is not an objective criticism"-- Thompson fails to define her criteria by any objective method.  She gives the impression of an empirical approach by aspiring to "break down" the problems with the equality-argument into "four primary categories."  But as I've noted copiously elsewhere, she blurs the line between "sexualization" and "hyper-sexualization" so that both terms become meaningless, and makes vague references to temporal periods without specificity:

And now let’s look at ten of the most popular marquee superheroines: Wonder Woman (strapless swimsuit, sometimes a thong, sometimes heels), Catwoman (regularly unzipped, frequently heels), Ms. Marvel (swimsuit, sometimes a thong, thigh high boots), Storm (strapless swimsuit, thigh high boots, sometimes heels), Batgirl (fully covered, sometimes heels), Black Widow (regularly unzipped, sometimes heels), Invisible Woman (fully covered – for now at least), Black Canary (swimsuit, sometimes a thong, fishnet stockings, sometimes heels), Rogue (as of late – constantly unzipped), and Power Girl (boob hole, swimsuit, sometimes a thong, sometimes heels).

I confess I didn't read every response in the mile-long comments-thread to the essay, but I'd be curious as to whether I'm the only online critic to fault Thompson for tossing out terms like "regularly unzipped" or "sometimes a thong" without nailing down a time-period during which she made these unsupported observations.  That she could have supported at least some of them had she tried; that I do not doubt.  But I do doubt the perspicacity of online comics-fandom for giving Thompson a pass on issues of empirical reproducibility, when she's so vehemently against the "tunnel vision" of those who spout unsupported defenses of "equal treatment." And yet, despite all this, Thompson got that pass because she used the right password-- "equality," which in this case carried the connotation of "fairness."

Most of the American comics-fans who could fairly be called "hardcore" (ironic though the term may be in other contexts) are male.  Some male fans, as Thompson observes, don't have a real problem with what Thompson terms objectification, and claim that the representations are essentially equal.  Other male fans may purchase sexy superheroine comics but would never overtly defend the practice, and probably would be entirely sheepish if called out on the matter.  Still others buy into the oppositional "either/or" argument Thompson promulgates, finding both sexual and hyper-sexual superheroes to be repellent, and thus using them as a club with which to beat superhero fans, as I showed in my response to a Dirk Deppey blogpost.  All of them, to the extent that all are influenced to American culture to some degree, must respond in some way to the feminist imputation of unfairness.  Thompston's exemplary unnamed poster claims that the argument will "always" be flawed, by suggesting that it's impossible to mount objectively.  But even the fact that he makes an argument, flawed in its respects, demonstrates a desire to see gender-representation in comics to be essentially fair-minded.

I have no doubt that Thompson could have justified her belief that "sexism in comics" engenders what she calls a "trickle down effect" leading to real-world inequities, but since I haven't agreed with such "monkey see-monkey do" arguments in past, I doubt I'd find her justifications persuasive.  In one of my comments to Julian Darius, I said:

I agree that male readers don’t relate to the female characters precisely the same as they do to male characters. It’s a whole different question as to whether they *should* react exactly the same, any more than female readers should react equally toward male and female characters.

In other words, there's some question in my mind as to whether either "equality" or "fairness" in the senses Thompson uses the words should be the signal qualities of any art, be it highbrow canonical literature or the sort of arts that James Joyce called "pornographic"-- which is to say, all popular arts.

But that's a subject for Part 3.