THE READING RHEUM: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

 I'm reasonably sure I never reread Arthur C. Clarke's novelization of the movie he scripted with Stanley Kubrick. I don't even remember noticing the various differences between book and movie, though I imagine that I twigged to the obvious fact that Clarke rendered highly specific explications of all the things that Kubrick left implicit in the cinematic 2001. In fact, I recall that one book reviewer for a SF-magazine back in The Day was so enamored of Clarke's version of the book that he regretted that it hadn't been followed for the movie.                     

I was not so entranced. Frankly, after coming off the high of watching the completed Kubrick film, I was mostly bored out of my skull. Now I say that with the caveat that I've long been a Clarke fan, though I divide his novels into two categories (leaving aside the short stories for separate consideration). One category includes his most ambitious, visionary works, mainly (assuming I haven't forgotten something) CHILDHOOD'S END and THE CITY AND THE STARS. The other group takes in books which are more blandly informational about whatever scientific subject they explore -- the ecology of the sea for THE DEEP RANGE, the lunar surface for A FALL OF MOONDUST. Clarke's ODYSSEY, despite reproducing many of the narrative tropes of the finished movie, proves not visionary in the least. It delivers lots and lots of dry information about the world of ODYSSEY but would have made a very dull movie.                                                                                           

  Divergences between book and movie came about because, even though the book wasn't in circulation until after the finished movie came out, Clarke wrote the novel from a treatment he and Kubrick had completed, as well as from some incomplete rushes from the movie. However, everything I've heard about Kubrick's directorial process indicates that he frequently changed his mind on various elements while still in the process of filming, and there's no way Clarke could have incorporated any of those changes. Yet as a reader I still find Clarke culpable for some of his choices-- for instance, dragging out the cavepeople sequence far beyond its function within the greater whole. The oddest divergence is the ending, after astronaut Dave Bowman has passed through the Stargate and finds himself stuck, for the rest of his life, in a replica of a human hotel room. In one of Kubrick's few commentaries on his enigmatic masterpiece, he admitted that the monolith-making aliens were keeping Bowman in a zoo-like captivity in order to study him. The nature of the replicated room suggests no other feasible purpose, so I tend to reject any idea that some alternate function appeared in the treatment from which Clarke was working. I think it more likely that Clarke simply did not, for whatever reason, like the idea of Bowman passing his whole life in the room until he's transfigured. So in the book, Bowman spends one "evening" in the room, has a meal, goes to bed-- and is immediately transfigured.                                                   

  I hadn't reread the book when I reviewed the movie in January, but I did glance at the book's transfiguration sequence and the subsequent birth of the Star-Child. Clarke doesn't provide any more rationale for the aliens to transform Bowman than the movie did, though in one chapter Clarke asserts that at some point the ETs became fascinated with other life-forms out of an existential loneliness. In that film-review, and in this essay touching on Jack Kirby's comics-adaptation of the story, I raised the question as to whether Kubrick or Kirby reproduced any narrative tropes relating to Nietzsche's concept of "self-mastery," which to him was essential to the formation of the ubermensch. I did find one (possibly accidental) trope in the Kirby work, but I couldn't demonstrate anything definite in Kubrick's movie, and I didn't find (or expect to find) anything of that nature in Clarke. From the smattering of accounts I've read/heard about Kubrick's creative process, I don't think he was all that devoted to Nietzsche's philosophy. I think he intuited some similitudes between that philosophy and the themes of "transhumanism" in certain science-fiction works, though when he first started working with Clarke, it doesn't sound like Kubrick had even read any of the author's works. I don't see the theme of self-mastery in most of the director's other famous movies, so it may be that he only embraced the German thinker for the sake of that one movie, much as Federico Fellini directed a passion for Carl Jung into one film, JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, but did not explore Jungian themes in his later movies.                                                        

CURIOSITIES: KIRBY'S 2001

 In my recent review of the 1968 film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, I wondered about the alleged Nietzschean inspirations of the Kubrick-Clarke script, particularly with respect to the ending, wherein astronaut Bowman is transformed into a sort of superman-- or maybe "super-fetus." Because Kubrick's film utilized so little exposition, though, it's tough to figure out what's going on with Bowman when he transforms. Does he incarnate the Nietzschean idea of "self-overcoming?" I wasn't able to find an online copy of the final 2001 script, which I believe Kubrick changed a lot during the movie's production. The novelization by Kubrick's co-writer Arthur C. Clarke does include a lot of mental exposition by Bowman when he transforms. However, Clarke's description of the process is pretty vague. Novel-Bowman doesn't behold a monolith in his fantasy-bedroom. He goes to sleep and feels like "something invaded his mind," though one can only assume that his alien controllers have triggered this process. He experiences a vision of time flowing backward, and as he re-experiences old memories, he regresses to the super-fetus. Then, as Bowman-Fetus transitions into outer space, he then sees the Jupiter monolith. But Clarke never directly says that the aliens have transformed Bowman, though he may have assumed that all readers would make that assumption.                                                             

  I then gave a quick look to Jack Kirby's 1976 adaptation of 2001. Obviously Kirby had seen the film by then, as he duplicates the scenario of the bedroom-monolith, among many other scenes. Maverick that he was, Kirby diverges from the film in many ways too, sometimes just out of personal preference. According to one online source, Kirby also borrows elements from the Clarke novelization as well, one example being that Kirby has the primeval ape-men hunt Clarke's warthogs, rather than Kubrick's tapirs. But though I doubt Kirby ever read much if any Nietzsche-- it's in the conclusion of the 2001 adaptation that I found the most Nietschean statement about Bowman's transformation. To be sure, the first part of the "explanation" is jumbled, as a Kirby Kaption says, "What is the end or beginning to something that has known neither-- mortally is a condition of man." I can only assume Kirby meant to write "mortality," because the following sentence is, "And he must be taught to surmount it..." That's all the internal monologuing Kirby gives us before the monolith begins its transforming process, but the whole ideal of "surmounting death" bears comparison to Nietzsche's idea of "self-overcoming." Then, in the last few pages, Kirby totally dispenses with the endings of both Kubrick and Clarke, claiming that the Star Child is "the first of many new ones," implying that the monolith is programmed to transform other humans into a race of super-psychics. It's kind of a wacky take on both movie and novelization, but I must admit-- it's Kwintessential Kirby!                                           

SUFFER THE LITTLE MASTERS

I've just finished reading NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND for the first time. I probably have not read any Dostoyevsky in twenty years, despite my admiration for his major novels and my knowledge that he was a major influence on Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy.

I won't review the book as a whole, since there's far too much to unpack in the space of a blogpost. The wider context of UNDERGROUND is that the book consists of the diary-like ramblings of an unnamed Russian clerical type. He addresses many of Dostoyevsky's own concerns about the pending modernization of Imperial Russia and the project to make the nation able to compete with the great countries of Western Europe. Parts of the narrative are a coded response to another Russian intellectual of the period, who advised a utilitarian, reason-based conception of culture. 

The strangest thing about UNDERGROUND is that Dostoyevsky makes no attempt to make his narrator seem admirable, which is a frequent strategy for authors trying to sell whatever philosophy their characters expouse. Rather, Nameless Man admits that he's perpetually full of spite and given to imagining grand schemes of revenge against those who offend him-- schemes which he has absolutely no real desire to carry out, even if he possessed the will to do so. He seems in many ways the incarnation of Nietzsche's "ressentiment," except that he's aware of his own absurdity, excusing it only in the sense that all of humankind is no less absurd.

Because Nameless Man is something of an unreliable narrator, one can't be entirely sure that everything he advocates is what Dostoyevsky himself advocated, any more than Captain Ahab represents the totality of Herman Melville's beliefs. But the author clearly meant for readers to carefully weigh the opinions set forth by the narrator, and one of the most interesting opinions concerns the rejection of utilitarian "reason" as the defining characteristic of human beings.

You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives. I suspect, gentlemen, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me again that an enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the future man will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous to himself, that that can be proved mathematically. I thoroughly agree, it can--by mathematics. But I repeat for the hundredth time, there is one case, one only, when man may consciously, purposely, desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very stupid--simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is sensible. Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth, especially in certain cases. And in particular it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us obvious harm and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage--for in any circumstances it preserves for us what is most precious and most important--that is, our personality, our individuality.

The Nameless Man doesn't really define the nature of the "will" that he believes a fuller expression of humanity, so there may be no way to know if he's referencing something akin to Schopenhauer's "universal will." He does seem to have some of the Gloomy Philosopher's attitude toward suffering, however.

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive – in other words, only what is conducive to welfare – is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. 

I agree that "will" should be seen as the totality of human thought and expressivity, and that the full expression of will is indeed the key to "our personality, our individuality." It's also universally true that people chafe against living their lives only for "advantage," and that they may rebel against their own interests, seeking to "smash things" to assert their individual will. George Bataille built much of his philosophy upon the opposed ideas of "consumption," all reason-based activities that keep a culture alive and viable, and "expenditure," those activities that have no real rational ends. 

I would part company from Dostoyevsky on the subject of suffering, however. Without doubting that many persons "kick at the slats" of their cultures simply to feel the thrill of defiance-- or else use fictional proxies for the same purpose-- there is a broader context to suffering in world cultures. Here's Nietzsche on the subject:

“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul—has it not been bestowed through suffering?” -- BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.

This particular Nietzsche quote does not directly cite his concept of uberwinden, "self-overcoming," for which I substitute (for possible greater clarity) the term "self-mastery" in my own philosophical ruminations. But clearly, he has stated that suffering can bring forth all of the "inventiveness and bravery" that humankind has used to mitigate or alleviate misfortune. 

As I am not an expert on Dostoyevsky, I don't know if anything comparable to Nietzsche's concept appears in his other works, but it's not in UNDERGROUND. I believe that the great Russian writer was just as opposed to small-minded utilitarianism as the great German philosopher. But my best guess is that Dostoyevsky was narrowly focused upon the goal of refuting a particular utilitarian writer through this nameless spokesperson, and so he did not make any connections between suffering and self-mastery. Or perhaps Dostoyevsky made some such connection, and thought it contravened his ideal of a "will" that had absolutely no practical applications.  

QUICK SELF-MASTERY POST

From a fairly recent issue of NAGATORO. It's by no means unique among manga on the theme of characters mastering their own weaknesses rather than simply conquering other opponents. But this sequence is interesting since the context is that of a fine artist honing his skills.

THE READING RHEUM: SONG OF SOLOMON (1977)

 In Part 1 and Part 2 of my blog-series RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS, I leveled a general criticism against all literary works that use the tropes of either "the despised overclass" or "the despised underclass" for nothing more than fantasies of mastering the respective class involved. In addition to the formal consequences-- that such a utilitarian fantasy is so focused on political advancement that the literary value of free variation is neglected-- such works also encourage the idea that no evil enters the righteous hearts of those opposed to the anathema-class.

I had never read Toni Morrison before this year, but I was happy to see that her third published novel SONG OF SOLOMON evinces the quality of mental freedom that I've termed "self-mastery." SONG bears superficial resemblance to dozens of other works in which members of a Black culture-- usually that of Afro-Americans, but sometimes of native Africans-- ceaselessly disparage the majority culture of Whites, be they Americans or Europeans. I do not reject the base trope of "the Evil Outsiders," since I respect that it was used in folklore and myth long before the rise of formal literature. But the uses made of the trope by someone like Spike Lee are banal in the extreme.

SONG, however, manages to use the Evil Outsiders to achieve self-mastery of her own vision, the vision of Afro-Americans as they exist on the margins of American society of the late 1950s and early 1960s. White Americans do not exist as characters in SONG, but White Society exerts an inexorable influence upon all Afro-Americans of the period, like the gravity of the Earth affecting the course of the moon. In the view of those who live on the margins, Whites are insane, senselessly driven to take Black lives the moment they are given some paltry excuse to do so. White Liberals of the period barely exist in SONG-- there's a passing, distrustful allusion to President Kennedy-- and Morrison elides White Liberals precisely because she wants to use the trope of the Evil Outsiders to its full potential.

But unlike Spike Lee, Morrison does not pretend that everyone within her ingroup is given a halo of nobility by the fact of being marginalized. SONG is built around the central character of "Milkman" Dead, who's about thirty years old within the novel's  main timeline. Though Milkman is as aware as anyone of the unpredictable dangers of the White Overclass-- the 1955 murder of Emmett Till is discussed in his presence early on in SONG-- the young man also incarnates some of the worst indulgences for which his ingroup is known. Despite coming to his mother's defense against his father's tyrannies, the novel shows Milkman as having contempt for the many female relatives in his family-- not least his father's sister Pilate and her daughter Hagar, since Milkman persuades Hagar to give him regular sex but eventually rejects her when she becomes clingy, which action has tragic results for both Hagar and her mother. Given Morrison's own gender, it's not surprising that she would be less than approving of the negative attitudes of Black males toward Black females.

But Morrison goes further in articulating a mythos of Black Society that draws upon the many tropes of folklore. The main character is basically an everyman with no special visionary propensities, and so in order to articulate the vision of Black Society, Morrison must send Milkman on a somewhat mundane mission of a "treasure-hunt." Within the space of a blogpost, I can't explore the nature of the rich society Milkman discovers on his quest. But in contrast to the naturalistic tradition of most Afro-American fiction, Morrison's approach is closer to the South American concept of magical realism. Many of the questionable phenomena witnessed by SONG's characters might best be judged as "uncanny" rather than "marvelous," but this orientation does not in the least dim Morrison's ability to lend the ordinary world the patina of magic, without diminishing the real world's mortality. 

Sadly, given some of the later examples I've cited of "mastery fantasies without self-mastery," I have the impression that few later talents have pursued the theme of marginalized Black Society with anything like Morrison's combination of wit, social respnsibility and pure joie de vivre.

RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS PT. 2

The subject's fundamental nature is to overturn all external constraints, and then to realize that this is a futile and irrational activity.-- HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT: AN INTRODUCTION, Larry Krasnoff, p. 65.

At base the ressentiment ethic is one that continually says, "It was unjust for this terrible thing happened to us or to our ancestors, and so everything in our conceptual universe reflects that injustice." In Part 1 I noted that in theory the fantasy of the despicable overclass is no better or worse than the fantasy of the despicable underclass, in practice it's become much more difficult to assail the former fantasy without some detractor resorting to the usual attack: "Oh, so you're against the advancement of Black people/Asians/women/transexuals etc." 

Rather, I reject the application of fantasies, that have their aesthetic use within fiction, as direct analogues of reality. Within the past twenty years the Liberal subculture has embraced its addiction to eternal victimage, which is a ploy they use to minimize contrary voices and to gain cultural hegemony. Ironically, they don't appreciate the irony that this is precisely the strategy that was often (though not always) followed by their hypothetical overclass in maintaining their hegemony. There is also no appreciation that the standard Liberal-Conservative opposition duplicates Hegel's slave-master dichotomy, but without any of Hegel's insight that the "slave" may replace the "master" and so become come to realize that doing so is "futile and irrational." On this theme, Hegel said:

...although the fear of the lord is indeed the beginning of wisdom, consciousness is not therein aware that it is a being-for-self.  Through work, however, the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.

Without troubling about Hegel's exact meaning of "being-for-self," this excerpt makes clear that "fear of the lord" plays a role in the bondsman's journey to consciousness. In my experience, the usual Liberal response to this concept comes down to claiming that the speaker is trying to excuse the lord's activities/tyrannies. This reaction is at least comprehensible when talking about hegemonies based in race or religion, for these inequalities arise from one ingroup seeking to control another. But the reaction is stupid when dealing with hegemonies based in gender. The Left's attempt to impose an identical condemnation upon such disparate forms of inequality is characteristic of the lack of discrimination found in Nietzsche's "man of ressentiment."

For this reason, I'm often frustrated with the mediocrity of much fiction that endorses simplistic Ultraliberal (or Progressive) ideals in order to indulge the fantasy of the despicable overclass. Some examples I've railed against include (1) Jordan Peele's film US, (2) N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, and (3) almost anything by Spike Lee, though particularly THE BLACKKLANSMAN.

All of these works share the trait of not being able to evince self-mastery in their quest for an illusory mastery of external hegemony. However, as I said in Part 1, I did find an example of a superior work that did combine self-mastery with the fantasy of the despised overclass-- which I hope to address soon.

RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS

Because free variation is paramount in art, any observations that artists make about empirical contingencies prove secondary. Eugene O’Neill may think that if he emulates Freudian theories of psychology in a play like MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, the play has tapped into “reality,” and indeed many critics would agree with him. William Butler Yeats may feel the same way if he conceives a metaphysical magnum opus like A VISION. But non-fiction is the place where pure reportage of allegedly empirical contingencies is the primary value. In the worlds of art, with special emphasis upon narrative fiction, such contingencies become transformed into epistemological patterns, and they exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination. In this, the canonical artist is in no way superior to the toiler in popular fiction; at most, the canonical artist is just better about making his chosen flights of fancy seem grounded in reality. But for a myth-critic like myself, Eugene O’Neill has no greater imagination than Frank Miller, and Yeats has nothing on Steve Ditko.-- FUN WITH PHENOMENOLOGY.

I considered making a continued use of the title RESSENTIMENT OF THE NERDS after reviving it here. Yet I soon realized that I would be talking about a lot of cultural manifestations that weren't exclusively "nerdy," and so I switched to RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS.

In the NERDS essay, I provided a lengthy Nietzsche quote in which he contrasted the "noble man" with "the man of ressentiment." Nietzsche's definition of ressentiment served his philosophical purposes, but I'm more interested in the application of the concept to literary theory. Over the years I've devoted no small attention to Frank Fukuyama's adaptation of Nietzsche's distinctions into the concepts of *megalothymia* and *isothymia," and how these concepts in turn can be applied to fiction, as in (for example) my October 2011 essay THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 4.

Nietzsche scorns the "man of ressentiment" for many reasons, and only faults the "noble man" for being "naive," at least in the excerpt I'm considering. But of course the history of Classic liberalism has been rife with criticisms of the *megalothymotic* type, who rules by strength, and the earliest extensive critique of popular comic books was that of Frederic Wertham, who complained of super-characters "how did Nietzsche get into the nursery?" 

Most of these critiques were simplistic in the extreme, but it's at least fair to state that the noble man can dehumanize those he conquers, reducing them into an underclass. The man of ressentiment pursues the opposite course: the "overclass" is the class of "pale kings and princes," and that is meant to be despised and rejected in every way. 

Both of these rhetorical stances influence literature, but as I noted in my quote from FUN FROM PHENOMENOLOGY, they're both reducible to epistemological patterns. These patterns 'exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination.' 

That doesn't mean, of course, that artists don't create works which advocate one political stance or the other. In MYSTERY OF MASTERY 4 I loosely associated Frank Miller with the *megalothymotic* tendency, which often got him tarred with the fascist brush, while Alan Moore got a pass for his "alleged anarchism," which I find to be identical with *isothymia's* tendency to break down hierarchical structures. Both authors have created a wealth of genuinely mythic works, but neither has been able to avoid taking ideological positions that usually result in inferior works, such as Miller's HOLY TERROR and Moore's KILLING JOKE.

"Non-nerd literature" boasts its own ideological tendencies, which come down to "things would be great if we could control/destroy that damned overclass/underclass." Two authors who produced their best known works within the same literary period would be underclass-despiser Thomas Dixon Jr (THE CLANSMAN, 1905) and overclass-despiser Upton Sinclair (THE JUNGLE, 1906). Both novels are fantasies of mastery, but they lack what Nietzsche termed "self-overcoming," and which I have renamed "self-mastery"-- and which I have associated with the artist's capacity for "free variation."

Nietzsche argued that the noble man is more capable of self-mastery than the man of ressentiment, which argument I explored more fully in COURAGE OVER FEAR. Whether or not this is true in real culture, I tend to think that the "noble man fantasy" tends to favor self-mastery/free variation more than the "man of ressentiment fantasy," because the former is more overtly a product of artifice than the latter, while the latter often appears to be a response to the need for verisimilitude in fiction. I noted in SENSE AND SYMMETRY (AND ARTIFICE):

The tropes belonging to "artifice" are infinite in terms of their potential content and in terms of their ability to combine with other artifice-tropes. In contrast, the tropes that signal “verisimilitude” to the audience are finite in that they always depend on reproducing some sense of “life as it is..."

Since I have defined fiction and general literature more in terms of artifice than of verisimilitude, I find myself unreceptive to a lot of literature devoted to ressentiment: to the fantasies of overthrowing some tyrannical overclass seen in, say, Marxist lectures like Sinclair's JUNGLE or racial ideologies like the oeuvre of Spike Lee. However, I hope to find time in the near future to review one of the few novels I've encountered that manages to portray the ressentiment fantasy through the lens of free variation, which allowed the author to imbue self-mastery upon the standard fantasy. 

DEATHMATCH AND DEATHBLOW

One of my title words sounds like the name of an Image superhero, and the other sounds like it might as well be one. But these are, for the time being, working titles for the tropes I discussed in GIVE-AND-TAKE VS. THE KILLING STROKE—neither of which names were ever more than provisional placeholders.

The trope I call “deathblow” subsumes two structurally related sub-tropes. One sub-trope represents the concentration of will/power in order for a megadynamic character to overthrow a character of far greater dynamicity, and in GIVE-AND-TAKE I cited the example of Odysseus and his men wounding Polyphemus in such a way to cripple, though not totally enervate, the Cyclops. The other sub-trope is practically the obverse of the first and concerns a character of superior dynamicity concentrating will/power to overthrow a character of lesser dynamicity. In the essay SELF-MASTERY MEDITATIONS PT. 3, I used the temporary term “reverse killing stroke” to signify both Classical examples like Dionysus’s destruction of Pentheus and pop-cultural examples like the Spectre hurling “the wrath of God” down upon lowly criminals.

The trope I call “deathmatch” is more unitary, and for most of this blog’s history it was the sole trope by which I defined the mode of the combative: that of roughly matched adversaries matching their respective forms of “might” against one another. In the essay ON MASTERING SELF-MASTERY I mentioned a variation on this form, that of the “indirect commander” who doesn’t usually contend with an opponent himself but has “henchmen” who do his fighting for him, which was the case with almost all of the Fu Manchu novels. But the “deathmatch” in all forms requires the opposition of roughly equivalent incarnations of dynamicity, as opposed to the “inferior vs. superior” and “superior vs. inferior” sub-tropes.

Now, in 1913’s THE ETHIC OF THECOMBATIVE PART 2, I wrote “One only proceeds away from the condition of ‘non-might’ by acquiring ‘might’ oneself.” But over the years I progressed away from the idea that megadynamicity was determined only by a certain level of physical power, and I allowed for the idea that the condition of “self-mastery” could be equally significant. In 1912 I rated Jack Burton of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA as merely “mesodynamic” because he wasn’t an extraordinary all-around fighter. However, in the series WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS I viewed Burton’s mastery of his “one good trick” as a factor that allowed him to enter the ranks of the megadynamic. Yet I would still disallow from those ranks many characters who conquer superior forces through the use of tricks that don’t indicate self-mastery, such as the folktale-kids Hansel and Gretel. By the same token, there are many examples of “superior force” that don’t connote self-mastery. The Spectre shows self-mastery whenever he punishes a mortal transgressor with some diabolical fate, but there exist dozens of monsters who reverse the Hansel and Gretel paradigm, luring hapless victims into traps but not really doling out well-crafted punishments. In fact, Freddy Kruger starts as this sort of subcombative ghost. But with the third installment the filmmakers begin to endow Freddy’s opponents with the ability to engage in oneric “deathmatches” with the evil spirit—. Oddly, it’s after that film that Freddy himself starts making more use of the “deathblow” trope.

And though it seems obvious to me, I should note at this point that "deathmatch" and "deathblow" are metaphors, and as such can apply to situations where no life is actually taken, or even truly threatened, as in the ONE POUND GOSPEL stories of Rumiko Takahashi, where the starring boxer is never in literal peril of losing his life.

SELF-MASTERY MEDITATIONS PT. 2

I’ve only devoted three essays to the concepts of interiorization and exteriorization, but it seems to me that the concept of self-mastery is implicit within those essays. Here I’ll attempt to extend those nations into greater elaboration.

Interiorization is a narrative pattern in which a character literally or figuratively draws upon his inner resources or character in order to become a more imposing figure, be it Doctor Jekyll unleashing his evil side or Billy Batson summoning up an idealized adult persona. As should be evident from these two examples, this pattern can be subcombative as well as combative, and even the combative example, that of Captain Marvel, requires a little further analysis. Golden Age CAPTAIN MARVEL stories don’t overtly posit that the hero is the adult form of Billy Batson, but the Captain seems to enjoy no existence independent from that of Billy. Although Billy’s ability to summon his adult self needs to be jump-started by the “Shazam-lightning,” which confer the power of legendary characters upon the Captain, Billy’s own self is strongly implicated in the formation of the hero, and therefore this qualifies as a form of self-mastery.

In contrast, I’ve cites a number of examples in which great power is thrust upon this or that character, in such a way that no self-mastery can be adduced. My review of SCOOBY DOO AND THE SAMURAI SCHOOL provides a pertinent. The characters of Shaggy and Scooby Doo are meant to be much more ludicrous in nature than Billy Batson, but all three are roughly on the same level of dynamicity. It would not be impossible to imagine a situation in which Scooby and Shaggy gained great martial-arts skills through the use of some improbable crash-course. If Howard the Duck could do it, why not Scooby and Shaggy? But the writers of SAMURAI SCHOOL may not have wanted to diverge that far from the duo’s default characterization as lovable goof-ups. Thus the duo get samurai-powers thrust upon them by an outside agent, with no indication of self-mastery.

THE COURT JESTER is another film in which the release of interiorized energies is somewhat undermined by the principal thread of the narrative. While a spoof of the swashbuckler genre does not have to be subcombative, JESTER sets up its main character Hubert Hawkins to undermine that aspect of the genre. In the early scene Hawkins wants very much to be fighting on the front lines with the courageous resistance, headed by the vaguely paternal Black Fox. Instead, Hawkins is relegated to protecting the infant heir to England’s throne. Yet in a roundabout way this “maternal” activity puts him in the position to take the identity of jester to the evil king’s court, giving him the inside track by which the king’s forces are eventually defeated. Hawkins’s only deeds of physical valor come about when a witch puts a hypnosis-like spell on the jester, making him into a wizard with a sword. Now, though this sounds like the same process described in SAMURAI SCHOOL, the setup allows for an “out” in terms of self-mastery. Since at the outset Hawkins admires the heroism of the Black Fox, it’s not impossible to imagine that he has watched sword-duels even if he never personally achieved mastery with the blade. The witch’s spell could be seen as a jump-starting process like that of Shazam’s lightning, unleashing hidden in the hero abilities that he always possessed in utero. However, the script doesn’t shoot for an integration between Hawkins’s external and internal personas, for he loses his sword-skill when he’s snapped out of his trance, and when Hawkins does defeat his main opponent, it’s done through a stratagem that undercuts the swashbuckler genre’s trope of the dazzling climactic duel.

Possibly the most improbable representative of combative interiorization can be found in the deservedly obscure Italian comedy BLONDE IN BLACK LEATHER. In this very rough precursor to THELMA AND LOUISE, Claudia Cardinale plays an abused housewife who meets a motorcycle-riding free spirit, played by Monica Vitti. Vitti encourages the naïve Cardinale to desert her heavy-handed husband and to embark on a series of rambunctious adventures. During one exploit, a gang of seven or eight gangsters surrounds the two young women, intending to commit mayhem. Neither female has displayed any skill at fighting, but Vitti performs a sort of “hypnosis” on Cardinale, saying (more or less):

Your husband beat you, didn’t he? So do what your husband did, and beat them up!

The resulting fight shows Cardinale, with barely any help from Vitti, clobbering all the gangsters with basic fisticuffs. The farcical mood is very close to that of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, where the rabbit can pull any weapon or contrivance he wants out of thin air. BLACK LEATHER is very close to being this type of fantasy-farce. Yet the basic intent still seems to be that of validating the ability of “helpless” women to kick ass if they really want to, in contrast to JESTER, which seeks to undercut the appeal of extravagant ass-kicking.

The pattern of exteriorization occurs when a character creates or empowers some other entity, or entities, to do his fighting for him. Most robot-protagonists, ranging from Gigantor to Bozo the Iron Man, are obvious combative manifestations of this pattern. However, in TO BREAK OR NOT TO BREAK PT. 2 I devoted a great deal of space to showing why a big fight at the end of 1934’s BABES IN TOYLAND, between king-sized toy soldiers and some nasty boogiemen, did not result in a combative work of art. I did not invoke the idea of self-mastery in the essay, but I emphasized the notion that there was no purposive connection between the soldiers and their dimwitted creator Stannie Dum. He builds the toy soldiers, but his achievement comes about through dumb luck, not as a means of exteriorizing his own buried passions and/or talents.

I’ve remarked that in the earliest extant telling of the story of Aladdin, there’s no combat between the lazy youth and the evil lamp-swiping magician. Disney’s version of the story gives Aladdin more swashbuckler-like abilities, though much of the film emphasizes romance more than action, and the conclusion depends largely on Aladdin undoing Jafar through strategy rather than direct combat. A more inventive, albeit forgotten, iteration was offered by 1952’s ALADDIN AND HIS LAMP.  Here as well, Aladdin is a tough sword-fighter, so he doesn’t entirely need the genie to do all of his fighting for him. Indeed, the script works in the idea of both “obedient genie” and “disobedient genie.” Though the genie will grant his new master’s wishes, the genie will also try to kill Aladdin in order to win free from his service. Since Aladdin must be vigilant to counter the genie’s attempts at assassination, this supernatural creature is more like Mister Hyde than like the traditional obedient servant of the lamp-bearer. That said, the genie ends up serving his master through Aladdin’s self-mastery strategy. The film’s villain manages to steal Aladdin’s lamp, but doesn’t keep his guard up against the rebellious spirit and thus meets the doom that could have befallen the hero.

SELF MASTERY MEDITATIONS PT. 1

GIVE-AND-TAKE VS. THE KILLING STROKE proposed that these two tropes provided the principal narrative strategies through which authors have created the combative mode. In my earliest mediations upon the subject, I tended toward the view that the key manifestations of the mode were those narratives in which some clash of equal dynamicities transpired, usually at the story’s climax (as noted in PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX). But to some extent this view was a consequence of my over-emphasis on the mode of dynamicity, since it was 2013 that I formulated the complementary combinatory mode. That said, I still devoted considerable space on my blogs to narratives in which a concluding conflict failed to convey the dynamic-sublime, ranging from canonical artworks like MACBETH to pop-art creations like WORLD WITHOUT END.

I did allow for a major exception to the “combat-climax” proposition, and this was what I originally called the use of strategy. For instance, I viewed FORBIDDEN PLANET as a combative film even though its major dynamicity-clash takes place in the film’s middle. Rather, the Id Monster is defeated by a strategic move on the part of the heroic space-soldiers. I hadn’t coined the term “self-mastery” in this period, but it seems clear to me that this is what I was aiming for, in valuing this movie’s conclusion as combative even though the soldiers use “brain” more than “brawn.” That said, I would not have deemed comparable characters, like those of THE ANGRY RED PLANET, to be combative figures, given that they didn’t show any real penchant for “brawn.” And within the same period, I viewed that the 1953 WAR OF THE WORLDS film was not in the combative mode. There’s a major clash of dynamicities in the middle of that film as there is in FORBIDDEN PLANET. But the Martians aren’t defeated by either the brain or brawn of the Earthpeople, but by sheer dumb luck.

The trope of “the killing stroke,” as exemplified by Odysseus’ blinding of the Cyclops, still depends on a clash of dynamicities, but it’s one characterized less by an exchange of powerful blows than by one principal thrust, often at a more powerful opponent’s weak point. Arguably self-mastery, with the attendant idea of “digging deep,” takes a more concentrated form in this trope. In the GIVE-AND-TAKE essay, I pursued a similar logical path in my comparison of the protagonists of two works: the 1940 THIEF OF BAGDAD and Neil Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE. The denouements of both works involve the protagonist using a magical weapon to strike down a more powerful menace: Abu shoots the wizard Jaffar with a magic arrow and Mayhew stabs a big monster with a magic sword. But Mayhew exhibits no self-mastery, while Abu does so prior to shooting Jaffar, particularly in the young thief’s battle with a giant spider.

However, such distinctions become a little harder to make when the “star of the show” is the monster. For a monster-centric film to be combative, the monster’s opponents, while often forgettable as characters, must evince the quality of self-mastery in order for the work to qualify as combative. Two such examples, from very different periods of filmmaking, are 1955’s IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA and 2010’s SHARKTOPUS. Yet it’s difficult to quantify what separates the climaxes of these films from those of, say, 1975’s JAWS and 1994’s TREMORS. It’s my conviction that even though these films have very violent climaxes, I don’t find either the trope of contending dynamicities or strategy informed by self-mastery. The triumphs of the monster-slayers in the latter two films are impressive—but just not “super-impressive.” And I make this judgment in spite of all the other literary factors that make TREMORS a better film than IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA, and JAWS (pretty much without question) a better film than any latter-day shark-opus.

Next up: considerations of self-mastery’s effects on the patterns of exteriorization and interiorization.

MYTHCOMICS: DEADMAN WONDERLAND (2007-2013)

SPOILERS  SPOILERS SPOILERS

The word “apocalypse” originally connoted an unveiling of the reality underlying the illusion of ordinary life. For several generations, the Japanese people lived in the shadow of a real-life catastrophe, that of nuclear devastation brought on when scientific research uncovered the titanic powers hiding beneath physical phenomena. With the cessation of war, the nation eventually returned to the lesser rigors of daily existence. Still, in Japanese cinema  normalcy was periodically menaced by an incarnation of chaos in the form of a dragon breathing atomic fire.

DEADMAN WONDERLAND takes place in a fictional future, though for the most part the world looks almost indistinguishable from that of modern-day Japan. However, the world of viewpoint character Ganta Igarashi does have its own apocalyptic shadow: that of the patently fictional Great Tokyo Earthquake. Ganta, like most of his middle-school peers, knows nothing about the cause of the cataclysm, which occurred when he was a small child. In his innocent existence—going to school in a rebuilt Tokyo and enjoying a mild home life with a father who’s barely seen during the entire series—Ganta doesn’t know of the link between the disaster ten years ago and Deadman Wonderland. Like most Tokyo citizens, Ganta doesn’t know anything about the Wonderlannd, except that it’s a private prison that broadcasts gladiatorial contests between its incarcerated residents. Certainly Ganta doesn’t know that the bizarre edifice just happens to exist at the former epicenter of the quake.

Innocent Ganta soon gets an education in hard knocks. One fine day, all of the students in his class are slaughtered by a weird, super-powered being whom Ganta describes as “the Red Man.”  Ganta alone survives the massacre, and since no one else beholds the spectre of the true killer, the authorities find it expedient to condemn Ganta as a mass murderer.  In no time, the young man is sentenced to the life of a prisoner in Deadman Wonderland, the first step in his journey to knowledge—not only with regard to the prison’s relevance to Tokyo’s apocalyptic history, but also to the youth's own familial background. As is often the case, children suffer for the sins of the previous generation.

On Ganta’s first day “in stir,” head guard Makina tells him, “Absurdity is your new reality.” To the reader, one patent absurdity is the way the prison operates. Though Ganta and his fellow inmates wear collars that can stun them if they rebel, the Wonderland doesn’t otherwise restrict their movements. Though some areas of the prison are off limits, inmates are allowed to wander from cell to cell, much as if they occupied a college dormitory. But this freedom is perhaps explained by the fact that though not every prison is termed a “deadman,” all of them receive periodical doses of poison from their collars, and so will perish if they don’t labor to earn an antidote called “candy.”  The gladiatorial games, which citizens on the outside believe to be fake spectacles, exist to make money for corrupt warden Tamaki, though even his strings are being pulled by a darker mastermind.

The real meaning of “deadman?”  For reasons relating to the cataclysm ten years ago, many inmates have mutated, acquiring a weird super-power called “the branch of sin.” In essence, the deadmen (and deadwomen) have the ability to make weapons out of blood from their opened veins.  Spikes, whips, flames—deadman-blood seems as malleable as the energies of a Green Lantern’s ring. Ganta himself proves to be a deadman, and finds that he can shoot blood-projectiles from his fingers like bullets from a gun. Ganta must use this new talent to preserve his life in various contests, even while trying not to become corrupted by the perverse indifference of both convicts and officials.

But the prison’s greatest absurdity is Shiro, who seems to come out of nowhere and doesn’t occupy a cell like the other convicts. Shiro, a teenaged albino girl with white hair and red eyes, displays immense strength and agility, though she doesn’t initially show deadman-abilities. She acts as if she knows Ganta, though he does not reoognize her, at least initially.  Shiro usually talks like a small child, though she can sometimes speak in more adult tones, and not surprisingly it’s eventually disclosed that the two of them did know each other as children. Warden Tamaki and his overseer know all of Shiro’s secrets, though, and these villains aspire to use the convicts of Deadman Wonderland for insidious purposes.

Like many “new fish” sentenced to prison, Ganta is an uncorrupted innocent who seems doomed to be overwhelmed by the evil of both the prison and its prisoners. Most of the support-characters whom Ganta encounters have manifested their deadman-powers in line with suffering various personal traumas, and they essentially embrace the Wonderland’s horrors rather than confront their own demons. But Ganta, despite his apparent “everyman” nature and comparative weakness, becomes a rallying-point for his fellow trauma-victims. Minatsuki, a vicious, foul-mouthed patricide, initially scorns Ganta for his bleeding-heart empathy. But after she’s been exposed to his relentless purity, she finds herself seduced by the prospect of hope. Ganta’s loyalty to one friend even leads his temporary inmate-allies to reject him for a time. Yet Shiro, in one of her rare moments of eloquence, brings the lost sheep back to the fold by telling them, “If bad memories are stronger than you are, don’t blame it on Ganta.”

This and other lines evince the common theme of WONDERLAND: the uniquely Japanese take on Nietzchean self-overcoming. I’m tempted to the belief that no one but a Japanese author could have a hero rage, “I want to become strong enough to beat the crap out of my weaker self.” Ordinary life is seen to be an illusion, and yet a necessary illusion for all that. Ganta and Shiro are linked by the sins of the older generation—in particular, of Ganta’s deceased mother, one of the scientists who unleashed both the earthquake and the “branch of sin” mutation.Yet through the efforts of her children, real and adopted—through Ganta’s persistence and in spite of the the monster hiding behind Shiro’s seeming looniness-- it turns out that even deadmen can resurrect themselves. WONDERLAND’s many wonders cannot be explicated in a single blogpost. However, in contrast to many of the narratives that pretend to evoke the lunatic spirit of Lewis Carroll, authors Jinsei Kataoka and Kazuma Kondou succeed in creating a world no less governed by insanity. Yet they also manage to show how, in the vein of Dante, one must descend to the deepest circles of hell before one has any hope of returning to the world of light and comparative sanity.    

ON MASTERING SELF-MASTERY PT. 2

I concluded Part 1 by sketching out three primary story-tropes used by fictional characters to demonstrate self-mastery:

(1) Combat between bodies, which in fiction usually takes place as "hand to hand combat" between human beings, though it can also include beasts in combat with claw and fang, and all analogous conflicts.

(2) Combat through the use of "extensions," which can range from weapons modeled on those of the real world to unreal "super-powers" not natural to the human form, such as X-ray vision, fire-breathing, or even peculiar uses of parts of the human form, like stretching this or that part of one's anatomy.

(3) Combat through the use of physically independent pawns, which can be other human beings, beasts, robots, etc.

In Part One I stated that with the first category, it's relatively easy to get a sense as to whether the combatants demonstrate greater-than-average dynamicity, what I termed "megadynamicity" in this 2012 essay. The second two, however, can be more elusive.

In my recent essay THE INVISIBLE FORCE OF INVESTIGATORS, I stressed that most "police procedurals" don't allow for "battles of personal glory." Many though not all shows in this genre are all about the power of cops to sweep through the city and overpower the criminal element by dint of superior numbers. The viewer assumes that every fictional cop has been through some form of training, both in armed and unarmed combat, but the stories themselves do not generally stress whatever megadynamic talents the policemen and policewoman may possess. Thus I would not label the cop-characters of HAWAII FIVE-O or LAW AND ORDER as megadynamic. In contrast, some less "procedural" cop-dramas definitely emphasize the violent conflict of order and chaos, ranging from cinema's DIRTY HARRY series to the gleeful absurdity of T.J HOOKER.

Now, in a less "civilized" genre, such as the western, one usually presumes that anyone who wields a gun knows how to use it-- or at least, any man. In every medium, the western tends to represent women as wielding weapons purely in self-defense. A female western character on average is at best mesodynamic, which means more or less that she can wield a gun well enough not to shoot herself with it. Only a precious female characters are touted for their skill with weapons. The real-life trick-shooter Annie Oakley has given rise to fictionalized versions like the 1954-57 teleseries with Gail Davis.

That said, a given character may demonstrate self-mastery, but not in a combative situation. In 1935 Barbara Stanwyck starred in an equally fictionalized version of the famous markswoman's life. However, this version of ANNIE OAKLEY was a romantic drama, with no combative content.

To segue a second time, I've sometimes debated with myself as to when a character with a gun registers as *mesodynamic* rather than "megadynamic." Prison-films-- particularly of the species known as "women-in-prison"-- can prove highly variable in this regard. A lot of guns are fired at the conclusions of THE BIG DOLL HOUSE, THE BIG BIRD CAGE and SWEET SUGAR, but I derived no sense that most of the character shooting off big guns were especially skilled. As with the character of Mayhem, discussed in Part 1, their power comes not from themselves but from the sheer power of the weapons they acquire.

In contrast, though a number of female characters in the 1974 CAGED HEAT wield guns, the big shootout at the conclusion shows that the two characters played, respectively, by Erica Gavin and by Roberta Collins are skilled at picking off armed enemies from a considerable distance. I don't plan to review HEAT in the near future, as I found it somewhat boring. But at least director Jonathan Demme set up a situation in which his "femmes formidables" had to exchange sustained fire with a bunch of unsympathetic prison-guards, thus satisfying the combative mode.

Moving on to the second of the difficult categories, it's a given that there are many characters in fiction who are capable of unleashing vast armies against other armies: kings and queens, emperors and empresses, popes and popesses (?) But countless stories merely imply this power without seeing it in operation, just as numerous police-types do not demonstrate their dynamicity but simply imply it. Shakespeare's kings are forever going to war about this or that, but it's not a given that all of them are megadynamic figures, particularly when the wars are conveniently offstage. Henry V is easy to pronounce as "combative" in part because he's out there fighting with his troops. But Macbeth comes to power by assassination, and though there's a fight between Macbeth and Macduff while their respective armies contend, it's hard to state outright that either of them is a megadynamic type.

In this situation, female rulers may be no less complicated. Shakespeare's Cleopatra does not fight in the trenches in the fashion of Henry V, or even the Bard's tough-gal version of Joan of Arc. But the play does attribute to her the indirect power over Egypt's armies, so that one might indeed regard her as satisfying the combative mode. However, there are numerous Cleopatra tales-- not least Shaw's CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA-- in which the queen displays no queenly dynamicity, and thus she would register as mesodynamic at most. I might say the same for the Timely Comics version of the character Venus, though since she's given a definite super-power in later stories, the determination is perhaps moot.

ON MASTERING SELF-MASTERY

I've recently hunted through past posts and added the tag "self-mastery" to any post where I used the Nietzschean term "self-overcoming." I find Nietzsche's term a little too obscure for my own use, but "self-mastery" serves to express the ways in which fictional combative characters illustrate humankind's ability to do more with their "might" than to dominate others. I wrote in 2015's NIETZSCHE VS. THE NEOPURITAN NANNIES:

Nietzsche is interested in war and violence only as forces within humankind that must be overcome by the overman-- not indulged in, like the Nazis to whom Frederic Wertham compared the philosopher. The overman was Nietzsche's solution to the vagaries of rule by the mob or by the tyrant:

Now, in fiction combative characters embody a plethora of philosophical attitudes, and Nietzsche's idea of self-mastery diverges even from that of, say, Frank Miller. (Interesting side-note: in ZARATHUSTRA Nietzsche castigates a "Spirit of Gravity," which is a value Miller and his co-writer Azzarello champion in THE DARK KNIGHT MASTER RACE. ) But I would still argue that the semantic manner in which both the philosopher and the comics-writers express the idea of self-mastery is essentially the same.

Now, in COMBAT PLAY PT. 4, I  used the ideal of "fair play" as an example of what I then called "self-limitation" and considered essentially identical with "self-overcoming:"

In my own lit-critic cosmos, the ideal of "fair play" assumes the role of "self-limitation" that is, in Nietzsche's philosophy, occupied by "self-overcoming."

And yet, I find that I've used it not in terms of limiting oneself but also in terms of exceeding limits. In WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS PT. 1, I compared two protagonists whose dynamicity was certainly not at the highest level, but who both utilized particular weapons to overcome obstacles. I argued in part that although Richard Mayhew of NEVERWHERE gained possession of a super-sword and used it to kill a monster, he lacked the quality of "self-mastery," since the weapon's power did all the work. In contrast, Jack Burton of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA didn't command a lot of power with his one weapon, a simple throwing-knife, but like Aristotle's hedgehog he mastered one good trick. Thus his triumph over the villain Lo-Pan is entirely the result of Burton's self-mastery.

In my philosophical cosmos, the acquisition of a skill or power comes about through a process of self-monitoring, a subject's attempt to understand his or her natural limits at a given time, after which the subject seeks to exceed said limits, to gain greater self-mastery. The appeal of fair play is affective rather than cognitive; the subject believes, for instance, that he shouldn't use a weapon if his opponent does not have one. Thus, in THOR #152, the thunder-god "sheathes" his hammer after destroying his foe's mace.

However, this "noblesse oblige" gesture can have an objective effect, in that it forces a given character to "dig deeper" in order to defeat a worthy opponent. Of course, one doesn't need the gesture, since combative narratives are replete with dozens of situations wherein combatants seek out worthy opponents purely to improve themselves. DRAGONBALL frequently uses this scenario, in that the Seiyans Goku and Vegeta repeatedly challenge one another, even when on relatively friendly terms:

Having dovetailed these two related concepts, my next consideration is: what are the most familiar story-tropes through which fictional characters may demonstrate self-mastery?

Both of the two previous examples fall into the most elementary category, that of the hand-to-hand battle. This is also the easiest trope with which an author can express self-mastery.

The trope of weapons-use, however, becomes more complicated, as seen in the WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS analysis, wherein I found that Mayhew did not display self-mastery even though he had a bigger, badder weapon than did Jack Burton. An even greater complication is that any form of "super-power" not intimately tied to the human body becomes similarly problematic. If Nightcrawler's ability to teleport demonstrates self-mastery, can one necessarily say the same of a comical type of teleporter like Ambush Bug?

The third major trope of self-mastery is that of the indirect commander: a figure whose main role is often to order others into battle. In this essay I said that I discounted the "Adama" character of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA in terms of "combative status" because he functioned largely as a figurehead. Yet there are millions of villains who are basically "master planner" types who get henchmen to do their fighting for them. However, the difference between Adama and, say, Fu Manchu is that the latter's genius for evil infuses every errand his servants perform in his name.

More on these matters later, perhaps.

GIVE-AND-TAKE VS. THE KILLING STROKE

Might is an ability that is superior to great obstacles. It is called dominance [Gewalt] if it is superior even to the resistance of something that itself possesses might.-- Kant, CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT.

Plainly, Kant, in formulating his linked concepts of "might" and "dominance," is never as concerned as I am with sussing out the diverse ways in which two mighty forces may contend to produce the sense of dominance. And at present I now see two major archetypal tropes by which fiction creates the sense of dominance, though to be sure I'm not claiming that the two tropes, that of "give-and-take" and "the killing stroke," are necessarily the only ones.

"Give-and-take" refers to the sort of battles in which at least two entities, both possessed of some analogous level of might, come to blows in some manner as to show that both characters can "dish it out" as well as being able to "take it." In my 2015 essay COMBAT PLAY PT. 4, I correlated the ideal of an equally matched battle as one that depended on the ethic of fair play, whether or not the two fighters both subscribe to that ethic:

 ...the notion of "fair play" becomes important within the sphere of fiction and fantasy, possibly more important than it can ever be in the real world of political negotiation and compulsion. In my own lit-critic cosmos, the ideal of "fair play" assumes the role of "self-limitation" that is, in Nietzsche's philosophy, occupied by "self-overcoming."

In the COMBAT PLAY series I already used images from a Jack Kirby bout between Thor and Ulik, so for variety's sake, this time I'll illustrate with scenes from an analogous fight between THE NEW GODS' hero Orion and his evil half-brother Kalibak:

However, the second archetypal trope has less to do with evenly matched combat than with a character, possesses of some level of personal might, who finds a weakness in a mighty opponent's defenses. In my 2012 essay MIGHT VS. DOMINANCE, I pointed out that in the 1940 THIEF OF BAGDAD the climax is not one of direct contention:

There is no one-on-one combat as such between the principal heroes and the principal villain in THIEF, as usually takes place in related adventure-films.  Earlier sequences show Jaffar triumphing over the heroes with his magic with no real contest, but when Ahmad and Abu join in flouting his forces with the help of a flying carpet, Jaffar seems to run out of magic and flees, only to receive the same fate most villains get even when they do engage in combat.

In this case, Jaffar is struck down by an arrow, sent from a bow wielded by the film's hero Abu. Some dialogue suggests that the bow's bolts cannot miss when they're aimed at "injustice." In some instances, such as that of Neil Gaiman's protagonist in the novel NEVERWHERE, I've cited examples where a "killing stroke" is brought about by a magic weapon wielded by a subcombative character. However, Abu's combative credentials should prove beyond reproach for most viewers, given the manner in which he overcomes a gigantic spider in an earlier scene.

It may be of some interest that both combative tropes take place in Homer's ODYSSEY. During the imprisonment of Odysseus and his men in the cave of the Cyclops, it's made abundantly clear that even as a group the mortals are unable to battle Polyphemus directly. Thus they come up with a way to wound him that also allows them to escape the cave.

However, should any reader doubt the pugnacity of Odysseus, the epic concludes with the traveler returning to his island home Ithaca, where he, his son Telemachus, and a few other allies decimate the ranks of Penelope's unwanted suitors, who are initially unarmed but who, during the onslaught, do manage to acquire weapons and are able to put up a fight before being slain.

I'll note for the time being that most of the "monster-slaying" films I discussed in the essay WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS PT. 3 depended on the monsters being slain in Cyclops-fashion, by some human being who uncovers an Achilles Heel. That said, I usually don't view such works as combative unless they've first depicted some "give-and-take" in which the monster withstands the onslaughts of conventional human weapons.