The War On Drugs is an obscene, violent, Orwellian, unconstitutional sham. Film at 11.
Also: Is the “Bush lied about the imminent threat” meme an imminent threat to my ability to take Democrats seriously ever again? Andrew Sullivan reports, you decide.
“And this would have solved things how?”
By winning, Jim. By beating them. That’s how problems caused by armed people killing us are solved, generally, not by retreating behind Fortress America and congratulating ourselves for no longer “abridging liberty” while lunatic theocratic fascists skullfuck their subjects with impunity.
Or do those folks’ liberties not count? This is an aspect of the antiwar libertarian argument I’ve never understood. That, and the Confederacy fetish. I dunno, maybe I’m still a pinko at heart.
Uh, how ’bout that Alias storyline, huh? 🙂
Well, the big news here is that I received a link from the mighty Corner, The National Review‘s group blog. Mike Potemra comments on my discussion with Eve Tushnet of the Calvinist/arbitrary horror in Kubrick’s The Shining. This precipitates a discussion about Kubrick, Tarantino, Un Chien Andalou, etc. with Jonah Goldberg. (What does the fact that I’m actually pleased about getting linked to by NRO say about post-9/11 politics? That’s a topic for another post, I’m afraid.)
Bruce Baugh talks Wicker Man, pointing out two subtle strengths of a movie with many. He also reviews The Eye, yet another Asian horror film I’ve heard good things about, and Dario Argento’s Suspiria. (The only Argento I’ve seen is Deep Red, an experience which took a lot out of me. Man, that bathtub scene is… unpleasant.)
Big Sunny D talks about the ways your viewing conditions affect your receptivity to horror movies (a very important point, i think), and refuses to give up hope for a horror comic as scary as a really great horror film.
Rick Geerling asks whether less is more in horror, in terms of both what is shown and what is explained. The consensus seems to be that sometimes less is more, and sometimes more is more–it just depends on the intent and the execution. That’s my take on it, as a cursory glance at the films on my list might suggest. But beyond the fact that I like horror films that take a wide range of approaches to showing and explaining the horror, it seems that I tend to prefer films that show quite a bit and explain very little. But that’s not a hard and fast rule.
Finally, the Malaysian government has banned horror fiction (link courtesy of Dirk Deppey). Apparently they’ve decided that their revolting brand of Islamic quasitheocracy is scary enough.
The little meme that could continues to spark discussion as more bloggers jump into the “do comics actually suck?” fray, and earlier contributors refine their original statements. Here’s Johnny Bacardi on the trials and travails of buying comics on an unemployed person’s budget. Here’s Kevin Melrose on how bad bad retailers can be for comics (the post also touches on Pimpgate–joy!). Here’s Eve Tushnet on what’s wrong with floppies. Here’s Ron Phillips, taking a view on all the negativity that’s roughly equivalent to Clemenza’s view on the upcoming war between the families in The Godfather. And here’s the man who started it all, John Jakala, saying “My God, what have I done?” and clarifying that he’s only as fed up (or not) with comics as he is (or isn’t) with every other art form. On the upside, here’s Tegan Gjovaag, defending both floppies and Diamond’s pre-ordering system as embodied by Previews. It ain’t all gloom and doom!
In other news:
My defense of DK2 is seconded by Dirk Deppey, who offers ebullient praise for Miller’s controversial book himself as part of an exceptionally entertaining day at Journalista. And mine and Chris Allen’s dueling reviews of the book are being discussed at the V forum.
Entertaining capusle reviews from Jim Henley (particularly insightful regarding the unsatisfying wrap-up of the actual Purple Man storyline in the final issue of Brian Bendis’s excellent Alias), and from Big Sunny D (on the mess that is the current X-Statix storyline), and from Eve Tushnet (Grant Morrison and Ultimate Spider-Man, pros and cons thereof). Eve also offers entertaining capsule summaries of the appeal and drawbacks of different superheroes. She’s wrong about Ultimate Spider-Man in both posts, though, because that book is awesome. (Wrong about Batman, too.)
Over on the Comics Journal message board, there’s a thread that’s equal parts horrifying and hysterical about the problems the New York Press has been having with paying and firing its freelance illustrators. In my experience in publishing, when it comes to arguments about this sort of thing, the freelancers are almost always in the right. Just keep that in mind.
This anti-porn article by Naomi Wolf has been making the blogosphere rounds lately, most recently by way of a dismissal of it at The Intermittent. I’m of two minds about this.
On the one hand, I’m a lot more sympathetic to Wolf than most people, and even many feminists, seem to be. This is because I found The Beauty Myth, her book about how the fashion, diet, entertainment, and cosmetics industries essentially generate neurosis in women to fuel their respective economic engines, both compelling and convincing. It does not hurt that I’ve seen this in action, live and in person, with my wife, who without putting too fine a point on it was driven to slow suicide with the help of the standard of “beauty” propogated by contemporary culture. The current wave of “lighten up!” sentiment is well taken when it’s used against the stifling of dissent that’s part and parcel of political correctness, but when it ignores or ridicules the real, demonstrable damage done to real, demonstrable women by unrealistic, impossible standards of appearance and behavior, it’s something to fight against, not for.
And Wolf’s article points out many things to be feared about the pervasive influence of pornography on our culture. I guarantee you that high school and college age girls now feel compelled to kiss each other to turn guys on. This is not some victory for the sexual revolution–well, it may be for some girls who are genuinely bisexual or even lesbian–it’s just forcing yet another unrealistic, male-dictated sex role on women who ultimately have little say in the matter if they want to be valued as sexually attractive beings. I’ve talked about this before in the context of MTV (the Tatu and Madonna/Britney/Christina bullshit), but it seems reasonable to suggest that porn has helped raise the demand for this sort of behavior among men–aided and abetted, of course, by the pop-culture media that jerks itself off about such things (Rolling Stone, anyone?). Finally, there’s certainly an argument to be made that while porn is interesting and arousing, PORN! as trumpeted on the covers of every New York City-based glossy and beamed into our homes in countless salacious MTV and E! and Dateline reports and staring down at us in the shape of a 200-foot Jenna Jameson billboard in Times Square is a tedious, anti-sensual bore, just like trucker hats and Ashton Kutcher.
But Wolf also evinces what appears to be a strange and, I think, unhealthy aversion to sex practices that have little or nothing to do with pornography. Listen to the way she seems to shudder as she discusses the idea of using orifices other than the vagina for sexual gratification, or the prospect of having one’s face ejaculated upon. I’ve never been able to figure out what’s so degrading or demeaning or insulting or dominating about any of these things. They aren’t degrading or demeaning or insulting or controlling at all–if you’re doing it right. They can, and maybe even should, be a part of any sexually healthy person’s repertoire of giving and receiving pleasure. Personal preferences may vary, and no one should do anything they find physically or emotionally uncomfortable, but Wolf appears to suggest that there’s something intrinsically wrong with these things, beyond the clear wrong of feeling pressured to do them.
This vague sense that sex is somehow dirty or bad is reinforced by her effusive praise of an orthodox Jewish friend of hers who has adopted the strict dress code and head-covering routine of that religion. Wolf breathlessly describes how “hot” it must be for this woman to only be visible, sexually, to her husband. I don’t think I need to suggest that you simply substitute “fundamentalist Muslim” and “burqa” for “orthodox Jewish” and “head-covering” for the bizarrely retrograde and repressive nature of this notion to be readily apparent. I’m all for women covering up if that’s what they feel like doing, but fundamentalist religions make not doing so a sin, something intrinsically wrong and bad. There’s nothing hot about that at all, particularly since such rules of dress and conduct usually applies a lot more stringently to women than they do to men. And the idea that this kind of covering-up is for the wife’s benefit as opposed to the husband’s (his property, his alone to enjoy) is simply preposterous. (I don’t mean to suggest that orthodox Jews are akin to the Taliban or the ayatollahs–I’ve heard of very few honor killings in Crown Heights, just by way of a for instance–but you’ll forgive me if I have very little respect for religions that prove how “special” women are by forcing them to shroud themselves like dead bodies at a crime scene.)
As for the notion that men are being “spoiled” by porn and are no longer attracted to real live women, I’ve seen some anecdotal evidence of this, but in my experience and in that of most guys i know, seeing sexy women makes us more interested in being with sexy women, not less. At any rate, if the prevalence of male-directed porn is truly a problem, to me the answer is more porn, not less–and this time of the female-centric variety. And not just porn, either, but Maxim-style magazines where the latest male starlets are paraded around half naked and airbrushed for the perusal of bored women commuters; sitcoms where dimpy, annoying women are married to gorgeous, intelligent men and not the other way around; Justin Timberlake making out with David Bowie; and so forth. Women are not going to be sexually empowered by sticking them in head coverings and nuking the Internet so men have no other options; they’re going to be empowered when they take the reigns of sexual culture and are free to explore and demonstrate what they find sexy, not what they’re supposed to find sexy–pornography and puritanism be damned.
This was the speech I’ve been waiting for during long months of wishing I was governed by Tony Blair. It articulates nearly everything that needed to be articulated about why we’re doing what we’re doing, and why it needs to be done. Someone up there gets it.
And yet those same voices who complained for years about our coddling of dictatorships the world over–and rightly so–are beside themselves with rage now that there’s an administration who’s actually doing something about it. No, they’re not doing everything, and they’re not doing it perfectly, but it’s a start, and a good one.
The comicsphere is getting esoteric all of a sudden. We’ve moved on from Tony Isabella and The Comics Pimp to trying to determine whether or not blogs and comics both actually suck.
My two cents on both topics can be found here and here, along with some links; and more folks are jumping into the fray.
Defending Blogs, we find D. Emerson Eddy and Rick Geerling. D. opts against the simple defense I offered–that good blogs are, in fact, quite good indeed–and instead argues that the mere fact that blogs are a means by which people can express themselves, for good or for ill, makes them worthwhile; Rick brings it back down to earth by recounting how the blogosphere lacks the idiotic initiation rituals and name-calling atmosphere of message boards and such.
On the “Sick of Comics” front, there’s Rick again, saying that the last few months have been a dry spell for him but that these things are cyclical; Ron Phillips, pinning his disillusionment on the fact that they don’t make comics shops like they used to; and Alan David Doane, pointing out that you know what? this has been a good year for comics, at least in the alternative arena.
I tend to be optimistic about these kinds of things, but then I’m also optimistic about the new Matrix movie, so take that for whatever you think it’s worth.
Tegan Gjovaag has written her own tremendous post on the Green River killings, reminding us that the dead and their families were only the tip of the iceberg when it came to “the vicitms.”
Where Christopher Hitchens gets the patience to enumerate the innumerable reasons why Saddam Hussein’s regime needed to be destroyed, and why the arguments agains this action all contain the seeds of their own refutation, is beyond me, but thank goodness he gets it somehow.
Then again, Hitchens is probably just one of those national-greatness types, hellbent on turning the United States into a Baathist regime.
Interesting reviews of the work of Frank Miller were posted by two different writers today.
J.W. Hastings continues his series (one, two) of “comics ain’t for kids” grudge-match tandem reviews of the work of Miller and his contemporary Alan Moore. This time, Miller comes out on top. Generally speaking, I’m all for that–Miller is my favorite comics creator, so much so that any time I attempt to explain why I lapse into semi-incoherence. J.W. is right to criticize Moore’s lack of tonal variation within the confines of a given story–with pretty much any Moore book (excepting, perhaps, Smax?) you can quickly determine what kind of comic you’ll be getting–funny, scary, retro, revisionist, etc–without fear that this will change at all before “The End.” I also enjoyed the way J.W. skewers the occult/conspiracy angle of Moore’s Jack the Ripper epic From Hell, which given the seriousness Moore invests in the topic can come across as simultaneously simplistic and pretentious; and additionally I dug the way he goes after the “this is a comic you don’t have to be ashamed of!” crowd by saying, essentially, “just get over yourself.” But I think J.W. sells From Hell, which I think is in every way a remarkable comic, way too short, particularly in comparing it so unfavorably to Miller’s enjoyable, powerful, but nowhere near as complex or rewarding Ancient Greece war comic 300. Please keep in mind that I’m a lot more receptive to Miller’s emphasis on loyalty, courage, and honor (which, by the way, is a more nuanced take than anyone gives it credit for) than I am to Moore’s mystical-radical hodgepodge (though I’m receptive to that too)–it’s just that in this case I think Moore & Campbell produced a monstrously successful, and important, book.
(I also tend to agree with Alan David Doane‘s view that Miller’s final Daredevil story, Man Without Fear, feels like a redundant coda rather than an essential contribution; to me, Miller said everything he needed to say about Daredevil and his milieu in the astounding Elektra Lives Again. On the other hand, as an excuse for some of the most gorgeous and propulsive superhero artwork in the world, courtesy of a never-better John Romita, Jr., you can’t do much worse than this.)
Writer number two is Chris Allen, who, in the course of a very long column that also includes a spot-on take-down of World War 3 Illustrated and an interesting interview with internet critic Johanna Draper Carlson, reviews Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Dark Knight Strikes Again. I was glad to see that Allen enjoyed the former, which he was revisiting after years without having read the book. I myself return to it time and again, and find each visit rewarding (the masterful pacing, the tremendous linework, the splash pages, the manically black humor, and, yeah, the message). So I was bummed out to see Chris jump on the DK2-bashing bandwagon. This is one of the most underrated comics, well, ever. Its detractors employ a panoply of arguments: It’s hurried, it’s sloppy, it’s stupid, it’s hamfisted, it’s cashing in, it’s corporate. (Those last two are inexplicable to me–if Miller wanted to really just cash in he could have handed in something exactly like DK1; and what kind of corporation wants to release a comic in which Batman flies planes into buildings and Superman and Wonder Woman destroy a mountain while fucking?) What they miss is that Miller almost single-handedly wrested superheroes away from the leaden reverence they’ve been saddled with by Alex Ross and his ilk and produced a comic that’s the spandex set’s equivalent of Iggy & the Stooges’ Raw Power. Nothing is true, everything is permissible: Characters scream and shout and let it all hang out, as does the art (panels are obliterated, inking is chunky as hell, and of course Lynn Varley subjects her Photoshop to a panoptic gang-bang), as does the storyline, which begins with Batman and his superhero pals beating the snot out of Superman and then just gets crazier from there. Chris argues that Miller’s refusal to acknowledge, say, the current Flash and Green Lantern secret identities, smacks of “arrogance”–and I say, shit, yeah. What the hell is wrong with us if we think that Wally West and Kyle Rayner deserve “respect” or something? That way lies madness. Miller isn’t saying “comics are better the way I remember them”–he’s saying “comics are better when you break free of the obligation to capital-R Remember anything.” He’s thumbing his nose at the self-reflexive, self-aggrandizing superhero-continuity establishment, and showing that the important thing for superhero comics to do is to ROCK. I, for one, was rocked indeed.
Stuart Moore runs the numbers on the direct market and trade paperbacks, proving my long-time theory that American comics companies will remain beholden to floppy/pamphlet/monthly/individual issue comics, as opposed to more book-like tpb or manga formats, for some time to come.
Also, this comic is funny, because nothing on God’s Earth is funnier than someone masturbating, then crying. (Courtesy of John Jakala.)
No sooner have bloggers and the Comics Pimp been duking it out over the best way to convey the message that Comics Doesn’t Suck than messboard users and still other bloggers are coming to the conclusion that You Know What? Yeah, Comics Does Suck. These threads at TCJ.com and this one at Sequential Tart advance the meme; John Jakala and Johnny Bacardi can’t help but ponder the same imponderables (thanks to Rick Geerling for linkage).
Me? Well, alls I can say is that today was a pretty great haul at the comics shop, one of the best New Comics Days in a while for me: Powers, Alias, Ultimate Spider-Man, Savage Dragon, Supreme Power, and Arrowsmith; I’ve been avoiding collections for financial reasons lately, but a collection of Matrix comix and Gilbert Hernandez’s monstrous Palomar collection just came out today as well, and the last month or so has seen oodles of great trades tempt my comics-buying dollar.
I don’t blame people for suddenly getting sick of the amount of crappy comics, or even just not-great comics, they’ve been buying more out of habit than anything else–this happens to all of us from time to time. I just think it’s a mistake to ascribe the decision to stop buying them to some sort of searing insight into comics versus other media. This goes double because, when you’re in a bad mood about comics in general, I’m you end up being much harder on specific comics than they deserve.
I have something of a professional (and, in the case of the blog, serious-hobbyist) obligation to keep on top of comics, both for the the publication I write for and for my own aspirations to writing comics professionally. I’m lucky enough to have a great deal of this mitigated by financial compensation for many of the things I purchase in order to keep abreast of the medium. Still, I occasionally feel jaded by how much inessential stuff I’ve accumulated. On a week-to-week basis I find I’ve purged a lot of this feeling by no longer buying no-longer-interesting titles. Mainly, though, I just enjoy the heck out of a lot of comics, and those I’m still buying.
In those TCJ.com threads, scholar Andrei Molotiu is dead right about being a devotee of an entire medium–that really is silly. That’s the fatal flaw of comics activism, too: Comics is worthy of consideration the same way film, literature, TV, music etc. are, but that’s something that will be proven to the world at large, if it ever will, by the strengths of individual works, not some vague devotion to Comics. And it’s the former, not the latter, that keeps me excited to visit the shop every Wednesday morning.
UPDATE: Please note that I’m not just some comics-hating curmudgeon who hasn’t Done His Part–I’m actually something of an activist myself. Here’s the deal: I really do think that “comics activism,” which even when you just write it or say it is self-evidently silly, is sort of dumb.
Great Garys in Serial-Killing History, Volume II: Gary Heidnik
The Missus‘s “Favorite” Serial Killer: Albert Fish
Serial Killer Most Likely to Have Bumped Into Jimmy Corrigan’s Grandpa at the Chicago World’s Fair: H.H. Holmes
Harry Chapin’s Unlikely Muse: Charles Whitman
Who Inspired Hannibal Lecter?: the candidates
All links courtesy of the indispensable CrimeLibrary.com.
Gary Ridgway has confessed to the Green River killings. For those of you who aren’t unhealthily obsessed with serial killers, the Green River Killer was for years the unsolved mystery in the American serial-murder demimonde; like Jack the Ripper several times over, “he” was deemed responsible for so many slayings (mainly of prostitutes) that it was widely believed (and by legendary FBI serial-killer expert Jack Douglas) that “he” was actually a “they,” two or more different serial killers with roughly the same M.O. and area of activity.
Actually, I still wonder whether “they” is the real deal here. Ridgeway pled guilty to 48 counts of first-degree murder mainly so he could avoid the death penalty, and I’d imagine there are many, many law enforcement officials happy to see this case closed. (Since the Green River killings stopped years ago, there’s not even really an issue of “we got the wrong guy!” to worry about.) It’s also worth noting that there are at least 7 “official” Green River slayings that Ridgeway did not plead guilty to, and God knows how many other killings took place that didn’t make it onto law enforcement’s tally (Ridgeway pled to six such cases himself).
At any rate, if you’re interested in this case you could do worse than to read over CrimeLibrary.com‘s thorough run-down of the Green River Killer. The site has recently been redone, and it’s user-friendly and fascinating. Let’s just hope they’re able to add an epilogue to this story that will stand the test of time.
Amanda has written a truly moving post about our little cat, Lucy. I’ve got to say, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about casual cruelty lately, but Amy brings the reality of it home.
Early in October, blogger Bruce Baugh promised to do a bunch of horrorblogging for the remainder of the month. That fell by the wayside, but it looks like he’s making up for lost time now: here’s a post on horror as a means of expressing grief (“that was worthwhile, and now it’s gone”), here’s a post on 28 Days Later that pays attention to the unusually strong characterization in the film, and here’s a post on the most recent David Cronenberg movie, Spider, which I haven’t seen (and which is just going to have to go to the back of the Netflix cue like everyone else).
My guess is that you’ve noticed this already, but the comics blogosphere has exploded recently. I think it’s doubled in size since September or so, no kidding. Perhaps, then, it’s a good time to point out why blogs are, when done right, good–and not, as their detractors claim, just a bunch of assholes on soapboxes barking at the moon without bothering with discussion or dissent.
I don’t know what blogs you’ve been reading, but I’m pretty sure that if they’re any good (and I try to make mine “any good”) there’s discussion and differences of opinion aplenty. I’m unapologetic about the fact that my blog has no comments feature and no messboard or forum: This is a dictatorship, not a democracy, and a big part of the attraction of running a blog the way I run mine is to not have to put up with trolls, either of the straightforward namecalling variety or the TCJ.com type who hijack every thread about topics they don’t approve of into endless, resolution-free arguments about whether that topic even deserves to be discussed in the first place.
That being said, I ASSURE you that the discussions and differences of opinion I’ve encountered through the use of my un-user-friendly, heavily-moderated blog are, on average, about a billion times more interesting, intelligent, and rewarding than messboard discussions I’ve participated on about those same topics, or any other topic, for that matter. The comicsphere is diverse, articulate, insightful, and demanding of high quality from comics. The discussions and debates that have gone on between me, Dirk Deppey, Bill Sherman, Alan David Doane, Johnny Bacardi, Eve Tushnet, Franklin Harris, NeilAlien, Jim Henley, John Jakala, David Fiore, JW Hastings, Shawn Fumo, Tegan Gjovaag and on and on (links in the blogroll) are, I submit, the best comics-related discussions you’re likely to find–and they’ve been waged, in the main, through posts on blogs. (UPDATE: I think it’s also important to note, given what appears to be becoming conventional wisdom about comicsbloggers, that as a group these are some of the most passionate, enthusiastic advocates of good comics around. Hell, you could even call me an “activist” if you wanted….)
I think a problem that most people who don’t like “blogs” have is that they picture the least-good blog imaginable and attack that as the norm: Blogs that discuss an article or issue without linking to it, blogs that pontificate and then don’t link to or respond to worthwhile counterarguments, etc. Ted Rall did something exactly like that–saying blogs take stuff out of context, crush free speech, etc. (before, of course, with the charming hypocrisy that has become his trademark, he launched a blog of his own). In that Comics Pimp thread at the Brian Wood forums, Matt Brady just did the same thing, saying that Doane’s little “dancing monkey” gag wouldn’t be clicked through to the original post by its readers–ignorant of the fact that a one-line link is THE link most likely to be clicked through by blog readers, since on the whole such readers really DO want to know the context of things.
I’m not one of these “blogging is the future” people, but I will say that in my experience blogs are a far more useful means of discussing a topic with other intelligent people than any other venue on the web.
Another powerful post from Amanda, this one on the aftermath of the Green River killings. Worth reading, and more than once if, like me, you sometimes find that your “fascination” with serial killers causes you to gloss over the pain felt by their victims, both living and dead.
Like the guys running around the mall in Dawn of the Dead, I’m continuing the mopping-up operation.
Bill Sherman and Johnny Bacardi have finished their thoughtful film-by-film responses to my 13 Days of Halloween movie selections. Bill uses the occasion to propose three categories for horror fans: old-schoolers, thrill-seekers, and purists. (You can guess which category I fall into.) He’s also got some thought-provoking comments on the differing tactics of The Shining and Blair Witch, by way of explaining why he prefers the latter. Johnny, meanwhile, runs down my top six, with an eye on how the venues in which one sees such films can affect how effective you view them to be. He also offers critical beatdowns of Nicholson’s performance in The Shining (the way his character is written and performed is a sticking point for many Shining detractors) and, in a separate post worth reading for his hilarious description of the film’s central fright device as “a weird Nine Inch Nails video” alone, The Ring. He also adds Last House on the Left and The Devil’s Backbone to my must-see list….
Jason Adams is also responding to the horrorthon, with a series of posts commenting on my choices and suggesting his own. The first takes issue with the climax and priestly protagonists of The Exorcist, which in my opinion are the two strongest aspects of the film. However, he does raise (mainly in his second post) the interesting issue of how Ellen Burstyn’s mother character is shuffled offstage while the Men of God duke it out with the Devil. Do you think a message is being conveyed there? I sure do. Still, Jason Miller’s performance is too heartbreaking, and that climax too crescendoingly terrifying, to write them off just because Burstyn’s powerful presence was absent. Anyway, post #2 also nominates Frenzy (onto the gotta-see list with ye!) over both Psycho and The Birds as the most appalling Hitchcock film, which in both of our books is ultimately a good thing to be. Jason’s third post nominates and subsequently rejects Rosemary’s Baby, Seven, and The Game as the movies that most horrified him, and finally goes with Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. I’d say that the latter two have to go on that to-see list, but I’m starting to sound like a broken record, aren’t I?
The two Daves of The Intermittent offer dueling posts on the failure of comics to generate truly horrifying moments, and on what makes for a horrifying moment generally. Dave Intermittent says that it’s hard for comics to shock the reader with anywhere near the force that film can, and that the medium therefore has emphasized “conceptual horror,” which as he delineates it is more effective when focusing on the horror of awful human behavior. Dave Jon tries to trump his colleague’s arguments by saying that yeah, comics can shock, and they can disturb, and they can fail at both too–ultimately it’s in the eye of the beholder. This is of course true, but the same can be said of any kind of emotional or intellectual response engendered by art–“beauty” and “goodness” and “suckiness” and whatever else is all ultimately in the eye of the beholder. The job of the critic is to sift through her own responses to find out what is prompting them, and why, and whether this can be extrapolated to other art. I don’t think this is as useless or reductive an enterprise as Dave J. seems to suggest. But as to his rhetorical question of “what is horror?”, I recommend Noel Carroll’s masterful book The Philosophy of Horror and H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal treatise Supernatural Horror in Literature. Taken together, they’re offer the best definition of what makes horror-art horrifying around, and I can’t stress strongly enough how much people who are really serious about the scary stuff should read these.
I’ve been thinking about Eve Tushnet’s comments on our difference of opinion re: Kubrick’s The Shining, specifically how she wants films about sin, not Calvinism, and how I have a much higher tolerance for “random, absurd evil” than she does. You know what? This makes a great deal of sense. In my struggles with Christianity and the notion of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God, I’ve never been able to buy the tortuous logic by which Catholicism and the mainstream Protestants say “see? it really does all make sense, and it’s good, honest.” I think that when you accept the basic precepts of Judeo-Christian monotheism, you’ve either got to go the completely nonjudgmental, essentially nondenominational route my wife has, or the predestination route of the Calvinists; everything in between is a dodge born out of unwillingness to actually follow the “logic” of faith to its inevitable, contradictory conclusions. (A succint example would be this whole “God didn’t create evil, since evil is just the absesnce of good” jive–what, is Creation like a condom with airbubbles in it that He got too excited and forgot to smooth out?) I’m an unbeliever, mainly, yeah, but nevertheless I’m still not satisfied with my unbelief; so I see a real appeal in the essential capriciousness of the universe present in what I guess Eve would call “Calvinist horror.” Sin, meanwhile, I see as nothing but a bonafide racket. (I’ve got very, very little use for guilt and shame, even though that’s pretty much what shapes my whole personality if you ask my therapist; honor and duty–that’s another story entirely.) So to sum up: I like The Shining. (If that was confusing, my apologies. Hey, there’s a reason I don’t talk about religion all that much around here.)
Finally, it was truly an honor to see Dirk Deppey break his comics-only commandments to compliment the horror-blogging I’ve been doing. Seriously, if he’d started a thread on the topic he’d have been booted off his own messageboard. Damn the Man, Dirk! And thank you! (And another movie, Audition, gets added to the list….)