Elizabeth Sandifer

A guest post by Noah Berlatsky, from his new book The Hammer Dracula Films: And Other Vampires. Which is great stuff that you should check out.

You can’t see a vampire in the mirror for the simple reason that the vampire is your reflection. The monsters onscreen are projections of human desires. Hammer audiences lick their fangs with Christopher Lee at all the delicious bosoms beckoning. Dracula pierces the exposed neck with a phallic oomph, just as the vampire hunter drives his rigid stake into the nubile beauty’s trembling form. Lust and blood drive both the living and undead; the population of Stephen King’s Jerusalem’s Lot is murdered by proliferating vampires, and then murdered again by the heroic vampire killers. First the vampires rage through the town like a consuming fire, and then, at the end of the book, they are themselves consumed. The same townspeople are destroyed once, then twice— as if the first time was so much fun it needed to be rewound and watched again.

In King’s Salem’s Lot (1976), the fact that the vampires are in fact, just us, is the point of the novel and its horror. King hates the people of Jerusalem’s Lot, and loves that hatred with the same vicious delectation of his vampire antagonist, Straker. The people in the town cheat on each other, loathe each other, lust after each other, betray each other and beat their children. They are squalid, loathsome, mean-spirited and ugly—King shines his narrative upon them, and they hiss and burn and thrash feebly, just like they do when they become vampires and are pulled out of their sleep and into the sunlight.  As police chief Parkins says before he heads out of town, Salem’s Lot “ain’t alive…That’s why he came here.”

It’s dead, like him. Has been for twenty years or more. Whole country’s goin’ the same way. Me and Nolly went to a drive-in show up in Falmouth a couple of weeks ago, just before they closed her down for the season. I seen more blood and killin’s in that first Western than I seen both years in Korea. Kids was eatin’ popcorn and cheerin’ ‘em on.” He gestured vaguely at the town, now lying unnaturally gilded in the broken rays of the westering sun, like a dream village. “They prob’ly like bein’ vampires.”

The kids Parkins describe eagerly watching carnage on those movie screens are, of course, much like the kids eagerly turning the pages of Stephen King’s novel. The magic of the vampire narrative is that it reaches out and bites you, changing you into the fiendish antagonist you are supposed to hate and despise. Readers, like Parkins, wait with leering, moralistic satisfaction for evil to be done, and for the deaths that follow —first of the humans who are vampires, then of the vampires who are human.  If you enjoy Salem’s Lot, then you all, along with those townspeople, “probl’ly like bein’ vampires.”

To like being a vampire is, first of all, to enjoy killing.…

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Well that was a pleasant surprise, albeit on the whole more pleasant than surprising. It’s not quite fair to say that bottle episodes are easy to do well, because they’re very definitely not, but once you’ve got them working they tend to end up with enough momentum to pull off impressive things. “Detained” is a case in point. It doesn’t shed Class’s persistent problem of never aspiring to anything more than cliches done well, but it does at least manage to take the cliche to an interesting place that’s based firmly on what Class can do as a show.

What that is, given the singular lack of an original idea at any point so far this season, is good character work with an impressive ensemble. Which is maybe an obvious thing to say about a bottle episode – character work is what they inevitably end up hinging on. But “Detained” is a bracing reminder of just how good a cast of characters the show has. Even Matteusz and Charlie, who have generally been the weak links in the cast, get moments to shine here. The use of Matteusz as the first person to pick up the stone on one level speaks to his marginalization (and Ram also points out his odd status), but it also works, and not just because it doubles to establish him as the one of the crew who does things like step up and pick up a weird alien rock to throw it away.

Charlie, on the other hand, gets the last slot in the “pick up the stone and confess shit” list, and thus gets the episode’s primary hero moment, something he’s not actually gotten prior to this episode. This is interesting. On the one hand, he for the most part doesn’t behave how you’d expect. I mean, the existence of contours between regalness and vulnerability is obvious, but they come in fairly interesting places. On the other, most of these places are absences as opposed to presences. Other than the revelation of his claustrophobia, the most interesting things revealed are things like his relative lack of anger. Which is legitimately interesting, and yet still somehow falls short of developing him as a character. Still, it’s progress in what had been the show’s weakest area.

The other three characters, meanwhile, are also generally well-served. Of them Ram has the oddest episode, largely reverting to type in the face of the stone’s (somewhat contrived) ability to make everyone in the room angry. But his surliness sparks interesting confrontations as well. His breakup with April is devastating in the way that it’s at once obviously self-defeating and utterly in character, and the brash recklessness with which he picks up the stone is fantastic.

April is similarly good – I loved her account of herself after her confession, which highlights the sort of emotional maturity and practicality that makes her such an interesting character. But even more than that, I liked the way in which she still made mistakes, especially in her anger.…

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We are pleased to announce a new episode of Pex Lives, in which Kevin and James forget to watch The Mind Robber and talk about the smoldering wreck that is the 2016 election instead. That’s available here for your listening pleasure, or through most standard podcast apps. …

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Still not a spectacular insta-classic, but at least it’s an episode that stays away from most of the obvious things it could be as well. The double-threat structure means that there’s building momentum at all moments of the plot, which is good. Less good is the no-doubt budget-required decision to have two of the three plot strands consist of people standing in a room urgently discussing the plot. The biggest problem here is probably the strand consisting of Tanya and her parents, which ends up being in the kind of awkwardly stupid position of ineffectually relaying information between the two actual plots. But none of the plots are particularly high on urgency – it’s a significant problem that the flowers plot requires Dorothea to simply declare that they’re running out of time in order to garner momentum, and a pretty big one that Ram and April are essentially left with nothing to do but walk around for most of the episode.

So that’s what keeps it just shy of genius. On the other hand, however, there’s what the show always has, which is a dogged determination to be interesting. For instance, Ram and April’s relationship continues to be pitched well. It’s very eager to shout “WE ARE NOT FALLING INTO CONVENTIONAL TROPES OF TEEN ROMANCE,” which is probably irksome to some people, most probably teenagers, but the flipside of that is that it’s legitimately not falling into the conventional tropes of teen romance. Personally, I hope the season ends without them saying they love each other. That would be fantastic. (Also, though I missed a fair chunk of the details of the dialogue, the conversation about Ram’s Sikh heritage was a hoot.)

Even better are Charlie and Ms. Quill, who continue to go in unexpected directions. Has there ever, in the history of Doctor Who, been such a concentrated effort to take violent revolutionary politics as a serious moral position? I mean, it’s far from perfect, and the show would be wildly more interesting if Quill were presented as a hothead who considers violence a legitimate tactic as opposed to an ideological warrior for whom killing her enemies is her default setting. Indeed, and this is obviously a viewpoint influenced by political concerns that the episode couldn’t possibly respond to, I think equating violent resistance to slavery with the fetishization of violence is grotesque and irresponsible. But I still appreciate that this is a show willing to take the accusation of slavery completely seriously in the first place. And I want to be clear, I like Quill’s tendency to fly off the handle in the general case – her last scene with Dorothea is brilliant stuff. And I like that she’s being freed from her slavery now and that we get to see her unchained. I just wish that the surprisingly nuanced portrait of revolutionary violence was subtler yet.

But for the most part this is still another worthy but unspectacular example of the show’s default setting. It’s not leaning on any overly obvious plot structures, which is nice, but it’s not replacing them with interesting ideas either – just with a different sort of autopilot and wallpaper.…

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The Tower, at its most optimistic (which is not very) offers the destruction of illusions. I don’t know about you, but I feel like burning some shit down.

First, then: nobody is to blame for Trump’s election save for the people who voted for him. A failed resistance is not at fault for the actions it tried to prevent. Everyone in the circular firing squad is in the end wrong. The awful truth is that there is nothing you could have done to stop him. Let’s start, then, by jettisoning the illusion that said otherwise. The arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice. The moral universe has no arc. The moral universe does not even exist. History is a butcher without face or agency – a thing that simply happens to people. There is no individual level response to it. Your relationship to history is not one of subject to narrative, but of meat to predator.

Accordingly, there is no refuge to be found in any of the liberal platitudes offered as possible modes of resistance. There is no benefit to be found in giving him an open mind. There is no point in appealing to the checks and balances of the very system that has just given him material power. There is no value in hoping that history is going to suddenly develop a benevolent streak. “What do we do for the next four years?” is as stupid a question as “What do we do about Syria?” was. We don’t do anything. We cannot stop history. It is going to proceed with a grim inevitability, as deterministic and implacable as planetary motion.

The flip side of that is that history has no moral legitimacy beyond the mere fact of its existence. The material fact that when Donald Trump orders a drone strike there will be a drone strike is not “right” or “just.” It’s just true, in the same way that a bullet is true. There is no moral dimension to mere existence. That is not to embrace the idiot fantasy of “#notmypresident” or anything. Of course he’s the President. But this is only true as a material fact, and only material concerns follow from it.

Put another way, being President has not made Trump any more morally justifiable. Nor has it made him any more competent. Even for a right-wing authoritarian he’s a fucking moron driven by easily manipulable pathologies. The material consequences of this are by and large easy to figure out, at least in the broad strokes. Spoiler: it goes badly, and not just for his targets. Deaths in the millions are the best case scenario. The worst is billions. You can’t change that either.

But that does not mean that there is no resistance to be had. It’s merely to understand that resistance starts as an individual program. The fact that there is no intrinsic morality to Trump’s material power does not mean that we cannot ascribe morality. Indeed, allow me to do so with utter bluntness: Trump is fucking evil.…

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No comics reviews this week. I just can’t. We’ll see about next week when we get there, but I was thinking of winding down the feature anyway, so peg your expectations accordingly. Instead, here’s this week’s Super Nintendo Project.

The future arrived in late September 1996, untethered to any major gift-giving occasion. My assumption in hindsight is that my mother, giddily triumphant after scoring one on the sly and apparently correct logic that Toy Works was still a place that would get a shipment but was not a place where they’d sell out in thirty seconds, couldn’t resist giving it to me immediately. It seems as though I must have known the Nintendo 64 was coming, just because it’s hard to imagine myself as a person who didn’t know things like that a new Nintendo console was coming out, but I honestly can’t even remember a trace of anticipation for the future. Perhaps that’s just where I was in late 1996. Certainly it was something of a low point for me, as adolescent depression’s teeth sunk in deepest and my academic performance began to degrade in the face of a simple and blunt inability to drag myself through page after page of rote busywork.

So it’s perhaps not a surprise that I was at the time unimpressed by the future. But oh boy was I. I beat Super Mario 64, but my desire to go back and collect further stars was essentially nonexistent. My objections were numerous and diffuse. I saw the “hunt for six stars in a level” schtick as little more than flagrant cover for the fact that there weren’t actually very many levels in the game, found the camera thoroughly unsatisfying, and hated holding the weird M-shaped controller by the middle and right prongs.

Most, though not all of this, was unfair, at least as a judgment of the future, in that it amounted to peculiarities of the early-version tech involved in Super Mario 64. Yes, the multiple stars per level were a workaround to deal with the fact that the cartridge could only hold so many of of the big 3D levels, but with subsequent games in the 3D star-hunt format this restriction loosened, and levels started getting the number of stars they could interestingly fit instead of six come hell or high water. The camera, likewise, gradually improved its basic AI, and the eventual switch away from the four-button C-Pad of the Nintendo 64 towards cameras controlled by a second analog stick took away most of the annoyance involved in Super Mario 64. Likewise the controller design, rooted in an understandable but still fundamentally erroneous guess that the D-Pad would remain the primary control mechanism for most games, was subsequently ditched, with future controllers, whether Nintendo’s or not, positioning the analog stick in more ergonomically pleasant locations.

(A side note on the multiple stars per level. On the one hand Super Mario 64 is focused on the search for a singular and defining object – a golden star around which entire worlds are organized.…

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Judging the first part of a two-parter is always a pain in the neck. (Remember when I thought Under the Lake had promise?) And there are other factors complicating this, like the nagging worry that Class isn’t ever going to transcend the fact that you can snarkily describe it as “The Sarah Jane Adventures with fucking.” Certainly we’re in familiar territory here, both in general and for Class, which is to say that we’re running through a fairly standard set of genre paces with a couple of unique spins. In this case, the basic mode is the mid-season finale, with the most obvious model being the “Surprise/Innocence” two-parter of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Class is at least consistently good at throwing itself into whatever it’s doing with zeal, and so four episodes in its reliance on old standards has consistently been outshone by the flare with which they’re being done. All the same, my fondest and most adamant hope for the second part of this, or at least for something in the back half of the season, is that we get an episode that’s actually doing something new instead of adding a bit of spice to a cliche.

All of which said, once again the cliche is very tasty. Ness continues to be very good at striking a balance between the show’s instincts towards taking place in a TV school and its instincts towards emotional realism. The scene among Ram, April, and her mother is probably the highlight in this regard, with Ram being perfectly pitched both as a genuinely decent guy (“I didn’t want her to think bad of you.”) and as a mildly rebellious “bad” kid (“I had some condoms.”) It’s a smart balance, and more to the point one that’s ultimately derived from Doctor Who’s own longstanding balance of melodrama and actual drama. (And, of course, from Buffy.) And there are other bits of genuine intelligence around this. The “April feeds back into Corakinus” beat is entirely expected. Corakinus asking to cuddle after sex, on the other hand, is absolutely inspired. (Less successful – Tanya’s “I think they had sex” seeming to exist entirely to set up the moronic “Ram and the Shadow Kin?” joke.)

This last parenthetical also brings us to the things the episode is doing that at least offer real potential for going in a boldly original direction. The most interesting thing the show has going for it remains the Charlie/Ms. Quill relationship, which is clearly being pushed gradually to the forefront. It’s frustrating that this is often some of the clumsiest writing, with Tanya and Matteusz getting to flail uselessly against Charlie’s conviction of his moral rectitude, both on the slavery issue and on the owning weapons of mass destruction issue. This sets up the odd phenomenon of a plot that’s simultaneously the show’s best hope of turning in something that really makes you sit up and take notice and that’s flopping around on the table unsatisfyingly.

In a similar and more successful vein is the new head teacher, Dorothea, who tragically isn’t played by Sophie Aldred or Jackie Lane, but who is otherwise charming.…

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Bitch Planet #9

Righteous and angry the way you want tis book to be, but… who’s Eleanor Doane again? I mean, the issue tells me somewhat, but clearly she’s a big part of the book’s underlying mythology, and, well, that’s always rough when a book’s as sporadic as this. This would work if it were coming out on an actual release schedule, but the “an issue every once in a while” is just killing it, and I’m increasingly contemplating switching to trade for it. 

Animosity #3

The meta-arc of this one is feeling cloudy – there’s a big jump between the second issue and the third, enough of one that I went back to the second to refresh my memory, which was a mistake because I’d forgotten just how clumsy the end of that issue was, making the jump even more jarring. But on a single-issue level this is golden – an unsettling and provocative look at animal-human relationships that’s an absolute joy to read. I suspect its problems quite fitting together will eventually overwhelm it, but for now this is a highlight. 

The Wicked + The Divine #23

An ambitious high-concept issue in which Gillen proceeds to get a bunch of real journalists to roleplay interviews with his characters and then write up those interviews as though they were real articles. There’s literal authorial self-insertion. Add to that some gorgeously lush portraits by Kevin Wada and you’ve got something that’s obviously a lot of fun, and that manages to seed hints for where the next arc of WicDiv is going as well. Shit like this is why this is one of the best books on the stands. …

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