Eruditorum Press

Our Imposter Syndrome cancels out our Dunning-Kruger

Outside the Government: The Middle Men

, 27

It’s August 12th, 2011. “Party Rock Anthem” will never die. Never. In news, in the UK at least, it’s all riots, as protests over the death of Mark Duggan expand into riots in Tottenham, which in turn spark riots across the country. Cameron’s government responds with a strong law and order platform that includes such reasonable things as a six month prison sentence for stealing a case of bottled water. In the US, meanwhile, it’s mostly just reeling from the aftermath of the latest debt ceiling showdown. 
While on television. More perhaps than any other episode of Miracle Day, “The Middle Men” is a sequel to the previous. We’ve talked already about how Miracle Day is in many ways an expanded version of Children of Earth’s structure, with each pair of episodes serving as a distinct phase of the operation. But with “The Categories of Life” building to the cliffhanger it does, “The Middle Men” ends up having very little to do except to resolve its plot lines. And so we get the final disposal of Colin Maloney and the Cowbridge camp.
What’s odd, then, is how much of this episode feels at a slight disjoint to the previous one. Certainly they have dramatically different themes. “The Categories of Life” is straightforwardly an attack on particular political trends that builds towards a shock death. “The Middle Men,” on the other hand, is making a more philosophical point. The phrase “middle man” appears twice, once in reference to Colin, and the other time as a self-description of Ernie Hudson’s character. The thematic implications are in classic Miracle Day fashion, crashingly unsubtle. 
Although the particulars of how this is put together are, to say the least, elusive. Ernie Hudson’s character appears to be intended as a suggestion that the evil is not, in fact, individual actors but a fundamentally corrupt system. And yet Colin is equally clearly held up as an individual evil. And the larger message of the story, hammered home in Gwen’s monologue before blowing up Cowbridge, in Ralph’s intervention to save Esther and Rex, and, in one of the story’s few moments of grace and subtlety, in the nameless camp worker who silently aids Gwen’s escape, is the power of individual actions and defiance in fighting institutional corruption. And in many ways this is a strong point of the episode. It is, after all, a sensible transition – “The Categories of Life” is about institutional horror, and “The Middle Men” offers a meaningful response to it. 
Which ought to render Ernie Hudson’s character a more substantive villain than he is. His entire speech about a vast and faceless system, after all, cuts against the moral message of the story. Everything else is declaring that, actually, the system isn’t what matters, the willingness of individuals to take a stand or to remain violently complicit with the system is. And yet he’s not really challenged – instead he’s given a fairly significant voice within the narrative, serving as the major bit of exposition for the story, even if that exposition amounts to little more than a contextless word that could mean anything.
…

Continue Reading

A Secret Story (The Last War in Albion Part 52: Wein and Wrightson’s Swamp Thing)

, 16

This is the second of a currently unknown number of parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. Finding volume 2-6 are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: French postmodernists Deleuze and Guattari used vegetable metaphors to argue against the notion of fixed identity, while Alan Moore got a phone call from Len Wein, acting as a representative of the assemblage known as DC Comics.
“It’s a secret story. It’s a story of two brothers.” – Neil Gaiman
Figure 382: Detective Comics gave DC
Comics its name, was the reason Jack
Liebowitz had a financial stake in the
company, and, in its first issue, featured
an appallingly racist cover.
The Time Warner subsidiary known as DC Comics has its origins in the merger between National Comics, itself a merger of two companies initially formed in the mid-1930s by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, a World War I veteran turned pulp writer, and All-American Publications, which, at the time of their merger was co-owned by Jack Liebowitz, who had also come to own National Comics after forcing Wheeler-Nicholson out. National Comics’ two major publications were Action Comics and Detective Comics, the latter of which was the title that had given Liebowitz a stake in the company, as he underwrote its publication. All-American Publications was a 1938 partnership between Liebowitz and Max Gaines, and published a number of other significant characters: the Flash, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman, most notably. The companies, due to the shared presence of Liebowitz, were always stablemates, but after Liebowitz bought Gaines out, leaving him free to create the competing EC Comics, they officially merged into one company in 1944 under the official name of National Perodical Publications, although they were by this time generally referred to as DC Comics, a name they’d officially adopt in 1977. 
During its early days, unlike what would eventually become its sole major competitor, DC invested hard in superheroes, churning out characters to follow its initial smash success with the adventures of Superman in Action Comics. This began with Batman, created by Bill Finger, with Bob Kane on art, which appeared in Detective Comics, and eventually expanded to a large and familiar stable of characters. The breadth and success of this line meant that when superheroes went out of fashion at the end of World War II, DC, unlike Marvel/Timely, did not entirely abandon superheroes, publishing title featuring Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman continually through the 1940s and 50s. And when the superhero comic proved a useful way of getting around the censorship imposed on the industry in the wake of psychologist and public intellectual Frederic Wertham’s 1954 attack on comic books, it was DC that jumped back upon that bandwagon, developing new versions of many of its old superhero properties and eventually, in 1960, teaming several of them up in the Justice League of America, a move that prompted Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to create the Fantastic Four for Marvel.
…

Continue Reading

“Television causes…Not smartness!”: The Little Dictator! Let Sleeping Top Secrets Lie

, 1

There is, believe it or not, an upper limit to how much forced zaniness I can handle in Dirty Pair. As it turns out, that tolerance threshold is somewhere around “Mouse Nazis”.

This episode is pretty much the inverse of “What? We’re Heinous Kidnappers!”. Like the earlier story, this absolutely doesn’t work in any conceivable respect, except this time it’s the first half that’s an unwatchable disaster and the second half that features one or two intriguing bits of erudition. Let’s just get the big one out of the way right off the bat: The plot is, ironically enough, insufferably dumb and idiotic. There’s a very fine line between “offbeat and clever idea” and “unbelievably annoying idea”, and this episode leaps across that line with boundless enthusiasm. For the first time on Dirty Pair, absolutely none of the humour feels natural or appropriate: Kei and Yuri’s incessant quips about vacations and bonus pay, disarmingly cute and endearing in “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys” and “Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always be brand New” now just feel strained and overused, and that’s just one example. There’s an overwhelming, and unsettling, feeling of the show trying far, far too hard to be “wacky” and the whole thing just comes across as stilted.

The 3WA gets overrun by an army of mice who want to form Mouse Nazi Germany with swastikas and everything! Aren’t we clever! Mughi (who we’ve retconned from being an advanced sentient extraterrestrial being to a genetically engineered house pet) is terrified of mice! Isn’t that so funny? Let’s have Nanmo fly in at the last second and shoot some stuff to save the day because robots! Everyone in the building is shockingly cruel to Kei and Yuri, who spend half the runtime throwing temper tantrums, breaking things or talking about boys, vacations and special bonuses! Those girls sure are silly! We even have our own more-than-vaguely racist comedy relief Chinese stereotype now, who naturally will go on and on about ancestors and Chinese history and is actually named Chan, because those funny Chinese people across the pond are quirky and strange and we don’t quite understand them.

You get the picture. Frankly, fuck this.

There is, obviously, an attempt at meta-commentary about the novel and short story Flowers for Algernon here. This episode is trying to do something similar to what “Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal” did by referencing a familiar plot, mashing it up with a mixture of different motifs and signifiers and then from there exploring themes that build off of the ones in the original work, but are fundamentally separate from them. However, it can’t even do that right, because this episode isn’t *referencing* Flowers for Algernon, it *is* Flowers for Algernon, down to the plot centring around a genetically engineered laboratory mouse with artificially enhanced intelligence who is actually called Algernon.

(The story, for those who haven’t read it, concerns a janitor named Charlie Goodwin who undergoes the same treatment as the titular Algernon, swiftly gaining and then losing remarkable intelligence, and is about how people treat him differently every step of the way.…

Continue Reading

Othering Thursday

, , , , , , , , , , , 5

Someone called ‘Bright Coat and Bravado’ (you can guess their favourite Doctor), posted this on tumblr.  Here’s a snippet:

I have a serious problem with  the “Cartmel Masterplan”. It’s not really about Looms, if you’ll believe that. It’s about The Other.

I can’t fucking stand the idea that the Doctor – or anyone – is “destined for greatness”. 

I posted the following off-the-cuff response (which I reproduce here, opportunistically, because I quite liked it when I read it back):

On the whole, I love the Cartmel era, and have a lot of affection for the Virgin New Adventures… but I don’t like the idea of the Doctor as the recycled ‘Other’.

I don’t like the idea of him being ‘exceptional’ for his society.  Much as he is bound to be exceptional from a human standpoint, I think that should always be because of what he does rather than what he is.  I like the idea of him as someone who failed in his home context – “…scraping through with 51% at the second attempt” – and being a bit rubbish, a bit of a dilettante, a bit of a second-rater, a bit of a fartaround.  Probably because I feel like one of those myself.  But that’s okay.  I hate the winners vs losers view of life.  I hate the idea that one’s worth is determined by one’s ‘success’ in the competition of life, in carving a niche for oneself in a hierarchy.  I still more hate the idea of those kinds of judgements being made without taking into account the fact that some people start off at higher rungs and with greater advantages.  The Doctor should be someone who started off at such a high rung but who proved unsuited for it because of his infinite distractability, his vagueness and his inability to ‘play the game’… and also because of the moral sense – and the imperative to be a social actor – that he acquires from his involvement, from his breaching of the walls of the enclosed and reactionary envelope of Gallifrey, from his adventures and researches and friendships ‘out there’ in the muck and strife and pain of the universe.

The transformation of him into the reincarnation of a godlike founder figure from mythological pre-history injects a 80s/90s ‘epic’ sensibility into a 60s/70s ‘rebel’ storyline.  It is a post-defeat rationalisation overwriting an artefact that originated at a time of struggle.  The Doctor-as-drop-out-from-the-ruling-class is an (admittedly imperfect) artefact of 1969.  It gets renewed – even intensified – in 1976.  And then it gets downplayed and downplayed until – interestingly enough – Holmes gets his hands on it again at the end of the Trial in 1986.  But in the run up to the ‘long-90s’, Cartmel et al lay the groundwork for a potential vitiation of it.  Even as that crew take the show to angrier and bolshier territory than its has visited for quite some time, they’re also utiling an affect from various cultural strands that bigs the Doctor up and fetishizes him, and his ‘power’. 

…

Continue Reading

Comics Reviews (July 2nd and 9th, 2014)

4

Since we have two weeks of comics here, I’m doing two picks of the week. No idea if both or either are from this week, last week, or what.


All-New X-Men #29

After an issue where I felt utterly lost we get one I understand, at least. Not sure about the ending, mind you – the time travel is still way too muddy and full of characters I can’t keep straight. But the Angel/X-23 love plot is a nice ending. I’m still not loving this particular phase of Bendis’s X-Men, though. Hoping that whatever shakeups are planned with Last Will and Testament of Charles Xavier get things flowing a bit better. C

Avengers #32

These “Steve Rogers moves ever forward in time” issues are… not exactly a solid gold premise, even as the individual issues are pretty good. There’s an increasing sense of sound and fury in Hickman’s run that’s worrisome – the mysteries and secrets are stacking ever higher, with each issue being more and more setup and very little payoff. There’s a staleness that can set into a book when it goes too long without a feasible jumping on point, and we’re at thirty-two issues since the last usable one. I suspect that, when all is said and done, Hickman’s Avengers run will be looked at as something of a let-down, and as a wasted opportunity in terms of feeding out of or into the movies. C-

Captain Marvel #5

A book that feels like it’s been rolling along at a simmer for a bit too long finally bursts out and does something interesting. There are satisfying echoes of the start of Messner-Loebs’s Wonder Woman run here – the balance between alien weirdness and real drama is satisfying. I wish some of the plot revelations had come earlier – I suspect this arc could have lost an issue without serious damage. But we appear to have reached the parts of the arc that are important and that do belong there, and that’s exciting and fun. Still not one of my favorite books, but this is a solid issue that delivers some real entertainment. B+

Daredevil #0.1 and #5

A pair of Daredevil issues, each of them functionally one-shots. I believe 0.1, also called Road Warrior, is a reprint of a digital “Infinite Comic” – certainly the panel layout seems to suggest that. (No splash pages, and every page bisects neatly at the halfway point) It’s a prequel to the current Daredevil run, and is, like most of Waid’s Daredevil, a perfectly satisfying little adventure. #5 fills in some backstory on Foggy Nelson that was left mysterious for four issues, and is… a perfectly satisfying little adventure. It’s hard not to wonder if Waid’s Daredevil is on a downward slope at this point – certainly nothing in the six issues so far of the San Francisco iteration suggests the book has a raison d’etre. Pleasant, but unambiguously for the sorts of fans with large pull accounts. B-

Lazarus #9 (Pick of the Week)


The conclusion to an arc, and the thing that jumps out at me the most is that you can still basically jump in here and understand everything that’s going on.…

Continue Reading

Outside the Government: The Categories of Life

, 27

It’s August 5th, 2011. Yep. LMFAO again. In news, terrible flooding strikes Thailand, the US manages one of its periodic narrow aversions of global economic catastrophe by increasing its debt ceiling, but suffers a downgrading to its credit rating anyway, and some guy named Mark Duggan is killed by the police in London, but really, what are the odds that that’s going to go absolutely terribly. 
While on television, Miracle Day reaches the halfway point. “The Categories of Life” is a ruthless, effective thing. It is not quite a surprising piece of television – it is an episode built around major character death, which is by this point an absolutely bog standard trick that television pulls. But Jane Espenson has been around the block more than enough times to execute it correctly, and “The Categories of Life” is a well-worked example, with the standard approach of focusing the episode heavily on the character you’re about to off, and initially making it appear that they’re going to be newly minted as a primary character before unexpectedly killing them.
There is a certain degree to which this is an inherently flawed practice, especially given how common the episode structure is. The use of shock deaths as a default way of adding tension to a show has become a cliche and a crutch – an easy way to generate the feel of something being a “major episode.” Torchwood has been plenty guilty of this in the past, most infamously with the finale to Season Two, but it’s hardly a Torchwood-specific vice. 
The most infamous version of this phenomenon, named by comics-writer Gail Simone in reaction to a particularly grim plot twist in an issue of Green Lantern, is the trope of “women in refrigerators,” a trope whose naming serves to identify and condemn the tendency to use female characters for the job of being gratuitously killed in order to anger and motivate male characters. And the killing of Vera Juaraez, the series’ most promising new character, in order to give Rex some more man pain, fits squarely and frustratingly into this tradition, so much so that the means of her death – being incinerated in an oven – has to go down as the most bitter joke Jane Espenson has ever written. 
And yet for all of this, “The Categories of Life” bristles with a potential not previously seen within Miracle Day. Part of this is the fact that Miracle Day has been consciously configured to take character death off the table. Shock character death is, it has to be admitted, a materially different trick in a show where nobody can die, and the fact that the previous episodes contained three separate instances of a character who visibly should be dead being shown to be alive, including the gruesome eyeball-in-a-crushed-car scene at the end of “Escape to LA,” further emphasized the illusion that this was a show that wasn’t going to kill characters. And so killing Vera feels wrong and shocking in a way that other television deaths don’t. 
…

Continue Reading

“I just wanted to make a phone call.”: Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New

, 5

Thankfully, it doesn’t take long for Dirty Pair to get back on its feet.

“Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New” is a proper farce, and one of the most memorable episodes in the series yet. The show’s rapid-fire humour and beat-perfect comic timing is the best it’s been since “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death”, a story which this outing is definitely in company with. This time, though, the show doesn’t need to evoke any external works to make its point: This episode works purely on Dirty Pair logic and Dirty Pair logic alone. And, if you can keep yourself together through the manic assault of comedy, you might just notice the series has gone and said something really profound about the nature of narrative and the roles of protagonists.

“Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New” is a story about Kei and Yuri trying to get ready for a party. It is also a story about Kei and Yuri being mistaken for 50-year old bank robbers, accidentally kidnapping a group of schoolchildren and being chased all over a city by planetary armed forces. Not only does this week’s episode intuitively understand what last week’s utterly failed to, it exaggerates it beyond infinity: Our poor girls are so chronically and ridiculously unlucky they can’t even go shopping without stumbling into some gigantic disaster. A farce is such a perfect match for Dirty Pair’s setting because this is the structure it operates under already: It’s either unfathomably tragic or unbelievably funny the amount of inconceivable destruction left in Kei and Yuri’s wake, and thankfully the show went with unbelievably funny because really it all just works better that way.

Speaking of humour, it’s maybe worth pointing out the jokes here are *extremely* bawdy and sexual, more so than I think the show’s ever been before. I could see that rubbing some people the wrong way, especially in the opening scene where the girls complain to Gooley about not being able to get dates and how their interest in the party basically boils down to them being able to chase men. However, as is the case with most things on this show, it becomes in my opinion extremely easy to explain away and forgive this once you realise Kei and Yuri are making fun of themselves. My absolute favourite bit comes near the end when a despondent and exhausted Kei and Yuri, having just outwitted an entire planet’s armed forces, escaped a mob of spoiled children and singlehandedly captured the real bad guys, are desperate to take off, fearing they’ll be late for their party. Naturally, they are promptly surrounded by reporters who all want exclusive interviews with the beloved duo, and their panicky excuses to get out of doing primetime TV are pure gold: “We already have plans for tonight! We hate kids! Look! A naked woman!”.

(Also note how in an additional bit of cynical self-deprecation, the pubic personas of the Lovely Angels are shown to be idolized by children, but the kids are horrible to the real Kei and Yuri.…

Continue Reading

Déjà bloody vu

, , , , , , , , , , , , 1

I was going to do this post all over again… (this is what we do with Palestine: say the same bloody things over and over again, because the same bloody things keep happening over and over again)… but Richard Seymour has already done it for me, very succintly.

(EDIT: I originally posted a screencap of Seymour’s tweet of a screencap.  But Seymour has now posted the original screencap itself on his blog.  So it seems only fair to remove my screencap of his tweet and just link to him.  Not that he needs hits from me.) …

Continue Reading

A Presumptious Dilettante’s Five Belated Eggs

, , , , , , , , , 0

The more I think about it, the more I think a humble, sympathetic, non-domineering, non-entryist engagement with the anti-oppression movements springing up around issues of gender identity (i.e. Trans issues) is going to be absolutely crucial for the Left in the coming years. 

This isn’t just a moral imperative.  Sure, the Left must stand with the oppressed.  Always.  By definition.  Otherwise why bother being on the Left?  Otherwise, what does ‘The Left’ mean?  But it’s also a tactical imperative.  The system must be attacked at its weakest points.  The righteous and rightful rage felt by many on the axis of Trans oppression is absolutely one of the system’s weakest points.  It hits people where they live: in their bodies.  Bodies are oppressed, disciplined, punished, curtailed, invaded, wounded and even dissected by capitalism… and it behoves the Left to realise that this happens in arenas outside the sites of direct capitalist production.  This is one of those things that everyone formally ‘gets’ and then puts to one side.  That’s not good enough.  Capitalist oppression is total, hegemonic, far-reaching and omnipresent.  It is intimately and demonstrably bound up with oppression along lines of personal identity, bodily autonomy, bodily identity, sexual identity, gender, sexuality, and race.  This is why intersectionality is a crucial concept that’s only going to get more crucial.  The task will be to relate all these issues to class.  Not so that they can be subsumed, assimilated and/or digested, but so the analysis wielded by the Left can be enlarged, educated, made stronger and more inclusive.  That is an end in itself – if we know what our ultimate goal really is.

The good news is that class is as intimately bound up with these things as the Left thinks it is.  The bad news is that we have to stress the importance of class without playing ‘issue trumps’ (i.e. our preferred axis of oppression is more crucial or ‘primary’ or ‘causal’ than yours… and, by the way, how dare you stress the issues that hit you where you live before the issues that we think of as theoretically more important???). 

But there is more good news.  We can stress how capitalism, and thus class exploitation along lines of work and wage exploitation (which is basically just another way of saying ‘capitalism’), generates and exacerbates such oppression… for the simple reason that it bloody does; it’s the currently regnant form of class society, and we can adduce powerful facts to show how the structure of class society generates sexism, female oppression, gender essentialism, the reduction of people to categories, the reification of socially constructed categories into hegemonic ‘facts of life’, etc. 

That’s why this is so good.  There isn’t anything in there that constitutes new and startling revelation, but it’s a great little summary/primer/starting-point, from the perspective of a totally ‘on-side’ Marxism.  I found it so anyway – speaking as someone who personally embraces the elderly Goya’s maxim “I’m still learning”.

One (related) crucial issue to remember… and here I’d proffer the great work of Silvia Federici… is that the oppression of women is not an optional extra with capitalism, nor is it a by-product of capitalism. …

Continue Reading

Outside the Government: Escape to LA

, 6

The schedule for this week will be Miracle Day on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, comics reviews on Thursday, Last War in Albion on Friday, and Waffling on Sunday. 
It’s July 29th, 2011. LMFAO remain at number one. Forever. In news, Amy Winehouse dies, Congressman David Wu resigns over a rape allegation, and Congress decides to ignore the ten year term limit on FBI Directors to keep Robert Mueller in place.
While on television, more Torchwood. “Escape to LA” falls in an interesting place within Miracle Day. Not to look ahead too much, but with the next installment, “The Categories of Life,” Miracle Day finally hits a point where you can say with a straight face that it’s working. Which is to say that “Escape to LA” is another component of the awkward start that doomed Miracle Day. And yet in almost every regard the worst of that start is over, and the series is finally starting to get to the things it’s going to do well. It’s just that it doesn’t actually do them well yet, leaving that as a topic for Wednesday.
Here, though, what is interesting is that “Escape to LA” is in many ways a bespoke episode. In hindsight this has been an element of past episodes – the entire series thus far has been unusually focused on single episode storytelling: the instantly disappearing Soulless, the single episode villain of Lyn Peterson in “Rendition,” et cetera. But “Escape to LA” takes this to, perhaps, its furthest extent. Ellis Hartley Monroe, Jack’s father, and C. Thomas Howell’s nameless assassin are all single episode characters who exist to show up, make the plot of this single episode work, and then disappear into thin air. 
This is, to be sure, an odd move for a ten-part series focused on a metaplot. Some of it is clearly motivated by a desire to do some stunt casting, although it’s not clear that Mare Winningham or C. Thomas Howell are particularly big gets. They’re both competent and respectable American actors, and the US equivalent of Torchwood getting, say, Richard Briers for an episode. But the decision to structure entire episodes around the ability to get them in for two days of filming creates a bizarre effect, in that “Escape from LA” ends up weirdly disconnected from the episodes on either side of it even as it picks up the plot from “Dead of Night” and sets up the plot of “The Categories of Life.”
Perhaps the most bewildering is Rex’s father, a scene that exists in strange isolation from everything around it. In an episode that hinges in a large part on the consequences of Esther’s inability to leave her family alone, Rex’s decision to visit his father (a father who is clearly known to the CIA, as Esther says she found mention of him in his file) has no consequences or implications whatsoever. It’s barely set up, little yet paid off. And within the scene there’s precious little content – clearly Rex and his father do not get along and never have, but there’s not even a hint of why.
…

Continue Reading

«‹ 215 216 217 218 ›»