It is not easy to be an outcast in the Dead Empire. Imagine a machine as complex as the world, constructed of a million cogs of brass and light and flesh. Imagine yourself as one of those cogs. Imagine trying to escape, as the teeth of other gears hold you in place. Imagine me.
When I was sixteen years old, my mother received an Imperial order. This was a rare occurrence in our small, ill-regarded slum. Of course, the Emperor sees all, so there's no reason he wouldn't have just as much a plan or purpose for the beggars and servants of my home than for high-born lords and ladies, but it never seemed to work out that way. Indeed, we had only the one Tube winding down from the upper levels of the city, bringing us the occasional summon or command or edict from the Imperial Bureaucracy. Our neighbor had received one a few years earlier, ordering him to change his name from Jessup to Michael, which he promptly obeyed. The next year, a friend of his addressed him by the old name, violating the order. He was not seen again.
So you can see, I think, that my mother was in no position to argue when the Tubeman came to our little shack and handed her one of those famous crimson envelopes. She reached to open it, but the Tubeman walked past her, and handed it to me. My mother (name: Maria Hent, Imperial Designate 604432Q, servant) made a sound in protest, but quieted at the Tubeman's warning look. He was not a cruel man, by any means, and had lived in our village his entire life (save the time he spent at the Imperial Academy), but he was still a member of the Bureaucracy, and he was law- and honor-bound to place the letter in the proper hand. My hand.
Unlike many of my young friends, I was an avid and able reader, and so it was very little trouble to decipher the black ink, placed with a firm and even hand, on the red envelope. "Alistair Hent, Imperial Designate 700000X. Open immediately." And so I did.
"Dear Alistair," (the letter read)
"I have waited, I think you can agree, a fair amount of time before sending this letter. Sixteen years is more time than many get, and sixteen more that I was, at first, inclined to allow you, given the severity of your crimes. Please know that I wish you no ill-will, re: your scheduled execution, and I hope that the feeling can be considered mutual.
That being said, I have no choice but to present you with, charge you, and convict you of the following treasonous acts, to be committed at undisclosed later dates:
The destruction of the Tube station at the Imperial district Quez17" - this being the slum where I had spent the previous, significantly less eventful, twelve years of life - "via jury-rigging of the letter redirection systems, destroying several vital Imperial orders in the process,
Evasion of an Imperially appointed Tubeman in the execution of his sacred duty,
The stealing of said Tubeman's Imperial vestments, and the impersonation of him thereof,
Various and sundry offenses against the Empire, to be detailed at future as they become relevant to the case at hand, and, most pressingly,
The destruction of the Dead Empire through the unlicensed and unauthorized use of the controlled substance known as 'Free Will'.
Those official charges are written in the most painfully dry of language, aren't they, my boy? In any case, I'm afraid it's all true, and the sentence, as you've probably gathered, is death. And so, my Imperial order is this: Hand this letter to the Tubeman, and let him lead you to the prison, where we can get this messy business over once and for all.
Cheers!
The Dead Emperor.
PS: No sneaky lying to the poor man and running off, eh? Be good."
There are many benefits to living in a society ruled by a man several years dead. There's no danger of him acting out of self-interest, no chance of him using his power to woo women or steal funds or what have you. You might think it would leave his orders horribly out of date, but that's easily fixed by only picking emperors imbued with the gift of prophecy, and only letting them issue orders for the period after their deaths. I had not, until now, known that the Dead Emperor was quite so whimsical in his writing style, of course. And I had never imagined that I might someday be named the enemy of a being who controlled armies, cities, and, it had always seemed, the threads of fate itself.
The Tubeman was looking at me, curiously. In a day or two, he would receive an order confirming the letter I had gotten, to ensure that I had not attempted to defy the Imperial order.
Unless, of course.... And the idea would never have come into my mind, you understand, would never have even dared to suggest itself to me... That I could lie. Disobey the order. Wait a few hours, and sabotage the Tube. I'd have to be clever to do it (I was clever), and I'd need a disguise (like his clothes) to escape afterward...
But it could be done. Would be done, even, if the crimes I had been charged with were accurate (and they always were). Had the Emperor expected me to simply give up my life? Did he think his subjects so servile? Or was this what he had expected or wanted, all along? It does not pay, I have found over the years, to second-guess the mind of a man who can see the future. But I held to the one truth I have desperately gripped these many years... I wanted to live.
I smiled at the Tubeman. "It says I'm to be given a tour of the tube station, m'lord. Right now."
He frowned at this, reached for the letter, but I held it back. Imperial orders are for ONLY the addressee, and not even the Bureaucracy is allowed to look at them. Shrugging, he turned away, gesturing me to follow. I took a moment to kiss my mother goodbye (not that she knew), and then followed along, already looking for weaknesses in the system.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Issue Two: Down and Out in Heaven and Hell, Pt. 1
The Invisibles
Volume One, Issue Two
"Down and Out in Heaven and Hell Pt. 1"
Synopsis
Dane McGowan, after being left on the streets of London by King Mob, quickly becomes a homeless beggar. After throwing a trash can through a store window in a fit of rage, he falls in with Tom O'Bedlam, a seemingly insane man who possesses certain magical powers - including the ability to render people invisible.
While being shown how to survive by Tom, Dane encounters The Hunt - a group of aristocrats who hunt and kill young people on the streets of London for sport. Avoiding them, Tom leads Dane into the undercity below London, where they smoke an apparently hallucinogenic blue mold that grows there. Dane sees the word "Barbelith" scrawled on a wall, and then has a mysterious experience that shares certain characteristics with an alien abduction.
Upon awakening from this trance, he finds himself and Tom in an alternate London, where zeppelins float over the city and unfamiliar fashions and statuary abound. While here, Tom appears to blank out all the lights of London, allowing Dane to see the stars. After this, Dane acknowledges that he would like to become Invisible.
Immediately after this, Dane reappears in the normal London, to see members of The Hunt bearing down on him with knives.
ELF, Elf, and elf
So, for reasons of time and clarity, I'm dropping the page-by-page thing I did for the first issue. It was a crutch, really - no need to organize thoughts when you can just lump them in by page.
That being said, let's start today with the first page of this issue, the first part of Dane McGowan's true descent into the world of the Invisibles, "Down and Out in Heaven and Hell."
And we start with a nutter talking in the park about the evil radiation is frying our brains and controlling our minds. It's all perfectly laughable stuff, of course... if maybe a little less so, knowing what we know about the sort of things that were happening to the human mind in Harmony House.
Specifically, he's worried about Extremely Low Frequencies, or ELFs. I might be diving too deep here, but I can't help but feel that there's a double meaning to that. Like I mentioned last time, Elves, fairies, the Fair Folk are all tied into the upper levels of reality in The Invisibles, higher-order consciousnesses unable to relate to their own. And there are also machine elves, common fixtures during hallucinations from certain drugs, described as "jewelled self-dribbling basketballs" that construct reality. More on reality altering/creating spheres or circles in a bit.
Down and out
So here we have young rebel Dane McGowan, brilliantly non-conforming by... dropping out of society. Going homeless, begging for food, getting sick, dying. Full of rage at the things he wants, can't have, and is disgusted at the world for producing. He's been effectively neutered, not by any malevolent force, but by the structure of society. If he wasn't being targeted for initiation into a glorious magical battle with the forces of evil, he'd be done for. Rebellion called off due to indifference and an unremarked death. Or maybe he'd get really unlucky, and get the attention of The Hunt.
The Hunt
Maybe I'm just a cynical bastard, but I find something blackly comic in the sequence that introduces us to The Hunt. There's just something about seeing those jolly good English lords and ladies - and their kids - all kitted out in their fox hunting regalia, sounding their horns - in the middle of downtown London. Of course, the conclusion isn't so funny, as they cut a young woman to shreds, just because they can, just because they're better than her.
The Wild Hunt, like the Fair Folk, is one of those old ideas that's always cropping up in stories. It's the prey/predator relationship at its most brutal: you run, we kill. Power abusing weakness, because that's what power's for. No wonder Tom's afraid of the dark magic of it, as the powerful men of the world exercise their privilege on the weak (as she beats her fists against a giant steel door marked "Private").
"Mad Tom is come to view the world again"
Confession: I've never read King Lear. Curse me for a Philistine if you like, but it's true. So until tonight, I'd missed the vast majority of the references built into the character Tom O' Bedlam when I read The Invisibles.
So, for the Philistines: In Lear, Tom O' Bedlam (which was old British slang for a madman - Bedlam being Bethlehem Hospital for the mad) is the guise adopted by Edgar, son of Gloucester, after his bastard brother Edmund frames him for the attempted murder of their father. Which is to say, he's a guise of madness into which a good and honest man retreats from the evils of the world. Later, he guides his blinded father to safety.
If you're following along on your Hero's Journey Bingo cards, Tom's introduction will let you cover up the "Mentor" spots (those of you who already filled in "Call to Adventure," "Rejection of the Call," "Supernatural Aid," and "Crossing of the Threshold" after our trip to Harmony House are obviously playing to win). And Tom's a good fit for that role in Dane's case, because here is a man who conforms to nothing. Completely absent from society, yet hale and hearty. And at the same time, completely divorced from and uninterested in the war the Invisibles are waging. He's the ultimate non-joiner.
Luan-Dun
So down we go with our mentor, into the city below the city. There's something about the places under cities that draws the imagination. Passing through that underworld on rigidly laid-out subway tracks, it's hard not to imagine the other tunnels, the ones we're not allowed into. The consequence of hundreds of years of human civilization all built on the same land, sinking into the earth.
Dane's pissed that someone's been here before, but isn't that the point? This isn't just caves in the mountains, this is humanity's place... for a while. Halfway, at least, until it intersects with a deeper/higher world. We'll be back here some day, to see those spires. Because what is it to be Invisible, if not to transcend and make meaningless the borders of humanity?
Barbelith
And then some aliens show up.
So, a few years before writing The Invisibles, Grant Morrison made a name for himself by taking a character called Animal Man and making him interesting. Animal Man - Buddy Baker to his friends - was a guy who was given powers by aliens that let him use the abilities of animals in his vicinity. That's it.
Morrison used this goofy character, with his goofy premise, to explore the relationship between fictional characters and reality. And he started with that origin, the one about the aliens. Early in his run, Buddy's origin gets rewritten - if memory serves, it was badly out of date due to the unchanging nature of comic book time, meaning Buddy had been Animal Man-ing around for twenty or thirty years, despite still being a young man. But the interesting part was that it was the aliens themselves who seemed to be doing the re-writing, acting, essentially, as editors to the story. They just look like aliens, because that's the shape that things from a higher reality (ours, in this case) look like when they dip into the fictional world to mess around with things.
So when Dane McGowan puffs on the blue mold, he sees, among other things, aliens. He also sees a solid circle of changing color. And his perception fragments into smaller and smaller boxes, but all of them hang under the banner of one word - Barbelith.
Go then, there are other worlds than these
And so we find ourselves in an alternate London, where statues of William Blake's Urizen (god of rationality and confining order) dominate the water, but which, as Tom O'Bedlam will remind you, are exactly as real as the London we've been reading about already. And it's here where Dane finally acknowledges that, yes, magic and knowledge and the stars in London are worth joining something. That being Invisible, unseen, outside of perception, is something he wants.
Of course, wanting to become Invisible and becoming Invisible aren't the same thing...
(That's actually almost exactly wrong. But you are going to have to show you want it. Cue the Hunt!)
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Issue One: Dead Beatles
One rule before I start: I'm trying to stay away from the extremely good annotations on Barbelith.com, for the simple reason that, if I started cribbing from them, I don't think I could stop (and it would call the whole point of this exercise into question).
At the same time, I want to reiterate that I am in no way an authority on Morrison or his work. Where this approaches insight, I'm certain I've pulled it from people who are. This is just my attempt, in my words, to try to understand why I love this book.
The Invisibles
Vol. 1
Issue 1
"Dead Beatles"
Synopsis: Young Liverpudlian Dane McGowan is in a state of rebellion against his teachers, his school, and his life. He's also seeing things - ghosts of the past, spirits of... something else. He eventually attempts to burn down his school, brutally attacking a teacher who earlier tried to reach out to him in the process. He is sentenced to serve time at a brutal reform school.
Meanwhile, the anarchist/terrorist/hero King Mob consults friends and associates for portents about his attempts to recruit Dane into his organization, The Invisibles, going so far as to commune with the spirit of John Lennon for insight.
The reform school is run by a Mr. Gelt, who wears black, eye-concealing glasses, and is obsessed with instilling conformity in his charges. Dane's friend, Gaz, is taken by Gelt, and is shortly after revealed to have been brainwashed. Gelt is shown to be agent of the shadowy extradimensional entities known as the Outer Church. Their representative, the King-in-Chains, demands Dane be brought to him, so that the Invisibles cannot get him.
The night he is brought to the school, Dane sneaks from his room and discovers that the school is castrating the boys sent there as part of the brainwashing program. Gelt attempts to subdue him, but before he can, he is attacked by King Mob, now decked out in his crazy battle helmet. KM kills several security guards (along with Gelt himself) and then burns the school to the ground. He drives Dane to London and then, when the boy declares he doesn't want to join The Invisibles, suddenly disappears, leaving Dane in the city... alone.
P1.
And right out the gate, we're playing with time, hinting that all of this has happened before and will happen again. "And so we return and begin again."
The speaker is Elfayed. He's an interesting guy - an old friend of our main man King Mob - the bald guy in the chair - and a key member of the larger Invisibles organization, but he'll only intersect with our main cast a few times. His attitude here - that the mystical is all well and good, but that common sense is just as, if even more, important, is going to be an important one to hold on to as things get stranger and stranger from here on out.
As to what he's saying, Khepri/Khepra is the sacred beetle god who pushes the sun across the sky in Egyptian mythology, like a dung beetle pushes his ball of crap. He's a symbol of transformation, unsurprisingly, of growth and change. New life growing out of manure. Filthy, but necessary. Which is presumably why Elfayed finds the idea of mummifying a scarab so amusing - unnatural, desperate preservation of something symbolizing change and rebirth.
p2.
Meet Dane McGowan. Reader surrogate. Rebel. Potential Buddha. Protagonist - although that designation will get slippier and slippier the further into this we get.
But really, all you need to know about him right now is this page, triumphant, one fist in the air, a molotov in the other, shouting FUCK at the world.
p3-4
And burning books. Burning down a whole library, in fact. Dane's not just striking out blindly, here, and not just at something he knew would burn. He's attacking received knowledge, all the facts and data that's being shoved into his head daily by a school he's too smart for.
Or he just wanted to see something burn, I don't know. But the graffiti says it all: King Mob's been here before. Nothing new.
p5
More apocalyptic, fiery imagery from our hero. Burning away the world. Well, that's the only way a new one can grow, right?
Dane feels like he's seen that graffiti before? Almost like a story you read a long time ago and just picked back up for the first time.
p6
Our introduction to Ms. Edith Manning, seen here near the end of her days. Edith's long life runs all around and through the history of our story (as she hints with her comments about knowing King Mob in 1924). Some of the first people we see in this story are the people it's already chewed up and ruined in some way or another - Edith here, and the Tom KM asks her to contact, especially.
This is also our first good look at King Mob, aka Gideon. Charming, manipulative, morbidly funny, driven and willing to sacrifice. Shamanistic James Bond. Loving his own, badass image.
But back to Edith. The Invisibles is, among other things, a time travel story. And Edith is one of our great time travellers. Not in the exciting, clocks-spinning-in-the-wrong-direction, calendar-pages-flipping-off-walls sense. Edith took the slow route, 95 years of it, from birth to now. Is it any wonder she's tired? Is it any wonder she doesn't want to be involved any more?
And note the reference to John-A-Dreams. What exactly happened to him, and where he is now, is going to be something we'll be revisiting more than once here.
p7-8.
Back to school! Big Malkie wants to talk about how revolutions get killed, strangled, turned into new authorities, but Dane just wants to leave a mark on the world.
Malkie is the kind face of authority for this issue (we'll be meeting the less kind faces later on). He's the carrot, encouraging intelligence, nurturing young minds, curtailing violent rebellion. He's also incredibly condescending, telling Dane not to become "another blank, brutalized face, drinking beer in front of the telly." But he's clearly out of touch, and he's doomed to fail - if those kind of appeals to his better nature and intellectual vanity appealed to Dane, he wouldn't really be Dane.
p9
Speaking of blank, brutalized faces, Mrs. McGowan gives a pretty good example here, doesn't she? She's almost a caricature of a bad mother, kicking the kid out on the street so she can have a date. In a lot of ways, Dane's whole life is caricature - the young rebel who doesn't know what he's trying to rebel against. In his mother's mirror, they're both twisted, ugly, mindless things.
This would be a stock story... except King Mob's shadow looms here, too.
p10 - 12
As Shakespeare would put it, "Enter ghost." And what ghost could haunt Liverpool more appropriately than John Lennon? Not the later, established Lennon, the instigator, the assassin's target. The young man seen here, chatting with Stu Sutcliffe, is on the verge of becoming John Lennon. In fact, what Dane's seeing (and really, it's less a haunting and more seeing time out of order - if those are even different things) is the moment before the revolution. One of these two men is about to fundamentally alter the way people think... but for now, he's just shooting the shit with his friend.
p13
Another haunting, of a more sinister type. Jack Frost, speaking German, laughing mirthlessly. It translates as something like "good earthly method" and "strong owner". The dead at 22 and 40 are Sutcliffe and Lennon.
"The Reverse of the Moon." We'll keep coming back to this. What's hidden behind the moon? It's always been there, and we've only ever seen half of it. What's been hidden from us for all that time? If I'm translating this right, it's the inner world, the emotional world. Seelisches land.
But Dane's not ready to play yet.
It's probably worth pointing out that Jack looks a bit like an elf or fairy here. The Fair Folk, inexplicable by human standards, cold and distant - at least from our point of view.
p14-15
So what do you do when you're seeing ghosts and being menaced by something that looks like a demon? Lash out!
Dane's still just a kid. He wants to get laid, he wants to drink, and he wants to show that he's smarter than everyone around him. So why not steal a car? Why not disconnect a system from the world, pull out it's protectors/antibodies/car alarms, and then start it back up - this time in your control?
p 16
And then take it joy-riding. His mates wish they could score some Ecstasy so they could strip the reality out of the situation - make it feel like a video game. Pretty sure Dane is already doing just fine on that score, though, as he weaves through the lines and the rules of traffic.
p17
"We can do anything we want with it. They should just be glad we didn't wreck it." Why shouldn't he? He took control of the system. It's his.
And here we are, back at school. Dane can't seem to get away from this place, can he? He's an ambitious young man, and he can see the channels the world wants to push him into. Time to fight back.
p18-19
And here's a couple of pages for those who were worried this wasn't going to get suitably weird.
Although it won't be clear for a few pages, King Mob is summoning John Lennon - not the physical spirit or man, but the idea of him, the pop god, to grant him a little insight. What that translates as is some psychedelic imagery, and something that reads like The Hero's Journey as built from Beatles' lyrics.
KM invokes Ganesh here, the remover of obstacles, the god of beginnings. So it's as much Morrison calling out to him at the start of this project as it is King Mob asking for help as he begins his ritual.
It's the last part of the second page that interests me (besides the wonderfully trippy artwork, anyway). At this level, we're moving back and forth between narration and god-speech, between the voice in King Mob's head and the Voice in his head, but I think this is where the prophecy proper starts, because it flows from "let me take you down" (after visiting an oracle?) through the grave (he is not dying) into rebirth, into an apple - knowledge/temptation. That's a concise way of describing what Dane's got ahead of him.
p20-21
I'm honestly not sure about the sincerity of Malkie's entreaties here. He's pleading for rationality, civility, but he's also begging Dane to stay within the system. By claiming to understand his frustration, he's drawing a box around him, ensuring him that what he's feeling is normal, natural.
But (and here I am dipping into spoiler territory) Malkie's not just Malkie, is he? He's an Invisible, presumably sent to keep an eye on Dane. So is he really trying to reach out to the boy, take a non-violent tack to his recruitment? Or is the kind-hearted teacher a goad, prodding the kid toward the violent escape of the Invisibles?
p22
The judge here labels Dane's acts as "far beyond the limits of what might be regarded as legitimate youthful rebellion against authority." Well, no shit, yerhonner. Wasn't that the point? It's normal for bad boys to talk back to the teacher and nick a car and maybe even start a fire. That's within the lines. But beating the shit out of a teacher and trying to blow up the school? That's where Dane McGowan wants to be.
The judge is a lovely piece of authoritarian snobbery. An aristocrat through and through, and in The Invisibles "aristocrat" might as well be "bad guy." There's also the first hint here that the the government, the system is a full part of this conflict - they may not know EXACTLY what's happening at Harmony House, but they like the results they're getting, clearly.
p23
Not much to say here, except to note that this is certainly not the last time we'll be seeing Miss Dwyer, and that this is a world where not seeing people's eyes - not seeing how they perceive the world, that is - is usually a bad, bad sign.
p24
Loath as we may be to admit it, Mr. Gelt has a point here. It's Dane's individuality that makes him attack the world. If we were all as desperate to fight conformity as he is, we'd be a world on fire, constantly kicking at the people around us.
Of course, Mr. Gelt, with his eyeless face and his creepily meaningful name, may be going a tad far. He thinks there's a war going on, between good and evil, order and chaos. So that's how our bad guys think, in violent, stark dualities. Presumably our heroes won't think like them.
p25
"It's not the government, it's your country. Anyway, I'd be fighting for money." That Gaz doesn't realize those three things are all just one thing is the difference between him and Dane.
And man, do I love those cards the boys are playing with. YES NO YES NO YES NO. Good/Bad, Order/Chaos. With us/Against us. US/THEM. I wonder what the rules are. I'm guessing there's not a lot of room for critical decision making.
p26-27
As Ragged Robin (hi, Robin!) so kindly informs us, the Moon is another initiation symbol. It's also the internal landscape, emotional battles, magical thinking. Seelisches land.
God, is there anything better than King Mob's costume? There's a line in Morrison's The Filth about how the secret interdimensional super-garbagemen who work for The Hand dress the way they do (crazily-colored fetish outfits) because it tickles people's Freudian issues and makes them ignore them. Can't help thinking that's what KM is doing too. I mean, why dress like that, except that it weirds out his enemies and makes him feel powerful?
Robin also namechecks the other members of the cell, Boy and Lord Fanny. More on them, of course, later.
And that last line is King Mob in a nutshell. It might actually be The Invisible in a nutshell, too.
"You know, when I was a kid, I wanted to grow up and find myself living in a '60s spy series. Funny how things turn out."
p28
Virtual reality? Yep! Although I'm not sure Gelt is referring to the chaps in the goggles so much as he is to everyone in the world. Although those goggles are plugged right into the eye. Around here, when you control how people perceive, you control the people.
p29
And here we meet our first archon, The King-in-Chains. The archons do their job wonderfully, because their job is to look scary and reflect your own hates and fears back into your head (after all, he said snarkily, they do style themselves as a church). And again, it talks in absolutes - because what is sin if not absolute?
And of course, the face is a giant vertical slit full of light, in a story about young boys being brainwashed by cutting off their dicks. So it's got subtlety going for it, too.
p30-31
Well, they certainly fixed Gaz, didn't they? (Tee-hee, "fixed," I'm so clever.) And now he's talking in the simplest of dualities, too.
p32-33
Oh, so that's why he's named Gelt!
Okay, I'm being silly, but the book started it, with the room full of balls-in-jars. But (and maybe this is a male thing), it's got that visceral horror to it, too. I almost feel like my Freudian issues are being poked, so that I won't look too closely.
And honestly, I'm not exactly sure what's in those jars. Testes, certainly, but testes don't scream when you drop them. I didn't notice that, somehow, the first few times I read this - looking away with a cringe, I guess - but there's something horrifying about how the scream wraps itself around Dane.
Gelt's talking about mummifying living things here, shades of our conversation with Elfayed back on page one. Taking a living thing and preserving it, draining it of life, rendering it immobile and safe.
p34-35
So it's a good thing King Mob is here! Bam! Pow! Feed on this, fat boy!
Dropping one-liners, dressed like a weirdo, shooting dudes in the dick! Take that, irony! This is a crazy action spy story, so it's a good thing these faceless goons are here so that our hero can blow them away! And the last thing they'll see is his eyeless face staring down at him, and the last thing they'll hear is his witty one-liner. After all, they picked their side. It's us against them, right?
Hmm.
p36-37
So, Dane McGowan kicks the crap out of his teacher and tries to burn down his school. So he gets sent to Harmony House, where Our Hero, King Mob shoots the headmaster in the head with another witty line, then burns down the school, then writes his name on it.
Harmony House needed to burn, of course. But there's a hint there that we're just seeing a boy's angry rebellion writ large. Turned toward justice, maybe. But still immature.
Maybe I'm tipping my hand - and the comic's - but King Mob is a trick being played on you. This super-competent, super-violent badass dude... who's killing people. Murdering. Declaring people as "Us" or "Them" just as clearly as the Outer Church does. "He's not Gaz anymore - forget him." We've been conditioned to accept this, because that's how spy stories work.
But "The Young Rebel Who Burnt The World" is just a story Dane's telling himself. And "The Headmaster Who Got Rid of Sin and Made Everyone Act Right" was a story Gelt told himself. So who's to say "The Invisibles, A Spy Story Starring King Mob" isn't just another story he's telling himself? When people control how you perceive, they control you.
p38
Gelt has been turned, of course, into a beetle. Rebirth, resurrection, continuing cycles.
And then Dane steps on him, without even noticing or thinking about it. Cycle's getting broken, folks.
p39-40
But even when he's been rescued by a mysterious action hero in an awesome hat, Dane McGowan's not much of a joiner. The counter-culture is just the part of the culture where the party in opposition lives, right? They're still a party. And frankly, if he was willing to join, he wouldn't be ready, for exactly that reason. Because the Invisibles aren't just the counter-culture - a safe outlet for frustrations, Big Malkie style - the Invisibles are a revolution.
Hell, the poor kid hasn't even been to the Underworld yet.
Next time: Down and Out in Heaven and Hell.
At the same time, I want to reiterate that I am in no way an authority on Morrison or his work. Where this approaches insight, I'm certain I've pulled it from people who are. This is just my attempt, in my words, to try to understand why I love this book.
The InvisiblesVol. 1
Issue 1
"Dead Beatles"
Synopsis: Young Liverpudlian Dane McGowan is in a state of rebellion against his teachers, his school, and his life. He's also seeing things - ghosts of the past, spirits of... something else. He eventually attempts to burn down his school, brutally attacking a teacher who earlier tried to reach out to him in the process. He is sentenced to serve time at a brutal reform school.
Meanwhile, the anarchist/terrorist/hero King Mob consults friends and associates for portents about his attempts to recruit Dane into his organization, The Invisibles, going so far as to commune with the spirit of John Lennon for insight.
The reform school is run by a Mr. Gelt, who wears black, eye-concealing glasses, and is obsessed with instilling conformity in his charges. Dane's friend, Gaz, is taken by Gelt, and is shortly after revealed to have been brainwashed. Gelt is shown to be agent of the shadowy extradimensional entities known as the Outer Church. Their representative, the King-in-Chains, demands Dane be brought to him, so that the Invisibles cannot get him.
The night he is brought to the school, Dane sneaks from his room and discovers that the school is castrating the boys sent there as part of the brainwashing program. Gelt attempts to subdue him, but before he can, he is attacked by King Mob, now decked out in his crazy battle helmet. KM kills several security guards (along with Gelt himself) and then burns the school to the ground. He drives Dane to London and then, when the boy declares he doesn't want to join The Invisibles, suddenly disappears, leaving Dane in the city... alone.
P1.
And right out the gate, we're playing with time, hinting that all of this has happened before and will happen again. "And so we return and begin again."
The speaker is Elfayed. He's an interesting guy - an old friend of our main man King Mob - the bald guy in the chair - and a key member of the larger Invisibles organization, but he'll only intersect with our main cast a few times. His attitude here - that the mystical is all well and good, but that common sense is just as, if even more, important, is going to be an important one to hold on to as things get stranger and stranger from here on out.
As to what he's saying, Khepri/Khepra is the sacred beetle god who pushes the sun across the sky in Egyptian mythology, like a dung beetle pushes his ball of crap. He's a symbol of transformation, unsurprisingly, of growth and change. New life growing out of manure. Filthy, but necessary. Which is presumably why Elfayed finds the idea of mummifying a scarab so amusing - unnatural, desperate preservation of something symbolizing change and rebirth.
p2.
Meet Dane McGowan. Reader surrogate. Rebel. Potential Buddha. Protagonist - although that designation will get slippier and slippier the further into this we get.
But really, all you need to know about him right now is this page, triumphant, one fist in the air, a molotov in the other, shouting FUCK at the world.
p3-4
And burning books. Burning down a whole library, in fact. Dane's not just striking out blindly, here, and not just at something he knew would burn. He's attacking received knowledge, all the facts and data that's being shoved into his head daily by a school he's too smart for.
Or he just wanted to see something burn, I don't know. But the graffiti says it all: King Mob's been here before. Nothing new.
p5
More apocalyptic, fiery imagery from our hero. Burning away the world. Well, that's the only way a new one can grow, right?
Dane feels like he's seen that graffiti before? Almost like a story you read a long time ago and just picked back up for the first time.
p6
Our introduction to Ms. Edith Manning, seen here near the end of her days. Edith's long life runs all around and through the history of our story (as she hints with her comments about knowing King Mob in 1924). Some of the first people we see in this story are the people it's already chewed up and ruined in some way or another - Edith here, and the Tom KM asks her to contact, especially.
This is also our first good look at King Mob, aka Gideon. Charming, manipulative, morbidly funny, driven and willing to sacrifice. Shamanistic James Bond. Loving his own, badass image.
But back to Edith. The Invisibles is, among other things, a time travel story. And Edith is one of our great time travellers. Not in the exciting, clocks-spinning-in-the-wrong-direction, calendar-pages-flipping-off-walls sense. Edith took the slow route, 95 years of it, from birth to now. Is it any wonder she's tired? Is it any wonder she doesn't want to be involved any more?
And note the reference to John-A-Dreams. What exactly happened to him, and where he is now, is going to be something we'll be revisiting more than once here.
p7-8.
Back to school! Big Malkie wants to talk about how revolutions get killed, strangled, turned into new authorities, but Dane just wants to leave a mark on the world.
Malkie is the kind face of authority for this issue (we'll be meeting the less kind faces later on). He's the carrot, encouraging intelligence, nurturing young minds, curtailing violent rebellion. He's also incredibly condescending, telling Dane not to become "another blank, brutalized face, drinking beer in front of the telly." But he's clearly out of touch, and he's doomed to fail - if those kind of appeals to his better nature and intellectual vanity appealed to Dane, he wouldn't really be Dane.
p9
Speaking of blank, brutalized faces, Mrs. McGowan gives a pretty good example here, doesn't she? She's almost a caricature of a bad mother, kicking the kid out on the street so she can have a date. In a lot of ways, Dane's whole life is caricature - the young rebel who doesn't know what he's trying to rebel against. In his mother's mirror, they're both twisted, ugly, mindless things.
This would be a stock story... except King Mob's shadow looms here, too.
p10 - 12
As Shakespeare would put it, "Enter ghost." And what ghost could haunt Liverpool more appropriately than John Lennon? Not the later, established Lennon, the instigator, the assassin's target. The young man seen here, chatting with Stu Sutcliffe, is on the verge of becoming John Lennon. In fact, what Dane's seeing (and really, it's less a haunting and more seeing time out of order - if those are even different things) is the moment before the revolution. One of these two men is about to fundamentally alter the way people think... but for now, he's just shooting the shit with his friend.
p13
Another haunting, of a more sinister type. Jack Frost, speaking German, laughing mirthlessly. It translates as something like "good earthly method" and "strong owner". The dead at 22 and 40 are Sutcliffe and Lennon.
"The Reverse of the Moon." We'll keep coming back to this. What's hidden behind the moon? It's always been there, and we've only ever seen half of it. What's been hidden from us for all that time? If I'm translating this right, it's the inner world, the emotional world. Seelisches land.
But Dane's not ready to play yet.
It's probably worth pointing out that Jack looks a bit like an elf or fairy here. The Fair Folk, inexplicable by human standards, cold and distant - at least from our point of view.
p14-15
So what do you do when you're seeing ghosts and being menaced by something that looks like a demon? Lash out!
Dane's still just a kid. He wants to get laid, he wants to drink, and he wants to show that he's smarter than everyone around him. So why not steal a car? Why not disconnect a system from the world, pull out it's protectors/antibodies/car alarms, and then start it back up - this time in your control?
p 16
And then take it joy-riding. His mates wish they could score some Ecstasy so they could strip the reality out of the situation - make it feel like a video game. Pretty sure Dane is already doing just fine on that score, though, as he weaves through the lines and the rules of traffic.
p17
"We can do anything we want with it. They should just be glad we didn't wreck it." Why shouldn't he? He took control of the system. It's his.
And here we are, back at school. Dane can't seem to get away from this place, can he? He's an ambitious young man, and he can see the channels the world wants to push him into. Time to fight back.
p18-19
And here's a couple of pages for those who were worried this wasn't going to get suitably weird.
Although it won't be clear for a few pages, King Mob is summoning John Lennon - not the physical spirit or man, but the idea of him, the pop god, to grant him a little insight. What that translates as is some psychedelic imagery, and something that reads like The Hero's Journey as built from Beatles' lyrics.
KM invokes Ganesh here, the remover of obstacles, the god of beginnings. So it's as much Morrison calling out to him at the start of this project as it is King Mob asking for help as he begins his ritual.
It's the last part of the second page that interests me (besides the wonderfully trippy artwork, anyway). At this level, we're moving back and forth between narration and god-speech, between the voice in King Mob's head and the Voice in his head, but I think this is where the prophecy proper starts, because it flows from "let me take you down" (after visiting an oracle?) through the grave (he is not dying) into rebirth, into an apple - knowledge/temptation. That's a concise way of describing what Dane's got ahead of him.
p20-21I'm honestly not sure about the sincerity of Malkie's entreaties here. He's pleading for rationality, civility, but he's also begging Dane to stay within the system. By claiming to understand his frustration, he's drawing a box around him, ensuring him that what he's feeling is normal, natural.
But (and here I am dipping into spoiler territory) Malkie's not just Malkie, is he? He's an Invisible, presumably sent to keep an eye on Dane. So is he really trying to reach out to the boy, take a non-violent tack to his recruitment? Or is the kind-hearted teacher a goad, prodding the kid toward the violent escape of the Invisibles?
p22
The judge here labels Dane's acts as "far beyond the limits of what might be regarded as legitimate youthful rebellion against authority." Well, no shit, yerhonner. Wasn't that the point? It's normal for bad boys to talk back to the teacher and nick a car and maybe even start a fire. That's within the lines. But beating the shit out of a teacher and trying to blow up the school? That's where Dane McGowan wants to be.
The judge is a lovely piece of authoritarian snobbery. An aristocrat through and through, and in The Invisibles "aristocrat" might as well be "bad guy." There's also the first hint here that the the government, the system is a full part of this conflict - they may not know EXACTLY what's happening at Harmony House, but they like the results they're getting, clearly.
p23
Not much to say here, except to note that this is certainly not the last time we'll be seeing Miss Dwyer, and that this is a world where not seeing people's eyes - not seeing how they perceive the world, that is - is usually a bad, bad sign.
p24
Loath as we may be to admit it, Mr. Gelt has a point here. It's Dane's individuality that makes him attack the world. If we were all as desperate to fight conformity as he is, we'd be a world on fire, constantly kicking at the people around us.
Of course, Mr. Gelt, with his eyeless face and his creepily meaningful name, may be going a tad far. He thinks there's a war going on, between good and evil, order and chaos. So that's how our bad guys think, in violent, stark dualities. Presumably our heroes won't think like them.
p25
"It's not the government, it's your country. Anyway, I'd be fighting for money." That Gaz doesn't realize those three things are all just one thing is the difference between him and Dane.
And man, do I love those cards the boys are playing with. YES NO YES NO YES NO. Good/Bad, Order/Chaos. With us/Against us. US/THEM. I wonder what the rules are. I'm guessing there's not a lot of room for critical decision making.
p26-27As Ragged Robin (hi, Robin!) so kindly informs us, the Moon is another initiation symbol. It's also the internal landscape, emotional battles, magical thinking. Seelisches land.
God, is there anything better than King Mob's costume? There's a line in Morrison's The Filth about how the secret interdimensional super-garbagemen who work for The Hand dress the way they do (crazily-colored fetish outfits) because it tickles people's Freudian issues and makes them ignore them. Can't help thinking that's what KM is doing too. I mean, why dress like that, except that it weirds out his enemies and makes him feel powerful?
Robin also namechecks the other members of the cell, Boy and Lord Fanny. More on them, of course, later.
And that last line is King Mob in a nutshell. It might actually be The Invisible in a nutshell, too.
"You know, when I was a kid, I wanted to grow up and find myself living in a '60s spy series. Funny how things turn out."
p28
Virtual reality? Yep! Although I'm not sure Gelt is referring to the chaps in the goggles so much as he is to everyone in the world. Although those goggles are plugged right into the eye. Around here, when you control how people perceive, you control the people.
p29
And here we meet our first archon, The King-in-Chains. The archons do their job wonderfully, because their job is to look scary and reflect your own hates and fears back into your head (after all, he said snarkily, they do style themselves as a church). And again, it talks in absolutes - because what is sin if not absolute?
And of course, the face is a giant vertical slit full of light, in a story about young boys being brainwashed by cutting off their dicks. So it's got subtlety going for it, too.
p30-31
Well, they certainly fixed Gaz, didn't they? (Tee-hee, "fixed," I'm so clever.) And now he's talking in the simplest of dualities, too.
p32-33
Oh, so that's why he's named Gelt!
Okay, I'm being silly, but the book started it, with the room full of balls-in-jars. But (and maybe this is a male thing), it's got that visceral horror to it, too. I almost feel like my Freudian issues are being poked, so that I won't look too closely.
And honestly, I'm not exactly sure what's in those jars. Testes, certainly, but testes don't scream when you drop them. I didn't notice that, somehow, the first few times I read this - looking away with a cringe, I guess - but there's something horrifying about how the scream wraps itself around Dane.
Gelt's talking about mummifying living things here, shades of our conversation with Elfayed back on page one. Taking a living thing and preserving it, draining it of life, rendering it immobile and safe.
p34-35So it's a good thing King Mob is here! Bam! Pow! Feed on this, fat boy!
Dropping one-liners, dressed like a weirdo, shooting dudes in the dick! Take that, irony! This is a crazy action spy story, so it's a good thing these faceless goons are here so that our hero can blow them away! And the last thing they'll see is his eyeless face staring down at him, and the last thing they'll hear is his witty one-liner. After all, they picked their side. It's us against them, right?
Hmm.
p36-37
So, Dane McGowan kicks the crap out of his teacher and tries to burn down his school. So he gets sent to Harmony House, where Our Hero, King Mob shoots the headmaster in the head with another witty line, then burns down the school, then writes his name on it.
Harmony House needed to burn, of course. But there's a hint there that we're just seeing a boy's angry rebellion writ large. Turned toward justice, maybe. But still immature.
Maybe I'm tipping my hand - and the comic's - but King Mob is a trick being played on you. This super-competent, super-violent badass dude... who's killing people. Murdering. Declaring people as "Us" or "Them" just as clearly as the Outer Church does. "He's not Gaz anymore - forget him." We've been conditioned to accept this, because that's how spy stories work.
But "The Young Rebel Who Burnt The World" is just a story Dane's telling himself. And "The Headmaster Who Got Rid of Sin and Made Everyone Act Right" was a story Gelt told himself. So who's to say "The Invisibles, A Spy Story Starring King Mob" isn't just another story he's telling himself? When people control how you perceive, they control you.
p38
Gelt has been turned, of course, into a beetle. Rebirth, resurrection, continuing cycles.
And then Dane steps on him, without even noticing or thinking about it. Cycle's getting broken, folks.
p39-40
But even when he's been rescued by a mysterious action hero in an awesome hat, Dane McGowan's not much of a joiner. The counter-culture is just the part of the culture where the party in opposition lives, right? They're still a party. And frankly, if he was willing to join, he wouldn't be ready, for exactly that reason. Because the Invisibles aren't just the counter-culture - a safe outlet for frustrations, Big Malkie style - the Invisibles are a revolution.
Hell, the poor kid hasn't even been to the Underworld yet.
Next time: Down and Out in Heaven and Hell.
New Series: The Invisibles
So, I've decided, in the interest of writing something every day, this blog needs a project. Something to keep me coming back every single day, and which will be interesting to me, if no one else. So, I've decided that, every day for the next 59 days, I'm going to be discussing, reviewing, and analyzing one issue of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.
For those who don't know, The Invisibles is a comic series, published by Vertigo from 1994 until 1999. Morrison started on it after finishing his run on Doom Patrol (a team of crippled people, led by a crippled man, fighting crippled villains - Morrison didn't invent that premise, he just realized how weird it was), and it still probably stands as his magnum opus. Morrison is best known these days for playing in other people's sandbox - New X-Men, All-Star Superman, Final Crisis, Batman - finding new, weird, inventive spins on existing characters. The Invisibles is its own universe, and that means that it's a place where Grant can get really, really weird.
On the surface, The Invisibles is the story of good vs. evil, about finding enlightenment. At times, it mimics the structure of Campbell's Hero's Journey and magical initiation. Up on the surface, it's pulp - kick-ass bald men with guns and fetish masks shooting horrifying monsters that want to cut off your dick and rape your brain.
That's just the suit it's wearing, though, the mold it's been poured into. Quoting GM in the column at the back of the first issue:
"- a comic about everything: action, philosophy, paranoia, sex, magic, biography, travel, drugs, religion, UFOs... you can make your own list."
Disclaimer: I'm not a professional reviewer. I'm not even a particularly GOOD reviewer. But I love this book, and I wanted to examine why. These posts may be inaccurate, stupid, completely wrong. But here goes. Down the rabbithole.
...And so we return and begin again.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Five movies you haven't seen, that maybe you should see? I don't know.
BLOG!
Having written two blogposts in the last year on this thing, and having taken one of those down on the grounds that it was 'stupid,' I've decided that there's no choice. I've got to break some boundaries. I've got to hit a homer. I've got to do what no man hath dared to: I'm going to write a LIST OF MOVIES I LIKE.
But not just movies I like! That wouldn't be pretentious enough. No, this is a list of movies I like... That YOU, the Unwashed Masses, haven't seen. So, with one cry of my catchphrase (BLOGS IS LIKE BACON AND EGGS!), let's get started.
BLOGS IS LIKE BACON AND EGGS!
5 (We are starting from the lower parts of the list, and then proceeding mathematically in a direction): Primer
Primer is a movie about how people are assholes. Two guys invent a time travel box, and then they are assholes with it. The time travel operates on "Futurama" rules, which is to say, you are going to think your time-double is an asshole and beat him up.
BUT SERIOUSLY. Primer was made for couch-cushion money and looks it. The acting is naturalistic (bad), there are NO effects, special or otherwise, and the movie is intentionally confusing. It has exactly one thing going for it, and that is that the guy who wrote, directed, scored, and starred in it thought really, REALLY hard about time travel before he made it. And hence, the movie is AWESOME.
It is free on the Youbtubues, and you should watch it.
IV (I DON'T SPEAK LATIN BUT I COUNT IT): Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.
This is a movie about how people are assholes. The specific assholes here: MURDERERS.
Behind the Mask has the dumbest premise ever: Hey, what if slasher killers were real? What if a new one was getting ready to start? It would be awesome to make a documentary about that, right?
RIGHT. I know I threw you when I called the premise dumb earlier, but it actually makes for a great, smart movie. Most of the credit for that goes to the guy playing the titular (tee-hee) Leslie Vernon. He is charming, bouncy, hyper, like a young Jim Carrey, except that one seeks to destroy happiness and joy and the other one just wants to kill people do you SEE WHAT I DID THERE
The movie examines all the cliches of the slasher film, except this time from the killer's point of view. There is a lot of pseudo-philosophical nonsense about the purity of the "Final Girl" and the power of phallic objects, and it completely works as a mockery of the self-serious analysis of the horror genre. This isn't "Scream," where Halloween is a movie we've all seen, this is a world where Mike Meyers is a known murderer, and the movie gets a lot of fun out of the idea that this is a "tradition" that the character is entering into.
The most interesting stuff happens when the movie flirts with reality. The documentary crew is watching, even in a few cases, helping, Leslie prepare to brutally murder several people. This whole part would fall apart without Nathan Baesal, who plays Leslie. His gleeful energy makes it really easy to get into the spirit of what he's doing, and makes it all the more disorienting when it falls away and you can see the killer inside.
This movie is so good, I stopped shouting jokes while writing about it. You should check it out. BUTTS!
¡Tres! (HOLA AMIGOS YO HABLO FRENCH): In The Loop
This is a movie about how people are assholes.
Did you know that America and probably England are at war right now? Not with each other, but with tear. Tear apparently lives in Iraq and Afghanhisthan(?), because those are the places we invade and blow up and etc.
In the Loop is a funny fictionalized story about how we started killing all those people we killed. A bumbling (everyone in this movie is either bumbling or yelling) British minister (like a priest but with gov'ment) says that war is unforseeable. This causes him to become the center of what, for the sake of politeness, I will call a political shitstorm.
The Chief Shit-Weather-Wizard and Yelling King is Malcolm Tucker. The conflict between him and the minister is the basic one of the whole movie: Everyone in power is either evil or useless. A few of the characters are evil AND useless, so at least they are being represented.
This movie produces two kinds of laughs (man, that's a lot of duality going on around here. Note to self: am I enough of a bullshitter to throw the word Manichean in here without seeming like an asshole), a Manichean divide between humor types. One kind of laugh is "OMG that was some incredibly amazing swearing LOL," which is fair, because this movie has the best, funniest swearing in the world. The other kind is "Oh God I have a horrible suspicion that this movie is more accurate than not I had better laugh so no one notices me killing myself ha ha ha haaaaa."
It is very gud I liked it a lot.
2 (MANICHEAN!!!!!) Southland Tales
This is a movie about how people are assholes.
I will now, in a single paragraph, attempt to describe Southland Tales to you. Spoilers follow. Let me just reaaaach over for my bottle of Malort and my capslock...
OKAY SO THE ROCK PLAYS THE ROCK EXCEPT HE HAS AMNESIA AND WALLACE SHAWN PLAYS AN EVIL WIZARD IN A CAPE AND HE HAS HARNESSED THE TIDE TO MAKE FLUID KARMA WHICH IS BOTH A DRUG AND AN ALTERNATE FUEL SOURCE AND HE MAKES OUT WITH BAI LING AND OH GOD JON LOVITZ HAS SILVER HAIR AND HE MURDERS PEOPLE AND THEN QUOTES PHILIP K DICK WAIT DID I MENTION THE CGI CAR COMMERCIALS WHERE THE CARS FUCK LIKE LITERALLY ONE CAR EXTENDS ITS TAILPIPE LIKE A DICK AND PUTS IT IN THE OTHER CAR'S VAGINA SEANN WILLIAM SCOTT PLAYS IDENTICAL TWINS WHO ARE ACTUALLY TIME CLONES (SPOILERS) AND THE ROCK CONSTANTLY OSCILLATES BETWEEN PLAYING A CHARACTER FROM THE SCREENPLAY HE WROTE WITH SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR (PORN STAR!) AND A SCARED LITTLE KID WHO TWIDDLES HIS FINGERS AND THEN JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE STARES INTO THE CAMERA AND LIP SYNCS A KILLERS SONG AND THERE WAS A NUCLEAR ATTACK ON TEXAS AND NOW THE DAD FROM DONNIE DARKO IS A REPUBLICAN SENATOR AND THERE ARE CAMERAS EVERYWHERE, MAN, THEY'RE WATCHING YOU AND THERE IS AN UNDERGROUND INTERNET RUN BY KEVIN SMITH IN OLD MAN MAKEUP NOT TO MENTION THE CLIMAX TAKES PLACE ON A MEGAZEPPELIN WHERE THE ROCK DECLARES THAT PIMPS DON'T COMMIT SUICIDE AND BOOGER FROM REVENGE OF THE NERDS TALKS ABOUT
A RIFT IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION AND WHAT THEY DID WITH IT (DIRECT QUOTE: WE SHOT MONKEYS INTO IT) AND CHERI O'TERI IS KILLING PEOPLE AND IT'S AN APOCALYPTIC POLITICAL SATIRE SCIENCE FICTION COMEDY ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD.
The first time I watched Southland Tales was the closest I've ever felt to losing my mind.
Neo: Zero Effect
This is a movie about finding grace in a world where people are assholes.
This is another one of those movies where the stats say it should be crap. A first-time writer/director making a modern-day tragic-comic loose adaptation of Sherlock Holmes with Bill Pullman as Holmes and Ben Stiller as his Watson? Come on.
But the film makes its case from the first moments and never lets up. The opening scenes are a beautiful bit of character building. Steve Arlo, played by Stiller, meets with a nervous potential client and begins to sell him on why he needs his employer, the mysterious detective Darryl Zero. He speaks of a man of complete secrecy and total professionalism, capable of unraveling the most devious schemes with a few seconds of careful observation.
This scene cuts back and forth with another, where Arlo, at a bar with his friend, endlessly bemoans the weirdness of the freak he works for. Rude, incredibly awkward, helpless in any interaction not directly related to his work, Zero is painted as an irritating, paranoid near-psychotic. And the joy of the movie is that both scenes are shown to be fundamentally true.
I have never regarded Pullman as an amazing actor, but he wears the skin of Zero extremely well. When on the case, we're in his head, listening as he narrates to himself the art of his work as he delves into an intricate blackmailing plot. At the same time, we seem him run Arlo ragged with weird demands and intense, whiny neediness. He's that strangest of things - a likable, vulnerable asshole.
His interactions lead him to a woman named Gloria Sullivan, played by Kim Dickens. Maybe it's just my predilection for short-haired women, but Dickens gives an amazingly strong, sexy performance. She's our Irene Adler - less film noir femme fatale than honorable opponent, and the romantic elements introduced with her character give Zero's a chance to expand beyond quirks into an actual person.
So yeah. A funny, emotionally satisfying, interesting mystery story, with an engagingly fucked up Holmes and a uniformly strong cast. I love this movie. You should find it, if you can.
SO MUCH EARNESTNESS POOP FART LIST OVER
Having written two blogposts in the last year on this thing, and having taken one of those down on the grounds that it was 'stupid,' I've decided that there's no choice. I've got to break some boundaries. I've got to hit a homer. I've got to do what no man hath dared to: I'm going to write a LIST OF MOVIES I LIKE.
But not just movies I like! That wouldn't be pretentious enough. No, this is a list of movies I like... That YOU, the Unwashed Masses, haven't seen. So, with one cry of my catchphrase (BLOGS IS LIKE BACON AND EGGS!), let's get started.
BLOGS IS LIKE BACON AND EGGS!
5 (We are starting from the lower parts of the list, and then proceeding mathematically in a direction): Primer
Primer is a movie about how people are assholes. Two guys invent a time travel box, and then they are assholes with it. The time travel operates on "Futurama" rules, which is to say, you are going to think your time-double is an asshole and beat him up.
BUT SERIOUSLY. Primer was made for couch-cushion money and looks it. The acting is naturalistic (bad), there are NO effects, special or otherwise, and the movie is intentionally confusing. It has exactly one thing going for it, and that is that the guy who wrote, directed, scored, and starred in it thought really, REALLY hard about time travel before he made it. And hence, the movie is AWESOME.
It is free on the Youbtubues, and you should watch it.
IV (I DON'T SPEAK LATIN BUT I COUNT IT): Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.
This is a movie about how people are assholes. The specific assholes here: MURDERERS.
Behind the Mask has the dumbest premise ever: Hey, what if slasher killers were real? What if a new one was getting ready to start? It would be awesome to make a documentary about that, right?
RIGHT. I know I threw you when I called the premise dumb earlier, but it actually makes for a great, smart movie. Most of the credit for that goes to the guy playing the titular (tee-hee) Leslie Vernon. He is charming, bouncy, hyper, like a young Jim Carrey, except that one seeks to destroy happiness and joy and the other one just wants to kill people do you SEE WHAT I DID THERE
The movie examines all the cliches of the slasher film, except this time from the killer's point of view. There is a lot of pseudo-philosophical nonsense about the purity of the "Final Girl" and the power of phallic objects, and it completely works as a mockery of the self-serious analysis of the horror genre. This isn't "Scream," where Halloween is a movie we've all seen, this is a world where Mike Meyers is a known murderer, and the movie gets a lot of fun out of the idea that this is a "tradition" that the character is entering into.
The most interesting stuff happens when the movie flirts with reality. The documentary crew is watching, even in a few cases, helping, Leslie prepare to brutally murder several people. This whole part would fall apart without Nathan Baesal, who plays Leslie. His gleeful energy makes it really easy to get into the spirit of what he's doing, and makes it all the more disorienting when it falls away and you can see the killer inside.
This movie is so good, I stopped shouting jokes while writing about it. You should check it out. BUTTS!
¡Tres! (HOLA AMIGOS YO HABLO FRENCH): In The Loop
This is a movie about how people are assholes.
Did you know that America and probably England are at war right now? Not with each other, but with tear. Tear apparently lives in Iraq and Afghanhisthan(?), because those are the places we invade and blow up and etc.
In the Loop is a funny fictionalized story about how we started killing all those people we killed. A bumbling (everyone in this movie is either bumbling or yelling) British minister (like a priest but with gov'ment) says that war is unforseeable. This causes him to become the center of what, for the sake of politeness, I will call a political shitstorm.
The Chief Shit-Weather-Wizard and Yelling King is Malcolm Tucker. The conflict between him and the minister is the basic one of the whole movie: Everyone in power is either evil or useless. A few of the characters are evil AND useless, so at least they are being represented.
This movie produces two kinds of laughs (man, that's a lot of duality going on around here. Note to self: am I enough of a bullshitter to throw the word Manichean in here without seeming like an asshole), a Manichean divide between humor types. One kind of laugh is "OMG that was some incredibly amazing swearing LOL," which is fair, because this movie has the best, funniest swearing in the world. The other kind is "Oh God I have a horrible suspicion that this movie is more accurate than not I had better laugh so no one notices me killing myself ha ha ha haaaaa."
It is very gud I liked it a lot.
2 (MANICHEAN!!!!!) Southland Tales
This is a movie about how people are assholes.
I will now, in a single paragraph, attempt to describe Southland Tales to you. Spoilers follow. Let me just reaaaach over for my bottle of Malort and my capslock...
OKAY SO THE ROCK PLAYS THE ROCK EXCEPT HE HAS AMNESIA AND WALLACE SHAWN PLAYS AN EVIL WIZARD IN A CAPE AND HE HAS HARNESSED THE TIDE TO MAKE FLUID KARMA WHICH IS BOTH A DRUG AND AN ALTERNATE FUEL SOURCE AND HE MAKES OUT WITH BAI LING AND OH GOD JON LOVITZ HAS SILVER HAIR AND HE MURDERS PEOPLE AND THEN QUOTES PHILIP K DICK WAIT DID I MENTION THE CGI CAR COMMERCIALS WHERE THE CARS FUCK LIKE LITERALLY ONE CAR EXTENDS ITS TAILPIPE LIKE A DICK AND PUTS IT IN THE OTHER CAR'S VAGINA SEANN WILLIAM SCOTT PLAYS IDENTICAL TWINS WHO ARE ACTUALLY TIME CLONES (SPOILERS) AND THE ROCK CONSTANTLY OSCILLATES BETWEEN PLAYING A CHARACTER FROM THE SCREENPLAY HE WROTE WITH SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR (PORN STAR!) AND A SCARED LITTLE KID WHO TWIDDLES HIS FINGERS AND THEN JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE STARES INTO THE CAMERA AND LIP SYNCS A KILLERS SONG AND THERE WAS A NUCLEAR ATTACK ON TEXAS AND NOW THE DAD FROM DONNIE DARKO IS A REPUBLICAN SENATOR AND THERE ARE CAMERAS EVERYWHERE, MAN, THEY'RE WATCHING YOU AND THERE IS AN UNDERGROUND INTERNET RUN BY KEVIN SMITH IN OLD MAN MAKEUP NOT TO MENTION THE CLIMAX TAKES PLACE ON A MEGAZEPPELIN WHERE THE ROCK DECLARES THAT PIMPS DON'T COMMIT SUICIDE AND BOOGER FROM REVENGE OF THE NERDS TALKS ABOUT
A RIFT IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION AND WHAT THEY DID WITH IT (DIRECT QUOTE: WE SHOT MONKEYS INTO IT) AND CHERI O'TERI IS KILLING PEOPLE AND IT'S AN APOCALYPTIC POLITICAL SATIRE SCIENCE FICTION COMEDY ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD.The first time I watched Southland Tales was the closest I've ever felt to losing my mind.
Neo: Zero Effect
This is a movie about finding grace in a world where people are assholes.
This is another one of those movies where the stats say it should be crap. A first-time writer/director making a modern-day tragic-comic loose adaptation of Sherlock Holmes with Bill Pullman as Holmes and Ben Stiller as his Watson? Come on.
But the film makes its case from the first moments and never lets up. The opening scenes are a beautiful bit of character building. Steve Arlo, played by Stiller, meets with a nervous potential client and begins to sell him on why he needs his employer, the mysterious detective Darryl Zero. He speaks of a man of complete secrecy and total professionalism, capable of unraveling the most devious schemes with a few seconds of careful observation.
This scene cuts back and forth with another, where Arlo, at a bar with his friend, endlessly bemoans the weirdness of the freak he works for. Rude, incredibly awkward, helpless in any interaction not directly related to his work, Zero is painted as an irritating, paranoid near-psychotic. And the joy of the movie is that both scenes are shown to be fundamentally true.
I have never regarded Pullman as an amazing actor, but he wears the skin of Zero extremely well. When on the case, we're in his head, listening as he narrates to himself the art of his work as he delves into an intricate blackmailing plot. At the same time, we seem him run Arlo ragged with weird demands and intense, whiny neediness. He's that strangest of things - a likable, vulnerable asshole.
His interactions lead him to a woman named Gloria Sullivan, played by Kim Dickens. Maybe it's just my predilection for short-haired women, but Dickens gives an amazingly strong, sexy performance. She's our Irene Adler - less film noir femme fatale than honorable opponent, and the romantic elements introduced with her character give Zero's a chance to expand beyond quirks into an actual person.
So yeah. A funny, emotionally satisfying, interesting mystery story, with an engagingly fucked up Holmes and a uniformly strong cast. I love this movie. You should find it, if you can.
SO MUCH EARNESTNESS POOP FART LIST OVER
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Lex and Bruce 2
Two characters. Both are extremely successful businessman, usually depicted (when not dressed for mayhem) in expensive suits. Extremely ambitious. Troubled childhoods. And both, through years of hard work and obsession, have pushed themselves to the limits of what the human body and mind have achieved. Neither has superpowers, and both have complicated relationships with a non-human who, by a quirk of birth (and parentage, which is not the same thing here) has dwarfed everything they have ever done. One is, more often than not, this alien's greatest friend. The other is his most hated enemy.
There's an idea that every great hero, at some point, has to fight himself. Some shadow version who reflects his strengths and especially his weaknesses, which must be overcome to show that he understands himself. Comic books, with their love of presenting themselves as modern mythology, embrace this idea all over the place. Batman, whose obsession and trauma push him to the edge of human endurance, grapples constantly with a laughing clown who is, essentially, the avatar of madness. Green Lantern has the fallen corpsman Sinestro (who has of course spawned an entire shadow-corps of fear-based psychotics). Hell, the Flash has a recurring character literally named "Reverse Flash".
Superman is not immune to this trope. Doomsday, the hulking monster that killed Supes back in the '90s, is Superman's raw force unleavened with mind or compassion. And of course there's Bizarro, the backwards Superman. Bizarro's interesting because he's usually presented as a kind of tragic, ineffectual figure. It's almost as if Superman is so good that even his imperfect, backwards copy absorbs some of that inherent good. And of course, there's the fact that a true, "shadow" Superman would be able to do so much damage that he'd wreck the story-telling universe. Superman, as Grant Morrison has put forward at times, Wins. He always wins, because he is Superman. (Morrison, of course, has actually written a shadow Superman, the bullying, cruel, hateful Ultraman who plays the "Token Evil Teammate" role in Final Crisis: Superman Beyond). Trying to reflect that "winning" quality would be hard to do without a) wrecking the universe) or b) making the villain seem ineffectual (although it would be interesting in the context of the question: Does Superman win because he is perfectly good, or are those two qualities separate? But I digress).
Where was I? Lex and Bruce? Right.
Lex Luthor, Superman's most iconic foe, is NOT a Shadow. Lex is human where Clark is alien, weak where he is strong, utterly self-centered where he is compassionate almost by definition. Lex is humanity denying outside salvation. He is vain and he hates feeling powerless. He is also an extremely intelligent, ambitious, successful businessman. He often bemoans the fact that, if not for Superman, he would rule Metropolis without question, and he makes a compelling case.
Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne has spent years turning his body and mind into the perfect crime-fighting weapons. He has unlimited resources, but has sacrificed family and love any number of times in order to wage his crusade. Unlike Superman, he doesn't fight out of compassion - he fights because he's taking a kind of extended, operatic vengeance on the very idea of crime.
And when compared to Superman, comic writers do everything they can to make him as cool as The Man of Steel, or cooler. When the two fight, Bruce seems to win more than Clark does. Makes sense because a) massively more powerful person winning every time is boring, but b) also because there's a part of us that WANTS to see him win. He's the underdog, and he's us. We want to see a human win, but it can't be Lex Luthor, because he's the bad guy (and the conventions of the medium say that the good guys always win), so Bruce wins for him. It's still a brilliant HUMAN defeating the "perfect" man.
Bruce and Lex are both humanity at the very edges of what they can reach. Superman is comforting because he's "The Man of Tomorrow," the perfect people we could eventually be. He's a dare to be better tomorrow. Batman is an indictment, because he's the man of today. There's a sneer, buried at the heart of the character - if you cared enough, if you were willing to work hard enough, you could have been this good, too. And every time we refuse the help of someone who's "better" than we are, every time we care more about ourselves more than others, every time we get scared that the world has left us powerless and that fear makes us do something selfish or stupid, well, that's Lex. He's the man of today, too. We can pretend he's the man of yesterday, of course, that we've left him and his big green and purple armor behind us. But he's going to keep popping up.
Huh. I appear to have accidentally divided Superman, Batman, and Lex into a sort of pseudo-Freudian trinity. That wasn't the intent when I started this, but it seems inescapable: What we might be someday, what we could be today, what we are right now. Maybe it comes down to this: Lex Luthor wants superpowers, lusts after them, would kill hundreds and thousands to get them. I know the feeling, if not the extreme of the desire. Batman could care less - he has accepted and modified himself, instead of lusting after external power.
There's an idea that every great hero, at some point, has to fight himself. Some shadow version who reflects his strengths and especially his weaknesses, which must be overcome to show that he understands himself. Comic books, with their love of presenting themselves as modern mythology, embrace this idea all over the place. Batman, whose obsession and trauma push him to the edge of human endurance, grapples constantly with a laughing clown who is, essentially, the avatar of madness. Green Lantern has the fallen corpsman Sinestro (who has of course spawned an entire shadow-corps of fear-based psychotics). Hell, the Flash has a recurring character literally named "Reverse Flash".
Superman is not immune to this trope. Doomsday, the hulking monster that killed Supes back in the '90s, is Superman's raw force unleavened with mind or compassion. And of course there's Bizarro, the backwards Superman. Bizarro's interesting because he's usually presented as a kind of tragic, ineffectual figure. It's almost as if Superman is so good that even his imperfect, backwards copy absorbs some of that inherent good. And of course, there's the fact that a true, "shadow" Superman would be able to do so much damage that he'd wreck the story-telling universe. Superman, as Grant Morrison has put forward at times, Wins. He always wins, because he is Superman. (Morrison, of course, has actually written a shadow Superman, the bullying, cruel, hateful Ultraman who plays the "Token Evil Teammate" role in Final Crisis: Superman Beyond). Trying to reflect that "winning" quality would be hard to do without a) wrecking the universe) or b) making the villain seem ineffectual (although it would be interesting in the context of the question: Does Superman win because he is perfectly good, or are those two qualities separate? But I digress).
Where was I? Lex and Bruce? Right.
Lex Luthor, Superman's most iconic foe, is NOT a Shadow. Lex is human where Clark is alien, weak where he is strong, utterly self-centered where he is compassionate almost by definition. Lex is humanity denying outside salvation. He is vain and he hates feeling powerless. He is also an extremely intelligent, ambitious, successful businessman. He often bemoans the fact that, if not for Superman, he would rule Metropolis without question, and he makes a compelling case.
Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne has spent years turning his body and mind into the perfect crime-fighting weapons. He has unlimited resources, but has sacrificed family and love any number of times in order to wage his crusade. Unlike Superman, he doesn't fight out of compassion - he fights because he's taking a kind of extended, operatic vengeance on the very idea of crime.
And when compared to Superman, comic writers do everything they can to make him as cool as The Man of Steel, or cooler. When the two fight, Bruce seems to win more than Clark does. Makes sense because a) massively more powerful person winning every time is boring, but b) also because there's a part of us that WANTS to see him win. He's the underdog, and he's us. We want to see a human win, but it can't be Lex Luthor, because he's the bad guy (and the conventions of the medium say that the good guys always win), so Bruce wins for him. It's still a brilliant HUMAN defeating the "perfect" man.
Bruce and Lex are both humanity at the very edges of what they can reach. Superman is comforting because he's "The Man of Tomorrow," the perfect people we could eventually be. He's a dare to be better tomorrow. Batman is an indictment, because he's the man of today. There's a sneer, buried at the heart of the character - if you cared enough, if you were willing to work hard enough, you could have been this good, too. And every time we refuse the help of someone who's "better" than we are, every time we care more about ourselves more than others, every time we get scared that the world has left us powerless and that fear makes us do something selfish or stupid, well, that's Lex. He's the man of today, too. We can pretend he's the man of yesterday, of course, that we've left him and his big green and purple armor behind us. But he's going to keep popping up.
Huh. I appear to have accidentally divided Superman, Batman, and Lex into a sort of pseudo-Freudian trinity. That wasn't the intent when I started this, but it seems inescapable: What we might be someday, what we could be today, what we are right now. Maybe it comes down to this: Lex Luthor wants superpowers, lusts after them, would kill hundreds and thousands to get them. I know the feeling, if not the extreme of the desire. Batman could care less - he has accepted and modified himself, instead of lusting after external power.
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